Just grift your way through life like the Pedophile of the United States. Become a jester/influencer. Smell your own farts on a live stream and pump your engagements. Be a clown. It clearly pays to do so.
US High school students' scores fall in reading and math
251–260 of 1001 posts
Re: US High school students' scores fall in reading and math
#252Earlier quoted context omitted.
> This is in California where the test scores are some of the worst in the nation I read your post and thought it was BS, so I did a little research. According to this, California public school test scores are better than Texas and closing in on New York and Florida. > California politics is heavily influenced by Teachers Unions, and yet we score near the bottom of the entire US. California scores better than Texas,…
Adjusted for income its really bad. Income is the strongest causes of academic performance, so if you adjust for them California is doing way worse than other states.
Re: US High school students' scores fall in reading and math
#253Earlier quoted context omitted.
How do Asian countries and top-performing countries deal with this? We should do whatever they do. On that note, we should also segregate kids by academic desire and achievement like Japan and China. The bullies and underachievers hold back those who are academically excellent. We do this in limited instances, but not enough to really count.
In Japan and China, high-stakes entrance exams come earlier and play a stronger role than in the U.S. In China, the zhongkao (high school entrance exam, around age 15) and gaokao (college entrance exam, age 18) largely determine access to selective schools and universities. In Japan, competitive entrance exams for high schools (age 15) and universities (age 18).
Responding to the OC, this is a downright awful solution to the current education problem in the U.S.
https://www.hup.harvard.edu/file/feeds/PDF/9780674295391_sam...
Re: US High school students' scores fall in reading and math
#254Earlier quoted context omitted.
How do Asian countries and top-performing countries deal with this? We should do whatever they do. On that note, we should also segregate kids by academic desire and achievement like Japan and China. The bullies and underachievers hold back those who are academically excellent. We do this in limited instances, but not enough to really count.
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Do you have another reason for being against streaming?
Re: US High school students' scores fall in reading and math
#255The majority of the public school system has devolved into day-care, not education. Most parents just watch TV, stare at their phones and don't want to be bothered by anything that requires effort. A major societal shift needs to happen for this to be reversed. It's many factors... the parents, the food system, various inequalities, social media, technology, healthcare... the solution is multi-pronged. But if I had t…
The costs of this societal shift fall on those who can’t compete for time. Student’s go unparented and unmentioned.
Re: US High school students' scores fall in reading and math
#256Nearly half of kids aren’t being raised with their parents in the home. This was rare 50 years ago, and all the research shows that home dynamics matters the most. Education spending has shot up per student because people think it will solve cultural ills.
We have decades of evidence yet these types of comments still pop up.
Why aReNt PaReNts HomE eNoUgH? Are they stupid??
Re: US High school students' scores fall in reading and math
#257Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43522966 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43537808
Re: US High school students' scores fall in reading and math
#258The majority of the public school system has devolved into day-care, not education. Most parents just watch TV, stare at their phones and don't want to be bothered by anything that requires effort. A major societal shift needs to happen for this to be reversed. It's many factors... the parents, the food system, various inequalities, social media, technology, healthcare... the solution is multi-pronged. But if I had t…
Parent here with school-aged kids. I think this sub-thread blaming the parents is particularly depressing and not founded in reality. Here is the way I see it. The social media companies with quasi infinite resources have won. They hired the best and the brightest engineers to hack our minds and steal our attention and they have succeeded beyond expectations. As evidence look that the market capitalization of Meta, e…
- There's also a reward issue, in that reading, especially long form is "soft punished." It's not directly punished, yet there's very little reward, mostly a lot of struggle, not much of the candy feedback of TV, movies, and video games. It requires personal imagination and visualization of often difficult concepts rather than simply taking what someone else has "imagined correctly" for you. If you've never seen the Lord of the Rings movies, imaging what Frodo, Aragorn, and the rest are actually doing, where they're going, and the struggling through Tolkien's complicated prose is quite challenging. And socially, there's also significant peer pressure issues involved, that evoke “epidemic” or “contagion” comparisons. Once large numbers of peers discount reading, then the population on average starts receiving negative feedback. Notably, if peers are high achievers, then students who interact with these peers may also adopt those habits. [1]
[1] https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/jameskim/files/jep-peer_in...
- Part that's less nefarious, like a teen highlights about the difficulties of reading in this paper [2] (pg 34.) "You can’t ask a book to explain what it means right now. I go to people because of their interactive nature."
[2] https://alair.ala.org/server/api/core/bitstreams/0051cf84-91...
- The social media companies and the world wide web culture in general have also implemented a form of reading detriment. There's little reward to blogging, writing, or reading long form writing. Incendiary writing and rage-farming was long ago found to be an extremely effective tactic compared to informative discussion. And a lot of the time, almost all you can look forward to with your informative post is your contribution being aggressively scraped, while being compensated nothing, and then churned out to make someone else money.
- There's actually a few positive though, apparently teen and juvenile literature is actually increasing in sales somewhat from [2] compared with adult literature sales. Young adult books have been the fastest-growing category over the last 5 years, with print unit sales jumping by 48.2% since 2018. 35.03 million print copies of young adult (YA) books are sold each year as of 2022. [3]
[3] https://wordsrated.com/young-adult-book-sales/#:~:text=Compa...
- You may be slightly down biasing how much people read Lord of the Rings. The Hobbit edition from 2007 has 76,000 ratings and 12,000 reviews on Amazon. [4]
[4] https://www.amazon.com/Hobbit-J-R-R-Tolkien/dp/0618968636/re...
Re: US High school students' scores fall in reading and math
#259There's a longer trend but also a clear inflection point around the rise of mobile phones and social media. N=1 but we delayed getting a phone for our kid until a few months after she turned 13, which was a good choice because now we wish we'd gone longer. We can see how social media and app snacking clearly have negative effects on attention span, attitude, etc. Also choosing to close schools during COVID was as cat…
The agreement I had with him: "Scroll all day, play video games, etc. That is my side of the agreement. And you also do your school work, learn, practice for exams, homework, etc. That is your side of the agreement. I'll trust you. If your grades get worse, i.e. you need help managing device time, we'll review/change this agreement."
We also sat down many times looking at content together, in attempt to teach him what's trust-worthy and what isn't, what's "healthy" and what isn't, etc. And of course we do other things together as well.
So far (knock on wood) my son has managed well - he is 16 now. He organizes his own time, and has learned when to play and when to work. And crucially he has learned when to disconnect from his devices to do what's necessary.
No kid is the same. I am not saying my approach is best or even right, I just offer it as another data point.