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US High school students' scores fall in reading and math

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Re: US High school students' scores fall in reading and math

#321

Post by moduspol »

sdsd wrote: post #312
ecshafer wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 outco…

To be fair: that mom gets to pick and choose which kids to teach. She probably wouldn’t get the same result if she had to apply the same techniques to inner-city Detroit kids six hours a day and five days a week.

Re: US High school students' scores fall in reading and math

#322

Post by liveoneggs »

tenarchits wrote: post #198

Most 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…

My kids don't get textbooks in public school, are comingled with highly disruptive kids (except in the limited gifted classes) and the curriculum is accelerated way past where it was when I was younger.

So my anecdotal theory is that the (public) education system is optimized to the edges, abandoning the middle entirely, resulting in majority decline.

They do get computers with TONS of dumb-ass apps and zero reference materials.

Re: US High school students' scores fall in reading and math

#323

Post by moduspol »

dmix wrote: post #275
paulryanrogers wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Most parents just watch TV, stare at their phones and don't want to be bothered by anything that requires effort. No? Most of the parents around me are busy each working a full time job and doing their best to raise their kids. They now spend some of their free time reading on the phones instead of a newspaper, magazine, or book. Some listen to books while they mow the lawn, clean the house, or do other chores like…

People always want to blame the new thing in culture. Some collective sin if only we had better self control. Every generation has one. Usually it’s just institutional failure at multiple levels and a whole bunch of people who don’t care about the institution’s output sufficiently. Every time I read about new education stories they’re busy trying to solve wider social issues instead of being the best place to get an…

I agree, but it’s tough to see the studies showing average daily screen time of different age groups and not see that as a pretty obvious contributor.

Re: US High school students' scores fall in reading and math

#324

Post by throwaway31131 »

decimalenough wrote: post #307
dzink wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I'm pretty sure the same argument was made for television, movies, radio and fiction books.

That’s certainly true but at the same time, when I was a kid in the early 90s, we watched TV but cartoons ended (we did not have cable or a computer). I came home from school, ate a snack, watched TV for about an hour with a friend, cartoons were over and we went outside. With the internet and YouTube etc. you’re never “done”

Re: US High school students' scores fall in reading and math

#325

Post by [deleted] »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #318
jjulius wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 competi…

[deleted]

Re: US High school students' scores fall in reading and math

#326

Post by braincat31415 »

ghostpepper wrote: post #231
k2enemy wrote: post #214

Earlier 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…

do you live in Canada or is this happening elsewhere?

Chicago for example. Look up recent action on magnet schools.

Re: US High school students' scores fall in reading and math

#327

Post by ivape »

liveoneggs wrote: post #322
tenarchits wrote: post #198

Most 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…

My kids don't get textbooks in public school, are comingled with highly disruptive kids (except in the limited gifted classes) and the curriculum is accelerated way past where it was when I was younger. So my anecdotal theory is that the (public) education system is optimized to the edges, abandoning the middle entirely, resulting in majority decline. They do get computers with TONS of dumb-ass apps and zero referenc…

So, basically the general distribution strikes again? I guess the floor fell out, but what evidence do we have that the ceiling also went up? Could just be the same or lower when we normalize for grade inflation and requirement destruction.

Re: US High school students' scores fall in reading and math

#328

Post by Edman274 »

decimalenough wrote: post #307
dzink wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I'm pretty sure the same argument was made for television, movies, radio and fiction books.

That's true, the arguments were also made for television, movies, radio, and fiction books. However, during the times of movies, television, radio, and written books being introduced, the trend line of student performance seemed to be going upward. It now seems to be trending downward. It's harder to convincingly make the argument that cell phones are no worse than TVs when student performance was increasing during the TV era and is decreasing during the smartphone era. Even if the correlation is totally spurious, it's an uphill climb to ignore it.

Re: US High school students' scores fall in reading and math

#329

Post by rayiner »

tenarchits wrote: post #198

Most 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…

The problem with that “culture” explanation is that white kids in America do fine in international educational comparisons. In the 2018 PISA assessment, 15 year old white american students were near the top in reading (behind only Singapore and some Chinese SEZs) and in the top echelon in science (comparable to Japan). Their weakest performance was math, where they’re around the middle, behind the top asian countries but only modestly behind Finland: https://nces.ed.gov/surveys/pisa/pisa2018/pdf/PISA2018_compi....

Insofar as the US had a “culture averse to education,” surely that affects white americans as much as it affects anyone else. But, on average, they are not the ones who are behind their peers internationally.

Re: US High school students' scores fall in reading and math

#330

Post by monkeyelite »

deepsun wrote: post #313
dzink wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

For this theory to hold up you would need to explain what changed as high schools in the US have loved sports since at least the 40s
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