Largest score declines in NAEP mathematics at grades 4 and 8
nationsreportcard.gov
nationsreportcard.gov
Luckily, we send her to private school. It reopened more quickly than public schools in many areas nearby (Fairfax VA and Montgomery MD). And once we were back in person, she got 1 on 1 reading instruction every morning until she caught back up. My wife sometimes resisted the expense of private school (we both went to public) but the pandemic totally confirmed why it was worth the money.
Does this result provide enough evidence to the contrary, or was the pandemic too much of a special circumstance?
I certainly wouldn't argue that spending time in a public school math class correlates negatively with math learning. I have no doubt that some math education takes place in public school math classes.
I think the argument is that it doesn't do a great job teaching most students most of the time while simultaneously having serious issues like requiring young children to sit still for extended stretches and punishing kids who aren't well suited to this.
I'm not saying that's the whole argument, just an example
My understanding is that home-schooling with private tutors > the typical school environment > remote learning without supervision.
In pure academics, maybe. What about your children's social/well-being from not interacting with their peers?
Also, some communities, like online games, provide serious amounts of social interaction set around reaching a common goal to willing peers.
I don't know. It seems like there's plenty of kids suffering at school precisely because they have to interact with other kids. Getting bullied at school is probably something almost everyone's experienced at some point.
The bullying was damaging I agree, but I think taking me out of school completely would have been so much more harmful.
I'm glad you've made it out of that situation without major harm (and even some constructive conclusions), but you're an outlier, I think. Normally it doesn't go that well. It really shouldn't happen in the first place...
Also, the problem with bullying isn't bullying itself but that people are receptive to it and don't defend themselves (partly because school rules prohibit defense). If everyone stands their ground and defends themselves, bullying will disappear. Bullying only makes sense when the reward (whether psychopathic self-satisfaction or bolstering your social status) is worth more than the risk (which is usually nothing if the target doesn't defend themselves). If bullying is guaranteed to result in a punch in the face, it will change the risk/reward calculation dramatically and make 99% of it not worth it.
If you're a kid that does something really obnoxious/socially unacceptable, bullying is a way for peers to correct you. The kid that picks their nose will be made fun of and they'll grow up to be an adult that doesn't pick their nose.
As with most things, bullying can go too far but that's not the norm.
It's possible to nudge proper behaviors without causing physical (or emotional) harm to a person. That kind of violence is never necessary, and the thinking that justifies it is hideous complacency at best
These days, bullying has grown to an umbrella term that includes things like teasing. Teasing or making fun of a kid who does gross things is part of a natural reaction from the other kids. Sure you could nudge that kid to stop in a positive way but whose job is that? The other kids? Probably not. The teacher/parents? They have probably tried and failed. So what complacency are you describing? Do you think as a society we can stop kids from being mean to each other?
There was a kid I went to high school with who was in a friend group I was also in. There was a point where we started calling him names just as a joke to mess with him. It got to a point where he became emotionally distant, but we kept doing it anyway just bc we didn't think much of it. His personality completely changed. He went from being a happy person to a shell of a person. We were his only friends at the time. He was still distant when we weren't around. He's (apparently) still like this also
I still feel sick to my stomach about that situation to this day, but tl;dr there's a line at which teasing goes from just teasing to something horrible
> If bullying is guaranteed to result in a punch in the face, it will change the risk/reward calculation dramatically and make 99% of it not worth it.
This just isn't how violence happens. Bullies don't select targets they can't win against. In addition to that, they often come in groups. Victim managed to punch one guy? Not only is it likely that he'll overpower the victim, his buddies are there to make sure he doesn't lose.
"Just defend yourself" is what leads to kids bringing weapons to school. Because that actually is how you defend yourself against violent thugs and certainly what a responsible adult would do when faced with unprovoked violence.
It's not really any different than literal gangs of criminals to be honest. The best way to deal with such violent people is to avoid them. You can't avoid bullies at school. If your plan is to defend yourself, then you better be able and willing to dish out extreme violence when warranted because that's what it's going to take. The ability and willingness to do that is the threat you speak of. Victims of bullying pretty much always have neither. Chances are the bullied kid isn't some hardened street tough capable of taking out three guys before they do the same to him.
Even if these victims were that tough, they can't do that because schools don't really like it when kids create liability for them with violence like that so they impose harsh consequences to violence regardless of how warranted it is. So not only are victims weaker and outnumbered, schools will also punish them for defending themselves as is any human's right.
If you get into a proper fight you will lose, however most bullying is verbal and even bullies have no interest in escalating it to physical violence if it risks yielding consequences (if not for the violence itself, but their other behavior, that might otherwise fly under the radar). So merely showing the intent to fight back will make them move onto another target.
Yes, this is completely different from gangs and I'm not talking about those. If your school has a gang problem, this advice won't help you. However below "gangs" there will generally be a clique of people that may engage in occasional verbal bullying (because it's fun for them and/or bolsters their social status) but otherwise generally do well in school and have no interest in jeopardizing that standing - therefore violence will not be in their best interest, regardless of whether they'll actually win the physical fight.
> You can't avoid bullies at school. If your plan is to defend yourself, then you better be able and willing to dish out extreme violence when warranted because that's what it's going to take
You can't avoid 100% of them. You can avoid 90% of them by being stronger/more difficult than the other targets.
This is magical thinking. "If I do A, he will do B" as if it were a cosmic law. No such deal exists! Bully has a whole alphabet of responses to choose from, including taking you up on your challenge.
You need to take a hard look at what you're suggesting here. You're describing people who are verbally violent. You're telling people that the way to get them to stop is by using physical violence. You're escalating the situation. You're doing this on the assumption that verbally violent people are not willing to go further. This is false. The problem with violent people is there's always someone willing to go further than you.
What you're actually doing is telling kids to make a threat display. Like a thug displaying his gun to intimidate the other person into backing down. This is an effective deterrent but you better be able and willing to follow up on that threat if necessary. If you do this, all bets are off. There is no guarantee that your opponent will back down. It's also possible that your threat will be perceived as a challenge to his masculity, especially if you do it in front of his peers. He'll think he'll have no choice but to take you on because he'll lose face if he doesn't.
If you're going to do this, you better be able to quickly incapacitate your opponent. I don't mean punching his face once and walking away victorious. I mean literally breaking his jaw and then following up with more attacks until he's unconscious on the floor. Then you better hope that this display of extreme violence was enough to intimidate any other bullies hanging around or you'll have to do the same thing to them before they gang up on you. If at any point your confidence in your ability to do this ever wavers, you should not attempt it.
You will lose either way.
You're putting people in actual danger with this advice. There's any number of things people can do in response to your threat display. You're telling people the aggressor will always fold. They might call your bluff instead.
Can you actually retaliate? Because eventually someone is gonna wonder if you're for real and you're gonna need to make good on that threat. If there's even the slightest doubt in your mind about it, you can't.
What are you talking about? Were you ever actually bullied?
The only place where violence is tolerated is school. Post high school, if anyone physically bullied me, I’d just call the police, the person could end in jail or at least their career would be gone.
In school, you’re left to your own devices. Police don’t care, teachers can’t do anything because schooling is compulsory.
> people are receptive to it and don't defend themselves
Another delusional take. Why did she let him rape her, she should have just defended herself! Well, because I’m smaller, weaker, and there’s less of me (1 vs group of bullies). Taking it and hoping they leave is best option, not hitting back and provoking even more violence.
I think it’s best if you don’t contribute to this discussion any more to avoid embarrassing yourself further.
> I think it’s best if you don’t contribute to this discussion any more to avoid embarrassing yourself further.
You can literally just remove yourself from the situation! No such option for vast majority of school-age children (because schooling is compulsory).
No, you really can't in many cases. And even then it isn't healthy to run every time someone crosses a boundary
There's no basis for this claim.
> it isn't healthy to run every time
That wasn't the argument. The point was that leaving isn't an option if you're forced to be in the situation by the school.
In a way, his post was a form of negotiation. He wants the other person to stop posting opinions he considers invalid and embarrassing, so he appealed to their self-interest in order to get them to change their behavior. Real violence comes with the threat of escalation: "you better stop, or else".
Seems kind of odd to see this written on an anonymous forum
Verbally, yes - though it never escalated to actual violence. To be fair, they weren't "career" bullies (for the lack of a better word), but simply a clique of kids (that were otherwise decent in school) that like to make fun of other people - turns out that actually not being afraid and confronting them is all it took to 1) stop the bullying and 2) completely change the dynamics of the relationship where they saw me as one of theirs and from that on we had decent interactions. The only violent incident I was involved in had nothing to do with bullying and was about stealing my phone.
> The only place where violence is tolerated is school
Violence still costs significantly more than verbal bullying, so most bullies would generally not want to resort to it if they can avoid it. If your option is 1) pick on the weak kid or 2) pick on the weak kid that shows a willingness to fight, you will pick option 1 because option 2 will still attract significant more attention from authority even if you easily win the physical fight.
I'm sure there are gangs of violent bullies, but for each one of those there's probably hundreds of verbal bullies that just pick on people verbally for fun and have no desire for violence or even significant confrontation because it's too much risk & effort. Standing your ground would at least protect you against those as they'd rather move onto an easier target. Will it protect you against 100% of bullying? No. Will it protect you against 90% of it? Very likely.
And I'm not saying bullying is good, but it's virtually impossible to eradicate completely (if you think there is no bullying you just need to look closer), so short of getting rid of it, trying to at least get see the "good" parts of it in the form of a lesson on dealing with conflict is IMO the most pragmatic observation.
This is even worse nowadays with social media where bullying "leaks" outside of school premises and can follow you around even across schools.
And bullying did not magically appear later in my life.
Agree. The worst things people do are to themselves. If you're trapped in an abusive situation, it'll fuck you up. But if you're receptive to that kind of abuse and stop seeing it as an inherent wrong, this is where people go from being abused to abusing themselves.
This is the difference between someone getting bullied vs someone becoming an emotionally scarred shell of a person
With "social skills", you mean either tolerating bullying or becoming a bully? (Compulsary) school is a prison, so the only social skills that children learn in school are about surviving in this prison.
Not saying this is right, but you can't change the world (neither as a parent nor as a kid), so adaptation is the best strategy.
Private tutors are the best there is and you won't beat it. Whatever is lacking, can and should be supplemented. It doesn't even need to be a 1-1 with a tutor: 3-5 kids are still a manageable group. 25-1 or sometimes 35-1 is absolutely horrible and it shows in the results.
Remote learning without help and care (honestly, "supervision"? The heck? Are they your child or inmates serving time for the crime of being born?) is obviously even worse than going to school. So, to my eyes, the GP got it right with that quote.
I'd wager that 25 parents banding together to hire a tutor might outperform a typical classroom, if it was a biased sample towards people who care. I'd trust my parents and a group of like-minded parents to pick out a good educator better than the typical teacher, teachers aren't the sort of people I would recommend to teach children how to think.
Remote learning is not though.
I'm sympathetic towards public schools; they have to deal with a wide variety of kids and families, and what works for my family might be a disaster for another. I'm less sympathetic to the politicians who vastly underestimated the harm from closing the schools. The schools were nowhere near prepared or equipped.
I think the socialization thing is probably the biggest drawback to homeschooling. It also probably depends entirely on the personality of the kids. Some kids thrive in huge group environments. Some don't. I guess it would also depend on how good and available your parent is, but most homeschoolers have very engaged parents from what I've seen.
Also, who is homeschooling in the set up of two working parents? Or we are going to pretend this work does not exist as we do with other household chores?
It might not be for everyone-- I'm not homeschooling my kids-- but I've seen it work, and I hope it's an option that remains legal.
And anyway, unless you live in some sort of jerk-run school district, the public school system welcomes home school kids for band, athletics or any other after-school program.
The way those kids are treated was a completely shock to me, and I went through the system. They're treated like subhumans and it's done right out in the open because it's so normalized (I usually hate that word, but it applies here).
I did a brief stint as a dell person who was sent out to a few schools (for extra money towards the end of my college career) and what I saw there was very eye opening. It was very eye-opening.
The other part that was very eye-opening was having a kindergarten teacher interacting with me almost as if I was an overly tall kindergarten teacher. It made me realize these people interact with kids all day, every day, and it sort of becomes ingrained in them. They themselves probably don't even realize the extent to which interacting with kids every day affects how they socialize.
If you aren't motivated in some way, you will not do well. In person school was boring for me and wouldn't have made a difference for me since I always looked up youtube videos to learn math and science anyway. We can see here that remote learning needs more work and time in order to catch up to in person school scores.
"kids are unfocused and need someone to focus their attention" is simply not true on its own. I think it needs the caveat of "focus their attention on things they're not interested in".
"Remote learning", or sitting in front of a computer and using it for a few hours in a row, is something many children do willingly and must be pried away from with continual arguments, see video games.
I argue the problem, generally, isn't the fact that students need to sit at a computer, but that remote learning, much like current in-person learning as you say yourself, is simply boring.
B) The word "addictive" gets bandied about very freely when it comes to video games. Unless we're talking about loot boxes or pseudo (or not so pseudo) gambling in video games, there's a pretty big difference between video game "addiction" and an alcohol/nicotine addiction.
My hobbies are not "addictive", and nor are the things I find boring "anti-additive".
Video games are designed primarily for the person playing them to want to be there, to learn what the games world has to teach, and in some cases to draw as much money out of the whales as possible.
Standardised schooling is designed primarily to be quantifiable and scaleable.
Case in point? Paradox interactive grand strategy titles. You'll learn more history and geography in a CK2 campaign than a whole year of the average 8th grade history/geography course.
Of course, we always assume children get addicted to video games that don't teach anything.
Addicted to video games or simply absorbed in an interactive medium?
Uninterested in learning or simply bored by the un-engaging monologue?
What proof do you have about this?
Stuff like this sounds highly attractive – "If we just designed the right games, our kids would learn as they play", but it's about as useful as your CEO saying "I could just have my 16-year old write that program, he learns programming at schools".
Curricula to teach specific subjects have been designed by professionals to carefully cover learning with reinforcement over time. They don't stop being valid just because you played a game one time that you think you enjoyed a lot.
"But...we want a way to measure!"
Keep thinking that way and you'll end up with a test prep industry for fourth grade. Take it from an immigrant who comes from that culture and hopes American schools don't get it any time soon.
If you really want to measure progress on history and geography, you have to measure minor intangibles like whether your kid can find their neighborhood on a city map, or can recognize similarities between strategic problems in history and the problems that they face. I at least have not heard of any meaningful attempt to measure minute aspects like this, but would be interesting if there were any.
Oh I agree with you that more standardised testing is not a solution, nor is more of what is already the default in North America.
That being said, "But...we want a way to measure!" and "Curricula are typically designed for learning" are not opposed to one another. How do you know if learning took place without some sort of measurement?
I'm not advocating for standardized testing; measure however you want. Measure by having a conversation with the student about the topic and see if they can make coherent sentences, if they can articulate what they learned, if they remember what they learned.
But you still need to measure somehow, even if it's not quantitative.
At the end of a semester of learning a new language (e.g. French or Spanish for high schoolers), can they pronounce they alphabet? Do they know the alphabet? Can they use basic phrases and sentences. If they can't, then that class was a failure.
I'm not sure how to go about proving the benefit that the OP mentioned, but I am willing to put my money where my mouth is at least when it comes to the education of my own children.
Well, let's see.
This is a totally honesty-based exercise, but could you write two paragraphs upon the causes of the Tokugawa Shogunate's policy of isolationism (Sakoku), and its short- or long-term (pick your favorite) effects upon the relationship of Japan with the rest of the world?
I am actually interested to see how far you can extend the understanding from the game. In my opinion, this is a reasonably broad question which any adult who has studied the highlights of the history of the period that that game covers should be able to answer to some degree.
Nevertheless, let's give it a shot.
This is my impression based not only on the game, but also from subsequent content I have been exposed to after having played the game (based on my interest in the game factions - Oda, Hojo, Toyotomi, Uesugi, etc.).
Upon exposure to foreign culture (after the landing of the black ships), the shogunate worried about the influence of foreign ideas on its populace. They also recognized the value of foreign technology (e.g. guns in the game). So they limited foreign interactions to mercantile activity on the island of... the name escapes me (something-jima).
This policy continued for... a couple of centuries? But started to fall apart before the era depicted in media such as The Last Samurai.
Now I will admit that my understanding of the events and impact is somewhat superficial. It may also be inaccurate, in which case I am sure you will correct me. But my understanding would have been non-existent if not for the game.
>Stuff like this sounds highly attractive – "If we just designed the right games, our kids would learn as they play",
the act of playing and improving at a game is in fact an exercise in the generalized learning process and one that i would argue is often better designed than most curricula. good level design is pretty much the artform of pattern recognition and syllogism.
And why is classroom instruction important for basic maths anyways? People bought and sold goods, kept accounting books, had investment portfolios, mortgage-style debt instruments far before there was ever a "4th grade" education, much less a 4th grade NAEP score. The ones that need to learn such things will learn, far faster and better than in a decontextualized classroom. I highly doubt people got 13% wiser in managing money or whatever other pro-social thing this increased NAEP math average is supposed to be a proxy for.
So, it doesn't produce more Galois' and Gauss' and it doesn't make people wiser with mathy things... literally what's the point.
One should also mention the enormous costs - all the public expense diverted to this pointless endeavor, the stifling of the truly mathematically gifted in structured "lesson plans" fit for mass mediocrity, and torturing future truck drivers, dancers, janitors, and burger flippers for years with equations.
the point of developing "mass mediocrity" is to prepare the ground for the exceptions by having a strong education system to support them. Equal access to education is important for locating and helping the exceptional
2) Also, "equal access to education" does not mean sticking kids in classrooms and instructing them according to a pre-set plan and pace. Education has never been more equally accessible, mostly thanks to the internet. What you're talking about is "equal access to a human instructor who acts as a cattleprod to force you to learn math" by gatekeeping diplomas, complaining to the parents, or generally using/abusing the obedient nature of kids in the presence of adults. Nobody exceptional has come from external force like that. Exceptions are exceptional due to intrinsic motivation, which Khan Academy et al is plenty enough to help discover.
3) There is enormous iatrogenic harm in education against the exceptional. They are forced to share classrooms with students uninterested in math, they can rarely find their peers, they are at the whim of ever dwindling gifted/accelerating programs, often artificially slowed down and bored to death, their time wasted and their spirit broken.
What exactly are you arguing for here?
I care singularly about the Mozarts. Identification of talent, airlifting the proto-Mozarts out of Jingle Bells classrooms, putting them in company of their peers and under the tutelage of the best pianists alive. Sink or swim, let the eagle soar or faceplant. If they soar, we get Mozarts. If they faceplant, they can always go back to practicing Jingle Bells.
As to what you do with the mediocre masses - I personally think it's cruel and inhumane to force them into Jingle Bells practice for years on end if they hate it, but ultimately I only care about rescuing Mozarts from being swallowed and stifled by mediocrity, not the suffering masses. Too much money, careers, egos tied up in torturing the masses with Jingle Bells lessons and Jingle bells diplomas and overruling that is not my concern.
This is not how high-achievers are taught/educated. They do strive for mastery and continuous improvement, but not in a "sink or swim" way. The difference is that effective tutoring requires individualized attention.
Effective mass instruction is driven by completely different dynamics, but these are not really "sink or swim" either, more about very direct, continued reinforcement of somewhat basic "lessons" that are to be effectively committed to memory, more or less verbatim. (Think of the way "memes" spread and advertisement campaigns are run; mass education that's truly optimized for raw effectiveness is not very different from that.)
See here https://covid19.uis.unesco.org/global-monitoring-school-clos... France and Switzerland as an example.
Lots of speculation of course as to contribution from Covid / school shutdowns, etc.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/24/us/math-reading-scores-pa... ( https://archive.ph/vgaxR )
I mean I like math. But if I had to choose between "how to get 1 mio followers on tiktok" and "how to calculate the differential of log(x)", I'd still consider the first course to have a higher roi... Attention is easy to convert into money in today's economy. Math skills, less so.
FTFY
This is an interesting point. I have no hard-facts based counter-argument to offer, so it might be true but I have my doubts.
I believe that in the attention economy only the most popular of the popular are doing well and only a tiny fraction of them does extremely well.
If you are good at math you can certainly have a good life without being in the top percentile.
Also money is trivially convertible into attention, the other way around is hard work.
"In a good month, I can make €50 or €100,” [Patica] says".
Literally could not be more wrong.
>I'd still consider the first course to have a higher roi...
Even knowing in theory how to get 1M followers, luck plays a massive role and you might as well be playing the lottery. So I'm not sure you've really "done the math" on your position here.
>Attention is easy to convert into money in today's economy. Math skills, less so.
On a website full of SWE's largely making well over 6 figures per year I find this take to be truly laughable...
Most academics is for the enrichment of the school and instructors, not because it's an effective education.
They're having to start campus diversity for programs now in some places as a form of affirmative action in schools that became too gynocentric.
This has to be one of the of the most worn out stupid takes. The point of teaching things like math and science which people "will never use in real life" is to teach problem solving and critical thinking. NO ONE actually thinks knowing the quadratic formula is useful in and of itself.
I find it hard to believe that anyone could actually say that and believe it. In what scenario would a person that is not actively working in a STEM field (and frankly even then) ever need to solve a quadratic equation by hand? When most kids can barely handle using the formula on it's own I don't think deriving it is going to add any value to anyone other than already advanced students.
As you said, what good is being given a formula and told to use it for problem solving if you can barely understand it. Instead do the problem solving to derive the equation.
And that if you instead start with squares and rectangles and built up to it, it'll be less daunting.
But my point wasn't about this one formula specifically, but about the approach in general.
Then addition is "proved" in terms of those.
Then multiplication is "proved" using addition.
One building on the next.
But the length of the real proof is beside the point. We teach them about 1 and 2 before going to 1+1=2. And when we do go to 1+1=2, we show it to them using objects and counting. We don't simply tell "here's the function for addition, just put numbers into to to solve problems".
Also, NOT knowing the quadratic formula will make it much harder to solve hundreds of other math related problems. And the same is of course true for most of fundamental math knowledge.
But whatever you may think about the usefulness of mathematics, I can assure you that it's not a giant conspiracy to siphon money from tax payers. Every math teacher you can find (anyone in a STEM field, really) is 100% genuinely convinced that mathematics is extremely useful in a multitude of ways. They could of course all be mistaken, and devwastaken have seen the truth, but I don't think that is very likely.
> However, fewer than half of students at each grade had teachers who were quite or extremely confident in their ability to address learning gaps that may have occurred due to pandemic-related school closures.
So _hopefully_ but I'm not sure that _most likely_.
That's the thing about natural disasters - they're disasters. Bad things happen and there is no business as usual option.
I honestly don't think either could have really been achieved. But it's illogical to recognize that it's impossible for one group to justify pulling out all the stops to quarantine children.
[1] Douaud, G., Lee, S., Alfaro-Almagro, F. et al. SARS-CoV-2 is associated with changes in brain structure in UK Biobank. Nature 604, 697–707 (2022). https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-04569-5#citeas
[2] https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnins.2022.9921...
[3] https://neurosciencenews.com/covid-microglia-21676/
[3] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00415-022-11398-z
We can argue about the pros and cons of doing that, but pretending COVID is over is just sticking our heads in the sand.
I'm amazed at the level of ignorance about a disease that has killed more than a million people in the US and Canada alone; thousands dead unnecessarily because this ignorance.
No learning loss in Sweden during the pandemic: Evidence from primary school reading assessments
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S088303552...
In addition, the study compares up to Q1 2021 (average would be feb 2021). By then it had 580k confirmed COVID cases on a population of 10 million (5%) and it was in the middle of the first large wave.
Personally, I think the study is not 100% convincing, but important to position within a larger frame of evidence.
4th grade and 8th grade reading dropped slightly, but there's only slight improvement since the 90s
tl;dr we pretty much lost 20 years of educational advancement. It probably isn't the end of the world, but there's a widening achievement gap and there's much work to be done. Hopefully it's resolved within the next couple years. Inability to course correct by that time would be far more troubling
Parents I know who switched to homeschooling with classes designed for that did quite well, except that extra curriculars were all shut down by government.
The teachers unions insisted on schools being closed, despite no perceivable risk. It was known very early on that since ACE2 receptors kick in at puberty, there was very little if any risk to children. The disease needs those receptors.
If you look at Sweden
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMc2026670
they kept schools open for up thru 10th grade, with no masks. The incidence of covid in teachers and other adult staff was pretty much the same as for the general population. The incidence of covid between 10th grade (in school) and 11th grade (remote) was indistinguishable.
In other words, kids may get it, but get a weak case. The incidence of severe infection was like the flu, and we don't shut down everything for the flu.
Also from this data, adults very rarely get a strong case from children.
This was known by the end of term in 2020 (spring). There is absolutely no excuse that school systems should have been shut down going into fall 2020 with this as a known fact.
Also this is inevitably going to lead to a quality vs quantity discussion. Between grades 4 and 8 I had some brilliant mathematics teachers, and some mediocre ones.
It looks (to me) like the older generations are really, really eager to "coach" the upcoming generation
Being able to read, write, and having a basic grasp of math is what an alarming number of kids are missing out on.
These proficiency levels are appalling, and everyone responsible for them should be deeply ashamed of themselves...and I am not even addressing the decline due to covid.
And the scores are important because they suggest to us how well education systems are working in the country, regardless of how "important" you may think the resulting knowledge is.
And nothing is being done about it.
Children of hairdressers or farmers have slightly lower IQ (controlled for all other variables) than others because the mothers are exposed to similar substances.
You're right about that.
The timing of the decline in scores matches up pretty precisely with the start of covid shutdowns. Whatever you are alluding to (pesticides?) has been a thing for well before covid.
From the 90s on, test scores are falling, even if this specific data doesn’t show it.
I agree that what is seen here in this short-term data is the lockdown effect.
Study: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6042097/
Since the western society does not want to change the way learning is done, the path will lead us downwards.
The only chance as a parent to build a better future for your own child is to fight the system and help the child learn.
The decline in learning is yet another example of politics ruining things that work in the society.
The data shows improvement until 2019 and then a decline in 2020/2021 coinciding with COVID, lockdowns and inability to attend schools physically.
The global pandemic seems like a much better explanation to the data the article is showing.
I'm shocked! Shocked I tell you!
1) I hadn't heard people making exactly the same argument since I was a kid in the 1970s,
2) I've read even older accounts making identical claims,
3) there was no correlation with covid,
4) western society hadn't actually had many changes over the last 150 years in the way learning is done. (My grandfather's high school education was very different than mine, as I describe out https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25574534 .), and
5) education in the US, except of the children of the rich, has always been intimately connected with politics. If there were a golden era where education wasn't ruined, then it was because of politics.
> "The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers."
> ~ Socrates
One human constant seems to be thinking that future generations are the worst.