[HN Gopher] Scores decline again for 13-year-old students in rea...
___________________________________________________________________
Scores decline again for 13-year-old students in reading and
mathematics
Author : alach11
Score : 117 points
Date : 2023-06-21 17:21 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.nationsreportcard.gov)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.nationsreportcard.gov)
| 11thEarlOfMar wrote:
| IMHO, we should be able to train an AI to be a constant in-the-
| student's-ear teacher. The AI should be able to learn about the
| student's specific learning style and hence, the student and AI
| teach each other.
|
| If every student is taught in the style that they learn the most
| efficiently with, could we expect performance to increase
| dramatically overall? Would it work to close the socio-economic
| performance gap among schools? How would the role of human
| teacher change?
|
| I am sure there are people who've been focusing on this, it can't
| be novel, would appreciate to know what's being done in this
| realm.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| CGP Grey talked about it. "Digital Aristotle"
|
| If you were extremely rich and lucky in the time of Aristotle,
| you could have Aristotle as a tutor. Why can't everyone have
| their own personal digital 24/7 tutor?
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7vsCAM17O-M
| UncleSlacky wrote:
| Reminds me of the "Young Lady's Illustrated Primer" from Neal
| Stephenson's "Diamond Age", too:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Diamond_Age
| eigh0xohyeib6Te wrote:
| But instead we will train AIs to be constant in-the-
| person's-ear salesmen and propagandists.
| sorwin wrote:
| Sounds a lot like the "Mrs Davis" TV Show.
|
| Anyhow, this is not a good idea. We are having issues with
| their scores and performance declining. We have to find the
| root cause, not try to patch it with another band-aid by saying
| "Here, lets try this OTHER NEW THING", on top of the hundreds
| of other tools students already have.
| cwkoss wrote:
| How many years should we spend on this 'find the root cause'
| exercise without acting to intervene?
| woodruffw wrote:
| Is there some principled reason to believe that an AI trained
| on 8th grades will emergently perform _better_ than 8th
| graders?
| 11thEarlOfMar wrote:
| Hmm... that's a clue to how I may have poorly constructed my
| post.
|
| The point is that the AI is already fully trained on
| teaching. But it uses the student's learning progress to
| determine how that specific student learns the most
| efficiently.
|
| Yes, possible dystopian outcomes abound, maybe they can be
| mitigated.
| wjnc wrote:
| Yes, I'm adamant. But schools are very slow to react and
| commercial initiatives are hardly a substitute for school
| curriculum at least where I'm from. School teach and then teach
| to test. So even a little bit different way of phrasing could
| throw a students ability to score the local test. In the long
| run you'd be learning but the signaling function of education
| is then missing. Plus what I notice in one of my kids: tests
| below his level get abysmal performance due to lack of
| interest. Again teaching to test in his class with him lacking
| the grit to just perform regardless of his feelings regarding
| the difficulty of the test. (He is nine so nothing lost yet.)
| Night_Thastus wrote:
| No. LLMs aren't capable of learning how a student best learns.
| Nor are they capable of really "teaching".
|
| At best, using an LLM this way would get it to parrot out
| existing, common explanations for some math topics.
|
| If you asked it something outside its existing knowledge base
| (or asked it a question from a different perspective), it would
| make up fake or logically inconsistent, but very reasonable-
| sounding explanations which would be _horrific_ for a student
| trying to learn.
|
| It cannot actually _learn_ mathematics or logic itself, so it
| has no way to ensure that its explanations are logically or
| mathmatically sound.
| spywaregorilla wrote:
| idk. I think if I were a kid provided with a curriculum of
| math, I could have grinded out many years of progress in a
| fraction of the time using an LLM. I would probably not have
| practiced the execution of curriculum, but I would have been
| hitting a lot of different reasoning models. The ability to
| ask followup questions in LLMs is great. And its proficiency
| in grade school math is very good.
|
| I'd rather be able to think through vector spaces than be
| able to solve algebraic equations effectively and
| efficiently.
| EA-3167 wrote:
| How much of this is continuous decline and how much is sudden
| post-Covid decline? From the graphs it looks like a pretty sudden
| decline, and therefore not a systemic issue.
| jeffbee wrote:
| Imagine how much easier it would be to answer that question if
| there was NAEP data from 2016, or if there was post-2012 data
| for the 17-year-old group.
| ren_engineer wrote:
| it shows scores have been in decline for over 10 years before a
| sharp covid related decline. And worse is that scores are now
| back to where they were in the early 70s. So despite the
| massive increase in spending and in theory the fact that all
| the spending dedicating to researching how to improve
| education, results are the same.
| basch wrote:
| YouTube, Fortnite, cell phones. People worried about MTV
| rotting the brain back in the day but we really are frying
| attention spans with an arms race of color, editing,
| explosions, excitement, and fast movement. I'm willing to bet
| almost anything home reading is down.
|
| School has not caught up to other more engaging temptations.
| A question is, should it.
| RC_ITR wrote:
| > I'm willing to bet almost anything home reading is down.
|
| Your implication is that children, famous for their love of
| texting rather than calling, are reading less than a
| generation of tv watching phone callers?
|
| Don't discount the idea that children are simply better at
| reading _digital content_ and these tests are testing
| analogue reading skills.
|
| Keep in mind we just invented the machine that takes
| complex abstract writing and makes it easy to digest (and
| takes simple thoughts and expands them into rich texts).
| parineum wrote:
| I'm not sure that's an applicable data point.
|
| I think "reading" is usually shorthand for reading
| material that is intellectually and/or
| grammatically/vocabularily challenging. In short,
| something that can expand your ability to understand and
| communicate ideas.
|
| I don't think it hurts or kids should stop doing it but I
| don't think reading text messages from your peers is
| going to do that.
| brigadier132 wrote:
| Nobody became a genius from only reading cartoons and
| text messages between adolescents is of much lower
| academic and literary quality.
| novalis78 wrote:
| All the Covid explanation folks should try this: take
| away phones and computer for six months and have your
| kids read (old!) fiction books and good (challenging)
| non-fiction. Limit TV to a few approved shows/movies as a
| rare treat. I bet you 'll be surprised.
| mcpackieh wrote:
| Texting with your peers (people at roughly the same
| reading level as you) won't teach you much compared to
| reading increasingly challenging books written by adults
| who actually know what they're doing with words.
| idiotsecant wrote:
| I think it's pretty clear that the critical reading
| skills required to handle the information density in a
| tiktok caption or the average message between 15 year
| olds is a little different than what we're aiming for in
| an educational setting.
|
| Language informs thought, in a very concrete way. If I
| can't write it, or read it, I can't think it (to some
| degree). We abandon formal reading and writing
| educational standards at the risk of handicapping a
| generation of young people with poor cognitive
| scaffolding.
| woodruffw wrote:
| The graphs don't show that: there's no data points at all
| between 2012 and 2020. The extrapolation doesn't imply a
| linear decline.
|
| It's also worth noting that educational spending hasn't
| actually increased that much in real terms over the last
| decade[1].
|
| [1]: https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=66
| cmiles74 wrote:
| Salaries for educators isn't great, there were strikes right
| up until the pandemic started. Pay hasn't increased since
| then; whatever the money is being spent on it's not teachers.
| My first thought was maybe "mohr teachers" but I believe
| there's a shortage, they can't hire more math or science
| teachers here in western MA.
|
| It has me wondering where this money is actually being spent!
|
| https://thehill.com/changing-
| america/enrichment/education/36...
| aylmao wrote:
| > I believe there's a shortage, they can't hire more math
| or science teachers here in western MA.
|
| This is probably a symptom of, amongst other things,
| unsatisfactory salaries over generational time-periods;
| people might simply don't grow up wishing to be a teacher.
| I think this cultural phenomenon struck me when I watched
| Breaking Bad, where Walter being a high-school teacher is
| often presented as proof that he "failed", something
| undesirable and to be ashamed of.
|
| I'm from outside the USA and over here being a teacher is
| considered a pretty good gig-- if you're in a private
| school because you can earn good money. If you're in a
| public school because you get access to state benefits;
| better free health-care, retirement benefits, etc, with the
| largest (albeit a pretty controversial one too) union in
| Latin America [1] standing by you.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sindicato_Nacional_de_Tra
| bajad...
| mcpackieh wrote:
| My perspective as an American with school teachers in my
| family: Being a teacher is a coveted job in America, it
| offers a lot of flexibility and fulfillment. Salaries are
| low because there's a surplus of young people who want to
| teach. Getting a teaching position at a nice school is
| very competitive, but bad schools always need new
| teachers because the unruly kids chase new teachers away
| (the root cause of schools being bad is usually bad
| parenting.) It is common for newly minted teachers to
| take jobs at bad schools in the hopes of getting enough
| experience to later get a job at a good school, but most
| wash out before they get that far. Others try to get in
| "the back way" by working as substitute teachers for many
| years to accumulate experience and get a good teaching
| job; the poor and irregular pay for substitute teachers
| makes this possibly an even worse strategy, but a lot of
| people still try it because these jobs are desired.
| EA-3167 wrote:
| What are the numbers, adjusted for inflation and taking into
| account a rising population of students, in terms of spending
| on education? Where did that money go exactly, was it spent
| on teacher salaries or was it spent on administrative
| overhead and "services" unrelated to the business of actually
| teaching? How evenly is that spread?
|
| Those all seem like important questions to ask and answer
| before we talk about an alleged "massive increase in
| spending" around education.
| itscodingtime wrote:
| A common narrative is that a lot of kids were set back by the
| quality of remote or in person education due to a covid. Another
| common narrative is that these kids are screwed for life because
| of this setup back. I would just like to remind people Black
| Americans and poor whites often deal with lower quality of
| education compared to white and upperclass peers for their entire
| K-12 experience.
| [deleted]
| comte7092 wrote:
| While the scores do appear to reflect a real decline (ie not just
| noise), we are talking about a 4 & 7 point decline for reading
| and math respectively on a 500 point scale.
|
| The reading scores in particular seem to reflect a fairly normal
| variance.
|
| Take that into account before posting your hobby horse narrative
| as to why society is falling apart.
| SkyBelow wrote:
| If the data is taken from a wide range of plentiful sources,
| then even a small variance can be very significant. What is the
| 95%, 99%, or 99.9% confidence intervals for this data?
| comte7092 wrote:
| What do you mean by "very significant"
|
| "Significant" from a statistical perspective typically means
| "not 0 effect size". It does not follow that the magnitude of
| the real life impact is particularly notable.
| GoodJokes wrote:
| [dead]
| Scubabear68 wrote:
| In our public school,the true tragedy is how the school union
| took advantage of Covid to push for teachers to have almost zero
| accountability or responsibility anymore.
|
| Remote learning was an obvious disaster, but problems continued
| post-Covid. Some teachers stayed remote (!), requiring assistants
| in the classroom. Teachers rely on a host of shitty online
| platforms and expect the kids to figure out how to navigate all
| of them. Class is often little more than an email "read chapter 7
| and do the problems".
|
| The icing on the cake was the grading system that gave kids a B
| for showing up.
|
| Ourselves and many parents didn't know how bad it was until
| standard testing came up and our kids were scoring in the single
| digits in percentile.
|
| We have since moved to a private school for both. The first year
| was rough as they over came the Learning deficit and learned how
| to study again, but both are back as normal students with the
| kind of understanding in math, science, reading, etc they never
| would have gotten in public school.
| GoodJokes wrote:
| [dead]
| StanislavPetrov wrote:
| The fact is that the vast majority of people who go into
| "education" do it because it is the one of the least demanding
| career paths. Yes, there are some "true believers" who go into
| teaching because they truly seek to make a difference, but they
| are the tiny minority. Majoring in education is even less
| rigorous than majoring in liberal arts and is more akin to
| majoring in gender studies or basket weaving. This is even more
| true of the administrators who bloat the schools and drain
| crucial funding from actual teachers and classrooms while
| adding nothing in terms of educational value (and often
| detracting from it). But teachers certainly aren't entirely to
| blame for the mess we've gotten into to - there is more than
| enough blame to go around. The unfortunate truth is that our
| educational system is horribly broken, corrupt and inefficient.
| We hear far more from the leadership of the teacher's union and
| from school administrators about diversity nonsense than we do
| about the fact that they are churning out a generation of kids
| who are not literate and cannot do basic math. The "remote
| learning" nonsense was the final nail in the coffin as far as
| many public schools were concerned. They were already on life
| support before the pandemic when it came to academic
| achievement, and "remote learning" pulled the plug entirely.
| "Chronic school absenteeism", defined as missing at least 15
| days of school per year (3 school weeks) is 16% nationally, and
| much higher in many large cities. Achievement is so bad that
| states like New York are lowering their standards across the
| board so that it appears that more students are proficient.
|
| When a massive number of kids aren't even showing up at
| schools, teachers aren't very well educated, administrators are
| more interested in promoting their social and political agenda
| than they are in teaching children how to read and write and
| standards for achievement are being lowered and/or eliminated
| you end up with the situation we have today.
|
| https://www.timesunion.com/news/article/new-york-lowers-bar-...
| delecti wrote:
| You're taking it as a given that people perceive education to
| not be a demanding career, and I find that incredibly absurd.
| I've known since I was a young child that teachers didn't get
| paid much, and since I was a teen that the job required a lot
| of extra work for grading and buying your own supplies. As an
| adult I've known teachers, and those things are very clearly
| true.
|
| I don't know what world you're from, but I want to live where
| everyone "knows" that teaching is easy and lucrative.
| bamfly wrote:
| > You're taking it as a given that people perceive
| education to not be a demanding career, and I find that
| incredibly absurd.
|
| It's comically wrong. People choosing education for that
| reason are in for a rude awakening. Many of that sort
| figure that out during their student-teaching phase, I
| suppose. Lots of teachers also leave within the first few
| years, and it's pretty much never because they found it
| _too easy_. It 's a hard job, with an abusive strain of
| "you should make this sacrifice--for the children, you
| know, and of course we won't compensate you in any way,
| because _we 're_ not going to sacrifice for the kids, don't
| be silly" running through it, and bad pay, especially if
| you've got the kind of mind, interpersonal skills, and
| work-ethic we'd _hope_ the median teacher would have.
|
| Reports I've heard of truly bad teachers in-the-wild are
| mostly ones who are power-tripping jerks who like being
| "liked" by (some of) the kids (and who are typically fairly
| dumb, besides), not ones who are hanging around for an easy
| job where they can sponge off the taxpayer, because that's
| not really what it's like. The bad ones who stick around,
| it's not mainly because admin _can 't_ get rid of them, but
| for the same "admin has no idea WTF is going on with them"
| visibility-problems that are also common in private
| industry, plus they aren't necessarily _totally_ bad at the
| job, in the ways that are being measured. Teacher efficacy
| measurements keep being attempted, and keep turning out to
| be so noisy they 're nearly useless--even ones you'd
| _expect_ to work, turn out not to, when you look at the
| statistics. That part 's an unsolved problem that, believe
| me, plenty of teachers wouldn't mind seeing solved (they
| don't like their bad co-workers, either) though none of
| them like it when _crappy_ solutions are pushed, since, you
| know, they don 't actually work and are highly likely to
| punish/reward practically randomly.
| StanislavPetrov wrote:
| >You're taking it as a given that people perceive education
| to not be a demanding career, and I find that incredibly
| absurd.
|
| No, I went a state school here in New York for a graduate
| degree in a program that included many teachers that were
| seeking to get their Master's degree (which is required to
| teach here in New York within 5 years of becoming a
| teacher). All of the teachers in the program were actively
| employed as teachers at the time of their enrollment. Most
| of them were barely literate. At least two I would classify
| as not literate. Not a single one could be characterized as
| "well educated". None were especially intelligent. They
| were all nice, well-meaning people - but they were
| certainly not the best and brightest.
|
| >I don't know what world you're from, but I want to live
| where everyone "knows" that teaching is easy and lucrative.
|
| I certainly didn't say it was lucrative to be a teacher
| (though it can be after many years in the system). Most of
| them were paid very poorly. But it is a stable career. And
| it is easy to keep your job - which doesn't mean it is an
| easy job to perform (it isn't).
| jmye wrote:
| > The fact is that the vast majority of people who go into
| "education" do it because it is the one of the least
| demanding career paths.
|
| I'll never understand why the people who think teachers are
| glorified babysitters complain that those glorified
| babysitters aren't dramatically improving test scores. To say
| nothing, of course, of the abject, utter nonsense that
| statement is.
|
| > diversity nonsense
|
| What, specifically, do you mean by that?
| gotoeleven wrote:
| Ill bet most of these kids whose test scores were terrible
| had at least a few lessons on pronouns.
| fineIllregister wrote:
| We've had lessons on pronouns for at least since I've
| been in school.
| mulletbum wrote:
| I mean, I would hope so, considering pronouns are part of
| reading/writing education.
| StanislavPetrov wrote:
| >I'll never understand why the people who think teachers
| are glorified babysitters complain that those glorified
| babysitters aren't dramatically improving test scores.
|
| Perhaps if you had better teachers, you'd understand the
| difference between explaining a situation and complaining
| about it.
|
| >What, specifically, do you mean by that?
|
| I mean that any school that is turning out a school
| population where less than 20% of the students can read and
| write at grade level should spend 0% of their time talking
| about pronouns, cultural or social issues of any kind.
| bamfly wrote:
| > I mean that any school that is turning out a school
| population where less than 20% of the students can read
| and write at grade level should spend 0% of their time
| talking about pronouns, cultural or social issues of any
| kind.
|
| About half of US adults can barely read, or can't at all.
| Another 25-30% can't read at a "high school level", which
| _is not_ a high bar (as regarded by strong readers,
| anyway). Many of these were educated well before anyone
| was talking about "pronouns" in school. Maybe it was the
| student smoke breaks that were the education-ruining
| distraction, back then.
| StanislavPetrov wrote:
| Do you understand that in dozens or hundreds of schools
| *0%* of students can read at a high school level? Are New
| York State officials lying when they say they have to
| permanently lower standards because "this is the new
| normal"?
|
| >Last year some schools posted shocking results -- in
| Schenectady, no eighth grader who took the math test
| scored as proficient.
|
| >The committee is resetting the lowest scores -- called
| cut scores -- for each achievement level on this spring's
| new ELA (English language arts) and math tests.
|
| >"Right now we're setting new cut scores for 2023. This
| is the baseline moving forward," Perie said.
|
| >Over the summer the committee will do the same for the
| U.S. history Regents exam, with the change taking effect
| in 2024.
|
| https://www.timesunion.com/news/article/new-york-lowers-
| bar-...
| bamfly wrote:
| Most of what causes low performance in schools is beyond
| the ability of schools to address. It's why we keep
| trying reforms and they don't do much--and when they
| appear to, it usually turns out, in the long run, to have
| been dumb luck or number-fudging, either intentional or
| because the people involved don't know how statistics
| work. "Bussing" is within the scope of schools (kinda...)
| and that worked--it's got little company, in the things-
| that-worked category--but practically everyone hated it,
| so that's out.
|
| Properly fixing all this either means launching massive
| social programs that have little to do (directly) with
| schools and will likely take years to really bear fruit,
| in terms of educational outcomes--good luck with getting
| _that_ done in the US--or letting schools do things we
| 've decided (largely for good reasons) they aren't
| permitted to, like simply declining to serve a whole lot
| of kids.
|
| (separately, yes, Covid was an absolute disaster for
| education and we'll be dealing with that damage for
| generations--that's just _true_ , and I think much of
| society's kinda in denial about exactly how bad it was--
| but it certainly wasn't because teachers were, in
| general, kicking back and having a great, relaxing time
| for that couple of years; I also think there's a set of
| people who credit teachers with a much greater degree of
| influence on school policy than they actually have;
| further, I think these discussions can be difficult
| because the facts on the ground re: union power and such
| vary _wildly_ across the country, though, I 'm pretty
| sure, without strong and clear correlation to educational
| outcomes--my state has _very_ weak teachers, on that
| front, but still has plenty of schools posting terrible
| outcomes)
|
| As for the baseline-resetting, a lot of these measures
| are, for good reasons, concerned with _relative_
| achievement--achievement year-over-year, not absolute
| achievement, i.e. they 're looking to measure growth--so
| it's a little hard for me to tell if that's a totally
| normal thing being spun as bad, or in-fact bad. Could be
| the latter and it's every bit as bad as you suggest, IDK,
| I've only a little familiarity with NY's achievement
| metrics. Your article leads me to believe it's the
| former, actually ("A scoring committee that reports to
| the Board of Regents said Monday that they must take into
| account the results of last year's tests for students in
| grades three through eight to determine whether schools
| are showing improvement from year to year") despite
| framing the move as unusual/remarkable, though it's hard
| to be sure just from that source. School admin and state
| governments definitely aren't above screwing with those
| kinds of stats to make themselves look better, though--
| seen it happen, it's pathetic, and a dereliction of their
| duty to the kids, but it can be effective at achieving
| their ends of making it look like they're doing anything
| useful.
| treeman79 wrote:
| My kids go to a charter school. They went very hard on the
| online learning during Covid. Crazy amount of assignments. Lots
| of online time.
|
| As parents the workload was totally overwhelming to stay on top
| of everything.
|
| They ended up going back early because the test results were
| just atrocious even with how hard they were pushing.
|
| My wife teaches kindergarten there. There have been massive
| problems with the kids that came in that missed preschool
| during Covid. No idea how to share or interact with others. Had
| to spend a lot of time with basic life skills.
|
| Lots of students that had severe mental problems / disabilities
| that were completely missed since they missed preschool.
| Basically shutting down entire classes for months while various
| testing and placements were handled. Lots of "Jimmy is a
| genius" 4 months later. He has an IQ of 50.
|
| The masks also destroyed many students. Many highly depressed
| kids became happy cheerful kids once the masks were removed.
| BenFranklin100 wrote:
| Union teachers in Massachusetts were among the worst. They used
| COVID to lobby hard to end the Massachusetts Comprehensive
| Assessment System (MCAS) standardized tests.
|
| https://www.masslive.com/news/2020/08/mass-educators-urge-pa...
|
| Truly despicable.
| panzagl wrote:
| Before blaming unions, you might want to look at performance of
| students in districts that don't have them.
| the_shivers wrote:
| Do you mind sharing?
| mulletbum wrote:
| [flagged]
| MostlyStable wrote:
| Honest question: how many public school districts don't have
| a Teachers Union? My understanding is that it's close to
| none, and private and charter schools are the only ones
| without unions. A quick google search isn't returning a
| conclusive answer though.
| bamfly wrote:
| Some whole states have (due to state laws) very weak
| teacher's unions that can barely do anything to protect
| teachers when they _should_ be protected, and that hardly
| have any say in anything. I think if it were _at all_
| possible to spin those states as having better educational
| outcomes, Republicans would be crowing about it on Fox News
| 24 /7.
| hotpotamus wrote:
| Indeed, those who dislike teachers' unions (and unions in
| general) are quite quick to blame those unions for all the
| woes of modern education. I'm sure it is possible that they
| have downsides, but I wonder what the small government, free-
| market solutions for better education are? I was listening
| some conservative podcast talk about how teachers and unions
| need to be punished for these failures, but that just doesn't
| feel like the kind of thing that fosters a nurturing
| environment for learning. Certainly the for-profit colleges
| are seen as a scam rather than being held in good regard.
| Scoundreller wrote:
| > rely on a host of shitty online platforms and expect the kids
| to figure out how to navigate all of them.
|
| This sounds like good real world preparation
|
| > Ourselves and many parents didn't know how bad it was until
| standard testing came up and our kids were scoring in the
| single digits in percentile.
|
| Who was the comparator group here?
| _aavaa_ wrote:
| > > rely on a host of shitty online platforms and expect the
| kids to figure out how to navigate all of them.
|
| > This sounds like good real world preparation
|
| Or, we could push to have a better standard for them, and get
| them to see and treat the shitty software as something other
| than an unavoidable and unchangeable status quo.
| Scubabear68 wrote:
| The comparator group is every kid in the state at the same
| grade level.
|
| It is very shocking to see an 8th grader with a 3.5 GPA come
| in at 9 percentile in multiple subjects.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| School choice so that people can vote with their feet seems
| reasonable.
| subsubzero wrote:
| You are not alone, looking at enrollment for most public
| schools they are falling across the board with many choosing
| homeschooling[1] or private school[2]. On the homeschooling
| article one thing that blew me away was 16.1% of black families
| now homeschool their kids(from 3.3%). Private school admittance
| went up 53% as well during the pandemic. With my daughter I am
| extremely disappointed in the quality and difficulty(way too
| easy) of her schoolwork(1st grade public school). The school
| iving out 2-3 homework assignments a week with mindless
| addition and subtraction really makes me feel like my Daughter
| is wasting her time and even she says she doesn't know why she
| is doing the same problems over and over. Overall we may look
| to pull her and move to a private school if the low quality of
| this education continues.
|
| [1] - https://www.ksbw.com/article/homeschooling-surge-
| continues/3...
|
| [2] - https://www.thewellnews.com/education/private-school-
| enrollm...
| jrsdav wrote:
| I think the true tragedy of public education in the US is the
| sentiment of the public itself. The thinking that it's a
| conveyer belt where we put our children "on-rails" for 6 hours
| a day and they'll come out the other side with a strong
| education and high test scores. This is bolstered by yet more
| poor reasoning that any failures to reach that metric must
| surely be the fault of the workers in the factory. Workers who
| don't even get paid a livable wage but yet have to front the
| cash for tools just to do the job.
|
| Absent from your comment is the reality of just how much a shit
| job it is to be a teacher under _normal_ circumstances, with
| the pandemic being unequivocally _abnormal_. Teachers are still
| stuck in this whirlwind trying to figure out how to teach in
| the post-pandemic ruins that 's not just our education system,
| but our _public sentiment_ that is bursting with shitty
| expectations.
| bob_theslob646 wrote:
| >This is bolstered by yet more poor reasoning that any
| failures to reach that metric must surely be the fault of the
| workers in the factory.
|
| Even if the workers in the factory made faulty parts, in the
| United States, it would be incredibly hard to fire the
| workers. Their are no incentives on either side, for the
| worker nor the student. Their needs to be higher pay to
| attract people to want to do the job.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| > I think the true tragedy of public education in the US is
| the sentiment of the public itself.
|
| Are there any other countries that don't rely heavily on
| public education? Europe seems to lean on schools even more
| for shaping society, especially Swiss schools, which
| aggressively integrate immigrants into a common Swissness
| model. China, well, not 6 hours, maybe 8 hours, and boarding
| schools are common, see mom and dad on the weekend. They
| probably weathered COVID better than we did, however, just
| given that they went to back school much earlier or never
| left.
|
| Families with more resources/education did OK during COVID,
| the real negative effects were felt in lesser resourced
| families, who depended on the schools more and weren't able
| to provide alternatives because they had to work their non-
| WFH friendly jobs.
|
| Of course the teachers weren't the perpetrators here, I'm not
| sure the unions were either (I don't equate teachers with
| teacher unions, its not like they have so much choice in
| union representation).
| Scubabear68 wrote:
| The problem here is we are required by law to pay taxes for
| schools, and the people running the schools have almost zero
| accountability on anything.
|
| In our tiny regional district, the yearly school budget is
| $25 million a year, for less than a thousand students. Our
| combined municipal budgets, by comparison, are about $6
| million.
|
| For that $25 million a year, we are forced to pay, we get
| crap teachers and kids who can't read or do math.
|
| We are now in private school, for a total of $25,000 a year
| we pay ourselves, and we still have to pay the school taxes
| too.
|
| It is absolutely outrageous.
| ALittleLight wrote:
| How do parents not know how bad the school is? Are you not, on
| a daily basis asking what they learned in school and
| challenging them on it?
|
| I do it whenever I have a chance with my niece and nephew.
| They're learning about multiplication? We're doing times tables
| in the car trip. History of some Native American tribe? What
| happened, who were their leaders, etc.
|
| With my son it's simpler stuff - what color is this? What
| letter is that? Does our house have a door? And it's mainly my
| wife and I teaching him, but still - evaluation is critical.
|
| During the lockdown it took my sister one to two weeks to move
| her kids to private schools.
|
| I can't imagine not understanding, first intuitively, and
| second empirically, that online education is a poor fit for
| young children.
| Scubabear68 wrote:
| In our case, the school was OK but became progressively worse
| as a new Superintendent came in.
|
| We do check our kids general knowledge, but we don't grill
| them regularly or anything. We are all too busy for that, and
| given the amount of time they are at school, and how much it
| costs, it's not unreasonable to assume a bit that it going
| well when the report cards look good.
|
| Our first hint was when our daughter stopped having any
| homework. Her teacher said it "upset the children's work-life
| balance" (really!). We started to see declining proficiency
| in reading and writing at home.
|
| Then the standardized test scores started dropping
| precipitously. They are reported on by grade, and you can
| literally see which grades have the higher percentage of bad
| teachers from that.
|
| It is crazy that our kids were in a legally required and tax
| payer funded school for 6-7 hours a day, 9 months a year, and
| weren't being taught.
| hadlock wrote:
| > How do parents not know how bad the school is? Are you not,
| on a daily basis asking what they learned in school and
|
| A lot of parents work 2, 3 jobs to make ends meet. When they
| get home there's barely enough money left over for food. They
| get up at 4, 5 am and work until 10 or 11pm. Working 8 hours
| a day 5 days a week is a real luxury for some people.
| [deleted]
| ALittleLight wrote:
| Looks like it's a little less than 5% of job holders
| working multiple jobs [1][2]. Average hours of work per
| week is around 34 [3].
|
| If you're telling me that you don't know how your kids are
| doing in school because you never get a chance to talk to
| them because you're so busy working, that's sad, but it's
| probably not typical.
|
| It's also the case that people with greater income work
| more hours [4]. So, maybe you should reprioritize money
| versus family if you're working more than you need to.
|
| 1 - https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS12026620
|
| 2 - https://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat36.htm
|
| 3 - https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/AWHAETP
|
| 4 - https://www.visualcapitalist.com/cp/charted-actual-
| working-h...
| bob_theslob646 wrote:
| "Looks like it's a little less than 5% of job holders
| working multiple jobs "
|
| What's 5% of 300 million??
|
| That's not an insignificant amount of people, so I'm not
| sure what your point is at pointing that out.
|
| 15 million people is insignificant to you? It doesn't
| take away from what they were saying that a lot of times
| people don't have time to do the job of being the
| teacher. They cannot reinforce the job every day.
| amanaplanacanal wrote:
| You would think the other 95% would know what is going on
| in their kids school though.
| ALittleLight wrote:
| Your post is clearly an example of "You said X, so you
| mean worse Y??" In general, you should try to engage with
| X and not invent your own Y.
|
| As I previously wrote working so much you can't talk to
| your kids is not typical. Not every multiple job holder
| has kids, not every multiple job holder has multiple full
| time jobs, not every multiple job holder lacks ten to
| fifteen minutes a day to talk with their kids, some
| multiple job holders have spouses/parents/etc who can
| talk to their kids on their behalf, some multiple job
| holders could afford to work less.
|
| I don't know, but I suspect the previous reply comes from
| someone not in the situation they're describing. That is
| - the basic question I posed is how you could not know
| that your kid's school was bad. A response was that poor
| people had to work so many jobs they have no time to talk
| to their kids and I responded in turn by explaining that
| no, that's not the answer. I suspect the respondent is
| not particularly poor and isn't even explaining his own
| situation.
|
| Now, as for what my point is - my guess is that the modal
| reason people don't know how bad their kids schools are
| is that they aren't evaluating what their kids learn. I
| think that's bad and I'm trying to shame that behavior.
| Parents should be involved, should be tracking what their
| kids learn, and should be doing something about it when
| problems arise.
|
| I think attitudes like "some people have to work multiple
| jobs so we can't blame parents for being complacent with
| the poor public school system" are bad.
|
| Going back to what I wrote about the previous commenter
| not being in the situation he's describing - I think it's
| a common pattern for the rich to give bad advice to the
| poor. "Oh, you poor poor person, don't worry that you
| don't know how your children are doing at school, it's
| probably because you're so busy working! This isn't your
| fault, etc etc". I would say that if you don't know how
| your kids are doing in school you are failing as a parent
| and should immediately correct that. Education is vital
| to improving your child's circumstances and if you want a
| better life for your child you should do your best to
| insure your child is well educated.
|
| Again, just going off guesses, I bet the previous
| commenter holds himself to a higher standard. He won't
| ignore the education of his children, but will defend
| others doing so - assuming they're too busy to pay
| attention.
| primax wrote:
| Of course 5% is insignificant when talking about the
| experiences of a cohort overall.
| bamfly wrote:
| I guess we have this kind of anti-union, anti-teacher
| propaganda to thank for _anyone_ still choosing to major in
| education (such enrollment has been declining for some time,
| with good reason). An easy-street gravy train with no
| accountability and perfect job security? Sign me up!
|
| In fact, the work sucks--and parents with this kind of
| perspective are part of why--and the pay's bad. Accountability-
| seeking regulation and admin overhead gets more onerous every
| year. Time actually productively teaching kids keeps dropping.
| It's a miserable career.
|
| Get into ordinary state government then lateral-hop jobs until
| you land in some do-nothing office (they exist! Hop around, and
| you _will_ find one!) where you can truly screw around most of
| the day and collect your paycheck as long as you know how to
| work the rules, if you want the secure, barely-working, low-
| paid-but-at-least-you-have-retirement "paradise" that certain
| folks believe teaching to be. If you go into teaching thinking
| these folks are right about it, you're gonna have a _very bad
| time_.
|
| > Some teachers stayed remote (!), requiring assistants in the
| classroom.
|
| Schools were facing the loss of a ton of their teachers, if
| they forced them back to the classroom, for a fairly long
| stretch of Covid. They kept trying, and teachers kept pushing
| back. Many teachers personally at high risk of serious illness
| if they caught Covid, or with close family members at high
| risk, were wiling to walk if forced back. In the earlier, less-
| certain phase of the whole thing when the threat wasn't as
| clearly defined, many were offended by the "die for the
| children" vibe they were getting from admin. Classrooms that
| opened back up before the vaccine was available faced their own
| challenges, due to high rates of absence and teachers often
| being out sick or quarantining after close exposure (you know,
| because of Covid spreading). There's an ongoing staffing crisis
| as a result of stress from dealing with the school environment
| during Covid, which _was not_ a cakewalk and was far worse than
| usual (which is saying something), and other factors (pay
| stagnating for years in many districts, even as high inflation
| hit, would be a big one). If you think the way things went was
| a disaster, try losing 20+% of teachers in a district in a
| single year. They 're not in the military, you can't just order
| them to do _whatever_.
|
| > Teachers rely on a host of shitty online platforms and expect
| the kids to figure out how to navigate all of them.
|
| They don't always get to pick them, and often hate those too
| :-/
|
| They're also not tech or ed-tech experts and have little or no
| support from people who are. And they often had a few days or
| weeks to put this together, with minimal assistance with
| ongoing support. I assure you, none of them were happy about
| spending a quarter of their time doing tech support.
|
| > The icing on the cake was the grading system that gave kids a
| B for showing up.
|
| Schools had a choice during Covid of failing a shitload of
| kids, or doing this. Ultimately, they answer to parents, and
| were not prepared to deal with the fallout of 50%+ of their
| constituent families seeing F grades on report cards. This goes
| for in-person and remote, both. A similar effect is why grading
| has become more and more lax over the years--many teachers hate
| this and wouldn't choose to operate that way if it were up to
| them, but admin doesn't want to deal with a bunch of angry
| parents, in part because those parents can and will agitate
| enough to get them fired if they're upset enough, so they
| follow incentives. Failing kids isn't really a thing, anymore,
| period, even before Covid, and it's mostly not _teachers_
| making that call.
|
| Covid _was_ a disaster for education--that 's true! It was
| really bad!--but if you think it's because teachers don't
| actually care about teaching kids, you're not going to find
| useful solutions to those or similar problems in the future.
| Most of them care about that _a lot_ --again, the job's shit,
| so it's a minority, overall, who are willing to tolerate that
| without the positive-vibes experience of _teaching children_.
| That 's what most of them are there for. Certainly not the work
| environment, the parents (the ones who make the most noise,
| anyway), or the pay.
|
| > We have since moved to a private school for both. The first
| year was rough as they over came the Learning deficit and
| learned how to study again, but both are back as normal
| students with the kind of understanding in math, science,
| reading, etc they never would have gotten in public school.
|
| Selection bias is a hell of a thing. Nb we've sent our kids to
| private school at times, too--it may not be fair, and much of
| the difference probably is, in fact, due to that ability to
| select for easy-to-teach students and parents who are on-board
| with your particular program, but that doesn't make the
| advantage less _real_ , and ultimately we personally have to
| play the game the rest of the table's playing, no matter what
| we wish it were.
|
| Incidentally, you know what enabled one private school we were
| involved with to open for in-person sooner _and safer_ than
| area public schools? The parents. They had selected for a pool
| of parents who were highly likely to comply with Covid
| protocols and take them seriously. While a bunch of public
| schools were contending with a large body of parents who were
| evading rules and telling their kids they were bullshit and
| that they should chin-wear their masks, this private school
| could tell such parents to _get fucked_ because they had a
| waiting list for admission, and, besides, had already
| cultivated a rather, I suppose, liberal-leaning set of parents,
| so it largely wasn 't an issue. Fewer parents modeling poor
| adherence to masking and distancing for their kids, fewer
| parents sending their kids when they knew they were sick or had
| been exposed, fewer having ill-advised outings to restaurants
| and other high-risk places or holding family reunions or
| whatever during Covid infection peaks, and, go figure, they
| weren't dealing with as many teacher absences in the middle of
| a (very much related) substitute shortage, kids weren't sick or
| exposed as often, the _families_ weren 't sick or exposed as
| often, and so on. SES (socio-economic status) also helped, as
| many parents were well-off and had the kind of jobs where they
| could work from home, not performing jobs where they _had to_
| go in or else get fired, which meant fewer exposures. IOW the
| private school did better in part because they had Covid on
| easy mode, largely because the parents of the attending kids
| weren 't giant assholes and also had the money and freedom to
| mitigate the risk of Covid. When they were remote, parents were
| better-able to help the kids learn, for similar reasons. They
| had tons of advantages that public schools didn't.
| nradov wrote:
| That is a false narrative. Other countries such as Sweden
| kept primary schools open throughout the pandemic. They did
| fine.
| golergka wrote:
| Pretty much what I expect from a strong union. They're fighting
| for their members, not for their customers.
| BenFranklin100 wrote:
| "When school children start paying union dues, that's when
| I'll start representing the interests of children."
|
| - Al Shanker, President of the American Federation of
| Teachers
| ttymck wrote:
| Pretty much what I expect from a union fighting a society who
| refuses to value the work that they do.
|
| I really have a hard time blaming teachers for anything. We
| (America) seem to expect them to perform miracles. We are not
| their "customers", public eduction is not a business, but we
| insist on treating it like one. We get what we deserve.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Union teachers have long campaigned for having no
| accountability. They've been pretty successful at it. When
| was the last time you heard a public school teacher take
| any responsibility at all for poor academic achievement?
| I've never heard one. They always blame:
|
| 1. the parents
|
| 2. the students
|
| 3. the administration
|
| 4. not enough pay
|
| 5. not enough technology in the classroom
|
| 6. the tests
|
| The answer is to give a bonus to teachers depending on
| their students meeting the grade level academic standards.
| I've proposed this many times, and the pushback on it is
| fierce.
| Scubabear68 wrote:
| This.
|
| I know many teachers who absolutely crow about the total
| lack of metrics or accountability. They absolutely love
| it.
|
| As a result, good teachers aren't recognized, and bad
| ones proliferate.
| ttymck wrote:
| Yes, I would agree the current state of the profession
| absolutely attracts low quality candidates. It's a self
| fulfilling prophecy. Every other wealthy nation
| understands this.
| Utkarsh_Mood wrote:
| I have a brother who's 13 years old.
|
| Before the pandemic, he was a pretty smart kid, around the top
| half of his class, with an interest in learning for the sake of
| learning itself. During the pandemic, classes happened
| online(microsoft teams) and almost all his friends were playing
| video games while teaching was ongoing and disconnecting if asked
| a question(Not chastising him here, I did this too at times ha!)
|
| Back to school, he's been struggling with simple algebra and
| geometry, which should have been clear(in a normal scenario) a
| year ago. The desire to learn, has been replaced with other more
| short-term pleasures like watching yt,gaming etc. School teachers
| are ill-equipped to address this but thats a tangent I'll not go
| off right now.
|
| My parents have hired a private tutor for math to help him
| address the struggles he's facing right now, because the school
| sure as hell wont.
| HWR_14 wrote:
| If there is a more convincing indicator of a failing school
| system, it's that a 13 year old no longer wants to do
| schoolwork and instead play video games with his friends.
|
| Seriously, puberty is a thing. Math in particular can go from
| clear to impenetrable surprisingly quickly.
| lIl-IIIl wrote:
| The exact opposite happened to me in math - math went from
| hard to easy. I attributed it to brain changes during
| puberty.
| andrewclunn wrote:
| There's a problem. Don't every ask why though. The only
| acceptable solution is to throw more money to institutional
| authorities claiming to represent the best interest of children.
| Looking any deeper or suggesting any other solution is not
| acceptable. Now move along.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| It sounds like you have an opinion. Care to share it?
| gemstones wrote:
| I'm not the original poster, but I'll share an anecdote from
| tutoring in a bad public school district. The kids, in the
| first 5 minutes of class (and these are the supposedly good,
| motivated kids - in an elective CS class) make more trouble
| than would have been allowed in an entire school day in a
| class entirely composed of the biggest class clowns from my
| private high school.
|
| No amount of money fixes that culture problem. Better
| parenting does. I'm convinced that the only way to spend
| money to fix schools is to not give money to the actual
| school and put it towards social programs (which I am in
| favor of.)
| theossuary wrote:
| I've always believed that schools should see themselves as
| community centers. They should invite everyone in their tax
| base for activities, especially parents. They should do
| little BBQs, potlucks, have little plays or movie nights,
| etc.
|
| They should offer all children in their tax base breakfast,
| lunch, and/or dinner. They should encourage students to
| stay after for sports, to read in the library, or just to
| hangout.
|
| Basically schools should be like libraries or churches. I
| hate that the culture is moving in the other direction.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| Our school does much of what you suggest, but only for
| students. They are tightly locked away from the general
| public now, because some people think schools make a nice
| place for live target practice. I don't see this changing
| for the better anytime soon, it'll probably get worse.
| Guns are more popular than ever in the US, and with
| prevalence comes increased risk.
| ern wrote:
| I recall reading/seeing that a lot of standardized testing in the
| US is gamed by schools, which focus on "teaching the test".
|
| Could the decline in test scores be related to a shift im how
| schools approach these tests?
| taeric wrote:
| I also seem to recall that most concerns over "teaching to the
| test" were themselves misguided. Is like being worried that you
| are training to the sport, for kids that are getting into
| sports.
|
| Not that there isn't systemic cheating that can be done by some
| places. There can also be neglect of topics. That said, for the
| most part, if you can do the test, you have learned more of the
| topic than if you can't.
| jewayne wrote:
| This. If you're not "teaching to the test", what are you
| teaching, exactly?
| aylmao wrote:
| There's a clue later on in the article, when it describes
| reading for fun almost every day is also lower than
| previous years.
|
| The goal of school is not for students to learn what The
| Pearl by Hemingway is about. The goal is for students to
| learn "to read"-- ie, learn what to skim, what to pay
| attention to, what's being said between lines, how literary
| devices are used, how to piece different layers of ideas
| from a stream of words, etc. And importantly, to enjoy it
| at least to some degree, since it's a healthy habit
|
| Teaching the test in this context would be similar to
| teaching students to write some "top 20" algorithms, and
| recite their time complexities, knowing at least some of
| them will be on the test. It's definitely easier than
| teaching students the parts that make up a programming
| language, what big-O notation actually means, and the sort
| of generalized knowledge that will not only allow them to
| write and analyze _any_ program, but to see the beauty in
| programming and maybe even inspire a few to program for
| fun.
|
| This view of school as some sort of "training camp" for a
| test, is a terrible manifestation of focusing on the metric
| to the detriment of focusing on the goal.
| brycewray wrote:
| Hemingway?
| gms7777 wrote:
| The problem is that there are plenty of valuable skills
| that are difficult to test in a standardized way. Most
| standardized test questions focus on Bloom levels 1-3
| (remember, understand, apply) and struggle to test higher
| order skills (analyze, evaluate, create). Those questions
| are harder to write, usually take much longer for students
| to answer, and it's hard to format them such that they can
| be graded in a standardized manner (e.g., how do you test
| the skills ability to "create", to generate new ideas, to
| plan, to design, using a multiple choice question?)
|
| Placing a heavy emphasis on teaching to standardized tests
| means that teachers spend less time fostering higher order
| thinking skills.
| no_wizard wrote:
| >how do you test the skills ability to "create", to
| generate new ideas, to plan, to design, using a multiple
| choice question?
|
| The real answer to this is "don't use multiple choice
| questions", but that would require significant investment
| in actually properly grading the outputs. One of course
| could say that then you're going to teach to criteria
| (IE, what are the evaluators looking for?) but that may
| or may not be a bad thing, depending on how its handled.
| scarmig wrote:
| But you need to master the lower order skills before you
| can master the higher order skills. If someone is unable
| to evaluate a multi-digit sum, they'll be unable to
| devise creative solutions that use multi-digit sums.
| gms7777 wrote:
| Of course, I'm not saying that the lower order skills are
| not important -- as you say, they're foundational. And
| I'm not even saying that it's a bad idea to test lower
| order skills. But they're not the only important thing,
| and "teaching to the test" tends to treat them like they
| are and prioritize them over critical thinking,
| synthesis, and creative skills.
| xeromal wrote:
| I have a buddy who managed to pass his engineer PE without
| studying and is generally very good at all math and logic
| based problems without really having to "learn the test".
| What he excels at though is breaking down a problem and
| deriving the solution rather than pattern matching. It
| isn't a very good skill for a timed test, but it is a very
| good skill in real life in engineering and pretty much
| everything else. Teaching the test takes away the learning
| of this valuable skill to have.
| karaterobot wrote:
| It'd be a less flexible approach, with more lessons
| oriented around test _problems_ than the underlying
| concepts they 're meant to represent?
|
| So, an equivalent would be learning leetcode programming
| puzzles to pass an interview, vs. learning to be a well-
| rounded programmer.
| detaro wrote:
| Related skills that are useful outside the limited form the
| standardized test takes.
|
| To take a practical example, if you wanted to get a group
| of kids to get best high marks in my high-school CS final
| exams, it'd been very effective to have them drill a a few
| standard sorting algorithms and a pile of formal
| definitions, so they are certain to be able to perfectly
| reproduce them from memory when prompted. But I'm fairly
| sure the few extra weeks of messing around with graph
| algorithms, despite that not being material relevant for
| the exams, probably were more useful for everyone in the
| class despite someone typoing a heapsort or not remembering
| how UTF-8 bit encoding works under pressure and loosing
| some points on that.
| jimbob45 wrote:
| I think the original criticism surrounding "teaching to the
| test" was that students were being taught useless shortcuts
| to answers rather than actually learning the material. I've
| never personally felt that the teachers I had ever did it
| though.
|
| One contrived example might be, "If you see "states' rights"
| anywhere in the question, then the answer is most likely
| going to be Daniel Webster, John Calhoun, or Henry Clay."
| taeric wrote:
| Yeah, but again, this isn't as damning as it sounds.
| Teaching kids to play sports, you definitely start with the
| "stand out there and watch the ball in motion." Ideally,
| you want them to engage with the sport, but just getting
| them there with the gear is a big part of it.
| mlyle wrote:
| I think it's pretty damning, actually. Spending most of
| your time circumventing the test and rote repetition
| undoes any learning of the real subject.
|
| I taught AP Microeconomics this past year. About a third
| of my time was spent teaching about different ways that
| the AP grading standards are picky and ways to exploit
| the test, because this is what is most important for the
| outcome they're worried about-- scoring a 5 on the exam.
| In turn, it didn't leave a lot of time for deeper
| discussions, simulations, etc, engaging with
| microeconomics.
| alephnerd wrote:
| How my AP Econ (Macro+Micro) teacher tackled that was
| spend the majority of the the time teaching the Samuelson
| and Mankiw books and then spend 1 month having everyone
| practice College Board style tests.
|
| Tbf, in our HS AP Econ was gatekept for 12th graders, and
| most of us had at least 6-7 AP tests done already so we
| had experience with the exams already.
| mlyle wrote:
| I had mostly seniors with lots of AP experience too.
|
| AP Macro+Micro can work a lot better, because there's a
| few weeks of overlapping material. So it's the difference
| between fitting 45 hours of instructional material into
| 50 hours vs. fitting 80-85 into 100.
|
| The tight fit annoyed me, as did the strictly graded
| nature of the course.
|
| Two areas of particular annoyance:
|
| - I had a cohort of students who had entirely been
| through AP Calc, but fitting into the explanations
| expected for HS meant making somewhat bogus algebra based
| explanations (the slope of this line is double the other
| one, just because!!). A student who gave a calc-based
| explanation on the test would probably not get the points
| (frankly, a lot of the readers would not understand it).
|
| - About a third of the students had founded a "Game
| Theory" club on their own and were off in the weeds
| exploring game theory. I'd have loved to have taken a
| couple extra classes on the topic since they were already
| so interested and engaged, but I had no margin. I was
| forced to give the very simple 2 person payoff matrix
| form and leave the topic there. Again, I spent more time
| encouraging my students to not think too fancy.
| alephnerd wrote:
| This low key sounds like the environment in my high
| school XD.
|
| > had a cohort of students who had entirely been through
| AP Calc, but fitting into the explanations expected for
| HS meant making somewhat bogus algebra based explanations
|
| Yep. I remember that. We had the same problem as well in
| our class so our teacher spent that month prior to the
| exams teaching us Econ the Wrong/College Board Way.
|
| > I was forced to give the very simple 2 person payoff
| matrix form and leave the topic there
|
| Yep, I remember that too. A bunch of us were CS/Applied
| Math bound so we ended up expanding further on
| Optimization Theory and Game Theory via competitive math
| exams or working with our supportive AP Calc and E&M
| teachers who taught us how to hone knowledge in both
| concepts using math.
| taeric wrote:
| Odds are high we are talking past each other. Teaching
| the rules of the game is the same as teaching grading
| rubrics in many ways. And yes, learning the nature of
| rubrics is very important for students to know.
|
| Now, can you devolve to completely degenerate states
| where they are only playing the "meta topic" and not
| learning the topic? I mean, yeah? I'd wager the folks
| that can complete the meta topic still know more than the
| folks that can't even do that. You can also devolve into
| stagnation by thinking you can reduce all learning to
| "first principals." Such that I just don't see that as
| damning on its own.
|
| Back to my sports comparison, the technicalities and
| fundamentals of a sport are important. But you also do
| well to teach kids to get out there and play the game,
| even with loose rule enforcement and heavy help. Bumpers
| in a bowling match, as it were.
| mlyle wrote:
| > Teaching the rules of the game is the same as teaching
| grading rubrics in many ways.
|
| I'm a big fan of teaching rubrics and even test-taking
| skills.
|
| But that's a far different thing from eviscerating your
| subject in order to teach points tests are likely to hit
| in isolation, which is happening a whole lot, especially
| when teachers are evaluated heavily on test outcomes.
| taeric wrote:
| Right, this is why I'm guessing we are talking past each
| other. I fully believe some places got degenerate and did
| it poorly. I'm not convinced every "teaching to the test"
| case our there is that, though. Often folks would whine
| about teaching to the tests for teaching how tests are
| scored.
|
| I'd love to see a large study on this. And now that I
| have kids in schools, I'm very interested in ways I can
| help them learn. At the same time I also want them to do
| well with grades. Knowing that is often two separate
| things.
| mlyle wrote:
| For an example of how it can go wrong: I know for a fact
| that the competitive math class I teach makes a couple of
| standardized test measures go down-- especially
| "procedural knowledge". I know this because I've compared
| changes in performance to similar control students not
| taking the courses.
|
| I also know that it has a big positive impact on
| performance overall. And our students do pretty well in
| comp and a lot reach state championships.
|
| If I were strictly evaluated on standardized test
| outcomes, I would be asked to figure out how to pull
| those procedural knowledge scores up.
| taeric wrote:
| Right, and I am not really arguing against you on this.
| For an example of places where not teaching to the test
| can go wrong, though, I need only look at some extended
| family that were only taught evolution, as it would be on
| some tests.
|
| Anecdotes being what they are, I'm interested in knowing
| if there is a large study on this. I'm also very open to
| thoughts on how to fix things. Knowing that it typically
| comes around to better tests...
|
| Edit: To be clear, my evolution example was supposed to
| be that they were only taught it because it would be on
| the tests. Not that they were only taught evolution.
| mlyle wrote:
| > if there is a large study on this
|
| I'm not sure what "this" is, though. The question isn't
| well-posed, so I'm not sure what you would study.
|
| Absolutely there are many public school teachers that
| report that they are spending a lot of time teaching "to
| the test" rather than what they consider important. And
| this is a case of misaligned incentives. Overall mastery
| is important for the student's outcome going forward; the
| outcome of this, say, 5th grade standardized test doesn't
| affect their educational trajectory at all.
|
| But the outcome of that test is very important to the
| school's perception and the teacher's career.
|
| We'd all love better tests that really measure what we're
| trying to inculcate in students. But we also want tests
| that are easy to grade and very quantitative, which is in
| opposition to the other goal.
| taeric wrote:
| "This" would be how many places are harmed by "teaching
| to the tests."
|
| For example, you are asserting that "there are many
| public school teachers that report that they are spending
| a lot of time.." but... where is this tabulated? Are
| there biases mitigated in the self reporting side of what
| you are talking about?
|
| I don't want to be dismissive of the idea that it is
| harmful. I have seen very little compelling evidence that
| it is as harmful as it is asserted. Both as a student and
| as a parent. Is akin to employees that are upset about
| long term compromises for short term gain. Yes, it
| happens. All too often, short term survival is the best
| thing for long term survival. (With the ack that it is
| until it isn't.)
|
| Which is why I would love to see data and studies on
| this. Indeed, if "teaching to the test" is the concern,
| how do I then interpret declining test scores? Failing to
| teach either to the test or the subject?
| mlyle wrote:
| > where is this tabulated?
|
| How would one tabulate this or conduct such a study?
| Usually the main outcome measure you're looking at is
| something like the test.
|
| > if "teaching to the test" is the concern, how do I then
| interpret declining test scores?
|
| Exactly what you mentioned before and dismissed: short
| term gain is not necessarily long term gain.
|
| There's not enough high quality educational research. But
| one area we have strong research is on what kinds of
| learning are durable. The National Training Laboratory
| Institute has done a whole lot of research on what
| results in retention at 6 months, and the things you do
| for immediate test performance (rote practice, mnemonics,
| tricks to answer specific subject-specific questions,
| etc) are the least durable things.
|
| Test focused classrooms spend a whole lot of time on this
| stuff, and less time on things that work to create
| durable understanding (think-pair-share, low intensity
| practice built around spaced repetition, mastery-based
| methods, etc).
|
| Note that I am not a career teacher. I am a retired
| entrepreneur who now happens to teach. I have
| extraordinary programs that get extraordinary results--
| despite being a small school, we're routinely having
| multiple students reaching state level championships in
| things I teach. Under test-focused pressure I could not
| achieve these things. Similarly, if I was spending a huge
| portion of my energy on classroom management and
| behavioral norms, I couldn't do them either.
|
| (Of course, on _most_ test measures my students do pretty
| well, too).
|
| Indeed, I've written here:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36423142 (and in the
| grandchild comment) about my experience teaching a very
| heavily test-focused course. I know I could have given my
| students a better and more durable knowledge of economics
| with less of the test-focused pressure.
| taeric wrote:
| My assertion, then, would be to point that "teaching to
| the tests" concerns started and continued through a time
| that tests scores have decreased. If they really are
| teaching to the tests, they are doing a bad job at that,
| as well. :D
|
| I didn't dismiss the idea that short term gain can be a
| long term loss. I question if that is a panacea of a
| claim. Specifically, all too often, I see it pushed by
| fellow programmers when they are pushing for a harder
| solution and have stalled out on it. I have been said
| programmer doing that, before. It is best exemplified in
| the nonsense talk people have about how "worse is
| better." Antifragility appeals to me. Total ordering of
| ideas, required for "worse is better," do not.
|
| Worse, I've seen students that did a lot of these
| supposed better methods fall flat on their faces when in
| a new environment. And then it falls back to an obnoxious
| "true scotsman" debate about how they must not have been
| in these superior settings, as otherwise they would have
| succeeded.
|
| To that end, I would challenge that you could have really
| given them more durable knowledge of anything, right off.
| If only because I have yet to see anyone succeed at
| giving durable knowledge of anything that wasn't flat
| facts. I'd love to be shown how that is wrong, so please
| don't let my skepticism keep you from doing what you do.
| I'll go further and say that it is very likely that my
| skepticism is unhealthy at some levels.
|
| And again, I am interested in seeing more exploration of
| all of these ideas. As a parent, I'd love for my kids to
| get good at all they want to do. Rote practice and simple
| following of recipes and such is far better at that than
| it often gets stated. (And a big "f you" to "sight
| words." I can't believe how misguided that is and how it
| set back one of my kids in reading.)
| mlyle wrote:
| > would be to point that "teaching to the tests" concerns
| started and continued through a time that tests scores
| have decreased
|
| This is false. The concerns of teaching to the tests,
| from my memory, peaked around 2005. No Child Left Behind
| was a major driver of these concerns, passed in 2001.
| Test scores peaked in 2012. This is exactly what you
| would expect if "teaching to the test" yielded a short
| term benefit but longer term harms, and was increasing
| during this interval.
|
| > Worse, I've seen students that did a lot of these
| supposed better methods fall flat on their faces when in
| a new environment.
|
| NTL did pretty simple experiments: teach something
| various ways, and see what ones resulted in best
| performance 6mos and 12mos later.
|
| Having students themselves pair off, teach, and explain
| ideas is the most durable thing we know. It requires
| active engagement with the material in order to
| reformulate it to help someone else through
| understanding. It requires being able to do this while
| multitasking and attending to social cues. And it can be
| a powerful motivator for students to fully understand
| before undertaking explanation.
|
| > (And a big "f you" to "sight words."
|
| I can't figure out what you're saying. "sight words" are
| a classic example of a hyper-focused rote memorization
| practice.
|
| I'm not saying rote is worthless. From my perspective, a
| perfect math class equally emphasizes intuition, rote
| practice, and rigorous explanation. What we tend to get,
| instead, is that once a student falls at all behind, they
| get 80+% rote practice. Worse, this practice is often
| subtly faulty and on topics that the student doesn't have
| the higher level explanations necessary to monitor their
| own performance.
| taeric wrote:
| Teaching to the tests never stopped being a concern from
| the circles I can remember. No Child Left Behind is an
| interesting fence post on this, though. "Sold a Story"
| was rather effective at showing the major opposition to
| all things Bush in that legislation and how it backfired
| heavily for reading. As so many opponents of that act
| railed against how it was pushing for reading to be
| tested, and how we are still struggling from that.
|
| That said, I do not have hard data here. Happy to be
| shown I was wrong that that peaked about that time.
|
| For teaching/learning, I confess I'm more partial to
| https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/getting-it-
| wrong/. I'm curious to know more on studies like this, so
| I'll be looking up some of the NTL studies you are
| referencing. Would be delighted if you have a good
| reference on them.
|
| My "f you" to sight words is just hearkening back to the
| "Sold a Story" thing. So many of the "best practices" for
| teaching reading from teachers centered around "sight
| words" and such. Which, I suppose you can frame that to
| teaching to a test. But I think it is more teaching the
| wrong things. And flat out not teaching any technique to
| reading.
|
| Which, that last is fully to your point. I don't want
| techniques ignored or passed over. So if there is large
| scale evidence that that is happening, I'm very
| interested in the evidence.
| jewayne wrote:
| That seems to be a round-about criticism of the design of
| the individual tests. Ideally, the tests should be
| comprehensive enough that "gaming" the tests still requires
| mastering the material.
| lettergram wrote:
| It's ironic to have this on the HN home page as
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36417252
|
| Pretty sure cognitive reasoning is declining too. School choice
| is the way to go. This does two things (1) forces parents to at
| least be involved enough to make a decision and (2) incentivizes
| schools to improve
|
| As a parent of quite a few kiddos, I've noticed a massive lack of
| involvement with most parents. It shows
| jalk wrote:
| How about letting kids earn screen time points through learning
| apps. The current time based blocking in iOS doesn't mean the
| kids will do homework when device is locked.
| jhedwards wrote:
| > incentivizes schools to improve.
|
| Doesn't school choice divert funds away from public schools,
| depriving them of the means to improve?
| lettergram wrote:
| it's implemented in a variety of ways, the simplest way is
| every parent gets an account with $X. They can then choose to
| spend that money on education similar to an Healthcare
| Spending Account.
|
| What this results in, many schools, typically smaller. Where
| I'm at no one sends their kids to public schools if they're
| well off. We create our own pods or select one of the larger
| private schools.
|
| Really only poor people, with parents who don't home school,
| send their kids to the public schools. School choice helps
| the poor, because it gives them the freedom of choice they
| wouldn't otherwise have.
|
| The wealthy already choose better options.
|
| In way of example, we have 30 kids in our neighborhood. We
| can hire 3x teachers and build a small school house for
| $10-12k per student. We now have a neighborhood school and
| school choice would allow that.
|
| People on this thread don't really know what they're talking
| about. Everyone in the school choice system still pays into
| taxes, it's just you get a voucher / credit / account to
| apply to your place of choice. This allows for greater
| variation in education and more diversity of thought. It also
| reduces segregation due to redlining, etc of the past.
| OkayPhysicist wrote:
| Increasing school choice incentivizes the stratification of
| schooling, by changing the choice from "free, probably
| adequate" public schools versus "expensive, maybe better"
| into "free, where all the poor kids go", "mid-priced, where
| everyone who gives a shit and can afford to goes", and
| "expensive, maybe better". Adding that middle tier charter
| school leaves the public school with only the poor or
| uncaring, leading to worse outcomes.
|
| And that's before the absolutely, stark-raving mad
| suggestion that religious institutions should be able to
| collect from state-funded education allowances, introducing
| a healthy mix of indoctrination into the mix.
| lettergram wrote:
| > And that's before the absolutely, stark-raving mad
| suggestion that religious institutions should be able to
| collect from state-funded education allowances,
| introducing a healthy mix of indoctrination into the mix.
|
| Yeah we can't have those silly people educating their
| kids how they see fit -- you know better! \s
|
| You can't argue public schooling is good, when by any
| metric public schools are worse than private options.
| There's more violence, more indoctrination, are often
| less diverse (it's based off neighborhood) and worse
| outcomes at public schools. The data backs up how bad
| they are.
|
| There are also a lot of different school choice options.
| For instance, the state can impose restrictions on which
| institutions can get funds, etc.
|
| That said, in the US you really can't stop anyone from
| hiring public tutors and homeschooling. So what you're
| arguing is basically that the rich get this method and
| the poor get to go to the public schools. This leads to a
| much larger stratification than allowing school choice
| alistairSH wrote:
| Potentially. For example, Oklahoma now allows "public"
| parochial charter schools.[1]. The end game here is any
| district that can only support a single school pyramid will
| have a privately-run, religious school funded by public tax
| dollars.
|
| I'll be following Oklahoma - it will be interesting to see
| how quickly Islamic schools, or The Satanic Temple get their
| requests for schools submitted. And how quickly Oklahoma
| approves/denies them.
|
| 1 - https://www.politico.com/news/2023/06/05/oklahoma-
| approves-p...
| wbronitsky wrote:
| Yes, it absolutely does. It also uses public funds for
| private religious institutions, which I personally believe
| goes against the separation of church and state.
| HDThoreaun wrote:
| Not if families choose the public school. I think private
| school choice is unequivocally bad, but charters might be
| good depending on the situation. Charters have quickly risen
| to serve 1/4 of the highschoolers in my district because the
| public options available to poor families are legitimately
| violent, as in students being shot on campus. The school
| district was counting on poor families having no other choice
| so they allowed those schools to languish while they invested
| in the schools in wealthier areas in order to keep middle+
| class families from fleeing for the suburbs. The charter
| schools have forced the district to at least attempt to serve
| the poor students.
| alistairSH wrote:
| Posted this in another response. Oklahoma is testing the
| waters with publicly-funded parochial charters. The end-
| game for many proponents of school choice, vouchers, and
| charters is absolutely a parochial education for everybody.
| Or at least parochial education for their family and
| friends, and everybody else can get fucked.
|
| https://www.politico.com/news/2023/06/05/oklahoma-
| approves-p...
| bitshiftfaced wrote:
| > with school choice programs, public schools get to keep
| almost all of the federal and local tax dollars and usually a
| portion of the state funds allocated for each child
| https://www.edchoice.org/school-choice/faqs/how-does-
| school-...
|
| Since the fixed costs of running a public school are
| effectively covered, the public school saves the marginal
| cost of educating the student that has diverted their funds.
| The school then has the same means to improve on a per
| student basis.
|
| Also keep in mind that "improving" often means replacing
| costly and ineffective process with better ones.
| bamfly wrote:
| > (2) incentivizes schools to improve
|
| The largest factor in good v bad schools is already selection
| bias. Turning up the temperature on that (if you will) is not
| gonna help a thing, except the people itching like a goddamn
| meth addict at the prospect of getting a piece of those sweet,
| sweet public dollars. _They 'll_ benefit.
| misiti3780 wrote:
| I'm not sure why you are getting downvoted.
| mahathu wrote:
| Because being able to choose schools is an incredibly
| privileged position many well-meaning parents and their kids
| aren't in.
| adamwong246 wrote:
| And betrays how little those parents care for the children
| without which they share DNA. When the rich pull their kids
| and taxes away from the common good of public schools, it
| degrades that common good all the faster.
| speakfreely wrote:
| You're saying you prioritize the well being of strangers
| above your own family? That's not how the human brain
| works. We are tribal primates. In a zero sum game, you're
| going to pick your in-group over the out-group. Any
| insistence otherwise just virtue signaling with no
| credibility.
|
| The better question is why the US education system has
| become a zero sum game. But don't blame affluent parents
| for following the incentives the system has forced on
| them.
| alistairSH wrote:
| _The better question is why the US education system has
| become a zero sum game._
|
| I'm not sure I agree with that assertion. But, if it is,
| my vote would be to fix that instead of throwing out the
| system. Public education works - it worked in the US for
| decades and it works in most of our peer nations.
| adamwong246 wrote:
| In some sense, can virtue signal all I want, because I
| have no children. It's very much in my interest that
| education be distributed evenly, rather than hoarded by a
| minority of monied families.
| JohnClark1337 wrote:
| [dead]
| speakfreely wrote:
| > In some sense, can virtue signal all I want, because I
| have no children.
|
| Well, you're admitting there's no personal cost to your
| advocacy, which makes sense and I can't really argue
| you're not entitled to feel that way. Like in criminal
| justice reform, homelessness advocacy, etc. everyone is a
| liberal until the first time they get robbed, the first
| time someone smashes their car window, etc. Personal cost
| has a way to delivering reality to people who are
| disconnected from it.
|
| > It's very much in my interest that education be
| distributed evenly
|
| If there was no cost to the high performing students to
| keep everyone in public schools, I would actually 100%
| agree with you. But limiting the upper percentiles'
| outcomes to deliver almost negligible changes to the
| bottom percentile doesn't seem fair, either.
| adamwong246 wrote:
| It's going to be very hard to improve society if I cannot
| convince others to act against against their own narrow,
| immediate self-interest at least some of the time.
| Society rapidly dissolves under such conditions. Indeed,
| can such an arrangement be called "society" at all?
| nathan_compton wrote:
| Yeah, there are all sorts of primal instincts which human
| beings modify or suppress. In fact, most of what people
| recognize as common sense morality is restrictions on
| exactly what would be base primal instincts.
| tastyfreeze wrote:
| School choice is unfortunately the enemy of the teachers
| union. There is a horde of folks that believe school choice
| will be detrimental to schools.
| MisterBastahrd wrote:
| Because "school choice" is a euphemism for defunding public
| schools in favor of segregated parochial schools.
| yieldcrv wrote:
| So the specific term is the problem, but the verbatim plain
| reading is not?
|
| fascinating.
|
| isn't that we all do for higher education? some community
| colleges are free for nearby residents now, everyone that
| is privileged enough to go to a university is secretly into
| segregation!
| nathan_compton wrote:
| School choice is controversial because it is associated with
| right wing attempts to undermine public schools and, among
| other things, teacher's unions. In fact, the school choice
| movement as we know it goes back to desegregation in the
| south:
| https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2021/09/27/school-
| cho....
|
| That is just one article about it, but someone close to me
| was involved in the original litigation on the subject. It
| was not uncommon in the south for districts to close public
| schools and almost literally give public land and equipment
| from those schools to private schools which could more easily
| remain segregated.
|
| There are other dimensions to school choice as well. In
| particular, some parents would prefer to "insulate" their
| children from information about sexuality or uncomfortable
| truths about american history.
|
| And, I admit, public schools often are struggling to teach,
| so its not entirely black and white. But school choice is
| politically fraught.
|
| But many people see it as the standard republican strategy:
| first, starve public services of funding, then claim that
| they are bad, and then get rid of them.
| clnq wrote:
| I come from a Nordic country, where many things are
| different from the US. When I was a kid, I could choose
| what public school I wanted to go to. I'm trying to
| understand the situation you describe better.
|
| First of all, are kids not free to choose which public
| school they will attend in the US? If so, is that by law?
| Do any US states allow a choice of public schools? If not,
| why not? Also, school curriculums were standardized where I
| was a kid, so there wasn't ever the problem of creating
| siloed "thought" schools. Isn't school curriculum
| standardized in the US?
|
| This was such a non-problem in my experience, I am honestly
| a bit surprised how controversial it is. It would be great
| if anyone gave more context, as that article relies on
| quite a lot of US life experience.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| America funds public education locally, so you are
| limited to public schools that you can attend by what
| schools are being funded by your property taxes. Some
| districts setup public choice schools in their districts,
| especially if the districts are large (e.g. Seattle, my
| son goes to an area choice school). Some states will also
| provide more equity to school districts (Washington state
| shifts education funding to east of the mountains from
| much richer Seattle area school districts), but in
| general you still aren't allowed to attend schools
| outside of your district without some kind of exception.
|
| Education is also governed largely locally with a few
| state/federal standards in the background that are often
| not seen as a good thing (e.g. Bush's No Child Left
| Behind).
| clnq wrote:
| Thank you for the context.
|
| It's interesting that NCLB is seen in negative light, it
| is similar to what I had as a kid. It seems to be one of
| those things that was fundamentally good-spirited but
| corrupted. I think it could have been done well. It
| shouldn't cast doubt on standards in education.
|
| Or maybe it was a failure. It would be interesting to
| know how education changed when NCLB was introduced and
| how many people liked it vs how many disliked the change.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| Criticism on NCLB is basically criticism on standardized
| testing. Higher performing schools are going to opt out
| anyways (they would rather focus their kids on prep for
| college), lower performing schools focus on the tests
| with hyper focus to the expense of everything else.
| OkayPhysicist wrote:
| Most of the belly-aching about NCLB that you'll hear
| comes from relatively affluent people (who are
| disproportionately represented on this site, since it's a
| forum for people in a relatively high-paying field),
| because it required school districts to focus
| disproportionately on getting closer to average outcomes
| for the worst performing students, rather than letting
| the best performing students excel even further.
|
| For example, if your school district had 2 high schools,
| one that was extremely high achieving to the point that
| anything short of a perfect score on standardized test
| was considered a moral failing, and the other that was
| struggling to keep the school average at the
| state/national average, the school district, in order to
| get more funding from the fed, would need to spend as
| much as possible on the lower achieving school. Secondary
| things, like a new pool, or new buildings, or in some
| cases basic renovations would be denied to the higher
| achieving school, because they still had a far way to
| fall before they represented a failure of the school
| district.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| > if your school district had 2 high schools, one that
| was extremely high achieving to the point that anything
| short of a perfect score on standardized test was
| considered a moral failing
|
| That would never really happen though. The poor high
| school is very likely to be in a completely different
| school district with a completely separate local funding
| source. Rich schools mostly complained about having to
| prep students for NCLB when they were also prepping them
| for AP exams and otherwise helping getting their students
| into an Ivy league.
| nathan_compton wrote:
| The main thing to be aware of is charter schools and
| school vouchers. The latter literally diverts public
| funds to parents who want to send their kids to private
| schools.
|
| Charter schools are more subtle. They are privately run
| schools which often can work around regulations which
| restrict public schools (for example, they may not have
| to hire union teachers). There are de jure rules to make
| sure that these schools are accessible to everyone in the
| community, but often there are informal methods by which
| these schools end up being just for white students (for
| instance, the administration will wait until the school
| choice period is over and then selectively eject non-
| white kids).
| irrational wrote:
| Maybe parents feeling guilty about their lack of involvement
| are downvoting.
| alistairSH wrote:
| I didn't downvote, but I suspect some of it could be
| because "school choice" probably doesn't solve the problems
| it claims to solve. After all, school choice already exists
| - just move to the district you prefer. Vouchers might
| allow a student to travel to a better school, but outside
| the densest urban areas, that means a lot of time spent on
| a bus (or parents driving even more than they do today) -
| not always feasible.
| MrMan wrote:
| [dead]
| sixothree wrote:
| I think "school choice" in most places is just a front for a
| movement to shut down public schools or at least kill funding
| for them. That's my guess why he's being downvoted.
| karamanolev wrote:
| For me, it might be a way to give richer parents access to
| further away nicer schools and limit choices for poorer
| parents by way of economics, therefore increasing
| inequality. And HN considers, AFAIK, inequality bad.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| I think "school choice" in most places is _perceived_ to be
| just a front for a movement to shut down public schools or
| at least kill funding for them.
|
| But if you're a parent who wants decent schools for your
| kids, and your current schools are lousy, and you aren't a
| big enough fish to move the school board, and you can't
| afford private school... what else are you going to try to
| do other than push for school choice? (You could
| homeschool, I guess, but not everybody feels like they're
| cut out for that.)
| jeffbee wrote:
| "Percentage of students missing 5 or more days of school monthly
| has doubled since 2020" seems like it might have some explanatory
| powers. How can you miss a quarter of the school days and keep
| up?
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| A lot of this is mandated by the school: you have a cough? Go
| home, it might be COVID!
|
| It gets annoying as a parent: the kid wants to be in school,
| they aren't really sick (well, above the normal level of
| snifflies a kid has during much of the winter), but the system
| is ultra conservative right now.
| WalterBright wrote:
| > How can you miss a quarter of the school days and keep up?
|
| Not a problem, as public schools move at a glacial pace. In 8th
| grade, the teachers were still going over the times tables with
| them.
|
| In high school "honors" class, the teacher spent an entire
| semester on the concept of "molar mass".
|
| My experience going through the bowels of the public school
| system was it was fun place to be with your friends. Any
| learning was incidental.
|
| Of course, the magnitude of this disaster made it very
| difficult for me to get my feet under me in college.
| projektfu wrote:
| I forget where you're from, but I know you're a little older
| than me. In my public school, 8th grade tracked some students
| into high-school math (New York Regents Course 1) and the
| others into math that they'd need for the next year. But in
| 7th grade, all students were solving some algebra problems,
| graphing and plotting, etc. basic geometry, some
| constructions, etc. 11th grade (Regents, not Honors)
| Chemistry had equilibrium problems, etc., although it was hit
| or miss whether the teacher could teach them. It was also not
| required, as only 2 years of science were required, and most
| students would have taken Earth Science/Geology and Biology.
| However, it shows that public schools can get teach it, and
| the standards can require it.
|
| I do wish people would give up on teaching Physics without
| Calculus. Kind of a wasted year for me, and everything made
| sense as soon as you added differentiation and integration. I
| think the two courses should be taught together in the same
| class.
|
| Presumably, the No Child Left Behind act and the Common Core
| curriculum are supposed to provide a baseline for the country
| that is well above "times tables in 8th grade". Common Core
| seems to me to suffer from a second-system effect, eschewing
| some of the tried-and-true for the experimental, but the
| motivation is a reasonable one. I never understood why they
| didn't take a successful state's curriculum and adapt it to
| all the states, but that's politics more than anything else.
| I'm pretty concerned though, now that I'll be having kids go
| through the system, that the parties involved (teachers,
| administration, politicians) will conspire to avoid doing
| work while avoiding responsibility. But that's local
| politics, not national.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Calculus had this fearsome reputation in high school of
| being terribly difficult. When I finally learned the basics
| of it (in college) I thought "is that all?" Of course, it
| wasn't all at all, but the calculus needed for high school
| physics is pretty simple.
|
| I took every honors class in high school. Everything they
| had. I was _terribly_ , _woefully_ underprepared for
| college. It took a year and a half before I had my legs
| back under me. It was a wonder I didn 't flunk out.
|
| But I had a great time in high school. I had little
| responsibilities, a little money, and lots of friends to
| hang with.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| For certain kids, HS is pretty easy academically, even if
| you play it on hard mode. It comes as a huge shock when
| hitting university in how hard things can get, and how
| you weren't really being challenged with homework you
| could do in class the period before it was due.
|
| Washington state has the option for kids to take some
| college courses in HS. I hope my kid can take advantage
| of that (but he just graduated from Kindergarten, so we
| are a ways off from determining anything).
| WalterBright wrote:
| You can teach basic calculus to high school students in a
| couple hours, if they have a solid understanding of
| algebra.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| Ya. And it really isn't that hard if you have a solid
| understanding of algebra. Linear algebra on the other
| hand...I wish I started earlier on that so I could really
| get all the cool stuff happening in ML today.
| tallytarik wrote:
| > In 8th grade, the teachers were still going over the times
| tables with them.
|
| > In high school "honors" class, the teacher spent an entire
| semester on the concept of "molar mass".
|
| This is not the case everywhere.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Being an Air Force brat, I attended 4 public schools in
| various locales. They were all the same. All ordinary,
| middle class schools.
|
| Average test scores seem to be about the same from then to
| now.
| jeffbee wrote:
| Your experience from > 50 years ago may not be relevant.
| Supermancho wrote:
| I do not expect this trend to reverse, due to increases in carbon
| dioxide levels contributing to a decline in (the way we currently
| measure) intelligence, generation by generation.
| sfblah wrote:
| I have a 13 and a 15 year old, and my opinion is it's the phones.
| opportune wrote:
| I'm in basically the first cohort to get fully fledged (web
| browsing, YouTube, social media, games, porn) unmonitored
| smartphone access at those ages and I think it did not mess me
| up much if at all. I was living in isolated suburbia so it's
| not like playing outside was an option anyway.
|
| If those are a problem, it's more likely to be from getting
| access at a younger age IMO. I have a theory that it's
| primarily the increasing use of video as a medium that is
| damaging. Not only does video prevent building literacy skills,
| it also tends to be used to deliver content that leads to
| parasocial relationships and celebrity worship which is frankly
| concerning IME.
| smogcutter wrote:
| > I was living in isolated suburbia so it's not like playing
| outside was an option anyway.
|
| Obviously not really addressing your childhood in particular,
| but this is insane to me. Isn't playing outside the whole
| point of moving to the suburbs? I grew up in Brooklyn and we
| played outside all day. I have a hard time seeing how more
| space, more grass, and less traffic makes that not really an
| option. Maybe this is a generational thing?
| opportune wrote:
| I think it's a generational thing for sure. I guess when I
| say suburbia I mean something kind of in between culdesac
| master-planned communities (which are easier to play in)
| and an actual urban environment. There are too many roads
| with too many cars, and it's not the 70s anymore, so
| proportionately fewer houses have kids at all, and if they
| do they're not likely to be your school mates. Plus,
| stranger danger came and changed everything. I'm not saying
| no teenagers run around outside anymore but among middle
| class teens it's a lot less common than it was - life is
| more like being shuttled to an fro extracurriculars or
| friends' places by your parents' car.
| no_wizard wrote:
| I know we're talking about kids here, but as an adult, I'm
| _not_ a video learner. I need written material (with good
| examples, usually) to really learn something. I need to
| _read_ to _understand_ and then _apply_ and be able to check
| what I 'm doing against a crop of known good implementations.
|
| The trend in learning, like Frontend Masters, while _amazing_
| for what it is, its all video, and I 'm finding people are
| putting out more and more video to teach topics, and less and
| less written works to teach stuff, and I'm getting more and
| more frustrated at this, as it takes me longer to digest
| videos than written materials.
|
| I don't know how anyone learns to become a developer from
| just watching videos and doing exercises, my pace would be
| that of a snail.
|
| And yes, I get that everyone learns differently, but us who
| learn best from reading are being left out in the cold.
| opportune wrote:
| Oh, completely agree. Same with podcasts honestly. I can
| consume the content way faster, search and skim more
| easily, determine relevancy in a flash with text vs video.
| It's why I have no interest in TikTok and never developed
| the YouTube addiction that seems so common among tweens.
|
| Bringing it back to kids, I realized you could draw some
| parallels to TV. The thing about TV is that you had much
| fewer choices in what to watch and it was harder to "hide"
| from your parents compared to smartphone videos - if your
| parents thought something was stupid they could just
| overhear it and make you turn it off more easily than the
| smartphone equivalent. Also, with TV the branding is
| usually not done on the e-celeb/individual level, it's more
| show-based branding, so it's a little less tilted towards
| parasocial content.
|
| There are a few things driving this trend towards video I
| think, one is that a lot of consumers now are less
| literate/educated than would be on the internet in the
| past, as well as younger with poorer reading skills - video
| has relatively more demand vs text. The other is that
| videos are easier to monetize and from what I understand
| have higher paying ads.
| no_wizard wrote:
| I'd also argue to some degree, that video is easier to
| produce well vs the written word. Its a lot harder to
| become a block buster author than it is to become a block
| buster video feed producer, in my observation.
|
| You're right the continuing trend of less and less
| "serious" readers continues unabated as it has for
| decades
| novalis78 wrote:
| Social media and computer games in general.
| Buttons840 wrote:
| The scores have increased since the 70s until a peak in 2012.
| Social media may play a role, but "computer games in general"
| have existed for decades, and been blamed for decades, and in
| most of those decades test scores have improved. Leave
| blaming "computer games" to the 90s.
| basisword wrote:
| Games have changed significantly though. I feel like the
| PS4 in 2013 was the first games console to make online
| gaming widespread. Playing a self contained game by
| yourself or in person with friends is a very different
| experience to loot boxes, IAP's, and games designed to make
| you play more and more. Maybe it's not impactful but I
| don't think you can dismiss it as easily as you have.
| optimalsolver wrote:
| And this darned, newfangled Internet thing. And don't even get
| me started on printed, moveable type.
| basisword wrote:
| Get yourself a job at one of the social media giants, or one
| of the ad tech companies and see the investments they make
| into engagement and addicting young people to their apps and
| devices. It's appalling. Not many kids are reading articles
| on the internet, they're consuming TikTok for hours. The
| newfangled Internet thing can be a blessing and a curse, and
| it can curse some more than others.
| the_sleaze9 wrote:
| This is an incredibly myopic view, the "internet" is now
| composed of the most psychologically addicting programs known
| to man, and no one is safe. It's so powerful it's having
| meaningful negative impact on our democracy and meaureable
| impact on childrens' mental health.
|
| And here you are.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| It would be like if we completely deregulated all gambling
| and allowed extremely perverted betting systems and
| advertising all around encouraging addiction.
|
| Actually we are going in that direction with all the sports
| betting bullshit too.
| karmakurtisaani wrote:
| No doubt the electronics explain the majority of it. Giving the
| kids a gadget like the phone is the ultimate lazy parenting.
| johndhi wrote:
| How do your kids use phones? What about it hurts the scores?
| missedthecue wrote:
| The way children use smartphones today destroys attention
| spans for one.
| mustacheemperor wrote:
| This is exactly - verbatim - the same theory my parents
| applied to my lagging grades 20 years ago, except then it
| was videogames and the TV.
| sneed_chucker wrote:
| A lot has changed since then.
| AlgorithmicTime wrote:
| [dead]
| missedthecue wrote:
| I've seen my younger cousin pull up his phone for a
| dopamine hit during the 17 seconds he waits for his video
| game loading screen to finish. It just isn't the same as
| it was 20 years ago. The algorithms are crazy and
| extremely effective, and it's all so accessible.
|
| And of course it's not just kids, it's everyone. But kids
| are the only humans that are regularly and uniformly
| tested for aptitude with public results we can all look
| at and discuss. Just for a random statistic to support
| this assertion, over 50% of US adults haven't read a
| single book in the past 12 months. Something that would
| have been unthinkable in the 1990s.
| asdff wrote:
| Are you watching TV when you have a free thirty seconds
| at the urinal? Waiting for the elevator for a minute? The
| red light? Any waking moment at all with the TV in front
| of you? It was certainly not ideal then given how
| addictive marketing on these screens has always been, but
| its even worse now in terms of attention span.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| There was no "algorithm" tuned to swap out the games in
| my nintendo every couple of minutes to keep me drowning
| in dopamine.
| _Algernon_ wrote:
| Reading is more than interpreting simple letters, words,
| sentences or even paragraphs. It is just as much about
| following an argument, retaining information from reading,
| and being critical of the information in parallel. There is
| very little written content of sufficient length to practice
| such skills online, especially content to which children and
| teens would be exposed.
|
| People have always taken the path of least resistance. Radio,
| TV, and now the internet has gradually shifted the path of
| least resistance away from reading.
|
| Not to mention the constant distractions one is constantly
| bombarded with even if one _where to try_. Popup ads,
| newsletter signups, inline gifs and memes, notifications,
| etc. Heck, even Wikipedia breaks up the text with constant
| hyperlinks which break up the linearity of the page.
| techsceptic wrote:
| It seems like we forgot the immense value of an ingrained culture
| of education, where practically all kids get some form of
| schooling. Where I live (Wales, UK), the government statistics on
| school attendance post-Covid are grim, if you are anything less
| than middle class.
| NickBeee wrote:
| And nobody mentions brain damage (proved) from Covid, from each
| infection. Sure, it's because of Lockdowns, nobody ever saw that
| virus can infect some neurons.
| asnyder wrote:
| Related discussion on the NYT piece:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36417375
| dayk995 wrote:
| Yet another anecdote here but I have an 8 year old that had a
| "covid kindergarten" as her teachers call it.
|
| She's now about to finish 2nd grade and is doing a summer reading
| program with her school because she's in the ~40% percent of her
| grade that are behind state standards. As her parent, I almost
| feel helpless here. I want her to enjoy reading. I try not to
| push her "too" hard at home to the point where it's a constant
| fight.
| droopyEyelids wrote:
| One thing that helped me as a kid was that my dad made time for
| us both to sit down and write a free form "story" (really a big
| paragraph) as kids. It could be on any topic but sometimes we'd
| all agree to write on the same topic if we were having trouble
| starting.
|
| My siblings, father, and I would all write one over half an
| hour, and then read them to each other and discuss them.
|
| I did fight it plenty, but in the end it was fun and helped
| make reading and writing more of a natural thing for me.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| May help to go on regular walks with her while reading or
| listening to an audio book to reignite the love of stories.
| basisword wrote:
| I spent my summers at that age reading lots (probably a book per
| week) and spending 6 or more hours a day learning guitar and
| listening to the same handful of CD's. If not doing those things
| I was out with my friends playing a sport in the street. I
| imagine if I was that age now I would be spending a huge amount
| of time on TikTok and the remainder on Netflix. I fall into the
| same traps as an adult with responsibilities despite wanting to
| spend more time reading, playing guitar, and hanging with my
| friends.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| I wouldn't claim I know "the reason", but it often feels like
| there's just a lot less enthusiasm for education and learning in
| the US, across the whole society. My relatives have been screamed
| at every day for decades that teachers are clearly overpowered by
| their unions, or that they are trying to undermine your authority
| as a parent because your local school teaches basic biology, or
| that they're pawns of the gay agenda and trying to turn your kids
| into trans or something, meanwhile actual small town school
| teachers are pretty fucking conservative, including being openly
| and vocally "covid is a hoax" in front of their whole class of
| first graders.
|
| Everyone is convinced they are the smartest one in the room even
| though they haven't read a book in a decade and their child can't
| even do their basic times tables. Meanwhile teachers are finally
| giving up after what amounts to direct abuse for at least 4
| decades, with stagnant pathetic wages, zero support from
| administration, absurd requirements placed on them by people with
| ulterior motives, now bullshit book bans, outright parent hostile
| actions, and nevermind the fact that in many places the
| "requirements" to be a teacher is have an occasional pulse.
|
| Oh, and lets not talk about the abysmal state of education
| materials companies, which are hollowing out and rent seeking
| just like every other corp in the US, so it's not like we are
| even giving our kids helpful tools.
| bityard wrote:
| My son and daughter both went to the same elementary school, but
| at different times. We chose this school in particular because
| was well-funded (for a public school anyway), had a good
| reputation, and was diverse. My daughter is now a teenager and is
| an A and B student. Zero problems academically, other than
| constantly forgetting to turn in already-completed assignments.
| Despite going to the same school and having the same teachers,
| parents, and home life, etc my son is really struggling, though.
| They're both bright kids, but what changed for him?
|
| Two things that I can see. One is that the COVID quarantine,
| while necessary for public safety, set most kids back
| developmentally at least a year, often two. It was far worse for
| younger kids than older kids because Kindergarten through 2nd
| grade are absolutely foundational points in their education. Kids
| who don't get a solid grasp of reading, spelling, and arithmetic
| at this point sometimes never catch up to where they should be.
| Hopefully my son will.
|
| The other is that around the time my son started at the school,
| they got rid of the special education (or whatever is the correct
| phrase) classrooms, laid off those teachers, and put the students
| in regular classes instead. This is going about as well as you'd
| think.
|
| The kids with emotional issues do not get the special attention
| and resources that they need, and the rest of the class is
| severely disrupted to the point that almost no learning gets
| done. According to my wife who works at the school, his class
| this year had four special-needs students in it. My son says that
| these students were constantly disrupting the classroom. They
| bullied the other students, they verbally and physically fought
| with everyone (including teachers), they scream when they don't
| get their way. The teacher is not allowed to send them to the
| office or another room. The whole class didn't get recess for
| over half the year because the teacher couldn't handle the kids
| outside. (One of them would just run right off the school grounds
| every time, apparently.)
|
| The school used to have a strong positivity vibe and a zero-
| tolerance anti-bullying policy. Now, when an emotionally-troubled
| child draws blood on my child (which happened), the response from
| the faculty and staff is so silent it's deafening.
| AlexAndScripts wrote:
| This process of lumping disruptive, frequently violent kids in
| is the norm in the UK. It's pushed by people who are totally
| detached from reality, convinced that it will help students and
| willfully ignorant of its consequences. It's in the same vein
| as mixed sets and the UK's absurd ban on grammar schools.
| woeirua wrote:
| Why are you still sending your kid there? Those are atrocious
| conditions. Complain, loudly, to your school board and vote
| with your feet.
| Glyptodon wrote:
| Since those kids have IEPs the main recourse you have will be
| lawyering up because there are a bunch of backwards incentives
| if someone at the top thinks they can excessively mainstream
| self contained needing kids.
| tuchsen wrote:
| Do ya mind me asking where you are in the country? I ask
| because I have a severely disabled nephew, and if I recall a
| few years before Covid our corner of California tried to get
| rid of special ed in elementary school. It went about as well
| as its going for your kid. My nephew literally couldn't
| integrate with the rest of the class, he's got severe epilepsy,
| even if he could understand the material, he couldn't actually
| write because his hands shake horribly! It was actually insane
| to put him in a normal class, the only thing he could do was
| disrupt it. It was bad for everyone involved.
|
| Fortunately though, they had kept special ed programs at other
| schools nearby and he got transferred pretty quickly for being
| a severe case. It was my understanding that our school district
| backpedaled and reinstated special ed, but maybe that's not the
| case? I thought that it was just a crazy liberal California
| thing, but is this cancelling of special ed a more widespread
| phenomena? Why the hell is that happening?
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| This is common in Seattle schools also: integrate special ed
| kids in normal classrooms to promote equity...and goes as
| well as you would expect.
| alephnerd wrote:
| Not OP but if you're in the Bay Area a lot of that was
| because sales tax revenue collapsed during COVID.
|
| School district budgets are heavily dependent on local taxes,
| which in turn are heavily dependent on sales tax.
|
| Some districts have larger pockets than others due to a
| diverse tax base and thus were able to keep paying for those
| services in each school (eg. Palo Alto, Cupertino, MTV, the
| Tri-Valley districts) but others didn't have as deep pockets
| and as such had to cut down on programs and merge them.
| IG_Semmelweiss wrote:
| Looks like the start of a doom loop.
|
| > ?? > No money in jurisdiction > Cut special Ed >
| Education quality takes a hit for all families > Some
| families move, taking their tax dollars with them > No
| money in jurisdiction
|
| ...
| alephnerd wrote:
| Not really.
|
| Sales Tax and Property Taxes recovered by 2022-23 in most
| counties within the Bay Area (excluding SF county which
| only represents 9-10% of the Bay's population) as RTO
| began being enforced, Asian and South American tourists
| returned (with some new countries now - lots of Thai and
| Argentine tourists now beyond the traditional
| SK/PRC/IN/HK tourists), and the spike in high value
| property sales refilled coffers.
|
| That said, the 1-2 school years spent remotely will
| continue to have a statistical impact in the coming
| years.
| [deleted]
| themaninthedark wrote:
| One thing I notice that you do not take in account nor do the
| child comments is that you are comparing your daughter to your
| son.
|
| Boys have more challenges with academics starting in late
| elementary school up to high school.
| https://www.apa.org/monitor/2023/04/boys-school-challenges-r...
|
| This has been known for a while yet does not receive any real
| attention.
| AlexAndScripts wrote:
| An interesting related statistic is that women tend to be
| biast against boys on average, while male teachers have no
| bias against girls.
|
| From personal experience: It does not receive any attention
| because of the widespread belief in education that to point
| out a problem for boys is to claim that everything is perfect
| for girls, or that boys have it easier than girls in general,
| which is then taken as misogyny, and so the fact is
| dismissed. That, or the fact is acknowledged and what-about-
| ism follows.
|
| It's a shame. I doubt there will be progress on this issue
| any time soon.
| hguant wrote:
| >This has been known for a while yet does not receive any
| real attention.
|
| because school teachers are overwhelmingly female, and
| overwhelming biased against male students? And there's a
| political/cultural movement built around promoting female
| academic advancement, while no such movement exists for male
| students?
|
| >Results show that, when comparing students who have
| identical subject-specific competence, teachers are more
| likely to give higher grades to girls. Furthermore, they
| demonstrate for the first time that this grading premium
| favouring girls is systemic, as teacher and classroom
| characteristics play a negligible role in reducing it.
|
| https://mitili.mit.edu/sites/default/files/project-
| documents...
|
| https://economics.uq.edu.au/article/2021/12/teacher-
| gender-b...
|
| https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/01425692.2022.21.
| ..
| alephnerd wrote:
| > they got rid of the special education (or whatever is the
| correct phrase) classrooms, laid off those teachers
|
| How did they lay off special education teachers?
|
| Special Education is funded via the Federal DoE because of a
| mix of requirements from the ADA and NCLB.
|
| Unless you mean low severity student cases which might not be
| classified as SpED.
|
| Edit: Now that I think about it, it might be dependent on your
| school district and state's fiscal condition too. There might
| have been a reclassification done by the school district as a
| personnel cutting measure
|
| Source: Mom's a Special Education teacher.
| Scubabear68 wrote:
| In NJ, there is a severe deficiency in this in many schools,
| and federal funding does not come into play directly. Here,
| when your school can't provide services, they can be forced
| to pay for another school that offers those services. Our
| district spends hundreds of thousands of dollars a year
| paying for out of district schooling because they don't have
| the resources themselves.
| alephnerd wrote:
| That makes sense. How is the fiscal health of school
| districts in NJ? I'd assume they aren't the greatest
| because of how Balkanized NJ local govt seems to be, but
| you guys also have variable property taxes and that might
| make it better than a lot of those in CA.
| Scubabear68 wrote:
| It is all over the place. Some districts are great, some
| are terrible. There is a theoretical framework of
| accountability at the County and State level, but it is
| not enforced hardly at all.
|
| So it is up to local school boards and superintendents,
| and the local municipal tax levy. Most medium and small
| districts' BOE members are regular citizens who are
| elected with no qualifications at all, and lean on the
| Superintendent for everything. So if you get a bad one
| (and it is common), your district is screwed for many
| years.
| kjellsbells wrote:
| The saying, "Every idea contains the seeds of its own
| destruction" keeps popping into my head.
|
| The notion that children shouldnt be excluded for their
| differences is laudable, and led to IEPs, mainstreaming, and
| lots of progress. And then calcified into dogma that no child
| should be excluded no matter how disruptive they were.
|
| Anti-bullying and "empower yourself to solve your problems"
| became the dogma of zero-tolerance and non-intervention.
| Children and staff are attacked in school and the
| administration doesn't do a thing.
|
| There is plenty of blame to go around, but as a left leaning
| kind of person it is obvious now how calcification of some
| progressive ideas into rigid dogma is sending people screaming
| into the arms of the authoritarian right. Religious schools,
| charter schools, andnthe right wing etc are going to win
| because the combination of entitled parents, frustrated
| teachers, weakened administration and a educational academic
| establishment that has had essentially no intellectual rigor
| while still being able to suggest pedagogical approaches that
| affect millions of children are busy policing one another's
| adherence to dogma.
| idlewords wrote:
| At this rate, if two trains depart their depot at the same time,
| one leaving Wichita eastbound at 45 mph and the other departing
| St. Louis westbound at 58 mph, we may never know where they are
| going to meet, let alone how long it will take them to get there.
| kypro wrote:
| I live in the UK, but a few kids in my family are around this age
| and we've had similar declines in test scores here too. I'll
| comment on a few things I've notice - at least as someone from my
| working class background.
|
| Covid lockdowns were brutal for kids of this age bracket.
|
| Kids in my family were mostly just locked in doors watching
| Netflix and playing video games during lockdowns and did next to
| no physical activity, socialising, or anything mentally
| simulating.
|
| A couple of kids in my family have also developed mental
| illnesses as a result of lockdowns - and I don't use this word
| lightly.
|
| For kids from my background school is really the only opportunity
| they get to experience normality. A space free from all the
| various social issues that plague families from this
| socioeconomic background.
|
| To be more specific here, one kid ended up becoming extremely
| anti-social during the lockdowns since violence is normal and
| common within his household. The other has develop extreme social
| anxiety and depression and now refuses to attend school. I'm sure
| other kids have developed post-Covid anxiety, but those kids
| probably have parents that care enough about their children to
| ensure they attend school.
|
| Obviously if they had better parents this stuff probably wouldn't
| have happened, but school is so important for people of my
| background. It's the only place in their life where order and
| discipline will be enforced. It's also the only place they get to
| socialise with normal people who are not criminals or drug users.
| And the only place they'll get to feel safe.
|
| I have no idea how much of this decline in tests scores is
| related to the pandemic, but if other kids took the pandemic as
| bad the kids in my family then I'm not surprised by this at all.
| BizarreByte wrote:
| > A couple of kids in my family have also developed mental
| illnesses as a result of lockdowns - and I don't use this word
| lightly.
|
| I've witnessed the same among several kids I know, they're
| really suffering and worse yet there's no supports for them. My
| province had some of, if not the strictest measures in Canada
| and honestly people just don't seem okay in general.
|
| I myself got to experience my first psychotic break in 2022
| after never having had any such issues in my life. It is the
| single scariest thing I've ever gone through and it's not an
| understatement to say the last few years have permentantly
| changed me.
| swarfield wrote:
| https://www.wsj.com/articles/pandemic-learning-slide-continu...
|
| Looks like a lot of it can be attributed to covid.
| taeric wrote:
| "Sold a Story" paints a very compelling case for what went wrong
| with reading. I wouldn't be shocked to see some bleed in of that
| across to math, as well. In particular, decoding a word
| phonetically is a very "interact with the characters of the word"
| activity that many students weren't taught for many years.
| Literally teaching you to look around the word for context as a
| starting point for how to interact with a word. The same approach
| in math would reach similarly bad results, I'd wager.
|
| Edit: https://features.apmreports.org/sold-a-story/, in case you
| don't know what I'm referring to.
| scythe wrote:
| It's a nice argument. But it probably isn't a great way to
| explain a decline in performance that was _larger_ in math than
| in reading!
| taeric wrote:
| I'm not pushing it as a total answer. My assertion, though,
| is that reading is a fundamental part of math. We talk about
| them as if they are separate topics, but learning to "read" a
| math statement is a big part of learning how to use a math
| statement.
|
| In very "phonetic" style. You aren't necessarily looking for
| the phonemes, of course, but you are looking for what the
| constituent parts mean. For example, if you see "Sigma x",
| you almost certainly pronounce that as "sum". And you don't
| necessarily do that from "cues" around the symbol/letter
| sigma, but by learning how to decode it at a symbolic level.
| Same would go for "F = ma", you learn to read that as a
| relation of the three symbols. And you can play with it, "if
| that is F, what is m?" You can go further in the exploration
| and start learning units attached to the symbols, such that
| you can put it together.
| isk517 wrote:
| I had a friend who needed to upgrade his math in order to
| qualify for a particular college program and asked me to
| tutor him. Ultimately didn't take very long because he
| showed me a sheet of problems he was working on and I
| noticed right away that he was writing our all of his
| equations horizontally (ex. 1 + x = y = x = y - 1) like one
| would write a sentence. All I had to do to significantly
| increase his grade was show him how to work through
| equations vertically. When I asked why none of his teachers
| berated him for this he said he just did it like he was
| taught. Afterwards I phoned my mother and told her she was
| definitely correct in her assessment that the Catholic
| school I was sent to provided a much higher quality
| education than the public schools in the area.
| [deleted]
| no_wizard wrote:
| Wait, so the idea that I've used for years, which is deriving
| meaning of a word based on context clues around how its used in
| a sentence, is a sham?
|
| I have been doing this my whole life nearly, at this point.
| This hits me hard for some reason. And I tested in the top
| percentiles for reading too! (in 1997, 2004, and 2008)
|
| EDIT: I may be completely misunderstanding this here. Are you
| saying using context for word pronunciation or for trying to
| derive meaning?
| Manuel_D wrote:
| Not the meaning, but the pronunciation. Phonics is about
| teaching the sounds each letter, or letter combination ("th",
| "sh", "ch", etc.) produces and equipping students with the
| ability to sound out words they don't recognize. "whole word"
| approach is geared around making students memorize entire
| words, and hope that they can guess at how to pronounce
| unrecognized words based on context.
|
| You're definitely still supposed to derive meaning from
| context and clues. But you should be able to pronounce the
| word without this context.
| AlanYx wrote:
| Not exactly. Most models of reading involve at least two
| steps: (i) decoding and (ii) assigning meaning. Decoding is
| translating written letters into blended sounds, then meaning
| is assigned.
|
| There is very strong evidence that skilled, fast readers
| rarely rely on context for decoding, and conversely, that
| students who are only taught context-based strategies for
| decoding rather than phonics tend to struggle with reading,
| find it a chore, and have trouble reading quickly.
|
| But for the next step, assigning meaning, context is
| valuable. Skilled readers do use a variety of context clues,
| including images, to infer meaning of words they have not
| encountered before or whose meaning is potentially ambiguous.
| no_wizard wrote:
| okay gotcha.
|
| I'm definitely talking about the second example here (
| _assigning meaning_ ). I learned Phonics as a kid (Hooked
| On Phonics and all that), guess I never thought about it
| much as an adult.
|
| Though I'm not the fastest reader, my retention is
| typically higher than average, even as I age, and I wonder
| if that has anything to do with it.
| taeric wrote:
| Yeah, the story is about how phonics was basically
| abandoned. And how disastrous that has been for reading
| education.
| gizmo686 wrote:
| What is being discussed is using context clues to determine
| what a word is, in the sense of mapping the sequence of
| symbols on paper to a word. When you teach children to read,
| you want to use words that they already know.
|
| Once you have the word, infering the meaning of it is a
| seperate skill.
| taeric wrote:
| I mean, sorta? Odds are super high that you learned to decode
| a word into constituent parts. This includes syllables,
| letters, and phonemes. For some languages, this also includes
| gender, tense, etc.
|
| The sham is that you can basically learn to read by learning
| to predict the missing word in a sentence all of the time.
| And that you can treat words in a phonetic alphabet as the
| same as words from a logographic set. To the point that many
| teachings flat out ignore the phonetic breakdown of how to
| decode a word. This is often hilariously displayed by having
| people not realize that English uses a phonetic symbol set.
|
| To your edit, both? I used the example of "sake" earlier.
| Just decoding that word, you can see roughly how it can be
| pronounced. Knowing that I said I was "drinking sake" likely
| changed how you originally pronounced it. But if you don't
| know what sake is, then it will take a lot of context to fill
| in the meaning for you.
|
| And a lot of learning is pitting words against expected
| meanings. Amelia Bedelia is a great set of books that go into
| this. Such that, yes, you almost certainly have to use
| context to really get the meaning of words, but you need to
| know how to decode words for a lot of that context to work
| out.
| droopyEyelids wrote:
| As we went over in the last discussion, "Sold a Story" can be a
| grueling podcast because of the ratio of information to cliff
| hangers.
|
| The short version, and maybe the entirety of the information in
| the 15+ hours of podcast is:
|
| Phonics works. While some kids can learn to read English
| without phonics, many kids can't, and there are periodic trends
| to teach reading without phonics, which causes a lot of
| problems when a school district follows one of those trends.
| morkalork wrote:
| >You shall know a word by the company it keeps.
| AlanYx wrote:
| There was a fantastic Hacker News discussion about Sold a Story
| a few months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35599181
|
| Apparently the same sort of analysis with math isn't quite as
| straightforward. There is some evidence that pure
| constructivism is not successful with struggling math students.
| But unlike reading instruction where skilled readers never use
| the strategies taught in things like three-cueing (for
| "decoding", anyway), skilled mathematicians do approach novel
| problems in an exploratory manner.
| taeric wrote:
| Oddly, I'd expect skilled readers do use cueing. But, I'd
| expect that understanding and interpreting the different cues
| around requires experience. I also expect that it is never
| done "blind" on the word. For example, if you see the word
| "sake", cues let you know if it is one or two syllables. But
| the cues alone are almost certainly not usable for
| determining what word would appear somewhere. (edit: LLMs and
| an interpretation of them being only the connection of cues
| not withstanding.)
| mrangle wrote:
| Huge mystery. Will never be solved.
| alkibiades wrote:
| [flagged]
| kaonashi wrote:
| gotta wonder how much mental decline due to covid exposure is
| contributing
|
| https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8715665/
| brigadier132 wrote:
| Teaching philosophy in the US is deeply flawed. Memorization has
| been deemphasized and "understanding" is being promoted. Ask the
| proponents of "understanding" and "critical thinking" based
| education to explain what the terms actually mean.
|
| I have a simple definition of "understanding".
|
| Understanding is when you've developed an accurate, predictive,
| mental model for some topic.
|
| It's much easier to develop an accurate mental model when you
| memorize all the components of some topic.
|
| I think memorization is deemphasized because memorization is
| painful and benefits from having an invested family that will
| encourage and even force the student to practice.
| alyandon wrote:
| As a parent with a child in public grade school, the whole rote
| memorization of facts vs trying to help him understand and
| think isn't the real problem.
|
| The thing that makes him an A/B student (and sometimes almost
| C) instead of a straight A student is that my ability to help
| him is virtually nil because all his tests, classwork and even
| homework are done electronically. I never get to see an actual
| graded copy of anything that would tell me exactly where he is
| struggling. Instead, I'm supposed to trust that he is getting
| adequate guidance from his teacher when they review classwork
| but given a classroom size of 20+ students I have serious
| doubts that that is actually happening.
|
| I hate to say it - but I really am coming around to the idea
| that having computers in classrooms and digitization of tests,
| classwork and homework is actually a hindrance to learning
| because of the missing feedback loop. :-/
| spywaregorilla wrote:
| Why are you less able to ask to see the electronic version
| than the paper version? I don't think kids are eagerly
| sharing their graded papers with their parents otherwise.
| alyandon wrote:
| In most cases, it is a result of the teacher immediately
| "closing" the assignment/test after it has been submitted
| and you are only then able to see the final score.
|
| For the couple of teachers that actually use canvas
| properly, I am actually able to see his answers and see
| which ones he missed and work with him to help him better
| understand.
| otoburb wrote:
| In such a situation, a (possibly poor) mitigation would
| be to ask your child to go through practice standardized
| tests (e.g. 10th grade PSAT, SAT, ACT) earlier to see
| which areas they might need help with.
|
| At least you'd have a (little) bit more visibility into
| possible areas to work on with your child in the future
| instead of the black box that you are both currently
| facing.
| spywaregorilla wrote:
| I have fond memories of my calculus teacher being confused when
| she realized everybody had been made to memorize basic trig
| identities in the previous grade but were never taught their
| very basic and intuitive relationship and derivation from the
| Pythagorean theorem.
|
| A great shocked pikachu moment for the class to realize,
| collectively, that they were all being dumbasses in their empty
| understanding of things.
| brigadier132 wrote:
| > but were never taught their very basic and intuitive
| relationship and derivation from the Pythagorean theorem
|
| And how is this not just another fact to be memorized?
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