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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

#401

Post by Aurornis »

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.

Something that isn’t obvious to non-Americans or non-parents is just how diverse the US education system is. Even within a medium size city you’ll find multiple schools that might have completely different cultures.

Some schools are sports centric. Others have to work hard to get students interested in sports.

I think the implication that sports are bad is also misleading. Sports programs, when run well, can do a good job of getting kids into routines, out of trouble, and keeping them accountable to their peers for something. The TV and movie style sports culture where the football players aren’t expected to even attempt to pass their classes doesn’t actually exist in most schools.

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

#402

Post by apical_dendrite »

ars wrote: post #285
PartiallyTyped wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not just education but overall intellectualism. It’s a purely cultural issue that can be observed by looking at demographics.

> 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…

What you're describing is a fad that has subsided a bit over the last few years. Cambridge MA stopped teaching 8th grade algebra because they didn't like the racial disparity between students in advanced vs non-advanced math. There was a significant backlash from parents, and now they're bringing back 8th grade algebra. The debate now seems to be much more about how to offer more advanced math than whether to offer it at all. A similar dynamic seems to be playing out in other towns as well.

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

#403

Post by nradov »

bxsioshc wrote: post #221
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…

Just look at HN. Nominally an educated crowd, but talk about physics, and you immediately see terms like "ivory towers" or "return on investment", despite the fact that most on HN doesn't understand in fundamental science works.

A lot of the complaints here about physics have to do with focusing so heavily for decades on string theory (or M-theory) which hasn't produced much in the way of practical results. At some point we have to quit throwing good money after bad and redirect funding towards other lines of inquiry.

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

#404

Post by nradov »

brewdad wrote: post #399
nradov wrote: post #389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please stop spreading misinformation. Public charter schools aren't allowed to kick out underperforming students.

They are allowed to screen prospective students up front. They also won't kick out under-performers for getting Ds. They will find a disciplinary reason to do so. Every one of us could have been kicked out of school at one time or another if we had fallen under the microscope looking for an excuse.

No, that's also misinformation. Public charter schools in most states aren't allowed to screen prospective students up front. Any parents can enroll their children, and when a charter school is oversubscribed they use admission lotteries. And they follow the same disciplinary procedures as other public schools.

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

#405

Post by brewdad »

KPGv2 wrote: post #387
hombre_fatal wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember racing home from school to catch Gundam Wing and Dragonball Z. And then they were over until the next day.

yeah but you get home at 4, watch an hour of anime, it's 5pm, you do homework for half an hour, then you have dinner with family until about 7, then you have about an hour of getting ready for bed/chores and that gets you to 8pm. At most you have one more hour of studying. So 90 minutes of education-related stuff at home a day in your ideal past where kids "only" spent an hour on TV.

Much like extending the workday past 10 hours there must be a point of diminishing/negative returns to expecting multiple hours of study per night. Also, those times you list seem indicative of elementary school kids. Most high schoolers are going to be up way past 9pm. Of course, they also probably aren't getting home before 6pm and don't have the luxury of an hour long family dinner every night either.

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

#406

Post by weitendorf »

TimorousBestie wrote: post #398
weitendorf wrote: post #382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't consider myself right wing, but I guess in this case I wouldn't care even if it were nominally right-wing, because it's more important to give students good educations than it is to perpetuate institutions (eg giant school systems with awful performance) that might ideologically better align with my beliefs but are clearly not working. Also, while I don't think students should be pushed out of charter schools…

Perhaps you believe the “nominally right-wing” thing is merely academic. It is not. https://freespeechproject.georgetown.edu/tracker-entries/neo...

Nazis drink water and post on internet communities too. And that's a homeschool network, not a charter school.

Honestly, this might be a good opportunity for you to think about why you find charter schools such a nonstarter JUST because they tend to have more support among those on the right (which I'm not) than those on the left. That's actually one of the big problems I was trying to point out: people have extremely strong opinions on educational policy because of these ideological left vs right things rather than on what students actually need!

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

#407

Post by BobbyTables2 »

I find it funny that schools took away textbooks and then wonder why scores went down.

Textbooks cohesively presented material. Random printouts and notes glued into a notebook do not.

Similarly, we read a whole lot more in Literature classes than kids do now.

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

#408

Post by Aurornis »

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…

> However,the United States, particularly in the last 50 years, seems to have fostered a culture averse to education.

I always find it interesting that the anti-schooling mentality is so prevalent here on HN, too. It’s most obvious in threads about cheating, where a popular topic of discussion is to defend cheating as a rational reaction because school doesn’t matter, a degree is “just a piece of paper”, and you’ll learn everything on the job anyway.

It also shows up in the tired argument that college is only really about networking, not learning.

I’ve had some on and off experience mentoring college students in the past. Those who adopt these mentalities often hit a wall partway through college or even at their first job when their baseline intelligence runs out and they realize they don’t have the necessary foundation because they’ve been blowing off coursework or even cheating their way through college for years.

I’m afraid that LLMs are only going to enable more of this behavior. It’s now easier to cheat and students are emboldened by the idea that they don’t need to learn things because they can always just ask ChatGPT.

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

#409

Post by monero-xmr »

brewdad wrote: post #400
monero-xmr wrote: post #385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why wouldn’t I want a school to be able to kick out bad kids? Violent and disruptive kids need to be warehoused away from actual future productive members of society, rather than forcing 90% of kids to have their education ruined by 10% of bad kids

Prepare to build a fuckton more prisons then. Most kids can get turned around from a bad path if they get the right support early on. I don't want to live in a world where we write off 7 year olds forever.

If anything we need to double the amount of money paid to build high-intensity “schools” for those kids, and then reduce the amount of money needed for the good kids, because honestly all of that money is wasted now on the bad ones. We should also imprison criminals but that goes without saying. If we don’t have enough prisons to house violent criminals then we simply need more prisons, or release them only into communities that vote for such a thing (maybe rich liberal communities only etc.)

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

#410

Post by TimorousBestie »

nradov wrote: post #389
KPGv2 wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Please stop spreading misinformation. Public charter schools aren't allowed to kick out underperforming students.

If you want to be exceedingly pedantic, a student at a typical charter school in the United States has much weaker due process guarantees than a student at a public school. The school administration at a charter school has much less government oversight by design, and in some states there is effectively none.
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