something was missing in this article....hmmmm.
Posted on 10/02/2015 7:10:59 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
California Sen. Holly Mitchell (D) connects the lack of racial diversity in Silicon Valley with racially motivated “math misplacement.”
She claims middle-school algebra teachers are holding back black and Latino kids from advancing to ninth-grade geometry, even though they are doing just as well as white kids who are getting a grade of “B” or better, and are meeting or exceeding state standard assessments.
However, the study that Mitchell and others supporting her effort cite as proof of their position also shows the real problem is actually with middle-school algebra teachers. Many of them just aren’t very good at their jobs.
The study also shows teachers’ judgment could be affected by a ferocious academic debate over whether algebra should even be taught in middle schools.
Legislation authored by Sen. Mitchell, which is intended to protect black and Latino students from being pushed to the back of the mathematics classroom bus, has received bipartisan support.
Senate Bill 359 was recently passed out of the California Assembly on a 77-0 vote. It awaits the signature of Gov. Jerry Brown (D).
The bill requires public school districts to develop and adhere to performance and assessment-based standards for assigning students to math courses.
Isn’t that what always happens, especially in math courses? If the numbers add up, students advance, right?
Wrong, according to Mitchell. She pointed to a 2010 Noyce Foundation Pathways [1]study that Mitchell said found that African-American and Latino students, in particular, were improperly held back in nine Bay Area school districts despite having demonstrated proficiency on state standardized math tests.
More simply put, Mitchell said white kids were moved into advanced classes while black and Latino kids with the same or sometimes better scores were held back.
“Kids deserve the best shot we can give them at success,” said Sen. Mitchell. “Yet too many students who are working hard to build the skills they need to be successful in our economy are being prevented from doing so.”
Whatever the cause of the problem, there is no doubt the Silicon Valley tech community has been criticized for its lack of racial and gender diversity.
A 2014 Brookings Institution report showed African-Americans and Latinos hold fewer than four percent of the jobs at the six largest Silicon Valley tech companies.
Given that nearly 60 percent of California’s children belong to those ethnic groups, while technology jobs are projected to grow by 22 percent in the state over the next five years, advocates of SB 359 said opening a career pipeline for children of color into STEM careers is crucial for both them and the state.
“California and its economy can no longer afford to allow successful students, particularly those of color, to be unnecessarily held back in math due to a lack of fair, transparent and objective math placement policies in school districts,” said Dr. Emmett Carson, CEO and president of the Silicon Valley Community Foundation.
Alice Huffman, the president of the California State Conference of the NAACP, and Andrea Deveau, the California executive director of TechNet, a bipartisan network of innovation economy executives, expressed support for Sen. Mitchell’s proposal in an op-ed column they co-authored for the Sacramento Bee.
“The number of minority applicants for jobs in tech and other STEM industries is not keeping pace with the overall diversity of the workforce. Latinos and African Americans combined make up 58 percent of California’s children and future workforce. With statewide STEM jobs expected to grow by 22 percent over the next five years, we should be removing obstacles that prevent students from advancing in math,” Deveau and Huffman wrote.
“There is a clear connection between the math misplacement problem and the lack of diversity in STEM. If kids fall behind in math in the ninth grade or sooner, they won’t have enough time to take courses that colleges require a math or science major to have taken,” they added.
Alicia Berhow, the vice president of Workforce Development and Advocacy for the Orange County Business Council, also endorsed SB 359 in an op-ed for Fox & Hounds.
“With a large population of minority, particularly young Latino students, representing the future workforce of the Los Angeles and Orange County region,” she wrote, “we cannot allow mistakes in math placement to result in students being unfairly held back in math and thrown off a STEM career trajectory.”
However, Steve Waterman, the author of the Noyce Foundation Pathways study, wrote, “There is no evidence that any district set out to hold back any students of color or to advance one ethnic group rather than others.”
“Rather, the movement to Algebra in eighth grade seems to have run into a series of unwritten beliefs and rules,” Waterman added in the introduction of his report.
He wrote the real problem is what teachers believe about the ways “students prove they understand math, the ways students demonstrate they have the ‘right stuff’ to advance in math, how much math is needed, when topics should be introduced, whether mathematics is linear, how important homework is, how much a teacher should reach down, and what a teacher should do when a student fails to understand a concept.”
Waterman stressed it is this confusion on the part of teachers that really impacts lower-income students because they rely on teachers for classroom help more than middle- and upper-middle income students, who are more often helped by their parents.
He also wrote that blaming “math misplacement” on racism could also exacerbate the problem, because no one wants to talk about the real causes.
“Unfortunately, belief systems are intractable precisely because they are rarely expressed.”
The destruction of the black family from the democrat agenda and now they wonder why they can’t do math.
something was missing in this article....hmmmm.
>>The study also shows teachers’ judgment could be affected by a ferocious academic debate over whether algebra should even be taught in middle schools.
<<
The dumbing down of America in favor of Political Correctness is complete. That is why India and China are eating our lunch, brunch and dinner.
X=(3-1) = X=2 no matter if you are white, black, green, red or polka-dotted. Algebra and the other true sciences are supposed to be color-blind.
This entire article says that people of colour are too stupid to learn the maths.
Pssssst.....Senator Mitchell.
How about the Americans of Vietnamese Descent and Americans of Japanese Descent and Americans of Chinese Descent?
Are the Americans of European Descent holding them back, too?
Are we EVER going to run out of excuses for the enduring social pathogies of minorities?
Yes, I've long noticed that people who I work with - many of whom are very good at math - tend to have grown up in intact families.
Kids who grow up in intact families, with a father and a mother, don't have to spend a lot of energy worrying about "what will happen to me if mom and dad split up" and "what will happen to me if one of mom's boyfriends moves in." They can therefore devote themselves to studying difficult things like the slope-intercept form and the quadratic formula.
I do know one person who is a brilliant programmer and who had family problems growing up. He is a most unusual fellow, who's inner vision of himself was so strong at an early age that it carried him through the chaotic times.
People like that are kind of a separate case, in my opinion. Most kids are not so lucky as that, and for those - the majority - having an intact family gives them time to figure out their mission in life later.
I recall an article from Chicago several years ago where a teacher was fired for teaching math the ‘black way’. She/he/it had used drug lingo to show how to do fractions and percentages as well as how to teach basic business ideas about profit and loss.
The black kids picked it up nearly instantly and started to ace their exams. Which is how she got ‘caught’. Her students were out-performing the others in the school system.
No good deed goes unpunished aka the nail that stands above the others gets hammered down.
Are the scores on the tests being manipulated to show more minority students doing well? Atlanta and Houston school personnel were caught cheating by changing scores. It’s certain that these schools are not the only ones doing it.
Lots of kids can’t do math & science. It’s horrible when you force a kid to take classes they’re not qualified to take. Like a deer in the headlights.
Two + Dos am Fo.
I don’t know about California, but in our district there are two metrics - the local curricula and the scores on that, and then, the state assessment exams at year end.
In our area, if you did not pass the district courses, it wouldn’t matter if you squeaked by on the state assessment tests.
“She claims middle-school algebra teachers are holding back black and Latino kids from advancing to ninth-grade geometry, ....”
I graduated in 71, back then you had Alg I in 9th grade and Alg II in 10th grade, and geometry in 11th. Geometry in 9th grade is way to soon.
This article states that some of the minority students repeating Algebra 1 scored higher than those not held back. I'd like to know why...class grades, student choice, perhaps an unwillingness to complete course work in summer school.
I don't like articles such as this. The author is assuming the premise that Calculus in HS is preferable to a mastery level of the basics.
Short story. When my youngest daughter was in 8th grade, she took Algebra. This was a Catholic school. She went on to take Honors courses in Math throughout HS (also Catholic). However, one of her classmates went to a public HS. When they were placing her in classes, they put her in an Algebra course. She told them that she had already taken an Algebra course. The response from the "educator" was: "The 8th grade mind cannot comprehend Algebra." So, the poor kid had to take it over again.
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