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2017 California school test scores: Why are they flatlining?

mercurynews.com

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Re: 2017 California school test scores: Why are they flatlining?

#51

Post by cobookman »

cobookman wrote: post #22

What is California's score if you get remove all the test scores of illegal immigrants. I'm sure that they drastically drop the scores. 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.

To add, Asian and white students are ~2x the proficiency rate as black / Latino.

http://www.mercurynews.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/sjm-l-...

Re: 2017 California school test scores: Why are they flatlining?

#52

Post by dang »

dragonwriter wrote: post #26

HN title is editorialized inappropriately from source (and focus shifted to absolute results rather than trends and discussion of the reasons behind the trends, which include questions about the validity of the tests.) The source title is “2017 California school test scores: Why are they flatlining?”

Yes, we've fixed it now. The submitted title ("2017 California school test scores: fewer than HALF proficient in Math, English") was an egregious violation of HN's rules: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. It even put some caps in there to boot.

Submitters: you can't use HN titles to editorialize. If you want to say what you think is important about an article, you need to do so in a comment, on a level playing field with everyone else. If you break this rule repeatedly you eventually lose submission privileges, so please don't break this rule.

Re: 2017 California school test scores: Why are they flatlining?

#53

Post by swivelmaster »

dragonwriter wrote: post #44
swivelmaster wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agree that the title should be edited. Still, the question of "why are the schools in and around Silicon Valley doing so poorly?" is worth discussing. We [residents of supposedly the most innovative region on the planet] should be able to solve these problems, and yet we either are unable to or haven't tried very hard.

> Still, the question of "why are the schools in and around Silicon Valley doing so poorly?" is worth discussing. It probably is but California is, by population or number of schools, mostly “in and around Los Angeles”, not “in and around Silicon Valley.”

The data that the article highlights is from the Bay Area, though.

Re: 2017 California school test scores: Why are they flatlining?

#54

Post by mulmen »

swivelmaster wrote: post #50
mulmen wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Graduation rate strikes me as a dangerous metric because it could easily be maximized by lowering the bar. We want to graduate as many students as possible but we should not compromise quality to do so. It seems to me we need metrics on both. I do admit to not knowing what I am talking about so maybe there is no danger in using the graduation rate metric.

Well the best metric is going to be something like annual pre-tax income a decade after graduation but that will never happen so we'll just need to figure out some kind of composite metric that avoids perverse incentives. edit: This is not an entirely serious suggestion. See later comment below.

Should income really be the final metric? What about less tangible (measurable?) factors like happiness? If we program all of our students to maximize income do we really make the world a better place?

Re: 2017 California school test scores: Why are they flatlining?

#55

Post by dragonwriter »

lr4444lr wrote: post #30
swivelmaster wrote: post #7

"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…

So what's your recommended alternative metric? I don't doubt there is a good case to improve certain standardized tests, but that doesn't mean there isn't a valuable correlation even in a flawed one, nor that it's better to keep moving the goal posts into more subjective territory to explain away bad outcomes.

The existing test is privately developed, opaque, and the responsible policy makers in the states using it, including California, can't get information on the validation from the maker. And, regardless of previous trends, which varied, every state using it saw a drop in 2017. This is all mentioned in the article.

Either there was a common national effect that dropped real outcomes, all states using the test independently made simultaneously missteps that dropped real outcomes, or the 2017 test was changed in some way which produced the downward movement.

If it weren't for the opacity, it would be easy to eliminate the last possibility.

Re: 2017 California school test scores: Why are they flatlining?

#56

Post by cobookman »

mitja_belak wrote: post #24
curiousgal wrote: post #3

Not being good at Math is not that big of deal but not being proficient at your own native language seems inexcusable.

Half the population not basicly proficient in math is a sign of weak education and shouldnt be dismissed with left hand.

The white and Asian population is passing with a high rate. It's not the schools failing then.

http://www.mercurynews.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/sjm-l-...

Re: 2017 California school test scores: Why are they flatlining?

#58

Post by peterwwillis »

One of the reasons - probably one of the biggest reasons - for continuously lower test scores in America is the quality of the care these children receive.

Over 40% of children in the US are born to unwed mothers, compared to 5% at the beginning of last century. About 70% of unwed childbirth is by black mothers, versus just 24% in 1965. The last two peaks of teenage pregnancy were 1991 and 2007 - so the children of teens have more children, whom are now 10 years old, with 26yr old parents, and whose grandparents are about 42yrs, with great grandparents about 70 years old.

The financial and social strain on such families is intense. It's also difficult to be the best parent you can be when you yourself are still not an adult. And it virtually guarantees poverty for these children. There is almost no reasonable assistance given to the families of these children - assistance like food, shelter, access to education, daycare, transportation.

Kids are getting left behind not by their school system, but a social system that has ignored them as part of a lower class of society that we'd rather starve and struggle than give assistance to.

If you don't believe this, go into a [public] school in Philly, Baltimore, New York, and ask about the grade level of reading comprehension of the kids, what their family life is like, and their economic status. You will see a trend in all three: "poor."

Re: 2017 California school test scores: Why are they flatlining?

#59

Post by swivelmaster »

mulmen wrote: post #54
swivelmaster wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well the best metric is going to be something like annual pre-tax income a decade after graduation but that will never happen so we'll just need to figure out some kind of composite metric that avoids perverse incentives. edit: This is not an entirely serious suggestion. See later comment below.

Should income really be the final metric? What about less tangible (measurable?) factors like happiness? If we program all of our students to maximize income do we really make the world a better place?

It's not a metric for the students though, it's for the school. If you average it among all students, you get a reasonable metric for the how the school is doing. Of course, this would likely fail if you applied it to arts schools...

Anyway, it wasn't a completely serious suggestion. It's got some problems. Happiness is a good thing to measure, but you'd want to still do some long term tracking of other metrics. Incarceration rates, income, college graduation rates, higher degrees and certifications, etc.

edit: I make the comment about arts schools having received a degree in film and taken a haphazard path into startups and programming that ultimately worked out pretty well. I absolutely encourage people to go to school for the arts if that's what you want to be doing.

Re: 2017 California school test scores: Why are they flatlining?

#60

Post by labster »

dragonwriter wrote: post #39
labster wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. Most of the hispanics whose families arrived in California before the English speakers arrived have long since become native English speakers. As with most second-generation or later immigrants. Though I have heard tales of Californians being native speakers of Lisp, this is probably just a rumor.

> Most of the hispanics whose families arrived in California before the English speakers arrived have long since become native English speakers. That's true of most Californios, sure, but they are, by far, a minority of California Hispanics, who are mostly from families that immigrated much more recently.

If you had read my comment past the first sentence, you would see that the second addressed your the larger population too.
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