US High school students' scores fall in reading and math • Hacker News Board

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

#691

Post by EdiX » Wed, Sep 10, 2025, 2:00 PM UTC

kristopolous wrote: post #605

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…

Wow it's almost like racism is systemic. It's pretty wild how you can show lower achievement scores for any countries definition of "black" while changing who belongs in that group. For instance, Italians were considered black in the early 1900s and wouldn't you know it, there was an achievement discrepancy for Italians so long as that definition held. Or you can look at apartheid and post apartheid South Africa - wh…

> Or you can look at apartheid and post apartheid South Africa - when the political structure flipped, so did the academic scores of the groups

Do you have a source for this. As far as I can verify this is not true, the gap in achievement persisted and the cause is usually attributed to the legacy of apartheid.

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

#692

Post by alphazard » Wed, Sep 10, 2025, 2:00 PM UTC

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…

> However,the United States, particularly in the last 50 years, seems to have fostered a culture averse to education.

There's good reason for this. Not everyone enjoys learning for the sake of it. The pitch for forced education is that it will help you sustain yourself as an adult. If adults are finding their time in forced public education to be regretted, then they pass that information onto the younger generations. Maybe there are better ways to acquire useful skills.

I'm always a little surprised to see the HN crowd so in favor of education. The median commenter writes programs for a living, and probably acquired that skill mostly on their own. They might enjoy learning for its own sake, but surely they can look at their own situation objectively and realize their marketable skill came more from free time, computer access, and internet access, than an educational institution. If the strategy was to bet on what already worked for oneself, and hope it works for others too, then they would want to pull money out of schools and put it into libraries, computer labs, and internet cafes.

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

#693

Post by jmpman » Wed, Sep 10, 2025, 2:05 PM UTC

My son is taking a woodworking class in high school. First week, he came home and I asked him what he was doing in his woodworking class… “Disassembling the library bookcases”. “Why???” “Because they’re getting rid of the library”.

Apparently the school board decided to save money by cutting the librarian, and then decided to just move the books out of the school library and into the “nearby” public library.

In reality, there were 95 books in the school library which were being questioned by some parents. Instead of removing just those books, and being accused of book banning, they just removed the entire library. For all intents and purposes, it was a book burning.

Yet the football team is fully funded, and the baseball diamond is kept up.

This society has priorities which aren’t education.

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

#694

Post by breakyerself » Wed, Sep 10, 2025, 2:06 PM UTC

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…

It's easy to blame culture. It's kind of a thought terminating cliche. Once you've assigned blame to a general attitude among the public there nothing much to be done.

We could examine the common differences between US education and other high performing nations and try to reform towards something more effective, but really culture is the problem so let's all pack it up and find something else to worry about.

I think the one way that American culture does prevent progress is that Americans tend to be averse to evidence based reforms. They like to atomize responsibility for everything down to the individual. Homelessness, drug addiction, poor education outcomes, poor health outcomes, it's all just individuals making bad decisions or perpetuating bad culture.

If we did anything that actually helped it would somehow be condoning/encouraging the badness of these individuals. Regardless of how effective it would be it's somehow worse than allowing the problem to fester.

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

#695

Post by breakyerself » Wed, Sep 10, 2025, 2:08 PM UTC

jmpman wrote: post #693

My son is taking a woodworking class in high school. First week, he came home and I asked him what he was doing in his woodworking class… “Disassembling the library bookcases”. “Why???” “Because they’re getting rid of the library”. Apparently the school board decided to save money by cutting the librarian, and then decided to just move the books out of the school library and into the “nearby” public library. In reali…

Wish I could say we were moving in the right direction, but it's going to be getting worse for the foreseeable future. What part of the country is this?

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

#696

Post by commandlinefan » Wed, Sep 10, 2025, 2:09 PM UTC

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…

Also, high schoolers who see their advanced degree-holding parents out of work for months or years at a time may begin to wonder if the effort is worth it - education is a lot of work for comparatively little benefit.

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

#697

Post by djeastm » Wed, Sep 10, 2025, 2:11 PM UTC

ToucanLoucan wrote: post #689

djeastm wrote: post #686

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. 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.

Fair enough, I misunderstood your point. It's so strange to me that teachers are having to deal with any of these behavioral issues. I seem to recall it being the domain of Assistant Principals and what we called "resource officers". Any disruption more than a childish comment meant a trip to the principals office escorted by an officer. That was it. Teaching could continue.

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

#698

Post by chrsw » Wed, Sep 10, 2025, 2:11 PM UTC

Isn’t contemporary education just a preview of the highly competitive white collar rat race? Constant grading, judgement and ranking? And for what? For some coveted yet mind-numbing tech job so can stay one step ahead of your peers and afford a decent place to live?

And that’s nearly the best realistic future. Why wouldn’t students internalize this and start mentally checking out?

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

#699

Post by sdsd » Wed, Sep 10, 2025, 2:12 PM UTC

gnz11 wrote: post #572

sdsd wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is an empirical claim and there's statistics already available. Almost every study of student performance dramatically favors homeschool over American public school. I'm not saying this in support of homeschool, but as an indictment of public school. It's wild that schools spend many millions of dollars on hundreds of professionals, materials, and centuries of institutional knowledge, and yet are trivially outco…

> yet are trivially outcompeted by just a mom who puts in the hours with a curriculum from the internet. Oh come on. A quick read on Wikipedia will even tell you the research on outcomes is fraught with biases and lacking evidence. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeschooling

Thankfully, my reading of the research didn't begin or end with "a quick read on Wikipedia"

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

#700

Post by Yossarrian22 » Wed, Sep 10, 2025, 2:14 PM UTC

braincat31415 wrote: post #333

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…

Chicago public school teachers salaries will reach over $110,000 by 2029 or earlier. Just going by the track record, this will not result in a better quality of education.

I wouldn’t work in Chicago for that amount of money