Test Scores Cast Doubt on U.S. Education Reform • Hacker News Board

Re: Test Scores Cast Doubt on U.S. Education Reform

#61

Post by shantly » Tue, Dec 03, 2019, 7:09 PM UTC

tcj wrote: post #51

shantly wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No one can come up with anything better that provides feedback at least annually for all grades upper elementary and higher, and can be used to compare districts and schools across a state.

Why do you need to compare districts and schools across a state in the first place?

To determine relative school effectiveness. You could come up with some measure that's different for every school but it'd be a lot less useful for answering questions like "which schools are having trouble, so we can go try to find out what's going wrong there and fix it?"

Re: Test Scores Cast Doubt on U.S. Education Reform

#62

Post by shantly » Tue, Dec 03, 2019, 7:18 PM UTC

rossdavidh wrote: post #37

shantly wrote: post #4

> Because the United States lacks a centralized system for teacher training or distributing quality instructional materials to schools, Professor Koretz said, states and districts did not always effectively carry out the Common Core or other reforms. I’ve only got a decent sample for one state, but here the state decides what its common core standards and teaching methods will be (rewriting the national standards, I…

My first thought on this was, "our reform efforts haven't worked well in most places they were tried, and you think the problem is we didn't have a centralized enough system?" Centralization and standardization is generally only useful when you know what needs to be done, it just needs to be done everywhere. There is considerable evidence that we _don't_ know what needs to be done differently, so centralization is th…

I think it's a fact that our system, even for relatively high-profile "centralized" efforts, is in fact very decentralized already. I don't think we've tried centralized command of instruction methods and various things about how schools run that have way more to do with the experience of a student than someone in Washington saying "do Common Core, uh, somehow", really, so far as I'm aware, aside from some very high-level directives.

I know lots of school administrators are effectively incompetent at implementing reforms & any kinds of systems, really, directed from higher up or otherwise (frankly, it's usually even worse when "otherwise"), due to some combination of ignorance or misaligned incentives (the balance of these varies but one or both are often present in some quantity). Whether it's worth bringing the few who have a clue and are choosing to use it to-heel in order to attempt to fix the many who don't and aren't, I do not know, but so far as I know anything like that's pretty far outside the Overton window so I wouldn't worry about it either way. Just recording how this stuff looks when it hits the state, district, and school level, since not everyone has insight into that, and it's largely a mess.

Probably it's worth looking at how schools are run and their governance structured in other countries that are doing better than us, if the core motivation of all this anxiety is our falling behind them.

Re: Test Scores Cast Doubt on U.S. Education Reform

#63

Post by tcj » Wed, Dec 04, 2019, 1:49 PM UTC

shantly wrote: post #61

tcj wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you need to compare districts and schools across a state in the first place?

To determine relative school effectiveness. You could come up with some measure that's different for every school but it'd be a lot less useful for answering questions like "which schools are having trouble, so we can go try to find out what's going wrong there and fix it?"

I agree, especially in regards to knowing where to improve.

But a bigger question is what do we consider effectiveness? Do higher scores on math tests mean a school is more effective than another? Because if we do we are saying that the "best" schools are the ones that provide the best test scores. Is that the measure we want for our schools, for our education and for learning in general?

What do you think about that?

Re: Test Scores Cast Doubt on U.S. Education Reform

#64

Post by cpitman » Wed, Dec 04, 2019, 3:13 PM UTC

nopinsight wrote: post #18

cpitman wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Before reading too much into China's scores, there reason to believe there is selection bias in who they are testing. In 2017, applying the same rules to the US would have resulted in it shooting up to first and second place in some subjects, which shows that methodology has a bigger impact than what we actually want to measure. https://www.forbes.com/sites/realspin/2017/01/04/are-the-pis...

Math results of the best performing US state, Massachusetts, was actually 20th and 9th in the world for PISA 2015 and 2012, respectively, according to the links below. Moreover, MA's population of ~7 million is only ~2% of US population, whereas the four provinces' 180 million is about 13% of China's population. "for the Program for International Student Assessment, or PISA. It shows the state is tops in the country…

I think the population density was one of the points. The current system allows countries to pick the schools within a selected region, and in a high population region they can focus on top performing schools.

> that the sampling done on mainland China (Beijing, Jiangsu, Guangdong and Shanghai) and other cities was not taken from a wide variety of schools. Rather, the very best schools were chosen and the very best students were cherry-picked from those schools.

So this is more than just focusing on Massachusetts, this is picking only the best students from the best schools in Massachusetts.