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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

#671

Post by ToucanLoucan »

atwrk wrote: post #668
etempleton wrote: post #654

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the US there are a few obvious things, but everyone acts as if we are powerless to solve them: 1. Cell phones in classrooms. I don’t know how or why they were ever allowed. They should have to be in a backpack or in a locker and off during class. 2. Not removing students with bad behavior from classrooms and schools. The current thinking on how to handle a student who is seriously misbehaving and potentially viole…

Re point 2: In Germany, among other countries, you have social education workers (a college-educated job) in school for these situations. Such behavior has underlying causes, e.g. problems at home (fresh divorce, drugs, poverty-related stress) recent trauma (accidents, death of a loved one, abuse), mental illness (AHDS etc.). Treat the cause and the behavior changes.

Most schools here have those too. The problem is in the United States children are treated just a hair better than chattel slaves and their parents can basically do anything they want up to the line of actually killing them, and the state does very little.

And, even in the cases where the state should and could do something, the line for those services is incredibly long and the child will be properly fucked up by the time they get to the front.

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

#673

Post by atwrk »

philipallstar wrote: post #594
Meekro wrote: post #443

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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…

It's not the poverty; it's the learned helplessness.

The causal direction from poverty to learned helplessness is pretty much established, though

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

#674

Post by dbish »

ToucanLoucan wrote: post #670
etempleton wrote: post #654

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the US there are a few obvious things, but everyone acts as if we are powerless to solve them: 1. Cell phones in classrooms. I don’t know how or why they were ever allowed. They should have to be in a backpack or in a locker and off during class. 2. Not removing students with bad behavior from classrooms and schools. The current thinking on how to handle a student who is seriously misbehaving and potentially viole…

1. Good luck. Have you ever tried to take an iPad kid's iPad? Be ready for the fight of your fucking life. 2 and 5 are handily down to No Child Left Behind which is frankly some of the worst legislation ever devised for education. 3 and 4: And these factors are only getting worse as worse and worse kids enter the school systems. Nobody wants to deal with them, including their parents. Bonus: It's not hard, but we won…

If you can't take a kid's iPad away the parents have made major mistakes and the only option is for the school to directly address this addiction head on.

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

#675

Post by nathan_compton »

MisterTea wrote: post #657
nathan_compton wrote: post #560

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the system is such that you have to be an exceptional parent not to fuck up your kids, the system is the problem. Like I applaud your friend with kids, but I think its worth considering that their might be an issue if you need to be working very hard to give your kids a stimulating, healthy, childhood.

> if you need to be working very hard to give your kids a stimulating, healthy, childhood. They don't work hard, they enjoy themselves. They also have hobbies and my friend is always working on some hobby/home project. His wife is very social and is always planning something and he has no issues following along as he likes going out and doing things. They take the kids because they enjoy being with them and the kids…

Yes. Phones are part of the system and they are part of the problem.

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

#676

Post by philipallstar »

atwrk wrote: post #673
philipallstar wrote: post #594

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not the poverty; it's the learned helplessness.

The causal direction from poverty to learned helplessness is pretty much established, though

Learned helplessness is poverty+some other things, though. Otherwise no one in poverty would ever leave it. Just talking about causal direction elides reality.

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

#677

Post by dbish »

6LLvveMx2koXfwn wrote: post #533
Mountain_Skies wrote: post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only if the US is a monoculture but we're a diverse multi-cultural society. Different cultural groups have different values and priorities.

And different individuals within those cultural groups also have different values and priorities. A good education system supports everyone equally in achieving their goals.

eh no. a good education system educates the populous. if a student's goals are to play sports and never learn to read, that is irrelevant, they are measured on the education aspect. if their goals are to become a professional streamer, or they value "fame" over anything else, also irrelevant.

we have and should set clear and high education goals. you can adjust teaching strategies towards those goals based on the student and aim to drive those goals even higher, and things like advanced classes are clear ways to do so.

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

#678

Post by nathan_compton »

bluGill wrote: post #639
nathan_compton wrote: post #558

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The problem is string theory was pushed by people who were really good at getting attention and so they appeared to be outsized. Eventually everyone realized they were never making good on their promises and it was time to quit given them money - but most people who are not physics insiders don't really understand the other parts and so the total budget was cut to punish string theory - but by more than just the stri…

I actually think that for the most part string theory and its detractors and its rise and fall have had little effect on total physics budgets in the last 30 years.

I will say that theoretical physics is in a hard spot, but the problem isn't string theory. It is that we are short experimental data because the domain of validity of our theories is currently somewhat larger (in most obvious ways, anyway) than the domains we can reach with experiment.

I don't think any amount of clever budget allocation is going to make progress in theoretical physics go faster, nor do I think we'd be in a different position if we had allocated the resources differently. Notably, LQG and similar approaches (of which there is hardly any shortage) have not made noticeable progress either.

My perspective is this: string theorists are cheap. We may as well have a few for some long shot research, and while we fund them they teach kids math and physics. Seems like a good trade.

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

#679

Post by atwrk »

rayiner wrote: post #419
weitendorf wrote: post #374

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…

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 indicati…

Why do you assume racial achievement gaps indicate problems with schools?

GP didn't say that, but educators of course see schools as an important area to address the gap. The literature is pretty clear on this being a complex problems with schools being an important wedge to break the vicious circle.

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

#680

Post by loudmax »

buu700 wrote: post #462
liveoneggs wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 my anecdotal theory is that the (public) education system is optimized to the edges, abandoning the middle entirely, resulting in majority decline. Based on my anecdotal experience, this is the explanation that makes the most sense to me. I've been hearing constantly for at least a decade how atrocious American public education is, which I can't reconcile at all with my experience as a 2010 graduate of McLean High…

I graduated from McLean High School in 1990. I had some fantastic teachers. McLean is absolutely an outlier.

McLean's formula for success is to be located in an upper-middle class district with parents who value education and are wealthy enough to provide a stable environment, but not so wealthy they must send their kids to a private school. This formula isn't something that can be easily replicated or scaled out nationwide.

The aspiration is to make excellent education available for all children, regardless of what school district their parents can afford to move into. This is a problem that looks easy on the surface, but it seems to be extremely difficult in practice. Education is a social benefit, and a lot of people seem to have rejected the notion that taxes should even pay for social benefits.

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