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I'm perpetually perplexed at why some people seem to think that lowering the standards is going to help anyone. Do they not realise the source of all scientific and technical advancement is really the result of a minority of high achievers, and that by trying to "flatten" this inequality and effectively make everyone equally stupid, they are also going to be affected negatively?
applies social justice principles to math lessons
The inmates aren't running the asylum anymore; they're running the government. All I hope is that this cancerous ideology (I'll resist the prop65 joke...) doesn't grow any further than it already has. The decline is certainly sad to see and already rather visible.
What if you invert your thesis. Sooner doesn’t necessarily imply “higher standard”:
1 - American school teach the alphabet before grade 1, and push kids to read early. German schools don’t even teach the alphabet until grade 1' yet by the end of that year the reading level of the kids is the same as US kids at the end of grade 1, or better. German Pädagogin justify this by saying there is some neural development issue — I think that is likely bull. But what I do recognize is that instead of being pushed to read before the kids are ready, the kids instead learn other valuable life skills. I happened to learn to read at age 5 (not in Germany nor USA) but that didn’t make me “better” than other kids; they did other things.
2 - kids who have parents who can afford tutors and such can push the kids through the prescribed steps sooner. Kids whose parents each have two jobs to get food on the table, well, they simply can’t. So the former define “higher standards” because they chose their parents well?
3 - To combine the two: if we can open up opportunities for all the kids aren’t we likely to end up with a larger pool of well educated people who will end up being the inventors, leaders, poets etc of the future? How many ramanujans are we leaving behind?
I’m not saying “throw out all the standards” but rather quite the opposite. I think your unidimensional absolutism is narrow and inadequate.
If there was a mixed program where you could either choose to have your children under Equitable Math or Common Core (the current standard which is adopted by the majority of US states), that would risk Equitable Math being framed as the way to fall behind. That's why the central contention is not about improving Common Core, but rather about whether all children should always be at the same level.
Sometimes children benefit from a delay, and other children benefit by moving ahead; but all children deserve the opportunity to advance according to their individual math ambition and ability. Under Equitable Math, all children must be at the same level up until the last year.
This is a huge win for private schools and after-school programs such as RSM.
Let's cut the bullshit and get straight to the heart here. Are black people, in your opinion, predisposed to be bad at math? If yes, then i guess your opinion is at least logically consistent. If no, then why are they (according to the article at least) underachieving?
If black kids aren't being served by the current curriculum, then I think it's reasonable to assume that some white kids aren't either.
I suggest that certain kids are being served poorly by the current system. If those kids were served better we could lift the floor, which would enable the high achievers to reach even further.
If you have 100 high achievers it's much more likely that one of them will produce a breakthrough than if you have 10.
I engaged in math competitions and such as a kid, I hope we can put this into the realm of "higher achievement".
I dont think minimum standards or curriculum moving accross grades have all that much to do with what competitive higher top does. The higher top require way more knowledge then what standards require. And more importantly, it requires more depth and speed.
High achievers are expected to know so much more then standards and to apply it in much higher variety of situations to compete.
In my experience, high achievers become interested in topics only covered in higher grades sooner or later anyways. And once they do, they pursue them only out of interest and intrinsic motivation, and that tends to boost their motivation. So I don't think this affects high achievers all that much either way.
Almost by definition, school (and everything else) is designed for the top of the bell curve.
Now, maybe school plan design can move the median ability up or down, and I don't have an opinion on if this change here does that, and if so, in what direction. I do think it doesn't affect the high end much either way.
The mass universal education system was designed to control and brainwash masses. The massive "free and universal" education movement launched by US was meant for this sort of end games and I am not surprised at all.
Having said that as a priviledged parent I merely chuckle at this social justice wanking as my kid goes to a private school and is tutored by me. She will be more successful than the "equity" kids from California if eveyrthing else remains the same.
> All I hope is that this cancerous ideology doesn't grow any further than it already has.
Give me one reason why you think your hope is valid. Everywhere I look this attitude seems to grow stronger and even discussing it becomes socially awkward, at least in some circles.
The situation sounds very similar to what happened in Argentina.
About 30 years ago, Argentina's education level was good. In the name of social justice , high school standards were significantly lowered by the populist/socialist ruling party. Low grades started to be considered 'stigmatizing' for the students. The effect is that now there are some children that finish high school without being able to read fluently.
Don't be like Argentina.
However, regarding math, if there are cognitive research studies that justify delaying some topics, I don't consider that as negative.
I only got into algebra late. Some people just have more advantages earlier. Why is this concept so hard to understand?
I’m Danish and not at all interested in the politics of it, but there can be a case for teaching algebra late. We do it in Denmark, because it’s the subject children have the hardest time learning, and having too many of them fail too early kills their interest in math. We still teach algebra in grade 7-9, but we’ve gone through the social experiments of teaching it at different ages, and have lost entire generations because it was taught too soon.
I don’t think social justice or equality should play a part of the argument, but it’s always hard to tell where the legislation ends and the propaganda begins these days, and I’m honestly no interested enough to read the 800 page document this article is about.
I will say, however, that I think we’re going to have problems teaching math until we reform the school system to be suited for the modern world instead of the early 1900’s “assembly line” society. It makes no sense to place children in classes based on their age, and certainly not for all subjects.
The result is always going to be that both slow and brilliant students get fucked over, in a myriad of ways, especially if they are a mix of good and bad at different subjects.
Why exactly is it that you aren’t taught courses like math, or history or language according to your ability instead of your age?
This is one of those issues that I can't understand the opposing argument. It's just an issue I find so objectionable that I cannot understand why anyone would be imposing this. Literally holding kids back.
The only defense I hear is that kids don't really benefit from advanced classes and they'll be fine anyway. But gifted children will not necessarily be fine. Most of the smartest people I know struggled in school just, but most were fortunately saved by advanced placement classes that put them in classes where they can learn at a faster pace than the rest of the children. Were they forced to stay in what to them amounted to remedial classes, they would grow to resent education and actually underperform.
The utter disregard the people pushing these policies have for children is appalling. Hopefully this is just a weird time in our countries history where that we'll look back on and think how absurd the policies were.
My parents introduced it to me at home around 4th-5th grade? So I was ~9-10yo? Not sure why delaying it will help, if anything the earlier the better. Everything I hear about "equity in education" seems to be making it worse, but more equally I guess.
Like another poster already mentioned, reminds me of the Harrison Bergeron story by Vonnegut - seems like we are rapidly approaching that point.
Not from California, but I took algebra in 7th grade - it was the advanced math course in my public middle school. It was a much-welcomed safe haven from the other classes - the middle schoolers here were actually SMART. In that class I sat next to a guy who taught me how to program the TI-84. We would spend all class programming, making games, and just learning.
Now, over a decade later, I am a professional software engineer. Sitting next to that guy in my 7th grade algebra class set my life on a course that turned out to be great. It makes me sad to know that future students won't be able to have such opportunities to be surrounded by similarly smart people. In the rest of my middle school classes the disrespect, distracting behavior, bullying, etc. were totally out of control - now I guess students won't know anything different.
I think this is a TERRIBLE decision, pushed by radical leftists that are completely out of touch with regular people. I wonder how much farther California and its cities will fall before people wake up.
These superficial debates are in my eyes futile since they presuppose: "We ought to have a strict curriculum for a certain narrow age group."
After what we have learned the last 30-50 years from cognitive sciences one has to wonder what schools are actually for, nowadays. There are most certainly not optimized for "learning" by any means. Imho to put it blatantly schools are reduced to be a effective stronghold for indoctrination. They justify their power by using "science, technology, art, literature, history, social community, cultural exchange ...". Of course sheer by its power and scope we certainly "learn" something there. And you also happen to find great teachers in that system but its certainly not its main purpose.
Going back historically, schools still remain inherently (and shockingly so) medieval institutions. Interestingly "school" originally stems from the greek word of σχολή (/skʰo.lɛ̌ː/) which simply means "free time, leisure" which got hijacked by the church with "monastic schools" and today "school" means quite the opposite.
Throughout its (western) history with changing society they were succesful adaptions made (Prussian system, Humboldt's Ideal, Montessori pedagogy) skyrocketing literacy, expolding number of scientists etc.
But today the educational system is massively outpaced by the societal changes and by failing simply regresses to its medieval core of indoctrination ("preparation for the labor market").
No scientific literacy (aka critical thinking, controversial debates), no "learning" grounded on cognitive sciences, no hearing and tending to the needs of our young which they can perfectly articulate.
I am not from US so don't interpret my comment trough US blue vs red or similar lenses. My observations is that students learn at different speed, the issue with a teacher that is forced to teach a class of 25 students is very obvious, at each step some student will fall behind, then if he is behind he will have more trouble comprehending the next topic and in the end you get a student that does not know the basic rules of signs when multiplying. I know such a person that failed his national exam, he did not know how to multiply negative integers , but this person had the ambition to get his dream job so he found a tutor and he learned and then he got a good grade. The difference was that you had a tutor with 1 or maybe 2 students at a time and that the student wanted to learn.
When I am doing homework with my son or check is lessons I always wonder what is happening with students that parents don't have the time or the skill to do math,physics,programming together with the child. Some will hire private tutors but to few.
Seems to me that either you get fewer students to a teacher, or have less dense material to work with so the teacher can have the time to check each student and figure-out what exactly is unclear. And you ofcourse you need good teachers,
Well that's stupid. If anything they should introduce it sooner. There's tons of research that show the sooner it's introduced the better they are able to digest that (as in it becomes more second nature and are later able to reason with it and build off that knowledge better).
So much dialogue is around how to pace and sequence the traditional math curriculum (geometry, trig, precalc, calc). Are those still the most important things to teach? And do they need to be taught and tested through working through the same calculations framed in the same narrow scenarios? When's the last time you solved a quadratic equation or did integration by parts in the real world? The concepts may be important, but is chugging through trigonometric identities really helping kids?
I use the concept of a derivative often, and I'm glad it enriches my understanding of the world even if I calculate derivatives almost never. But there are so many other useful math concepts which might be better to communicate than just doing exercises around techniques (e.g. can you apply the quotient rule correctly).
Concepts I wish we emphasized instead:
- stats: uncertainty, confidence intervals. (In)dependence of variables. Correlation.
- discrete math: enough to communicate the concept of structure being preserved. Enough combinatorics to understand why some families of structures might be huge. Basic concepts around graphs.
These ideas don't necessarily need to be sequenced. You can deal with plenty of integrals while learning stats, but you don't have to.
What if our concept of woke math involved introducing posets and relations and cases where comparison isn't possible? What if we stopped talking about high school math as a single ladder and consider it more as a landscape to explore? By desequentualizing topics, maybe upper class hs students can actually catch up by taking more than one math class at a time?
I was doing algebra and Russian math word problems in 4th grade (maybe earlier, it's been a while). What exactly is the logic of pushing back mathematical training to later grades? [1]
We have observed that physical distancing children hurt a lot of children. It was a sacrifical experiment to try to save the elderly and weak.
When the virus leaked from the Wuhan laboratory and spread across the globe in a matter of months, we knew even then that children are not really at risk of dying from sars-cov-2.
Seems like the correct course of action for the times is to take education out of the hands of government.
I do not believe children should be left behind, but the dumbing down of society isn't going to work. Seems like a segment ripe for complete market disruption.
My 5th grader is learning algebra and we support him at home.
Naturally we will continue to look for resources for him outside of public indoctrination. Perhaps we will see countless real schools being formed across the nation.
I learned almost all I know from the Internet over my 36 years. If more injection mandates occur, especially for children in my region, I will pull my children out of government school.
In 2020 we did distance learning and my children thrived while so many another's back tracked regarding test scores.
Our children thrived because my wife and I work from home. They thrived because life at home, while not structured like school, is an on going homeschool-like experience.
I'm so grateful to have been able to see my children thrive in these times.
We have had a lot of set backs as a society but we will continue to rebuild, repair, and grow!
The irony is that this is probably going to exacerbate social injustice. Cupertino kids are going to be taking extracurricular math through RSM or Kumon in elementary school, and then the Cupertino school district (in the article) says that they have no intention to comply with the recommendations. SF kids aren't going to be exposed to algebra until 9th grade and then get a rude awakening in college when they realize all the cool courses have pre-reqs.
I've heard a good argument that algebra specifically should be moved the other way: teach it in elementary school, when kids are first exposed to arithmetic. There's a really natural progression from addition/subtraction/zero and multiplication/division/one to inverses and identities, and from addition/multiplication to distribution and associativity. My 3-year-old understands that if he has 5 raspberries on his fingers and he takes away one, he has 4, and then if he grabs another one and puts it on his finger, he has 5 again. Not a huge leap from there to the concept of equations, inverse operations, and solving for unknowns.
This is not going to work well unless they massively improve math instruction in the lower grades. In fact they seem to be taking the opposite approach, where "equity" just means setting every student up for failure equally.
This is really making the public school system more unequal. Since this is just a "recommendation", the good public schools like Cupertino or Piedmont will ignore it, and keep teaching children algebra. The bad public schools that are having trouble hiring algebra teachers will use this as an excuse to stop teaching algebra.
There's more value in flexibility than catering to the lowest common denominator. There's plenty of money to do so, unfortunately it gets leeched out before ever reaching the classroom. People learn at a different pace. Algebra should be available as early as 7th grade, and can be deferred to 9th for those with different aptitudes.
The reason many minorities and POC lag behind has nothing to do with race. Like many issues in the US there are effective ways to address this, none of which survive the compromises and competing desires of bureaucracy.
Like many readers of HN, I've taken a lot of math over the years--at least 25 semester long courses at the university level. So I have well informed opinions about what works and what doesn't work for me; schools, on the other hand, have to educate everyone. This, perhaps, accounts for the wide range of opinions being expressed here.
I think that we can agree that the whatever they are doing in the United States isn't working very well. According to the scores on the PSIA math test given internationally to 15 year olds, the US ranks behind 21 other nations [1], well below the international average. Why not pick, say, the top four countries, (recently South Korea, Japan, Switzerland, and the Netherlands) and adopt their methods that are working? Instead of dreaming up new approaches that have no quality research justification, just teach math in a manner that is already known to be significantly better.
[1] https://www.nsf.gov/nsb/sei/edTool/data/highschool-08.html
The article does a great job of covering what people think about these changes, but a terrible job of covering what on earth the changes actually are. I felt like I was trying to solve a mystery where every paragraph buried in the opinions were small clues about what they're actually talking about.
The program is called Equitable Math and it frames current mathematics pedagogy as a mechanism by which White Supremacy is sustained.¹ Note that in a very long multi-part document on White Supremacy, there is absolutely zero mention of Asians, despite that they are somewhere between 15.5% to 17% of the state population.²
Program goals includes the de-emphasis of Algebra for middle school and Calculus for high school. Under Equitable Math, all students must take the same level of courses up until the senior year.
[1]: https://equitablemath.org
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asian_Americans_in_California
I immigrated from India after high school and we had already studied advanced calculus and other subjects by high school. Basic Calculus was introduced in grade 9 onwards if I remember right. When I immigrated for university to Canada, I was teaching algebra, trig, calculus etc to university students 1 year above me.
All these delaying important subjects is going to let immigrants from other countries like India, China, Pakistan, Bangladesh etc excel while Canadians and Americans to fall behind. This is a stupid idea.
In Soviet Union algebra and geometry were taught from 5th to 11th grade to every kid in the country. And 10th & 11th grade algebra text-book was edited by Kolmogorov himself [0]. No surprise that _Russian School of Mathematics_ [1] after-school program is becoming very popular in the USA.
[0] Search for "algebra" in https://www.kolmogorov.com/Books.html
One more nail in the public education system. This will amplify the inequality through middle class folks hiring tutors and such or just opting for private schools where the curriculum is “modified”.
Here's a revolutionary idea that pretty much all of the world adopts, if students are having trouble with a topic, get them to do more of it, instead of running away from it.
I always find it hilarious that the pre college education in US is so messed up. Instead of doing Algebra 1, Algebra 2, calculus, geometry as one subject that you do in a year and then completely forgetting about it till the next time you have to do it, how about you do a little bit of everything every year from grade 8-12. Problem solved.
For e.g. in India you learn geometry, algebra, etc. every year from grade 6 to grade 12. i.e. You have a single subject called "Math" that teaches grade appropriate concepts in all the topics in math. Trains the mind gradually over 7 years instead of one big dump. In undergrad in USA, I cruised through most of my freshmen math classes because I had learnt most of it in high school.
"Yet for all the sound and fury, the proposed framework, about 800-pages long, is little more than a set of suggestions. Its designers are revising it now and will subject it to 60 more days of public review. Once it’s approved in July, districts may adopt as much or as little of the framework as they choose — and can disregard it completely without any penalty."
Everything about this movement is rotten.
SFUSD claims their reforms pushing algebra to 9th grade decreased the algebra re-take rate from 40% to 7%. However, the drop in re-take rate was actually caused primarily by the removal of the requirement to pass a curriculum exam. Quite simply, if “knowing algebra” is removed as a requirement to pass algebra, more people will pass algebra.
More at https://www.familiesforsanfrancisco.com/updates/inequity-in-...
They should certainly correct, but it’s weird to stop entirely. It seems like a failure on the part of administration to create a more equitable program.
I grew up in a diverse city where all the advanced schools and classes were filled with white kids, and it was incredibly obvious that it was due to socioeconomic factors.
Kids in my classes were going to expensive tutors and had parents in high paying jobs that could be around to help them.
My neighbor on the other hand was an immigrant taking care of younger siblings after school and eventually working to help his mom when he was old enough. No time or money for tutoring, or even homework for that matter. I was in the same boat for a long time but was fortunate enough to not need to study as much as my peers, some who had enormous amounts of help. As an adult I still can’t afford the amount of tutoring they were getting, some even paid someone to write college admission essays.
It’s 20 years later and it’s all the same, if not worse, and I still get mad about it.
I'm going to be controversial and say this has a marginal impact on educational outcomes. Probably skewed towards better as I'm assuming they've done their homework.
Look, kids who love math and nerd out in their spare time will still be tearing into calc in uni.
Those who don't will still pick up enough to hit the trades or JOB.
The kids who don't need advanced maths might actually get more out of what they do learn as it's delivered at a higher age.
Ok who knows maybe it has marginally lower outcomes over all. No one knows and the people in this thread decrying the end of exceptionalism are deluding themselves into thinking life outcomes are extremely sensitive to high school educational content. I don't think that's verifiable.
Getting people to school and keeping them from dropping out is likely a better first order optimization to overall outcomes. Kids are still going to get their calcs in uni and the universities will still be pumping out overly-educated overly-indebted young adults...
I think we should really hold off on addition and reading until the post graduate level.
Once we take this to it's logical conclusion and reset the achievment bar to absolute zero, it will be impossible for there to be any inequality.
All classess straight through undergrad could be limited to a combination of nap time and snack time.
With such an overwhelmingly negative response in the comments on these things, you have to wonder who actually supports this stuff and how is it possible that such a small group yields so much power
Beginning algebra is more of a language learning exercise. There's not much content; it's more about notation and manipulation, which will be used later.
Looked at that way, it's helpful to get that done reasonably early.
Calculus? I wonder how that's taught today. I had way too much stuff about summing infinite series, which you don't really do very often. I think calculus should be taught in conjunction with Newtonian physics, so you see how it predicts what happens in simple physical situations. This provides motivation.
If you are high income, then this won’t affect you at all. Your kids will be doing calculus and algebra early because they enjoy it and are probably good at it. It’ll just be outside of school.
Like many other things California (and SF in particular) is doing, this is cruelty disguised as compassion.
Let's take away the opportunities to get ahead early, because it may disrupt some egalitarian principles that are totally absent in the real world. As someone who majored in mathematics and was involved in educating K-12 students for many years, I find this to be completely ignorant of the reality behind school districts like those in the Bay Area, where affluent kids take Russian math after school to compensate for the inadequacies in their school's mathematics curriculum.
This is basically what we're dealing with here in California: https://equitablemath.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/11...
"The framework for deconstructing racism in mathematics offers essential characteristics of antiracist math educators and critical approaches to dismantling white supremacy in math classrooms by making visible the toxic characteristics of white supremacy culture with respect to math."
On page 8, the authors claim that one way white supremacy manifests itself is when "students are required to show their work in standardized, prescribed ways". This is literally the definition of mathematical notation, and the use of standardized notation is fundamental to being able to communicate with other mathematicians.
I took my first algebra class in 7th grade (early 90s, Maryland). I remember struggling initially (in part because we had moved from another state the summer before, and my prior math class didn't quite prepare me for it), but an hour or two of my dad explaining it to me at home made things "click" and I was fine after that. The class was a good size (probably around 30 kids), so it's not like this was a tiny accelerated-learning class (it wasn't the "standard" class, though; it was definitely the "honors" level or something like that).
By the end of high school, I'd taken the equivalent of two semesters of university-level calculus, which allowed me to skip those classes when I went to college, and take more challenging courses. It's hard to imagine students who first take algebra in 9th grade progressing to anything beyond the most basic of calculus (at best) before graduating from high school.
Judging by other responses here, I'm not even a particularly special or advanced case, with some kids being introduced to basic algebra many years before I was. Which makes sense. If you can teach a kid "1 + 1 = ?", then at some point shortly after, you can start to teach "1 + ? = 2". Bam: basic algebra.
It just sounds like instead of getting students to stretch, we're pushing the gifted kids down to the lowest common denominator. It makes me assume that school administrators just want to avoid conflict with parents and hurt feelings among kids when they bucket students between remedial/standard/honors classes. We're sacrificing education for temporary good feelings.
This state has lost its mind. When I have kids, they are going to private schools or if I can't afford that home school. Seems like the aim of California schools is to create politically radical students, who can't do math. Perfect for our times!
I remember in 2nd or 3rd grade sitting with my classmates on the floor and the teacher wrote something like 4 + ? = 7 on the board.
Without even mentioning the word variable, algebra, or any other terms, they began teaching us about these concepts.
They started with a problem where the answer is so easy everyone can get it. No formalization to start with, just, here's a simple example that you can immediately relate to. Only after doing this do you need to learn and understand the formalization and theory of the concepts.
I find the same is true in programming. Often to learn something new, it's better to copy and run a code snippet that does the new thing. Only after running it, seeing the result, seeing it work is the formalization and theory needed. Then you just rinse and repeat to get better and better at it.
As an aside: I think had the teacher asked us for a name as well instead of using the ?, we could have even started learning about using variables earlier. By our own laziness as kids, someone would likely have gotten tired of writing out "my number that I'm trying to find" + 3 = 7 and thought about shortening it by some degree. It would have felt empowering to have that insight come from a class mate, and if not, the teacher could always introduce it on their own.
ETA
I also had a college professor who started each new unit by explicitly motivating why we were going to learn, what we were going to learn, and how it related to what we just learned.
That context was a huge help in learning the material.
It's the principle of experiential learning. Pushing back such a basic concept of math would only disadvantage society.
I have some concerns.
What are the psychological effects of daily reminders of inequality, equity, and systems of white supremacy. Could this grow resentment, hostility, and/or entitlement?
How is delaying mathematics equitable? How does this represent equity in a global economy?
How does equity and social justice in education respond to individual talent, aptitude, mental health, physical health, and/or socioeconomic status?
My cousin who lives in California told me the other day that her son was a couple of years behind in math compared to where she was in high school back in Bangladesh in the 1990s. This is a nice suburb of Sacramento.
The way math is taught in primary school is a disaster. Paul Lockhart's "A Mathematician’s Lament" puts it better than I could, and is worth reading in full (it's hard to find just one quote to provide here): https://www.maa.org/external_archive/devlin/LockhartsLament.....
Maybe one section that's relevant here is the one on "pseudo-mathematics":
> The cultural problem is a self-perpetuating monster: students learn about math from their teachers, and teachers learn about it from their teachers, so this lack of understanding and appreciation for mathematics in our culture replicates itself indefinitely. Worse, the perpetuation of this “pseudo-mathematics,” this emphasis on the accurate yet mindless manipulation of symbols, creates its own culture and its own set of values. Those who have become adept at it derive a great deal of self-esteem from their success. The last thing they want to hear is that math is really about raw creativity and aesthetic sensitivity. Many a graduate student has come to grief when they discover, after a decade of being told they were “good at math,” that in fact they have no real mathematical talent and are just very good at following directions. Math is not about following directions, it’s about making new directions.
Many people on this website did well at the pseudo-mathematics taught in schools and think of themselves as being improved by learning it. If this (pseudo-)math is what distinguishes the "smart kids" from the rest, our "smart kids" will be harmed by delaying it. But what if the pseudo-math and the concept of "smart kid" it creates is actually harmful, both to the practice of real math and to the kids' own sense of self-worth?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harrison_Bergeron
An old short story about enforced equality. Intelligent people had noise makers on ears to keep them from concentrating. Beautiful people were made to look like clowns.
No one could stand out, no one could excel.
These efforts feel misguided. Black and Latino people aren't bad at math because of the language used in math education (most of the language seems neutral from what I remembered), it's because they are largely poor, due to structural racism or they are first generation immigrants who didn't come to work in tech or something. They're just poor and unfortunately it's hard to really do anything when you're poor in America.
My parents immigrated from Romania and were part of the Florida Romanian community. Many were poor, didn't really have a great support system, and didnt really get America. Many of the kids in that community just dropped out or didn't do well in school and that's largely because of a poor home life and just not having access to anything. All the countries that have great education systems also have great support systems for families.
Algebra isn't hard (though it is time consuming imo), you can pass all the tests with memorization since it's applying a few patterns over and over again. Delaying it isn't going to make people better at it.
When I pulled my kids out of traditional school we started introducing concepts of Algebra and Geometry to them immediately (2st and 4th grades). It takes extra work, but they understand everything just fine. The problem isn't that the kids can't understand it. The problem is our education system is broken and no longer has the ability to teach children anything other than what might be on a standardized test. This is literally every subject, not just math. Writing, history, spelling, science, even physical education has suffered the same decline. The whole of the education system is a shell of its former self, and is more concerned with providing child care rather than instruction.