Virginia Department of Education this week announced the “Virginia Mathematics Pathways Initiative” (VMPI), a plan to reorient Virginia’s mathematics curriculum that will rid their public schools of all advanced math classes for students prior to the 11th grade. No longer will those students who excel be given the opportunity to challenge themselves until they are almost in college. As the VMPI’s “Essential Concepts” Committee member Ian Shenk admits in their webinar, the new program means removing algebra, geometry, and algebra II from the curriculum for anyone before their junior year in high school.
Advanced math students typically take algebra by 8th grade, and in the webinar the committee even noted students that were taking geometry in 8th grade.
The new program means those kids would be denied those challenges for three years, in which they will be forced to wallow in “learning” concepts they had likely mastered years before.
Why would the Department of Education purposefully hobble the education of its students?
“Equity.” The VMPI even spells it on in PowerPoint: the project’s number one goal is “improving equity in mathematics learning opportunities.”
It’s the Left’s obsession, and like every Leftist obsession, it’s destructive to anything it touches.
Instead of letting advanced students advance, for Virginia’s educrats, “equity” means bringing everyone down to a lower level. It means limiting the opportunities for hard-working, excellent students.
That’s one way to decrease any racial, class, or sex discrepancies in academic excellence. If you don’t allow anyone to excel, everyone will be limited to mediocrity.
That’s generally been the Left’s way, anyway, so it should come as no surprise. You can’t teach an old dog new tricks.
It’s similar to how the Left speaks of billionaires. Bernie Sanders can bleat about how “billionaires should not exist.” He doesn’t explain why billionaires should not exist, of course.
Whatever else they are, billionaires are often people who excelled at business. But the real problem is that billionaires are powerful, and for the Left, all power must be held by the Left.
Billionaires might have visions that their billions allow them to accomplish, like eliminating malaria or becoming a multi-planet species. Sorry, Bernie, but we should have more billionaires, not fewer. Wouldn’t mind being one myself, truth be told (though to be fair, Bernie’s got a significant head start on me, if this is a race).
It’s better than he Left’s alternative vision: “equity” in mediocrity.
Da Techguy's (no longer backup) Blog 
Those who cannot rise to hgher level will seek equality by dragging the upper levels down to where they are.
Well it’s much easer to drag someone down than to lift yourself up.