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Comment by teachrdan | Hacker News Reader

> 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...

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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.

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