Refusing to teach kids math will not improve equity
The author says<p>&gt; The idea that offering children fewer educational resources through the public school system will help the poor kids catch up with rich ones, or help the Black kids catch up with the White and Asian ones, is unsupported by any available evidence of which I am aware.<p>I was wondering if some people are aware of studies supporting this strategy.<p>I could try to dig them up, but I remember few studies demonstrating that school success is more correlated to the socio-economical situation of the parent than to the child intrinsic capacities (I think one usual method is to compare success of twins adopted in different families to remove the naive argument &quot;higher socio-economical situation means that these people are intrinsically smarter&quot;).<p>If it is the case, while avoiding the privileged ones to run ahead is not ideal, the alternative of doing nothing is even worse (which is in practice what a lot of people criticizing this measure prone: they did not have any plan to change anything before the subject was introduced).<p>I think that the idea is not to &quot;dumb down&quot; the kids, but to have a goal that everyone can achieve instead of a goal that is impossible to achieve for some of the poor kids anyway. See under this lens, the proposal makes more sense: the lectures are given at the NORMAL pace, without assuming that extra learning is made at home while it is known that this extra learning is impossible to do for some. A bit like if your professor was saying &quot;we have an exam on chapters 1, 2, 3 and 4, I will tell you the chapters 1 and 3, the chapters 2 and 4 are in the books but I&#x27;m going to give this book only to some students and not other&quot;. If a professor does that, people will obviously say that it is stupid, that the professor should teach chapters 1 and 2 to everyone and then do a test on chapters 1 and 2, and nobody will pretend that this is &quot;dumbying down&quot; the students.