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US High school students' scores fall in reading and math

apnews.com

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

#411

Post by tyoma »

ironman1478 wrote: post #362

The article mentions the chronic absenteeism which is mind blowing: https://apnews.com/article/school-attendance-sick-day-chroni... I don't see how somebody can learn when they're missing school so much. Math and reading require so much repetition and if you're not in school, you're not getting that time to sit down and do the exercises required to ingrain these topics. It doesn't even matter how a school teaches if…

Chronic absenteeism is a huge misnomer. The statistic covers both excused and unexcused absences.

The reason it’s since covid up is because (more) parents stopped sending their kids to school when they are sick.

Last year I got a semi-threatening letter from the district for “chronic absenteeism” because I didn’t want to send a sick child to school. To their defense, they did say that the state (California) requires them to send the letter.

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

#412

Post by nradov »

eli_gottlieb wrote: post #371
monkeyelite wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I doubt much changed. American STEM education has always been pretty mediocre. I've been hearing about my whole life.

Mediocre by what metric? American STEM education seems to objectively be doing pretty well in terms of Nobel prizes, scholarly journal articles, patents, technology product revenue, etc. Of course there's always room for improvement.

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

#413

Post by speakfreely »

verteu wrote: post #250
Scubabear68 wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I live in the US in New Jersey, and here a big problem was the State flooded school districts with money during Covid with no material oversight of its spending. The end result was huge increases in spending. But not on education. The money was spent on more MacBooks, more iPads, more buildings, more smart TVs, more consultants, more School Bullshit System as a Service, more scoreboards, more $50,000 signs in front o…

Hard to conclude much from this, given New Jersey is consistently rated one of the top 2 states in the nation for K-12 education. The lesson may even be the opposite: "If your school's biggest problem is 'too much money', outcomes will be pretty good."

New Jersey is probably the most socioeconomically segregated state in the country, mostly based on its school districts. It has crazy real estate prices precisely so parents can get their children into specific, high-performing school districts. These districts bring the state average up very high, but best of luck if your district is in the bottom 50%.

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

#414

Post by kevinventullo »

cwillu wrote: post #388
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…

The implication seems to be that charter schools are superior, but does that jive with other countries' successes? A commonly given alternative explanation is that the public options in the US are deliberately sabotaged via budget restrictions, and then the resulting poor performance is used to justify further cuts—a similar dynamic has been fairly recently executed in Alberta with public health care.

I thought charter schools and public schools received the same $/student.

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

#415

Post by brewdad »

rayiner wrote: post #266
soulofmischief wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Institutions are supposed to protect culture, but they have failed due to the actions of a small elite class. It's like blaming a child for not having parents.

No, institutions reflect the culture of the broad population. It’s like blaming a community for having streets filled with litter.

It's a litter filled community with limited trash service and no public receptacles.

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

#416

Post by rixed »

jjulius wrote: post #195
watwut wrote: post #182

Earlier 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…

Alas, the evolution of societies is dictated by rules that no individual cases, however inspirational, can radically influence.

You can teach your kids how to fly a plane, yet gravity is not up to parents.

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

#417

Post by Aurornis »

JKCalhoun wrote: post #357
ars wrote: post #285

Earlier 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…

> Democrats that will dumb down classes to make sure even the worst performing student will pass News to me.

Unfortunately it’s a real thing among leftists (not necessarily Democrats in general).

The belief is that any advanced classes increase the achievement gap. People who subscribe to this also believe that advanced placement testing is discrimination and must be eliminated. They want equity of outcome, so reducing the curriculum to a single class at a single level that everyone the same age takes is their preference.

It has been implemented in several places with predictable backlash.

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

#418

Post by Aurornis »

lucideng wrote: post #33

The 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…

> Most parents just watch TV, stare at their phones and don't want to be bothered by anything that requires effort.

You must live in a very sad place. This does not describe the average parent of any of the kids around me. I know these people exist, but it’s not the norm at least in my state.

The most common complaint among my teacher friends is about helicopter parents who are too involved.

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

#419

Post by rayiner »

weitendorf wrote: post #374
rayiner wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The racial achievement gap is probably one of the most significant problems educators in the US think about. I think one of the biggest obstacles to improving it (not causing the problem, but making solutions difficult or ineffective) is that low-performing urban school districts tend to correlate strongly with strong teachers' unions and big, mismanaged school administrations where things are too bureaucratic and in…

Why do you assume racial achievement gaps indicate problems with schools? For example, Asian students perform much better than white students. We don’t say that indicates a problem with how schools educate white kids. Instead, most people see it as a predictable consequence of asian immigrants being filtered for higher education. By that same token, why would we treat Hispanic students having lower scores as indicative of a problem with the schools? The U.S. Hispanic population is subject to the same immigrant filtering effect, but in the opposite direction. Both immigrant groups largely arrived in the last 50 years. Why would we assume the effects of the initial filtering would disappear so quickly?

Here’s a modest proposal: American schools are actually quite good across the board.

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

#420

Post by weitendorf »

cwillu wrote: post #388
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…

The implication seems to be that charter schools are superior, but does that jive with other countries' successes? A commonly given alternative explanation is that the public options in the US are deliberately sabotaged via budget restrictions, and then the resulting poor performance is used to justify further cuts—a similar dynamic has been fairly recently executed in Alberta with public health care.

I think the specific form of "charter schools" we have are mainly a US invention, but a lot of countries (like the Netherlands, where it's more common than not) actually just let students use public funds to go to private schools, which would melt the heads of most people who oppose charter schools because it's "right wing".

Charter schools are I think a direct response to figuring out how to fix low performing, big school districts in the US. So while I have no idea if private or public schools do better in the Netherlands, I think we'd need to find something more like the Baltimore public school system in another country to make the right comparison.

> A commonly given alternative explanation is that the public options in the US are deliberately sabotaged via budget restrictions, and then the resulting poor performance is used to justify further cuts

I find this hard to address because it's not really a matter of policy but of ulterior motives or conspiracy. I personally have no secret plan to make public education even worse by posting about charter schools on hacker news. To me it's just about giving students the option to get educated by an independent institution rather than be forced to attend some of the worst public school systems in the country.

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