U.S. math scores drop on major international test

If, for example, they degraded, then it would indicate there is a problem happening that even the higher socioeconomic status doesn't protect from despite all its benefits (well it might protect relatively better that other SES, but not enough to prevent the downward trend).

If, instead, they improved relative to their past selves, it would indicate the problem causing the overall trend is found entirely within other SES groups (well not entirely, as it is possible the impact still hit this group but that other factors more than made up for it, but to keep it simple, we can ignore such a possibility unless we see even better data that can parse out these more complex relationships).

it doesn't say the immigrants are to blame, it just strongly implies that this could be a likely reason, furthermore for some reason to be an immigrant is to not be white which certainly was not the case when I immigrated to America.

That doesn't make this argument credible. Is there any credible source?

> rather than that they’re blaming immigrants, which I didn’t see in this post

We know well that the talking points of racism are formed to create ambiguity and use dog whistles. That goes back half a century and probably much longer. These are the talking points.

Americans, overwhelmingly, agree that things are not going in the right direction. What they are split on, is how to fix it, and what is the greatest driver.

Finland solution was to ban all private education. Once rich kids were forced to go to public schools, then suddenly education became a larger part of the gov budget, those parents spent more time asking for reforms, volunteering etc.

They have one of the best performant school systems in the planet. And all it takes is not allowing a percentage of the population think of education as optional

To the contrary, you could totally conclude from this that US has excellent educational system at least with respect to these, as you call them, “advantaged” groups. At best you could argue that the system is not so excellent for other, less well performing groups. However, these less well performing groups still perform better in US system than matched groups outside the US, so it is indeed the case that for both higher and lower performing groups, US educational system beats all other systems around the world.

This is not what he did. He just explained to you that the outcomes for all those subgroups are basically better in the US than elsewhere.

Even that is a moot point though, because the aggregate US score is already perfectly comparable to e.g. EU level. Even if you cherry-pick EU nations for GDP/capita (Switzerland, Netherlands, Denmark), you can see that they are pretty much exactly on US level (with the EU leaning a bit more toward math).

This also tracks with anecdata I have from family (central europe) that did a year at a US highschool (east/west) and both described the math curriculum as "joke".

To reiterate: Describing the US education system as "bad" (=> compared to peer-nations) is just objectively wrong.

If group B has characteristics that make education more difficult relative to group A (e.g. lower mean IQ), then if there are two countries with identical educations systems, the one with more students of group B will end up with worse educational outcomes, just because group B are harder to educate regardless of the system.

1) kids with two married parents at home

2) kids of parents with a college or professional degree

3) kids of parents who work white collar salaried jobs

4) kids of parents who are native English speakers

If you check all those boxes you're going to see that the resulting subgroup does very well on all standardized tests, including PISA. It will also be predominantly white/European-American & Asian/Asian-American. Those four attributes make the biggest difference in educational attainment, and brown & black families are the ones who are being left behind.

For the next thought exercise, consider what can be done to address this shortcoming in our political, social & education systems.

Sorry, what do you mean by “evidence”? I clearly said that I am talking about PISA results, and described what these look like. You can look these up yourself if you are curious about more details.

> Second, other than racism, I don't see why we would distinguish between the 'race' of the Americans.

For better or worse, this opinion is not shared by the mainstream American culture and policy-making circles. We take great efforts to distinguish between these groups in the context of educational outcomes. It is not surprising, because these different groups very much exist in very objective sense, and quite objectively have different educational outcomes, which makes it useful to distinguish between them for the purposes like the original question, which was whether the educational quality went down recently. My original point that in order to answer this question, you have to distinguish between these groups so that you don’t fall victim to composition fallacy, is largely orthogonal to any discussion about the causes of these disparities, because it still stands regardless of whether the causes are 100% biological or 100% cultural or 100% result of systemic discrimination or whatever.

> Unless you make the racist claim that math skills biologically depend on race, there is no reason to compare some Americans with people in Africa because they have similar skin color - it's absurd.

You are creating a really weird straw man, because I don’t think that even extreme KKK-style racists have much of an issue with skin color per se. Who are you arguing against here? I am extremely confused.

> I don't believe that you are unaware of the hate and discrimination against immigrants and minorities, justified by these same and similar arguments.

Ah, here comes smears and innuendos that by open discussion of clear, objective facts that are relevant to policy making, I’m causing some kind of nebulous harm to some unnamed people via some proxies. Just stop it, I don’t care, and nobody cares anymore either.

If so, might still be a lot worse elsewhere. Maybe the US is not good, but less bad?

As an extreme example, think of Haiti for example.

Of course, another aspect of the education system are the resources given to the average student, and I don't think there is much debate that the US could do better here.

It's also the primary medium schools use to communicate analytical reasoning and deductive analysis. If you cut math as a target without fundamentally reworking curricular elements, you'll have a ton of graduates who are much worse at negotiating the validity of competing logical arguments.

Are the standards really that low? AIUI in most developed countries w/ the significant exception of the U.S. (and to a lesser extent, other English speaking countries), 4th and 5th grade math are for teaching the earliest elements of pre-algebra. (Meaning that algebraic expressions are very much not used, but the style of reasoning is clearly intended as preparation for that). They may get a lot of practice with fractions or multiple-digit arithmetic, but the basic procedures are not new to them in 4th grade. It seems to me that the U.S. educational system is underserving these kids quite significantly by not catering to their potential and actual skills for mathematical reasoning, which while not fully developed (and very much tied to "concrete" skillsets, as opposed to a real capacity for abstraction) are still quite substantial.

I'm probably explaining it poorly, but what if IQ was not a test of just 'intelligence', but perhaps some proxy of intelligence, attention, motivation, and other factors combined? Having taken the WAIS-IV myself, I am not convinced the measurements are all they are cracked up to be.

Think about Homer's Odyssey. The entire epic poem was passed down verbally from memory. If I am not mistaken, Homer thought reading would make people less intelligent because reading would diminish the one's capacity for memory. Does not having the ability to recite the entire Odyssey from memory mean we have become less intelligent, or perhaps, maybe we do not need to memorize the Odyssey because our intellectual capacity is better spent on other endeavors?

"moving a chunk of non-IEP kids into more non-secular schools with lower standards"

When we applied to public schools for my child, the one we were most excited about was a charter school, not one run by the local school district.

As far as I can tell, charter schools have some selection pressure that is absent from government-run schools: if a charter school does poorly, parents don't choose it, and it closes. If a district-run school does poorly, the district will allocate kids there anyway.

Any source for this? My understanding is that most states have criteria for what needs to be taught in a primary and secondary school, regardless of public or non-secular. In my experience (attending, touring, friends who are teachers), the non-secular schools had higher standards.

"concentrating behavior issue and IEP kids in public schools"

Public schools in many areas are increasingly doing this by sending G-IEP to entirely separate schools. Indirectly, they are also doing this by increasing school population. Smaller communities tend to better self-police. The biggest issue is the lack of appropriate involvement followed by the lack of leverage the school has. In some areas, some non-public schools even get district IEP resources for their IEP students, so they aren't all avoiding it.

Schools in much of the US were closed longer than many of those around the world.

Doesn't mean it hasn't happened elsewhere, but that may be a cultural issue due to many of the social safety nets that exist in other countries simply not being a thing in the US.

At most hypothesis may be false, or unsupported by the evidence, but never is a hypothesis by itself "bigotry".

Also, because demographics aren't distributed evenly geographically, I think there is probably a case that the education system is different for different races (to the extent that racial geographic distribution is different).

This is incorrect, certainly an ideal we'd all like but far from reality. The educational experiences and outcomes of 1st and 2nd generation immigrants can and often does differ significantly from native-born students. Seeing the difference in the data/scores should clue you into this and helps us understand the socioeconomic impact on student achievement that immigration has. Language is often a large factor where 1st and 2nd generation students may be speaking a different language at home than they are in school. The US has significantly more immigrants than other countries in the world which is why not controlling for it skews the data disproportionately.

It's the same for any educational achievement measures, including PISA. Kids from households with two parents who are working professionals and college educated will do fine most of the time, and kids without those privileges will struggle most of the time.

The problem is that they fall way behind in the 3 months not in school.

(There is also a North/South divide in Europe but Northern Italy is in the high IQ group.)

https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpreview.redd....

All of their children did exceptionally well in school because the parents were very involved in their schooling.

These kids were often the first in their family to ever get into college.

How?

> but it's undermined by school choice vouchers

How do school vouchers undermine enforcement of standards?

> Instead we should follow Finland's example and get rid of private schools altogether.

I fail to see what is the relationship between private schools and enforcement of standards

San Francisco Unified School District implemented math sequencing changes that failed. District Leadership claimed they worked. Those changes were then cited by the authors of the latest California Math Framework.

Because California is a big state (and with some popular state universities), the California Math Framework will influence curricula and teaching methods far beyond California.

I could also see it resulting in more subvocalization, but my assumption is that subvocalization is actually a very important short-term strategy that almost always goes away quickly.

then just ignore their comment, nobody forced you to engage or reply, and not every comment is written specifically for xracy.

you could also reflect the fact that you responded to a bad take (your opinion) with bad faith and arguably made the situation worse by adding nothing of value, or no value, and instead negative value :)

last estimates I read mentioned 400k covid research papers, diabetes had over 1.5m and 'cancers' , as varied as that topic is , has many many millions of papers.

The intensity of research was high, and the technology yielded quick high quality results, but there isn't much reason to consider it to be 'the most thoroughly studied disease' -- maybe if you go by some arbitrary figure like 'megabytes of genomic data sequenced' ?

As they should be. Lots of American medical workers quit during and after the pandemic because the American people treated them so horribly, screaming at them that "it's just a flu", that it was a hoax, to take off their masks, to give them horse dewormer, etc. If this is how Americans treat their medical workers, they don't deserve to have proper staffing.

This is not at all self-evident and if any such factor so strongly correlated with academics, it would be born out in real life and society. "Smarter people like vanilla over chocolate ice cream." The only reason race has come to matter so much is that it IS such a massive factor on one's life experience, whereas having brown hair vs. blonde hair does not and causes far less controversy.

I either buy kindle unlimited subscription or find pirated epub

It was a pretty huge failure. They couldn't produce a laptop as cheap as they initially wanted, power infrastructure to recharge them was just not there, and most importantly, the prime belief of "just give everyone a computer and education will magically improve" of technologists has not born out at all.

The vast majority of "technology" that got injected into classrooms has had zero impact. Your average teacher is not given the time, material, money, or experience to leverage the technology in a way that multiplies their ability to educate.

My mother is a renowned teacher in the state, since about the late 80s, and lived through both the proliferation of technology in education in general, and specifically the "MLTI" program that gave every single Maine middle school student a personal iBook laptop to use. In the 80s, she learned how to program BASIC in school. In the 90s, she used the nascent internet, before Google, to research my sister's medical condition to discover treatments and support and resources despite literal poverty and living 500 miles from the nearest hospital that even had familiarity with the problem. In the 2000s, she digitized her gradebook and started to keep in touch with parents through regular email, and learned how to use digital tools to build tests and homework assignments. During the 2010s, she had an entire corpus of digital test systems that could autogenerate completely new and distinct tests from a single click. Over COVID, she attempted to teach herself OBS to improve the production quality of her remote lessons. Despite her empirical experience with tech in education, despite her outright buy-in of new techniques to improve her teaching, despite her willingness to learn new methods, none of it really improved her ability to teach a body of students a lesson.

The vast majority of teachers in all the schools in northern Maine had less aptitude with tech than she did and barely used any of the tech, and NONE of their lessons were less useful for it. The best use of "tech" I experienced during education was ONE teacher using a shared notebook application to digitize their entire lesson into digital notes that were automatically distributed to the class in a nice way that could be referenced, and that did not educate students better than a Xerox'd handout.

Tech is simply not a force multiplier in education. It's almost entirely a farce in fact. Khan academy has probably helped a few people improve their understanding on a few topics, but it's been two decades since Ivy League colleges first offered massively open online classes, and they have not moved any needle on education, as this very article shows.

The reality is that motivated people who want to learn haven't been hurting for information access since the proliferation of public libraries. Even in my shithole, dead end rural town, we had a Carnegie library that could borrow a book on any topic from most other libraries across the country. Any book that existed could be yours within a week or so. By the 90s, digital encyclopedias were in vogue and also pretty good.

The primary difficulty in teaching children anything is motivation. You can't really teach a child that doesn't want to learn. Kids in the US want to learn less than they previously did. Part of this is that education is no longer seen as an easy way to money, with those kids instead thinking they'll just become fortnite streamers or influencers or grifters. The large cohort of children of evangelical and fundamentalist families have never had it easier to deny things taught to children either, as we are seeing an outright anti-intellectualism we haven't seen since the scopes-monkey trial. Kids see their parents diss education. Kids don't think education is important.

"Screens = bad" seems to be, as far as I can tell, the kind of unhelfpul massive oversimplification that always happens when science gets filtered through the rumor mill. Because the truth is too nuanced to make for a fun anecdote you can tweet or share in light social conversation.

But yeah, sometimes I just need a quick overview of something, and it's perfectly fine (maybe even good) if I forget 90% of the details. I feel like this actually describes a lot of learning later in one's tech career. It's hard to predict what knowledge is worth retaining in a vacuum. Fumbling with it at work, though, is a great signal.

For fundamental skills, though? I'm kind of surprised how little "instinct" for programming undergraduates and recent graduates that I mentor have nowadays. I'm part of the last generation to go through CS programs at a time when programming assignments were often done on pencil and paper. For some classes the development tools we used were only available in a computer lab, and a decent proportion of students didn't even own their own computers. It was decidedly Not Fun, but those of us who went through it seem to have an easier time mentally "compiling and running" code as they read it.

But I'm not sure if that result has ever been independently replicated.

Maybe set up a society where intellectual effort and achievement is rewarded and teachers get paid well enough to make being knowledgeable seem a laudable thing?

Moreover, giving more money does not prevent admin bloat.