California Keeps Trying to Achieve Equity by Cheating

California, we've got to talk about equity because California is often on the forefront of being in favor of equity, of promoting equity, but often is willing to settle for fake equity.

And there are two big issues where I see this happening the most aggressively and the most egregiously in California.

One is discipline, which I talk about all the time.

And California, like many other states, wants to reduce disproportionality, wants to improve equitable outcomes in terms of discipline.

but has demonstrated over and over that they're willing to settle for fake equity, right?

If we can juke the statistics, if we can manipulate the numbers in such a way that it looks like we're getting equity, then that's good enough.

And I don't think that's good enough.

What's really happening with discipline is that we're settling for unsafe schools, which of course is extremely inequitable in reality, right?

If some kids have to go to very unsafe schools because we can't afford to have statistics that make us look bad, that's not equity.

The second big place I see this happening, and this made national news recently, it was in the Atlantic, the California Mathematics Framework was designed to improve equitable access to mathematics and promote equitable outcomes.

And essentially, what ended up happening was they tried to do that by essentially cheating, right?

By saying, in order to get, you know, basically Algebra 2 credit, you don't have to actually pass Algebra 2, you have to take a data science class or take Algebra 2 and pass it.

And a Stanford mathematics professor had a big piece in the Atlantic yesterday that just called them on the carpet for that and said, you know what, this is not an equivalent course.

You are trying to give students credit for knowledge that they need but don't have.

And in order to understand what's wrong with this, you have to understand the two ways gatekeeping works in mathematics and higher education.

The one way that gatekeeping works that we can kind of reduce and eliminate in the name of equity is the kind of artificial gatekeeping that happens when, say, we have a limited number of spots, say, at Stanford or at one of the flagship state universities.

If you artificially limit something, then you have to have some sort of artificial cut score, and those can be very inequitable.

There's no real reason why many students who apply to colleges don't get into them other than that there's only so much space and you have to have some sort of way of deciding who gets in and who doesn't, and often inequity creeps in in that way.

The second form of gatekeeping, though, is ability-based, is knowledge-based, and if you can do the math that would lead to success in, say, the Stanford engineering program, Well, great.

You have overcome that hurdle.

But the thing we have to understand is if you don't know the math, getting credit in a course that's not equivalent math doesn't help you, right?

Getting into that program in the name of producing better statistics for the people who are accountable for the statistics actually works against the student.

So we're actually setting students up for failure in the name of equity, not by teaching them better, not by giving them the skills and abilities they need to succeed in higher level math, but by giving them credit that is not worth the paper that it's printed on.

So I'd encourage you to read the whole Atlantic article to get the full scoop on what's going on with the California mathematics framework and how the universities are pushing back against that and saying, Like, look, you can't give kids credit for an Algebra 2 class that's not really Algebra 2 because then they're going to get on to more advanced math and they're not going to know it and they're going to fail their next class.

That is not equity.

Equity would be actually teaching the math and actually caring that kids learn it so that they're able to do what they're supposed to be able to do as a result of taking that class and earning that credit.

So, California, we've got to stop with this fake equity stuff.

Like, yes, you're right to emphasize equity.

equity it is important it is hugely important but you can't get there by cheating whether that's on discipline statistics or algebra to completion let me know what you think