What could possible explain this drop over the last ~10 years? Unrelated: schools with effective phone bans are seeing improved grades and less absences.
Unrelated?
Oregon raised spending by 80%, math scores dropped
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Re: Oregon raised spending by 80%, math scores dropped
#102Where is the money going? Isn't the average teacher pay down?
Publishers?
Re: Oregon raised spending by 80%, math scores dropped
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Why are big changes not arrived at by first gaining experience with them in in some reduced scale Because the results that come back are always politically inexpedient to agendas--generally for all sides. Examples: 1) Charter schools: As soon as you force charter schools into an actual lottery which normalizes their student body relative to the public schools, their performance relative to the public schools crater…
> focus most of your resource on the lowest performers as they are the easiest to improve That depends heavily on the pedagogical approach. There are approaches that are quite effective in bringing low performers up to near-par (so-called "direct instruction", in a broad sense) but teacher actively hate them because they're viewed as "demeaning" the profession, and ed schools don't teach them. Special Ed teachers act…
> Teacher-centered and direct approaches cope quite well with greater class sizes, but again they're unpopular among teachers.
Cite. All research I have seen completely contradicts this.
The limitation with larger class sizes is not "knowledge transfer"; it's "classroom management" aka dealing with a student causing an interruption for some reason (bathroom, injury, sickness, etc.).
I use the Gates Foundation as my primary citations because they are easily findable on the web and simply match all of the other findings. You max out at about 15 students per 2 teachers because one of the teachers can handle the inevitable disruption while the other teacher can continue teaching. The more students you add on top of the roughly 15, the more likely you wind up with 2 interruptions which stops the class cold irrespective of teaching technique.
And, as I have stated, most of the research focuses on elementary to middle levels. High school requires teacher specialization which confounds a lot of the data.
Re: Oregon raised spending by 80%, math scores dropped
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
> focus most of your resource on the lowest performers as they are the easiest to improve That depends heavily on the pedagogical approach. There are approaches that are quite effective in bringing low performers up to near-par (so-called "direct instruction", in a broad sense) but teacher actively hate them because they're viewed as "demeaning" the profession, and ed schools don't teach them. Special Ed teachers act…
> Teacher-centered and direct approaches cope quite well with greater class sizes, but again they're unpopular among teachers. Cite. All research I have seen completely contradicts this. The limitation with larger class sizes is not "knowledge transfer"; it's "classroom management" aka dealing with a student causing an interruption for some reason (bathroom, injury, sickness, etc.). I use the Gates Foundation as my p…
How Does Class Size Vary Around the World? (OECD, 2012) shows that there are countries such as Japan and South Korea with some of the largest average class sizes, and excellent educational achievement. Clearly it's far from the only or even the most important factor. The United Kingdom is one country that skews the other way, though there are countries like Estonia with similarly small classes that seem to do a lot better.
Re: Oregon raised spending by 80%, math scores dropped
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
Most studies are showing children with neurological damage from continued exposure to covid outbreaks in schools multiple times a year. Lockdowns did not last more than a few months for the vast majority of school districts in the US.
Three-quarters of urban school districts were operating fully remote until late 2020. That may skew the results.
New York City had hybrid in-person and remote as an option, so only about 4 months were remote for most students. Seems like a perfect A/B test case to test the theory that a remote learning was actually associated with cognitive decline 5 years later. Meanwhile every year since 2020 there have been studies published from nearly every country on the neurological and cognitive damage from mild covid cases. Seems to be more of a cognitive dissonance issue, that people don't want to confront the elephant in the room. 100 years ago when TB and Polio were taken more seriously than today, the common solution was fresh air. Schools today are even more sealed off to the point where a simple lack of oxygen starts to noticeably reduce cognitive ability after a few minutes.
Re: Oregon raised spending by 80%, math scores dropped
#106It should be well-known by now that throwing money at education doesn't solve a thing.
How are they gonna fix education, if they cannot even grasp:
If the method does not work, try a different method.Re: Oregon raised spending by 80%, math scores dropped
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I think that Oregon teacher salaries have gone up quite a bit more than the national average in the last 10 years, less so in the last couple. Also let's not forget Covid. Yeah, Covid is at the tail end of the time period but it would be an error to make assumptions about the rates of change being constant over these periods. We've all seen that El Nino graph that is used to misrepresent climate change by careful w…
Yes, COVID was a problem, along with many of the ill-considered responses to it. However, it’s now four years later, and it’s misguided to attribute the situation today to mostly being a result of COVID. Eliminating the DOE and most of our current approach to K-12 education seems entirely prudent! Just compare what students learned circa 1900 before graduating high school to today…
> it’s now four years later
Also yes, that's kinda the point. You don't think doing poorly in a grade below makes it likely you won't do good in the next level? The data points are 2019, 2022, and 2024. You got a sharp decrease from 2019 to 2022. Then a lower decrease from 2022 to 2024. Isn't that what you'd expect from a recovery? And only 2 years after the damage from the pandemic?
You sure wouldn't expect it to instantly jump back to 2019 levels (V shaped). They'd only do that if they didn't do worse during the pandemic. Effects compound. The years aren't independent measurements
Re: Oregon raised spending by 80%, math scores dropped
#108What could possible explain this drop over the last ~10 years? Unrelated: schools with effective phone bans are seeing improved grades and less absences.
You said it!
Re: Oregon raised spending by 80%, math scores dropped
#109Oregon 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…
>> much of math education seems to have been farmed out to really crappy software and short video clips running on chromebooks Our local school committee is debating this currently. There was a book mentioned "Ditch That Textbook" about using EdTech to reimagine curriculums. I have a hard time imagining actual high quality math education not using a textbook, and I don't really see how crappy software (and I do not f…
I absolutely think that there is a better way to educate than tests and textbooks...however I'm certain we haven't found the perfect formula, and videos and chromebooks significantly worse. Different is not better.
Re: Oregon raised spending by 80%, math scores dropped
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
I was in school in Wisconsin when they got rid of the teachers union; schooling improved drastically. We had a physics teacher who went years refusing to write AP level physics courses when it was a union job, but suddenly found the motivation once the union left. Most substantially, at the state level the governor passed course options, which allowed high school students to take courses at local universities or othe…
Someone should tell the Wisconsin Education Association Council that they don't exist. They were removed back when you were in school and clearly aren't around today.
> Someone should tell the Wisconsin Education Association Council that they don't exist.
"Here's what happened to teachers after Wisconsin gutted its unions":
* https://web.archive.org/web/20171117133914/https://money.cnn...