Earlier quoted context omitted.
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There is in fact not good evidence for IQ being "highly linked to genetics".
You're right. It's the only human trait that has no genetic link. Convenient. That's why dogs and humans also have equal IQs.
US High school students' scores fall in reading and math
311–320 of 1001 posts
Re: US High school students' scores fall in reading and math
#312Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe. I've definitely seen that anecdotally in some cases. But the school system is also problematic for the families that do value education and the kids that could excel in the classroom. Our district has eliminated programs for the kids at the top end in the name of equity. They've also eliminated separate spaces for kids with learning and behavioral issues for the same reason. So everyone is in the same classroo…
At a certain level “homeschool” is going to be more effective. Ive seen parents get together with 3-6 similar aged students, and then do a combination of hiring a teacher/tutor for them and splitting duting to making it tenable.
This is an empirical claim and there's statistics already available. Almost every study of student performance dramatically favors homeschool over American public school. I'm not saying this in support of homeschool, but as an indictment of public school. It's wild that schools spend many millions of dollars on hundreds of professionals, materials, and centuries of institutional knowledge, and yet are trivially outcompeted by just a mom who puts in the hours with a curriculum from the internet.
Re: US High school students' scores fall in reading and math
#313Most of the comments are focused on the supply of education. But I don't think the supply side is the problem, irrespective of teachers and high schools. There is more and cheaper education available than ever before. Nearly every highschooler has more access to learning that kings and emperors would have fought wars for less than 200 years ago. However,the United States, particularly in the last 50 years, seems to h…
It’s culture led by phones and other screens. Most teens are addicted to the screens. The need them for school and for socialization with friends and they end up on TikTok or another network and zombie there for most of their best brain years. They lack the ability to focus necessary to learn because the brain is used to constant screen simulation. Letting your child be babysat by a screen is absolutely the worst thi…
From my conversations with 20-year-ago school students, American schools are culture led by sports, and football most of all. No surprise many parents don't see a reason for their kids to excel in STEM.
Re: US High school students' scores fall in reading and math
#314Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is in fact not good evidence for IQ being "highly linked to genetics".
It still amazes me that people believe that intelligence has no link to genetics. Down's syndrome is not simply a social construct, Trisomy 21 is a genetic disorder from a third copy of chromosome 21, distorting gene dosages and resulting developmental pathways. Nearly all phenotypes are a mixture of genetics and environment, yet some traits have a much higher degree of heritability. For example, height has a heritab…
I'm not a blank-slateist or an anti-hereditarian, as someone else claimed earlier today. I understand that cognitive disabilities are often causally --- mechanistically understood --- genetic.
But leaving aside things like Trisomy 21, your evidence here is twin study heritability. Heritability is not genetic determinism; it's almost a category error to claim otherwise, since "heritability" is really just a way of framing the question of whether something is genetically determined --- you still have to answer the question! There's a whole big research field controversy about this, "missing heritability", exploring (in part) why molecular genetics results, especially when corrected for things like within-family bias, are returning such lower heritability estimates than classic twin studies.
I do not believe that any random child selected at birth has an equivalent potential to win a Fields Medal, given the optimal environment to do that in. But the "hard truth nobody wants to face", from the parent commenter, is subtextually about race --- and there the evidence is a wreck; extraordinarily unlikely to bear any fruit.
Re: US High school students' scores fall in reading and math
#315Earlier quoted context omitted.
And the institutions reflect culture. The fact that these institutions can exist at the low-performing state they do is a direct reflection of the culture of the people who run them, send their kids to them, pay taxes to support them, etc. The schools can only do what they do to the degree that people aren't willing to put up with it.
What could people unwilling do?
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Re: US High school students' scores fall in reading and math
#316Earlier quoted context omitted.
> intellectualism It's interesting to blame anti-intellectualism because Republicans are usually labeled with that. But simultaneously it's Democrats that will dumb down classes to make sure even the worst performing student will pass. And this is also anti-intellectualism, but of a different sort. The combination is failing our students, doesn't matter the political orientation. I'm involved in education, I see this…
A Republican promoted and implemented No Child Left Behind though? Maybe I’m misunderstanding your point.
My point is that Democrats are implementing it by making classes worse for everyone.
Republican states aren't doing that. It's not the concept of No Child Left Behind that is bad, it's the implementation (and it's used as a reason to worsen classes).
Re: US High school students' scores fall in reading and math
#317Earlier 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,…
Maybe California just has more rich people. When you control for demographics/SES, Texas schools seem far superior: https://www.chadaldeman.com/p/which-states-actually-have-the... https://www.urban.org/sites/default/files/2024-12/States_Dem...
Texas, Mississippi, and others partially achieve this by holding students back.
Mississippi, for example, has a third grade reading gate. Texas holds black kids back at a nearly twice the rate of white kids. These kids are older and have repeated the grade so they do better in the 4th grade NAEP assessment.
This is possibly working as intended. However, you can achieve the same results by redshirting your kid or having them repeat a grade.
So the claim from the blog post that
> but Texas has a slight edge for Hispanic students and a huge advantage for Black students.
says that the Texas results are driven by a demographic that's aggressively held back.
Re: US High school students' scores fall in reading and math
#318Earlier quoted context omitted.
Of course kids are reading less. When I was growing, there was frequently not much else to do. Reading was replaced by movies and shows on demand and wont come back no matter what educators or parents do. It is cheaper, easily available and more fun. Sure kids also use social networks. But the role reading had was mostly taken over by Netflix, youtube, disney and such.
>Reading was replaced by movies and shows on demand and wont come back no matter what educators or parents do. ... huh? I'm a parent and this just isn't true. My wife and I have phones, our young children do not. We do not own a tablet. Our children have never known what it's like to have the option of resorting to a screen to keep them busy when we're out of the house. TV time is limited on the weekends, extra limit…
I wish people would understand that their personal experience doesn't automatically generalise to collective trends.
It's great that your kids are reading, but clearly a lot of kids, and even more adults, aren't.
It's not just "up to parents" because the media, in all its forms, sets collective values.
And the strategic problem in the US is that reading - and culture in general - is caught between a number of competing ideologies, most of which are destructive to what's usually understood as education both in and out of school.
What individual parents do is downstream of all of those cultural influences. It's heavily dependent on socioeconomics, opportunity, and status, with error bars that depend on a random range of individual values.
The US is a competing patchwork of wildly incompatible cultures and traditions, some of which are directly opposed to each other, and all of which - in practice - are suspicious of traditional educational goals.
Put simply, no one is driving the bus. So it's stuck in a ditch, with its wheels spinning. And it's about to burst into flames.
There's only so much individual parents can do to fix that. The problems are strategic and political, not individual, and they're much harder to fix than they seem.
Re: US High school students' scores fall in reading and math
#319Earlier quoted context omitted.
> intellectualism It's interesting to blame anti-intellectualism because Republicans are usually labeled with that. But simultaneously it's Democrats that will dumb down classes to make sure even the worst performing student will pass. And this is also anti-intellectualism, but of a different sort. The combination is failing our students, doesn't matter the political orientation. I'm involved in education, I see this…
A Republican promoted and implemented No Child Left Behind though? Maybe I’m misunderstanding your point.
That republican had stated during his campaign that he wanted to end the department of education…
Re: US High school students' scores fall in reading and math
#320- The Pandemic really set that generation of kids back, particularly kids who were in elementary during that time. - Public school is essentially daycare. They try to integrate special education students more into the regular classrooms, but the teachers end up spending disproportionate time dealing with them and their behavioral issues, which hurts learning for regular students. - I don't have strong, set in stone o…
If public school is essentially daycare, why did the pandemic set a generation of kids back?
It's a cascading failure. I live in another part of the world, and we have been witnessing the actual toll of the pandemic unravel in the past couple of years.