US High school students' scores fall in reading and math • Hacker News Board

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

#561

Post by lupusreal » Wed, Sep 10, 2025, 10:11 AM UTC

weitendorf wrote: post #374

rayiner wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with that “culture” explanation is that white kids in America do fine in international educational comparisons. In the 2018 PISA assessment, 15 year old white american students were near the top in reading (behind only Singapore and some Chinese SEZs) and in the top echelon in science (comparable to Japan). Their weakest performance was math, where they’re around the middle, behind the top asian countries…

The racial achievement gap is probably one of the most significant problems educators in the US think about. I think one of the biggest obstacles to improving it (not causing the problem, but making solutions difficult or ineffective) is that low-performing urban school districts tend to correlate strongly with strong teachers' unions and big, mismanaged school administrations where things are too bureaucratic and in…

There is no shortage of young naive newly minted teachers who are eager to go into those low performing urban schools and help turn things around. But very few of them last more than a few years in those schools, they get badly burned by reality. The ones who last almost inevitably become callused and bitter, having lost all of the hope they had at the start. The biggest problem with those schools is the students themselves, and the families of those students. They're incredibly dysfunction and stymie all well intentioned efforts to help them.

Insofar as charter schools can help, it's because giving enough of a shit to apply for and go to one weeds out enough of the lost causes that would only disrupt everybody else. In fact, I think the best ways to improve those public schools is even simpler; make attendance optional. Families who give a shit will still attend, while all the trash will voluntarily stay home.

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

#562

Post by bpt3 » Wed, Sep 10, 2025, 10:12 AM UTC

harrall wrote: post #430

Aurornis wrote: post #408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> However,the United States, particularly in the last 50 years, seems to have fostered a culture averse to education. I always find it interesting that the anti-schooling mentality is so prevalent here on HN, too. It’s most obvious in threads about cheating, where a popular topic of discussion is to defend cheating as a rational reaction because school doesn’t matter, a degree is “just a piece of paper”, and you’ll l…

I noticed a weird disdain for education too. I once posted in support of general education and it didn’t go so well. I suppose the people on HN are a certain demographic.

I don't think it's a disdain for education, but a disdain for the educational system that currently exists in the US.

If you have kids and experience it first hand, it's extremely underwhelming. If you were an outlier in any way as a student (and I bet a majority of people here are), it's extremely underwhelming.

My wife and I have advanced degrees and place a very high value on education, and I have very little that's positive to say about the state of education in our very highly ranked public schools. They've completely lost the plot. But any criticism is presumed to be hostility to teachers (and their union) or flat out racism by a vocal and increasingly large segment of the population.

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

#563

Post by inglor_cz » Wed, Sep 10, 2025, 10:13 AM UTC

zdragnar wrote: post #439

rayiner wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with that “culture” explanation is that white kids in America do fine in international educational comparisons. In the 2018 PISA assessment, 15 year old white american students were near the top in reading (behind only Singapore and some Chinese SEZs) and in the top echelon in science (comparable to Japan). Their weakest performance was math, where they’re around the middle, behind the top asian countries…

Skin color isn't it, actually. I knew (second hand) a teacher in a rural area of a low population state. All white kids, she'd have kindergartners cussing her out. Very little hope for any academic future for the other grades as things didn't get better with the older kids. I knew a white kid who lived in a trailer park whose mom was upset he was getting tutoring after school for his dyslexia because she told him he'…

I cannot think of any single ethnocultural group in the West that highly values education and, at the same time, has bad outcomes doing so. We have invested a lot of money and effort into our educational systems.

Even traditionally oppressed groups like the Jews or the Chinese (Chinese Exclusion Act anyone?) or descendants of Russian muzhiks or Indian untouchable castes do have good outcomes if they actually motivate their kids to learn.

The groups that are systematically out (in Czechia, the part of the Roma that lives in ghettos - contrary what people tend to think, a lot of the Roma marry into the wider society, mix with it and live quite comfortable self-sufficient lives) tend to be the ones that despise schooling, and it will take a century or so of concerted efforts to change the attitudes.

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

#564

Post by jeofken » Wed, Sep 10, 2025, 10:16 AM UTC

theF00l wrote: post #536

Yokolos wrote: post #515

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I grew up being told by my peers in school that memorising things was a waste of time and critical thinking was all that mattered. Now I use Anki to literally memorize programming language syntax and ideas and facts that are relevant to my job (like data structures and algorithms). I wish I'd valued memorization when I was in school, because it's such a foundational thing to have knowledge upon which to build everyth…

I find that very interesting and also thought of using Anki for that but decided it wouldn't be useful for me now. Could you give me an example and how it helped you? Thank you :)

- memorising names and birthdates of relevant people - private life and work life - anything I’m looking up more than ~5 times can go in Anki - spelling of words I often misspell (eg bureaucracy) - when reading anything technical I need for my work or study I have Anki open and type in what I learn in QnA format, and I will never forget it but have it easy within reach for an investment of only a few minutes per QnA over its (and my) life time - just for fun, the cantons of Switzerland, landskap of Sweden, provinces of Canada, and states and capitals of the USA - NATO phonetic alphabet which comes in useful more often that you’d think

Life-changingly useful program for every aspect of my life, when I can finish it every day

My top tips:

- put all decks in a master “daily” deck using the :: syntax in the deck names. Otherwise you feel “done” when having finished one deck, and feel like not starting the next. Have only one goal - finishing today’s Anki - for that master deck (and every other deck) go Study Options > Display Order > New/review order > Show after reviews. Otherwise it’s hard to ever catch up when slipping behind. With this setting, the system becomes somewhat self correcting

My only regret is not being able to pay more than $25 to the developers

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

#565

Post by Aeolun » Wed, Sep 10, 2025, 10:20 AM UTC

buu700 wrote: post #462

liveoneggs wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My kids don't get textbooks in public school, are comingled with highly disruptive kids (except in the limited gifted classes) and the curriculum is accelerated way past where it was when I was younger. So my anecdotal theory is that the (public) education system is optimized to the edges, abandoning the middle entirely, resulting in majority decline. They do get computers with TONS of dumb-ass apps and zero referenc…

So my anecdotal theory is that the (public) education system is optimized to the edges, abandoning the middle entirely, resulting in majority decline. Based on my anecdotal experience, this is the explanation that makes the most sense to me. I've been hearing constantly for at least a decade how atrocious American public education is, which I can't reconcile at all with my experience as a 2010 graduate of McLean High…

I think it’s so weird that your level of education in the US (and most of the world really) seems to depend on which specific school you went to.

The Netherlands has settled on three levels of schooling and within that level (according to capacity, and desire to learn) most of the schools show relatively little variation.

The same thing continues into university, with pretty much 99% of all the universities in the Netherlands being public.

You don’t select a university based on level of theoretical educational attainment, you select one by virtue of proximity, or which of them teaches the specific courses you are interested in.

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

#566

Post by bell-cot » Wed, Sep 10, 2025, 10:21 AM UTC

nradov wrote: post #412

eli_gottlieb wrote: post #371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I doubt much changed. American STEM education has always been pretty mediocre. I've been hearing about my whole life.

Mediocre by what metric? American STEM education seems to objectively be doing pretty well in terms of Nobel prizes, scholarly journal articles, patents, technology product revenue, etc. Of course there's always room for improvement.

Unfortunately, those metrics are very focused on the 0.1%, if not the 0.01%.

Like a sorting algorithm which is O(n) on nearly-sorted input - the utility is limited.

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

#567

Post by lupusreal » Wed, Sep 10, 2025, 10:22 AM UTC

lelanthran wrote: post #478

KPGv2 wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

> the schools are able to kick out any underperforming students Being able to kick out disruptive students has a pretty big influence on the remaining students. How do you distinguish between underperforming-non-disruptive students and under-performing-disruptive students, especially as the almost all the disruptive students are going to be underperforming anyway.

You make it sound difficult. It's not. Schools are filled with security cameras. When a student attacks another, expell him. And none of that "the victim tried to defend himself so we have to expelled him too, we don't care who started it" horse shit. The schools have cameras, use them.

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

#568

Post by odwyerrich » Wed, Sep 10, 2025, 10:22 AM UTC

[flagged]

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

#569

Post by imiric » Wed, Sep 10, 2025, 10:24 AM UTC

noobermin wrote: post #506

obscurette wrote: post #504

As someone old (60+) who was a teacher in school and thinking a lot about it: - It's mostly a cultural shift in the western world – we don't value personal responsibility any more. When I was in school in seventies, it was my responsibility to study no matter what since grade 1. It didn't matter whether I liked a teacher, topic or whatever. It's not the case any more. - Since nineties there has been a shift in educat…

I've related this story here before. I was a first year in physics grad school, and my professor told me he heard rumours of students telling each other memorising formulae was a waste of time, and that as a physicist one should just be good at deriving results. The professor scoffed at that and sardonically surmised that may be the person who said that was intentionally trying to stiffle their competition in the cla…

The way of getting those facts and ideas into your head can be very different, though.

You can either mechanically memorize them, which is a boring and mindless activity, or you can be challenged, participate in discussions, projects, and activities that engage the parts of your brain involved with critical thinking.

Both will technically get you to pass a test, but the latter will be better for retaining information, while developing skills and neural pathways that make future learning easier.

The problem is that most academia is based on the memorization approach. Here are a bunch of ideas and facts we think are important; get them into your head, and regurgitate them back at us later. This is not a system that creates knowledgeable people. It doesn't inspire or reward curiosity, creativity, or critical thinking. It's an on-rails pipeline that can get you a piece of paper that says you've been through it, which is enough to make you a tax-paying citizen employed by companies who expect the bare minimum as well.

I get that the alternative approach is more difficult to scale, and requires a more nuanced, qualitative, and personal process. But that's how learning works. It's unique for everyone, and can't be specified as a fixed set of steps.

After all, what is the point of teaching people to be idea and fact storing machines, if machines can do a far better job at that than us? Everyone today can tell you a random fact about the world in an instant by looking it up in a computer. That's great, but we should be training and rewarding people for things computers can't do.

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

#570

Post by JohnMakin » Wed, Sep 10, 2025, 10:25 AM UTC

poemxo wrote: post #549

zdragnar wrote: post #439

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Skin color isn't it, actually. I knew (second hand) a teacher in a rural area of a low population state. All white kids, she'd have kindergartners cussing her out. Very little hope for any academic future for the other grades as things didn't get better with the older kids. I knew a white kid who lived in a trailer park whose mom was upset he was getting tutoring after school for his dyslexia because she told him he'…

I don't appreciate reading anecdata in response to cited findings. It cheapens the discussion. Now everyone is going to spend time writing knee-jerk responses to you. At least the parent commenter had the grace to reply with another source instead of falling for it.

The parent commenter’s “source” makes no claims about race related performance whatsoever - it measures by just about everything but that, and then sorts by country. So maybe this is one of those darned reflexive knee jerk responses.