121–130 of 236 posts
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The SAT is explicitly designed to predict success at college. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAT
We are not talking about the SAT. This article is talking about the CAASPP, which is intended to provide feedback and ratings for the schools, not the students.
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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-...
To go to one of the majority-white / Asian schools you need to live in neighborhoods where the houses are easily 3x the cost of the houses in Latino /black neighborhoods. There are few if any apartments to rent. These schools routinely have fundraisers where parents are asked to donate thousands of dollars to their specific schools. Stay-again-home mothers help teachers out in the classroom. There aren’t ESL classes, just Spanish or Chinese immersion classes.
So I wouldn’t be so sure that the schools don’t make a difference.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
We are not talking about the SAT. This article is talking about the CAASPP, which is intended to provide feedback and ratings for the schools, not the students.
Does CAASPP differ in any salient way from SAT? If someone from another nation took each of them without seeing the cover sheet, could she say that the tests were different in any important way?
SAT is a paper-based fixed set of questions, CAASPP is an adaptive computer-based exam. So, yes, quite.
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 sch…
There must be better ways to teach algebra and higher math, science, history, literature, etc. But to say they are useless is bonkers to me. Especially at a time where menial jobs are at great risk due to outsourcing and automation. The solution has to be more and better education, not less. I don't know how you expect people who know basic math, reading, and writing to succeed.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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-...
If the schools are only effectively serving White and Asian students, they are failing.
If the schools are effectively doing nothing and success is determined mostly by parents educational attainment which just correlates with race, then the schools are still failing.
So, no, I think your basis for concluding that the schools are not founding is inadequate to that conclusion.
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.
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 sch…
Giving everyone access to this kind of exploratory environment can yield huge benefits to society. Could we do a better job teaching these topics? Absolutely. Does that mean we should just give up in the name of maximizing resource efficiency? Not really, we have the resources, we just need to spend them properly.
I think it is unreasonable to expect that people will come to higher or secondary education on their own. Some will but for a lot of people they may go through life never realizing their potential because nobody challenged them and they never knew what was possible.
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 sch…
The most important point of school isn't accumulating facts or skills but teaching students _how to think_. How to reason, how to solve problems, the absorption of a diversity of ideas and topics. To expose everyone to the knowledge, and skills to be free in society. It isn't a trade skill to teach them precisely and only the things they will need for a specific job.
The thing they teach wrong very early to very many people is that learning is labor, and the key to success is following rules from an authority.
Back to the main point I'm trying to make is that school is about teaching children how to think. You don't achieve this by sending them to a seminar about thinking, you do this by exposing them to history, art, literature, mathematics, and all the rest. You learn how to think sideways by being exposed to knowledge and challenged to remember and analyze and master many different subjects in many different ways. It's been pushing increasingly more and more towards achieving certificates, honors, and test scores, and these things are poisonous to actual quality learning and as an effect quality life.
Just like in technology, optimizing for a poor metric makes you worse off than if you did nothing... and what YOU want to do is optimize for an even worse metric, myopic utility.
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I think this is more important: The numbers are half a percentage-point different from 2016 — down in English and up in math. Scores didn't really do down, they stayed the same. Why would one expect them to go up? Kids didn't get magically smarter, schools didn't change. It's more suspicious that the schools got better every year under the previous test.
Optimizing test taking took some years, maybe?
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This is the kind of comment that truly derails education. It's reactionary and doesn't have a real objective.
The wealthiest members of our society are on one hand sending their children to expensive private schools, specifically to avoid exposing them to computers in the classroom, while on the other hand lobbying for increased usage of computing in public education to support their businesses. This is a completely valid concern, and you are dismissing it without reason.