BY ELAINE GOODMAN
Daily Post Correspondent
A parent who sued the Palo Alto Unified School District over its math placement policies said yesterday that he has succeeded in getting his ninth-grade son moved to a more advanced math class.
The change in math class is part of a settlement of the lawsuit that parent Avery Wang filed in Santa Clara County Superior Court in June. PAUSD will also pay Wang $5,000 as part of the deal.
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Why does PAUSD want to hold students who excel at math back, while failing to educate others? Not even 50% of minority students at PAUSD are proficient at math. Check the caassp results. Yet PAUSD spends our tax dollars on attorney fees trying to hold qualified students back.
So they can close the achievement gap, if you can’t help those behind, the short cut is to drag those ahead, so there’s no achievement gap! And you hit your goal. That’s clever math.
I totally agree with Katie. What a waste of money, fighting to keep down a high-achieving kid while so many students aren’t getting the help they need. I wish the school board would explain publicly why they took this position in the first place. Seems the district’s general counsel either isn’t allowed to talk about it or can’t defend this stupid policy.
Well, there are two ways to reduce the achievement gap.
1. Lift the bottom and support low achievers.
2. Squash top and hold back high achievers.
Guess which one did PAUSD choose to implement? (Hint: the easier one)
Exactly, the PAUSD clearly knows how to hit their goal – closing the achievement gap.
Guess that’s why Komey had nothing to say to the Post.
I wish the school board took this case as a learning experience rather that an adversarial court case. We should be trying to help the top students learn even more, not hold them down. This policy needs to be re-examined in light of this case.
How does this get to the point where the parents need to sue. The boy showed he was an excellent math student. What is PAUSD afraid of? Do they think they’re protecting the child from aggressive parents?
I’m honestly wondering how it got to this point? Is this the system that they have established?
Let’s see if the PA Weekly even covers this case given that it shows how crazy PAUSD has become.
That topic is off-limits at the Weekly.
Does the Weekly exist anymore? I haven’t seen it in years.
The same idea of dumbing down the herd that my son encountered a long time ago. If parents would read some of the textbooks that their children are assigned I think they would be amazed.
This is what you get when you elect candidates who favor dumb-it-down like Ken Dauber. He’s always for weakening academic standards, lightening up or eliminating homework, letting kids create their own graduation requirements. We ought to be raising standards, not lowering them.
Yeah, remember the whisper campaign to kill Zero period at Gunn? It was a clever way of stopping Asian kids from taking 5 AP classes. [Portion deleted — don’t make accusations that aren’t factual.] The opponents of Zero period threatened to defeat a school tax on the ballot, and the superintendent at the time (McGee) caved.
Math is racist. Down with math!