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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?

#171

Post by mcny »

cyphar wrote: post #154
mcny wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Babysitters generally don't need to manage more 15 children all at once Sorry for going off-topic but I come from a small school and I don't understand how it is acceptable for class size to be huge (40+ students in a class is considered acceptable). I mean I get it if the class is led by someone extraordinary like Richard Feynman and everyone wants to be in his lectures but as others have said most teachers are no…

It boils down to lack of funding and lack of teachers. Lack of new teachers -- as well as absolutely insanely strong unions -- are also some of the reasons why teachers effectively have tenure at schools. In Australia, teachers can be moved around schools (in a given state) as well, which is even more flexible than just tenure at a university.

> It boils down to lack of funding and lack of teachers. Lack of new teachers -- as well as absolutely insanely strong unions -- are also some of the reasons why teachers effectively have tenure at schools. In Australia, teachers can be moved around schools (in a given state) as well, which is even more flexible than just tenure at a university.

So basically we have no friends. The unions are not our friends obviously but the people who want to break teacher unions are also not our friends because they want to profit at our expense.

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

#172

Post by JustSomeNobody »

csa wrote: post #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 sch…

We definitely need history and science otherwise people vote for politicians who also don't understand history and science.

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

#174

Post by Pigo »

swivelmaster wrote: post #41
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…

When was this? I graduated high school in 2002 and felt like the tests were taken fairly seriously. I went to school in Marin, though, so I don't know how that compares to anywhere else.

I agree, it always seemed to me that most of us didn't want people to think we're stupid. It seems sad that you have to worry that a kid will just fill in whatever so they can go to lunch. That seems like a self-esteem or discipline problem, not a fault of test taking.

For all the complaining, I'm curious what a better solution would be for finding out how much kids are learning.

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

#175

Post by dogruck »

jessaustin wrote: post #120
dogruck wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

I interpret your point as "in a perfect system, school will be a playground, with no connection to a career, and everyone will have equal wealth."

I do agree that schools are culpable when a child (and parents) fails. I do not agree that we should take away the student's agency.

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

#176

Post by Pigo »

andrei_says_ wrote: post #62

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 aby…

What would be a new, efficient approach?

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

#177

Post by tptacek »

dogruck wrote: post #162
tptacek wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Start here and follow links: https://www.vox.com/the-big-idea/2017/5/18/15655638/charles-... (This only looks like a Vox article; it's actually an open letter from authoritative researchers Vox happens to be publishing.)

I read the Vox piece, and I don't find it logical. Do you think a fair summary is "nature has a larger impact on IQ than nurture?" Note the article does concede that genetics impact IQ. Somewhat related: I find it amusing when parents talk at length about how similar their children are to themselves and to past relatives -- and then pivot to essentially argue that every individual has equal capabilities.

You read a piece by Eric Turkheimer and Richard Nisbett and "didn't find it logical"?

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

#178

Post by tptacek »

saint_fiasco wrote: post #170
tptacek wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SES and IQ are not orthogonal . In the limited studies we have, SES interventions generate durable IQ gains, gains substantially larger than the supposed gap between races. The grandparent comment is "not even wrong".

The comment is not "not even wrong". In fact you are not even really disagreeing. People with high SES have children with high IQ, then those children's children also have high SES and IQ. Does it really matter if the high IQ was because of inherited genes vs inherited wealth? You both already believe that it is hereditary.

It matters very much, because the subtext of saying that school performance is effectively hereditary is that no intervention we can come up with will improve test scores, because the problem is intrinsic to the student. That's false.

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

#179

Post by tptacek »

dogruck wrote: post #165
tptacek wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SES and IQ are not orthogonal . In the limited studies we have, SES interventions generate durable IQ gains, gains substantially larger than the supposed gap between races. The grandparent comment is "not even wrong".

I see irony when people make these simultaneous claims: 1. This test has deep bias and flaws because it shows a difference in groups 2. I know this is true because of the results of this other test that shows equality.

Those aren't contradictory statements at all.

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

#180

Post by contergan »

lsd5you wrote: post #144
cobookman wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-...

Plausible, simple explanations are dismissed while the intelectual 'elite' declare it either a mystery as to why it is happening or create a patchwork of complicated and inadequate explanations that don't stretch to similar phenonemon around the world.

It's really astonishing how intelligent people delude themselves into thinking intelligence is just magically distributed equally among all races and groups of humans that have developed in completely different environments mostly independent from each other over long periods of time. As if evolution somehow took a break when it came to the human brain.

It's pretty much denial of evolution. And the IQ differences between Asians, Blacks, Hispanics and Whites in the US have been well studied for over a century now. It's really no surprise that the demographic changes in California have led to the stagnation regarding test scores.

The same effect can be attributed to demographic changes in other countries, too, for example France:

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160289615...

And here in Germany, the two states that continuously rank worst education statistics, are those with the highest amount of immigrants.

Still, we're told to just ignore the obvious pattern and if anyone dares to mention this pattern openly, they are socially ostracized for it.

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