Large Percentages of American Students Perform Above Grade Level | Hacker News Reader

Large Percentages of American Students Perform Above Grade Level

education.jhu.edu

50 pointstokenadult100 comments

An additional data point on this issue is from a few years ago, the discovery that students surveyed by the federal National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP), known informally as "the Nation's Report Card," often self-report that their school lessons are so easy that school is mostly boring.

https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/education/report/201...

On my part, having lived in another country (Taiwan), I have long suspected that most United States pupils could handle more challenging school lessons, if only those were on offer in United States schools. For example, in almost every other country in the world, it is routine for pupils to begin foreign language study while still in elementary school, and in many countries (including Taiwan and Singapore, a generation ago) the majority of school pupils are attending school with a language of instruction that is not the same as the language they speak at home with their parents. Yet most United States high school graduates are resolutely monolingual English speakers, unless they grew up with another home language besides English. International comparisons suggest that there is still plenty of room at the top for achievable higher standards for United States students, and that students would enjoy school better if their lessons were more challenging.

Americans are also often shocked to see how challenging lessons actually are in other places, and sometimes kind of frightened by it. I feel like there's a whole genre of Internet posts of what students are allegedly learning in other countries. ("Cheryl's birthday" from Singapore is a famous recent example, but there are plenty of others.)

I had a physics teacher in high school who came from Russia and was always frustrated at the lower standards for science education here in the U.S. He would describe what people in Russia were supposed to know by a particular grade level and it was commonly years ahead of Americans -- and he claimed students were expected to take much more time studying overall (although that's not necessarily always useful, and there are presumably also many different kinds of schools in Russia, as there are in the U.S.).

We can surely find some possible tradeoffs and disadvantages of particular educational methods and approaches used in other countries. (People often complain about the rote-memorization issue with the associated lack of conceptual understanding or creativity, and, when we see very difficult educational materials from earlier eras in the U.S., there's the observation that students then may have had to learn many fewer subjects at a time.) But it seems like there's a lot of indication that huge numbers of U.S. students could be learning at a more challenging pace than they are today.

I only spent a semester in another country (in Madrid), but I felt that the lessons were not all that challenging, but they were thorough. Meaning, in my courses there we were expected to know a lot, but once we knew that material we weren't asked to manipulate it in any way that really pushed us. Confounding my interpretation is that one of my courses, as a computer engineering student, was a fluid mechanics course in the aerospace department.

Then again, my US undergrad is probably pretty atypical. My school had very heavy core requirements (at least for engineering), so you had a lot of classes each semester. It tends to be a top-ranked US school, but the classes really weren't very challenging, and because of how many we took, they never seemed to go into much depth.

On another note, it's not often that I reminisce longingly on my childhood, but that's exactly what happened while I was doing Cheryl's birthday. My favorite things growing up were math and logic puzzles in their pure forms, un-obscured by the tedium that accompanies them in real life. I remember Math 24 from Elementary school, Math Counts in middle school, and some brain teasers and logic puzzles sprinkled throughout both times. If you're needing some for late elementary children, I highly recommend "The Lady or The Tiger and Other Logic Puzzles"

It's a little different in college - this is generally where the US catches up.

It's kind of hard to tell what's real anymore thanks to said genre of posts, after hearing the whole gamut up to things to the order of "Well Russian children are expected to know calculus by 8, group theory by 9, and complete their mastery of theoretical physics by 11"

I would post the quote from Vladimir Arnold where he said he taught sixth graders group theory but that would probably be depressing.

Russian system is fundamentally different from the American (or at least it used to be in the USSR): students can choose schools and schools can choose students.

For example my school had been admitting everyone for the grades 1-8 but for grades 9-10 there had been a math test. I think about a dozen out of 70 eight graders made to the 9th grade in the same school and the rest had to go to other schools. The class had been replenished with students from elsewhere who also passed the test and went on with 15 hours of math lessons (and 40 hours of homework) per week for the grades 9-10. I don't think something like this could fly in the USA.

There is a reason students in other countries learn additional languages at a young age--it's more beneficial for them. The ROI for learning English as a second language is incredibly high. The ROI for learning any second language as an American is comparatively much lower.

The average American who learns a second language also lacks the ability/need to use that language day to day, so even if they do learn, they'll rapidly lose proficiency once they leave school.

In the US, the average student could benefit from learning Spanish. In some areas, they wouldnt get a chance to use it as much, but in many cases, they would be able to. If anything, they'd be able to use spanish language programming to help them learn. Which is ironically the same sorts of things that younger kids from other countries learning english have to learn from.

>In the US, the average student could benefit from learning Spanish.

There are some secondary benefits from learning a second language [1]. But learning Spanish outside of a few areas in the US brings little direct benefit. There just aren't enough Spanish speakers who don't also speak English in the vast majority of the US.

Furthermore, Immigration from Mexico is falling off, and the percent of Hispanic households who speak English at home is rapidly rising. This means that any direct benefit to learning Spanish will diminish over time.

>If anything, they'd be able to use spanish language programming to help them learn. Which is ironically the same sorts of things that younger kids from other countries learning english have to learn from.

Not even remotely comparable. The amount of material available only in English dwarfs the material available only in Spanish.

To sum up, sure kids in American can learn Spanish, and many do. But there are real tangible and financial benefits to learning English as a second language that dwarf any of the benefits American kids get from learning Spanish. Once you recognize that, it makes perfect sense that Americans are more likely to be monolingual.

[1] Studies show, there are cognitive benefits to bilingualism, but they also show there are benefits to monolingualism. Usually you'll find more benefits to bilingualism over all, but larger single-language vocabulary and faster retrieval time are definitely advantageous. Studies also don't show that the cognitive benefits of learning a second language outweigh the cognitive opportunity costs of studying something else instead.

Additionally, the majority of these cognitive benefits are recorded in children and adults who spent a fair amount of time speaking in both languages. It's unlikely that learning a language in school and then forgetting it later will have the same beneficial effects.

> Learning Spanish outside of a few areas in the US brings little direct benefit.

I'm originally from Indiana, and lived there until 3 years ago, upon which I moved to Norway. I lived in small to medium sized towns, and would have found it to be a benefit for many jobs, especially low-paying or lower-management jobs. I imagine it is the same for much of the midwest, the south, and the southwest. You are correct on the immigration from mexico, however, and it may bring dimishing returns as time goes on.

> The amount of material available only in English dwarfs the material available only in spanish. You don't need the same amount of material, nor do you need only available in spanish. You just have to find the material. Harry Potter is generally a good series to read when learning a foreign language because it is available in so many, for example. Outside of English, however, spanish language television and reading material is one of the easier to obtain in the US. Norwegian, for example, is a little trickier to find as it isn't nearly as widespread.

English is one of the 'special' languages, and a lot of languages don't compare - it is used as a unifying language in a lot of professions. It really, really helps me here in Norway, especially since there is a high fluency rate here (Console games and adult movies generally aren't translated, for example). I'm pretty lucky that English is my primary language.

Sidenote: I generally think the advantages to bilingualism are greater. Especially if they teach people a different way of looking at the world, which is somewhat the main benefit of a second language. At that point, however, it doesn't matter which language one learns. Klingon would probably work just as well for such cognitive effects. This sort of thing really shouldn't go away, even if the language was forgotten.

>and would have found it to be a benefit for many jobs, especially low-paying or lower-management jobs.

I think you may be overestimating the benefit. When I worked as a retail supervisor in college, we paid $0.25 more if you spoke one of a few different languages. It never really made much difference when hiring. I also had many Spanish speaking friends in lower paying jobs and apart from 1 who worked as a hospital translator there wasn't much financial benefit.

If you take the amount of time that it takes to become proficient (and keep proficiency), you'd be much better off spending that time on something more lucrative. From a purely financial perspective, after factoring in opportunity costs, I think that learning Spanish probably has a negative ROI.

>This sort of thing really shouldn't go away, even if the language was forgotten.

We don't really know that though. We need more evidence before we base start taking action here. It could be that learning the violin would have more benefit. Learning a new language is romantic, we can't let that romanticism impact policy decisions.

And my guess is that to get most of the benefits of bilingualism, you have to get to the point where you spend time thinking in both languages. I don't think classroom instruction is ever going to get you to that level.

> In the US, the average student could benefit from learning Spanish

That's very true today. It wasn't true just 20 and 30 years ago. The Spanish speaking population in the US has skyrocketed in that time. In 1980 for example, the US was about 82% white and almost exclusively English speaking. That's a very rapid cultural change, shifting from a few percent Spanish speaking to 1/4 in just three decades. I'd suggest that over the next 20 years it will be very beneficial for children to be taught Spanish (and they likely will be), however the near-past value of it was not remotely as high as it is now and will become. The point being, it takes time for a nation to adjust to such a rapid change, you're not going to get hundreds of millions of people - across very diverse (in every sense) education zones - to shift to all knowing Spanish in 10 or 15 years.

>shifting from a few percent Spanish speaking to 1/4 in just three decades

Where are you getting that? The current percent of native Spanish speakers in the US is only about 13%, and the majority of them also speak English.

Immigration from Mexico has dropped off and the number of Americans of Hispanic descent who speak only English at home is rapidly increasing.

Virtually all immigrant children learn English in school, so it's very likely that the benefits of learning Spanish will decrease over time not increase. Historically the 3rd generation of US immigrants speak only English, and the current trends suggest that will happen with Hispanic immigrants as well.

> Immigration from Mexico has dropped off

Mostly due to the recent US economic downturn and the poor distribution of the returns of the subsequent aggregate expansion beyond the upper classes. That's probably not a durable trend unless the US economy continues to be miserable for all but the elites.

Some of it yes, but there is also a limit to how many people are willing to migrate.

Mexico is only about 1/3 the size of the US and surveys indicate only 1/3 of Mexican adults have any desire to come to the US at all.

Of those people, only half indicated willingness to come illegally and given that fact that they haven't done it yet, you can assume most of them won't. (This matters because there are limits on the number of legal immigrants)

Assuming all Mexicans who are willing to actually make the journey here make it, and adding in immigrants from other Spanish speaking countries, it's still not enough to overcome the historical trend towards language assimilation.

I remember seeing some studies that suggested a beneficial effect of childhood second-language tuition on both childhood and adult verbal intelligence and language learning. But I unfortunately don't have a reference to hand. Perhaps someone else here will be able to find one.

I only spoke English until a couple years ago, despite having taken a bit of French and German in high school. I could have never actually used it. Couple years ago, I moved to Norway. And the kids here are amazing with language.

Not only do they understand dialects well and learn both official types of Norwegian, they are expected to understand Danish and Swedish. They start learning English their first year in school, and many wind up taking an additional language in high school.

There is no homework in elementary school (and less at higher levels), no grades, and no holding kids back a grade. The school days are shorter. If a kid is needing help, there are programs to help them catch up. A smart kid will make good grades (and work for them): Average actually means average, and that is OK. Good marks mean a kid is learning over and above what is expected of them. If too many students are getting high marks (instead of average) on the national tests, they adjust the tests so they are harder.

A few kids find school boring, but the system itself leaves room for kids to excel as well as makes provisions for those that aren't - which seems like one of the fallbacks of the American system. You are expected to make A's and B's and there simply isn't room for the high acheiver to work for anything.

> [there are] no grades

> A smart kid will make good grades

I read that as "there are no grades (levels)", especially as the following point is "there's no holding back a grade (level)".

I think it's a switch from grades/marks for elementary school vs. grades/marks for secondary school.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education_in_Norway#Primary_sc... says, of primary school:

> No official grades are given at this level. However, the teacher often writes a comment, analysis, and sometimes an unofficial grade on tests. Tests are to be taken home and shown to parents. There is also an introductory test to let the teacher know if the student is above average or is in need of some assistance at school.

> ... When the students enter lower secondary school, at age 12 or 13, they begin getting grades for their work.

maybe that's the two types of Norwegian seeping through?

If you look more closely at the eastern model you find they cover a lot of completely useless material. Which is the core issue we could have people say memorize the first 4 digits of the square and cube roots of every number from 1 to 100. And yes it's more useful than you might think. However, not enough that students are going to remember it in 15 years.

Quick, what year did the french revolution start and end?

Basically. I remember talking to a younger cousin in China, and he asked if I ever had to recite texts in language class. As in, memorize a passage verbatim and regurgitate it on the exam.

I said "No, what would even be the point of that? You'll just forget it afterwards."

Then I asked him if they ever discussed the meaning of the text in class. He said they did not.

The East Asian system gets a few things right. We definitely could give students more challenging material (especially in math and science), but the focus on rote learning and endless drudgery (they get soooo much homework) is not something I'm too keen on being introduced here.

I wouldn't say that about a comparison between math problems in textbooks in China and math problems in textbooks in the United States. (I have math textbooks in English, and math textbooks in Chinese, a language that I read well as a second language.) The focus on deep conceptual understanding and open-ended problem-solving in math is actually much better in east Asia than in the United States.

http://condor.depaul.edu/sepp/mat660/Askey.pdf

(I can well believe, however, that any current with a current one-party dictatorial government, something Taiwan had the first time I lived there and something China still has today, will lag in teaching history. Critical thinking about history is bad for dictators. Taiwan thoroughly revised the history textbooks after it had its peaceful transition to democracy.)

> I can well believe, however, that any current with a current one-party dictatorial government, something Taiwan had the first time I lived there and something China still has today, will lag in teaching history.

Multiparty liberal democracies allow much more scope for debating and interpreting history, but they still commonly encourage a teleological interpretation that glorifies the nation and its current political system.

I also get the feeling that understanding history in a meaningful way is hard, and that educational systems generally aren't making much headway against this problem, maybe somewhat independently of how much debate or criticism they permit. One difficulty is the conscious and semiconscious propagandization of many historical issues by many parties, together with the desire to see historical figures or groups we identify with in a positive light and those we don't identify with in a negative light. Another thing is the truth of the "past is a foreign country" observation:

https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/L._P._Hartley

Getting inside of the minds and cultures of people from the past is really difficult!

I remember a lot of US centric hate in my public US education. "Trail of tears" is not exactly nationalistic propaganda. Handing out diseased blankets to conduct large scale germ warfare. Only nation to use nuclear weapons, conducting disease experiments on prisoners. Corruption, racism, etc etc.

I could go on, but I don't think most people got US #1 outside of being an economic powerhouse.

Well, i think US people are the only one to chant USA on a slightest chance and more...

Maybe people from elsewhere would instead chant the names of their own countries? ;-)

Part of this is how well U, S, A works as a chant. People don't say Canada, Canada, Canada, or America, America, America.

I had a lot of friends during college who went to school in China. And I had a lot of Chinese CS/Math professors who would often say things like "We teach this to 12 year olds in China".

My Chinese friends would laugh when i asked them if that was true. They said that sure they covered it, but they just memorized algorithms, and no one really understood the concepts.

I don't think that looking at math textbooks is going to tell you all that much about the way math is actually taught. You're not going to see any of the official and unofficial performance incentives that can alter the way material is taught.

...the French revolution? Didn't they have two big ones, launching the 1st and 2nd republics?

I want to say the 1790s and the 1850s. But I can't get more precise than that. In my mind, they're sort of just after the American Revolution and just before the USA-CSA Civil War. And then there was the little failed rebellion in between that was in Les Miserables.

There was also a bunch of Napoleon in there, somewhere. But knowing any of that has had no use for me, other than keeping the plot straight in novels set in that era.

1789, arguably fall of Napoleon in 1805.

Sorry, I have a compulsion to answer questions that start with "Quick"

Edit: Wikipedia says 1789 to 1799. I was close on the dates but wrong about Napoleon (whom ultimately lost in 1814).

I don't have any data to back this up aside from personal anecdote, but it seems that while many students would benefit from more rigorous courses, the ones who don't keep up are very expensive. They'd need almost twice as many classes, and as someone who was on the TaG (Talented and Gifted), AP, and IB track at my school, I am always nervous about further separation from other classmates.

The larger the pool of people being drawn from the better tailoring that can be done.

If you have 24 kids total in the district, then maybe you put them all in one classroom regardless of age and teach that way. If you have 300 kids in the school district now you can do separate classes for each age. If you have 900 kids, now each grade can have 3 classes and maybe one of them in each grade can be set aside for advanced students and one for slower students. If you have 25,000 kids in the district, now you can start doing things like an entire G&T school, and/or a school for the students interested in performing arts, and/or a specialized vocational high school.

Unfortunately, the trend in the US is towards micro-catchment areas mostly as a legacy of racial segregation efforts and because of the continuing desire to have socio-economic segregation.

Classroom time doesn't need to be the primary social time for kids. A lot of the problems that people squawk about for mixed ages are only problems because they are tacitly tolerated. Discard social promotion and you don't need to worry about age group separation.

You've identified yet another social dysfunction for which we can blame the automobile: Americans think children ought to be stuck in their homes when unsupervised. The kids simply must socialize in school, since there's no way we could allow them to ride bikes a few miles to visit friends after school. This may be less of an issue now, with social media.

In third grade, I was in a mixed third/fourth grade classroom. It may have been the least boring year I spent in elementary school, although frankly that isn't a high bar to clear.

I'd blame that squarely on overprotective parents. If it was the cars fault "uphill both ways in the snow" stories would have died off about two generations ago. It's no longer socially acceptable for a parent to allow their kid(s) much freedom of movement ("no you can't ride your bike to your friend's house because crossing the street is too dangerous") and social media steps in to fill the void.

We're looking at different aspects of the same process. Americans are afraid of life for many reasons, but one of those is that so many of us tool around in our own private climate-controlled boxes rather than inhabiting the street as pedestrians, equestrians, or cyclists. The phrase "afraid of life" certainly includes "afraid of ridiculous innumerate peer opprobrium with respect to clearly superior parenting choices", and automobiles are as much to blame for that as anything else.

A guy at work was complaining a few days ago because they don't have a bus for his son.

The school is 500' away. Now, his son is too young to just walk on his own, but that's a couple of minutes to get him to school.

When I was in high school (early 00s) my school was 1.7 miles, had to walk further than 500' to get to the city bus stop (or just walk/bike).

Why would the helicopter-parent syndrome be less of an issue with social media?

At least the kids can talk to some other human beings instead being locked in solitary confinement

> Yet most United States high school graduates are resolutely monolingual English speakers, unless they grew up with another home language besides English

So?

Oh my god, I'm such a bad person for only speaking English. How can I suffer such a life. /s

But I agree with your point, the challenge offered by schools is too low.

My parents believed in "radical unschooling", i.e. they didn't formally teach us anything at all. I had to ask to learn to read.

I entered the public school system for high school and did not find myself at all behind. Much of the history kids had learned was wrong (Columbus, anyone?), I was reading better because I basically read fantasy novels 24/7 for the last seven years, and I caught up in math in one semester even though I started high school not knowing division. I have a BS in CS from Georgia Tech now.

I am not surprised that students are bored in elementary school. I am also skeptical of everyone commenting here to say things like "but in Russia/Singapore/China/Norway school is so much harder!" etc. Any motivated kid can catch up pretty easily. The big fear, IMO, is that you will burn your kid out, bore your kid to death, and crush their curiosity. I am pretty sure all school systems are capable of doing this, albeit in different ways.

Unsurprising. Under NCLB and related measures, schools are incentivized not to promote advanced students faster than their age peers, since they are rewarded for improvement in (and punished for insufficient improvement or backtracking in) the percentage of students performing at or above grade level, so students that would otherwise have been advanced in grade ahead of their peers are held back to the normal advancement rate to make the schools' results look better.

You get what you pay for.

Yeah, careful what you measure, because that's what will be gamed towards. It reminds me of what I heard[1] (I didn't check my sources carefully, whatever) is one reason station wagons fell out of favor relative to SUVs in the USA -- federal fuel economy standards that were divided into separate categories for trucks and non-trucks, incentivizing the sale of small trucks rather than big cars, even for a big car that is smaller and more effecient than a small truck :-(

[1] http://www.thetruthaboutcars.com/2012/10/how-cafe-killed-com...

You may also be interested to know that there has been, for much of the recent past, a significant tax incentive to buy large SUVs (actually more to finance them.) If GWVR> 6000 lb., you could expense $25k, vs only $11k for smaller vehicles. I don't know the current status of this.

When I starting searching "vehicles with gwvr..." google autocompleted ".. over 6000lb." Then I found this helpful webpage on how to reduce my tax burden by driving a stupidly large vehicle. http://www.linkcpa.com/tax-savings-still-available-for-heavy...

Thanks for the info! Wow, even more nonsense encouraging excessive weight, I had no idea but am sadly less and less surprised :-(

This whole situation is especially horrible in light of research [1] that shows that extra weight on motor vehicles is more dangerous to other road users and that any extra safety for those inside the heavier vehicle is strictly speaking being achieved by an equal and opposite "zero sum" reduction in safety for all other road users

[1] http://www.accessmagazine.org/articles/fall-2014/pounds-kill...

I'd like to know about this. Can you link to something about the incentive programs? I thought that they were heavily regional, but I admit that I haven't looked too deeply.

> Can you link to something about the incentive programs?

Well, the negative side is mostly the consequences for failing to make Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) under the NCLB.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adequate_Yearly_Progress

AYP is out. The goals looked good on paper, made good sound bites for the news, but weren't realistic. NCLB is out too. The new thing is the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA).

Right, but ESSA is less than a year old; NCLB and its AYP-based incentives spent nearly a decade and a half shaping American school outcomes (and many of the state and local laws and policies established in order to meet NCLB requirements and the incentives of the AYP system haven't been revised.)

ESSA, OTOH, maintains the basic structure of NCLB, including the same kind of accountability system, but leaves detailed setting of standards and interventions to the states. It may weaken, but seems unlikely to eliminate, the pressures against advanced promotion (particularly in grades 3-8, where it continues the requirement for annual testing) created by NCLB and its AYP-based interventions.

Grade inflation. Talk to highschool students in western canada/us. They talk of 90% as a below-average score. My highschool grades, if I applied to university today, wouldn't qualify me for anything.

There is an old skier's adage: If you aren't falling you aren't improving. By already knowing everything, these kids learn nothing. Then after all their As these now adults hit my classroom with reading issues and a fear of curiosity. Anything not on the exam is to be actively ignored. Don't read anything that might confuse the issues. Stick to the outlines.

And when the prof asks you to pick a paper topic on your own, something not already in the outline, inundate him with panicked emails asking what you should and shouldn't find interesting .

Students may perform above grade level in reading and math, but tests in these areas fail to measure the skills involved in learning how to learn. No Child Left Behind and its ilk focus on proficiency and remediation, but actually risks leaving bright students behind. When children can breeze through their assigned work because it’s so easy for them, they end up ill prepared for facing challenge and failure when it finally comes. They are left with poor study habits and time management skills because they never needed good ones before. I’m not sure how to measure these skills but doing so may give a more complete picture of a student’s learning situation — maybe a picture that incentivizes challenging students according to their abilities.

As a parent I will respond with the general observation that what most kids in my city (SF) need is more sleep and less rote work.

I will _opine_ that what they need is more time outside. Out of the classroom. Out of the house. On the beach and in the forest etc etc.

Unfortunately quantity of work [sheets] and number of hours invested are a convenient proxy for 'challenging' in public education.

Fortunately my daughters go to a charter school which is ahead of the curve on contemporary research into education and learning, and compared to their peers in mainline SFUSD, they are relatively insulated from that false equivalence.

The cliché but oft-recounted 'tiger mom' childhood saturated completely by academics sounds to me frankly like hell, and I would work hard to ensure that mirroring its excesses in the US does not become the fad.

Me, I'd far rather we have a generation of rounded kids with experience of the physical (especially, natural) world, than a cadre well trained from birth for knowledge worker jobs which may not even exist when they become adults.

I've already decided that my son won't have homework when he gets to elementary school. Studies have shown it to be a questionable practice, and I would rather him play and explore things he's interested in instead. If that means that he asks me about his school work, I'll be happy to talk with him about it, and maybe even do some of the homework together. But if he's interested in extracurricular things, then that's where we're going to spend his extracurricular time.

"Between 11% and 37% of California students scored at or above the next grade level . . . of their current grade level. The percentages tend to be higher for students in the older grades."

It's a pipe dream to believe that the public education system is going to adapt to be a one-size-fits-all, especially in California's gigantic public schools system which has a "minimum" budget of ~$70,000,000,000 allocated to it every year.

As a parent there is clear responsibility to help our kids outside of this structure - what strategies does HN undertake with their kids (or what did your parents undertake with you) that helped to close this gap?

(1) http://www.cde.ca.gov/fg/fr/eb/budletter15-16.asp

It's a pipe dream to believe that the public education system is going to adapt to be a one-size-fits-all

May I take it that you mean "It's a pipe dream to believe that the public education system is going to adapt to be SOMETHING OTHER THAN a one-size-fits-all"?

As a parent (of four children, two now adults) and as a voter and taxpayer, I am of course interested in general improvements in the education systems of all countries, and especially in the country I now live in, the United States. I think it will be helpful for advocacy of thoughtful improvements in education policy to be aware of how much young people do and can learn, whether or not their schools set high standards. I think setting more ambitious standards will make school less boring and more meaningful for the plurality of young people in the United States, and quite possibly for the majority of young people here.

As a parent, I chose to homeschool my children early on. That seems (according to my oldest son's testimony, sent to me by email) to have been helpful for my oldest son's career as a hacker. My second son may pursue a programming career too, although he has plenty of other interests. I'm still interested in discussions of education policy, the issue that drew me to Hacker News, here because I can still adjust the educational plan for my two younger children some more, and because this matters for all of us, childless or not. But so far I have found it expedient, in a high-income school district with high parental educational levels, to homeschool my children for their elementary education. They then go to the friendly local high school (which has improved its academic standards recently by dint of competition from Minnesota's public school open-enrollment policy) and take lots of AP classes and do lots of academic extracurricular activities with friends who have open-enrolled from the territory of other school districts. It isn't perfect, but it's a trade-off that works well enough for us.

Private school

Pretty sure we are all above average now.

But seriously, it seems like schools have really drifted towards programs that enhance self-esteem and build confidence rather than making school the narcissistic insult it was when I was kid. I think that is fine. For the most part you can learn everything you actually want to know or need to know yourself later in life. It would be great if every kid left school thinking they were really good at things and had the confidence to get out there and try.

The public school my kids attend routinely teaches the N+1 th grade math material in grades 7 and 8 so I suspect it is well known that the official syllabus has been pushed to allow score inflation. Same thing as all airline timetables having 10-20 minutes padding to reduce the probability of a late arrival.

I suspect it is well known

The submitted article suggests that this is not at all well known, and is an understudied issue. That's my impression too from years of doing research on education policy--most American teachers and school administrators have NO IDEA how much more young people could be learning in the school context, and indeed no idea how much learning the brighter kids do in the summer when they are away from school reading on their own.

I wouldn't say that is the same thing.

The airlines aren't trying to be the best by a measure of getting to the destination absolutely the fastest and basing their efforts and predictions on that, they are trying to be predictable (and therefor reliable) by building in some contingency.

The school wants the pupil to get the best score it possibly can and there is no "too good". The airline doesn't need to get the plane home in absolutely the best time, just reliably within a specified time, in fact arriving too early is potentially a problem for various reasons (you as a passenger only see the single nominal arrival time published, internally they will be working to a time window aiming to arrive "at or after YY:YY" as well as "at or before XX:XX").

American public schools don't have much to offer highly capable students. On the other hand, they don't stand in the way of them, either. I met many such in college, and they found ways to get what the wanted.

Generalizations about "American public school's" features are usually wrong. Many American public schools have a lot to offer highly-capable students. OTOH, many American public schools actually do quite a bit to stand in their way (often, at a minimum, forcing them to spend a large portion of the day in classes far below their ability is pretty significantly standing in their way.)

I'm sure there are some outstanding public schools. But the generalization still applies.

As for forcing them to be in slow moving classes, that is not really standing in the way. The student (and I know many who did) can be doing other things at his desk, and certainly a lot of students are doing other things in class :-) Some teachers also allow their highly capable students to spend class time in the school library instead.

The generalization was stated as an absolute, and that's why you're getting well-deserved objection.

On your second point: it is true that the students are not chained down and kept from self-study, but some might say that school should be a nurturing environment, and not just not_a_jail. These students are learning the value of waiting around without doing much of anything, and are praised for their achievements despite having expended little effort. And I think it would be pretty easy to get the impression that having a 4.0 GPA indicates that you're doing well; but if you're starting the school year far ahead of the evaluation criteria, then it's false feedback.

> The generalization was stated as an absolute

The word "all" was not used, and inferring it is unduly pedantic. English is not a precise language, which is why there are qualifiers like "all", such as:

1. leaves are green 2. all leaves are green

You used "These students are...". I would not infer that as meaning "All these students are..." and would be surprised if you meant it that way.

What real argument for age-based grades can there be?

Socialization. A 10-year-old prodigy going into a calculus class full of seniors is not going to spend much time socializing with their emotional peers.

A 10-year-old prodigy that could be succeeding in a calculus class full of seniors but who is actually stuck in a class of 10-year-olds struggling with arithmetic is not going to spend as much time socializing with their intellectual peers, and is also probably going to spend as little time socializing with their age peers as if they went to the calculus class -- being forced into a class with them doesn't mean socializing with them. (As for emotional peers, given the correlation between social and general intelligence, their age peers are unlikely to represent their emotional peers, so sticking them with age peers is also crippling their time spent socializing with emotional peers.)

Money (for the school) is a more likely explanation, as I argue elsewhere: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12298579

Exactly this.

I had a friend that skipped a grade, and the age difference affected her. She was 17 in her first year of college, unable to fully participate, for example. Many kids that are held back a year find other sorts of problems as well - sexual maturity and hormones a year ahead of their classmates, for example.

The other problem i've seen with "advanced" students is complete seperation from other students, with the implicit expectation that the students should be more mature because they were smart. One school system did this from a young age, and in high school there were multiples that simply had trouble socializing with 'normal' students. Really had a detrimental effect on some of them.

I would approve of specialized sorts of schedules for such 10 year olds, however. Part of the day in the classes needed for their level, while going back to enjoy the other classes with their emotional and developmental peers. Art, music, physical education, lunch, recess, and some of the reading (after all, it would be fun stories at an emotional level they understand), etc. Perhaps even special advanced classes with a lighter homework load designed for the advanced student, for example, could be worked in.

I was pushed ahead a grade, and didn't have many issues in elementary school, until we moved in the middle of 5th grade. Had to deal with a whole new set of people who I'd not grown up with, and that then carried on to middle and high school. No doubt the adolescent period would have been more difficult had I stayed in the original school, but I think it would have had less contributing factor.

I did occasionally get in to some 'trouble' with 'peers' (not really my peers, but others in the school) being 'advanced'.

Example: 4th grade - teacher gets sick - our class is split in to 2 to go sit with 5th grade classes for the last 2 hours of school. "just sit and read". Fine... but the 5th grade teacher was covering math lessons, and was asking questions - "who knows ... (fill in the blank)?". Silence in the room, except for me raising my hand. "I know!" She was thinking I wanted to leave the room, and kept ignoring me, until I spoke the answer. Pissed off the other 9-11 year old kids having a 8 year old answer their math questions (it was something to do with fractions).

I got a scratch-n-sniff pine tree sticker for my answer, and was told to keep reading my book and not disturb the class any more...

Still had that sticker until a few years ago (it didn't smell any more).

This is a poor argument. Seriously: I didn't spend much time socializing with my chronological peers either. At least with my academic peers we had some shared interests.

I didn't either, but it's not a poor argument just because you're an exception to it. Socialization is a very important part of human development.

It's a poor argument because it makes the unsupported assumption that children will socialize better with their chronological peers than with their intellectual peers. I agree that socialization is important - and that's exactly why I think it's entirely unreasonable to surround children with people with whom they share nothing except age.

I started taking college classes part time at 12, dropped out of high school my junior year, and graduated college at 19. Socialization was the main reason my parents kept me in high school. But it meant I had to deal with the high school administration much of the time.

I was not prepared to socialize well with either group of people: I was an odd duck in both groups. The place I found best to socialize with was with the Quick Recall-type kids, or with those who could have gotten into college a little early. The socialization argument cuts both ways.

Also physical development in sports. A year can make quite a difference. There is a practice called holding-back to start kids a half to full year late for better sports, learning and socialization.

Another question for me is: what is the argument for a single grade across subjects? Why not let a kid be in Math 7, while still staying in Literature 5, and Physical Education 3, while another kid the same age is in Physical Education 12, Literature 6, and Math 2? If you mixed it up enough you could substantially lessen the stigmas of both being ahead and behind.

> Another question for me is: what is the argument for a single grade across subjects?

Prior to middle school / junior high (starting usually between 6th and 8th grade, depending on the particular school system), the norm in the US isn't to have distinct subject-matter classes, but classrooms with a single teacher for all subjects for one grade, which may not use a strict fixed allotment of time slots for each subject, and even where they do it may not be the same time slot for the same subject area in different classrooms in different grades in the same school (and even the set of subjects may change somewhat in different grades.)

This makes per-subject variations in grade level for a student logistically difficult to accommodate.

OTOH, once you get to middle school with per-subject classes being the norm, this is fairly easy to accommodate, and its just a scheduling and resource problem (e.g., in a middle school, do you have enough qualified students to support a Calculus class) at that level.

I reread the Ingall-Wilder Little School House series recently and was impressed with how one room school house operated with kids of all grades in the same room. Villages were not large enough for multiple teachers. Basically education in those days was memorizing and doing all the exercises in various primers. Teachers were often just teenage girls, not much older than the oldest students. Older people were too busy working or running households.

Except for the kids who'd be ahead in everything - they'd still have a stigma...

I suspect uniform testing at 'grade level' becomes harder to use for comparisons against other schools.

If there's a kid who is ahead at everything, the material is not diverse enough. To some extent competence is a zero-sum game. The likelihood that a student is operating at above-typical levels in sports, art, math, and journalism seems small to me. The early experiences that lead to advanced performance in each of those fields are dramatically different.

The only way I would expect to see that is if the school was tailoring all of those subjects to a certain kind of student. Which, admittedly, is common. But I'm talking about a more universal advancement system where Art 12 really is for level-12 artists, not level-12 math students who want to do something that resembles art, and be graded on effort.

The nice thing about such a system is you wouldn't have to cater Art-12 to advanced level history students just to keep their GPAs up. Those students could stay in Art 4, and get their A there, while the Art-12 students were subject to the higher standard that really only they could handle. You could expect them to spend 20 hours a week in the studio, which would be unreasonable for a student carrying a full coursework burden in another field. And you could even put that burden on 10-year-olds who were ready for it, of which there are some.

> If there's a kid who is ahead at everything, the material is not diverse enough.

Or, you know, the kid is just more competent. All people may be created morally equal, but they aren't created equal in competence, even in some kind of "advantages in one area are balanced by deficits in others" way.

> To some extent competence is a zero-sum game.

No, its not. (Also, being zero-sum is absolutely binary -- either a thing is zero-sum or its not. It can't be zero-sum "to some extent". It can have tradeoffs to some extent and not be zero-sum, which is the nearest it can get to that.)

> The likelihood that a student is operating at above-typical levels in sports, art, math, and journalism seems small to me.

Yes, students that are above grade level across the board areas will be less common than those that are above grade level in a narrower domain. (Competence is generally a product of innate factors and effort, and even though the innate factors are correlated across disciplines -- general intelligence applies to most, and correlates with talents in others -- effort may or may not be.)

I appreciate your different perspective on the matter. One quibble:

> either a thing is zero-sum or its not.

A game can have both a zero sum component and an unbounded component. Only one person can win the presidency, but everyone who runs can get a reputation boost.

Learning how to shoot free throws might improve your saxophone playing, but 8 hours a day in the practice room could take away from your knowledge of literature.

Art and sports are generally electives in US public schools. It is entirely possible (and in fact very likely) for a student to be ahead in all academic subjects, especially at the lower grade levels when there's not much specialization yet. Probably not equally advanced. But at the very least, a student who is far ahead in math and science is probably also well above average in reading comprehension.

Thank you - that's what I was thinking, but you said it better than I could.

I was pushed ahead a grade, and as a result, was always a year or two behind everyone else physically, so, almost by definition, I was always "behind" in gym/phys-ed classes, but there wasn't much I could do about that. Looking back, I was normal/average for my age, but not for my 'grade', and had a tough time with that.

I was mostly self-educated because schools were too slow. I read nearly the entire non-fiction area of the library in pre-internet days. I dissembled and reassembled most of the objects in my environment. With the internet now the avenues of self-education are greater. Got me into MIT.

> above-typical levels in sports, art, math, and journalism

I think the term for students like that is "Ivy material" -- or at least, it used to be.

If I were a billionaire my kids wouldn't go to school. I'd fly in experts and pay them top dollar. Want to learn about the web today? Here's Tim Berners-Lee to show you.

I guess I'd make them do team sports so they didn't end up weird though...

My kid is only 3, and my dissatisfaction with public school is already starting. We sent her to a Fairfax County (one of the top public school districts in the country), VA preschool for a few months while we lived with my parents while looking for a new place in D.C. They gave her a ton of worksheets and reading exercises. Flashbacks to my horrendous experience with FCPS.

She goes to a Montessori preschool now, where they do about an hour and a half of real work a day and spend the rest of the day on the playground.

The history of kindergarten is interesting here, and I find that the Montessori method falls well in line.

http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?allowed_in_frame=0&searc...

"Kindergarten means a garden of children, and Froebel, the inventor of it, or rather, as he would prefer to express it, the discoverer of the method of Nature, meant to symbolize by the name the spirit and plan of treatment. How does the gardener treat his plants? He studies their individual natures, and puts them into such circumstances of soil and atmosphere as enable them to grow, flower, and bring forth fruit,-- also to renew their manifestation year after year." [Mann, Horace, and Elizabeth P. Peabody, "Moral Culture of Infancy and Kindergarten Guide," Boston, 1863]

The most advanced thing I learned in kindergarten was what the letters were and how to print them. We also only went for half the day, and spent most of the day playing with blocks and doing show-and-tell. I don't think it hurt any... well, except for my parent's pocketbook, since they still had to pay for full childcare.

Those experts are not experts in educating children.

> I guess I'd make them do team sports so they didn't end up weird though...

People are quite capable of ending up weird having done team sports while growing up.

His (pretty clear) point was that socialization is important, and if you spend your formative years in a room interacting only with your family or a tutor you're not going to be a well-functioning adult.

And my (I thought pretty clear) point was that "team sports", especially as the primary peer-interaction socialization venue, are far from a panacea for that problem.

Yes, team sports is a bit of a weird environment, and not just in America. Socialization is also possible while participating in 1v1 sports, or even something like chess club.

Pretty obvious side effect of lowering standards.

At the same time India has more kids with IQ over 120 than total amount of kids in the US.

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