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Oregon raised spending by 80%, math scores dropped
71–80 of 124 posts
Re: Oregon raised spending by 80%, math scores dropped
#72Almost no education research questions the quality of the students ability to learn. Students with an ability to learn will do so regardless of the resources expended, the ones that don't won't. Trillions wasted over the decades due to a preference to ignore reality.
It's about cultural preference not ability. School does a positively terrible job of making it easy and comfortable for kids to learn their stuff, and the more recent "student-centered", "progressive" or "constructivist" approaches to learning actually make this a lot worse not better since they heavily imply (as a matter of practical implementation, if perhaps not always in theory) that the teacher shouldn't even act to provide helpful guidance and direction. Many school pupils do the short-term reasonable thing (as they see it) and just do not bother unless they're motivated by some sort of independent interest, or pushed by their household environment to be more successful (the "tiger parenting" approach).
Re: Oregon raised spending by 80%, math scores dropped
#73Why was the headline changed? The story isn't about Oregon.
As a reminder to everyone, here's what the guidelines say[0]
> Otherwise please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize.
I'm also a little surprised that more people aren't talking about it and that it hasn't been changed. There's definitely a culture shift happening in HN...
If you've never read the guidelines, now is a great time. Seriously, it isn't that long and captures why many of us come to HN over other sites.
Re: Oregon raised spending by 80%, math scores dropped
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
News flash: Massachusetts and Wisconsin came in tied at #1 for student performance, and teacher union density is about 100% for both states.
Wisconsin has no collective bargaining for teachers and the unions can't require dues
I stand corrected. Looks like "194 unions (56.2%) hitting the 51% threshold in 2021" after cursory searching. Having said that, it still belies the notion that teacher's unions are single handedly responsible for poor student test results.
Re: Oregon raised spending by 80%, math scores dropped
#75You can go to the "nations report card" and play around with the NAEP score stats: https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/ltt/mathematics/scores-per...
For me, two things pop out in particular.
Firstly, in math, if you look at how the percentiles break down, it seems clear that while there an overall drop in performance from 2020-2023, it also seems clear to that the top end of doing relatively ok. For example, at the 75th percentile, the we are basically flat from 2008 to 2020 (before dropping in 2023) - 2008: 305, 2012: 309, 2020: 307, 2023: 301 (net -4). This contrasts with the median which went from 2008: 283, 2012: 287, 2020: 282, 2023: 274 (net -9).
This implies to me that whatever flaws are in the overall system (at least pre COVID), the top end was relatively durable.
Secondly, if you go the "student group scores" section and click through all of the different sub-groupings, the only group that looks to have an overall flat score at all is "Private: Catholic".
I think the combination of the upper end being pretty durable, as well as the higher scores in the only "self selecting" category in the dataset may support what a lot of people tend to grumble about - the distribution of domestic situations is not favorable.
Re: Oregon raised spending by 80%, math scores dropped
#76Careful looking at their graphs. If you don't keep in mind that they are showing changes you could get a wrong impression. For example on the page they link to to get data from every state, https://edunomicslab.org/roi-over-time/ , it shows the graphs for Massachusetts and Mississippi side by side.
In Massachusetts 8th grade math is down about 17 points. In Mississippi math down about 2 points. (I'm using 2022 scores).
That could give the impression that math scores are higher in Mississippi since the math line on the Massachusetts graph is way lower than the corresponding line on the Mississippi graph.
But the actual scores those years were 284 for Massachusetts and 268 for Mississippi.
Re: Oregon raised spending by 80%, math scores dropped
#77Almost no education research questions the quality of the students ability to learn. Students with an ability to learn will do so regardless of the resources expended, the ones that don't won't. Trillions wasted over the decades due to a preference to ignore reality.
No. Actually the elephant in the room is the dismal quality of most teachers. But teachers are kind of a sacred cow of discourse, and nobody can state the screaming obvious.
Teacher quality really does suck. The average school teacher may have a credential from an "Education" department but isn't even close to having the equivalent of an undergrad degree in the actual subject they're supposed to teach. We can hardly expect teachers to provide a good education when they don't even know their subject to a reasonable standard.
Re: Oregon raised spending by 80%, math scores dropped
#78Oregon 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…
> 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.
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 windowing...
But the article doesn't even cherry pick the window, but they do cherry pick the interpretation. How does anyone ignore the fact that from 2013 to 2020 is fairly flat in scores[0] and then sharply decreases after that. Similarly spending sharply increases.
It is so weird to do this because the main argument still exists when you account for Covid. It's the intellectual equivalent of taking a cookie, taking a shit on it, and then selling it for more because it has more chocolate. Who the fuck does that? It's manipulative and entirely unnecessary. From 2013 to 2020 scores are relatively flat and spending increases above inflation. It's still a lazy analysis since you don't analyze what the spending went to, but it's a million times better than pretending a shit cookie is made of chocolate.
But the title is also incredibly editorialized (against the guidelines[1]), but why are commenters not picking this apart? It's such an easy flaw to notice. This article contains zero evidence of their claims. You have to explain data, not just present it and conjecture.
[0] 2020 is as far down as 2015 was up. Normal variance?
Re: Oregon raised spending by 80%, math scores dropped
#79This is not surprising. It has been well known for a while that the amount of money given to the school systems has very little to do with students learning.
I think, in general, that the whole system is backwards and instead of giving money to school administrations to teach, we should be trying to figure out what are the obstacles to students learning.
Re: Oregon raised spending by 80%, math scores dropped
#80You can go to the "nations report card" and play around with the NAEP score stats: https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/ltt/mathematics/scores-per... For me, two things pop out in particular. Firstly, in math, if you look at how the percentiles break down, it seems clear that while there an overall drop in performance from 2020-2023, it also seems clear to that the top end of doing relatively ok. For example, at the 75t…
The thing that popped out to me playing around with that is that when you look at most of these things from the late '70s through now, many show some modest growth or flatness through the '90s, then grew a little more up through the 2010s or so, and have pulled back a little in the last few years to roughly 2008ish levels. This is for both math and reading and for both 9 year olds and 13 year olds.
Depending on what exactly you are looking at the places that it grew or was flat or declines change, but overall the big picture look gives me more "keep an eye on it" vibes than "we've got a crisis" vibes that some people seem to think are justified.