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

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

#921

Post by casey2 » Wed, Sep 10, 2025, 6:56 PM UTC

etempleton wrote: post #654

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…

In the US there are a few obvious things, but everyone acts as if we are powerless to solve them: 1. Cell phones in classrooms. I don’t know how or why they were ever allowed. They should have to be in a backpack or in a locker and off during class. 2. Not removing students with bad behavior from classrooms and schools. The current thinking on how to handle a student who is seriously misbehaving and potentially viole…

From your list it's hard to explain why jurisdictions such as San Diego (reading 4th grade male) test score have risen continuously since the 2000s seems like, if the students are defecating themselves at ever-increasing rates test scores would go down there too.

Or is San Diego immune to these problems? I think the reality is that these test scores aren't majorly affected by literally any of the things you listed.

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

#922

Post by georgeecollins » Wed, Sep 10, 2025, 7:02 PM UTC

mynameisvlad wrote: post #731

monkeyelite wrote: post #719

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At my school the kids asked for donations to fund their equipment and they brought in money on the games for their budget. But once again… students and community use football. They do not use high school libraries.

> students and community use football. They do not use high school libraries. That's literally the problem being presented, the "joke" as you called it. This isn't something to be weirdly proud about. This is something to be extremely concerned about. Prioritizing football over education in a place dedicated to the latter is absurd. Like, Idiocracy-levels absurd. How has it gone so far over your head?

I think the point is that the average person in a community cares more about football than education. There are place where they really do. You think that is idiotic and absurd -- I don't disagree. But we live in a democracy. You can't force people to care about what you think they should care about.

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

#923

Post by PartiallyTyped » Wed, Sep 10, 2025, 7:19 PM UTC

bluGill wrote: post #636

PartiallyTyped wrote: post #470

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t understand why this became about politics, but I will bite. Republicans want to dismantle department of education, have cut funding for education, food stamps, free meals, etc. they are by definition against education for the outgroup and “the poors”. So I think that label is apt. On the other hand, Dem leadership is quite racist and has a saviour complex. They identified the right issue — children from impov…

> Republicans want to dismantle department of education, have cut funding for education, food stamps, free meals, etc. > they are by definition against education for the outgroup and “the poors” The second does not follow from the first in anyway. You can be against federal education and strongly for education. Just because you think a federal department of education is needed for good education doesn't mean it every…

Grand, let’s observe state-wide evidence.

Red states overwhelmingly occupy the bottom end of leaderboards by all accounts of education except the number of people believing in fairytales about angels.

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

#924

Post by deepsun » Wed, Sep 10, 2025, 7:20 PM UTC

monkeyelite wrote: post #330

deepsun wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From my conversations with 20-year-ago school students, American schools are culture led by sports, and football most of all. No surprise many parents don't see a reason for their kids to excel in STEM.

For this theory to hold up you would need to explain what changed as high schools in the US have loved sports since at least the 40s

Changed was the reduction of brain-drain from Germany/Hungary and later USSR to the US.

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

#925

Post by buu700 » Wed, Sep 10, 2025, 7:25 PM UTC

loudmax wrote: post #680

buu700 wrote: post #462

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 graduated from McLean High School in 1990. I had some fantastic teachers. McLean is absolutely an outlier. McLean's formula for success is to be located in an upper-middle class district with parents who value education and are wealthy enough to provide a stable environment, but not so wealthy they must send their kids to a private school. This formula isn't something that can be easily replicated or scaled out nat…

Agreed, I believe its success can potentially be replicated to some degree, but not its particular formula. I left a few thoughts on that in a follow-up comment below, but fundamentally my thinking is that comprehensive well-designed integration of AI throughout the system could allow schools to move toward leaner administrations with smaller numbers of higher-quality better-compensated teachers. Furthermore, technology like Waymo's could potentially make it viable to shuttle larger numbers of students to a smaller number of higher-quality schools.

I'm also optimistic that physical goods as a whole will become much more affordable over the next decade or two for various reasons, which would further enable the median public school to approach the level of 00s MHS without relying on local concentration of a disproportionate share of national wealth.

All that being said, my point wasn't "look how well-funded my high school was". Regardless of the reasons, it's a bright spot in a narrative of doom and gloom. Only the horror stories seem to get any attention, and if you listen to anyone with strong political views on the topic you'd think each state's governing party had turned its entire school system into a network of indoctrination camps. It's also clearly the case based on my disturbingly bad elementary school experience, and from what I've heard of some other local schools that should have comparable financing to MHS, that money isn't sufficient to provide a top-tier educational experience.

I think it's important to look at schools and counties that perform well and carefully evaluate which elements can be used as a model to help improve public education as a whole, rather than assuming that absolutely nothing is replicable without gobs of cash. For example, off the top of my head, what if the federal government provided an annual budget for a handful of top-ranking districts across the country to have their best teachers of different subjects at each grade level oversee production and maintenance of open source course materials, video lectures, and possibly LLM chatbots? What if teachers all had some equivalent of GitHub to share and collaborate on that stuff? It wouldn't fix problems like rundown facilities or availability of computers and textbooks, but it would allow the worst Latin teacher in the country to provide something a lot closer to the Mr. Bigger experience, and that's just one idea.

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

#926

Post by OhMeadhbh » Wed, Sep 10, 2025, 7:27 PM UTC

isk517 wrote: post #825

OhMeadhbh wrote: post #785

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you think education is expensive, you should try ignorance.

The cost of ignorance won't be felt for at least a decade or two, and by then it will be somebody else problem. Or at least that is what the people making the decisions are hoping.

I really want to down-vote this for being overly snarky. But... I can't argue with the underlying logic, so +1.

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

#927

Post by japoneris » Wed, Sep 10, 2025, 7:50 PM UTC

ToDougie wrote: post #819

After moving my kids out of a bad elementary school and into a fantastic district with a highly ranked school, the differences are obvious. The good school has smarter kids with better parents. The bad school had dull kids with bad parents. The kids at the new school do their homework, read, play outside. The kids at the old school skipped homework, played call of duty, and could hardly read. The new school has fun e…

Reading a french book ''enfances de classes'' from bernard lahire, it explains exactly that. Children from low ''resource'' family have agressive behavior, they are left as animals because their parents are not teaching them.

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

#928

Post by casey2 » Wed, Sep 10, 2025, 7:52 PM UTC

wyattblue wrote: post #918

There cannot be a coherent discussion on this topic without also taking race-adjusted scores in account. America's demographics are changing and this must be understood by all.

Bringing race into it will surely increase the coherence of the discussion.

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

#929

Post by const_cast » Wed, Sep 10, 2025, 7:59 PM UTC

tristor wrote: post #834

const_cast wrote: post #759

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Insofar as the US had a “culture averse to education,” surely that affects white americans as much as it affects anyone else. Its like you've never lived in America. Obviously white people are extremely privileged and also have a different culture. Keep in mind that schools in predominantly black areas are typically significantly less funded than those in white areas.

> Obviously white people are extremely privileged and also have a different culture. Why is this obviously? It's like /you've/ never lived in America, not outside of some coastal city. Go to anywhere in the Midwest or Southeast and tell me that white people are privileged in some unique way. It's a poverty problem and a problem of cultural priorities, not about race.

It is a poverty problem, and black people are much more likely to be in poverty. That doesn't mean that white people can't also be in poverty.

A lot of people just don't understand what privilege is. Who has more upward mobility - an impoverished black person, or an impoverished white person? Who is more likely to face systemic factors that influence poverty and outcomes - black people or white people?

And before I hear "well not everything is about race!!1!" Uh, the US has a long history of systemic racism that does continue to this day.

Obviously if you just integrated a few decades ago you're not going to just magically have equal outcomes. People don't move like that, systems are sticky, and the US isn't evenly distributed.

And, of course, race is correlated tightly with culture and with average income and levels of poverty.

No, you can't just ignore race. Well you can, if that's easier for you, but it's dishonest and incomplete.

And, because I know it's coming: yes I'm white, no I don't have white guilt, I just think about the world we live in. Its easy not to think about things. I prefer thinking about things.

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

#930

Post by 0xTJ » Wed, Sep 10, 2025, 8:11 PM UTC

OhMeadhbh wrote: post #803

0xTJ wrote: post #781

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sometimes, you see a take that's so far-removed from any take you've ever heard someone speak that you're not even sure how to interact with the one stating it. This is one of those cases; it sounds like an argument made by a Victorian factory owner in London, angered that children aren't being allowed to work because too many lost an arm last month reaching into the grain mills. However, trying my best to answer sen…

For my part of the conversation, I think what I'm implying is we might get better outcomes if we paid teachers more. That being said... there's a critique that keeps coming up that the structure of public education is largely unchanged since Victorian times. I've heard people say that the reason you get kids up in the morning and have them move from class to class every hour is to prepare them for life in the mines a…

> For my part of the conversation, I think what I'm implying is we might get better outcomes if we paid teachers more.

That is not at all the impression that I got reading your original comment. It seemed (and continues to seem, on a second reading), that you disagree with further funding education, because there's no point, high schools "just" day care for teenagers.

Please consider that, just because someone doesn't bother to reply to you, it doesn't mean that you're right. They may simply see no point in arguing with some stranger with whom they'll hopefully never have to interact. With this follow-up comment, it seems to me that your actual opinions are significantly different from both the words and tone in your initial message. That isn't helped by the notes about downvotes without comments (and the Latin snark in the edit).