Friday, February 26, 2016

Less Equality Everywhere, Including Math

Atlantic has a nice piece on increasing achievement by American teenagers in math.  Why?  "problem solving", outside class programs, STEM parents.  But these things are available to the richer among us.
"National achievement data reflect this access gap in math instruction all too clearly. The ratio of rich math whizzes to poor ones is 3 to 1 in South Korea and 3.7 to 1 in Canada, to take two representative developed countries. In the U.S., it is 8 to 1. And while the proportion of American students scoring at advanced levels in math is rising, those gains are almost entirely limited to the children of the highly educated, and largely exclude the children of the poor."

Once upon a time I was good in math.  Participated in a state-wide test (the Mathematical Olympiad) in my junior year, did well, again my senior year, not so well.  It's been downhill from there.

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