What could possible explain this drop over the last ~10 years? Unrelated: schools with effective phone bans are seeing improved grades and less absences.
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Oregon raised spending by 80%, math scores dropped
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Re: Oregon raised spending by 80%, math scores dropped
#12Has anyone looked at the teacher's math scores? I have read in the past about about problems with basic numeracy amongst educators being transmitted to students.
>> (2008) Primary school teachers in England are often scared of basic numeracy and should be required to study English and maths at A-level, a report suggests.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/education/8162803.stm
>> This lack of confidence on the part of teachers can be transmitted to students and result in their own lack of mathematical confidence
Re: Oregon raised spending by 80%, math scores dropped
#13Where is the money going? Isn't the average teacher pay down?
Administration.
Large institutions in the USA are grossly mismanaged and/or corrupt. Normalize the amount of public money pupils cost and it easily dwarfs most elite private schools. Multiply by class size and an elementary school class can cost $500k+. The teacher is not making $100k.
Re: Oregon raised spending by 80%, math scores dropped
#14Focusing solely on the school isn't going be the answer. Students spend more time not at school. That has an effect.
Re: Oregon raised spending by 80%, math scores dropped
#15From my experience raising kids in public schools, adding money to a bad school only makes it worse.
Re: Oregon raised spending by 80%, math scores dropped
#16Politics and ideologies aside, just trying to be rational....
Can someone better informed about these metrics (the NAEP specifically) comment: how exactly do we know that we're comparing the same thing each year? Is the NAEP based off answering the same questions every year? Because if it's just like "average exam result" - those can change a lot. And can in fact trend, meaning change in the same direction for several years (e.g. becoming harder, becoming easier)
Re: Oregon raised spending by 80%, math scores dropped
#17This article is super weird because it's looking at an issue from orbit where the only things you can see are vague things like "funding" where the problem is on the ground and probably can't be solved by the levers available from orbit. The lesson of funding having arguably no effect on outcomes should either be that we genuinely don't know what improves outcomes or that we do but schools are lighting money on fire buying other things.
It means the problem is unfortunately local and you have to actually go to the schools and see what the issue is. Based on what my former HS spent money on I figure we will eventually find some commonalities:
* New computer labs, laptops, digital textbooks, learning software licenses, smart boards, and other and other expensive crap that is at best neutral from a learning perspective.
* Pointless building improvements that don't service education but instead service the prestige and egos of the administrators of the schools.
* Chronic long-term understaffing and light-speed "just get through it" lesson plans that makes teachers not give a shit, and powerless to do better even if they do.
I think "just blame the administrators" is too easy a cop-out because I've yet to meet one who isn't also underpaid and dying of stress. Although maybe I just don't have access to the real higher ups.
Re: Oregon raised spending by 80%, math scores dropped
#18Good grief! The bush admin tried to getting better scores by standard testing ... as a scheme in some ways by-pass local control by trading improvement for cash or removing cash.
Mixed results. There's whining about standard testing .. . There's whining without it too. But states brought that on themselves.
I raised two boys one a plain-joe kid, one with special needs. The older, regular kid got into and out of university in four years.
Seeing what I see now, and what I saw over those years:
- pay teachers more with commensurate increase in accountability. (You can't have only one.)
- focus on academics only. Too much resources are wasted in our American daydreaming that schools can be some kind of utopia superceding home, family. Regretably, if parents don't care, there's a tiny chance only the kid will change in school. Here i mean anything that detracts from language, math, science, arts, sports. Having different makes and models of kids at school? That's great; i like that. My kids have got to see our house isn't the only game in town.
- maybe eliminate all federal forms of funding by sending less money to the fed redistributed back later. Control and accountability has to be less complex with fewer regs from fewer places. Education is operationally local in the US and yet somehow the fed and national unions are big players too. We can't be serving two masters.
- withhold kids by class until they succeed. Kids must be held accountable too. If you can't deal with algebra I you are not doing algerbra II so you can suck at that too.
- contribute to kid's self esteem and confidence right: you're not graduating in this class, and I (as a teacher) will help you figure out a way forward by tackling what's in front of you. That's real success. That's real learning. That's better for kids.
- put principals and teachers top echelon. If they want/need admin staff, fine counter balanced by cost & success on accountability side. US schools like US medicine is phenomenal at having paper pushers suck up resources. Yah, I'm not a fan of this to put it politely.
Re: Oregon raised spending by 80%, math scores dropped
#19Oregon is mentioned as an example of the general decline through the US. The article isn't really about Oregon specifically:
Consider Oregon. Had it merely kept pace with inflation, it would have
increased school spending by about 35 percent from 2013 to 2023. In
actuality, it raised spending by 80 percent. Over the same period, math
and reading performance tanked, with math posting a remarkable 16-point
decline—the equivalent of 1.5 grade levels. Oregon is spending much more
and achieving much less.
My youngest child is just starting high school at the moment, and for the last several years much of math education seems to have been farmed out to really crappy software and short video clips running on chromebooks. She'd really be suffering without parental intervention.
Re: Oregon raised spending by 80%, math scores dropped
#20Has anyone looked at the teacher's math scores? I have read in the past about about problems with basic numeracy amongst educators being transmitted to students. >> (2008) Primary school teachers in England are often scared of basic numeracy and should be required to study English and maths at A-level, a report suggests. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/education/8162803.stm >> This lack of confidence on the part o…
In elementary school and early high school I liked older teachers more than younger teachers (just on average, I had many great younger teachers as well). I think 40+ years ago teaching in an elementary school and certainly in a high school was seen as a 'dignified' profession, causing many intelligent people who could've worked for better pay in private industry to work there. Knew some families where all kids (and they had many) either became lawyers, engineers, doctors or teachers. Teacher was seen as an equal option.
I have a feeling many of my greatest teachers wouldn't take the same path today, a lot more burdens and enough other 'intellectual' jobs to go for.