Just 26% of US 8th graders proficient in math, in biggest-ever setback
businessinsider.com
businessinsider.com
It's really sad.
And it did not matter how they performed, if they showed up for class, we passed them and sent them along. Also if they didn't show up, we passed them and sent them along anyway.
We should be absolutely ashamed of the public school system in our country. It'd corruption and perverse incentives from the top all the way down. Disgusting.
And that was likely behind where I would have been had I not immigrated to Canada from Europe, where I had been into basic one-variable linear equation solving by the end of fourth grade, plus other topics like sets. For instance we used a kind of set partitioning method to convert numbers into binary.
When I came to Canada in the fifth grade, the teacher took me to a room and probed me on various arithmetic of increasing difficulty. She was blown away that I could do long division of like a five digit number by a three dight number, either leaving it with a remainder, or else continuing into the fraction.
The US school system may have its separate problems, but the wider issue is not just there.
They chose not to fail them.
My son reports that his math classes for the last two years "are the same thing over and over again".
Shitty parents are not the fault of a CHILD.
Offering a child a safe space, food, and possibly education is the least we can do as a society.
One of the most fundamental parts of human nature is that parents want to see their children do well, and it's often the biggest reason why people toil and overcome great difficulties instead of settling for the minimum it takes to sustain themselves -- all so that their children might enjoy a life better than theirs. Once government steps in between that relationship and guarantees that children will be fine no matter what the parents do or don't do, you remove that important incentive.
Should we let children born to poor parents starve or dumb parents stay uneducated? No, let's do what we can to alleviate that. But how far will you go to ensure that your parentage has no effect whatsoever on your life? Clearly it's not my fault that my parents aren't Yao Ming (7'6") and Ye Li (6'3"), but nevertheless I shouldn't expect to have the same chance at making the NBA as their children. Then why should a child who was born to parents who don't value the qualities it takes to succeed be equally successful as one who was born to parents who did?
In other words, how high should your equalizing bar go, to remove the influence of parents on children, especially in the face of the fact that public educational outcomes in this country are stubbornly refusing to budge as the amount of money spent per pupil rises year after year?
There is legitimate debate to be had here, beyond just downvoting me and calling me an unsympathetic child-hater.
I don't agree that this is true. I might agree that a majority of parents now don't understand how to educate their children or have the excess capacity to do so.
Reading to your child means that you have literacy above your child as well as having time. Doing well in school presupposes that your parents know how to do well in school. Navigating bureaucracy is a skill learned by the upper-middle class and above.
Working the system is difficult when you spend most of your time simply trying to avoid having that system grind you apart.
Providing a public education to everyone is how society can help ameliorate some of those issues. It also is the most cost effective by a long, long margin.
Ruthlessly optimizing use of "the public's money" is not inherently virtuous, but providing the universal opportunity for education is. If it is spent to offer an education, and that offer is not accepted, it is still money well spent.
In Europe this isnt even a possibility. If you pass students without teaching them your school gets audited by state commission.
An entire generation of students is at risk of forever being behind. And even those that always attended online class, did all the work, and excelled given the circumstances are still going to fall behind because so many of their peers in the classroom are behind that entire curriculums are changing to accommodate those students.
I feel terrible for everyone involved, but especially the kids that have been set back literally years. And what's more is that this is going to further the divide between lower income/high income families. Those that were able to afford private tutoring, have one parent stop working to help educate their children, or afford to transfer their kids to a private/prep school.
There may be nothing we take more for granted in this country than public education and the very foundations are crumbling beneath us.
That ship sailed when Common Core was introduced. Teaching kids neat hacks instead of actual math will permanently stunt their progress.
Education in the U.S., like healthcare, and even defense, is an example of spending way too much money for the quality of the outcome. For a variety of reasons, we have little public capacity to efficiently provide government services compared to what the rest of the world does. This is even true for things like public works spending.
Anyone that tells you we are "not spending enough" has either no idea how much less the rest of the world spends, or they are just lying to you (usually it's the former).
I can only speak from examples I've seen from young ones in my family "acing" early math and suddenly struggling with trivial stuff like Geometry, more advanced fractions, factoring, etc.
Common tricks like so-called "number bonds", "colored numbers", excessively complicated math for simple arithmetic by using shapes, preferring "regrouping" to carrying, etc.
All of these are valid, and with the correct level of sophistication a student can learn these tricks fast and use them correctly. The issue is you're dealing with kids who haven't gotten any sophistication yet. The reason things are initially taught rote is not because of some shibboleth of mathematics but rather mathematics can be useful without always knowing exactly why something works. There are some examples of common core problems floating around the internet that border on introductory number theory. The premise of it is ridiculous. Your child arrives to high school or college with a cobbled together book of poorly learned tricks that end up having profound influence over their ability to digest actual complicated math.
To drive the point home a "common core" version of calculus would have you learning real analysis long before you even understood a derivative. It's asinine.
The end product of career success seems to be much more nature than nurture
There will always be outliers who get ahead via nepotism, that's life. There are also many wealthy kids who end up squandering it all
The obvious culprit, to me, is teacher's unions. Why don't we fire bad teachers and hire good ones? Seems like the teacher's unions prevent that. Compensating teachers based on tenure rather than performance is another teacher's union problem.
I find the whole thing very discouraging. Society is allowing immense waste of time, effort, and potential over very obvious problems.
I think another obvious thing to do is make it easier for people to become full or part time teachers by removing requirements around licensing and education. If you can prove subject matter expertise - something that, frankly, current teachers should be required to do, and demonstrate an ability to teach then you shouldn't need the licensing and degree requirements that many public schools have.
In my mind this would more like person X is curious about teaching. Maybe they are retired or underemployed or considering a career change. X is reasonably smart, knows math/science/writing/whatever to a high standard, and likes teaching. In our current reality X must either commit serious time and effort to getting the credentials required to start teaching, or just not do it. In my imagination X could easily pick up a role helping an existing teacher (after passing some subject matter tests). Maybe X is grading homework, helping prepare lesson plans, whatever the teacher needs. As X demonstrates their ability the teacher lets X take on more and responsibilities until X is either a full teacher, decides they don't like teaching, or is bounced for some reason.
If it turns out we don't have enough people who want to be teachers then we can consider raising salaries - but, again, they are already higher than average and our current hiring practices are so bad we should try improving those first.
One final thought regarding salaries - I think it really throws things off that teacher pay increases with their tenure. This results in a system where new teachers really are severely underpaid and old teachers are well paid. This can result in attrition among new teachers. Likewise, when teachers are laid off it is by reverse seniority. Again, this is due to the teacher's unions. In my opinion - if a teacher quickly ramps up to leading high performance classes then they should quickly ramp up to the top of the teacher pay scales as well - with performance bonuses thrown in.
1 - https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d17/tables/dt17_211.60.a...
I'd be interested to see the numbers for other countries that implemented similar policies. It'd also be interesting comparing districts that were closed for a minimal amount of time vs districts that were closed the longest.
Although the previous numbers from 2019 show that there are much larger problems in education.
Remote learning does not work. It fundamentally does not provide necessary environmental aspects for the healthy development of a child, even if they can be cajoled into attending and focusing.
Note that losing a year is not as simple as simply being a year behind, either. Consider spending a year completely indoors from age 25-26, say. You don't come out the same as your doppelganger who spent 25-26 living a normal and balanced life.
Any chance this is conflated with lousy reading skills as all testing relies on that.
So 8% drop
This is ironic, considering the title of the article.
I wasn't pointing out the delta
To illustrate this, consider if 1% of all children were dying of Smallpox, and after the vaccine it dropped to 0%. Did we reduce Smallpox deaths by 1%? No! We eliminated Smallpox deaths; reduced by 100%.
The irony of your statement is left as an exercise for the reader.
I do and that's why I wrote it
The only remaining mystery is which semantical variation of that would you and others accept. Fewer? No. Lower? No. Absolutely percentage? Well its not even clear if others would accept that, or find a different way to say you’re ironically dumb.
The purpose of language is to convey a shared concept. Whatever this conversation is has nothing to do with that.
> whether it's wrong mathematically or verbally is philosophical.
got it. yeah I don't care that much as I think what was being conveyed was obvious, and everyone else understood that too
We have a sizable number of people in western academia saying math is racist.