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Kids are far behind in school

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Re: Kids are far behind in school

#191

Post by danShumway »

toast0 wrote: post #147
taeric wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is silly. There is nothing stopping any other sport from being as central more than the amount of money and effort that currently goes to football. Often in an arms race against neighboring schools. To try and prop it up as a natural thing that is good just feels like a major problem.

> There is nothing stopping any other sport from being as central more than the amount of money and effort that currently goes to football. It's awful hard for the band to take the field at halftime at water polo. Those uniforms don't really want to be wet.

I'm not sure. If every halftime band show involved someone trying to desperately play a saxophone while swimming, I vaguely suspect more people would actually watch halftime shows.

Re: Kids are far behind in school

#192

Post by diputsmonro »

lapcat wrote: post #132
ekianjo wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But I eventually caught up, and it was fine. So I suspect that this problem is vastly overstated. Alternative explanation: you are acting like there is no problem based on anecdotal evidence that is irrelevant to the current situation - At the same time there might be a very serious one as quite a few kids basically have missed proper school for about 2 years. Let's not even try to pretend that lockdowns have no ne…

> At the same time there might be a very serious one as quite a few kids basically have missed proper school for about 2 years. Let's not even try to pretend that lockdowns have no negative effects at all. I'm not saying there are no negative effects. What I would say is this: even before the pandemic, many students were not sufficiently "challenged". They were already moving more slowly than they could have moved. I…

Unless you think that every single child was previously slacking off and is capable of effectively working double time without getting overwhelmed, then it's still a problem to be concerned about.

Re: Kids are far behind in school

#193

Post by javajosh »

lapcat wrote: post #132
ekianjo wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But I eventually caught up, and it was fine. So I suspect that this problem is vastly overstated. Alternative explanation: you are acting like there is no problem based on anecdotal evidence that is irrelevant to the current situation - At the same time there might be a very serious one as quite a few kids basically have missed proper school for about 2 years. Let's not even try to pretend that lockdowns have no ne…

> At the same time there might be a very serious one as quite a few kids basically have missed proper school for about 2 years. Let's not even try to pretend that lockdowns have no negative effects at all. I'm not saying there are no negative effects. What I would say is this: even before the pandemic, many students were not sufficiently "challenged". They were already moving more slowly than they could have moved. I…

Human intelligence is distributed, like everything else, on a normal distribution. Students at either end will have vastly different experiences. The low-end students, sadly, will never catch up. The high-end students will catch up easily, and may even enjoy the challenge. The really bad outcome is if the average student (e.g. +/- one sigma) can't catch up such that when this generation reaches employment age, there will be a noticable dip in education, roughly equivalent to skipping half of high-school.

Why didn't schools keep going during the pandemic, but outside or in very well ventilated buildings? This is what New York did during he Spanish flu pandemic, and it seemed to work. (It did look cold, though).

Re: Kids are far behind in school

#194

Post by nemo44x »

jdmichal wrote: post #156
015UUZn8aEvW wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Different school districts offer vastly different levels of education, depending mainly on wealth The data show that causation mostly flows in the opposite direction. The main determinant of whether a school is "good" is the average academic ability of the students who attend the school. And that, statistically speaking, is largely a function of race and income. Policy interventions based on the idea that school qua…

I'm going to repost a comment of mine from two years ago. This is not an unknown thing to school boards. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23012403 The wife of one of my good friends was on the county school board for 12 years. According to her, it was an unspoken secret was that parental involvement was the biggest predictor of / contributor to student success. The reason it was taboo was because you absolutely c…

The #1 factor in determining if a kid will have a desired outcome is if they have a mom and a dad present. It's really that simple. And that means parental involvement.

It's sad one is labeled a racist or anti-feminist or w/e when you point this obvious fact out. ~70% of black kids are born to single mom's. That's a broken culture. White kids are at ~30% and rising and we see the same failure rates. That's a broken culture. Asian's have 2-parent families and have success. Even the lower class ones, suggesting income/class shouldn't be a factor in having kids with 2 parents.

So of course the next step is to demonize the nuclear family. The trends keep getting worse.

Re: Kids are far behind in school

#195

Post by lapcat »

User23 wrote: post #178
lapcat wrote: post #55

What does being "behind" even mean? The dirty truth of the US educational "system" is that there is no system. Different school districts offer vastly different levels of education, depending mainly on wealth (i.e., the property tax base, because schools are locally funded). When I was a kid, my family moved from one city to another within the same state, and suddenly I was way behind in my new school, especially in…

Home schooling is quantifiably far superior to public schooling, pretty much independent of socioeconomic status[1]. As one would expect, the education level of parents did affect the results. For example, home-school students of parents without college degrees scored, on average, at the 83rd percentile for the core subjects. When one parent had a college degree, those students scored at the 86th percentile, and when…

> In fact, a concerned parent will wildly outperform a school teacher.

A parent teaches maybe 2 students per day. A school teacher teaches maybe 200 students per day. It's an unfair comparison.

Re: Kids are far behind in school

#197

Post by AlwaysRock »

Pre pandemic the US educational system was behind compared to most other developed countries. Now it's just sad. People don't seem to care. And those that do put their kids in private schools that provide better education.

I remember feeling smart for the first time in my life when I went to a public high school. My peers were not dumb but the average level of knowledge was pretty shallow and not so wide. This was a smallish high school in a small state (2000ish kids in new england) in the early 2000s. I know its worse now.

Re: Kids are far behind in school

#198

Post by brightball »

taeric wrote: post #120
brightball wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing about football is that so many people are involved with it, it becomes a school wide event. You have players on the team and coaches, yes. But you also have cheerleaders, marching band, trainer assistants (usually students who want to go into medicine or physical therapy). There are homecoming pagents and dances plus the social event every weekend for the school that goes along with it. There’s no sport in…

This is silly. There is nothing stopping any other sport from being as central more than the amount of money and effort that currently goes to football. Often in an arms race against neighboring schools. To try and prop it up as a natural thing that is good just feels like a major problem.

There is.

Other sports play a lot more games. Football has a predictable and consistent schedule, Friday nights in the fall. The limited number of home games (only 5 or 6 usually) also keeps involvement at a level that's not overwhelming for the student body.

Additionally, football teams can support a lot more players than any other sport with rosters typically 50 players or more. Especially in smaller schools, this means almost everybody will know somebody who plays.

Lastly, football is the most diverse sport in the US. There's a role for everybody. From smaller faster guys playing receiver, more medium sized athletes playing defense at linebacker or defensive back and bigger stronger guys playing offensive and defensive line. Even the soccer players can find a role at kicker / punter.

It brings together more people from different racial backgrounds than any other sport as well.

I was not an athlete in high school by any stretch. I was an overweight kid who played MtG, DnD and Duke Nukem all the time who just happened to be 6 feet tall. I played football for 4 years and learned a lot about hard work while I got in much better shape. Even though I was never a starter, I'd do it again in a heartbeat.

Re: Kids are far behind in school

#199

Post by corrral »

brightball wrote: post #77
buildsjets wrote: post #64

Especially in high school, an astounding amount of time, money, space, and personnel are dedicated to sports, and this does not just impact the athletes. In many schools the entire day is structured around the football team's practice schedule. Make school sports a truly after-hours extracurricular activity and remove their impact from non-participants, and I'd estimate you could see around 20% improvement time spent…

The thing about football is that so many people are involved with it, it becomes a school wide event. You have players on the team and coaches, yes. But you also have cheerleaders, marching band, trainer assistants (usually students who want to go into medicine or physical therapy). There are homecoming pagents and dances plus the social event every weekend for the school that goes along with it. There’s no sport in…

Football's the reason I dropped band when I no longer needed an arts elective. I'd have stayed in all four years, otherwise.

Being required to waste an entire evening at a football game to play for a few minutes here and there was insulting.

I'm pretty sure it's also the reason the curriculum was built almost entirely around the microscopic musical niche of marching band, rather than instruments & skills that were more likely to be useful in life beyond college.

Re: Kids are far behind in school

#200

Post by virgil_disgr4ce »

nemo44x wrote: post #194
jdmichal wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm going to repost a comment of mine from two years ago. This is not an unknown thing to school boards. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23012403 The wife of one of my good friends was on the county school board for 12 years. According to her, it was an unspoken secret was that parental involvement was the biggest predictor of / contributor to student success. The reason it was taboo was because you absolutely c…

The #1 factor in determining if a kid will have a desired outcome is if they have a mom and a dad present. It's really that simple. And that means parental involvement. It's sad one is labeled a racist or anti-feminist or w/e when you point this obvious fact out. ~70% of black kids are born to single mom's. That's a broken culture. White kids are at ~30% and rising and we see the same failure rates. That's a broken c…

What do you mean by "broken culture?"
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