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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)

#151
post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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

#152
post #86

Much ink has been spilled in the comments already, but as a child of the 80s, computers were a class, and not a lifestyle. If I had gone through school with what's available today, I doubt I would have done as well as I did. Most things were handwritten, I learned cursive, and computer class was Oregon Trail and basic programming essentially. Looking back, I don't think Chromebooks, iPads and the like would have been…

It's amazing how bad these things can be. My kids will sometimes get computerized homework which gets graded automatically, and if you don't format the answer the way it likes, zero points. They spend as much effort fighting with the formatting as they do understanding the material. And this is in one of the wealthiest, best run public school districts in the country. "Technology" has been an education buzzword since…

This gave me flashbacks to LonCapa in college when I was in calculus classes circa 2011. A correct answer was marked incorrect automatically because of floating point issues.

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

#153
post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Ok, so why privatize?

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

#154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 most…

Student/teacher ratios have gone down, not up over the last few decades. This isn't a lack of funding.

Teachers are put in an impossible position with students who come from homes where the parents don't do their proper jobs. It's never been easier to be a neglectful parent. Your child will be entertained non-stop by an iPad and a video game system. They won't get bored and bother you. You can send them to their room and do whatever you want if you don't care if they are sleeping or not, as long as they are quiet.

The "iPad babies" are an epidemic in schools.

Source:

My sister is a K-12 educator in a poor, rural public school system in southeastern Virginia.

In recent years, she's seen a surge in students who are sorted, improperly, into special education classes. These are students that exhibit symptoms of various learning disabilities, but these symptoms heavily overlap with the symptoms of children who are sleep deprived and over stimulated by dopamine activating content on the devices they are addicted to.

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

#155

Just gotta do the Mississippi thing and hold kids back unless they meet standards. Don't leave them behind by pretending to leave no one behind.

If kids are held back when they fail standards, shouldn't they also be allowed to race ahead when they exceed them?

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

#156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 most…

> 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.

Ok? Seems like that's more of a problem than the funding. Or whatever is causing that is more of a problem, but it does a disservice to the general argument of "kids aren't receiving the same level of care" argument to blame a drop in funding--especially when it was so easily falsified.

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

#157
post #24

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

Or look at corporations + elites constantly attacking children for the last 40 years (pushing school vouchers, school choices, attacking teacher unions, politicizing school boards). Who do you think suffers when elites attack public education? It's always the children. Fun fact: Silicon Valley elites are big proponents of school vouchers because, like their hatred of American labor, they also hate public schools and…

Internet commenters try to get me to hate lots of people for lots of reasons, but "Parents trying to send their kid to a school that fits their kid's needs" seems like such a hard sell.

Like, I get the desire in a hypothetical, that you hope that people in power would use their power to make public schools better if their kids were forced to go there.

But in reality, the actually powerful can just pay for private schools out of pocket and the vouchers help a lot of middle-income families send their kid to a school that can provide a better environment for whatever definition of better is relevant to that individual.

It just seems like such misplaced anger and energy. You could just advocate for improving public schools, without attacking regular families trying to do their best while trapped inside a system they have very little influence on.

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

#158

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.

I wonder if having the Soviet Union as an ever looming adversary could have something to do with it, and after their fall everyone just got complacent.

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

#159

Just gotta do the Mississippi thing and hold kids back unless they meet standards. Don't leave them behind by pretending to leave no one behind.

If kids are held back when they fail standards, shouldn't they also be allowed to race ahead when they exceed them?

Off the top of my head I don't have problem with this, but the topic is about declining scores so I'm not sure how relevant this is.

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

#160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Are Mississippi and Louisiana at the top of the pay scale? Then why are their reading scores improving so dramatically compared to wealthier states? Especially for under-privileged populations?

I only saw modest improvement in reading scores.
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