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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

#821

Post by BeFlatXIII »

pavlov wrote: post #529
eunos wrote: post #522

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>"acting white" Honestly this is one of the biggest bullshit I've ever heard. Assuming that this mentality is quite widespread(not necessarily universal) among non White, then any attempt to introduce affirmative action or other equalizer practice would be futile. That kind of mentality must be purged hard from yesterday.

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.

Mandatory HRT to improve academic performance time.

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

#822

Post by tiborsaas »

monkeyelite wrote: post #707
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…

> In the US there are a few obvious things, but everyone acts as if we are powerless to solve them Yes but they aren’t the things you said: 1. Schools are filled with disruptive kids who use up time and resources and are not removed. 2. Teachers have no enforcement authority so they cannot do any of what you said, including removing phones. 3. Teachers and administrators are generally not smart or capable and continu…

> 2. Teachers have no enforcement authority so they cannot do any of what you said, including removing phones.

If it's school policy, the teacher could say that offending students can get suspended or some similar measure.

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

#823

Post by OhMeadhbh »

rayiner wrote: post #772
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…

[flagged]

Texas is in the lowest decile in terms of high school graduation rates and the lower half of post-secondary educational attainment. It is not a paragon of educational achievement. https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/educational...

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

#824

Post by Projectiboga »

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…

Ugh, I was born in 68 and I always advocate for doing some research in libraries. The important factor is the serendipity of finding random stuff as you walk around and the narrowed part when you get to your target's area on the shelves and seeing other volumes in the same subject area.

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

#825

Post by isk517 »

OhMeadhbh wrote: post #785
fooqux wrote: post #773

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I presume if AI does come in, it won't be replacing those "geniuses running things now". They'll be fine; it's all the teachers who will be replaced. They're expensive, and all that money can go towards more sports!

If you think education is expensive, you should try ignorance.

The cost of ignorance won't be felt for at least a decade or two, and by then it will be somebody else problem. Or at least that is what the people making the decisions are hoping.

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

#826

Post by OhMeadhbh »

repeekad wrote: post #799
rayiner wrote: post #772

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Stereotyping white students as already fine and thus undeserving of any attention contributed this cultural mess in the first place, JD Vance wrote a book about white American struggles and now he’s VP. The school district might be primarily white, it’s more clearly likely poor and rural, and the electoral college values it more than dense educated rich cities.

I'm sure the white dude from Middletown with a law degree from Yale is personally familiar with systemic social depredation.

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

#828

Post by HPsquared »

sleepyguy wrote: post #715
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…

Here in North Texas, school districts drop tens of millions on artificial turf for junior high and high school football fields. Some even run bond elections to build stadiums and training facilities that would make an NFL team jealous. Meanwhile, academics sit dead last on the priority list—kids are walking across the stage barely able to read or write. Honestly, if AI came in and torched the whole education system,…

Bread and circuses seem to be the most important things.

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

#829

Post by crazygringo »

OhMeadhbh wrote: post #818
crazygringo wrote: post #784

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is probably an unpopular opinion, but is there still much purpose in a modern high school libraries except as a work/study space? Elementary school libraries are important because kids can check out books at their reading level and you don't need a huge variety. But in high school, when I wanted a book for research or recreational reading, 99% of the time my high school library wouldn't have it anyways. You had…

Libraries are about more than lending books (or media). Start here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library

Your patronizing comment is unhelpful. My high school library certainly didn't do anything but lend books and store some AV equipment, and provide a computer/study space, and I already referred to keeping the space for those other purposes.

If we wanted information or recommendations on books to read, that was definitely what our English teachers were for. The library wasn't helping with that.

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

#830

Post by programjames »

empath75 wrote: post #641
programjames wrote: post #283

The core problem is actually very simple. Education studies do not measure what they claim to measure. When they say, "education outcomes improve when..." they usually mean the pass rate, i.e. they only measured a signal among the bottom 20% of students. When they say, "test scores improve when..." they are, at best, measuring up to the 90th percentile. When they say, "the white/black attainment gap," or "socioeconom…

Test scores do not measure directly what they purport to measure. They are a proxy, and when you have a system designed to optimize for a proxy of the thing you want to improve, then the system will always find ways to exploit the difference between the proxy and the underlying thing. You can call it "juking the stats" or "overfitting", or whatever. https://sohl-dickstein.github.io/2022/11/06/strong-Goodhart....

We can only ever have proxies. The issue (at least here) isn't Goodharting, it's that the proxy does not even measure what the researchers claim it measures. For example, pretty much the only study of its name, "High-Achieving Students in the Era of NCLB" (Lovelass, Parkas, Duffett) uses the NAEP, which only releases 10th, 20th, ..., 90th percentile scores. Gifted programs are ~95th percentile. Or, look at this lovely graph of 36 ACT scores:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Percent_ACT_Composite_S...

When it increases by 30x in 30 years, it becomes very apparent that standardized tests are simultaneously being gamed by the students and the testwriters. Students (and school districts and states) are choosing the "easier" tests that make them look proficient, so testwriters are making their tests easier to get a bigger market share. And all along, the tests that only care about separating out the top show declining scores every year...

- [AMC Historical Results](https://artofproblemsolving.com/wiki/index.php/AMC_historica...)

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