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Less than half of California students read or do math at grade level

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Re: Less than half of California students read or do math at grade level

#101

Post by Scubabear68 »

cm2012 wrote: post #80
theGnuMe wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is not like we don't do research into effective teaching methods. It is not also like some schools have 90% of kids above grade level.

Some schools being above grade level has nothing to do with teaching methodology, and everything to do with student composition. Smart people who raise their kids to do well in school move to neighborhoods with better schools, which raises the grade levels. Ex: I went to Bronx Science, a specialized high school in NYC where 98% of the students are above grade level and go to college. The principal at the time was kno…

I understand where this narrative comes from, but I think it is false.

The reason I think that is Covid. With kids learning remote and going all digital, the facade was lifted from teaching. Parents can and did directly experience what our kids were going through.

Our kids’ lowest standardized State scores were with teachers who were terrible. A science teacher who hated kids in general (really). A general teacher near retirement phoning it in. A math teacher who said “read section 5.6 in your book and do the homework” - and that was class.

Our kids did well where the teachers were creative. Where they interacted with students. Where they gave direct feedback and corrections. Where they gave learning reinforcement extra credit to help them focus in areas they had trouble.

In good public schools and many private schools, these bad teachers are not tolerated. In poor ones, the bad teachers flourish, and the kids suffer.

Re: Less than half of California students read or do math at grade level

#102

Post by tmpz22 »

Ekaros wrote: post #97
jmathai wrote: post #17

As a California resident, I'm surprised there's no mention of % of ESL (english as a second language) students. There's a very large population of ESL students in California that drag down these statistics as the students catch up. If english isn't your primary language, learning math that is taught in english will also be more difficult.

So why not teach them in their primary language? It is not like big groups are too small... And there is no official language. So mandating that selected number of schools including universities receiving public funding must have sufficient classes and courses in some other language should be entirely possible.

There are a lot of Spanish immersion schools especially at the lower grade levels to help bridge the gap into bilingual learning.

Re: Less than half of California students read or do math at grade level

#103

Post by cm2012 »

fatcat500 wrote: post #68

A population of ignorant and illiterate peasants is great for maximizing political capital. They are receptive to propaganda. They are an energetic bloc of voters. They know something is wrong, but are too ineffective to correctly identify the problem, which means politicians will continually entice them with "solutions" that solve nothing but increase the political or financial capital of interested parties. We're h…

You really think the school system is bad because the entire cadre of school administrators are taking secret orders from shadowy politicians to keep kids dumb? I recommend you rethink the logical process that brought you to this conclusion.

Re: Less than half of California students read or do math at grade level

#104

Post by localplume »

fatcat500 wrote: post #68

A population of ignorant and illiterate peasants is great for maximizing political capital. They are receptive to propaganda. They are an energetic bloc of voters. They know something is wrong, but are too ineffective to correctly identify the problem, which means politicians will continually entice them with "solutions" that solve nothing but increase the political or financial capital of interested parties. We're h…

[dead]

Re: Less than half of California students read or do math at grade level

#105

Post by uejfiweun »

fatcat500 wrote: post #68

A population of ignorant and illiterate peasants is great for maximizing political capital. They are receptive to propaganda. They are an energetic bloc of voters. They know something is wrong, but are too ineffective to correctly identify the problem, which means politicians will continually entice them with "solutions" that solve nothing but increase the political or financial capital of interested parties. We're h…

Or, the Inner Party, the Outer Party, and the Proletariat, if you will.

Re: Less than half of California students read or do math at grade level

#106

Post by Scubabear68 »

Spivak wrote: post #83
Scubabear68 wrote: post #42

In our rural public school in NJ, both our kids were routinely socially promoted with B’a and C’s even though they were very below average on State testing. We tried fighting this but the inertia of “do nothing and pass anyway” was too great. When we moved them to private school last year (5th and 9th grade), they had a brutal adjustment period of catching up from being so far behind, and for learning studying habits…

> We tried fighting this but the inertia of “do nothing and pass anyway” was too great. It's because there's no story for what to do in this case. All schools, even good ones, only focus on the happy path. I mean you're basically describing the problem perfectly when you moved your kid to a private school. They're not getting a more personalized education, the expectations are just higher. School is still a train tha…

Well said and exactly right. The private school not only had higher expectations? But also realistic feedback in the form of real grades and consequences.

Re: Less than half of California students read or do math at grade level

#107

Post by lr4444lr »

fnordpiglet wrote: post #19

Looking at the history this doesn’t seem abnormal, and it hovers around 49%. This implies to me median is determined to be grade level (essentially) and it hasn’t moved materially beyond this point since the data was compiled and the entirely arbitrary definition of “grade level” was declared. Would be interesting to see other states but it wasn’t immediately obvious if a similar dataset exists for anywhere else. Giv…

Grade level education standards are criterion-based, not norm-referenced. That's why kids (used to) get held back to repeat a grade when they failed them.

Re: Less than half of California students read or do math at grade level

#108

Post by mistrial9 »

TheMagicHorsey wrote: post #59
jmathai wrote: post #17

As a California resident, I'm surprised there's no mention of % of ESL (english as a second language) students. There's a very large population of ESL students in California that drag down these statistics as the students catch up. If english isn't your primary language, learning math that is taught in english will also be more difficult.

No. California does not have a large Black immigrant population. The Black population speaks English and does worse than the average (including ESL students). Language alone doesn't explain the gap. Particularly since immigrant Asian groups are above average.

let me help you here - "black" is a particularly tragic demographic classification.. since a very large part of the world population live closer to the Equator, and have darker skin, than the people who wrote those English category names; add to that the particular unique form of slavery in Agricultural USA.

The fact that the President of the United States for two terms, a Harvard Law School graduate, is as demographically "black" as Haitians with loud and proud, violent anti-literacy every day.. says to me that actually.. you cannot lump together people by skin color in this day and age.

Re: Less than half of California students read or do math at grade level

#109

Post by Hermitian909 »

WalterBright wrote: post #66
cm2012 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's not much the education system can do here. When you look into educational research its grim - its really really hard to move the needle even a few % on outcomes in a school system, even with large grants and volunteers and special projects. Kids on the bottom half of the bell curve, especially without parental support, are always going to struggle at school.

When there's no incentive for the teachers and schools to get kids to grade level, they aren't. I've proposed before having a bonus to the teacher for every student that reaches grade level at the end of the year.

The general idea you're getting at, incentivize teacher performance, rests on the underlying assumption that a "great teacher" can have an outsized impact on students outcomes in the one year they're teaching the student. Much of the US tried to find evidence of this in the 2000s and failed. Past the basic "does the teacher understand the material?" level, outcomes on a year-long basis are dominated by:

- Home life (food, safety, parent engagement, socioeconomic background)

- Classroom size (smaller is better)

Teacher incentivization might work if students spent more years with individual students but that has a different set of problems and requires a much larger reform of schools.

Re: Less than half of California students read or do math at grade level

#110

Post by armatav »

snowwrestler wrote: post #72
bmmayer1 wrote: post #18

The failure of public education in this country is a national scandal. It should be the number one concern of everyone, and yet there's no outrage, no political wedge issue, no media -- what's going on?

Seemingly everything about education becomes a national scandal. The federal No Child Left Behind law, and the state-led Common Core initiative, were both major efforts to improve education in the U.S. They both also created massive national backlashes. California tried to do something as simple as refactor a few math classes and somehow it got turned into fodder for some ideological battle. The College Board tried t…

That’s one of the most disingenuous comments I’ve seen.

Common Core demolished the education system in this state, along with the other acts to “improve” education. The optional AP was just a single African American studies class.

Education in public schools is just straight terrible here - teachers live like 2 hours away and hate their lives, topics are low difficulty and uninteresting, and the entire system predicates itself on the SAT, which you need a part-time tutor to cover your ass for, unless you want to spend every weekend doing a test; most can’t afford that.

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