Calif. students rank 47th in science | Hacker News Reader

Calif. students rank 47th in science

ocregister.com

19 pointsmikecane31 comments

It seems to me there's a giant elephant in the room that no one wants to speak about. There is something broken with our educational system, specifically related to blacks. If you look at the top 10 states, they are not racially diverse consisting of large white populations. If you go from the bottom up, you pretty much have locales ranked in their density of black population. THIS IS A MAJOR PROBLEM. Until someone can stand up and say there is a problem culturally in black populations that needs fixing, or can determine what our school systems are doing wrong specifically to harm our black population our country will continue to suffer the consequences. This is not an easy subject to address, but it needs to be approached head on. We have a problem and it needs to be acknowledged before it can be fixed.

I'm confident in saying it's a cultural issue. Probably more to do with "poor" than "black".

Anecdotally I know this to be true. I live near a major urban high school in Denver. It's an interesting school as the surrounding neighborhoods have been undergoing rapid gentrification. The student population is half upper-middle class and the other half traditionally poor. It's pretty easy to pick out which group is which based on clothing, habits, and (sadly) ethnicity.

On any given day you'll see dozens and dozens of kids from the poorer demographics skipping class and getting into trouble. The bus into Downtown is filled with these kids literally blowing-off their education.

Talking to teachers at the school reveals what you'd expect. The cultural bias against education among the poorer students means most of those students do really poorly. The kids from more wealthy backgrounds take the same classes, with the same teachers, and use the same curriculum. They actually tend to do quite well.

Point being: I don't think the education system is broken at all. I think we have MAJOR cultural issues at play that heavily bias certain demographics from achieving in school.

I have absolutely no idea how you fix that.

Completely agree. Rich black kids would have no problems; poor white kids are just as badly prepared as poor black kids; the common denominator is economic resources more than anything. Being rich affords the child several benefits: 1. Stay at home parent with the time to take the child to enrichment classes, help the child with homework, challenge the child to stay on top of his classes 2. Child has access to extracurricular experiences such as summer science camps, weekend scouting trips, leadership retreats, etc. 3. Parents are involved and interested in the child's activities - parents of challenged backgrounds work so hard to make ends meet that at the end of the day, they just crash in front of the TV and tell the kids to play outside.

We have a problem in poor communities. Black communities are disproportionately poor due to historical factors. The problem isn't that we tap-dance around the issue, the problem is we don't like the solutions.

I second the other commenter. What are you advocating specifically that we don't like? Throwing money at poor black (and white) communities such that the individuals can live without having to work, or bringing back slavery (for poor whites and blacks) with a twist of being enforced as a contract between slave and master? Something else?

What are the solutions?

Investment in poor communities.

That seems..vague. What are we investing in? More money for schools? More money for roads? Mor money for...? Is there data to suggest that it works?

They tried that in Detroit...

Yes, and certain people in Detroit didn't like the solution, so they bolted and the whole city collapsed. They didn't seem to like the solution.

The problem is that we are more concerned with political correctness than solutions, and it's not PC to associate economical and educational problems with race and ethnicity.

It's not PC to do so in an extremely crude fashion that does nothing to illuminate problems nor suggest ways forward.

Among my friends in education, it's commonly accepted that the problems at underperforming schools are largely social issues and not education issues. The real question is why the public, politicians, and media don't focus on the social side more?

Because you can't just throw money at social issues.

culturally

Ha ha. Courageous giant elephant-identifier, you are. "Culture" is actually the unavoidable conventional wisdom. Whence the culture? is the real question.

The #10 state is Virginia, which is 20% African American (compared to California's 6.2%). I'd say that poverty is the more probable root cause.

Your hypothesis is that California ranks poorly on science because they have more blacks than other states.

Virginia is ranked #10 and has 40% proficient in science.

California is ranked #47 and has 22% proficient in science.

Virginia has 19.4% black population. (http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/51000.html)

California has 6.2% black population. (http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/06000.html)

Since Virginia has almost twice the rate of science proficiency as California does, and Virginia also has three times as many blacks by percentage of population as California, it would seem that the hypothesis that California ranks poorly on science because they have more blacks than other states is not correct.

On the other hand, California has about 1.5 times as many total blacks as Virginia. One might wonder whether there's a critical threshold X that is independent of the population proportion. Basically, I don't think these figures are sufficient to conclude either way.

Thanks for these statistics, I think the issue is pretty clearly "urban" as even the article points out. As other commenters have said it has more to do with poverty than race, it's just that blacks are generally heavily concentrated in poor communities. It may have nothing to do with race outside of the correlation of race to income levels in many communities, but the fact remains we are failing our black populations.

Until someone can stand up and say there is a problem culturally in black populations that needs fixing

People have stood up and said there is a cultural black problem. Off the top of my head, I know that Bill Cosby called out black men a couple of years ago and was absolutely lambasted by the black community. Aaron McGruder, the guy behind the Boondocks is another who comes to mind who calls out the black community and is often

I invite you to watch this illuminating interview with the creator of The Wire: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qulcqNMHVic

I think the problem with California has to do more with the large Latino immigrant population than blacks. It's hard to teach science when language is a barrier.

While it's certainly bad that California is so low (and somebody does have to be at the bottom, though I'd rather it not be one of the centers of tech), I'm also surprised that even the top states only have about 44% of their students "proficient/advanced".

Recently I saw a documentary ("Waiting for 'Superman'") about the state of education and schools in US and its biggest challenges. It was very disheartening. But it did try to discuss potential solutions. I highly recommend this to anyone who wants a better picture about what's going on.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1566648/

It is available on Netflix streaming.

Are they really going to blame statistical significance for a 47th place showing? As if a bigger sample pushes CA up to a podium finish.

Also found the "large urban districts" comment interesting. I understand it's an Orange County paper in which an Orange County supervisor is telling his constituents that the story isn't representative of Orange County. But it shouldn't be okay for "urban" kids to be 47th in science?

There's a sweet spot to be found, and I might even argue that their sample is too large if it isn't stratified in some meaningful sense. (It seems it isn't stratified: "Scores were not broken down beyond the state level.")

We're talking an average of 2400 students from each state. That's plenty for certain tests, such as the question of whether or not all states perform equally well. Since it's not stratified, we're basically talking about a rank order test concerning 50 means (depending on how you formulate it). A sample size of 120,000 is so enormously huge (for a question like that) that it might even be detrimental.

The quote about small sample sizes is just wrong. If anything, this sample is too large, such that even minuscule differences would appear to be statistically significant, when in fact that might not be "practically different."

This sounds like the biggest problem:

> The exams measure knowledge and understanding of physical, life, Earth and space sciences.

> In California, eighth-grade students are only taught in physical science, not in Earth or space sciences

It wouldn't surprise me if the science curriculum had to paired down due to schools having a finite amount of time with students, and choosing to spend that time focus on stuff that drives Reading and Math scores on testing like the NCLB.

Suck it Mississippi, Alabama and DC! We totally pwned you!

The great irony is that between Stanford, cal tech, the UCs, and the tech sector, Calif probably ranks 1st in the world in science...

Too bad they don't invest more time and resources in educating their community. They're content with sitting back and letting the government mismanage the problem.

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