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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)

#131

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

lamasery wrote: post #97
CodingJeebus wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 an…

I have had enough insight into enough school districts that I'm confident lots of them are hotbeds of corruption. Mostly at the upper admin level (superintendents and such). Kickbacks for contracts, hiring absurd numbers of assistants and secretaries to the point that one wonders what work remains for the top dogs, creating do-nothing decently-paid positions for people they're having affairs with. That kind of thing.

There hasn't been enough said about the corruption of public life in the US. (And elsewhere.)

It used to be this kind of thing was - maybe not exceptional, but certainly not expected.

Now it's common but underreported.

So there's a kind of dream world where "education" and "health" are still considered official public goals. But the reality is that government procurement is mostly grift and corruption. There's been an epic collapse of almost any kind of public service ethic in favour of opportunism and profiteering, sometimes covered over with religious/moral pretexts.

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

#133

Post by khat »

Let's see Common Core was released in 2010 and by 2014-2015 most states had implemented it. Lets do the math, 2026 - 13 = 2013. Hmmm... You can say funding all you want but in the same 13 years of Common Core funding per student has increased by 50%.

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

#134

Post by nradov »

throwaway27448 wrote: post #103
nradov wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The pension issue has nothing to do with private schooling one way or the other so I don't know what point you're trying to make.

Well surely corruption would be orders of magnitude worse under private management yea? Or are we pretending that schools trade on a competitive market, and that the US is a place that distributes money rationally? Cuz all evidence points towards privatization as a graft vector

Buddy you've really lost the plot here. Privatization or lack thereof has nothing to do with mismanagement of employee retirement benefits. Both public and private employers can set up defined-benefit or defined-contribution retirement plans. Defined benefit pension plans create a huge risk for both private and public schools because current operating funds intended for educating students might have to be diverted to meet financial obligations to retirees.

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

#135

Post by yoyohello13 »

WalterBright wrote: post #73
yoyohello13 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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."

This is always a common rebuttal but I used to work in education and believe me there was not a bunch of new money coming in. Quite the opposite. Maybe the data shows funding going up but that money is not making it to the students.

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

#136

Post by mothballed »

nitwit005 wrote: post #119
JuniperMesos wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Depending on what variety of racist you get, they'll either just ignore that sort of data, or they openly state they prefer Asian immigrants.

Alternatively, maybe they became [more] racist after looking at the data.

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

#137

Post by jedberg »

jvanderbot wrote: post #62
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…

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…

> Funding per student is on the rise, or level on inflation-adjusted $

That's at the state level. But that doesn't account for the explosion in admin salaries and positions. The actual money a district spends on each student has been going down every year. Those funds are going more towards admin activities.

> I got ahold of all the teachers I knew and asked them what impact it would have, and their response was mostly that they would lose their school lunch benefits.

Teachers have a very poor understanding of where their funding comes from. Most just assume "property taxes", but it's far more complicated than that. The department of Ed provides a lot of funding to states that is passed through to the schools. They also enforce the education titles.

Cutting the department of Ed may not have a direct, immediate impact on classroom teachers, but it will have a large downstream effect in a few years.

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

#138

Post by iamwpj »

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…

That doesn't line up though. See if you're 13 and meeting the level in 2012 your scores don't decline. So the levels would lag a few years. The 8 year-olds show up and miss the mark in 2017 that indicate the infinite scroll problem was having a toll on them. Additionally this would start to show in class specific measurements (those kids with access to home internet, personal devices, etc. would have worse scores). I think the argument about social media has merit in discussion of children, but it seems more of a social distinction rather than an objective indicator for academic performance.

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

#139

Post by [deleted] »

zozbot234 wrote: post #129
john_strinlai wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The average starving PhD would be a much better and more knowledgeable teacher to high school students in the subject she took her PhD in i dont think this is true. there is an art to educating (especially the ~10-15 year old range) that does not just manifest itself because you are smart: how to engage students, how to keep them engaged, how to adjust the message to the audience's level and communicate it effectiv…

~10-13 mostly comprises the junior high range. By the time the kids are 14, they're plenty old enough to benefit from a "college-prep" educational approach. Sure, some PhDs will be better, others will be worse. But you solve that by throwing out terrible teachers and rewarding the best ones. There's no guarantee that an Education-credentialed teacher with negligible education in the actual subject they're supposed to…

[deleted]

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

#140

Post by yoyohello13 »

declan_roberts wrote: post #75
yoyohello13 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

For what it’s worth. I think the rise of anti-intellectualism in our culture has far more impact than funding.
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