Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Scores decline again for 13-year-old students in reading and mathematics (2023)

nationsreportcard.gov

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 320 posts

Re: Scores decline again for 13-year-old students in reading and mathematics (2023)

#41

Post by lynndotpy »

cyberax wrote: post #35
japhyr wrote: post #22

People are talking about Covid, smartphones/screens, social media, and AI. No one has mentioned defunding public education yet. In Alaska, where I lived most of the last 20 years, education has been largely flat funded for about a decade now. Imagine running an organization in 2026 on that organization's 2016 budget. Schools have a bunch of obligations they have to spend on. Every time health care costs for staff go…

On the other hand, Seattle school funding has been going up and up. Yet the scores have been trending downwards.

As GP noted, there are multiple factors here. They're not arguing funding is the only factor.

Re: Scores decline again for 13-year-old students in reading and mathematics (2023)

#43

Post by lotsofpulp »

japhyr wrote: post #22

People are talking about Covid, smartphones/screens, social media, and AI. No one has mentioned defunding public education yet. In Alaska, where I lived most of the last 20 years, education has been largely flat funded for about a decade now. Imagine running an organization in 2026 on that organization's 2016 budget. Schools have a bunch of obligations they have to spend on. Every time health care costs for staff go…

> No one has mentioned defunding public education yet.

Some data.

https://edunomicslab.org/roi-over-time/

Re: Scores decline again for 13-year-old students in reading and mathematics (2023)

#44

Post by throwaway27448 »

weberer wrote: post #37
japhyr wrote: post #22

People are talking about Covid, smartphones/screens, social media, and AI. No one has mentioned defunding public education yet. In Alaska, where I lived most of the last 20 years, education has been largely flat funded for about a decade now. Imagine running an organization in 2026 on that organization's 2016 budget. Schools have a bunch of obligations they have to spend on. Every time health care costs for staff go…

>Averaged across the general student population, there was no statistically significant correlation between a school’s spending levels and its students’ academic performance in 27 of the 28 academic indicators used in the model. In the only category that did show a statistically significant correlation — seventh-grade math — the impact of spending more was very small. https://www.mackinac.org/S2016-02#results

Since 2007? That was long after we chose to leave kids behind

Re: Scores decline again for 13-year-old students in reading and mathematics (2023)

#45

Post by BrenBarn »

jaccola wrote: post #39
aggakake wrote: post #21

Look at Youtube Shorts in an incognito window to see the mindless crap that's popular among median users.

The most common reply to this is: “people said the same about Books/TV/Comics/Games/Facebook stop being such a Luddite” My answer to this is approximately: “yes they’re all relatively bad compared to the thing that came before so they were all right!” Even books. If the option were between my child reading about blacksmithing/compsci and DOING blacksmithing/compsci I’d choose the latter every time. It gives you real…

It's also not possible to carry around enough books with you to allow you to jump from one to another whenever you get bored, while it is possible to effectively carry around a device that lets you watch YouTube/TikTok at all times. I think this is an important factor.

Re: Scores decline again for 13-year-old students in reading and mathematics (2023)

#46

Post by nradov »

japhyr wrote: post #22

People are talking about Covid, smartphones/screens, social media, and AI. No one has mentioned defunding public education yet. In Alaska, where I lived most of the last 20 years, education has been largely flat funded for about a decade now. Imagine running an organization in 2026 on that organization's 2016 budget. Schools have a bunch of obligations they have to spend on. Every time health care costs for staff go…

I agree with you to an extent, but many states and school districts also engaged in fiscal malpractice by using defined-benefit employee pension plans to shift costs into the future. Those plans are financial weapons of mass destruction: far too risky for employers, retirees, and taxpayers. We need to eliminate them and shift all public school employees to 403(b) defined-contribution plans. This is especially critical as school enrollment declines.

Re: Scores decline again for 13-year-old students in reading and mathematics (2023)

#47

Post by zaphar »

estearum wrote: post #31
zaphar wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If increasing spending had almost no impact over time why would cutting spending have an impact?

If filling a leaky bucket had almost no impact over time, why would stopping filling the bucket have an impact?

But filling a leaky bucket does have an impact. You just have to fill it faster than it empties. Which is probably your point.

My point is different. Study after study shows that below a specific floor spending has almost no impact on educational outcomes. The correlation is such that you can both determine that there is likely no leak and also that it has no effect.

The stuff that does have an impact is much harder to move the needle on though so everyone just scapegoats funding instead. Stuff like building up the nuclear family in an area, increasing income mobility, and holding parents accountable for child outcomes do have a measurable effect but are politically intractable today.

Re: Scores decline again for 13-year-old students in reading and mathematics (2023)

#48

Post by zozbot234 »

crabbone wrote: post #38

Being a parent, I ask myself this question: is it worth it to struggle to get my child to try for better grades? And I don't have a definitive answer. The reasons to doubt are perfectly known: meritocracy is on a decline in the Western world, there's an ever improving safety net for losers, there's a price to pay for forcing my child to study vs the child spending time with their friends who were left to roam free as…

Why do you want to force your kid to study? Kids are naturally curious, it's likely that your kid will be curious about something. Introduce them to study and scholarship as a means of figuring these things out, so that it becomes natural to them.

Re: Scores decline again for 13-year-old students in reading and mathematics (2023)

#49

Post by AppleBananaPie »

kpw94 wrote: post #18
godelski wrote: post #7

The peak was in 2012 2012 2020 2023 Reading 263 260 256 Math 285 280 271 So people are looking at Covid and that's probably not enough. The scores are closer to those of the 80's than those in the 90's and 00's

My non-controversial theory: It's all the attention-span-shortening stuff. - tech apps starting with infinite scroll (facebook, 9gag, Instagram, etc.) - media/tech shortened content: shorter tv shows, short video content, etc. (Tiktok is the "state of the art" of those 2 trends pushed to the max) Specifically, we're getting more & more addicted to things that increase the dopamine spikes frequency, making it increasi…

I wonder if there's research on short form but educational content or if that's fundamentally impossible.

For example I remember reading a lot of science magazines / articles growing up (granted popsci but for a kid it still teaches some things) and as I grew up things like the Economist.

Similarly I also played games like math blaster as a kid and have realized I need to intentionally provide games like this to my kids that ideally teach something (the bar being greater than zero learning) rather than playing one of those infinite running games or whatever.

I think we're probably talking about the exact same thing but am curious where content vs. short form media is.

Thanks for sharing :)

Re: Scores decline again for 13-year-old students in reading and mathematics (2023)

#50

Post by nonameiguess »

Everyone is going to name their pet bugaboo, but if you look at the full charts, the scores were pretty stable in the 70s, 80s, and 90s, and are regressing back down to what they were historically. The real question is why they went up temporarily until 2012.
Post reply on HN