California is destroying math education in its public schools

GET YOUR CHILDREN OUT OF PUBLIC SCHOOLS!

I can’t shout it any louder.

We have gone from “No Child Left Behind” to “All Children Left Behind.”

In the name of “equity” – which Democrats define as equality of outcomes not equal opportunity, in true Soviet fashion – California is planning to eliminate “tracking” in math education altogether.

What does this mean?

It means schools will no longer be grouping kids into math courses by ability; all students will be educated at the level the lowest-performing students are functioning at. There will be no classes for gifted children whatsoever, or even children who are merely functioning well.

They are eliminating Algebra I before high school, which will put kids in California schools several grade levels behind their peers in other states. (Heck, many homeschoolers have their kids in Algebra I in elementary school. Mine will be.) In states like Florida, it is common for students to be taking some college courses in high school for duel credit, and California somehow thinks moving kids backward is a swell idea.

They are eliminating Calculus in high school altogether (though eliminating Algebra I before high school effectively does that already).

Probably the biggest consequence of this is the next generation of California students will be functionally disqualified from careers in most engineering and computer science-related STEM fields – though you already could tell that from tech companies walking away from the state or relying on immigrant labor from India and China, two countries that prize math education. Low education standards in California are why they fight so hard for those visas for specialized workers. China is already slated to replace the US as the largest economy in the world within the decade, and engineering plays a large role in that.

California only revisits its standards every 7 years, so once this is in place it will truly be changing the academic fate of a generation.

Yes, Virginia and New York have done something similar, though California’s changes go further. Also, in Virginia and NYC, everyone who can (from a financial perspective) already has their kids in private school. Before the pandemic, more than a quarter of NYC school children were in private or charter schools. Only a small fraction of NYC public school students can do math at grade level, so taking Calculus away from them is sort of pointless already. Democratic leadership has been dragging academic standards into the mud there for a while.

In California, this is an open war on high-performing Asian immigrants and their children, for whom education has culturally been a tremendous source of social mobility. You’ll note the mathematics framework I linked to above cites that directly. They want to get rid of these programs because white and Asian students dominate in them. This is explicitly racist public policy.

I highly encourage you to start giving people who call America a “systemically racist” country a piece of your mind, in no uncertain terms, because stuff like this is where that poisonous worldview leads. We have got to stop colleges and universities from cranking out these mentally ill political jihadis, because they are destroying children’s right to a decent education. They think they are making things “fair” and “just” by dumbing everyone down, and five minutes on social media can show you what kind of idiots they are creating en masse. Start telling them upfront that their speech is not only hateful and illogical, but deeply immoral, and you are not going to humor it. Tell them that you will not have their hate around your children.

Start paying attention to state and local elections, start talking to people you know about who to vote for and who to vote out. In every political collapse, like the Soviet Union, Venezuela, Argentina, etc., there was a point where people could have put on their big girl pants and stopped things. We are at that point in our country right now – we can humiliate them out of draining our schools intellectually and culturally, we can humiliate them out of tripling the federal budget with their pork and putting us in a hyperinflationary environment.

Start pushing for school choice and vouchers so every family, regardless of income or background, has the opportunity to protect their children from these failure factories. Otherwise you are going to be living in a world controlled by people who think we can still be a prosperous country with kids studying basic arithmetic when they are nearly adults. Honestly, even the Soviets didn’t carry the madness that far.