Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

US High school students' scores fall in reading and math

apnews.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

281–290 of 1001 posts

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

#281

Post by jen20 »

el_memorioso wrote: post #146
jimt1234 wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The majority of the public school system has devolved into day-care, not education. I resisted that narrative for years, thinking it was just a media-hyped scare tactic to get clicks. However, my niece started high school a few weeks ago (in mid-August, which is weird to me); her experience blew my mind. Her new high school is considered one of the better public high schools in the area. When I asked her how it was…

In what state are public high schools allowed to "how to pray"? It sounds like her new high school isn't that good. I have a daughter at a good public high school in California in a quite liberal area. There was none of what you mentioned. One day of reviewing the syllabi and rules and quizzes in most subjects starting less than a week later.

I don't know if "how to pray" is covered, but Texas passed legislation requiring the display of the Ten Commandments in public schools.

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

#282

Post by programjames »

estimator7292 wrote: post #170
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…

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…

The core problem is actually very simple. Education studies do not measure what they claim to measure. When they say, "education outcomes improve when..." they usually mean the pass rate, i.e. they only measured a signal among the bottom 20% of students. When they say, "test scores improve when..." they are, at best, measuring up to the 90th percentile. When they say, "the white/black attainment gap," or "socioeconomic disadvantages," they're usually just fishing for funding money, and their study will not actually attempt to measure either of those things. From a review of the literature on No Child Left Behind (NCLB) in 2015:

> Only one study specifically examined the achievement gap for students from low socioeconomic backgrounds (Hampton & Gruenert, 2008) despite NCLB’s stated commitment to improving education for children from low-income families. African American students were often mentioned in studies of general student achievement but none of the reviewed studies focused specifically on the effects of NCLB for this subgroup. Again, this is a curious gap in the research considering the law’s emphasis on narrowing the Black-White achievement gap. Other groups of students underrepresented in the research on NCLB include gifted students, students with vision impairments, and English proficient minority students.

("A Review of the Empirical Literature on No Child Left Behind From 2001 to 2010", Husband & Hunt, 2015)

Everything you see going wrong is downstream of this. Yes, harmful ideologies have done a lot of damage to the education system, but it could easily survive this we had actual signifiers of success.

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

#283

Post by programjames »

The core problem is actually very simple. Education studies do not measure what they claim to measure. When they say, "education outcomes improve when..." they usually mean the pass rate, i.e. they only measured a signal among the bottom 20% of students. When they say, "test scores improve when..." they are, at best, measuring up to the 90th percentile. When they say, "the white/black attainment gap," or "socioeconomic disadvantages," they're usually just fishing for funding money, and their study will not actually attempt to measure either of those things. From a review of the literature on No Child Left Behind (NCLB) in 2015: > Only one study specifically examined the achievement gap for students from low socioeconomic backgrounds (Hampton & Gruenert, 2008) despite NCLB’s stated commitment to improving education for children from low-income families. African American students were often mentioned in studies of general student achievement but none of the reviewed studies focused specifically on the effects of NCLB for this subgroup. Again, this is a curious gap in the research considering the law’s emphasis on narrowing the Black-White achievement gap. Other groups of students underrepresented in the research on NCLB include gifted students, students with vision impairments, and English proficient minority students.

("A Review of the Empirical Literature on No Child Left Behind From 2001 to 2010", Husband & Hunt, 2015)

Everything you see going wrong is downstream of this. Yes, harmful ideologies have done a lot of damage to the education system, but it could easily survive this if we had actual signifiers of success.

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

#284

Post by trimethylpurine »

potato3732842 wrote: post #262
soulofmischief wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Institutions are supposed to protect culture, but they have failed due to the actions of a small elite class. It's like blaming a child for not having parents.

Have they failed? Or are they dutifully resisting cultural shift that threatens the "don't think critically, just go to work, pay your taxes, don't question the system, don't do drugs, go to college, get a job, lease a new car, buy a condo, cross your fingers that stonks go up enough for you to retire" late 20th early 21st century status quo "ideal citizen" and "ideal culture" that they were built to foster (and who…

People choose based on grades, success stories, safety, and exclusivity, not political alignment. But public schools aren't competitive, so they don't have any incentive to offer any of those things. That makes them a useful and susceptible hot bed for the least desirable part of an education; politics.

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

#285

Post by ars »

PartiallyTyped wrote: post #203
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.

> intellectualism

It's interesting to blame anti-intellectualism because Republicans are usually labeled with that.

But simultaneously it's Democrats that will dumb down classes to make sure even the worst performing student will pass. And this is also anti-intellectualism, but of a different sort.

The combination is failing our students, doesn't matter the political orientation.

I'm involved in education, I see this every day - I spoke with someone taking a class on how to reach students, and due to no-child-left-behind, this is actually a class on how racism holds back black students and what to do about it (answer: Make simpler, easier classes). It's completely silent on any other type of student.

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

#286

Post by paulcole »

PartiallyTyped wrote: post #203
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.

Tell us more about the cultural issue that can be observed by looking at demographics. What specifically stands out to you?

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

#287

Post by Glyptodon »

Not limiting myself to just high schools:

Elephant in the room in my state is definitely chronic absence. Depending on source it's when student misses something like 15+ or 20+ school days a school year. More affluent areas have numbers 15% and lower. Less affluent ones it can be well above 50%. And nobody is doing anything.

Test scores substantially mirror this bifurcation.

It is substantially worsened by charter and voucher schools. Which interact with the whole mess in complex and negative ways.

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

#288

Post by 3cKU »

rootusrootus wrote: post #246
senordevnyc wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like we need to spend even more on those “demographics” to get their performance up!

Are you serious? Because I've heard it argued that this is one of the fundamental differences in the approach between left and right. The left thinks money can solve all problems if we just spend more of it in the right place. The right thinks there is a cultural problem to be solved. I'm generally quite progressive but I am beginning to appreciate that the right may have a good argument.

> The right thinks there is a cultural problem to be solved.

That's also the left. The right holds the differences are genetic, not likely to change, and the only problem to solve is how to keep them out of the country.

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

#289

Post by programjames »

runjake wrote: post #101

- The Pandemic really set that generation of kids back, particularly kids who were in elementary during that time. - Public school is essentially daycare. They try to integrate special education students more into the regular classrooms, but the teachers end up spending disproportionate time dealing with them and their behavioral issues, which hurts learning for regular students. - I don't have strong, set in stone o…

This was trending long before the pandemic.

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

#290

Post by yepitwas »

GrinningFool wrote: post #276
araes wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Add a couple thoughts to that general idea: - There's also a reward issue, in that reading, especially long form is "soft punished." It's not directly punished, yet there's very little reward, mostly a lot of struggle, not much of the candy feedback of TV, movies, and video games. It requires personal imagination and visualization of often difficult concepts rather than simply taking what someone else has "imagined c…

I wonder how much of the YA uptick is driven by adults who prefer less-challenging reading. If that's the case it just makes the picture appear even more bleak.

It’s mostly that. Basically the only genres that still sell meaningful numbers are YA (with lots of adult readers, and if we want to count that as its own genre) and romance (99.9% of which isn’t more challenging than average YA, and usually has even less going on as far as ideas and theme—not to knock it, I mean hell, it’s no worse a use of time than tons of other things).

Adult genre fic, even, is dying, and lit-fic has long been in decline and has pretty much just been for a few nerds since roughly the turn of the millennium.

I think the decline of reading is exactly what’s pushed publishers and agents to favor easier and easier books: you have to pursue as much of the market as possible to make money now because the whole market’s not that big, so you can’t afford to exclude readers. That means favoring ever-easier books as readership declines.

The only other route to make a living is aiming straight at film/TV adaptation, which is very hard to break into but a handful of authors have successfully specialized in that. Their books do OK but they’re watched, as it were, way, way more than they’re read.

Post reply on HN