Hacker News Reader

The core problem is actually very simple. Education studies do not measure what they claim to measure. When they say, "education outcomes improve when..." they usually mean the pass rate, i.e. they only measured a signal among the bottom 20% of students. When they say, "test scores improve when..." they are, at best, measuring up to the 90th percentile. When they say, "the white/black attainment gap," or "socioeconomic disadvantages," they're usually just fishing for funding money, and their study will not actually attempt to measure either of those things. From a review of the literature on No Child Left Behind (NCLB) in 2015:

> Only one study specifically examined the achievement gap for students from low socioeconomic backgrounds (Hampton & Gruenert, 2008) despite NCLB’s stated commitment to improving education for children from low-income families. African American students were often mentioned in studies of general student achievement but none of the reviewed studies focused specifically on the effects of NCLB for this subgroup. Again, this is a curious gap in the research considering the law’s emphasis on narrowing the Black-White achievement gap. Other groups of students underrepresented in the research on NCLB include gifted students, students with vision impairments, and English proficient minority students.

("A Review of the Empirical Literature on No Child Left Behind From 2001 to 2010", Husband & Hunt, 2015)

Everything you see going wrong is downstream of this. Yes, harmful ideologies have done a lot of damage to the education system, but it could easily survive this we had actual signifiers of success.

Where my wife works the average salary is over 100K per year, so not bad for 9 months of work. This is in California where the test scores are some of the worst in the nation. I would not lean too hard at political party affiliation, California politics is heavily influenced by Teachers Unions, and yet we score near the bottom of the entire US.

> This is in California where the test scores are some of the worst in the nation

I read your post and thought it was BS, so I did a little research. According to this, California public school test scores are better than Texas and closing in on New York and Florida.

> California politics is heavily influenced by Teachers Unions, and yet we score near the bottom of the entire US.

California scores better than Texas, a completely Republican-run state where the teacher's unions have almost no influence. How do you account for that?

https://www.ppic.org/publication/californias-k-12-test-score...

Maybe California just has more rich people. When you control for demographics/SES, Texas schools seem far superior:

https://www.chadaldeman.com/p/which-states-actually-have-the...

https://www.urban.org/sites/default/files/2024-12/States_Dem...

Texas, Mississippi, and others partially achieve this by holding students back.

Mississippi, for example, has a third grade reading gate. Texas holds black kids back at a nearly twice the rate of white kids. These kids are older and have repeated the grade so they do better in the 4th grade NAEP assessment.

This is possibly working as intended. However, you can achieve the same results by redshirting your kid or having them repeat a grade.

So the claim from the blog post that

> but Texas has a slight edge for Hispanic students and a huge advantage for Black students.

says that the Texas results are driven by a demographic that's aggressively held back.

Isn’t that a good thing? Should students be promoted to a higher grade if the aren’t doing well. It’s really difficult to do this in California. My wife has dealt with high school seniors who are functionally illiterate. Maybe if they were held back they might catch up.

I'm not making a judgment about whether it's a good or bad thing for the kid. I don't know the literature to have a position. I'm just contextualizing the data.

In practical terms, the states kind of have different definitions of what it means to be in 4th grade. And that's one way of increasing your score on this particular measurement.

I think the right thing to do is intervene before students are held back. But that costs money and might make your NAEP scores worse if the student just squeaks by this year rather than staying behind a year. But I don't have the data on how much they're attempting to intervene in cases where students look like they're going to be held back.

Good point, a true apples-to-apples comparison would be based on age rather than grade level.

Adjusted for income its really bad. Income is the strongest causes of academic performance, so if you adjust for them California is doing way worse than other states.

CA also scores middle of the pack on nominal poverty rate (OPM), but last in the country on cost of living adjusted poverty rate (SPM). If anything though, that means backwards from what I would expect for income controlled education scores... ?

This is false. Adjusted for income CA students outperform most other states because CA has one of the largest populations of low income students.

Huge ESOL population, too (but to be fair, Texas and several other states also face that challenge)

Yes they have large ESL populations but CAs is much larger and those other states fare worse by any breakdown.

Exactly. The problem is the students and parents.

It would not matter what school you sent me to, I did not care about learning or intellectual pursuits when I was 15.

I would have had to be raised by completely different parents with different values in a different time and place.

> This is in California where the test scores are some of the worst in the nation.

This is an easily disprovable statement that calls into question your credibility.

California schools generally score right at or just below the median for the entire US.

That doesn't make them good, but they sure aren't the worst.

> I would not lean too hard at political party affiliation

In the US, it's not hard to look at a map of political party affiliation and a ranking of the worst schools and not notice the correlation.

It's not hard to be in the median yet one of the worst states, if NY/CA/FL/TX all have shit scores (I have no idea if that's the case). You could conceivably be at the median while being one of the worst 5 or 10 states.

Median means that half the states are worse than you. Unless there are ties, it's impossible to be the median and the 10th percentile.

Unless I missed something?

I was thinking median meant enough population of below states to reach half of populace, are doing worse.

>It's not hard to be in the median yet one of the worst states, if NY/CA/FL/TX all have shit scores (I have no idea if that's the case). You could conceivably be at the median while being one of the worst 5 or 10 states.

I wonder where you went to school. Median means that half of the sample is above and half the sample is below.

To explain (and I'll use small words so you'll be sure to understand), the median of the fifty states is that 25 are above the median and 25 are below it. See how that works?

Here's a simpler example in case you're still confused:

Steve makes $5/hour

Bob makes $8/hour

Reggie makes $11/hour

Sylvana makes $14/hour

Benoit makes $17/hour

The median wage is then $11.00/hour. Get it now?

Check out this very complex page[0] (let me know if you need help with the bigger words) that discusses this idea. Good luck. I suspect you're gonna need it.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_tendency

>I wonder where you went to school. Median means that half of the sample is above and half the sample is below.

Yes I understand that, but the sample unit called out in finding the median explicitly was 'schools' not median 'state.' (And before that, test scores, in which the fundamental unit is a child and not a state).

I was trying to come up with an explanation how CA could be at the bottom while still have schools around the median.

If NY/CA/FL/TX are huge and tight to together, the median school or child could be in one of them even if they were amongst the worst 5 or 10 states. The 'median' as used above was in reference to schools, not states.

I think the key piece you're missing here is each state does not have equal number of schools or children. Therefore if a state's schools are all scoring near the median (of schools) as alleged, and the large states are all doing bad, California could be one of the worst few states while having their schools (and children) near the median. You're getting your units mixed up.

>California schools generally score right at or just below the median for the entire US.

I'm guessing you're referring to the statement above from the comment here[0]. Is that correct?

I read that as "[All] The schools in California [in aggregate] generally score right at or just below the median for [other states' schools in aggregate] for the entire US." Which is as Tyr42 (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45191847 ) interpreted it as well.

Perhaps I misunderstood, but I don't believe I've ever seen comparisons of individual schools across the US. Ever. It's always comparisons of all the schools in one state as compared with those in another state.

Sure, there are often comparisons within states between school districts or between schools in the same district, but never one-to-one comparisons of a single school in one state vs. all the other schools in the US.

But yes, i can see how you might read it that way. That said, I guess we won't know which GP meant unless they come back and tell us.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45190611

Edit: Clarified comparison examples within within states/between school districts/schools.

> I read that as "[All] The schools in California [in aggregate] generally score right at or just below the median for [other states' schools in aggregate] for the entire US."

That is how I intended it as, like you, I have never seen anything else.

However, the real comment I was refuting was "This is in California where the test scores are some of the worst in the nation." That statement simply isn't supported by the data.

It is certainly possible that California does have some of the worst individual districts in the nation as it definitely has pockets of incredibly poor socioeconomic areas. However, that does not define "California schools" as an aggregate any more than the fact that California has some of the highest individually performing schools in the country by virtue of demographics as well.

I think the way you read it is the more likely way to read it. But the way I read it for my comment was the way I had to read it to come up with California coming at the bottom while having schools all scoring near the median of schools. I was trying to come up with a way to read it to make the assertions possibly true.

>I think the way you read it is the more likely way to read it. But the way I read it for my comment was the way I had to read it to come up with California coming at the bottom while having schools all scoring near the median of schools. I was trying to come up with a way to read it to make the assertions possibly true.

Yep. Your comment here[0] made that clear. I completely misunderstood you. Sorry about that.

I think there may be some confusion about where various states sit WRT schools.

School rankings from the World Population review[1] as compared with state test scores[2] of various types and ages, as well as US News and World Report's State school rankings[3], all of which tell a different, if similar, story.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45196647

[1] https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/public-scho...

[2] https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/profiles/stateprofile?sfj=...

[3] https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/rankings/education

> Curricula is set by politics and ideology, not established science.

This is part of it. A friend is a teacher and is now in an admin position where he manages teachers. His big gripe is the higher ups have no formal system - every time a new person comes in they bring with them their system and politics, burning down the previous efforts while doing little to nothing for students. Then they leave for greener pastures and the next ideologue comes along with their matches.

Parents need to take responsibility for outcomes. Education happens as much at home as it does in school. You need engaged teachers AND parents.

Teacher salaries need to keep up. The problem is teacher salaries aren’t a state or a national setup. They depend on the school district you’re in. If you’re in a high income district where higher taxes are afforded. Teacher salaries are good. But then these places also have VERY engaged parents - which makes the scores much better.

If you want rural and inner city scores to improve it will need real funding - 1. For teachers to want to move to small town USA and teach there, 2. Or for them to risk life and limb going to inner cities and 3. Having an extremely high teacher to student ratio - probably 5-10 per teacher to compensate for lack of engagement at home.

It's a pipe dream. I live in a fairly high income district. The school's attitude is my way or the highway. Neighboring municipalities do not fare any better in this department. From my experience, schools will fight tooth and nail to defend the status quo. I gave up.

> There's also the intentional and systematic disassembling of our education system by the federal government

Where is your evidence of this? Schools are one of the most locally controlled institutions of our government.

Chicago public school teachers salaries will reach over $110,000 by 2029 or earlier. Just going by the track record, this will not result in a better quality of education.

I wouldn’t work in Chicago for that amount of money

> systematic disassembling of our education system by the federal government

So you support shutting down the federal Dept. of Education? Or is the answer more centralized control of education?

I fully support shutting down the DoE and starting from scratch. It has failed.

Instead, institute a voucher system and allow parents to literally shop around for the best school. With obvious allowances for children with special needs, rural areas, etc.

Education needs competition. Badly.

You are hilarious.

Schools are dominated by leftwing CRT ideology. It's the rare exception when there is real pushback against dinosaurs or evolution. I very much doubt that you are as angry about Islamic pushback against sex topics in school.

The reward structures, the dumbing down of courses, removing accelerated courses, passing everyone, the move against merit, the removal of structure, discipline, and punishment for bad behavior all come from liberal ideas on teaching.

Anyone who demands standards, values merit, values hard work with high expectations is labeled a fascist, colonizer, or some other pejorative. "Ways of knowing" is an idea that permeates modern teaching where we can't judge or grade anyone for what they know or don't know because different people just "know" differently. Grades are racist. Expectations are racist. Math is racist.