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Comment by bmmayer1 | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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...

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