- Always online phone access (and everything that comes with it)
- Generative AI for doing assignments without thought
- The COVID year or two that they had to learn from home couldn't have helped develop good habits (I know it would've for me)
while this may seem to align incentives, in reality a school that has struggling students needs MORE resources, not less.
the outcome, in reality, is an extreme desire to "teach to the test," where developing actual skills is secondary to learning the structure of test problems and how to answer them correctly enough to keep the school from being obliterated.
teachers are one of the most valuable, most undervalued positions in society. my mother taught elementary school for 20 years; when she retired, i was making 3 times her salary doing my computer job. this is the sad but inevitable outcome from the policies put in place by a class of people that can afford to educate their children outside of the systems forced upon the working class.
How would you explain that temporal gap? If the No Child Left Behind Act is the problem, why was the trend positive for the first 12-14 years of the time it's been in force?
Many of the schools with the most funding per student, like Washington D.C. and NYC currently underperform.
NYC has a spending of $36-40k per student with only 56% ELA, ~47% Math. Washington DC has $27k-31k of spending per student and only 22% proficient in reading and 16% in Math.
Charter schools have been the best bang for the buck. The best all-income schools are catholic schools, averaging at 1 grade level higher. Then private schools do even better, but aren't accessible to everyone, and then the top spot is left to selective high-performing schools, unsurprisingly.
These are not equal comparisons. People who send their kids to a private school are choosing that, and thus care about the education their kids get. While Catholics are all income and choosing for religion reasons, generally catholic implies cultural care for education. Public schools take everyone including those who don't care about education.
In general public schools in the US are very good. However a small number in every school are kids that would be kicked out of private (including catholic) schools. There are also significant variation between schools with richer areas of a city doing better - despite often spending less on education.
That is a lot easier when you can require a transcript from the prospective student, review it, and say, "Uh, no thank you".
There's a private technical college near here that offers EMT and paramedic training. They "guarantee" "100% success in certification and registration" for their students.
How do they get there? They boot students out after they fail (<80%) their second test in the class.
I'm not necessarily opposed to such a policy. It is, however, intellectually dishonest of them to try to tout it as a better school for that reason. Charter schools are free to reject students who will bring their grade averages down.
I believe this is not only restricted to Catholic schools though they are the most common. Most religious schools have higher scoring students.
IMHO, we always hear about such and such school (system) has X% kids proficient with $Y/year per pupil. But what I would really want to know about a school is how does a year change at the school change the proficiency of the class. If the class of 3rd graders starts the year at 20% proficient at 2nd grade level, and ends at 22% proficient at 3rd grade level, that might be a good school, even though a single point in time check says 22% proficient. But the numbers we get aren't really useful for that; a cohort analysis would be better; there's real privacy implications, but that doesn't make the numbers we get useful. :P
I wonder if USA schools are similar. It's next to impossible to require belief.
You need to test to an academic standard of course, as they definitely want to keep the bar rather high. So they won't take all comers. But if you are either just starting out or come with an academic track record/high percentile test scores you shouldn't have much of a problem at all. When I went even 30 years ago there were plenty of low income kids who were not academic superstars. The only real metric that was universal across the board was the requirement for involved parents.
I'm sure other areas are different, but Catholic schools in my region have really suffered in recent years with a lot of them closing down.
NCLB had some flaws but that wasn't one of them. Before NCLB you were stuck in the poor school district your likely single parent could afford to live in, inevitably doomed to poor education.
I would be interested if this is a nationwide trend or the bad performers are performing even worse. Especially since from my memory, this is mostly a poverty issue. Not a school funding issue, but that per capita income was a good indicator of where that state would score.
France — with all its problems — ensures the same incredibly high standard of curriculum across the country and perhaps most importantly it is actually expected that top university performers who will become researchers teach at high school in the periphery. It’s even a nation-wide competition by discipline (look up the “aggregation”) to obtain these highly sought positions. The idea is something like you teach high school outside Paris while preparing your doctorate and then either return triumphant to the big research institutes or continue teaching in the provinces. Something like this in the US would have immeasurable impact, since probably one of the biggest issues is just convincing well-educated people to teach in rural areas.
This led me into a bit of a rabbit hole trying to understand what in fact the official literacy rate is measured by if it’s so wildly different from - indeed almost double — the portion who can read at an eighth grade level.
The data is actually quite interesting. US National Center for Education statistics administer tests to assess “the ability to understand, evaluate, use, and engage with written texts to participate in society” and an individual falls into one of five categories. Official literacy definition considers above category one (“below basic”), but it is category three that maps approximately onto “eighth grade knowledge” (thus four as high school, five as post-graduate). The most interesting thing I found in the data is exploring that gap between two and three, ie states that have a high attainment of official literacy but then very low rates of the higher levels. California, for example, has the highest percentage of people below level two, but a relatively high percentage at level three and above — obviously I haven’t considered the data for long enough to conclude, but that suggests to me largely a question of immigration/non-English speaking populations. The state I’m from does better than California on attainment of level two, but significantly worse at attainment of three or above.
States where level 3+ > levels 1-2: District of Columbia, Washington, Minnesota, Oregon, Massachusetts, North Dakota / Utah / Colorado.
States with lowest level 3 (ie “eighth grade” equivalent) attainment: Mississippi 35%, Louisiana 35%, West Virginia 37%, New Mexico 39%, Nevada 39%, Alabama 39%, Arkansas 39%, Texas 40%, Tennessee 40%, Kentucky 41%.
TLDR that gap looks like an interesting way to separate issues with a state’s educational system from other questions. Whatever the best measure of literacy may be, it seems like the bar should be a bit higher than just “native speaker of the measured language.”
There's no way such a system can produce uniform results.
(The wisdom in forcing voters to elect all sorts of local commissions is another matter entirely. I struggle to see how anyone can make an informed choice, in ballots with 10 or more elected positions, but they seem normal in America.)
It's pretty simple to vote on local offices: are you happy with the current state of education in your district? Good, keep the incumbents around. Otherwise change out school board members until you achieve the desired results.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/232951/university-degree...
Honestly — and I’m not being at all utopian/overvaluing the present state of the technology — I think AI is one of the few prospects for even just marginal improvement, especially since it’s accessible by phone. Much as I wish it wasn’t the case, it’s hard to even imagine all the things that would have to change (from funding, to legislation, undoing all the embarrassing “teaching the controversy” curriculum, to say nothing of staffing) for a “non-technical solution.”
Combine this with an emphasis on single-tracking students and a de-emphasis of grading in general, and it's not surprising to me that scores are declining.
If social media and smartphones are the problem, I would have expected that results for English proficiency would be steady until the advent of TikTok, right?
On the other hand, it's shallow. Messages are short, and filled with shorthand and emoticons. There's no deep reading or expression of complicated ideas in written form.
Texting is unironically a better use of time than reading infinite jest, or gravities rainbow, etc.
... “How do you feel, Jake?” “Fine, it doesn’t hurt much.” “Are you all right?” ...
(Hemmingway)
First: Your HS kids hang out with a different crowd than my HS kids :-)
Second: This is about reading ability (comprehension, etc), not literature. Whether the quality of a text message is superior/inferior to whatever they use in literature classes is irrelevant.
I think back to some college peers who even in some more basic classes could clearly read the words of the assigned writings, they couldn't then parse out the deeper meanings behind the assignments. They weren't illiterate, you could ask them to read a passage, and they'd be able to say all the words. You could ask them face value questions about the text, and they'd probably be able to answer most questions right. But any deeper analysis was just beyond them. So, when the professor would ask deeper questions, they'd say "I don't know where he's getting this, the book didn't talk about that at all".
I avoided English Lit in college but thinking back to High School I recognize the "I don't know where he's getting this" reaction. I just rarely engaged with the so-called "classic" stuff we had to read, and like you say I had no trouble reading the words but struggled with deeper meanings or even just getting past the archaic language. And this was in the early 1980s, no chance it was influenced by social media or mobile phones or AI. My parents probably blamed television.
At least we now have AI, where a student could (if motivated) ask questions about the meaning of a passage and get back a synthesis of what other people have written about it. Back then I used Cliffs Notes to do that.
That and the culture of anti-intellectualism in the US. I’m completely unsurprised we are falling behind.
It's definitely not just funding.
It might not make it down to teacher salaries or more educators, but the money is absolutely being spent at massive levels.
The best schools where I grew up and around me today have the lowest per-pupil cost. There is basically no correlation between budget spent on education until you get to the extremes on both ends.
Some of that is cultural, some of that is due to parenting. A lot of parents aren't involved in their kids education. Frankly, a lot of them are barely involved in parenting in general.
Now, if someone came with a headline that said "Parents not involved in childrens education because they've been ragebaited into spending all their time yelling on social media" my biases would tend to lend me to believe it's true, even without sufficient evidence. There are other correlations, like cellphone ownership in the population.
Just having social media itself doesn't seem to be an exact fit, but that tells us nothing about the algorithms that social media was using at the time.
What isn't known is how to get parents to do better. Or lacking that, how to get kids to do better anyway. (there have been some successes, but nothing seems to be repeatable)
* Lowered attention spans
* A general reduction in critical thinking - instead preferring headlines, summaries, and easy answers
* Increased partisanship
* Reduction in third spaces and community connections - people becoming more isolated
* Financial stress
I'd say those are the main points. They apply in almost all developed nations, to varying extents.