Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

caaspp-elpac.ets.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

211–220 of 256 posts

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

#211

Post by klooney »

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,…

We get lots of immigrants from rural central America where the schools aren't amazing.

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

#212

Post by ndriscoll »

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.

California does have an official language (English). English is the official language in over half the states.

https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySectio...

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

#213

Post by klooney »

Xeoncross wrote: post #81
TheMagicHorsey wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In California, ESL students are primarily from Mexico. The sum of all other immigrants combined is not even close to this number. 40% of the CA population is Hispanic and Latino. I think that is what the parent was speaking about.

Is that still true? I thought the mix had changed over the Trump years. My wife's prepandemic immigrant students were primarily from south of Mexico- Guatemala, El Salvador, even Peru.

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

#214

Post by throwayyy479087 »

mazugrin2 wrote: post #137
throwayyy479087 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

California doesn't maintain order in schools or their major cities. If you want to live somewhere nice, that's liberal and has good schools move to Boston. If you want to live somewhere nice that's conservative and has good schools move anywhere in East Texas.

The public schools in Boston are struggling by almost every measure, with only about 34% reading at grade level across the system, for example.

Mass. has insanely high standards, compare the curricula.

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

#215

Post by ChainOfFools »

WalterBright wrote: post #208
tstrimple wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That system incentivizes working at schools where children are already likely to be at grade level, have supportive parents, etc. The best teachers will flock to schools that don't really need additional help. I feel like that's a problem we already have today. Parents who are motivated to get their child a good education will move to places with good educational outcomes. These parents are already invested in how…

> Parents who are motivated to get their child a good education will move to places with good educational outcomes. Yeah, well, it's a big jump going from free to $17,000/year > how to improve low outcome schools to the point where they are an adequate substitute for a poor parent. Give teachers a bonus for each student that achieves at grade level. Let the teachers figure out how to do it.

> Give teachers a bonus for each student that achieves at grade level. Let the teachers figure out how to do it.

As someone has already pointed out to you, what the teachers will figure out how to do is game the system in order to produce the appearance of success. Not all of them, not even perhaps a substantial majority. But enough of them will do so that the system becomes warped around reinforcing their behavior rather than the behavior the incentive is supposed to optimize for. You're a crypto nut; surely you have heard of gresham's law before.

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

#216

Post by mistrial9 »

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?

private school "revolution" is a regular talking point for some.. and also, there are ages-old responses and responses-to-responses to every single item here. The shock to Americans is not that some children get beaten at home for making a simple math mistake, the shock to Americans is that every child cannot do 9th grade math, no matter how many times you try to teach it.

Read the comment here about a Taiwan student who was average at home, becoming a "genius" immediately in the USA; similar storoes from some Eastern Europeans.. they can't believe that some strong students in public school do not have at least a semester of Calculus before college.. "I did that in 9th grade" they say.. it was written here..

there is no one-size-fits-all and somehow, Americans are shocked at this now, after thirty years of well-meaning propaganda from educational types.

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

#217

Post by DiggyJohnson »

golergka wrote: post #61

I'm not an american — what level of math proficiency for at what age are we talking about here? Is it about being bad at integrals or not being able to solve a simple quadratic equation?

The latter, and that's probably still too high a bar for any grade below senior year.

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

#218

Post by frumper »

cptskippy wrote: post #132
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.

> Kids on the bottom half of the bell curve, especially without parental support, are always going to struggle at school. It's not just kids on the bottom half because those that need support are disruptive to the entire class. The way the system is setup, you not only need parental support but the parent drives the process and the administration is resistive because it imposes more work on already strained staff. I…

I'm not understanding your point aside from the teacher could benefit from an aid. IEPs are legally binding agreements that the schools agree to based on student needs. Are you suggesting that the teacher should not be providing this IEP support, but the parents should seek outside support for that?

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

#219

Post by jmathai »

WalterBright wrote: post #198
jmathai wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Surely you would have had an easier time if the teacher taught in German.

At the glacial pace classes move, there's plenty of time to learn einz, zwei, drei, vier, etc. Learning arithmetic doesn't require language fluency. I've traveled in many countries where I didn't know a word of their language. It isn't hard to communicate with people for basic things. Besides, I often will spend a few minutes to learn the words for one...ten just so I can engage in commerce. It's not rocket science.

Something can be harder but still possible.

If you're saying that the language which math is taught in has no bearing on learning - then we disagree.

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

#220

Post by threatofrain »

armatav wrote: post #110
snowwrestler wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 predica…

Common Core can be fairly summarized as conservatively pushing math standards forward by 0.5 years. The spec of any particular grade level can be read in a few minutes and details simple requirements like some operationalized understanding of polynomials, and the entire math spec can be read in an afternoon. The more recent push to abolish the spec in favor of a more lax standard, namely Equitable Math, was a backlash against this.

There are public school districts in California which couldn't be more eager for specs to push standards forward by another 0.5+ years because the Common Core is still catching up from behind to their de facto standards, but there's a seriously powerful (perhaps majority) democratic and political will to hold standards back.

What the Common Core and Equitable Math should not be understood as is as a new way of teaching or learning math. Neither of these are revolutionary. All parties involved understand that there's an existing supply of math teachers across the nation who are comfortable teaching some curriculum at some level, and that a true re-arrangement or re-imagination of subjects carries high institutional friction.

In other words, we might rearrange Geometry to be taken before Algebra, but replacing Geometry with Linear Algebra (per Gilbert Strang's suggestion) would be revolutionary.

Post reply on HN