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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

#171

Post by jimt1234 »

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.

This is BS. My good friend moved to California from Taiwan during high school. She struggled in all her classes (because she barely spoke english ("struggle" means she actually had to put in effort to get an "A")), but she excelled in math. She told me that she was an average student in Taiwan, but when she moved to the US, she suddenly became a math genius. She was in the highest level math class the school offered, and it was a breeze for her. So, nope, she didn't "drag down" the statistics - in fact, just the opposite.

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

#172

Post by standardUser »

HardlyCurious wrote: post #100
listless wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Malcom Gladwell covers this in Outliers. There is something that can be done, but it has to be done starting in pre-school and continuing through second grade. And that "something" is that you don't get a summer. You learn year round for those first few years. The reason why some kids excel and some don't is almost entirely because they don't get continuing education at home. And past 2nd grade, it's almost irreparab…

The effects of preschool have been studied and showed no benefits after grade 3. Not sure about the year round portion of it, but it seems to me this is a narrative born from intuition and not from evidence.

I've heard these studies referenced before, but studies have limitations and I wonder if there is some form of early childhood education that can lead to statistically meaningful improvements down the road, just not approaches that happen top have been studied.

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

#173

Post by nhchris »

jeffbee wrote: post #135
nhchris wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a common but false claim. Property tax funding is supplemented by state and federal taxes to compensate disparities: https://www.heritage.org/education/report/the-myth-racial-di... on average, both Black and Latinx total per pupil expenditures exceed White total per pupil expenditures by $229.53 and $126.15, respectively [total per-pupil funding is around $14k, so the differences are negligible] - https://jou…

The state does not "compensate" for the fact that wealthy city school districts simply fund their schools under the table with massive PTA budgets, and there is not a lot the state can do about that in the short term without significant tax reform. Three adjacent school districts, in descending order of household income and grade-level performance: Piedmont (90% at-grade-level), Berkeley (67%), Oakland (33%).

Three randomly chosen districts out of tens of thousands prove little. Looking at wider statistics instead of small anecdote, we see that in addition to lagging behind countries the US outspends on education, greatly increased spending has had no benefits even within its borders:

Since 1970, inflation adjusted public school spending has more than doubled. Over the same period, achievement of students at the end of high school has stagnated according to the Department of Education’s own long term National Assessment of Educational Progress [I encourage you to visit the website for the illuminating graph of inflation adjusted per-pupil spending and test scores vs. time] - https://mjperry.blogspot.com/2009/09/education-spending-doub...

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

#174

Post by standardUser »

jimt1234 wrote: post #171
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.

This is BS. My good friend moved to California from Taiwan during high school. She struggled in all her classes (because she barely spoke english ("struggle" means she actually had to put in effort to get an "A")), but she excelled in math. She told me that she was an average student in Taiwan, but when she moved to the US, she suddenly became a math genius. She was in the highest level math class the school offered,…

Stop the presses, this guy's "good friend" is the only data point we need!

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

#175

Post by r3trohack3r »

preommr wrote: post #164
r3trohack3r wrote: post #133

Bucketing children by age and not developmental milestones has always confused me. No matter how you slice it, some kids are more advanced in verticals than others (emotional, math, reading, problem solving, etc.) and there aren’t tracks in the U.S. to accommodate that so we end up forcing all these square pegs into round holes - everyone loses.

Because school isn't about maximizing education; it's a daycare so that parents can work and children can come out with a uniform education that will suffice to do basic things in society like read/write/taxes etc.

This is my pet theory for why education in the US is the way it is.

Socialized child care is unpalatable. So public school starts at exactly the moment that research can come close to justifying having kids in school.

But parents need to work - so there is pressure once kids are in school to have a school day that matches the work day.

You might be able to get away with a 3 hour school day, and have the rest be dedicated to unstructured play/exploration. But you can't have child care, so if kids are in school they need to be "doing school."

So we have 8 hours of school and we need kids to be doing _school_ during that time because it can't be child care. So we create these gulags where kids move bricks from one pile to another and back all day and call it education because we've got to keep up this illusion of education.

And then we pay teachers child care wages because, under the hood, it's really just child care that nobody can call child care.

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

#176

Post by ackfoobar »

fatcat500 wrote: post #130
cm2012 wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Macroscopic politics is a phenomenon in its own right. Something that should be studied like one would study chemistry or physics. No one person or party controls the course of events. I don't believe there is a grand conspiracy with shadowy bond-villainesque bad guys. It's simply that there is positive pressure in one direction (to have an easier-to-manage populace) and negative pressure in the other (to have a virt…

It is quite bond-villainesque if one tries to make the population easier to manage.

I think it's simpler than that. It's memetics. Bad/wrong ideas infect brains, and propagate themselves by making believing those ideas fashionable. People then act according to the incentives. Some borrow the occult concept "egregore" describe the emergent behaviour.

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

#177

Post by tssva »

jimbob45 wrote: post #2

According to state testing? I was an A student (as were many of my peers) but you'd best believe we dicked around with anything that we were told wouldn't affect our letter grades (e.g. state testing).

This is still the case. In my state growth assessment tests are given for reading and math every fall and spring. These tests don't affect students grades in any manner. My experience with my child and her friends is that no effort is given. When the test answers were recorded via paper creating patterns on the test sheet was the only effort given. Now that it is computerized, they just randomly select answers or pick a letter to answer for every question. Based upon these tests my daughter and most of her friends are illiterate and can't count. Her and her friends are all A students enrolled in honors, AP and dual enrollment classes.

In high school there are a few state level tests which effect whether you graduate. These they take more seriously.

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

#178

Post by coredog64 »

s1artibartfast wrote: post #123
listless wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Malcom Gladwell covers this in Outliers. There is something that can be done, but it has to be done starting in pre-school and continuing through second grade. And that "something" is that you don't get a summer. You learn year round for those first few years. The reason why some kids excel and some don't is almost entirely because they don't get continuing education at home. And past 2nd grade, it's almost irreparab…

This is a bit of an aside but I wouldn't trust anything that Malcolm Gladwell says at face value. He approaches questions from a narrative perspective and Cherry picks studies or data to make a nice story. At the end of the day, he is a writer and not a scientist and that's where his priorities is lie

John Taylor Gatto (former NY teacher with multiple teacher of the year awards) had the opposite opinion to Malcolm Gladwell.

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

#179

Post by mwambua »

preommr wrote: post #164
r3trohack3r wrote: post #133

Bucketing children by age and not developmental milestones has always confused me. No matter how you slice it, some kids are more advanced in verticals than others (emotional, math, reading, problem solving, etc.) and there aren’t tracks in the U.S. to accommodate that so we end up forcing all these square pegs into round holes - everyone loses.

Because school isn't about maximizing education; it's a daycare so that parents can work and children can come out with a uniform education that will suffice to do basic things in society like read/write/taxes etc.

You hit the nail on the head there. It's hard articulating everything that feels off about it - but I felt the same way about the CHIPS Act forcing companies to provide cheap childcare to workers. I think for one, it emphasizes cheap childcare over quality childcare (and this doesn’t seem like the sort of situation where the free market will sort that out).

There’re also these conflicting ideas of children both a) being necessary/important enough that workers will sacrifice their own productivity for them; b) being a little like cattle and not requiring anything more than the bare minimum to develop into productive human beings.

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

#180

Post by Hermitian909 »

peterfirefly wrote: post #127
Hermitian909 wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 (…

Classroom size does not actually matter much. Teachers unions love smaller classrooms, though... Your first item -- which is really many items -- does matter. Especially if we open about the fact that "socioeconomic background" is mainly a (poor) proxy for the students' IQ. We know this, because grades track the students' IQ better than their socioeconomic background or the IQ of their parents. "Does the teacher unde…

Classroom size absolutely matters, at the extreme you encounter Bloom's 2 sigma[0] around ratios of 3:1. Small classes get you two things:

1. Easier classroom management

2. More individualized education

(1) is good and has some effect, but (2) is the meat and potatoes. I will grant the effects are not linear and so haggling about 16-24 kids may not be worth it but the difference between 20 kids and 10 is enormous.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom%27s_2_sigma_problem

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