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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?

#111

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.

The real problem is tests and goals changing every year... Constant changes to curriculum and learning goals cause nothing but confusion.

While I agree that this is a problem (i.e., one of suspect measurement), I don't think that it's the major problem. Tests that measure stuff that a not insignificant portion of the test taking population consider either irrelevant or (worse) antithetical to their lives are going to yield wonky results. The administrators claim to be measuring school or teacher effectiveness, while I would suggest that they are basically measuring SES.

Said another way, if you give tests that ask people about stuff that neither they nor most of the people they know care about, you shouldn't be surprised by bad and/or inconsistent results.

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

#112
post #103

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…

The lack of incentive to do well is precisely the point of these tests, and they are designed with this context in mind. The testing regimen relies on the same level of apathy in both students and teachers being present year after year, which provides a nice baseline for statistical analysis/comparison. Incentives mess everything up. See also: NAEP [1] Source: worked in ed covering this subject, studied assessment in…

I don't get why incentives mess test up? I would try harder on graded test, including preparation.

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

#113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if they are immigrants, knowing Spanish makes them half-way native English speakers because of the similarities between English and Spanish.

English is a Germanic language, with vocab borrowed from lots of other sources but mostly French, Spanish is a Romance language (with, especially in it's Latin American form) a bunch of vocabulary borrowed from Nahuatl and Quechua. They are extremely dissimilar grammatically, and though they have some overlap and similarities in vocabulary, it's nowhere close to making fluency with either making you even minimally fu…

There are enough similarities to give them significant advantages compared to immigrants coming from other parts of the language tree. English and Spanish have thousands of cognates. Having almost exactly the same alphabet is also a huge advantage. Having already learned thousands of permutations of the same alphabet letters (words) will make memorizing and learning the next thousand permutations much easier.

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

#114

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 t…

The most effective solution for this problem would be to encourage birth control and abortion for populations that are unfit to handle parenthood.

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

#115
post #112
post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The lack of incentive to do well is precisely the point of these tests, and they are designed with this context in mind. The testing regimen relies on the same level of apathy in both students and teachers being present year after year, which provides a nice baseline for statistical analysis/comparison. Incentives mess everything up. See also: NAEP [1] Source: worked in ed covering this subject, studied assessment in…

I don't get why incentives mess test up? I would try harder on graded test, including preparation.

When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.

The more you prepare specifically for a test, the harder it is to determine how much of your score is based on your general understanding of what is being tested, and how much is based on you exploiting the test.

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

#116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

English is a Germanic language, with vocab borrowed from lots of other sources but mostly French, Spanish is a Romance language (with, especially in it's Latin American form) a bunch of vocabulary borrowed from Nahuatl and Quechua. They are extremely dissimilar grammatically, and though they have some overlap and similarities in vocabulary, it's nowhere close to making fluency with either making you even minimally fu…

There are enough similarities to give them significant advantages compared to immigrants coming from other parts of the language tree. English and Spanish have thousands of cognates. Having almost exactly the same alphabet is also a huge advantage. Having already learned thousands of permutations of the same alphabet letters (words) will make memorizing and learning the next thousand permutations much easier.

> There are enough similarities to give them significant advantages compared to immigrants coming from other parts of the language tree.

Depends which other parts. Disadvantaged compared to German or Dutch speakers, and even French speakers, but, sure, advantages compared to other, say, people whose only prior language is Mandarin. And, of course, a big disadvantage compared to immigrants who already speak English, even if it's not American English.

But still very far from starting off even functional, much less halfway to native fluency.

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

#117
When are we going to come out and admit that our schools are not providing our society with what it needs or wants?

For a large chunk of HN, schools served us relatively well.

But for a huge chunk of the US, school is just a waste of time. At best, it's free childcare for parents. Preparing everyone to college is overkill (n.b. having a way for everyone who wants to go to college an affordable way to go to a good school is +++++EV... totally different issues).

Mandatory schooling should be for fundamentals in reading, communication (speaking and writing), and math -- if you want to get cheeky, teach them disciplinary approaches to history and science by using examples that currently exist in their communities. Most people don't need literature. Most people don't need algebra (or higher). Most people don't need history (esp. as it's currently taught). Most people don't need science (again, esp. not as it is currently taught). Why are we teaching these things on people who don't care about and will not use these potential skills? The resource sink is disgusting.

We could easily educate people to a functional level by 8th grade. Then let people join the real world if they want. Let them work rather than keep them in a glorified prison. If they at some point decide they want more schooling, give them easy access cheaply. This would be much cheaper than all the wasted high school resources we have now, and many of those resources could be funneled towards people who actually want to learn at the secondary and tertiary levels, even if it's not on a classic timeline.

It's time for a rethink of education -- our current system is ridiculously bad.

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

#118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm surprised I even have to explain this here but testing for basic language proficiency is not the only thing these types of tests are for. They test elements of writing, grammar, critical analysis, and vocabulary that students are still learning. 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…

>scores for African-American students were the lowest, and they're obviously native speakers. This isn't entirely true. There is a great diversity of dialects of English. Schools test and grade students on their abilities with "standard" English. For historical and racist reasons, African American Vernacular English is considered by many to be "stupid English", which puts many African American students at a disadvant…

>"standard English" (that is, "correct" written English) contains rules that are not, and have never been, part of any dialect of English that I am aware of.

It definitely doesn't, mainly because standard English is a dialect of English.

>in standard English you cannot split infinitives

Yes you can, that is not a rule in any form of English and never has been.

>and must use commas (which aren't a "thing" in spoken English) in certain places.

They are a 'thing'. Do you speak entire sentences in a rush without pausing anywhere? No, of course not. Commas represent the pauses that we use in spoken English. People put pauses more or less liberally generally because they use them in spoken English more or less liberally than the norm. If you read a sentence without commas you get lost because you're pronouncing it in your head without pauses. They read as 'breathless'.

>Further, the phonology of standard (written) English is miles away from what anyone says.

Written English doesn't have a phonology, it has spelling. Spoken English doesn't have spelling, only phonology. Lots of people speak General American or Received Pronunciation (rarer, but not uncommon in the upper class) Pakeha New Zealand English or any of the other many Standard accents of the various dialects of English.

You can't pronounce spelling, so of course written English doesn't represent what people say. And there's not really such a thing a 'standard written English'. There's basically American English and British English as spelling, lexical and grammatical systems. Everyone else has their own dialect of speech, but very little if any variation in writing.

>his result of this is that being a native speaker of English is not sufficient for anyone to learn standard English. To do so, one must be exposed to sufficient written material; and exposure to written material tends to correlate with class.

or, y'know, a decade or more of your formative years spending hours at school being required to learn to read, write and spell. I think that should be sufficient exposure to written material for anyone. It has little if anything to do with social or economic class.

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

#119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if they are immigrants, knowing Spanish makes them half-way native English speakers because of the similarities between English and Spanish.

English is a Germanic language, with vocab borrowed from lots of other sources but mostly French, Spanish is a Romance language (with, especially in it's Latin American form) a bunch of vocabulary borrowed from Nahuatl and Quechua. They are extremely dissimilar grammatically, and though they have some overlap and similarities in vocabulary, it's nowhere close to making fluency with either making you even minimally fu…

Among immigrants and their languages, Spanish is about as close to English as you can get, though. Not a lot of German/Swedish/Dutch immigration going on to California.

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

#120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I'm just saying that it's a weak argument to point out that success in school is linked with wealth. Would you like to say that the Earth is flat, disease is caused by an imbalance of humors, and Adam and Eve tamed dinosaurs for use in ancient rodeos while you're at it? Because those would have more chance of being correct than what you're saying. Socioeconomic security correlates more strongly to educational outcom…

Ah, the straw man technique. Well played. In a perfect system, what correlation would you expect between wealth and success in school?

Forget about "perfect". In a merely better system, "success in school" would be the last thing anyone thought about. The purpose of school is not to determine how well children navigate various arbitrary obstacles to learning. The purpose is to teach them, in whatever individual fashion best helps them to learn. If that doesn't happen it is a failure of the school, not of the child.

In a "perfect" system, the idea that anything about school would correlate with wealth would be viewed with deep suspicion. We're very far from that situation.

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