191–200 of 230 posts
I'm still trying to pinpoint exactly why Oregon has some of the worst scores in the country (I believe it ranked dead-last this year when adjusted for socio-economic factors). When I see what's going on around me, I can only think it's somewhat related to broken family's and undisciplined kids. The stuff that my kids come home and tell me is happening in school is pretty mind blowing. I've also noticed a complete rev…
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I think it was because the demographic adjustments move scores for black students higher and scores for white students lower. If unadjusted scores for white students and black students are converging over time, that would explain why Mississippi looks so strong compared to states like Maine, Vermont, and Oregon in the time series.
If I'm not mistaken, they compare children of similar demographics. This controls for how different states have different percentages of varying demographics. Based on this, I don't see how the convergence of performance over time could explain why Mississippi would be doing well.
> Mississippi, Louisiana and Alabama climbed the charts because they focused on core academic instruction when much of the country used ESSA as an excuse to focus on anything and everything else. It paid off.
Definitely worth a deeper dive.
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If I'm not mistaken, they compare children of similar demographics. This controls for how different states have different percentages of varying demographics. Based on this, I don't see how the convergence of performance over time could explain why Mississippi would be doing well.
Depends if the corrections are static or dynamic. The states with the worst relative moves are all super white, while the states with the best relative moves have large black populations. That suggests something strange is going on with the adjustment.
"Painting the Deep South as an embarrassing cultural backwater is one of the last socially acceptable forms of prejudice among elites. It’s not just tolerated - it’s venerated." Warning: possible flame bait, though I do not intend it this way. I am serious. I've had this thought for quite a while: the (social) left could pivot and win by being more woke. WTF? What I mean by this is: expand diversity and inclusion to…
> Why can't they extend this to their own country? Because they aren't a cohesive movement and, without someone to hate, could not manage even the rather poor pretense of unity with which they occasionally pretend to care to bother. If they were capable of taking your advice, they wouldn't need it.
If you extend diversity to include people who ideologically oppose diversity, then you're going to end up with more resistance and therefore less diversity.
Yes, it would be cool if we could just include populist nationalists in our policy but the problem is that those ideologies are inherently zero-compromise and reactionary. So, what now?
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> And yet, looking at the chart in the article, that appears to be pretty much all there is to say. The problem is, the Maine Secretary of Education would then reply “We actually teach math, also.”
Not nearly so well as they as they used to. What's changed?
What I've seen of Common Core math is very different from how it's traditionally taught, to the point that parents don't understand it. I think I can see a thread in there, that it's attempting to teach what those of us good at math end up figuring out ourselves with numbers, but the examples online are bad and lead to further misunderstandings. So I could see teachers having similar issues, and students not learning very well because of it.
To put it in more techy terms, Common Core math is like learning computer science before learning your first programming language: probably possible, but it won't work well for most people.
There is a similar effect in parts of SFUSD where some of the schools with more poor students are bucking trends: https://sfparents.org/sfkidscantwait/ (SFUSD overall has something like a 10% poverty rate and a 3% marginally housed population, so I think the comparison is fair) In our school, we saw a lot of outdated teaching materials - we got our kids hooked on Alphablocks - a BBC funded children’s education progra…
But even more than that I recommend Numberblocks. My kid loved that show and was doing multiplication by kindergarten, because he eagerly learned it from the show. And for a young kid's maths television program, some of the scripts and songs were surprisingly strong.
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"Well, Mississippi has lower scores, but when you account for the fact that the people having those scores are black people the Mississippi comes out ahead!" You don't see the issue?
You could make the argument that not adjusting for demographics obscures the fact that some states are for some reason failing to teach certain demographics as well as Mississippi.
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You could make the argument that not adjusting for demographics obscures the fact that some states are for some reason failing to teach certain demographics as well as Mississippi.
The more "adjustments" you do based on demographics, the more likely that one of your adjustments is incorrect and obscures problems or encourages incorrect solutions.
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Depends if the corrections are static or dynamic. The states with the worst relative moves are all super white, while the states with the best relative moves have large black populations. That suggests something strange is going on with the adjustment.
If state A has 30% reduced school lunches and state B has 5%, then I don't think it would be strange to see the adjustment resulting in an increase in state A's ranking relative to state B. For example, in the original raw scoring method, if state B has lower quality education, then it may still outperform state A due to the difference in demographics.