[HN Gopher] U.S. math scores drop on major international test
___________________________________________________________________
U.S. math scores drop on major international test
Author : akantler
Score : 124 points
Date : 2024-12-10 17:24 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.chalkbeat.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.chalkbeat.org)
| josefritzishere wrote:
| The article seems to be pushing a Covid-causation narrative
| without any evidence. Covid was a global pandemic, the claim that
| it somehow dissproportionately affected the US requires evidence.
| addicted232 wrote:
| And that's even sillier considering the strictest parts of the
| US had much more lax regulations than much of the rest of the
| world.
| dyauspitr wrote:
| It seems like there was a drop across the board for the most
| part though.
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| We're in the top 10 for international death rates related to
| covid so "disproportionately affected" isn't without some
| evidence
| zug_zug wrote:
| Probably only because we reported it better.
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| it's not, it's been years since, it's not a mystery
| zug_zug wrote:
| I don't think you understand. USA had exponentially
| higher reported deaths because we tested probably 10 to
| 100x as much as your average country.
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| I understand very well, you're spreading common
| misinformation that was debunked years ago.
|
| When we look at the _overall death rate_ during the
| pandemic (i.e., completely disregarding covid tests), it
| 's still true that the US had a much higher increase in
| deaths than most of the world.
|
| Even if you limit this to places where reporting is
| fairly accurate (the first world, or even just rich
| European countries), it's still true.
|
| The "because we tested more" line is complete nonsense,
| we can literally count the people missing and end up with
| a very similar result.
| honkycat wrote:
| other countries did social distancing and got it out of the way
| much faster. We drug it out for years due to incompetence.
| ACow_Adonis wrote:
| Literally the article:
|
| "The extent of the decline seems to be driven by the lowest
| performing students losing more ground, a worrying trend that
| predates the pandemic."
|
| "The TIMSS results echoed the 2022 findings of the National
| Assessment of Educational Progress or NAEP, which saw major
| declines in math scores among both fourth and eighth graders.
| American students' scores actually started to decline before
| the pandemic for reasons that are not entirely clear."
|
| "This gap between high- and low-performing students started to
| widen before the pandemic for reasons that are unclear. Since
| then, other research into post-pandemic academic performance
| has found widening gaps across race and income, even as many
| middle and higher income students are doing well."
|
| Hacker News commenter:
|
| "The article seems to be pushing a Covid-causation narrative
| without any evidence."
| PittleyDunkin wrote:
| I'm much more worried about literacy, frankly. Understanding
| numbers is quite important but this understanding doesn't mean
| much if you can't interpret their meaning in context.
|
| I live in an extremely poor city and I would estimate about half
| the adults I interact with cannot read, write, or articulate
| anywhere near the level you'd expect from the high school I went
| to twenty years ago. And I believe the problem is getting _much,
| much_ worse with the rise of youtube and the collapse of diction
| into a shared set of social-media memes--if you can 't express
| yourself through those memes, you may not be able to communicate
| well at all.
|
| Some portion of this can be written off to being a very
| attractive immigration target for those, like most, who don't
| speak english as their native language. I don't want to entirely
| write this off to a money/social/government/education problem--
| it's more complicated than any single narrative can convey. But I
| am firmly convinced we are looking at decades of literacy
| continuing to fall. If we can't figure out a way to collectively
| parent each other and resolve this, I can't imagine this is going
| to result in the kind of social and economic stability most
| people generally desire.
| ksymph wrote:
| To play devil's advocate: why does it matter? The purpose of
| language is communication, so it could be argued that if people
| feel they're able to understand and be understood sufficiently,
| classic ideas of literacy aren't really a useful metric. I
| suppose what modern language usage lacks in depth it makes up
| for in brevity and clarity, which seems like a natural
| correction to the low signal to noise ratio of a heavily
| interconnected world.
|
| Edit - I don't mean to challenge the value of literacy so much
| as speculate whether falling test scores necessarily indicate
| the loss of that value. Language, how it's used, and how
| changes spread are all very different in the information age.
| How do we know traditional literacy tests accurately measure
| the role it plays in people's lives now?
|
| As an example, written communication used to primarily take the
| form of writing letters. With instant communication, ability to
| put thoughts into words quickly has a higher relative impact on
| communication compared to being able to spend as much time as
| needed to find the perfect words to convey a message.
| axus wrote:
| "Don't you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow
| the range of thought? In the end we shall make thought-crime
| literally impossible, because there will be no words in which
| to express it. Every concept that can ever be needed will be
| expressed by exactly one word, with its meaning rigidly
| defined and all its subsidiary meanings rubbed out and
| forgotten. . . . The process will still be continuing long
| after you and I are dead. Every year fewer and fewer words,
| and the range of consciousness always a little smaller. Even
| now, of course, there's no reason or excuse for committing
| thought-crime. It's merely a question of self-discipline,
| reality-control. But in the end there won't be any need even
| for that. . . . Has it ever occurred to you, Winston, that by
| the year 2050, at the very latest, not a single human being
| will be alive who could understand such a conversation as we
| are having now?"
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| the bar of being a productive member of society is much
| higher than "sufficient communication" (which I would argue
| the illiterate aren't capable of anyway)
| recursive wrote:
| > they're able to understand and be understood sufficiently
|
| Communication isn't all or nothing. The more expressive power
| you have, the wider the scope of ideas you can communicate.
| It may be minimally sufficient to be able to communicate "me
| hungry" or "that crazy", but more is probably still better.
| robbiewxyz wrote:
| To add to this, expressive power also makes it possible to
| communicate nuance and discuss biases and fallacies.
| Pigalowda wrote:
| It matters because of entropy. How many people can society
| carry before it suddenly can't? Civilization doesn't persist
| from inertia.
| robbiewxyz wrote:
| > The purpose of language is communication
|
| It isn't this simple. Literacy plays an important role in
| information assessment and in decision making. It's strongly
| associated with health, success in personal finances and
| career path, and relationship satisfaction, to name just a
| few areas that have published papers readily accessible
| online.
|
| To get a look at the ugly side of this, high demand religious
| groups are a fascinating case study. Constant circulation of
| repetitive cliches is a key mechanism for isolating their
| members and making them easier to manipulate.
| PittleyDunkin wrote:
| I should have made my point clearer that I believe low
| literacy rates hurt your ability to articulate yourself and
| to understand others and even engage in basic reasoning well
| outside the written word, and that this is (often)
| detrimental to your ability to navigate the world. I
| certainly enjoy engaging in memes and jargon and slang too--
| in fact it's a great joy in life to find new words and
| manners of expression and to look beyond what worked
| yesterday--and much of this _is_ just as expressive as formal
| or classically-analytical english, if not more so given the
| baggage words tend to acquire over time. But that 's not what
| I was referring to at all.
| ksymph wrote:
| I should have made my point/question clearer too; I agree
| that literacy is valuable for all the reasons you outline.
|
| Tests are only as useful as what they measure. The
| qualitative changes to communication _could_ have impacted
| the quantitative changes we 're seeing (i.e. lower literacy
| rates). How much, in what ways, I have no idea; I was
| hoping to learn more by sparking discussion.
|
| Unfortunately (and ironically) my poor choice of words has
| instead led to my apparent taking of an anti-literacy
| stance. Oh well.
| BobaFloutist wrote:
| Public schools have been teaching "cueing" instead of phonics
| for a couple of decades, despite research showing that
| it...makes kids worse readers. This is finally changing.
| https://www.apmreports.org/episode/2019/08/22/whats-wrong-ho...
| bushbaba wrote:
| Public Schools near me in SF Bay area are more focused on
| political ideology than improving kids ability to attain
| Literary, Math, and Science education. There is a push for
| Equity over Achievement, by bringing the top performers down
| to raise the bottom. However the top performers have left for
| private school, and Public institutions declined. It's a
| downward spiral. There's hope it'll change either through
| full dissolution of the public institution (voucher programs)
| or through the dissolution of such "equity at all cost"
| political ideology.
| prisenco wrote:
| This situation, where it is true at all, is a vanishingly
| small minority when accounting for these across-the-board
| downward shifts in national data. Oppose it locally if you
| wish but extrapolating your local situation to a national
| level doesn't hold up.
|
| Whereas at least 75% of elementary students nationwide are
| learning cueing, so starting there makes more sense.
| HDThoreaun wrote:
| This was basically only in NYC from my understanding.
| Everyone Ive asked learned via phonics
| kvmet wrote:
| Phonics certainly doesn't _feel_ like the best way to teach
| English, but hopefully we now have enough data to show that
| it is at least acceptable. A big factor too is "can it be
| taught at scale". You don't only have to teach the students,
| you have to teach the teachers how to teach the new methods.
| Much like NCLB, these changes are well-meaning but we really
| need to stop rolling things out nationally only to find out
| they harm outcomes.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| > Phonics certainly doesn't _feel_ like the best way to
| teach English
|
| Phonics is not about "teaching English" in some fuzzy
| generic sense, it's specifically aimed towards teaching
| English _written orthography_ , starting from its
| phonetics. I.e. teaching fluent _speakers_ of English to
| read.
| anon291 wrote:
| Why doesn't phonics _feel_ like the best way to teach
| English? This is a minority opinion I would think.
| tootie wrote:
| Exhibit A: https://www.economist.com/finance-and-
| economics/2024/12/10/a...
|
| It's a nearly global trend that literacy and numeracy are
| decreasing and not just in students, but in adults. I can only
| wave my hands and say "pandemic" otherwise I have no clue
| what's going on.
| manquer wrote:
| Ability to read does not correlate interest to read or more
| importantly ability to understand
|
| Why is literacy important ? I don't think it is important at
| all.
|
| it is overrated today, it was far more important in the days
| when mass communication was largely written. It is not longer
| the case, cost and ease of video and audio publishing is
| extremely cheap.
|
| The issues in written communication are beyond production cost
| of writing, there are limits what can be described and how
| difficult it is do so for a large audience to understand, there
| is a reason why good authors historically were very
| influential.
|
| It is also more volume limited than say even speech/audio, you
| can say lot more with lot more meaning(using non verbal and non
| lingual sounds) in the same time it takes to read.
|
| Don't get me wrong, it is a wonderful format, but is no
| different than painting versus photography and now animation,
| you can do great art by working with the limits of the medium,
| but it depends on the consumer to use his "imagination" to
| understand. Just as paintings were actual tools of
| communication in a bygone era and are art today and can be
| appreciated as such so is written communication, it is not
| essential mass communication tool that people need to really
| learn anymore.
|
| ---
|
| It is far important to be able to critically think for yourself
| and question the information presented to you and be able to
| understand the mathematics needed to do the above and navigate
| life.
|
| The need for widespread literacy is relatively new, of only few
| hundred, and was result of drop in the cost of written
| publishing which made it the most popular form of mass
| communications. More effective means of communication including
| speech and video have become cheaper and becoming even more
| cheaper with AI.
|
| ---
|
| This association of intelligence or critical thinking skills to
| literacy is flawed and frankly elitist it is merely a function
| of schooling.
|
| I grew up in a country where literacy is a still a problem
| particularly amongst older generation not because they didn't
| learn properly in school because they didn't ever go to one.
|
| I know just as many smart thinkers, world aware, inventors who
| are illiterate as I know dumb, idiotic literates. The country
| is larger, poorer than America yet has more robust political
| process that is diverse, with more involved electorate even if
| what the people want is at times authoritarian , there is no
| denying the robustness of democracy itself.
|
| The difference is the uneducated would likely picked up
| literacy if they had the opportunity, what we have in America
| is people failing to learn despite given the opportunity to do.
|
| The issue is deeper than literacy as a skill, it is a poor
| proxy for other skills actually needed in life and becomes more
| weakly correlated in the future .
| anon291 wrote:
| > Ability to read does not correlate interest to read or more
| importantly ability to understand
|
| It may not correlate, but it does _condition_.
|
| That is to say, one can have 100% interest in reading, but if
| you can only read 1% of published works, you will be just as
| good as someone who is a perfect reader but only 1%
| interested in reading.
|
| Similarly, with comprehension.
|
| Reading well is necessary to be interested enough to read
| more and to comprehend.
| slt2021 wrote:
| this is because of Youtube and kids screen time.
|
| Tablets/Phones/screen time disables cognitive abilities of kids
| and reduces them to dumb clicking machines.
|
| Schools were doing pretty lousy job before proliferation of
| screens, and I have little hope they can do anything better. The
| recent dumbing down the math curriculum is just a last straw to
| keep students not failing on paper.
|
| check movements like Wait Until 8th https://www.waituntil8th.org/
| if you want to learn more
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| Yes, but only because the people in control of the screen are
| paid to reduce the user to a dumb clicking machine.
|
| Blaming the screen distracts from the fact that this is by
| design, and fixing it means rethinking the incentives of that
| designer.
| slt2021 wrote:
| Screen time is basically Tobacco of the 21st century
| jb1991 wrote:
| More like crack cocaine.
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| I'd say tobacco is more insidious.
| ryandrake wrote:
| Or maybe like Dungeons and Dragons, Rock and Roll, Harry
| Potter and other things parents got hysterical about but
| turned out to not actually lead us into evil. The jury
| seems to be still out. We don't really know yet if
| "screens" are bad, but that hasn't stopped a lot of
| people from pointing their fingers at them.
| Tade0 wrote:
| What we know about screens so far is that they're the
| perfect distraction and put processing of emotions on
| hold. That in turn creates a backlog which, as it grows,
| makes the person increasingly miserable.
|
| Personally I use the amount of screen time as an
| indicator of how bad I'm doing mentally at the moment.
|
| And therein lies the crux of the issue: we optimised
| ourselves out of downtime which traditionally allowed us
| to deal with emotions. Screens are just a side effect.
| nostrademons wrote:
| Nah, screen time is the video games (1980s) of the 21st
| century, or the TV (1960s), or the radio (1930s), or the
| gin (1800s).
|
| I'm on mobile now, but if I were on desktop I'd dig up Clay
| Shirky's essay on gin and the Industrial Revolution. There
| has _always_ been a moral panic about new forms of
| entertainment and time-wasting, because people look at
| these diversions and think "Why don't people use all that
| time to benefit society (ie me)?" That's just a refusal to
| admit that people don't have any obligation to you or
| larger society, and fundamentally are out to make
| themselves feel good.
| ajsnigrutin wrote:
| Let's be fair, replacing involved parenting with any of
| those is bad and was bad in the past.
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| a contributing factor for sure... but this is a lot more
| complicated than a single factor, and is an endemic problem to
| the whole of american society
|
| I'll also point out that whats additionally concerning is that
| parent's behaviors regarding smartphones can be even worse, at
| least kids aren't regularly operating heavy machinery.
| WillAdams wrote:
| Yes, but what if the kids instead did:
|
| https://www.khanacademy.org/
|
| or spent time watching:
|
| https://ocw.mit.edu/
|
| or used their screens to read and experiment with:
|
| https://mathcs.clarku.edu/~djoyce/java/elements/elements.htm...
|
| or
|
| https://www.motionmountain.net/
|
| or even:
|
| https://apps.apple.com/us/app/the-elements-by-theodore-gray/...
|
| Or at a younger level:
|
| https://wanderfulstorybooks.com/products
| bunderbunder wrote:
| I haven't followed up in a while, but last I did the research
| indicates that digital media generally underperform good old-
| fashioned print books in terms of learning outcomes.
|
| They're certainly more enjoyable and easier to breeze
| through, which is a large factor behind their popularity. But
| I suspect that that might also be why they're less good for
| learning. Cognitive load is an important factor in forming
| strong memories of things you're studying, and optimal levels
| of cognitive load are inherently uncomfortable.
| WillAdams wrote:
| Yeah, but I grew up in a rural county in Virginia where
| when we first moved there, the county library was a carrel
| of used paperbacks in the basement of the old courthouse
| --- some sort of book, even if on a screen should be way
| better than no book.
|
| How do e-ink e-book readers fare? I do pretty well reading
| every evening on my Kindle Paperwhite, and have a fair
| quantity of notes on my Kindle Scribe, as well as using it
| for reference for technical subjects.
|
| Whatever happened with "One Laptop Per Child"? Apparently
| it's now an Android tablet?
|
| https://www.fastcompany.com/section/one-laptop-per-child
| slt2021 wrote:
| Kindle for kids is the best purchase you can make.
|
| I either buy kindle unlimited subscription or find
| pirated epub
| WillAdams wrote:
| Why not Project Gutenberg?
| slt2021 wrote:
| thank you, didnt know about it
| WillAdams wrote:
| Project Gutenberg and the matching audiobook effort at
| Librivox are two of the best things on the internet (and
| I say that as a person who struggled to get corrections
| accepted by PG, but fortunately, Michael S. Hart, the
| founder intervened).
| mrguyorama wrote:
| >Whatever happened with "One Laptop Per Child"?
| Apparently it's now an Android tablet?
|
| It was a pretty huge failure. They couldn't produce a
| laptop as cheap as they initially wanted, power
| infrastructure to recharge them was just not there, and
| most importantly, the prime belief of "just give everyone
| a computer and education will magically improve" of
| technologists has not born out at all.
|
| The vast majority of "technology" that got injected into
| classrooms has had zero impact. Your average teacher is
| not given the time, material, money, or experience to
| leverage the technology in a way that multiplies their
| ability to educate.
|
| My mother is a renowned teacher in the state, since about
| the late 80s, and lived through both the proliferation of
| technology in education in general, and specifically the
| "MLTI" program that gave every single Maine middle school
| student a personal iBook laptop to use. In the 80s, she
| learned how to program BASIC in school. In the 90s, she
| used the nascent internet, before Google, to research my
| sister's medical condition to discover treatments and
| support and resources despite literal poverty and living
| 500 miles from the nearest hospital that even had
| familiarity with the problem. In the 2000s, she digitized
| her gradebook and started to keep in touch with parents
| through regular email, and learned how to use digital
| tools to build tests and homework assignments. During the
| 2010s, she had an entire corpus of digital test systems
| that could autogenerate completely new and distinct tests
| from a single click. Over COVID, she attempted to teach
| herself OBS to improve the production quality of her
| remote lessons. Despite her empirical experience with
| tech in education, despite her outright buy-in of new
| techniques to improve her teaching, despite her
| willingness to learn new methods, none of it really
| improved her ability to teach a body of students a
| lesson.
|
| The vast majority of teachers in all the schools in
| northern Maine had _less_ aptitude with tech than she did
| and barely used any of the tech, and NONE of their
| lessons were less useful for it. The best use of "tech"
| I experienced during education was ONE teacher using a
| shared notebook application to digitize their entire
| lesson into digital notes that were automatically
| distributed to the class in a nice way that could be
| referenced, and that did not educate students better than
| a Xerox'd handout.
|
| Tech is simply not a force multiplier in education. It's
| almost entirely a farce in fact. Khan academy has
| probably helped a few people improve their understanding
| on a few topics, but it's been two decades since Ivy
| League colleges first offered massively open online
| classes, and they have not moved any needle on education,
| as this very article shows.
|
| The reality is that motivated people who _want to learn_
| haven 't been hurting for information access since the
| proliferation of public libraries. Even in my shithole,
| dead end rural town, we had a Carnegie library that could
| borrow a book on any topic from most other libraries
| across the country. Any book that existed could be yours
| within a week or so. By the 90s, digital encyclopedias
| were in vogue and also pretty good.
|
| The primary difficulty in teaching children anything is
| motivation. You can't really teach a child that doesn't
| want to learn. Kids in the US want to learn less than
| they previously did. Part of this is that education is no
| longer seen as an easy way to money, with those kids
| instead thinking they'll just become fortnite streamers
| or influencers or grifters. The large cohort of children
| of evangelical and fundamentalist families have never had
| it easier to deny things taught to children either, as we
| are seeing an outright anti-intellectualism we haven't
| seen since the scopes-monkey trial. Kids see their
| parents diss education. Kids don't think education is
| important.
| prisenco wrote:
| When I first learned to code, google had yet to be founded
| and we had no internet. I had to go to the library and buy
| books that were much too hard for me and bang my head
| against the crt monitor until I got things to work.
|
| Now I have access to YouTube tutorials, hacker news, reddit
| forums, personalized instruction via AI... and I still feel
| like sitting down with a book, a pen and a notebook or a
| disconnected computer with a compiler is the way I learn
| best.
|
| Problem is, it doesn't feel _efficient_. At my age I have
| too many pressures to learn as efficiently as possible but
| not necessarily as deeply as possible. And doing both might
| well be impossible.
| MisterTea wrote:
| > I haven't followed up in a while, but last I did the
| research indicates that digital media generally under
| perform good old-fashioned print books in terms of learning
| outcomes.
|
| I bet a lot of that has to do with the fact that you cant
| open a new tab in a book to watch youtube or browse the
| web. You're stuck with whatever book you decided to open.
| Liquix wrote:
| i mean, that would be excellent, but that's not what children
| will use the internet for when unsupervised and immature.
| there's nothing wrong with accessing educational texts or
| using computers as classroom/teaching aids.
|
| kids under a certain age should not have an internet-
| connected dopamine dispenser in their pocket as it is
| incredibly detrimental to their development.
| azemetre wrote:
| IDK why we expect kids, whose brains are still being
| developed, to make perfectly rational decisions when adults
| struggle with this as well.
|
| Is there a psychology equivalent of the spherical cow in
| physics?
| WillAdams wrote:
| Show them the movie _Idiocracy_ at a young age?
|
| Maybe set up a society where intellectual effort and
| achievement is rewarded and teachers get paid well enough
| to make being knowledgeable seem a laudable thing?
| VincentEvans wrote:
| I think we are observing a shift of tectonic proportions
| in the opposite direction that is picking up steam each
| year, at least from the US perspective: flat earth
| movement, vaccine skepticism, climate change denial, "you
| don't need college" meme, anti-intellectualism of the
| sort of "your educated opinion is no better than my
| pulled out of the ass opinion", defunding of public
| education, calls to eliminate Department of Education...
| I could probably name more, but this seems like enough.
|
| And this before we get into structural things that seem
| to be designed to thwart the goals of advancing knowledge
| economy: soaring costs of higher education, making
| college loans non dischargeable in bankruptcy, schools
| unable to eject disruptive students that are at the same
| time burdened with security preparedness caused by
| constant active shooter threat.
| threatofrain wrote:
| No, no, no. We can't be in 2024 post COVID and wondering why
| we can't just say "Oh look, a laptop and world class
| pedagogical videos, go ahead." Because every other educator,
| administrator, parent, and entrepreneur has tried this.
|
| We all know that Khan Academy is top class material, but it's
| not even close to enough.
| red_admiral wrote:
| If you give kids devices with screens and internet access, I
| am afraid I think they will not spend most of their time on
| those sites.
| hooverd wrote:
| Yes, just don't give them a smart phone.
| honkycat wrote:
| Give me a break lmao
|
| no it's not. it is because our schools are underfunded and our
| people have gone through multiple massive market contractions.
|
| We don't put enough money into our schools. Our teachers are
| incredibly overworked and underpaid.
|
| You can't get blood from a stone. If you make being an educator
| a loser job that doesn't make any money, ONLY LOSERS WILL DO
| IT. And then the loser teachers do a shitty job teaching your
| kids, because why bother if you are never rewarded for trying?
|
| I would have LOVED the self-learning resources kids have today.
| When I was growing up, you had a textbook. Now they have
| Brilliant and endless youtube tutorials.
| reliabilityguy wrote:
| > it is because our schools are underfunded
|
| Do you have any data to back this up?
|
| NYC spends about $40,000/student (including teaches benefits,
| or $23,000/student without benefits and capital expenses) on
| average and the results are, how do I put it, suboptimal.
| Schools in the London spend $9,000/student. The CoL between
| NYC and London is similar. So, how much more money should we
| pour into DOEs to achieve better results?
|
| In other words: our schools fail not because of the lack of
| funding (on average, some probably are worse because they
| have no money), but for totally different reasons.
| LargeWu wrote:
| I think it could be argued the problem isn't schools, but
| families. Or, more precisely, a large subset of families
| with school aged children do not value education, whether
| out of apathy or survival. Educational outcomes across
| socioeconomic strata vary greatly in the USA. Schools
| cannot educate kids that are not invested in their own
| education.
|
| I think if you corrected for household income, the
| disparities between NYC and London would be significantly
| smaller. My hypothesis is that students from upper- and
| middle-class households would come out looking fine, but
| lower-class students would lag significantly.
| nostrademons wrote:
| It's motivation.
|
| Kids aren't stupid. They see their elders (Millennials)
| outperform in school, all go to college, get buried in
| student debt, and then have no jobs or money to show for
| it.
|
| When it comes to making a memecoin and shilling it for a
| quick $50k in profit, you'd be amazed at how many subpar
| students can very quickly master some pretty complex
| technologies if there's a quick buck involved.
| slt2021 wrote:
| Capitalism/invisible market hand is reallocating labor
| resources in the most efficient way (thanks to low
| interest rates)
| GeoAtreides wrote:
| >I would have LOVED the self-learning resources kids have
| today. When I was growing up, you had a textbook. Now they
| have Brilliant and endless youtube tutorials.
|
| Do you think that's what the kids are doing with their
| screens? Watching youtube tutorials? Dedicating hours each
| days to education content?
|
| Because I don't. I think they're glued to tiktok, youtube
| shorts and they're doing their homeworks with chatGPT, while
| reading nothing and getting fat on McDonald's.
| alaxhn wrote:
| Ok, I'll bite.
|
| Your thesis is that we are having poor educational outcomes
| due to poor funding of schools. Based on the latest numbers I
| could find, funding per pupil was $15,591 in 2022. Because of
| "cost disease", I would hypothesis that it makes sense to
| adjust for GDP per capita (a teacher in Poland might be just
| as good as a teacher in America but paid but be paid ~4x less
| and the primary cost in education is labor). GDP per capita
| in 2022 was $77,246. So per pupil we spend ~(15,591/77,246)
| people worth of labor on their education or .201 of a person.
|
| I notice Norway is on the list ahead of us and I often see
| them being called out as a country with policies and outcomes
| that are more close to ideal (although to be honest Asian
| countries dominate the list!) so let's look at their ration..
|
| In 2023 Norway spend $18,207 per pupil while gdp was 87,961
| so the ratio there was (18,207/87,961) or .206 of a person.
| You might say this is higher and it's true but.. it's very
| close to us and if you use 2022 numbers Norway comes in
| dramatically below .201.
|
| ---
|
| Another way to analyze things would be by US state while
| hoping that states would have more in common than countries
| and knowing that states have dramatically different spending
| budgets per pupil (see here
| https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/per-
| pupil-s... the difference is three fold from top to bottom).
| https://www.usnews.com/news/best-
| states/rankings/education/p... shows math attainment by
| state.
|
| Right off the bat you will notice that Utah spends the least
| amount of money per pupil and has the second highest average
| score while New York has the highest spend and comes in 23rd
| place.
|
| ---
|
| I recognize that the data I found is not in any way
| comprehensive, but do you have any data which indicate that
| I'm wrong and the issue really does have to do with
| underfunding?
| bvirb wrote:
| I think it's possible that your numbers of amount spent per
| pupil don't take into account the total benefit to that
| pupil towards their education. If Norway say also helps
| comparatively more with housing, food, and medicine, then
| that might also factor into the educational outcome of
| their pupils, especially if it means parents can spend more
| time helping their children.
|
| Anecdotally the smallish town I grew up in had good public
| schools, and many of my teachers lived in nice homes nearby
| the schools they taught at. The HCOL city I currently live
| in has (supposedly) poor public schools and one of the
| issues I hear is that teachers can't afford to live
| anywhere near them and don't want to commute hours to work,
| so they have high turnover. If housing weren't so expensive
| the public schools here might be better while appearing to
| spend the same amount on education.
| whoitwas wrote:
| It's because of school privatization. Notice the sharpest
| declines in low performing students based on race and income.
| It's a disgrace. Idiocracy is booooooming.
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| Specifically the problem is tax vouchers. It's fine to send
| your kids to a private school, but that shouldn't have any
| bearing on where your tax dollars go.
| whoitwas wrote:
| I don't think there's a need to distinguish for those alive
| in USA. This has all happened in the past 10 years. It was
| accelerated with DeVos in DoEd ... which is literally the
| epitome of regulatory capture. Coincidentally, this push
| for privatization coincides with the time frames in the
| study. Correlation ... causation ... Who cares. Fuckem
| let's get rich.
| whoitwas wrote:
| There is also the loosening of education standards since
| covid. I think literally anybody can just say they're a
| teacher in Florida now. That might be an exaggeration,
| but slightly.
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| I talk to many people who get excited about school choice
| and not having the state tell them how to educate their
| kids and totally gloss over the fact that _your_ taxes
| are not for _your_ kids, but for those of every other
| taxpayer, so I think it 's an important callout.
| byproxy wrote:
| > Tablets/Phones/screen time disables cognitive abilities of
| kids and reduces them to dumb clicking machines.
|
| Is this speculation, or are there statistics/studies that
| demonstrate this?
| sankumsek wrote:
| I'm wondering if there is another significant variable here.
| I'd assume there that most of the other countries on the list
| would also have kids that have youtube and and increased screen
| times for kids.
| nostrademons wrote:
| I'd argue the causality runs the other way. The popularity of
| YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, and casual games is a _consequence_
| of declining literacy, not a cause. The real cause was the
| abandonment of phonics in favor of whole-word approaches to
| teaching reading in the early 2000s. Those kids are now in
| their mid-20s and making their own purchase and usage
| decisions; with poor reading skills, is it any wonder that they
| prefer video and image forms of media?
|
| The timing doesn't really line up for the screen time
| hypothesis. Tablet mobile games became mainstream in the
| mid-2010s; the kids who grew up with them are now about 15 and
| younger. We've been seeing an inability to grasp complex
| written discourse and perform critical thinking since about
| 2016; the kids on tablets would've been in elementary school
| then, but the first cohort of students who grew up with whole
| word reading methods was just entering adulthood.
| slt2021 wrote:
| its not only mobile games, it is proliferation of youtube and
| stupid streamers targeted for kids (colomelon and alike for
| elementary kids) and social media for middle schools (snap /
| tiktok)
| WillPostForFood wrote:
| Screentime is an issue, but you'd expect to be affecting most
| countries, not the US particularly.
| ziddoap wrote:
| > _Tablets /Phones/screen time disables cognitive abilities of
| kids and reduces them to dumb clicking machines._
|
| Sure, if you hand your kid a phone and walk away, that's a
| likely outcome.
|
| Phones/tablets/etc. are tools that can and should be leveraged.
| But you need to teach your kids how to properly use the tools
| (which is not a one-time conversation). It seems like many
| people skip that part for some reason or another. Age-
| appropriate oversight is also a necessity that is often
| skipped.
|
| Having a pocket library/language instructor/graph
| calculator/music theory coach/etc. (i.e. a phone) is an
| absolute superpower that can accelerate learning significantly.
|
| However, every time I suggest that you can teach kids to
| responsibly use technology it seems to be an unpopular opinion.
| I'm not exactly sure why, though. So if you don't agree, I'd
| love to hear your side.
| carabiner wrote:
| Overall though, US scores in math & science are _excellent_ and
| near the top of the charts:
| https://x.com/cremieuxrecueil/status/1864412480677576816
| vecter wrote:
| Wait, the US overall is ranked 18th out of approximately 50
| countries (on the first chart for Math + Science). Obviously
| some American demographics are doing better, but across all
| demographics, the US scores are not excellent and not near the
| top.
| bpodgursky wrote:
| The point is that euopean americans perform strongly compared
| to europeans, asian americans perform strongly among asians,
| and black americans perform strongly compared to majority-
| black countries. Each demographic as the top of demographic
| peers internationally.
| carabiner wrote:
| Yes, and I don't think this is racism any more than other
| DEI/education initiatives that focus on one demographic
| more vs. another. Everyone talks about trying to get more
| blacks into gifted programs or selective high schools like
| Stuyvesant. This is scoping the problem, nothing more.
| dataviz1000 wrote:
| Anecdotally, I was zoned to attend John Jay High School
| which was the most violent school in the United States
| that year. I lived in NYC at the height of violence and
| the crack epidemic. This story in the New York Times was
| written later[0]. I could barely read and write at a 5th
| grade level at the time. Murrow and Midwood laughed at me
| when I asked for an entrance interview. Knowing I would
| get killed if I attended John Jay I studied for the
| Stuyvestant High School exam for a few hours a day for 8
| weeks. My favorite word I memorized studying for the test
| is loathe. It sounded like love but meant disgust like
| hate. It was on the test. I was accepted into a technical
| school out in Brighton Beach but things went wrong when I
| not only made the cut for Stuyvestant but on explaining
| my preference not to attend was told I should because I
| had the second highest score -- like I missed an easy
| problem on the test. They pressured me to attend but I
| didn't belong. I am of normal, neither low nor high,
| intelligence. Biggie Smalls lived a few blocks away on
| the other side of Flatbush Ave. He was a lot smarter and
| talented than all of my classmates. I call bullshit on
| that test.
|
| [0]
| https://www.nytimes.com/1998/04/26/nyregion/neighborhood-
| rep...
| knallfrosch wrote:
| > Each demographic as the top of demographic peers
| internationally.
|
| Does this hold true if we do the same for other countries?
| bpodgursky wrote:
| Most countries don't release fine-grained data but yes
| when you compare against other countries that are
| essentially ethnostates - Japan, Poland, few others.
| TeaBrain wrote:
| According to the chart, the American scores amongst the
| internationally high performing demographic categories are
| exceptional. The overall score is only dragged down due to
| demographic categories that perform low internationally.
| pie420 wrote:
| 18th out of 50 is not excellent for a HEGEMON country that
| essentially rules europe, south america, and half of asia. I
| imagine Britain was better than 18th out of 50 during the
| height of the british empire.
| slt2021 wrote:
| as a hegemon, USA is the firs tin number of victims (murdered
| and displaced) by the American weapons and ammo.
|
| This is a single undisputed thing about the American
| exceptionalism, the mind-boggling efficiency of the state-
| organized violence
| int_19h wrote:
| States by and large originated as a means to organize
| violence at scale, so it's not surprising that the most
| successful ones historically are also the best at that
| specifically.
| jdprgm wrote:
| It's strange to me that relative performance would even be a
| primary factor for defining performance as "excellent". You
| could be number one on the list and still deeply unsettled if
| performance is dropping or stagnant. I would want to focus on
| generational improvement targeting say 10%-20% improvement
| across the board every 10 years or so.
| cyberax wrote:
| You don't say. It's as if attacking education from the right and
| left has consequences.
|
| The right wants to defund everything on principle, and the left
| wants education to be "equitable". Which in practice ends up
| being as effective as chopping off legs of tall kids to make sure
| everyone is the same height.
| PessimalDecimal wrote:
| > Which in practice ends up being as effective as chopping off
| legs of tall kids to make sure everyone is the same height.
|
| This might have been the case twenty years ago. Now it's more
| like chopping off the legs of the tall kids to get back at them
| for being taller originally.
| neogodless wrote:
| I hesitate to jump into politics (again) here on HN but I would
| say this.
|
| I don't _disagree_ with you, exactly. There is a problem with
| polarized political agendas.
|
| If the right had some sense of being OK with money being
| invested in the future, instead of in the currently wealthy,
| and if the left wants to spread opportunity more equally to
| every student, those could be overlapping goals. Equal
| opportunity is very different from equitable outcomes. And
| prioritizing private schools is different from actually
| shrinking the government size and budget. (The right, I would
| argue, just prioritizes different spending, not less spending!)
| thrance wrote:
| It's really not a "both side" issue. Only one party wants to
| get rid of the department of education. Only one party wants to
| ban books from public schools on ideological grounds. Only one
| party wants to privatize the entire school system. Only one
| party considers teaching slavery to be anti-american
| indoctrination.
| cyberax wrote:
| > It's really not a "both side" issue.
|
| It really is. They just undermine the education differently.
|
| > Only one party wants to ban books from public schools on
| ideological grounds. Only one party wants to privatize the
| entire school system. Only one party considers teaching
| slavery to be anti-american indoctrination.
|
| My frank opinion: all those book bans don't mean anything for
| math or science education. The US science education was doing
| just fine during the racist 50-s and 60-s, after all.
|
| All the book bans (or conversely, the "woke nonsense" like
| the mandated "ethnic studies") are just noise in the overall
| curriculum, they affect less than 1% of the academic time.
|
| > Only one party considers teaching slavery to be anti-
| american indoctrination.
|
| And only one party cancels the gifted programs because they
| are "racist", or makes it hard to take advanced classes
| because of "equity".
| lostmsu wrote:
| How does this test account for age? 4th grade is different in
| different countries.
|
| Is anonymized data available?
| xyzzyz wrote:
| Did the test collect any data on the demographics of the takers,
| so that we can check whether the drop is within-group, or whether
| it's just artifact of changing composition? For all we know, this
| might be just a case of Simpson paradox, where each subgroup
| actually improved, but the overall score distribution shifted
| downwards due to school children population growing more and more
| immigrant, after years of mass immigration. While US has
| excellent education, and immigrant children in America do better
| than their counterparts in their countries of origin, they don't
| do as well as the modal group of white Americans, so as the
| composition changes, and the whites become less of a
| statistically dominating factor, the scores are expected to go
| down, even as the education quality improves.
| itishappy wrote:
| Yes, that's one of the main findings from the article.
|
| > The extent of the decline seems to be driven by the lowest
| performing students losing more ground, a worrying trend that
| predates the pandemic.
|
| > Scores for the highest performing American fourth graders
| were about the same as in 2019, but the lowest performing
| students -- those in the bottom 10% -- saw their scores drop by
| 37 points in math and by 22 points in science compared with
| similar students in 2019. The lowest performing eighth graders
| saw their scores drop by 19 points in math. One in five U.S.
| eighth graders scored below the low benchmark, meaning they
| lacked even basic proficiency.
|
| > This gap between high- and low-performing students started to
| widen before the pandemic for reasons that are unclear. Since
| then, other research into post-pandemic academic performance
| has found widening gaps across race and income, even as many
| middle and higher income students are doing well.
|
| What do we do with this info?
| mmooss wrote:
| Your claim and the GP's are very different:
|
| * Yours is that the bottom 10% are declining. That says
| nothing about who is in the bottom 10%.
|
| * The GP says the composition of the population has changed,
| and blames immigrants.
| itishappy wrote:
| > There was also a strong correlation between socioeconomic
| status and test scores. Students from higher income
| households and those who attended schools with more
| affluent students had higher scores.
| mmooss wrote:
| That doesn't say the composition changed - that could
| have been true before - or that immigration status is any
| factor at all.
| SkyBelow wrote:
| The question is what was the delta within that group (and
| within other groups). Given we know that those of higher
| socioeconomic status do better than average, did they
| improve compared to their past selves, stay roughly the
| same, or degrade despite still maintaining above average
| results?
|
| If, for example, they degraded, then it would indicate
| there is a problem happening that even the higher
| socioeconomic status doesn't protect from despite all its
| benefits (well it might protect relatively better that
| other SES, but not enough to prevent the downward trend).
|
| If, instead, they improved relative to their past selves,
| it would indicate the problem causing the overall trend
| is found entirely within other SES groups (well not
| entirely, as it is possible the impact still hit this
| group but that other factors more than made up for it,
| but to keep it simple, we can ignore such a possibility
| unless we see even better data that can parse out these
| more complex relationships).
| DAGdug wrote:
| The Simpson's paradox part is factual, and has been known
| for over a decade courtesy Steve Sailer, who is an
| immigration restrictionist. A fairer critique of the poster
| is that they're unoriginal (rather than that they're
| blaming immigrants, which I didn't see in this post).
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| > While US has excellent education, and immigrant
| children in America do better than their counterparts in
| their countries of origin, they don't do as well as the
| modal group of white Americans, so as the composition
| changes...
|
| it doesn't say the immigrants are to blame, it just
| strongly implies that this could be a likely reason,
| furthermore for some reason to be an immigrant is to not
| be white which certainly was not the case when I
| immigrated to America.
| geraldwhen wrote:
| https://www.pewresearch.org/race-and-
| ethnicity/2020/08/20/fa...
|
| American immigrants are no longer white, overwhelmingly.
| mmooss wrote:
| Perhaps that is related to all the rationalizations of
| white supremacy.
| mmooss wrote:
| > courtesy Steve Sailer, who is an immigration
| restrictionist
|
| That doesn't make this argument credible. Is there any
| credible source?
|
| > rather than that they're blaming immigrants, which I
| didn't see in this post
|
| We know well that the talking points of racism are formed
| to create ambiguity and use dog whistles. That goes back
| half a century and probably much longer. These are the
| talking points.
| DAGdug wrote:
| Make better policy decisions next time around? (Surprise,
| surprise, poor kids don't do zoom classes).
| mmooss wrote:
| > While US has excellent education
|
| By what measure? As far as I know it is poor, in absolute terms
| and relative to its peers.
|
| For the rest, do you have any evidence for the statements, or
| that the outcome depends on race (and not, for example, income,
| local school quality, etc)? A very large portion of the US
| population is neither immigrant nor white. And blaming the
| immigrants for undermining 'white' people is also part of a
| hateful disinformation campaign, so I think we should be very
| careful with statements that might be used to spread that hate.
|
| Edit: Even if immigration status were correlated, that doesn't
| mean that immigration causes people to be worse at mathematics.
| It could be, for example, that immigrants suffer disrcimination
| and a lack of resources - like some other groups that have
| lower scores.
| xyzzyz wrote:
| US has excellent education by the standard, commonly used
| international measures. In PISA, for example, white American
| children score better than any European country, and are only
| outscored by a handful of East Asian countries. These are all
| in turn outscored by US Asians, putting US on top yet again.
| US has a bunch of lower-performing population groups, who
| bring the overall average down, but even these perform better
| than their foreign counterparts. US blacks perform better
| than blacks in any African country, immigrants from South
| America perform better than kids in the countries they came
| from etc.
|
| > For the rest, do you have any evidence for the statements,
| or that the outcome depends on race
|
| Not sure what you're asking for. Did you not know that there
| are large differences in means of test scores between various
| ethnic and racial groups in US? This is a commonly known
| fact, I don't think really require me to provide specific
| evidence.
|
| > And blaming the immigrants for undermining 'white' people
| is also part of a hateful disinformation campaign, so I think
| we should be very careful with statements that might be used
| to spread that hate.
|
| Not sure what you're talking about, but I get the feeling
| that you're trying to smear me with allusions and innuendos.
| hervature wrote:
| I knew that you were going to get attacked because someone
| would take your statement as hateful. Unfortunately, it
| takes longer to collect data than it does to write a dumb
| comment. They took your factual statement of Simpson's
| paradox being able to drive one global summary (lower
| overall scores - a bad thing) counter to the local
| summaries (increased scores by all groups - a good thing)
| explained by shifting population proportions as you
| "blaming immigrants" for the bad outcome when the logical
| extension of your statement is "hold on, we may have a good
| thing going on". Ignore @mmooss.
| strangattractor wrote:
| Have to admit the immigration comment also triggered my
| "blaming immigrants" radar. After a careful reading it
| was an honest attempt for more information or
| clarification on how the details might be better
| interpreted. Something people should do more of when
| statistics are used as evidence. Actually a very good
| question.
| ivan_gammel wrote:
| > US has excellent education by the standard, commonly used
| international measures. In PISA, for example, white
| American children score better than any European country,
| and are only outscored by a handful of East Asian
| countries. These are all in turn outscored by US Asians,
| putting US on top yet again. US has a bunch of lower-
| performing population groups, who bring the overall average
| down, but even these perform better than their foreign
| counterparts. US blacks perform better than blacks in any
| African country, immigrants from South America perform
| better than kids in the countries they came from etc.
|
| Wow. I'm really impressed with your skill to interpret the
| data and build a narrative from it. However, let's face it,
| it is just a convenient narrative with a faulty logic. You
| cannot conclude that USA has excellent educational system
| if it delivers the great outcomes for certain advantaged
| subgroups. It's logically incorrect and not how efficiency
| of education system is defined.
|
| It is also wrong to compare black Americans and Africans
| and generally use non-scientific racial divisions which do
| not exist elsewhere in the world. Most of black Americans
| are no more immigrants than white people. They are simply
| Americans and should be compared to Europe the same way as
| whites.
| xyzzyz wrote:
| > You cannot conclude that USA has excellent educational
| system if it delivers the great outcomes for certain
| advantaged subgroups.
|
| To the contrary, you could totally conclude from this
| that US has excellent educational system at least with
| respect to these, as you call them, "advantaged" groups.
| At best you could argue that the system is not so
| excellent for other, less well performing groups.
| However, these less well performing groups still perform
| better in US system than matched groups outside the US,
| so it is indeed the case that for both higher and lower
| performing groups, US educational system beats all other
| systems around the world.
| aerhardt wrote:
| Why would you compare the advantaged US groups versus the
| entirety of other populations?
| xyzzyz wrote:
| Can you clarify what you mean by "advantaged"? I am not
| exactly sure what you are talking about.
| aerhardt wrote:
| I am talking about the leading group, whatever that may
| be, why would you split _only_ the United States by a
| certain dimension and compare it to the entirety of other
| populations?
| xyzzyz wrote:
| Ah, I get it now. Yes, it would be more apples-to-apples
| to, for example, compare white Americans with ancestral
| Europeans, by disaggregating scores in European countries
| by ethnic/ancestral group of origin. However, this would
| not affect comparison greatly, because in European
| countries, the children of ancestral Europeans comprise
| 80-90% of the total, compared to <45% in US, so taking
| the whole aggregate instead of this 80-90% doesn't change
| that much. Same is true for East Asian countries:
| immigrant population in Japan or Taiwan is pretty
| negligible, as these countries are fairly homogenous.
| Finally, for countries with highly heterogeneous
| populations, like eg India or Indonesia, none of the
| large ethnic groups is ahead of US whites.
| aerhardt wrote:
| I think I've found the answer and it's simpler than that.
| There is no analysis splitting whites or other ethnic
| groups because PISA has national variations of
| questionnaires (source on the US one below), and in all
| likelihood no other country splits by race.
|
| It's still weird, probably lacking rigor and
| methodological soundness, to split American races out and
| compare them to the bulk of other populations.
|
| https://www.oecd.org/content/dam/oecd/en/data/datasets/pi
| sa/...
| xyzzyz wrote:
| It might not be super sound methodologically to only do
| it for US in PISA, but I don't think that it affect
| results significantly. Other high performing countries
| have highly homogenous populations, so the aggregate
| score of the entire country is very close to the score of
| the top performing group. On the other hand, in countries
| with heterogenous populations like India, Indonesia,
| Afghanistan or Nigeria, even the top groups are not
| performing very well. If you know of a country other than
| US, where the top performing group does significantly
| better than country average, and their performance is on
| the level of, say, European average, I'd be very curious
| to learn about it!
| aerhardt wrote:
| The main methodological problem is how one can leave out
| like 40% of the United States, and say that the US comes
| on top (which it still doesn't!). Like, I'm not even
| questioning the racial split data, but selecting the two
| groups and saying that the US is the best is a weird flex
| that wouldn't pass muster in Stats 101.
| ivan_gammel wrote:
| > However, these less well performing groups still
| perform better in US system than matched groups outside
| the US
|
| If you pick random data points you can support with them
| any theory. Comparing white Americans (a random group of
| people defined by a subjective criteria, rather than by
| anything scientific) to a whole European country is
| random.
|
| Now, speaking of the choice of subgroups. If you select
| best performing subgroups to see which country can
| support the best talent, why are you not looking at the
| results of international olympiads?
|
| IOI - China, Russia, then USA. IPhO - China dominates the
| list of winners. IMO - USA has some wins, but China won
| more.
| xyzzyz wrote:
| > Comparing white Americans (a random group of people
| defined by a subjective criteria, rather than by anything
| scientific) to a whole European country is random.
|
| "White Americans" is very much not a "random group
| defined by subjective criteria". Self-identification as
| white is extremely highly correlated with objective,
| measurable metrics like percent of European ancestry, and
| this also makes US whites directly comparable to
| population of European countries, which as it happens
| still are overwhelmingly comprised by people of European
| ancestry.
|
| I am not selecting best performing group for the sake of
| comparison, I'm just comparing various natural and
| obvious population clusters that have been understood and
| distinguished by everyone completely unrelatedly to the
| discussion of educational outcomes. The category of white
| Americans has not been invented to show how great US
| education is. I am totally interested in comparing
| educational outcomes of white Americans with other major
| ethnic or ancestral populations in other countries, it's
| just white Americans come out ahead almost every single
| time.
| ivan_gammel wrote:
| Self-identification on the basis of race is not
| objective. Races do not exist, it is a scientific fact.
| There are many other more reasonable ways to cluster
| American population. Ancestral angle is important, but
| only from cultural proximity perspective if you talk
| about people who are 5-10th generation Americans. Black
| Americans that are descendants of slaves may have higher
| proximity to Europe than to Africa, so they should be
| included in the group that you compare to Europe and
| anyway that comparison must be based on some theory,
| otherwise it's just cherry-picking for building a
| convenient narrative.
| callingbull wrote:
| > Races do not exist, it is a scientific fact.
|
| Races do not exist in the same sense that the periodic
| table does not exist. Both are constructs over reality,
| and they are both informative (i.e. science).
| eitally wrote:
| I'm with you (just to be clear): the _educational_ system
| is perfectly fine in the US. The problem is that the
| educational system in the US is designed to be fine for
| the subset of kids who come from families that 1) speak
| English, 2) are educated themselves, 3) hold full time
| employment.
|
| Whenever these debates about the US education system
| arise it's important to clarify that when people who
| complain about the system do so, they're really
| complaining that the lack of a social safety net is
| keeping the doors open in public schools for kids whose
| families (and themselves) don't see value in formal
| education, can't maintain daily attendance for various
| reasons, may not have internet access at home, don't have
| food safety, may have health and developmental issues,
| and may not even have one parent caring for them.
|
| I don't care whether science shows a differentiation in
| IQ between racial groups, because that is so much less
| important than addressing how well a kid will be able to
| learn when they are being raised in poverty by a single
| parent without a college education who doesn't speak
| English natively and may not even be in the country
| legally. _That_ is the problem.
| myrmidon wrote:
| > You cannot conclude that USA has excellent educational
| system if it delivers the great outcomes for certain
| advantaged subgroups.
|
| This is _not_ what he did. He just explained to you that
| the outcomes for _all_ those subgroups are basically
| better in the US than elsewhere.
|
| Even that is a moot point though, because the aggregate
| US score is already _perfectly_ comparable to e.g. EU
| level. Even if you cherry-pick EU nations for GDP /capita
| (Switzerland, Netherlands, Denmark), you can see that
| they are pretty much exactly on US level (with the EU
| leaning a bit more toward math).
|
| This also tracks with anecdata I have from family
| (central europe) that did a year at a US highschool
| (east/west) and both described the math curriculum as
| "joke".
|
| To reiterate: Describing the US education system as "bad"
| (=> compared to peer-nations) is just objectively
| _wrong_.
| ivan_gammel wrote:
| > This is not what he did. He just explained to you that
| the outcomes for all those subgroups are basically better
| in the US than elsewhere.
|
| He literally said that USA has excellent educational
| system. The explanation with statistical gerrymandering
| and random comparisons followed.
|
| >Even that is a moot point though, because the aggregate
| US score is already perfectly comparable to e.g. EU level
|
| EU level isn't great. Besides, EU recently experienced
| major influx of immigrants (on the scale of millions).
| USA is #18 in the latest rating, 7-15% difference in the
| score with top 5%.
|
| And yes, American math curriculum is indeed a joke.
|
| > Describing the US education system as "bad" (=>
| compared to peer-nations) is just objectively wrong.
|
| I didn't say it is bad. You are replying to my comment
| where I basically say that you cannot say it's excellent
| based on THAT data.
| aerhardt wrote:
| What is the source on this?
|
| All I can find is this Twitter thread, and reposts of this
| from Reddit. I cannot find any official sources.
|
| https://twitter.com/ideafaktory/status/1732095406891282603
| xyzzyz wrote:
| The image in this thread you linked has the information
| about the data source in the bottom right corner.
| aerhardt wrote:
| The source he cites is himself, other than the PISA data.
|
| I cannot examine the entire dataset right now, but from
| reading the questionnaires I cannot find a single
| question on race. The only resembling question is on the
| birthplace of the parents [1], but you cannot infer the
| race from that, can you? How would you separate blacks
| then, most of whom would probably have American parents?
|
| How much do you trust the author of this data?
|
| [1] https://www.oecd.org/content/dam/oecd/en/data/dataset
| s/pisa/...
|
| Edit: The US version of the questionnaire _does_ ask for
| comprehensive data on race. I still cannot make sense of
| some of the elements of the Cremieux source, for example
| they show the US average (not split by race) in a
| position which is not what I see in the official data.
| But it should be entirely possible to analyze the data
| comprehensively by race.
| xyzzyz wrote:
| I have known Cremieux for a long time, and trust him a
| great deal when it comes to handling and presenting data.
| In any case, I don't know what standards you'd find
| satisfactory. He made the graph out of data he listed on
| the graph. Anyone can go and verity its accuracy. It
| being materially wrong would be devastating to his
| reputation. Thus, if you still don't trust it, you should
| just do your own leg work to verify it, instead of asking
| others, whom you probably don't trust any more than you
| trust Cremieux, to do it. Anything more would be unusual
| and unreasonable, even formal academic peer review does
| not involve verifying that the graphs are accurately
| representing underlying data.
| mmooss wrote:
| First, where is the evidence for all of that?
|
| Second, other than racism, I don't see why we would
| distinguish between the 'race' of the Americans. The US
| average is the average. People are no more or less American
| based on their skin color.
|
| Unless you make the racist claim that math skills
| biologically depend on race, there is no reason to compare
| some Americans with people in Africa because they have
| similar skin color - it's absurd.
|
| > Not sure what you're talking about
|
| I don't believe that you are unaware of the hate and
| discrimination against immigrants and minorities, justified
| by these same and similar arguments. If you said that was
| not your intent - well, your intent or not, it has the same
| effect. But to say you don't know is not credible.
| seneca wrote:
| > Unless you make the racist claim that math skills
| biologically depend on race, there is no reason to
| compare some Americans with people in Africa because they
| have similar skin color - it's absurd.
|
| Math skills correlate with IQ, and average IQ varies by
| racial groups.
|
| Calling facts you don't like racist doesn't erase them,
| and coming into discussions just to accuse everyone of
| heresy has gotten pretty old for most people.
|
| These may be uncomfortable facts, but pretending they
| don't exist and brow beating people for discussing them
| keeps us from understanding the world more fully.
| tptacek wrote:
| This is almost certainly an SES effect; the evidence for
| biological causation is weak and has gotten drastically
| weaker with each successive GWAS study. Either way: it's
| a race war point, and those are unwelcome on HN.
|
| https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false
| &qu...
| eitally wrote:
| While IQ may vary by racial groups, overall math
| attainment _not at the very top couple of percent_ has
| far more to do with socioeconomic circumstances &
| parental education than it does any inherent potential.
| eitally wrote:
| Fortunately for you, if you don't want to use race to
| distinguish you can instead use these characteristics to
| define your subgroups:
|
| 1) kids with two married parents at home
|
| 2) kids of parents with a college or professional degree
|
| 3) kids of parents who work white collar salaried jobs
|
| 4) kids of parents who are native English speakers
|
| If you check all those boxes you're going to see that the
| resulting subgroup does very well on all standardized
| tests, including PISA. It will also be predominantly
| white/European-American & Asian/Asian-American. Those
| four attributes make the biggest difference in
| educational attainment, and brown & black families are
| the ones who are being left behind.
|
| For the next thought exercise, consider what can be done
| to address this shortcoming in our political, social &
| education systems.
| xyzzyz wrote:
| > First, where is the evidence for all of that?
|
| Sorry, what do you mean by "evidence"? I clearly said
| that I am talking about PISA results, and described what
| these look like. You can look these up yourself if you
| are curious about more details.
|
| > Second, other than racism, I don't see why we would
| distinguish between the 'race' of the Americans.
|
| For better or worse, this opinion is not shared by the
| mainstream American culture and policy-making circles. We
| take great efforts to distinguish between these groups in
| the context of educational outcomes. It is not
| surprising, because these different groups very much
| exist in very objective sense, and quite objectively have
| different educational outcomes, which makes it useful to
| distinguish between them for the purposes like the
| original question, which was whether the educational
| quality went down recently. My original point that in
| order to answer this question, you have to distinguish
| between these groups so that you don't fall victim to
| composition fallacy, is largely orthogonal to any
| discussion about the causes of these disparities, because
| it still stands regardless of whether the causes are 100%
| biological or 100% cultural or 100% result of systemic
| discrimination or whatever.
|
| > Unless you make the racist claim that math skills
| biologically depend on race, there is no reason to
| compare some Americans with people in Africa because they
| have similar skin color - it's absurd.
|
| You are creating a really weird straw man, because I
| don't think that even extreme KKK-style racists have much
| of an issue with skin color per se. Who are you arguing
| against here? I am extremely confused.
|
| > I don't believe that you are unaware of the hate and
| discrimination against immigrants and minorities,
| justified by these same and similar arguments.
|
| Ah, here comes smears and innuendos that by open
| discussion of clear, objective facts that are relevant to
| policy making, I'm causing some kind of nebulous harm to
| some unnamed people via some proxies. Just stop it, I
| don't care, and nobody cares anymore either.
| phillypham wrote:
| At the very top, the US excels at math. We consistently place
| at the top or near the top in the IMO for instance
| (https://maa.org/news/usa-first-at-imo/). Yes the team is
| largely children of immigrants, but they are Americans, too.
| mmooss wrote:
| No difference between them and any other American. Congrats
| to the team.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| > At the very top, the US excels at math.
|
| Did you assess every other school system "at its very top"
| and compare? This seems to be very clearly a double
| standard. Consider that IMO numbers are going to be biased
| due to the US's larger population compared to other highly
| developed countries.
| hervature wrote:
| Thank you for the high quality comment. I'll try to add some
| insight here for race. Using the reports [1] and [2], the
| difference for Grade 4 students are:
|
| American Indian / Alaska Native - 2.5% in 2019 - 1.6% in 2023 -
| 515 in 2019 - 504 in 2023
|
| Asian - 5.3% in 2019 - 4.3% in 2023 - 586 in 2019 - 571 in 2023
|
| Black - 13.2% in 2019 - 15.5% in 2023 - 494 in 2019 - 468 in
| 2023
|
| Hispanic - 25.8% in 2019 - 26.3% in 2023 - 508 in 2019 - 491 in
| 2023
|
| Native Hawaiian / Other Pacific Islander - 1.7% in 2019 - 0.9%
| in 2023 - 500 in 2019 - 457 in 2023
|
| Two or more races - 5.6% in 2019 - 8.1% in 2023 - 554 in 2019 -
| 542 in 2023
|
| White - 45.9% in 2019 - 43.2% in 2023 - 559 in 2019 - 543 in
| 2023
|
| It looks like all groups suffered at least 10 points in loss
| but these effects are definitely exaggerated by the reweighing
| of population proportions.
|
| [1] -
| https://nces.ed.gov/timss/results19/index.asp#/math/achievem...
|
| [2] -
| https://nces.ed.gov/timss/results23/index.asp#/math/achievem...
| xyzzyz wrote:
| Thank you for looking it up! My personal hunch is that COVID
| related disruption in schooling is responsible for most of
| the within-group drop, and the rest is mostly a result of
| changes in educational policy, where many places deemphasize
| objective measures and standards, causing students to care
| less for these on the margin.
| trhway wrote:
| i think the impact of COVID lockdowns and de-SAT-ing would
| be harder to reverse than to build logical and mathematical
| reasoning into ChatGPT. The former is political and the
| latter is technical problem. Our whole industry, great at
| solving technical problems, is throwing tens of billions
| today, and it will be hundreds tomorrow, to solve the
| latter. So the math skills for the majority of the
| population is probably going the way of the "paper map"
| skills, etc.
| lanternfish wrote:
| The problem is that mathematics education isn't just
| about learning times tables.
|
| It's also the primary medium schools use to communicate
| analytical reasoning and deductive analysis. If you cut
| math as a target without fundamentally reworking
| curricular elements, you'll have a ton of graduates who
| are much worse at negotiating the validity of competing
| logical arguments.
| bcrosby95 wrote:
| It probably varies by grade and locale.
|
| My oldest is in 4th grade now, and the most relevant maths
| are from 2nd and 3rd grade. Basic division, multiplication,
| and fractions matters (3rd grade) - but so does adding and
| subtracting multi-digit numbers (2nd grade) because
| multiplication/division is now multiple digit (which is the
| actual, new, 4th grade material). Interestingly, she used
| almost no adding and subtracting in 3rd grade, to the point
| where the teacher supplemented required coursework to help
| stave off attrition, so you could actually get by 3rd grade
| while being terrible at adding and subtracting.
|
| Her covid year was kinder. It made her cohort pretty bad at
| writing. But that seems to have largely worked itself out
| over the past 4 years.
|
| It's not clear to me when these tests were taken, and that
| kinda matters - were they by people who were starting 4th
| grade, finishing 4th grade, or completed 4th grade?
|
| It matters because it tells us what they missed due to
| COVID - if these 4th graders had 1st grade for COVID, I'm
| not sure if that would be a huge deal. The most relevant
| bits are also taught in kinder, and they cover adding and
| subtracting again in 2nd. But if their main COVID year was
| 2nd, I could see 4th being a huge problem, especially with
| the general lack of adding and subtracting in 3rd grade.
| GlassOwAter wrote:
| How about COVID reducing IQ?
| WillyWonkaJr wrote:
| COVID is known to cause neurological damage including brain
| damage. I think we're now seeing the collective impact to
| IQ due to repeated COVID infections.
| cruffle_duffle wrote:
| Or maybe, just maybe, closing school for two years had a
| disastrous impact on kids.
| capybaraStorm wrote:
| They closed them then re-opened them in time for one of
| the biggest waves of asylum/undocumented immigration in
| recent history, part of which incentivized bringing
| children (who often need ESL and cultural integration
| assistance) who then are entitled to attend public
| schools whether or not the school has been allocated the
| resources for such influx. Such re-allocation of finite
| resources to include so many students with extra
| integrative needs would track well with across the board
| drops.
| bko wrote:
| | Race/Ethnicity | 2019 % | 2023 % | % Change | 2019 Score |
| 2023 Score | Score Change |
|
| | American Indian / Alaska Native | 2.5% | 1.6% | -0.9% | 515
| | 504 | -11 |
|
| | Asian | 5.3% | 4.3% | -1.0% | 586 | 571 | -15 |
|
| | Black | 13.2% | 15.5% | +2.3% | 494 | 468 | -26 |
|
| | Hispanic | 25.8% | 26.3% | +0.5% | 508 | 491 | -17 |
|
| | Native Hawaiian / Other Pacific Islander | 1.7% | 0.9% |
| -0.8% | 500 | 457 | -43 |
|
| | Two or more races | 5.6% | 8.1% | +2.5% | 554 | 542 | -12 |
|
| | White | 45.9% | 43.2% | -2.7% | 559 | 543 | -16 |
| optymizer wrote:
| Is there any data to back up your claim that immigrant kids are
| worse at math in US schools?
|
| It doesn't match my personal experience. It is _well known_ in
| Europe that the American K-12 education system is weak.
|
| Anecdata: All the exchange students from my middle- and high-
| school (in a third world country in Europe) came back saying
| they already knew the math that was being taught in the US
| school.
| cm2012 wrote:
| Well known and incorrect. If you control PISA scores for
| demographics, the American education system is fine to great.
| You can see American Whites outperform most other countries.
| American Black's outperform parts of Europe, including
| Greece.
|
| https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpreview.redd..
| ..
| optymizer wrote:
| Why would we control PISA scores for US demographics in the
| first place? Why are the 1st and 2nd generation immigrants
| removed?
|
| The education system is the same for all the kids, unless
| US Whites are using a different curriculum from the other
| demographic groups.
|
| "If we massage this data set the right way, we get the
| chart we want".
| bumby wrote:
| Conjecture, but it may be to focus on the native born
| population as a better metric for education quality since
| they have (presumably) been a product of that system for
| their entire life. Contrast that to a 1st gen immigrant
| who a major amount of time in a different country's
| system; testing them after a short stint in the US tells
| us much less about the US educational system. It's harder
| for me to think of a reason why 2nd gen should be
| removed, unless the assumption is the educational
| attainment/integration of 1st gen parents heavily biases
| the results of their kids. I don't know if all that holds
| up under scrutiny, though.
|
| Also, because demographics aren't distributed evenly
| geographically, I think there is probably a case that the
| education system is different for different races (to the
| extent that racial geographic distribution is different).
| iepathos wrote:
| > The education system is the same for all the kids
|
| This is incorrect, certainly an ideal we'd all like but
| far from reality. The educational experiences and
| outcomes of 1st and 2nd generation immigrants can and
| often does differ significantly from native-born
| students. Seeing the difference in the data/scores should
| clue you into this and helps us understand the
| socioeconomic impact on student achievement that
| immigration has. Language is often a large factor where
| 1st and 2nd generation students may be speaking a
| different language at home than they are in school. The
| US has significantly more immigrants than other countries
| in the world which is why not controlling for it skews
| the data disproportionately.
| oblio wrote:
| > The US has significantly more immigrants than other
| countries in the world
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_
| by_...
|
| If that table is to believed, the US is kind of middle of
| the pack if you sort by percentages, at 15%. It might
| even be middle of the pack for developed countries, too
| int_19h wrote:
| As far as I can tell, that table conflates temporary
| workers with permanent immigration, so I'm not sure how
| useful it really is in this context.
| eitally wrote:
| Why would we not? If I _didn 't_ control for
| demographics, I probably wouldn't have my kids in our
| local public schools (in the wealthiest county <? - Santa
| Clara> in the country) because the Great Schools ratings
| show only mid-pack achievement. If I do control for
| demographics, though, I see the white & Asian kids are
| doing fine and it's the rest who are struggling,
| primarily for a combination of socioeconomic &
| immigration reasons. Given this, I'm comfortable sending
| my kids to our neighborhood schools because I'm in the
| fortunate demographic where kids will do well no matter
| where you put them.
|
| It's the same for any educational achievement measures,
| including PISA. Kids from households with two parents who
| are working professionals and college educated will do
| fine most of the time, and kids without those privileges
| will struggle most of the time.
| dylan604 wrote:
| > While US has excellent education, and immigrant children in
| America do better than their counterparts in their countries of
| origin, they don't do as well as the modal group of white
| Americans
|
| My experience does not track with this at all, especially in
| the context of the very wide brush you're applying it. I was
| involved in a lot of extracurricular events around math/science
| in school, and it was not the white kids winning those events.
| There were some pretty racist comments about it as well which
| makes it stand out even more in my memory.
| daseiner1 wrote:
| Virtually all contemporary commentary surrounding race,
| education, and intelligence in this country is essentially an
| attempt at laundering and obfuscating the Black Problem.
| dylan604 wrote:
| I think you're limiting your color palette, but otherwise,
| I agree with the sentiment.
| daseiner1 wrote:
| You are correct, a trivial piece of evidence is the
| invention and (limited) popularization of a new label [1]
| beyond "minority"/non-white
|
| 1: https://www.nytimes.com/article/what-is-bipoc.html
|
| For anecdotal flavor I'll mention that I briefly worked
| in Hollywood and casting requests trended towards "BIPOC"
| rather than "non-white", including in roles that had no
| evident racial component (i.e., the request was
| indicative of an apparent desire to have a nominally
| "diverse" cast without any real storytelling commitment
| to the racial diversity of said character(s) and there
| was a pronounced bias in these characters (constructed to
| be "diverse") towards a particular sliver of racial
| diversity).
| bilbo0s wrote:
| I don't know man?
|
| I could be misunderstanding HN User dylan604, but I suspect
| the kids winning those competitions were not white or
| black. I could be wrong, but I think we all know who we
| suspect were winning those competitions. And it wasn't
| white or black kids.
| daseiner1 wrote:
| That is exactly my point. Our parent commenter was
| disputing the fact that the broad stripe of "immigrant"
| populations are responsible for our reduced and over all
| disappointing scores. My comment is meant to insinuate
| that the overly broad (and thereby meaningless) redirect
| to a vaguely monolithic "immigrant" population (one
| invariably implied to "not yet be assimilated!") is
| exactly that - a redirect from the genuine problem group
| in this country (an unnervingly underperforming one), a
| group which is not comprised of immigrants.
|
| Evidently "immigrants" is a popular term of convenience
| for all folks - left, right, and center.
| bilbo0s wrote:
| Again, the numbers don't add up tho?
|
| Maybe I'm reading the data wrong, but it _seems_ to say
| that Pacific Islanders are the lowest performers, blacks
| the second lowest, and Hispanics the third lowest? Again,
| if I 'm incorrect, please do correct me.
|
| So I add up, say, Pacific Islander and Black population
| percentages, and it's _maybe_ 16.5%. I mean, the
| weights... well put it this way, again, I could be wrong,
| but when I remove them from the data, I can see only one
| group that meets the target mark for being ready to learn
| more advanced concepts.
|
| ETA:
|
| - Misread charts initially and mistakenly said that two
| groups met the mark. Nope. Only one group met the mark.
| Point being, even if we drop Pacific Islanders _and_
| blacks from the numbers, the US wouldn 't even make the
| top ten. We should be, at least in the top five in my
| opinion, but that's not happening right now. And that
| problem is occurring very much across the board. Again,
| someone correct me if I'm wrong.
|
| - Also, not sure if it is well known or not, but the
| target TIMSS mark is 550 for being able to process next
| concepts.
| oblio wrote:
| Based on the numbers from above, it looks like Black kids
| are up 2%? Or maybe I don't understand what those
| percentages mean.
| tehjoker wrote:
| Which is another way of saying that there's nothing being
| done about inequality, the problem is worsening. Hard to
| teach poor kids, hard for kids to get out of poverty when
| the government literally removes anti-poverty measures
| because it wants an underclass of workers to do shitty jobs
| for shit pay or alternatively populations it considers
| reserve labor (to keep wages down for employed people) or
| expendable.
| DAGdug wrote:
| Comment is true of immigrants as a group, but it's a
| remarkably heterogeneous pool. When you break immigrants down
| down into East/South Asians versus White/Jewish versus
| others, the differences in educational outcomes between these
| splits is large.
| bilbo0s wrote:
| Yep.
|
| I would go a bit further and say that Asians should be in
| their own group altogether and not compared to anyone else
| until the other groups are remediated. They are so far off
| the scale, especially on the high end, that I'm not sure
| comparisons help until we can get everyone up to, at least,
| their neighborhood.
| myth_drannon wrote:
| It's strange to split whites into those two categories
| since Jews represent a trivially small group, why not
| Italian/Greek and German/Scandinavian ancestry that is
| somewhat similar to East/South Asian split?
| dylan604 wrote:
| It's not strange when you hear it as the dog whistle it
| is
| oblio wrote:
| Maybe it's meant to be a positive presentation? I
| remember reading somewhere that Ashkenazis have excellent
| educational attainment.
| BeetleB wrote:
| > and immigrant children in America do better than their
| counterparts in their countries of origin, they don't do as
| well as the modal group of white Americans
|
| East and South Asian immigrants probably beg to differ.
| anon291 wrote:
| We don't exist because it's politically inconvenient to
| remember.
| xyzzyz wrote:
| Of course you're right that children of US Asian immigrants
| are ahead even of US whites, I mention this in my different
| comment in this thread. However, since there are few of them
| relative to other groups, they don't affect the distribution
| much, so I didn't mention this for the sake of clarity, as it
| didn't detract from my main point.
| samatman wrote:
| Well no, East and South Asian immigrants to the United States
| do tend to outperform the median in their country of origin.
| Acutely, in the case of South Asians.
|
| So that's half of the statement, the other half is that those
| two groups are not a large fraction of the total immigrant
| population. As such, they affect the conclusion, in the sense
| that removing them from consideration would make the
| difference in question starker, but they do not change it,
| because it's a statement about a whole of which they are but
| a part.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| > While US has excellent education
|
| The US has excellent _post-secondary_ education. K-12 seems to
| be a mixed bag at best, especially in bang-for-the-buck terms.
| xyzzyz wrote:
| K-12 education is also leading international charts, but I
| agree that we are most likely massively overspending on it.
| whoitwas wrote:
| This shit is sick and the divide will only expand with GOP desire
| to privati$e public education.
| nonameiguess wrote:
| This doesn't seem to be reported here in a very illuminating way,
| which is reflected in the comments seeming to be everyone jumping
| to blame whatever pet peeve social issue they already have an axe
| to grind about.
|
| The scoring system on this is set up such that 500 is the
| distribution median and 100 points is roughly 1 standard
| deviation. The US score is 517 in math, down from 535 the last
| time it was tested four years ago. Assuming IQ scores have to be
| whole integers, this is like having your IQ go from 105 to 103.
| Is that even a real difference or within normal test to test
| variation? This isn't like measuring height, where you expect
| almost exactly the same result every time.
| piker wrote:
| You've described an individual instance ("your IQ") while
| considering a population variation. You're right in the first
| instance, individual 2 point variation between tests, say, no
| big deal. But the second, yes, you would be concerned if the
| population's mean IQ dropped 2 points over some period.
| dang wrote:
| The report: https://timss2023.org/results/
| xiaodai wrote:
| Just import Chinese and indians
| bamboozled wrote:
| I think the plan is mass deportations from day one...not the
| other way around.
| saltymug76 wrote:
| Great even fewer tech jobs!
| troyvit wrote:
| Can't speak for the rest of the world, but my 8th grade daughter
| threatened to throw her iReady math test because she's tired of
| being tested when the tests don't affect her grades. My kids are
| over tested to the point that from their perspective the schools
| care more about testing than learning.
| trhway wrote:
| >the tests don't affect her grades
|
| Then what the grades are given for/based on?
| hydrolox wrote:
| Iready was horrible
| lvl155 wrote:
| They've been at it with this narrative for decades now: that US
| students are bad at math and sciences. Is that why the world
| sends their best to US for education? If China and India are so
| great, they'd have great research institutions by now. China, and
| now India, certainly do not lack funding. So why are they lagging
| so badly when their gen pop is so great at math and science
| TESTS?
|
| Oh, you mean doing well on tests and tests only means absolutely
| nothing irl. I met some great Chinese mathematicians but I also
| met a lot of Chinese students who excelled in cheating on their
| work. In my undergraduate years ago, I knew of this straight A
| Chinese student who literally posted all his CS projects to be
| done by someone in China. My idiot professors never found out
| despite him doing it for four years. Good for him I guess because
| he and his buddy professor went to work for Google.
| anon291 wrote:
| Hold on... the world sends their kids here for _university_. If
| you look at top STEM programs, it 's oftentimes
| disproportionately foreigners. This means that American kids
| are not qualifying for those programs, while foreign students
| are.
|
| I don't know about the cheating. However, confusing higher-
| education for K-12 is wrong.
| lvl155 wrote:
| Have you been to top tier high schools in the US? They're
| filled with international students. It's been like this for
| decades. Now you have that in preschools. Look up any elite
| schools in NYC, SF, etc.
|
| Americans are simply priced out of these programs. Why?
| Because international students pay ALL CASH. If you're
| running a mid-tier schools, would you give 20 slots to
| American students who cannot pay full tuition or give them
| out to international students paying full tuition while
| increasing your "diversity" score for school ranking?
| anon291 wrote:
| These are private schools right? Sure, I agree. The well-
| off private schools and the select few public schools in
| rich areas are exemplary.
|
| Private schools are not the norm though, and public schools
| like that are even rarer.
|
| I agree that America's education system has higher
| variance.
| lvl155 wrote:
| Nope. I am talking about both private and public schools.
| Go to any top tier school districts and you're going to
| find these students. Just want to be clear that I am not
| criticizing these students. I am criticizing the OP
| narrative that US students are bad at math and sciences.
| We have the best schools period. Not even close. We churn
| out the best talent. Again not even close.
| npunt wrote:
| Yeah K12 and higher ed are vastly vastly different. There's
| also many reasons for many foreign students at US
| universities that are unrelated to academics:
|
| - we have the best universities in the world, and lots of
| them
|
| - our universities are accessible because English is the most
| taught/spoken language in the world
|
| - foreign student population is coming from a pool of 7.7bb
| people, whereas domestic is only 0.3bb, a 25x differential.
|
| - foreign students pay full tuition, which can be several
| times that of in-state tuition at state schools, so
| universities seek out foreign students to pay the bills
| kevinventullo wrote:
| The best people from those countries leave for places like the
| US at the college or grad school stage. I had a lot more Indian
| and Chinese colleagues in college and grad school than I did in
| high school.
| lvl155 wrote:
| That was the case 20-30 years ago. Now they are coming here
| for preschools.
| WillyWonkaJr wrote:
| COVID causes neurological damage which includes brain damage.
| (People who lost their sense of smell were suffering mild,
| localized brain damage.)
|
| Another observable impact is a steady rise in car crashes post
| COVID. The data is there, but most people want to whistle past
| the proverbial graveyard.
| npunt wrote:
| Another bit of evidence is unruly passenger reports from
| airlines [1]. There's a kind of mass PTSD / trauma response at
| work re covid that causes people to shy away from the obvious
| facts about its effects on us.
|
| That said, these test score effects are the result of many
| factors, only one of which is likely mild neurological damage.
|
| [1] https://x.com/AlecStapp/status/1864990443567562890
| WillyWonkaJr wrote:
| I for sure assume this is a multi-factorial problem, with
| COVID impacts being one of many. I understand why people are
| reluctant to acknowledge and discuss this. It would make
| repeated COVID infections a terrifying prospect.
|
| I had heard about the increase in rage outbursts, but hadn't
| seen the unruly passenger data. Interesting! (And not in a
| good way)
| TexanFeller wrote:
| The psychological impact of isolation from covid lockdowns,
| disruption to routines, and uncertainty/anxiety/grief after
| jobs were lost and small businesses closed is another plausible
| explanation for mental changes. Remote school and remote work
| were a terrible fit for some people who struggled to adapt to
| working a new way. Drug use and overdoses increased. Obesity
| rates went way up from restricted activity and people staying
| home more. Obesity alone could explain mental decline.
| WillyWonkaJr wrote:
| Yes, but study after study shows brain damage. In fact, viral
| reservoirs often persist in brain tissue for up to a year
| after infection. This is why we're seeing problems with very
| young children who were not born during lockdown or were
| infants.
|
| There were lots of additional problems, but at some point we
| need to own up to the brain damage and other neurological
| impacts being caused by repeated COVID infections.
| TexanFeller wrote:
| Covid isn't the only viral disease that has neurological
| effects. Covid is probably the most thoroughly studied
| disease in history by a mile though. It's possible we are
| just more aware of its neuro effects due to insane levels
| of scrutiny rather than those effects being much more
| significant than for other common diseases.
| jayde2767 wrote:
| With educational quality being less of a Political priority in
| this country, and the need to "teach to a standardized test"
| being more desired, surely these results should surprise no one,
| correct?
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Sure. I imagine though the move to teaching to a standardized
| test was a result of a previous failure in education. I would
| guess because there was a lot of disparity between States.
|
| I feel like education as a priority needs to be in the national
| zeitgeist -- perhaps is not. The U.S. had it during the Cold
| War.
|
| I grew up in the 70's and there were still echoes of the Space
| Race in the U.S. And education was fairly progressive. I even
| went to an "experimental school" for a year where they had open
| classrooms, emphasis on experimentation, new math, etc. (and
| this in Kansas of all places).
|
| As an example, I remember too in the 70's when the Metric
| System was made a national priority. Until it suddenly was not.
| (And Federal Markers, like on an highway summit, that had had
| elevation in both feet and meters went back to just feet.)
|
| During the Cold War, as now, engineering was where the high
| paying jobs were. And living the dream life in California....
|
| I'm not sure why more kids don't aspire to that today (or why
| their parents don't foster it). Perhaps engineering is seen as
| a difficult and stressful career, and perhaps people think
| there are, dare I say, lazier ways to get rich?
| npunt wrote:
| Part of the beauty of tests like PISA are that, at least in the
| US, nobody is teaching to the test because it doesn't have an
| effect on the students, the teacher, or the school. That makes
| it an ideal measure because it's less distorted, unlike other
| tests. This I believe is generally the case, absent some gaming
| from places like China, who for several years submitted PISA
| tests only from a few of their best schools in rich areas as a
| way to look better internationally.
| BeFlatXIII wrote:
| They weren't already at zero?
| ken47 wrote:
| I question the emphasis on averages. Moving the average of a
| country as big as the USA is very hard, with questionable ROI.
|
| The top N% in any given subject is going to drive a nation's
| progress. We aren't going to be putting tens of millions of
| Americans into jobs where their output is highly dependent on
| e.g. their mathematical knowledge and ability.
|
| Isn't it time to do away with the outdated goal of training
| everyone to be a well-rounded unicorn, and let students
| meaningfully specialize before ~25% of their life has expired?
|
| For a sample size of 1, I'm confident I'd be significantly more
| valuable economically in adulthood if I could have specialized in
| e.g. math at an early age, rather than spending _countless_ hours
| on subjects that I had little interest in and barely use today.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2024-12-10 23:00 UTC)