Any advice on where the affected parents and children can get $5-10K for tutoring so that their kids can catch up? Is the WEF running any give-aways these days?
More ideally it refers to where a child would’ve been without hinderances but that’s harder to articulate.
All our government policies for the last two years did was fuck over the poor and enrich the wealthy.
…Oh yeah, and create an entire sedimentary layer of discarded masks in our soil. I hope people realize those things are made entirely of unregulated dirt cheap plastic. Consider how much micro plastic you’d be inhaling if you had to wear it 8+ hours a day.
But you aren’t allowed to say this out loud because a ton of people will call you all kinds of horrible things. Independent thought has not been allowed at all. Just shut up and listen to “the experts”.
It is worth actually thinking through the question rather than being dismissive.
It seems rather out of nowhere that someone would suggest we aren't measuring and/or don't know what we're measuring. Sure, the measurements probably aren't perfect, but if someone is suggesting we simply have no data on the subject isn't something that seems like a genuine argument.
And standardized tests measure, again I ask you, _what_? Isn't it funny how deep we are in this thread and no one has put a name to it? So child A does better on a test than child B. What does that mean? And I do mean, what _precisely_ does that mean.
I'll give you my opinion in the interests of fairness, there is no way to know what that means. Maybe one child is better at taking tests. Maybe one child resents the test taking process and isn't interested in participating. There are plenty of examples of meaningless tests that people believe in. Lie detectors do nothing, some people still take them seriously. IQ tests measure the biases of the person designing the test, some people still take them seriously. Haven't you ever filled out a job application and had to answer a 20 minute personality quiz? Do you think that works or makes sense?
Is it really crazy to suggest that a top-down structure, where the federal government comes up with some arbitrary standards, then makes up a test to measure compliance with that standard, all in the face of intense political interference - did a bad job?
And more importantly - are the standards meaningful at all? This gets to the heart of the original question. Is there a singular path one is supposed to take? Is it really meaningful to measure your progress along that path?
I agree it's hard to say what that means, but that is an entirely different argument and has nothing to do with whether or not these averages exist. They do, as a matter of fact, they just might not be measuring things perfectly, as I'm sure we would agree it's hard to know what a perfect measurement even is.
I would consider it dismissive to pretend like these measurements that we do focus on today don't exist, though.
Do I need to offer up a list of standardized testing methods we utilize today or can we at least agree that we are attempting to measure education levels?
What I am saying is that "education level" is meaningless, and any attempt to measure it will ultimately be meaningless.
This is the statement, and while it's needlessly condescending I don't find it dismissive at all, it rebuts the point rather concretely. We have measurements that are specifically targeted at measuring education level. This is what "catching up" refers to. Those measurements might be bad, but I disagree strongly that they are meaningless as we have strong indicators that show the measurements do predict real-world success. GPA, for example is positively correlated with adulthood income by quite a lot.
Maybe these are self-fulfilling measurements? Hard to prove one way or another, but they certainly measure things that society has proven they care about.
Society deciding something is important is not what I mean by "meaningful" here. GPA predicting success is, as you note, a self fulfilling prophesy - so if we just assigned them at random, and then colleges and employers continued to take them seriously, that would just a meaningful exercise? And then if in successive generations we assigned your GPA to be the average of your parent's GPA - still great?
Then what do you mean by meaningful here? I can't think of anything people would consider more meaningful than ability to produce/provide in relation to educations purpose in todays society. No one presumes we're talking about underwater basket-weaving when we talk about the education system, because it's rather focused on enabling the youth to learn the skills necessary to compete in todays economy.
> GPA predicting success is, as you note, a self fulfilling prophesy
This is not an argument I made - it's a possibility, but I do not consider that to be an understood fact and I believe anyone, myself included, would have a very difficult time evidencing this claim in either direction (which is what I noted).
> so if we just assigned them at random, and then colleges and employers continued to take them seriously
This is quite the qualifier - no one would take GPAs seriously if we assigned them at random for the same reasons employers don't hire from their stacks of applicants at random.
> And then if in successive generations we assigned your GPA to be the average of your parent's GPA - still great?
GPA isn't a measurement against past generations, it's a measurement against your peers - this isn't a valid use of the metrics GPA try to provide. We have testing that attempts to answer "is the current generation more educated than the past?" but that metric is not GPA. Things like literacy rate would be useful for estimating if our education system is getting better.
Yes, this is a contrived hypothetical. I'm not stating this is how GPA works, I'm asking whether that would be acceptable. I'm asking you to suspend disbelief so we can have a discussion. I can see that isn't something you are willing to do, so I bid you a good day.