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How about they teach and do the work during school hours?
Being an ESL student would make school significantly harder. And would also explain he low English skills. And given that most illegals are manual labor and not high skilled jobs, the kids don't have parents who can help their kids with maths.
Not being good at Math is not that big of deal but not being proficient at your own native language seems inexcusable.
Unfortunately, I couldn't find any easy way to get example questions - they're all locked behind a login that requires student id.
Furthermore, this isn't entirely an ESL issue - according to the article, scores for African-American students were the lowest, and they're obviously native speakers. So we would need more information to figure out the origin of this disparity.
One final point - these numbers are the percentage of students who scored above a threshold, NOT their average scores. All of the scores for every ethnic group are likely on something like a normal distribution, shifted to the right or left. Of the groups who performed below the standard, it's likely that the majority of them performed very close to the standard even if they were just below it.
Not being good at Math is not that big of deal but not being proficient at your own native language seems inexcusable.
It has everything to do with home life and environment. No classroom within the expected margins of quality can overcome a negative home life that does not value education and encourage student achievement. Wealth and cultural/familial values are the major culprits.
"California isn’t alone in its stagnating scores and in fact compares favorably with the 12 other states, plus the U.S. Virgin Islands, that administered the same tests last spring from the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium. Scores decreased in every state, and California’s decline was about the smallest, retired educational testing specialist Douglas McRae said." This is the most important sentence in the artic…
It's almost as if the standard of what is standard changes drastically as the world does.
It has everything to do with home life and environment. No classroom within the expected margins of quality can overcome a negative home life that does not value education and encourage student achievement. Wealth and cultural/familial values are the major culprits.
Lack of wealth and lack of cultural/familial values more so than their overwhelming presence - though some might argue against the cultural part. When will American culture praise and reward academic acheivement in the way that some other cultures do?
America, in trying to promote the idea that anyone can become anything, has quite thoroughly quashed the idea that it is of any benefit to come from a "cultured" background; and, thereby, has devalued the concept of acquiring a Liberal Arts education as a necessary stepping stone in dynasty-building.
There are probably benefits to this, but there are also obvious drawbacks.
"California isn’t alone in its stagnating scores and in fact compares favorably with the 12 other states, plus the U.S. Virgin Islands, that administered the same tests last spring from the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium. Scores decreased in every state, and California’s decline was about the smallest, retired educational testing specialist Douglas McRae said." This is the most important sentence in the artic…