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

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

#171

Post by RyanOD »

john_strinlai wrote: post #123
zozbot234 wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Labor compensation in the U.S. is also extremely unequal, which pulls the average up in a way that isn't very informative as to this particular issue. 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, than the typical high school teacher with nothing more than an Education credential. Are you sure that you need to pay such high w…

> 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…

Yes to this! What makes a great teacher is the willingness to hold kids accountable for their behavior and their work. Sure, it helps to be a subject expert, but that won't matter if you can't manage your classroom.

And parents play an equally important role. One of the best things you can do for your child's education/life is support the teacher when they call you up and say, "Your child is making poor decisions..."

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

#172

Post by mlyle »

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…

I'm retired from engineering. I did startups / exited / joined difficult technical domains for the funsies / etc.

I have taught 5 years at a private school. I do not have a teaching credential.

Knowing the stuff you're teaching is the easiest part. And I say that despite teaching in an environment with far better behavior, student buy-in, family support, and academic accomplishment than most places.

I thought that when I launched a student team doing spacecraft design (selected for orbital flight on the basis of the quality of their mission, btw, not their age) that the hard part would be teaching kids about power budgets, radiation aging, and the thermal environment.

Turns out the hard part is helping them figure out how to navigate the social dynamics of talking to each other, organizing their work, realizing what other people know, and coping emotionally with setbacks. Kids will teach themselves the stuff if you have buy-in and the culture in the room is right.

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

#173

Post by jjk166 »

CSMastermind wrote: post #87
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

Demographic change is the obvious explanation.

Score changes look about the same across performance percentiles and ethnicities. That suggests it's a systemic issue unrelated to population makeup. While I'd be interested to see regional and economic breakdowns, it's certainly far from obvious it's a result of demographic change, especially after such a short period of time.

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

#175

Post by jmyeet »

There's a lot going on here. Most of it boils down to a concerted, decades-long project by half the country to defund, dismantle and destroy public education. This has infected every layer of education including what goes into textbooks. The Texas Board of Education has typically had outsized power here as they've mostly been the largest single purchaser of textbooks. But also we have the likes of Robert Maxwell who basically owned textbook printing [1], before "falling off" his yacht.

But the part I want to concentrate on is the education part and the role of tech. Anyone who sells to large bureaucracies like state and federal Education Departments will tell you the skill is in managing the procurement process. It's getting your claws in more than it is in delivering results. Any results tend to be more manufactured than not.

So contracts get signed with states and school districts that will require them to use a particular product, even if it doesn't work. We know how this goes too. Whoever was in charge of that decision will then tend to leave their job and go work for the seller. Shocking.

But we know what works in teaching and it's direct instruction [2] but you don't sell tech platforms or iPads or laptops that way. As a result we now have a disturbing number of people who have never read a book and really can't read a book, going so far as the students of elite colleges [3].

Likewise, we see Education PhDs who won't make a name for themselves pushing ideas from the 1800s. They have to come up with new methods and this was kind of a disaster for literacy [4], which people are finally waking up to as we go back to the 1800s method of phonics eg [5].

But it's hard to succeed when half the country wants the entire system to fail.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZM05gRIROqQ

[2]: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8476697/

[3]: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2024/11/the-eli...

[4]: https://www.apmreports.org/episode/2019/08/22/whats-wrong-ho...

[5]: https://news.stanford.edu/stories/2026/02/science-of-reading...

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

#176

Post by RyanOD »

havaloc wrote: 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…

And parents are equally distracted from their job of parenting by those same devices. Want to help your child with their education? Support their teachers when/if your child is making poor decisions at school.

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

#177

Post by shinjitsu »

lumost wrote: post #57
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…

Boston Public Schools had a 50 Million dollar budget shortfall for next year. We are rapidly closing schools and eating the disruption that comes with that. Teachers do not do their best work when they don't have confidence on long-term outcomes. To some extent, this shift is inevitable due to demographics changes - but I don't think that there has been realistic planning on how to manage a future with dramatically f…

How much of the school closures are because of declining enrollment? https://www.bostonindicators.org/article-pages/2024/june/emp... https://www.bu.edu/articles/2025/public-school-enrollment-do...

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

#178

Post by jcims »

My wife taught first through fifth grade from ~2004 until 2017.

One thing that was evident to me from the sidelines was how much admin work was continually added to her workload without any consideration for the amount of class time she had. The focus on data derived from continuous testing of the students resulted in her and her peers sticking ever more closely to a continuously disrupted and rotated collection of commercially sourced curriculum and materials. This constant flux disincentivized teachers augmenting with their own content (although they still often do) because it could fall out of line with next years 'innovative new approach' to teaching basic arithmetic.

Her role as educator started to take a back seat to facilitator, focused on classroom management and data collection. Add in differentiated instruction, where she was held accountable to develop personalized lesson plans for individual students and asked to track all of that and you end up with way too much workload to stay engaged and engaging year after year.

She was in a pretty good school district. A friend of mine had a similar role in a city district for a regional metro area and her students were horrific. She felt physically unsafe and ultimately quit.

It's a complex problem with many contributing factors. It's also difficult to experiment or strike out on your own as an educator when the future of the students in front of you could be negatively impacted by any mistakes made (not to mention job/test scores/etc) so most just ride the rail all the way down.

(Also, at least in the US, you can get stuck to a district b/c the value-add of a seasoned teacher doesn't really move the metrics in the current system enough to offset the fact that you can hire two junior/fresh grads for the same money.)

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

#179

Post by RyanOD »

randomNumber7 wrote: post #99

Children spend an insane amount of time in school yet it has little results. One overlooked problem is imo that you can't just waste their time with nonsense and get good results. A lot of people in the education system are so full of shit that they believe it's good for children to sit there the whole day. Improving exercises and lectures should be a priority.

"Children spend an insane amount of time in school yet it has little results."

What do you mean by "little results" and what data supports it?

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

#180

Post by eigencoder »

zozbot234 wrote: post #141
datadrivenangel wrote: post #132

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?

Absolutely
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