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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

#621

Post by thrance »

> There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.

- Isaac Asimov

The cult of ignorance now rules the country, simple as that. To half the nation, teachers are now all insane satanists out to trans their kids. As a result, they're paid dirt poor and the state, controlled by that anti-science reactionary wave, is making their work harder and less rewarding everyday.

Vaccine mandates are ended on religious grounds, public research is destroyed to save pennies in tax cuts to the wealthy, and foreign researchers are arrested at the borders for no reason but to assert American dominance over them and satisfy the racist folk fueling the machine.

This is what it looks like, witnessing the end of an Empire from the inside.

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

#622

Post by pavlov »

graemep wrote: post #616
pavlov wrote: post #529

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Teenage boys everywhere have a widespread bias against putting in the effort to get good grades. They might call it "gay" or "sissy" or "acting white" or whatever, but the root cause is usually their perception of what masculinity should look like. The men they look up to are anti-intellectual. This exists in all communities, race is not the main problem here.

Lack of role models, right? What men do they look up to? I guess primary school teachers in the US are predominantly women as they are in most countries? So boys without intellectually inclined men at home or in their social circles do not have role models for educated masculinity.

I’m not sure if the gender of teachers is so much a factor as class identity.

Young French author Édouard Louis has written about his experience growing up in an extremely anti-intellectual working class milieu in France. It’s a country where school teachers are traditionally men, and discipline is stricter than in America or the Northern European countries. But that seems to go together with a class separation where the working class boys don’t see the male teachers as role models but more as representatives of the distant authority.

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

#623

Post by thrance »

spicymaki wrote: post #587

Almost all of the comments have someone’s pet theory about the cause of the decline in achievement. The truth is we don’t actually know why there is a decline or how to stop it.

Maybe start with ousting the most anti-intellectual administration in existence? Whatever the solution is, they won't be the one to implement it.

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

#624

Post by myrmidon »

togetheragainor wrote: post #438
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 cultural shift is secondary to the demographic shift. Young Americans have been squeezed at one end by mass immigration from countries with lower educational performance and literacy rates, higher crime rates, higher gang participation rates, etc., which accelerated to such an extreme that native English speakers are now a minority in our local school district. And they’re squeezed at the other end, forced to com…

> We sold out the younger generation [...] for some greater good, and if you dare question that you’re a fascist.

I think this is a very flawed argument. Immigration was tolerated/encouraged because it kept demographics stable, labor affordable and economic growth high.

Pretending now that the previous generations did this for some "greater good" or out of misguided kindness is disingenuous.

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

#625

Post by yellowpencil »

apical_dendrite wrote: post #402
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…

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 i…

A positive change for sure but what about the kids who were stunted developmentally during that time?

In a nearby elementary school they are now touting teaching kids “AI literacy”. At an age where they don’t even have enough of a world view to understand anything related to it. Such an asinine idea, and of course it will be at the expense of something non-trendy.

It seems like public education suffers from so much “idea cascade” now and jumps from one fad to the next. Educational paths are more and more left to chance than organized thought.

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

#626

Post by xenobeb »

vondur wrote: post #176
estimator7292 wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The core problem is actually twofold: 1. We pay teachers like shit and treat them even worse. Even if you wanted to do a good job as a teacher, it's fundamentally impossible because: 2. Our schools are structured and run by busybodies that have absolutely no business being within 100 yards of a school. Curricula is set by politics and ideology, not established science. We have book bans and helicopter parents suing t…

Where my wife works the average salary is over 100K per year, so not bad for 9 months of work. This is in California where the test scores are some of the worst in the nation. I would not lean too hard at political party affiliation, California politics is heavily influenced by Teachers Unions, and yet we score near the bottom of the entire US.

Exactly. The problem is the students and parents.

It would not matter what school you sent me to, I did not care about learning or intellectual pursuits when I was 15.

I would have had to be raised by completely different parents with different values in a different time and place.

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

#627

Post by MisterSandman »

Dilettante_ wrote: post #613

My completely unfounded theory about why education is declining: Teachers don't get to beat kids anymore. (I'm not saying they ought to). If it's one mentally completely exhausted adult doing nothing but "use their words" against 25 kids/teenagers with nothing but energy, and a feeling that the system, which the teacher is the agent of, is their enemy, the power balance flips radically. Forcing kids to go to school o…

This is not just an unfounded theory but a completely insane theory. Many (all?) of the countries ahead of the US in test scores also don’t “beat their kids” because that is absolutely fucking insane.

It’s such an American thing, to blame something on a lack of violence.

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

#628

Post by ndriscoll »

xyst wrote: post #256
mensetmanusman wrote: post #230

Nearly half of kids aren’t being raised with their parents in the home. This was rare 50 years ago, and all the research shows that home dynamics matters the most. Education spending has shot up per student because people think it will solve cultural ills.

I wonder why parents are not in the home. Could it be a rising cost of living far outpacing the wage increases? Decades of wage stagnation? Decades of boomers ripping up our safety nets? Decades of Reaganomics that have eroded trust in our government? We have decades of evidence yet these types of comments still pop up. Why aReNt PaReNts HomE eNoUgH? Are they stupid??

25% of kids in the US don't have a father present.

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

#629

Post by bxsioshc »

nathan_compton wrote: post #558
nradov wrote: post #403

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes, but this is cartoon shit. String theory was a major research program in theoretical physics for a few decades but theoretical physics involves quite a lot more than string theory and physics involves quite a lot more than theoretical physics and if you stacked up all the budgets you'd find that string theory is a minor footnote. And also, its been a few decades since people took it very seriously as a strong can…

[dead]

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

#630

Post by pif »

rayiner wrote: post #329
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…

> 15 year old white american students

Which barbarian idiot included a question about skin colour in an otherwise-respectable test?

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