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Scores decline again for 13-year-old students in reading and mathematics (2023)

nationsreportcard.gov

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Re: Scores decline again for 13-year-old students in reading and mathematics (2023)

#61

Post by fusslo »

japhyr wrote: post #22

People are talking about Covid, smartphones/screens, social media, and AI. No one has mentioned defunding public education yet. In Alaska, where I lived most of the last 20 years, education has been largely flat funded for about a decade now. Imagine running an organization in 2026 on that organization's 2016 budget. Schools have a bunch of obligations they have to spend on. Every time health care costs for staff go…

An example from my neighbor state Connecticut

https://ctmirror.org/2024/01/28/ct-budget-fiscal-guardrails-...

ai summary: "According to that piece, K-12 education has been losing $407 million each year since 2017 due to inflation, even as Gov. Lamont called current funding levels the "largest ever commitment." The author also noted that $2.4 billion in urgent legislative funding requests were denied in one spring session alone, with needs for fully funding education among the shortfalls."

Re: Scores decline again for 13-year-old students in reading and mathematics (2023)

#62

Post by jvanderbot »

japhyr wrote: post #22

People are talking about Covid, smartphones/screens, social media, and AI. No one has mentioned defunding public education yet. In Alaska, where I lived most of the last 20 years, education has been largely flat funded for about a decade now. Imagine running an organization in 2026 on that organization's 2016 budget. Schools have a bunch of obligations they have to spend on. Every time health care costs for staff go…

Funding per student is on the rise, or level on inflation-adjusted $

https://educationdata.org/public-education-spending-statisti...

The funding for dept of ed has _exploded_ after 2000

https://educationdata.org/public-education-spending-statisti...

At the same time, school scores started to sag after 2014

https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/ushistory/results/scores/

There are highly politicized blogs which can discuss this further and offer opinions as to the correlation.

When DJT talked about cancelling the Dept of Edu, I got ahold of all the teachers I knew and asked them what impact it would have, and their response was mostly that they would lose their school lunch benefits.

Re: Scores decline again for 13-year-old students in reading and mathematics (2023)

#64

Post by [deleted] »

BrenBarn wrote: post #45
jaccola wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The most common reply to this is: “people said the same about Books/TV/Comics/Games/Facebook stop being such a Luddite” My answer to this is approximately: “yes they’re all relatively bad compared to the thing that came before so they were all right!” Even books. If the option were between my child reading about blacksmithing/compsci and DOING blacksmithing/compsci I’d choose the latter every time. It gives you real…

It's also not possible to carry around enough books with you to allow you to jump from one to another whenever you get bored, while it is possible to effectively carry around a device that lets you watch YouTube/TikTok at all times. I think this is an important factor.

[deleted]

Re: Scores decline again for 13-year-old students in reading and mathematics (2023)

#65

Post by john_strinlai »

zaphar wrote: post #25
japhyr wrote: post #22

People are talking about Covid, smartphones/screens, social media, and AI. No one has mentioned defunding public education yet. In Alaska, where I lived most of the last 20 years, education has been largely flat funded for about a decade now. Imagine running an organization in 2026 on that organization's 2016 budget. Schools have a bunch of obligations they have to spend on. Every time health care costs for staff go…

If increasing spending had almost no impact over time why would cutting spending have an impact?

>If increasing spending had almost no impact over time why would cutting spending have an impact?

big if true. we should probably cut 100% of spending in that case.

edit: not sure if people are missing the /s, or if people legitimately believe that cutting spending has no impact.

Re: Scores decline again for 13-year-old students in reading and mathematics (2023)

#66

Post by JuniperMesos »

shimman wrote: post #24
aggakake wrote: post #21

Look at Youtube Shorts in an incognito window to see the mindless crap that's popular among median users.

Or look at corporations + elites constantly attacking children for the last 40 years (pushing school vouchers, school choices, attacking teacher unions, politicizing school boards). Who do you think suffers when elites attack public education? It's always the children. Fun fact: Silicon Valley elites are big proponents of school vouchers because, like their hatred of American labor, they also hate public schools and…

Plenty of children suffer in public schools as they are currently constituted. School vouchers, school choice, and attacking teachers unions are attempts to create more schooling options than just whatever the local public school is, which should benefit children who are currently having a bad time in that system.

School boards are inherently poltical because as long as a publicly-run school system exists, how it is run and what things it will attempt to teach are political questions. There's no apolitical school board that existed 40 years ago that has been altered since then, they have always been poltical.

Re: Scores decline again for 13-year-old students in reading and mathematics (2023)

#67

Post by declan_roberts »

japhyr wrote: post #22

People are talking about Covid, smartphones/screens, social media, and AI. No one has mentioned defunding public education yet. In Alaska, where I lived most of the last 20 years, education has been largely flat funded for about a decade now. Imagine running an organization in 2026 on that organization's 2016 budget. Schools have a bunch of obligations they have to spend on. Every time health care costs for staff go…

It's weird you're using Alaska as an example of this because that state has the highest funding per student in the entire country:

https://www.learner.com/blog/states-that-spend-the-most-on-e...

Re: Scores decline again for 13-year-old students in reading and mathematics (2023)

#68

Post by PaulKeeble »

[1] is a summary of the impact on the brain of Covid-19 infections including IQ reduction but many others besides. Its best understood that there is no such thing as a consequence free Covid infection, it always damages something and the early british experiment where they intentionally infected young men resulted in all of them loosing IQ and none of them being aware of the loss. This finding has been built on substantially in the past 6 years and we have a much large list of issues now, none of it treatable.

[1] https://theconversation.com/mounting-research-shows-that-cov...

Re: Scores decline again for 13-year-old students in reading and mathematics (2023)

#69

Post by mlyle »

zozbot234 wrote: post #60
japhyr wrote: post #22

People are talking about Covid, smartphones/screens, social media, and AI. No one has mentioned defunding public education yet. In Alaska, where I lived most of the last 20 years, education has been largely flat funded for about a decade now. Imagine running an organization in 2026 on that organization's 2016 budget. Schools have a bunch of obligations they have to spend on. Every time health care costs for staff go…

> No one has mentioned defunding public education yet. Public education has vast amounts of funding in the U.S. compared to other developed countries. If it does badly despite that, it's very likely that "more funding" is not the answer.

It's worth pointing out that wages in the US are vast compared to other developed countries, though, too. We outspend OECD by 35-40%, but our average national wage is also higher than OECD by 35-40%.

Re: Scores decline again for 13-year-old students in reading and mathematics (2023)

#70

Post by declan_roberts »

throwaway27448 wrote: post #44
weberer wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Averaged across the general student population, there was no statistically significant correlation between a school’s spending levels and its students’ academic performance in 27 of the 28 academic indicators used in the model. In the only category that did show a statistically significant correlation — seventh-grade math — the impact of spending more was very small. https://www.mackinac.org/S2016-02#results

Since 2007? That was long after we chose to leave kids behind

That study had a major update in April 2016. If the results confirmed the original premise would it actually change your mind about education funding?
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