Less than half of California students read or do math at grade level | Hacker News Reader

Less than half of California students read or do math at grade level

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118 pointstomcam240 comments

Looking at the history this doesn’t seem abnormal, and it hovers around 49%. This implies to me median is determined to be grade level (essentially) and it hasn’t moved materially beyond this point since the data was compiled and the entirely arbitrary definition of “grade level” was declared.

Would be interesting to see other states but it wasn’t immediately obvious if a similar dataset exists for anywhere else.

Given all this it seems entirely unclear if this should be viewed in some subjective sense as “good” or “bad.” It just seems to reflect things are “normal.”

If it's "normal", isn't the conclusion then that the normal is not good?

The threshold is extremely low already, and that only 50% of students are hitting that threshold is concerning to me. It isn't that they aren't capable. It's that the social support structures are not there.

If nearly 50% of people perform below average is that bad?

I edited my comment probably as you were responding, but it wasn't my impression that that is what's being measured. Some level is set and the students are measured against that level. I would assume that the target percentage is of course close to 100% to be meeting that level. If not, then it should be. It is also my assumption that the level is already very low.

No, if you read the thread you’ll see it was picked to be greater than the median at the time the metric was established. So in the first year it was less than 50%, but close. The phrase “grade level” implies a 100% goal, but the math of the metric says you’ll do great to do anything better than 50%.

If the average is what should allow you to succeed in the next grade, then the problem is that they are being allowed to go on to the next grade where they won't be prepared and will take resources from the kids that were prepared.

Most of the time 50% of the population is below average. If you want to fail everyone who is below average you will likely fail 50% of the population.

Sure, it is possible that there are very low outliers pulling the average down so that the median is well above average, but I doubt that is generally the case.

The description of a grade level standard is basically an average performance estimate. It may have been codified in the past when the average was different, and they may have chosen to set the grade-level standard lower than the mathematical average for various reasons.

So it's not necessarily the case that 50% being below grade level is just normal. But without knowing how it is calculated and what the grade-level means, the headline is not useful. The general idea that there is a expectation being met by slightly less than 50% of the population seems totally expected from a mathematical standpoint and does not indicate any deficiency on its own.

Lets say it were worded like this: "Less than 50% of students are not meeting minimum grade-level proficiency standards in math." That would tell me something much more concerning. Because Minimum standards should be something that a vast majority of students can achieve. But it will always be the case that if we have and estimate of the "normal" mathematics ability for a particular grade, about 50% will likely exceed it and about 50% will likely fall short.

So does on-grade-level mean minimum expectations, or an estimate of normal grade-level abilities? I don't know. Reading through the website I see that when their standard is that the student shows competency that is consistent with progress toward being ready to take college level courses after finishing 12th grade. So it seems that they have set milestones for certain skills and placed them along a track for each grade. However those tracks are still likely influenced by the average abilities of most students.

I would still expect that any given student is likely to have productive periods and less productive periods throughout their schooling and might fall-behind for a while and might catch up later when some focus is returned. As a result I would still expect that at any time a large portion of students are going to be in falling-behind mode, then catching up later. Only a small percentage will just spend their entire time being ahead of the curve in math ability. The ones who don't have a particular interest will do what it takes to meet minimum often enough, when pressured by parents or teachers or counselors.

If the standards are set so low that 70% of students stay ahead of them most of the time, the standards are probably too low and we are not ambitious enough in our expections. Likely we would not sufficiently motivate the schools to achieve maximally. If they are so high that 70% of students at any time are falling behind, then they are probably too high and would only be discouraging. ~50% seems ideal to me. If we had 55% of students meeting expectations at any time, I'd want to raise the expectations.

Why? Because they used the phrase “grade level” to describe their threshold? This metric appears to be defined as “greater than the median scoring when the metric was first established.” This years results are a little less than before the pandemic but greater than when the metric was established. It appears you can’t compare this to any other state or region, so by what measure is it “not good?”

The term grade level was picked to induce a sense of “not good,” because presumably the goal is 100%. But it was picked to be in the first sample less than 50%. We will never shift a metric on a presumably normal distribution that far to the right. So it’ll always look “not good.” The fact that it’s relatively stable over time means “it’s better than it was 8 years ago” and that’s about all you can really say. Given it’s seen improvement over time, albeit with slippage after the pandemic, that seems pretty excellent.

I think your point is fairly solid. If you rephrase this to "just less than half the students in CA read or do math at the average level for their grade, in their state", the response should be "well, duh?".

This just in: half of a population are below average.

I think you are bringing up a key point. Probably the most important thing is whether we are getting better or worse. If kids 20 years ago were better able to do math in 8th grade than kids this year, it may indicate a very real problem. If we are are basically saying that not every kid is in the top 20% of what we want them to achieve, that will probably always be true. Not everyone is going to always make an A.

There's not much the education system can do here. When you look into educational research its grim - its really really hard to move the needle even a few % on outcomes in a school system, even with large grants and volunteers and special projects.

Kids on the bottom half of the bell curve, especially without parental support, are always going to struggle at school.

It is not like we don't do research into effective teaching methods. It is not also like some schools have 90% of kids above grade level.

Correct that figure for confounding factors, including but not limited to socioeconomic status, availability of prenatal care, nutrition. . .

Some schools being above grade level has nothing to do with teaching methodology, and everything to do with student composition. Smart people who raise their kids to do well in school move to neighborhoods with better schools, which raises the grade levels.

Ex: I went to Bronx Science, a specialized high school in NYC where 98% of the students are above grade level and go to college. The principal at the time was known to be an obvious subject of nepotism and generally made poor decisions often. The guidance department was a joke. Teachers were above average because schools full of smart kids attract smart teachers, but not so amazing that they'd make up for kids who started below grade level if there were any.

My wife actually went to the same high school and got depression, she dropped out of BX Science and went to a much lesser rated school. The teachers there were actually better in many ways (more organized, better processes, really useful classes work skills and stuff were available due to grants) but the students were still generally below grade level and less than 1/3 went to college according to the stats. She was effortlessly at the top of her class even though she was severely depressed and missed days all the time.

I understand where this narrative comes from, but I think it is false.

The reason I think that is Covid. With kids learning remote and going all digital, the facade was lifted from teaching. Parents can and did directly experience what our kids were going through.

Our kids’ lowest standardized State scores were with teachers who were terrible. A science teacher who hated kids in general (really). A general teacher near retirement phoning it in. A math teacher who said “read section 5.6 in your book and do the homework” - and that was class.

Our kids did well where the teachers were creative. Where they interacted with students. Where they gave direct feedback and corrections. Where they gave learning reinforcement extra credit to help them focus in areas they had trouble.

In good public schools and many private schools, these bad teachers are not tolerated. In poor ones, the bad teachers flourish, and the kids suffer.

Maybe bad teachers can pull down performance way more than good teachers can raise it.

You'd need to compare the performances of kids with varying levels of help at home in classes with good teachers vs bad teachers.

My own experience in school was that I tuned out bad teachers completely. If the teacher was good, I engaged more with the material in class. But in all subjects I had my parents' considerable expertise to fill in any gaps. And I did well in every subject, regardless of teacher quality.

My parents never helped me with homework and I did fine cause I had great teachers. In think focusing on the home and “home work” is putting the emphasis on the wrong thing. We go to school to learn. That is where learning should be evaluated and focused.

Pushing this on parents and home life is naive, immoral and wrong.

You're talking about how it should be, I'm tell you how it is.

A teacher's impact is diffuse and spread over 30 students. A parent might only have an free hour to help their kid with homework. But it's still more individual attention than any great teacher can give.

Parents can motivate and enforce standards on their children in ways that teachers just cannot do. No teacher can ground you for failing a quiz, or treat you to Disneyland for winning a science fair prize. Most people would rather make their parents proud than their teachers.

When there's no incentive for the teachers and schools to get kids to grade level, they aren't.

I've proposed before having a bonus to the teacher for every student that reaches grade level at the end of the year.

Tennessee did a version of this, and had to fire a huge number of teachers because they were just straight-up giving their students the answers to state-level test.

Not saying incentives are totally the wrong approach, but they're also easily gamed, especially in the hands of people who are already criminally underpaid and overworked.

I think the solution to this problem is rather obvious.

(Let other teachers grade the students)

I’m not sure how this is obvious when there is a teacher shortage almost everywhere. I’d be willing to bet that more often than not students’ exam proctor is not their everyday teacher.

Also while this is a solution to the symptom of perverse incentives, it is still part of a bandaid approach. Low-performing schools are already spending weeks and weeks teaching to the test, which is fine for achievement but just a step above giving the answers out when it comes to rigorous teaching and learning.

Instead of arguing that it won't work, why not give it a try? What's there to lose?

I’m simply pointing out that it’s not obvious how to implement teachers proctoring other classrooms’ exams in order to prevent the home room teacher from giving out answers for financial benefit. It’s not pragmatic when principals, guidance counselors, other-subject teachers and permanent subs are shoring up massive shortages across the country.

If someone wants to try then go for it. But there are a lot of other well-researched interventions that are hard to implement in classrooms for similar pragmatic reasons. If we are going to ignore facts on the ground, then those would be the obvious ones to me.

> What’s there to lose?

Federal, state and local tax dollars that school principals probably have a better idea on how to spend.

> it’s not obvious how to implement teachers proctoring other classrooms’ exams in order to prevent the home room teacher from giving out answers for financial benefit

A few seconds of thought: "don't give the teachers the test questions beforehand"

> It’s not pragmatic when principals, guidance counselors, other-subject teachers and permanent subs are shoring up massive shortages across the country.

It'll give the teachers a way to make more money, making teaching more attractive

Appreciate the enthusiasm and I’m all for trying. Still don’t think it’s pragmatic.

> don’t give the teachers the test questions beforehand

This is already the case, except for all of the practice questions that students are drilled over weeks before the actual test. Teachers simply could apply the test-taking strategies in real-time more efficiently than students to arrive at and share the answer.

Honestly I believe most teachers have too much integrity and we are solving for edge cases (per earlier comment about Tennessee experiment). Nonetheless all of these tactics are too naive for fed/state/local systems chock full of perverse incentives.

> It’ll give the teachers a way to make more money, making teaching more attractive

A few seconds of thought: “give the proposed money to teachers upfront.”

Why should there be more hoops to jump through towards a sustainable career in one of the toughest jobs? Why give Big Publishers (assessment, implementation and rubric developers) even more influence over perceived teacher quality than say parents, or everyday taxpayers who would foot the bill?

> A few seconds of thought: “give the proposed money to teachers upfront.”

No incentive, won't work.

Parents have zero influence over teacher quality, and neither do taxpayers.

> Why should there be more hoops to jump through towards a sustainable career in one of the toughest jobs?

Because the existing system doesn't produce results.

Wouldn't this just make all teachers grade generously since they all are dependent on each other for their bonuses? If I am grading Ms. Summers' class and her bonus is dependent on how I grade, I would be inclined to grade very generously so that she gets her bonus.

1. use multiple choice tests which have no ambiguity in grading

2. put a unique number on each test. Pass them out randomly to teachers in the district to grade. They won't know who the student is nor who his teacher is, nor will the teacher know who graded it. I.e. a double-blind system.

3. have administrators grade them, or an outside consultant, etc.

It's a workable idea, but needs more development. That system incentivizes working at schools where children are already likely to be at grade level, have supportive parents, etc. The best teachers will flock to schools that don't really need additional help.

I'd propose to spin that and base it on deltas. Taking a student that was already achieving expectations and is still doing so earns $X. Taking a student that was not meeting expectations and now is is worth 4*$X or something like that.

It should be worth more to take underachieving students and get them up to expectations than it is to maintain students at an achieving level.

> That system incentivizes working at schools where children are already likely to be at grade level, have supportive parents, etc. The best teachers will flock to schools that don't really need additional help.

I feel like that's a problem we already have today. Parents who are motivated to get their child a good education will move to places with good educational outcomes. These parents are already invested in how well their child is doing educationally, so they have better support structures at home which is likely the largest difference in educational attainment. So parents who care and can afford to move their students to schools where the majority of other parents are also invested in the education of their children so these schools will perform well regardless of actual teacher efficacy.

So good schools end up having a much higher percentage of good parents which is really what is making these good schools in the first place. If we really want to change education to improve outcomes we need to figure out either how to get parents to take some responsibility for their children or how to improve low outcome schools to the point where they are an adequate substitute for a poor parent.

> Parents who are motivated to get their child a good education will move to places with good educational outcomes.

Yeah, well, it's a big jump going from free to $17,000/year

> how to improve low outcome schools to the point where they are an adequate substitute for a poor parent.

Give teachers a bonus for each student that achieves at grade level. Let the teachers figure out how to do it.

> Give teachers a bonus for each student that achieves at grade level. Let the teachers figure out how to do it.

As someone has already pointed out to you, what the teachers will figure out how to do is game the system in order to produce the appearance of success. Not all of them, not even perhaps a substantial majority. But enough of them will do so that the system becomes warped around reinforcing their behavior rather than the behavior the incentive is supposed to optimize for. You're a crypto nut; surely you have heard of gresham's law before.

> what the teachers will figure out how to do is game the system in order to produce the appearance of success.

They will certainly try. However, bonus systems exist all over the place in the free market, and they work.

The current system is quite thoroughly gamed in the teachers' favor by the unions.

And the free market is full of countless examples of those perverse incentives leading to perverse outcomes.

The computer you're using is the result of the free market.

> These parents are already invested in how well their child is doing educationally, so they have better support structures at home which is likely the largest difference in educational attainment.

I do think this is an important part, I'm just not sure how to get there. I think it's at least partly wrapped up in socioeconomics. Good school districts tend to be expensive places to live. That in turn means the parents are more likely to be able to afford supplies, books, maybe a non-working parent, half-days off to see the school play, a stable work schedule, etc. Then compound that with being surrounded by children with similar parents, so peers are also likely pushed to excel.

Contrast that with a single parent (23% of kids live with a single parent) who works hourly on a schedule they don't control, and is floating around the poverty level. Even if they really wanted to, I don't think they could provide the same level of support.

I don't know how we fix that without dramatically changing society. Still, perfect is the enemy of good, and paying teachers bonuses for helping students achieve seems like a good step.

The general idea you're getting at, incentivize teacher performance, rests on the underlying assumption that a "great teacher" can have an outsized impact on students outcomes in the one year they're teaching the student. Much of the US tried to find evidence of this in the 2000s and failed. Past the basic "does the teacher understand the material?" level, outcomes on a year-long basis are dominated by:

- Home life (food, safety, parent engagement, socioeconomic background)

- Classroom size (smaller is better)

Teacher incentivization might work if students spent more years with individual students but that has a different set of problems and requires a much larger reform of schools.

Classroom size does not actually matter much. Teachers unions love smaller classrooms, though...

Your first item -- which is really many items -- does matter. Especially if we open about the fact that "socioeconomic background" is mainly a (poor) proxy for the students' IQ. We know this, because grades track the students' IQ better than their socioeconomic background or the IQ of their parents.

"Does the teacher understand the material?" is a low bar but one that many teachers don't clear. This is something that could actually realistically be fixed.

Classroom size absolutely matters, at the extreme you encounter Bloom's 2 sigma[0] around ratios of 3:1. Small classes get you two things:

1. Easier classroom management

2. More individualized education

(1) is good and has some effect, but (2) is the meat and potatoes. I will grant the effects are not linear and so haggling about 16-24 kids may not be worth it but the difference between 20 kids and 10 is enormous.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom%27s_2_sigma_problem

There's been some good research in the UK about the impact of class size in schools there. The summary is that it is unlikely to be the most effective way of improving outcomes:

https://educationendowmentfoundation.org.uk/education-eviden... https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/class-size-and-ed...

Classroom size matters a whole lot if you're expecting teachers to give special attention to struggling students to make up for parental deficiencies.

My proposal doesn't expect anything. It just gives a bonus if the kid reaches grade level. Leave it entirely up to the teacher as to how to achieve that, or not.

I bet the teachers will find a way. Greed is funny that way :-)

None of these assertions about SES and IQ are supported with citations, which is unsurprising because they're unlikely to be true: instead, we have studies that show the opposite thing (see, for instance, Turkheimer).

Monetary incentivization works quite well in the economy. The idea that it can't work with teachers is hard to believe.

I've paid for instruction for various things. You bet there's a big difference in ability to teach from person to person. The ones that are good get paid well because they are in demand. The ones who aren't good, well, they wind up trying another career.

Besides, if teachers don't matter, might as well hire a chimpanzee to run the class.

> The ones who aren't good, well, they wind up trying another career.

I think that maybe those who can't, well...

> When there's no incentive for the teachers and schools to get kids to grade level, they aren't.

There are already extensive punishments for failure on this front, and it's a huge part of what schools' attention and focus go toward, especially post-NCLB.

No, there isn't punishment. Teacher pay is entirely based on years of service and what degree they have. Achievement of their students has no affect on it. Teachers can't even be fired. See "Waiting for Superman".

(Well, they can be fired, but only for things that have nothing to do with teaching.)

I'm going to be blunt, for the sake of bystanders, because I think HN can suffer sometimes on non-tech topics when we try to all be excessively-nice and it gets hard to sort out what's true because the confidently-wrong and confidently-right all look the same: this is clearly very much not a topic you have expertise on or have studied very deeply, and you're wrong about a lot of it.

> No, there isn't punishment.

Simply wrong.

> Achievement of their students has no affect on it. Teachers can't even be fired.

> (Well, they can be fired, but only for things that have nothing to do with teaching.)

Wrong, even with the modification.

> Teacher pay is entirely based on years of service and what degree they have. Achievement of their students has no affect on it.

This part's true as far as pay goes, short of firing (which, yes, happens). Student achievement, however, can absolutely have an effect on quality of work-life—which courses a teacher is assigned or allowed to choose (this is huge for a lot of teachers), grade- or subject-level leadership positions that can effectively afford greater freedom in the classroom, and on career and pay advancement opportunities. In teaching, career advancement means "leaving the classroom" in practically all cases, which is a real problem, but it doesn't necessarily mean shifting to admin—it can mean moving into curriculum design, subject-area coaching, or other specialist roles that still work closely with students and teachers.

> See "Waiting for Superman".

Yeah, I've seen it.

> which, yes, happens

At extremely low rates compared to other professions. It's effectively "can't be fired", unless the teacher has an affair with a student or something like that.

> career advancement means "leaving the classroom" in practically all cases

Having the reward for good teaching being leaving teaching is not a good riposte for my proposal.

I expect that a cash bonus for meeting grade level will incentivize the more competent and confident teachers to want to teach classes with the harder cases in them, so they can collect more bonuses.

The core idea, obviously, is to pay for the results you want.

Like a salesman. They get a (low) base salary + commissions on sales. It's in common use because it works. For the good salesmen, it's the path to riches.

What is “grade level” to you?

Last time this same exchange (involving the same poster) happened on here, it came out that of course there'd have to be a bunch more nuance than just "pay teachers a bonus for having more kids end the year on-grade-level". Which, yes, obviously there would. That was acknowledged.

But, of course, the real wrinkle is that that system, with much of that extra nuance, is what's already in use. No bonuses to teachers for doing well but teachers and admin are definitely very concerned about meeting or exceeding those targets, because there are consequences if they don't. It's literally already how we evaluate schools and teachers, and it's very much on educators' and administrators' minds.

Meanwhile, the actual way for a capable teacher to earn a bonus is... to leave teaching for something that pays better. The more bullshit process and microscope-level evaluation we apply, the more will follow that incentive, and the worse the teacher labor pool gets. If this "bonus" isn't a solid $20k/yr or more, it's not gonna keep them around, especially if we make their jobs & work environment any more annoying and abusive than they already are.

> No bonuses

That's not what I proposed, so "that system" is not already in use. The key feature is a monetary bonus.

People love to strongly assert that they are professionals, and a performance bonus does not change their performance. I've never seen a performance bonus yet that did not improve it.

(It's why, back in the Zortech days, we gave a cut of the monthly gross sales to each employee.)

That’s not really an answer to what I asked. What does grade level, as a term and metric, mean to you? Because in this context it means the median score on a standardized test. That it’s about 50% is structurally unsurprising.

I disagree. There are known “good” and “bad” school districts. The known good school districts have better teachers and teaching methods.

This is not about the bell curve, it’s about a lot of US schools not actually teaching students successfully.

Copy and pasting from elsewhere in the thread:

My wife actually went to the same high school and got depression, she dropped out of BX Science and went to a much lesser rated school. The teachers there were actually better in many ways (more organized, better processes, really useful classes on work skills and stuff were available for seniors due to grants) but the students were still generally below grade level and less than 1/3 went to college according to the stats. She was effortlessly at the top of her class even though she was severely depressed and missed days all the time.

The "good students attract good teachers" factor is also why tracking is a terrible idea. It means that students who have "tracked" lower at any point in their schooling are then stuck with the worst quality teachers and cannot catch up to average standards.

Does it help a struggling student if the teaching is 1) too fast and 2) based on things the student hasn't learned in previous years?

Of course tracking is a good idea.

Conversely a teacher teaching below a students ability is going to drive the student out of the classroom. I was egalitarianly not tracked and I barely graduated school because I was so bored I checked out in the 6th grade, yet got summa cum laude at one of the worlds most difficult engineering programs.

> Some schools being above grade level has nothing to do with teaching methodology, and everything to do with student composition

While I mostly agree, we shouldn't underestimate the destruction that can be wrought by a bad teacher.

I’d also note that teacher quality probably correlated heavily to funding and “lack of social challenges” in the student body. Schools with worse parental education attainment levels, higher poverty rates, discriminated against classes and other demographics, kids exposed to more social ills, etc will lead to worse teachers picking that as their job opportunity. Why? Because most people prefer a job that’s not extraordinarily difficult in ways they’re not compelled by. There will always be a set of teachers that are compelled to be a great teacher AND a great social worker, but you have to expect that joint distribution is pretty small relative to the staffing needs.

I’d posit given the data presented students and schools being above grade level has more to do with the definition of grade level than literally any other factor. I’m curious what you believe the phrase means in this context?

I am using an absolute "grade level" for the average NYC student in general, as decided by whoever sets grade level for NYC, compared to the two schools here (which are above and below that level respectively).

Malcom Gladwell covers this in Outliers. There is something that can be done, but it has to be done starting in pre-school and continuing through second grade. And that "something" is that you don't get a summer. You learn year round for those first few years. The reason why some kids excel and some don't is almost entirely because they don't get continuing education at home. And past 2nd grade, it's almost irreparable.

We can fix it. But we have to retool primary education significantly. And "retooling education" isn't something that is ever going to happen in the current setup.

The effects of preschool have been studied and showed no benefits after grade 3. Not sure about the year round portion of it, but it seems to me this is a narrative born from intuition and not from evidence.

As I understand it, it's the gaps in the summer that account for the gaps in education. That's Gladwell's assertion. When kids have gaps without learning at an early age, they fall behind quickly and it is devastating.

That is summer gaps. Now how about lockdowns?

I've heard these studies referenced before, but studies have limitations and I wonder if there is some form of early childhood education that can lead to statistically meaningful improvements down the road, just not approaches that happen top have been studied.

This is a bit of an aside but I wouldn't trust anything that Malcolm Gladwell says at face value. He approaches questions from a narrative perspective and Cherry picks studies or data to make a nice story. At the end of the day, he is a writer and not a scientist and that's where his priorities is lie

John Taylor Gatto (former NY teacher with multiple teacher of the year awards) had the opposite opinion to Malcolm Gladwell.

Allow me to be an annoying pedant for a moment: Isn't that a bit tautological? The bottom half of the bell curve is below the mean in a normal distribution by definition. There's always going to be a lower half as long as we model statistics.

Not quite, since its theoretically possible to move the whole bell curve right with improved teaching methodologies, meaning the bottom half could then meet our current reading and math criteria. No one has found a way to do this though.

Pretty sure this would just reset what is normal. What children know how to do in 8th grade is going to be a normally distributed curve. Maybe you can move the curve to the right, but then what is normal just shifts to the right.

I’d note it’s not the mean but the median here. But the IQ is a good example where 100 is defined as the median but has had to be revised upward over time as test performance improves overall. So, in this case they set a fixed definition of grade level being slightly above the median at the outset of the measurements (presumably to induce HN headlines that attract clicks and ultimately funding for schools because more than half are under “grade level”) then over time the goal is to improve on the initial score. In 2019 and 2018 it’s interesting to note the score breached 50% for the first time, peaking at 51%. It’s slipped but presumably that’s a “large scale event” effect and will mean revert to the 2019 levels and continue advancing with time.

But even with the great results in 2019 you can still say “49% of California students are less than grade level” and it looks really bad and people post about how bad public schooling is and hand wringing ensues. - again ultimately leading to more funding, when in fact it’s a real milestone achievement to have lifted such a huge number of students so far in so short a time.

It’s always fascinating to watch the click bait statistic name induce reliable and predictable behavior every time, even when the actual data tells the exact opposite story. Very clever whoever decided to make “grade level” greater than the median performance.

Allow me to be a pedant a moment. Isn't a pedant annoying by definition?

https://www.google.com/search?&q=definition+of+pedant

> Kids on the bottom half of the bell curve, especially without parental support, are always going to struggle at school.

It's not just kids on the bottom half because those that need support are disruptive to the entire class. The way the system is setup, you not only need parental support but the parent drives the process and the administration is resistive because it imposes more work on already strained staff.

I volunteer in my child's class for 2-3 hours a week, as does my partner and a grand parent. There are a number of high needs kids in the class who need Individualized Education Plans (IEPs). These must be initiated by the parents and require outside services and assessments to be truly effective. The parents have largely been resistive to the teacher's appeals. Some point to their child's reading or math ability as proof that the child doesn't need support. Others just do not have the capacity or capability to take on the process.

The teacher is spending a disproportionate amount of time keeping children on task and as a result the entire class suffers. The teacher in this classroom has begged for support from the administration but they assert that it's the teacher's failing. The have taken her out of class to observe other classes at other schools but this was more punitive than beneficial. The only positive from that action was the substitute they got became an advocate for support. The administration has been slow walking the process to get someone to observe the classroom and at this point is just waiting out the school year.

I'm not understanding your point aside from the teacher could benefit from an aid. IEPs are legally binding agreements that the schools agree to based on student needs. Are you suggesting that the teacher should not be providing this IEP support, but the parents should seek outside support for that?

I'm not sure how you drew that conclusion, I said:

> There are a number of high needs kids in the class who need Individualized Education Plans (IEPs). These must be initiated by the parents and require outside services and assessments to be truly effective. The parents have largely been resistive to the teacher's appeals.

The teacher is asking the parents to initiate the IEP process because of the teacher's observations of the student in class.

> Are you suggesting ... the parents should seek outside support for that?

Part of the IEP process is that the parents must justify to the administration that an IEP is necessary. "Because the teacher said so" isn't sufficient. Outside support can be doctors, counselors, therapists, psychologists, etc.

Are they extremely low?

I have kids in elementary school and so far, I would say "grade level" expectations are a bit higher than what mine were 35 years ago. But maybe things change as they get older.

> that only 50% of students are hitting that threshold is concerning to me.

Why?

I gave it a quick look so perhaps I missed some stuff, but the worst performance was Grade 11 math, where about 55% of students did not meet standards. But as someone who was great a math, and went to do it in Uni etc, I do not think its concerning that 60% of people do not know how to do matrices, calculus, or logic formalism or any of the other topics we touched in AP Math.

Valuing education is important, and I think we are behind the curve in how we teach our kids, tools like Google make tons of memorization so silly to prioritise. But kids not being up to speed with 17-18 year old metaphor understanding in English in a state with tons of immigrants, or kids not mastering calculus at 17 and not needing integrals later in life is part of specialisation, we cannot all do everything.

I didn't think AP classes were considered "grade level". More like college level.

These tests are not looking (much) at advanced courses like Calculus.

This is more “what percentage 9th graders can read at a basic 9th grade level”, “what percentage of 3rd graders can multiply and do basic 3rd grade math”.

These numbers should be in the 80-90% range. But they are not. And note: the majority who are performing well below grade level are not failing. They are probably getting C’s and getting promoted to the next grade. Meaning every year they fall farther and farther behind.

But most of the 3rd grades seem to be doing ok when you look at the grade breakdown. The lowest performance is Math on grade 11, and its the lowest by a mile.

Also historically the results seem to track, this is not some crash compared to previous years.

All of this combined makes me think this is a headline that scares people, but not one that we should be worried about.

Smaller classes, better teacher pay, and shorter school days and those numbers would skyrocket I am sure, but it is easier to blame the kids than to learn from countries that outperform us.

What are you basing "not good" on, though? Not good for what?

Something like 90% in primary education should in my mind be a goal. But when we get to policies that don't allow repeating classes if needed, there really isn't any clear solution to keep kids on their level.

If the metric “grade level” were defined as the median when the measurement started, do you think 90% is reasonably achievable?

Just reenforces my perseption, after living in California for 40 years, and being a parent of a child going through public education, that education here sucks, and most Californian's are dumb as rocks...

Perhaps a graph of this metric over time will help in understanding where things are headed. The moment choice is added, in that parents can choose where to send their kids, the schools will have no choice but to improve or fail.

> Looking at the history this doesn’t seem abnormal, and it hovers around 49%.

Notice that the "historical data" goes all the way back to... 2014-2015. I'd put money on this percentage being significantly higher 20, 30+ years ago.

> This implies to me median is determined to be grade level (essentially) and it hasn’t moved materially beyond this point since the data was compiled and the entirely arbitrary definition of “grade level” was declared.

You may be both overthinking this and not understanding. The phrases "can read at grade level" or "can perform math at grade level" mean that a student can read/grasp mathematical concepts at the level expected of a normal person at the age equivalent to their grade (e.g., "can read at a 5th grade level" means "can read to the extent that is considered competent for a ten year old by educational standards"). The goal is for _100%_ of kids in a given grade level to be able to read/comprehend what is taught to them.

> Looking at the history this doesn’t seem abnormal, and it hovers around 49%.

Ties in with this data too:

https://www.apmresearchlab.org/10x-adult-literacy

~50% of the entire US is at a 6th-grade reading level.

Update: Sorry, I didn't put the hyphen that is in the text of the article. "sixth-grade level"

Ok so grade level is another word for “median.” So saying 50% of students are above or below the median doesn’t really elicit the same reaction as saying “grade level” - presumably they knew this and picked the name and the metric to induce hand wringing.

Technically, it is "6th-grade level". Was able to update my comment.

Grade level education standards are criterion-based, not norm-referenced. That's why kids (used to) get held back to repeat a grade when they failed them.

Right. And if we don't hold them back, it means that 50% of the students in the next grade are going to be holding back the the teachers ability to full help students who were in the top 50%.

Did you mean to prove your own point like that with your spelling?

Sorry, I couldn't resist the dig. In any case, your own personal feelings without anything to back them up doesn't really help anyone.

Now map this to spending per student.

As a California resident, I'm surprised there's no mention of % of ESL (english as a second language) students. There's a very large population of ESL students in California that drag down these statistics as the students catch up.

If english isn't your primary language, learning math that is taught in english will also be more difficult.

Math is language independent. Shouldn't ESL students be able to use workbooks in their native language?

Math teachers speak English.

You'd think so, but I've taught ESL math. Good luck getting them to understand what's even going on without speaking their language. Especially if some, like my students, come in at high school having only really had five years of formal schooling.

You need the language to teach the math, basically. Also, not all of the kids I had were literate in their first language (A Mayan language, so most weren't) or even their second (often another Mayan language) or third (Spanish usually), so you can't just say 'Give them a workbook'

I'd sure hate to be taught math from a workbook alone.

No. California does not have a large Black immigrant population. The Black population speaks English and does worse than the average (including ESL students). Language alone doesn't explain the gap. Particularly since immigrant Asian groups are above average.

That's a "yes and", not a "no".

In California, ESL students are primarily from Mexico. The sum of all other immigrants combined is not even close to this number. 40% of the CA population is Hispanic and Latino. I think that is what the parent was speaking about.

Is that still true? I thought the mix had changed over the Trump years. My wife's prepandemic immigrant students were primarily from south of Mexico- Guatemala, El Salvador, even Peru.

let me help you here - "black" is a particularly tragic demographic classification.. since a very large part of the world population live closer to the Equator, and have darker skin, than the people who wrote those English category names; add to that the particular unique form of slavery in Agricultural USA.

The fact that the President of the United States for two terms, a Harvard Law School graduate, is as demographically "black" as Haitians with loud and proud, violent anti-literacy every day.. says to me that actually.. you cannot lump together people by skin color in this day and age.

> If english isn't your primary language, learning math that is taught in english will also be more difficult.

Having been in a German school for several months where I did not know German, the only subject I did well in was math. I'm not so sure your assertion is correct.

Surely you would have had an easier time if the teacher taught in German.

At the glacial pace classes move, there's plenty of time to learn einz, zwei, drei, vier, etc. Learning arithmetic doesn't require language fluency.

I've traveled in many countries where I didn't know a word of their language. It isn't hard to communicate with people for basic things. Besides, I often will spend a few minutes to learn the words for one...ten just so I can engage in commerce. It's not rocket science.

Something can be harder but still possible.

If you're saying that the language which math is taught in has no bearing on learning - then we disagree.

So why not teach them in their primary language? It is not like big groups are too small... And there is no official language. So mandating that selected number of schools including universities receiving public funding must have sufficient classes and courses in some other language should be entirely possible.

There are a lot of Spanish immersion schools especially at the lower grade levels to help bridge the gap into bilingual learning.

There was a push to make all schools in California teach in both Spanish and English back in the eighties. The backlash was so great that it was made illegal for public schools to teach in anything but English.

Probably because it creates problems. You need math teachers who speak that language for one. Then you divide the student body, probably along racial lines for the most part, which isn't a good thing. And then lastly, it will only hinder the language development of the ESL group which will come back to bite them later in life.

California does have an official language (English). English is the official language in over half the states.

https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySectio...

This is BS. My good friend moved to California from Taiwan during high school. She struggled in all her classes (because she barely spoke english ("struggle" means she actually had to put in effort to get an "A")), but she excelled in math. She told me that she was an average student in Taiwan, but when she moved to the US, she suddenly became a math genius. She was in the highest level math class the school offered, and it was a breeze for her. So, nope, she didn't "drag down" the statistics - in fact, just the opposite.

Stop the presses, this guy's "good friend" is the only data point we need!

Naxalt.

We get lots of immigrants from rural central America where the schools aren't amazing.

In our rural public school in NJ, both our kids were routinely socially promoted with B’a and C’s even though they were very below average on State testing.

We tried fighting this but the inertia of “do nothing and pass anyway” was too great.

When we moved them to private school last year (5th and 9th grade), they had a brutal adjustment period of catching up from being so far behind, and for learning studying habits from scratch.

Public schools in the US have problems due to the unions giving too much protection to lousy teachers, and school boards throwing away money like water on things like laptops and athletic fields while not focusing on attracting and paying really good teachers with a track record of success.

It really is a travesty.

> We tried fighting this but the inertia of “do nothing and pass anyway” was too great.

It's because there's no story for what to do in this case. All schools, even good ones, only focus on the happy path. I mean you're basically describing the problem perfectly when you moved your kid to a private school. They're not getting a more personalized education, the expectations are just higher. School is still a train that keeps moving whether you're at the level or not.

Well said and exactly right. The private school not only had higher expectations? But also realistic feedback in the form of real grades and consequences.

Not just that, but the food we give to these kids is horrible.

I know that he is a bit contrived in his methodologies, but you watch enough of his shows that you can see the adult behavior reactions to his methods, it is clear that nothing is ever going to change...

https://www.publicschoolreview.com/blog/jamie-oliver-is-his-...

I watched this great documentary where the "problem kids" were fed high quality fresh food for breakfast and lunch. Many of their problems disappeared.

I think it was Cafeteria Man, but I am not sure.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DbCtpGV_Crg

Turns out there are a bunch documentaries that show how nutrition is a big driver in child development and school performance.

Teachers’ unions are basically ineffective outside of large liberal cities (NYC, Chicago, Seattle). Their ability to “protect lousy teachers”, as you put it, has already been gutted. As a side-effect, they’re also now incapable of retaining exceptional teachers.

Counter example, n=1. We are in one of the smallest school districts in NJ, "out in the sticks" as it were. The teacher's union is extremely powerful here. Everybody - and I mean everybody - knows who the bad teachers are. Nothing at all can be done get them to improve or to exit.

When parents come in talking about issues, the teachers all put up a wall of educational verbiage and jargon that is impenetrable, but the jargon is designed to make the administration look the other way. Use the magic code words in a meeting and you're OK.

I’m not sure how getting rid of teachers’ unions will also stamp out small town clique effects (i.e., the “good ol’ boys’” network).

The north east has some of the longest-standing cultures of bureaucracy and corruption in the US. I would not expect anything above average from these locations. As you mention, there is to much inertia and precedent in these regions.

If you can, move somewhere else. I've never heard anything good from the city management or education systems in the oldest parts of the nation.

> In our rural public school in NJ

Where in New Jersey is rural now?

Most of it. Go an hour to the west of NYC.

Yep, most of Western and Southern NJ is rural.

The failure of public education in this country is a national scandal. It should be the number one concern of everyone, and yet there's no outrage, no political wedge issue, no media -- what's going on?

One simple explanation would be that the problem just isn't as bad as you think it is.

What is your opinion on the NPR Reveal podcast episode about how the prominence of reading recovery instead of phonics has led to 1/3 of children by fourth grade reading at a substandard level?

That we can microbenchmark any aspect of the education system looking for improvements but and the end of the day colleges are packed and you'll be hard pressed to find someone who is genuinely illiterate -- you'll find people who don't read and write English super well but it's because it's their second language and they're perfectly literate in their native tongue.

We need to remember the average adult only reads at a 6th grade level... Not that that's good, but I'd say there's many other factors involved than just the schools (parental involvement, do they read outside school, etc)

This is an awful excuse. The whole purpose of public education is to give students who don't have support at home an education. Passing the buck to parents makes the whole point of public school moot -- if kids with involved parents read and those without don't, why put kids in school at all at that point?

It's not an excuse - it's just the way it is. If kids don't have parental encouragement or involvement at home, they won't see the value in education. I taught in a rural district in the South that epitomized this. Cultural/familial attitudes towards education matter a lot more than anything the school can do. After all, kids still spend more time with their parents and family than they do at school; those attitudes rub off.

And it's not passing the buck to the parents; we're not asking the parents to teach them, merely to be involved, take an interest in the kid's education and show them the value of an education and encourage them to do the stuff they learn outside. The school can't do it all, nor should it have to (I'd argue teachers are already doing a lot more than they were ever trained to do because parents often don't have time to do it in our current society).

Yes, parents should be involved, but the point of public education is it should work at least to a minimal level of standard even if the parents are literal sponges living under rocks.

The article being discussed here is "less than half of California students reading at grade level", so my opinion on "one third of fourth grade students reading at substandard level" is basically the same as my opinion on that, because they're not very different statements.

It's not country wide in my experience. When I lived in CA with 4 kids in public school, my opinion was that they were total garbage, enough so I moved out of state. Where I am now, the public schools my kids go to are great.

It's not even state-wide. There are some really good schools in California (and not just wealthy areas).

Public schools are heavily funded by property taxes. So schools in upper middle class and above areas are (usually) pretty great while schools and low income areas are (usually) pretty not great.

Yes, more interested parents + more money can make a huge difference even if they use the same basic textbooks/standards/etc.

Not even money. How involved are the parents in the child's education. That's generally the number one predictor I found in my years of teaching.

I agree that parents are the most important factor, but lack of money can cause problems even if extra money doesn’t help much. Severely under funded schools close more frequently for things like broken furnaces etc.

>Public schools are heavily funded by property taxes.

Not in California.

My kids' California school relied heavily on "voluntary" donations, which depend heavily on the socioeconomics of the parent community.

A blackboard and chalk do not need heavy funding.

The classes I learned the most at in university consisted of a professor, a blackboard, and chalk.

And you're focusing on the funding requirements of the blackboard and chalk in that equation?

The funding (and quality!) of the professor seems more relevant, whether they're teaching on a blackboard, a fancy networked glowing screen, or just declaiming from atop a rock.

Well, yeah, it's the professor, not all the expensive props that the schools say they need funding for.

This is a common but false claim. Property tax funding is supplemented by state and federal taxes to compensate disparities:

https://www.heritage.org/education/report/the-myth-racial-di...

on average, both Black and Latinx total per pupil expenditures exceed White total per pupil expenditures by $229.53 and $126.15, respectively [total per-pupil funding is around $14k, so the differences are negligible] - https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/23328584198724...

And the US spends more than average per pupil - more than Belgium, the Netherlands, Sweden, Germany, Finland, and Japan: https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/cmd

The state does not "compensate" for the fact that wealthy city school districts simply fund their schools under the table with massive PTA budgets, and there is not a lot the state can do about that in the short term without significant tax reform.

Three adjacent school districts, in descending order of household income and grade-level performance: Piedmont (90% at-grade-level), Berkeley (67%), Oakland (33%).

Three randomly chosen districts out of tens of thousands prove little. Looking at wider statistics instead of small anecdote, we see that in addition to lagging behind countries the US outspends on education, greatly increased spending has had no benefits even within its borders:

Since 1970, inflation adjusted public school spending has more than doubled. Over the same period, achievement of students at the end of high school has stagnated according to the Department of Education’s own long term National Assessment of Educational Progress [I encourage you to visit the website for the illuminating graph of inflation adjusted per-pupil spending and test scores vs. time] - https://mjperry.blogspot.com/2009/09/education-spending-doub...

California doesn't maintain order in schools or their major cities. If you want to live somewhere nice, that's liberal and has good schools move to Boston. If you want to live somewhere nice that's conservative and has good schools move anywhere in East Texas.

The public schools in Boston are struggling by almost every measure, with only about 34% reading at grade level across the system, for example.

Mass. has insanely high standards, compare the curricula.

as automatization becomes an ever larger share of the economy, math skills and thinking skills in general become a liability for the ruling class. Consumers dont really need to be smart.

Despite how noble our stated goals are, the primary benefit to most families of public education is childcare. The state of things is more easily understood from that perspective.

Seemingly everything about education becomes a national scandal.

The federal No Child Left Behind law, and the state-led Common Core initiative, were both major efforts to improve education in the U.S. They both also created massive national backlashes.

California tried to do something as simple as refactor a few math classes and somehow it got turned into fodder for some ideological battle. The College Board tried to offer a new optional AP class and the Florida governor nearly called the National Guard on them.

Everyone says they want to fix education until actual change starts to happen. Then there is a huge freak out about how (insert group) is trying to ruin schools.

That’s one of the most disingenuous comments I’ve seen.

Common Core demolished the education system in this state, along with the other acts to “improve” education. The optional AP was just a single African American studies class.

Education in public schools is just straight terrible here - teachers live like 2 hours away and hate their lives, topics are low difficulty and uninteresting, and the entire system predicates itself on the SAT, which you need a part-time tutor to cover your ass for, unless you want to spend every weekend doing a test; most can’t afford that.

Common Core can be fairly summarized as conservatively pushing math standards forward by 0.5 years. The spec of any particular grade level can be read in a few minutes and details simple requirements like some operationalized understanding of polynomials, and the entire math spec can be read in an afternoon. The more recent push to abolish the spec in favor of a more lax standard, namely Equitable Math, was a backlash against this.

There are public school districts in California which couldn't be more eager for specs to push standards forward by another 0.5+ years because the Common Core is still catching up from behind to their de facto standards, but there's a seriously powerful (perhaps majority) democratic and political will to hold standards back.

What the Common Core and Equitable Math should not be understood as is as a new way of teaching or learning math. Neither of these are revolutionary. All parties involved understand that there's an existing supply of math teachers across the nation who are comfortable teaching some curriculum at some level, and that a true re-arrangement or re-imagination of subjects carries high institutional friction.

In other words, we might rearrange Geometry to be taken before Algebra, but replacing Geometry with Linear Algebra (per Gilbert Strang's suggestion) would be revolutionary.

Fixing the Schools has been a massive political issue for decades. Huge amounts of money have been spent and all kinds of strategies have been tried. When you look at the long-term trends, though, you see only the standard, persistent performance gaps associated with demographic factors. The money and changes in education policy barely show up as blips.

If there were an obvious way to change things, things would have changed by now.

https://www.arnoldkling.com/blog/the-null-hypothesis-in-educ...

private school "revolution" is a regular talking point for some.. and also, there are ages-old responses and responses-to-responses to every single item here. The shock to Americans is not that some children get beaten at home for making a simple math mistake, the shock to Americans is that every child cannot do 9th grade math, no matter how many times you try to teach it.

Read the comment here about a Taiwan student who was average at home, becoming a "genius" immediately in the USA; similar storoes from some Eastern Europeans.. they can't believe that some strong students in public school do not have at least a semester of Calculus before college.. "I did that in 9th grade" they say.. it was written here..

there is no one-size-fits-all and somehow, Americans are shocked at this now, after thirty years of well-meaning propaganda from educational types.

Bucketing children by age and not developmental milestones has always confused me.

No matter how you slice it, some kids are more advanced in verticals than others (emotional, math, reading, problem solving, etc.) and there aren’t tracks in the U.S. to accommodate that so we end up forcing all these square pegs into round holes - everyone loses.

from a social development standpoint it makes sense, a lot of "geniuses" had/could develop problems growing up with people emotionally/socially more mature, altough keeping gifted people with underperformers and lowering education level to keep them "afloat" is a disservice to both groups

People are not underperformers, you can't and shouldn't segment the population across some quantitative boundary. Each individual should learn at a difficulty gradient for them that is positive and engaging for each subject. For everyone this will be a different value.

What you are describing is a form of damaging elitism.

People absolutely can and do underperform relative to a standard or mean.

Perhaps they should also learn at an optimal rate for personal growth. This doesn't negate the statement above, and it certainly isn't an argument for grouping children together where they can't learn at a personally appropriate rate.

Are you addressing the my statement relative to the GP? They are making the elitist assertion that the gifted kids should be separated from the chaff. Having been in gifted programs, I have not found the removal of "underperformers" to be anything other than classism.

I agree that gifted kids should be "separated from the chaff".

I don't see how you reconcile your belief that students should go at their own pace with the idea that students should not be separated. Lack of separation forces all students to progress at the same rate, either high or low.

Having been in gifted tracks and standard tracks, I saw a clear difference in the capabilities of students and coursework. If I had been forced to stay in the standard track, I would prefer to drop out.

Last, I reject your idea that no student can underperform. At best it is a meaningless empty statement. At worst it is a delusional denial that any differences or lines of comparison exist. Nobody is talented, untalented, tall, short, fast, slow. They just are what they are, unique and incomparable.

There is absolutely a class component to gifted programs, but the vast majority of the time this results from the additional support and nurturing upper class parents give their children. I don't think egalitarianism is a sufficient rationale for stifling and handicapping the progress of those children.

> At best it is a meaningless empty statement. At worst it is a delusional denial that any differences or lines of comparison exist. Nobody is talented, untalented, tall, short, fast, slow. They just are what they are, unique and incomparable.

Disingenuous hot take, you are putting words in my mouth. Done.

I gave a range of possibilities and my genuine opinion on them. I'm putting words in my mouth, not yours.

I'm not the one boldly claiming it is impossible for students to underperform.

public education is tailored to the class-level and school-year not individual performance, using underperformer is correct and they should be grouped by level of teachability and put on separate lanes than other students while obviously limiting self-limiting beliefs / segregation factors (like having a mixed classes of physical education or projects).

I radically believe one of the most damaging factor for education outcomes is (lack of) family support, most people dont have it in their most important formative years, so the state should put all highschool kids in oncampus communities for the 5 day week and let them use only earned cash (also by remunerating grades), while seeing family on weekend and vacations (vacation time should be connected to academic output)

All children of the same age aren't equally emotionally/socially developed. By your own argument we shouldn't be bucketing by age but by emotional/social development. Bucketing kids who are emotionally/socially more mature than their peers into the same cohort is is a disservice to both groups.

Take any vertical you want and you'll find the same argument.

The progression by age seems to be approximately correct when you average development across all verticals across an age group when you look at it from a high level, but once you zoom in it's an absolute mess.

Because school isn't about maximizing education; it's a daycare so that parents can work and children can come out with a uniform education that will suffice to do basic things in society like read/write/taxes etc.

This is my pet theory for why education in the US is the way it is.

Socialized child care is unpalatable. So public school starts at exactly the moment that research can come close to justifying having kids in school.

But parents need to work - so there is pressure once kids are in school to have a school day that matches the work day.

You might be able to get away with a 3 hour school day, and have the rest be dedicated to unstructured play/exploration. But you can't have child care, so if kids are in school they need to be "doing school."

So we have 8 hours of school and we need kids to be doing _school_ during that time because it can't be child care. So we create these gulags where kids move bricks from one pile to another and back all day and call it education because we've got to keep up this illusion of education.

And then we pay teachers child care wages because, under the hood, it's really just child care that nobody can call child care.

You hit the nail on the head there. It's hard articulating everything that feels off about it - but I felt the same way about the CHIPS Act forcing companies to provide cheap childcare to workers. I think for one, it emphasizes cheap childcare over quality childcare (and this doesn’t seem like the sort of situation where the free market will sort that out).

There’re also these conflicting ideas of children both a) being necessary/important enough that workers will sacrifice their own productivity for them; b) being a little like cattle and not requiring anything more than the bare minimum to develop into productive human beings.

This might not be as bad as it sounds: bright kids need to learn to study on their own, otherwise they will eventually hit the ceiling when there's no tutor available to raise their level further.

The site has a cool widget and you can browse through past data. From what I see, the decline isn't too dramatic. I'd expect an even worse drop off due to the pandemic than just a few points.

Wouldn't the grade level be defined by the median student?

No, it's a standard that is based on what a child should be able to perform at a certain age. Otherwise everyone could get exceptionally dumb and illiterate, which has already happened in CA apparently. As someone who went to CA public school, I can tell you that very little learning is going on (at least where I was).

I think it is defined by the aspirational median student.

I presume "grade level" was defined by the median student some time ago and has not been adjusted since. The fact that it's going down seems like bad news.

EDIT: It seems the headline is misleading and my take is not accurate.

It’s not really going down. There are years it was worse and years it was better. It seems like it’s staying fairly consistent around the original threshold, which appears to be close the median. But I’d note the first year observed was lower than this last year observed, so it couldn’t have been the actual median. They probably intentionally picked a level below the median as the threshold to convince people to freak out and “send funding now”

Yeah after taking a closer look at everything, it seems that the actual headline is alarmist and heavily misleading.

The conclusion to take from this is that the pandemic had a mild negative impact on test results, but otherwise everything is fine, and actually marginally improved since these metrics were first established.

Based upon the graphs there it doesn't seem to have much changed since 2014, so I don't know that we can say it's going down.

Grade level comprehension is an expectation set by the state. Having some standard to aim for gives us a better understanding of if students are generally regressing or progressing.

We're able to see tread lines over time, and raise alarms like this headline, when we know that students now are not learning as much as students of the past.

An important point: the high school dropout rate has been declining for many years. In the past, students who weren’t making it would simply stop attending. Now they are mostly still in school, and probably not doing a whole lot better, which makes the stats look like they are getting worse.

Overall dropout rate has dropped by nearly 50% since 1972:

https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/10/02/u-s-high-sc...

Why don't we get rid of grade levels? It would seem 50% of the students are continuously behind and probably suffering. A more humane approach would be to continue to teach the material at a level they can learn from until they get it, and or find new ways to teach it.

You see a bimodal distribution in technical subjects (reading and math are technical) where if you get behind, you will continue to get further behind. Catching up takes a 150% power output to even get back to parity if the rest of the non-lagging cohort continues to run ahead.

Perhaps we might get rid of across-subject grade levels but thing that grade levels solve is limited supply of teachers and the coordination of materials and standards. Otherwise we'd live in a world where every child gets their own tutor and their own custom curriculum.

Thus in some sense we should strive to have better grade levels, but we'll still have grade levels.

close to thirty percent of Oakland Public Schools students did not graduate High School last I looked.. spectacular levels of genuine confirmed illiteracy, plus dozens of non-English native languages; very high violence rates among and between some groups

I think at this point Oakland is a failed city. Or at least very close to it.

A population of ignorant and illiterate peasants is great for maximizing political capital. They are receptive to propaganda. They are an energetic bloc of voters. They know something is wrong, but are too ineffective to correctly identify the problem, which means politicians will continually entice them with "solutions" that solve nothing but increase the political or financial capital of interested parties.

We're headed toward a medieval "Three Estates" type system reupholstered with a post-modern aesthetic: the ruling class (brokers of power), the intelligentsia (white collars), and the peasants (everyone else).

In California we are already in that system

Is there no separation between the blue-collar working class and the homeless/hopeless class?

You really think the school system is bad because the entire cadre of school administrators are taking secret orders from shadowy politicians to keep kids dumb? I recommend you rethink the logical process that brought you to this conclusion.

Where was any of that mentioned? Complete strawman argument.

Although I don't agree with the conspiracy, it's more that the politicians can achieve the outcome by misdirecting funds (free iPads!) to achieve the "supposed" end goal (producing sheeple) while looking like they are achieving a nobler goal (educating the lesser off). This can be achieved with very few people interested in the former with the majority of the politicians believing they are accomplishing the latter.

Macroscopic politics is a phenomenon in its own right. Something that should be studied like one would study chemistry or physics. No one person or party controls the course of events.

I don't believe there is a grand conspiracy with shadowy bond-villainesque bad guys. It's simply that there is positive pressure in one direction (to have an easier-to-manage populace) and negative pressure in the other (to have a virtuous populace (harder to manage)).

It is quite bond-villainesque if one tries to make the population easier to manage.

I think it's simpler than that. It's memetics. Bad/wrong ideas infect brains, and propagate themselves by making believing those ideas fashionable. People then act according to the incentives. Some borrow the occult concept "egregore" describe the emergent behaviour.

I fail to see the difference between your arguments.

Making the population easier to manage doesn't need to be an explicit goal, it's an emergent outcome of many many different policies that target other things and are incentivized.

Making money from mass populations works better with more homogeneity of demand, and social media in particular provides a lot of effective levers to promote that homogeneity.

It is many people's jobs to influence memetics, and they're succeeding.

Right. I meant I don't believe that is an explicit goal/conscious thought, for most of them. Sorry for not making myself clear.

It's not the administrators. It is the politicians and some rich donors funding things like banning books, banning sex ed, changing curriculum standards i.e. not teaching about slavery because of political pressure or the threat of prosecution or defunding.

You know, all the stuff that's been in the news for all time as pushed by the conservative agenda?

You don't need conspiracy when you have hegemony.

Or, the Inner Party, the Outer Party, and the Proletariat, if you will.

I agree that education is extremely important to fight against social attacks. I would still add that I know a LOT of very intelligent people who are also extremely intolerant (think racism, antisemitism, homophobic, etc.)

I’ve yet to understand how this phenomena continues to persist in spite of education levels continuing to grow.

One of my current theory is that face to face interaction, especially between different types of people, is a requirement. And the wave of fascism that we see is due to face-to-face interaction going to an ATL during covid.

The solution is simpler. People are lazy.

Schools don't equip kids with literacy, life skills and critical thinking because highschoolers equipped with those skills are more effort to manage.

> We're headed toward a medieval "Three Estates" type system reupholstered with a post-modern aesthetic: the ruling class (brokers of power), the intelligentsia (white collars), and the peasants (everyone else).

We already have it, and it's nothing new. See: Fussell's Class : a guide through the American status system (1983).

> They know something is wrong,

Are you sure? Ignore is bliss and all of that.

p.s: accurate portrayal of the situation I must say.

Low levels of parental involvement in education.

It's not especially relevant but I can't help being reminded of VerizonMath https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MShv_74FNWU

According to state testing? I was an A student (as were many of my peers) but you'd best believe we dicked around with anything that we were told wouldn't affect our letter grades (e.g. state testing).

I wondered this a lot when I was a student in the 2000s. What fraction of kids take the tests seriously? What fraction put in the same effort as they would into their academic tests?

I had some friends who were poor students and didn't care much about school. I doubt these people put in much or any effort at all into these tests. I was a good student, but at a certain point I got burnt out too. It wasn't worth reading the 10th literature passage extra carefully, nor checking my work on each math problem. These tests are long and don't impact me: why should I give it my all?

This is an underrated comment. I remember taking a Golden State Exam [1] in high school. It was for English and it required some essay writing. I didn't think I'd be in the top group so I wouldn't win any award, and I knew it wouldn't affect my letter grade. I spent the time writing random stuff that would fill the page instead of what I was supposed to write about.

It would be interesting to get data on how much students don't even try on exams that don't affect their letter grade.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_State_Exams

This is still the case. In my state growth assessment tests are given for reading and math every fall and spring. These tests don't affect students grades in any manner. My experience with my child and her friends is that no effort is given. When the test answers were recorded via paper creating patterns on the test sheet was the only effort given. Now that it is computerized, they just randomly select answers or pick a letter to answer for every question. Based upon these tests my daughter and most of her friends are illiterate and can't count. Her and her friends are all A students enrolled in honors, AP and dual enrollment classes.

In high school there are a few state level tests which effect whether you graduate. These they take more seriously.

We have to cut the crap and get drilling. Common core is a disaster. Get rid of it. We need to build students to be resilient, work collectively and be able to demonstrate applied knowledge. Take a Finnish education system and copy it.

https://www.amazon.com/Leading-High-Performance-School-Syste...

What the Common Core and Equitable Math should not be understood as is as a new way of teaching or learning math. Neither of these are revolutionary. All parties involved understand that there's an existing supply of math teachers across the nation who are comfortable teaching some curriculum at some level, and that a true re-arrangement or re-imagination of subjects carries high institutional friction.

In other words, we might rearrange Geometry to be taken before Algebra, but replacing Geometry with Linear Algebra (per Gilbert Strang's suggestion) would be revolutionary.

As a non-Californian, I'm surprised that their education spending per pupil is "mid-tier" (14k/yr) compared to other US states.

https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2021/public-s...

This data is from the California Dept of Education. I wonder if other states track this also.

My guess is that some states don't even bother, and their students likely don't perform as well. Then there are other states, small ones like Connecticut, Rhode Island and Vermont, whose students might fall on the high side of the curve.

Just a guess. Anyone know?

States have to track these sorts of metrics to qualify for federal education funding. This is an enduring result of the “No Child Left Behind” act. Before that, you were correct, many states did not track educational stats in any consistent or reliable way.

I'm not an american — what level of math proficiency for at what age are we talking about here? Is it about being bad at integrals or not being able to solve a simple quadratic equation?

At the end of public school, the latter; algebra. Calculus is typically optional in US high schools. Although each state has different specific educational requirements.

The latter, and that's probably still too high a bar for any grade below senior year.

I don't usually swear on HN but what the fuck.

This is the effect on a state of reducing enrollment requirements.

I'm shocked that this is happening in a state that tried to get rid of advanced math class to promote equality.

Half of adults in the US read at or below an 8th grade level so I don’t see why this is surprising.

Don't worry, we'll simply reduce the standards.

Your comment is a bit dismissive, but you’re right. That’s what will happen. Another reply says “ Wouldn't the grade level be defined by the median student?”, which is exactly how you get ever lowering standards. You start with a few good sounding assumptions, and then keep adjusting the level, because the assumptions cannot, no, may not be wrong.

Financial incentives are another good example.

Aren't the standards higher now than the past? I have daughter in second grade who is learning multiplication, basic division, fractions and very basic algebra. I never learned that till 3rd and 4th grade.

Here's some sample questions from california standardized test. http://starsamplequestions.org/grades_2_3.pdf

I'm much more interested in the proportion of students who can't do math at the previous grade level. It means they completed the grade without being able to do the math.

I don't think this is going to change. I have kids in school in California. Most of the parents in my middle class neighborhood also went through public schools, and they have completely wrong ideas about how to improve academic performance. The only parents I agree with are parents from China, Singapore, Taiwan, India etc. But most of them are moving out of public schools and into private schools. So I'm mostly stuck with parents who themselves can't do math properly, so they complain about things like Common Core without understanding what the purpose is.

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