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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

#681

Post by atwrk »

rayiner wrote: post #433
aprilthird2021 wrote: post #421

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you compare a country where most people are one ethnicity or where wealth and race are not as correlated as in the US, then it's a bit of an unfair comparison. Does the comparison hold if you segment the white Americans, Chinese, Singaporeans, Japanese, etc. by economic class?

I think it’s the opposite—it is a fairer comparison. White Americans are a relatively homogenized population that reflect the entire spectrum of economic class, where immigration effects have been attenuated by time. Is it unfair to compare the median white american to the median Japanese, just because the U.S. also has a large Hispanic population that mostly descends from low-education post-1970 immigrants from impo…

West Virginia is a nice datapoint here: Almost completely white, but also poor. And one of the worst scores of all.

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

#682

Post by jf22 »

blackoil wrote: post #337
jihadjihad wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Go to any park/playground sometime and observe the benches. Go to any sports field/venue and observe the bleachers. What you find may astound you, even if the percentage isn't literally 50%+.

I find restaurants more eye-opening. Amount of toddlers being fed while their mind is zombified with a screen are astonishing. Parents don't want to put effort in engaging the child and screen is an easy legal drug.

Do you take your toddlers out to eat a lot?

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

#683

Post by raincole »

decimalenough wrote: post #516
BobaFloutist wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, but were those coupled with an enormous, precipitous reversion in literacy rates?

So why are the drops happening in the US, but not Asia, which is equally smartphone addicted?

> but not Asia

It's happening in many Asian countries too.

Korea: https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/pisa-2022-results-volum...

HK: https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/pisa-2022-results-volum...

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

#684

Post by whoiskevin »

etempleton wrote: post #654
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…

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…

[flagged]

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

#686

Post by djeastm »

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…

>1. Good luck. Have you ever tried to take an iPad kid's iPad? Be ready for the fight of your fucking life.

If a parent has a child that is addicted to an iPad or any other device, the blame is squarely on the parent having let the child use the addictive device so much in the first place. If there needs to be a "detox" period for the child's addiction, so be it, but throwing up one's hands and giving up is parental negligence.

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

#687

Post by breakyerself »

The US is practicing a mass production approach to education still. Drill students with excessive facts and expect them to remember it. 3 minute passing periods, 15 minutes for lunch, scolded for socializing. Etc. It's intensive and counter productive. Now there's an over reliance on tech that degrades rather than improves the experience. A link in Google classroom to an exercise that expires after a day, a PDF instead of a handout. Etc

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

#688

Post by raincole »

Fraterkes wrote: post #556
obscurette wrote: post #504

As someone old (60+) who was a teacher in school and thinking a lot about it: - It's mostly a cultural shift in the western world – we don't value personal responsibility any more. When I was in school in seventies, it was my responsibility to study no matter what since grade 1. It didn't matter whether I liked a teacher, topic or whatever. It's not the case any more. - Since nineties there has been a shift in educat…

Your first point is a favorite of a lot of people, but doesn’t make a lot of sense to me: how is your generation with the ostensibly correct culture producing a generation with the wrong culture? Parents are apparently raising their children wrong en masse, so was the parents’ generation rotten too? Which raises questions about the character of the generation that raised the parents…

If parents could perfectly pass their culture down to their children, no religious country would ever turn secular. Gay marriage would never have been legalized. Black people would have no right to cast vote today.

All these things are not true in the real world, so the conclusion is that a generation doesn't copy the previous generation's culture like a spit image.

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

#689

Post by ToucanLoucan »

djeastm wrote: post #686
ToucanLoucan wrote: post #670

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>1. Good luck. Have you ever tried to take an iPad kid's iPad? Be ready for the fight of your fucking life. If a parent has a child that is addicted to an iPad or any other device, the blame is squarely on the parent having let the child use the addictive device so much in the first place. If there needs to be a "detox" period for the child's addiction, so be it, but throwing up one's hands and giving up is parental…

Oh I completely agree. But it isn’t the parents problem, it’s the teachers, and the teacher is uniquely un-equipped and disempowered to deal with it. They have a room full of kids to attend to and one having a meltdown because they’ve lost their dopamine dispenser and have no emotional regulation capability ruins that entire class.

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

#690

Post by dfxm12 »

mschuster91 wrote: post #489
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…

> Insofar as the US had a “culture averse to education,” surely that affects white americans as much as it affects anyone else. But, on average, they are not the ones who are behind their peers internationally. Education outcome massively depends on economic status of the parents. And that, no matter the country by the way, is very closely tied to immigration history and ethnicity. When parents struggle to afford bas…

Education outcome massively depends on economic status of the parents

And to bring this point home, because of systemic racism in the US, race is an indicator of economic status.

Anyone intentionally leaving out this context is contributing to the system.

https://home.treasury.gov/news/featured-stories/racial-inequ...

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