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2017 California school test scores: Why are they flatlining?

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

#61

Post by labster »

ransom1538 wrote: post #36
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…

"This is the most important sentence in the article. It points to a problem in the test itself - California's students didn't just get magically stupider." Yes. Having gone through public education in California the tests were treated as a total joke. They had no weight to your grades and there was zero incentive to do well. Often you wouldn't even get the results. In elementary school it was common for a teacher to…

Easy solution: make the tests count for a significant chunk of the students' grades. Or at certain years, require a passing grade on the standardized tests to be promoted to the next grade.

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

#62

Post by andrei_says_ »

Treating learning as a process of moving information into children’s minds and then checking it’s quality via tests is an old, inefficient and misaligned with what we know about learning.

It is a broken approach which makes sense in the context of training factory workers while providing childcare for their worker parents. Works so-so for the bean counters at the tremendous cost of crushing ebmveryone else.

It is abysmal in the face of the pace at which the workforce moves and doesn’t even come close to what today’s kids actually need.

Tests are just one of the symptoms.

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

#63

Post by gizmo686 »

ransom1538 wrote: post #36
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…

"This is the most important sentence in the article. It points to a problem in the test itself - California's students didn't just get magically stupider." Yes. Having gone through public education in California the tests were treated as a total joke. They had no weight to your grades and there was zero incentive to do well. Often you wouldn't even get the results. In elementary school it was common for a teacher to…

>They had no weight to your grades and there was zero incentive to do well.

This doesn't seem like that bad of an idea. One of the bigger problems with tests is that they tend to become a terrible metric once people start preparing for them specifically (and test-prep can suck the oxegyn out of real education). If the students and teachers don't care about the test, it is much easier (but still difficult) to make a test that gives useful feedback to the school system. Of course, you want students to take it seriously enough while there taking it.

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

#64

Post by EpicEng »

labster wrote: post #61
ransom1538 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"This is the most important sentence in the article. It points to a problem in the test itself - California's students didn't just get magically stupider." Yes. Having gone through public education in California the tests were treated as a total joke. They had no weight to your grades and there was zero incentive to do well. Often you wouldn't even get the results. In elementary school it was common for a teacher to…

Easy solution: make the tests count for a significant chunk of the students' grades. Or at certain years, require a passing grade on the standardized tests to be promoted to the next grade.

Yes, boil the entire year down to one or two tests which have been shown to be a poor indicator of knowledge and performance. We'll just start holding back 25% of students. What could go wrong?

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

#65

Post by QAPereo »

TheAdamAndChe wrote: post #47
bitxbitxbitcoin wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I would argue that cultural influences do play a major role. Asian Americans on average make nearly $20k/yr more than whites. Almost 20% of billionaires are Jewish[1]. Those kinds of discrepancies don't come from nowhere, and absolutely show that upbringing and culture have a massive effect on future growth and goal attainment. Now look at popular US culture nowadays. People are told they can be whatever they want to…

Education is typically very important in a Jewish household, STEM, medicine, law, and business are likewise very respected, along with musical talent. I’m Jewish, and I’d say the cultural norm ranged from supportive of the things I mentioned, to extremely demanding of them. I’ve noticed similar patterns from childhood well into adulthood in my Asian friends, whether they’re Indian, Japanese, Chinese or Korean.

Drive matters. A family with expectations, and generations of educational aspirations matter, if you’re trying to excel.

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

#66

Post by pkaye »

swivelmaster wrote: post #38
lr4444lr wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They're mentioned in the article. Graduation rates, college acceptance, stuff like that. Some of the countries with the best education systems in the world don't have these kinds of standardized tests. Also, nobody's suggesting moving the goal posts to explain away bad outcomes. If every school suddenly loses three points on average from one year to another on what is supposed to be the same test, the only common var…

Can you provide a reference to those countries with the best education systems?

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

#68

Post by dragonwriter »

swivelmaster wrote: post #53
dragonwriter wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

It picks numbers from four Bay Area counties, but not really the four anyone would pick if they were concerned with “in and around Silicon Valley” (particularly, Contra Costa is included but not San Francisco.)

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

#69

Post by tptacek »

labster wrote: post #61
ransom1538 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"This is the most important sentence in the article. It points to a problem in the test itself - California's students didn't just get magically stupider." Yes. Having gone through public education in California the tests were treated as a total joke. They had no weight to your grades and there was zero incentive to do well. Often you wouldn't even get the results. In elementary school it was common for a teacher to…

Easy solution: make the tests count for a significant chunk of the students' grades. Or at certain years, require a passing grade on the standardized tests to be promoted to the next grade.

If we're going to have an enforced one-size fits all national curriculum, we can do better than the one we reverse engineer from some stupid standardized test.

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

#70

Post by tptacek »

pkaye wrote: post #66
swivelmaster wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're mentioned in the article. Graduation rates, college acceptance, stuff like that. Some of the countries with the best education systems in the world don't have these kinds of standardized tests. Also, nobody's suggesting moving the goal posts to explain away bad outcomes. If every school suddenly loses three points on average from one year to another on what is supposed to be the same test, the only common var…

Can you provide a reference to those countries with the best education systems?

Finland has just one, an exit exam at the end of high school, like a mandatory SAT.
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