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US High school students' scores fall in reading and math

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Re: US High school students' scores fall in reading and math

#201

Post by teachrdan »

vondur wrote: post #176
estimator7292 wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The core problem is actually twofold: 1. We pay teachers like shit and treat them even worse. Even if you wanted to do a good job as a teacher, it's fundamentally impossible because: 2. Our schools are structured and run by busybodies that have absolutely no business being within 100 yards of a school. Curricula is set by politics and ideology, not established science. We have book bans and helicopter parents suing t…

Where my wife works the average salary is over 100K per year, so not bad for 9 months of work. This is in California where the test scores are some of the worst in the nation. I would not lean too hard at political party affiliation, California politics is heavily influenced by Teachers Unions, and yet we score near the bottom of the entire US.

> This is in California where the test scores are some of the worst in the nation

I read your post and thought it was BS, so I did a little research. According to this, California public school test scores are better than Texas and closing in on New York and Florida.

> California politics is heavily influenced by Teachers Unions, and yet we score near the bottom of the entire US.

California scores better than Texas, a completely Republican-run state where the teacher's unions have almost no influence. How do you account for that?

https://www.ppic.org/publication/californias-k-12-test-score...

Re: US High school students' scores fall in reading and math

#202

Post by arjie »

bluGill wrote: post #76
drivebyhooting wrote: post #27

Just looking at the picture triggered me. Why are the students sitting in groups and cutting paper with scissors? There’s a huge teaching gap between USA and Asia. See for yourself: https://youtu.be/wIyVYCuPxl0?si=f6wFv2G3Iru7QFTy https://en.wikipedia-on-ipfs.org/wiki/James_W._Stigler Edit: since it may not have been clear from the video, this is my interpretation: * in the Japanese math class the teacher teaches at…

When someone links to a video I assuming that the video was heavily edited and cherry picked to show whatever point they want. I'm not wrong often enough to bother clicking on yours. I find it interesting that James W Stigler doesn't even have a wikipedia page. I'm not sure what that means, but he somehow isn't very notable despite having written popular books and being a university professor. (or he is so controvers…

Well, someone has to write the page. They don't self-manifest. The draft is currently here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Draft:James_W._Stigler but was rejected for mainspace because it was written too promotionally. It will take some work, but he looks to be notable enough to deserve the article.

Re: US High school students' scores fall in reading and math

#203

Post by PartiallyTyped »

tenarchits wrote: post #198

Most of the comments are focused on the supply of education. But I don't think the supply side is the problem, irrespective of teachers and high schools. There is more and cheaper education available than ever before. Nearly every highschooler has more access to learning that kings and emperors would have fought wars for less than 200 years ago. However,the United States, particularly in the last 50 years, seems to h…

Not just education but overall intellectualism. It’s a purely cultural issue that can be observed by looking at demographics.

Re: US High school students' scores fall in reading and math

#205

Post by 01HNNWZ0MV43FF »

benmw333 wrote: post #199

When I think of all my teachers I had throughout K-12 public school, not one of them stands out as having meaningfully impacted my life. In fact I would argue many of them were a net negative to my learning achievements (or lack thereof). So yeah, defund public schools as much as possible. That will get my vote.

"America is bad and should be destroyed without regard to the people living there"

The worst leftists (handshake) the worst right wingers

Re: US High school students' scores fall in reading and math

#206

Post by toast0 »

m00x wrote: post #167
FireBeyond wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Charter schools have been the best bang for the buck. That is a lot easier when you can require a transcript from the prospective student, review it, and say, "Uh, no thank you". There's a private technical college near here that offers EMT and paramedic training. They "guarantee" "100% success in certification and registration" for their students. How do they get there? They boot students out after they fail ( I'm…

Yeah, that's very selective. Catholic schools on the other hand just require you to be Catholic and be somewhat involved in the Parish and score much higher. I believe this is not only restricted to Catholic schools though they are the most common. Most religious schools have higher scoring students.

If nothing else, parental involvement correlates with higher test scores and being enrolled in a non-default school correlates with parent involvement. So it's no surprise that being enrolled in a non-default school correlates with higher test scores.

IMHO, we always hear about such and such school (system) has X% kids proficient with $Y/year per pupil. But what I would really want to know about a school is how does a year change at the school change the proficiency of the class. If the class of 3rd graders starts the year at 20% proficient at 2nd grade level, and ends at 22% proficient at 3rd grade level, that might be a good school, even though a single point in time check says 22% proficient. But the numbers we get aren't really useful for that; a cohort analysis would be better; there's real privacy implications, but that doesn't make the numbers we get useful. :P

Re: US High school students' scores fall in reading and math

#207

Post by eli_gottlieb »

tenarchits wrote: post #198

Most of the comments are focused on the supply of education. But I don't think the supply side is the problem, irrespective of teachers and high schools. There is more and cheaper education available than ever before. Nearly every highschooler has more access to learning that kings and emperors would have fought wars for less than 200 years ago. However,the United States, particularly in the last 50 years, seems to h…

"Culture" is downstream of incentives.

Re: US High school students' scores fall in reading and math

#208

Post by rawgabbit »

echelon wrote: post #80
stephendause wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Jonathan Haidt has a lot of good material on this. He is leading the charge in encouraging parents to delay giving their child a phone until high school and not allowing them to have social media accounts until age 16. https://www.goodmorningamerica.com/family/story/author-sugge...

How do Asian countries and top-performing countries deal with this? We should do whatever they do. On that note, we should also segregate kids by academic desire and achievement like Japan and China. The bullies and underachievers hold back those who are academically excellent. We do this in limited instances, but not enough to really count.

In Japan and China, high-stakes entrance exams come earlier and play a stronger role than in the U.S. In China, the zhongkao (high school entrance exam, around age 15) and gaokao (college entrance exam, age 18) largely determine access to selective schools and universities. In Japan, competitive entrance exams for high schools (age 15) and universities (age 18).

Re: US High school students' scores fall in reading and math

#209

Post by giantg2 »

lucideng wrote: post #33

The majority of the public school system has devolved into day-care, not education. Most parents just watch TV, stare at their phones and don't want to be bothered by anything that requires effort. A major societal shift needs to happen for this to be reversed. It's many factors... the parents, the food system, various inequalities, social media, technology, healthcare... the solution is multi-pronged. But if I had t…

I generally agree. However, I don't think most parents are neglectful for using a screen. The ones that can't be bothered would just be drinking, reading gossip magazines, going to bars, or whatever else they felt like if screens simply stopped existing.

Admittedly my kids get more screen time than I'd like, but we try to make it educational. An observation that I made that is on topic for this thread, is that there are very few modern US shows that seem to fit our criteria of being educational and not over-stimularing. It seemes there are many more international shows that are better.

Re: US High school students' scores fall in reading and math

#210

Post by giantg2 »

Scubabear68 wrote: post #103
lucideng wrote: post #33

The majority of the public school system has devolved into day-care, not education. Most parents just watch TV, stare at their phones and don't want to be bothered by anything that requires effort. A major societal shift needs to happen for this to be reversed. It's many factors... the parents, the food system, various inequalities, social media, technology, healthcare... the solution is multi-pronged. But if I had t…

I live in the US in New Jersey, and here a big problem was the State flooded school districts with money during Covid with no material oversight of its spending. The end result was huge increases in spending. But not on education. The money was spent on more MacBooks, more iPads, more buildings, more smart TVs, more consultants, more School Bullshit System as a Service, more scoreboards, more $50,000 signs in front o…

They do a pretty poor job at babysitting too. They do very little to create a calm and disciplined environment.
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