Just when you thought California could not get any worse….Californians are taking their poor leadership to the next level. They are now going after gifted students. Californian “Educators” are rejecting schools for the gifted and claiming math itself is inherently racist.
“The push to create “equity” and more “social justice” in public schools in California, America’s largest state, rests on this basic premise: “We reject ideas of natural gifts and talents,” declares the current draft of the California Math Framework, which also states that it rejects “the cult of genius.”
Informed by that fundamental idea, the 800-page framework calls for the elimination of accelerated classes and gifted programs for high-achieving students until at least the 11th grade.
It’s a major departure for the framework, commissioned every seven years by the Department of Education to provide guidance to the state’s 10,315 public schools serving 6 million students. Some California teachers describe it as a misguided “one-size-fits-all” approach to reversing long-standing discrimination against girls and students of color in math instruction.”
“Math operates as whiteness” is the way this has been put by some specialists in math education. “One must acknowledge that mathematics is part of a societal system that is inherently racist,” reads a typical sort of blog post among math educators proposing what they call “anti-racist math.”
But this whole idea discounts reality.
“The framework also ignores the fact that the major math departments at American colleges and universities include conspicuously large numbers of Asian immigrants and people of Asian ancestry and only a relatively small number of American-born members.
The Princeton math department, for example, is roughly four-fifths foreign-born, with many of its faculty and graduate students coming from several of the countries of East Asia and South Asia, as well as from the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. This alone would seem a powerful indication that math, like other scientific fields, does not “operate as whiteness.”
And then there is the fact that removing gifted programs actually hurts an even smaller minority.
“…only 8% of white students are enrolled in California’s math classes for gifted students. While this is higher than the percentage of African-Americans (4%) and Latinos (3%), it is dwarfed by the percentage of Asian-Americans (32%). These numbers show that if gifted programs are phased out, the students most affected will be overwhelmingly Asian (i.e., people of color), not whites.”
This is just another sign that people should get the hell out of California. I don’t care where in the country, we should always be nurturing our best and brightest. This is just stupid on their part. First off Asians are a smaller minority than blacks and Spanish. Secondly, there is double the number of white people in this country than blacks and Hispanics, so 8% white and 4% black makes sense. It looks like Californian educators need to find out what these Asian families are doing because their kids are excelling. But that would make sense and since they just called math racist we know they are definitely lacking in that department.
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