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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

#441
post #87

[flagged]

If kids could do math they would be able to divide the yearly American military aid to Israel ($18b last year) by the American population (340m), so they probably wouldn't conclude that fifty bucks per year per person was the main reason why their classmates are poor or their parents can't afford healthcare.

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

#442

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…

Skin color isn't it, actually. I knew (second hand) a teacher in a rural area of a low population state. All white kids, she'd have kindergartners cussing her out. Very little hope for any academic future for the other grades as things didn't get better with the older kids. I knew a white kid who lived in a trailer park whose mom was upset he was getting tutoring after school for his dyslexia because she told him he'…

Rural low population states actually have pretty good test scores: https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/profiles/stateprofile?sfj=...

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

#443

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…

Skin color isn't it, actually. I knew (second hand) a teacher in a rural area of a low population state. All white kids, she'd have kindergartners cussing her out. Very little hope for any academic future for the other grades as things didn't get better with the older kids. I knew a white kid who lived in a trailer park whose mom was upset he was getting tutoring after school for his dyslexia because she told him he'…

"Poverty blended with hopelessness" sounds about right. I'd like to emphasize that it's not just poverty, since there are plenty of recent immigrant families who live in poverty but the kids are at the top of their class. Unfortunately, though, there's a certain kind of degeneracy some families live in: the parents have largely failed in their every endeavor, and they'll become absolutely furious if they see the kids starting to rise above that, get their lives together, and accomplish things. If you live in communities like that, it's part of the deal: no one is allowed to escape, lest they make the rest of them look bad.

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

#444
post #389
post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

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

Please don’t spread misinformation. Charter school law varies by state and you should not make blanket statements about what they are allowed to do.

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

#445
It's consuming rather than creating, it's products aimed at sating short attention spans, it's superficial social media rather than books, it's instant answers from LLM rather than thinking through. We created this, and its fallout throughout society and politics. Yet we refuse to fess up.

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

#446

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.

There was a famous study that tried to test this - the Perry Preschool Study. [1] Basically they enlisted a number of high risk children - black, low iq, low income children. Half were placed into a high quality specialized preschool program (that lasted two years for 2.5 hours a day) with small class sizes, half were not, and they followed what happened over the next 40 years. The results were definitely impactful, but not the sort of major turn around one might hope for.

So for instance 55% of the control group ended up being arrested 5+ times by age 40, while 'only' 36% of the experiment group did. I think the thing this demonstrates is that intervention can help, but is also insufficient alone. Students who are in a sufficiently high risk scenario need ongoing support and treatment that they're not going to receive at a normal public institution. And not only that but they will remain disproportionately disruptive to other student's educations at normal institutions, even with years of ongoing care.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HighScope (overview)

[1] - https://highscope.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/perry-presc... (detailed paper)

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

#447
post #443

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Skin color isn't it, actually. I knew (second hand) a teacher in a rural area of a low population state. All white kids, she'd have kindergartners cussing her out. Very little hope for any academic future for the other grades as things didn't get better with the older kids. I knew a white kid who lived in a trailer park whose mom was upset he was getting tutoring after school for his dyslexia because she told him he'…

"Poverty blended with hopelessness" sounds about right. I'd like to emphasize that it's not just poverty, since there are plenty of recent immigrant families who live in poverty but the kids are at the top of their class. Unfortunately, though, there's a certain kind of degeneracy some families live in: the parents have largely failed in their every endeavor, and they'll become absolutely furious if they see the kids…

[deleted]

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

#448
post #436
post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

The only reason I became anything today is because my parents who were poor but cared very much were able to "opt out" of the shit-tier local public school that pandered to the kids who would rather not learn before it was too late for me. Just a couple disruptive kids per class can ruin an entire generation of students for a grade level. And there were far more than just a couple. Not to mention kids who had no busi…

There's one slow-motion conservative victory happening that's getting relatively little news coverage (and that's a good thing, lest there be more pushback): allowing more alternatives to public schools, funded by taxpayer dollars. Charter schools are the most obvious example, but I expect this to eventually be expanded further. If 10 homeschooler families want to get together and hire a professional teacher, there's no reason why the state shouldn't pay for it (provided the kids pass grade-level standardized tests).

Like you said, 99% of what makes a "good" school good is the quality of the other kids who go there. Since there's absolutely no political will for expelling the troublemakers (even in most conservative districts), the only remaining option is to build more lifeboats.

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

#449

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

At least near me the biggest problems facing the "urban" district compared to suburban ones is declining student populations as long time homeowners age in place and the maintenance costs of 100 year old buildings compared to 10-20 year old ones in the suburbs. Teachers tend to get paid the same or less in the city district and administration counts are higher but fairly close on a per student basis compared to the b…

> At least near me the biggest problems facing the "urban" district compared to suburban ones is declining student populations as long time homeowners age in place and the maintenance costs of 100 year old buildings compared to 10-20 year old ones in the suburbs

The building maintenance is a red herring. I believe in my district, it's about 10% of the budget on average.

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

#450

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you believe the average degree awarded today requires as much rigor as the average degree awarded half a century ago?

Not sure in the US but where I am from thats very much the case; they went to the paid per graduated student vs just student and students having loans vs state money (to study forever) and it turned the focus on churning out graduates from providing academic rigor. I saw the shift sharply studying and then teaching from late 90s to early 00s and as I see my nephews doing cs degrees now: it's really easy I would say,…

Academia is now vocational training but done badly. You get the pretend of academia and a very expensive loan as a bonus.
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