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

nationsreportcard.gov

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

#71
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'm not hearing a whole lot of talk about No Child Left Behind or the near-total elimination of analysis and synthesis from modern curricula either, but having watched a 14 year old navigate what passes for elementary and middle school currently I'm unsurprised that test scores continue to slip.

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

#72
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…

It's weird you're using Alaska as an example of this because that state has the highest funding per student in the entire country: https://www.learner.com/blog/states-that-spend-the-most-on-e...

>It's weird you're using Alaska as an example

its weird that they used the state that they live in and have lived in for the last 20 years as an example?

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

#73
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…

The US has been continuously defunding and deprioritizing education for decades. This is the result of a culture that doesn’t value education.

google sez:

"Inflation-adjusted public school funding per student in the United States has increased significantly over the long term, with a roughly 34% increase in inflation-adjusted revenue per student over the last two decades alone. Looking at a broader historical view, inflation-adjusted spending per student has risen by over 200% since the 1960s."

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

#74
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you explain for the non-terminally online?

They want to say that non-whites are naturally dumber than whites. There will be varying degrees of subtlety but that's what the dog whistlers are on about.

Oh. Racism.

I'm so relieved I left social media. Sadly, via democracy, even if you leave social media you are still impacted by those who use it and believe what they read.

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

#75
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…

The US has been continuously defunding and deprioritizing education for decades. This is the result of a culture that doesn’t value education.

This is the bias that keeps us from actually making improvements to the education system. I guess it's easy to repeat and blame money. Kind of like a brilliantly colored red herring.

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

#76
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you explain for the non-terminally online?

They want to say that non-whites are naturally dumber than whites. There will be varying degrees of subtlety but that's what the dog whistlers are on about.

You can take a look at the charts in the linked article and see that the scores for Asians are consistently higher than the scores for whites which are consistently higher than the scores for blacks and Hispanics. This was true in 2012 and it's true today.

If these numbers are at all meaningful for determining how much a student has learned as a result of going through schooling, then thye show that white people are consistently better than blacks and Hispanics at school and are consistently worse than Asians.

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

#77
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…

Funding per student is on the rise, or level on inflation-adjusted $ https://educationdata.org/public-education-spending-statisti... The funding for dept of ed has _exploded_ after 2000 https://educationdata.org/public-education-spending-statisti... At the same time, school scores started to sag after 2014 https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/ushistory/results/scores/ There are highly politicized blogs which can discuss…

> At the same time, school scores started to sag after 2014

That's around the time a bunch of districts in a state I lived in at the time had multi-year teacher pay scale freezes due to budget crunches. Not saying it's necessarily connected to the scores dropping, but still.

Total spending across the country may be high, but it's very much state-by-state and local how much is spent and where it goes. Some states pay teachers pretty well. Some states, the pay really is pretty awful. Some states are OK on staffing levels. Others are in an ongoing staffing catastrophe that's forcing them to cut school days to try to get by.

Meanwhile, school performance is heavily tied to home life and broader community support for students' families. That's why all this effort to improve schools hasn't been as effective as one might hope: the attention needs to go toward much harder problems that have little to do with schools and are really hard to get any progress on in the US. Worker protections, better and less-stressful "safety nets", better policing and a better justice system. That kind of thing. I'd look at least as much at what's been going on with those, and with security and home life for those in the lowest three quintiles of household income, as at schools themselves, to try to find reasons for trends like this.

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

#78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's weird you're using Alaska as an example of this because that state has the highest funding per student in the entire country: https://www.learner.com/blog/states-that-spend-the-most-on-e...

> It's weird you're using Alaska as an example its weird that they used the state that they live in and have lived in for the last 20 years as an example?

Raises even more questions.

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

#79
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…

Funding per student is on the rise, or level on inflation-adjusted $ https://educationdata.org/public-education-spending-statisti... The funding for dept of ed has _exploded_ after 2000 https://educationdata.org/public-education-spending-statisti... At the same time, school scores started to sag after 2014 https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/ushistory/results/scores/ There are highly politicized blogs which can discuss…

I met a forensic accountant recently who mentioned a corruption investigation she participated in involving a school district nearby, several high-ranking board members and admins were on the take. She pointed out the futility of the project, it was a large sum of money for a school district, but nothing like your headline-grabbing Medicare scams. She wound up leaving the investigation due to threats to her safety and took another job. It felt like one of those unresolved endings to "The Wire".

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

#80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

That study had a major update in April 2016. If the results confirmed the original premise would it actually change your mind about education funding?

We still need to find a cause for declining results. If it isn't funding, what is making our children stupider?

Regardless, I'd think that a study trying to find a correlation among practice, funding, and measurement would need at least a generation (~thirty years yea?) of results to show meaning

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