"California isn’t alone in its stagnating scores and in fact compares favorably with the 12 other states, plus the U.S. Virgin Islands, that administered the same tests last spring from the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium. Scores decreased in every state, and California’s decline was about the smallest, retired educational testing specialist Douglas McRae said."
This is the most important sentence in the article. It points to a problem in the test itself - California's students didn't just get magically stupider.
Standardized testing isn't a particularly good way to gauge schools' ability to prepare students for college or for the 'real world.' Unfortunately, our K-12 public education system is broken and the politics of fixing it are even more broken, so this is what we get.
"This is the most important sentence in the article. It points to a problem in the test itself - California's students didn't just get magically stupider."
Yes. Having gone through public education in California the tests were treated as a total joke. They had no weight to your grades and there was zero incentive to do well. Often you wouldn't even get the results. In elementary school it was common for a teacher to say "When you have finished with this test, you can go to lunch" -- well kids would just start filling in bubbles. These tests were also accompanied by a sheet to see if you have tried drugs or sex all anonymous. My entire 3rd grade class did heroin.
The lack of incentive to do well is precisely the point of these tests, and they are designed with this context in mind. The testing regimen relies on the same level of apathy in both students and teachers being present year after year, which provides a nice baseline for statistical analysis/comparison. Incentives mess everything up. See also: NAEP [1]
Source: worked in ed covering this subject, studied assessment in ed school with one of the creators of the standards.
In my experience certain children (and adults) -- ones who live in successful, wealthy neighborhoods are completely terrified of the idea of failing, at anything. They will start weeping if they feel like they performed poorly on an exam. Any test, no matter how meaningless, determines their self-worth. I'd imagine these students do disproportionately fantastic on this test. At this point it's culture/personality test, not a reasonable countrywide baseline.
I think the pathology of worship of competition and the credentialing system -- insisting you must be the best on a test that you are explicitly told means nothing is a mental disorder developed due to being raised in certain cultural contexts, not a cause of success -- do you really think breaking down in tears at the slightest inconsequential setback is a good recipe for success in the primarily luck-driven market economy we live in? How many times do eventually successful entrepreneurs fail and keep going undiscouraged?
When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.
The more you prepare specifically for a test, the harder it is to determine how much of your score is based on your general understanding of what is being tested, and how much is based on you exploiting the test.
But it seems humans only tend to acquire and demonstrate knowledge for some sort of self gain. These tests would then just tell you the general level of apathy of the students and do not tell you how much they know.
If I wanted to know how well the average person on the street can clean a toilet and my test involved asking a bunch of people for a demonstration without pay nor feedback of any kind I don't suspect I would find a lot of clean toilets. I would instead have learned that people don't like cleaning toilets and gained no insight into their ability to do so.
If I don't study at all ever, only then is my understanding pure and not contaminated by studying for a test?
If I dont study for the test, then you basically measure how long ago it was when I was revising the material last time (if it was last week I get much better result then if it was month and half ago) and you have even more random in terms of whether my learning coincided with I focused on what would count as "exploitation" of this test or different test. For example, was you focusing on speed during easy exercises or ability to solve hard problems last three weeks? It is pretty much random choice and preparation lets you get back to other mode relatively fast - while without it you get worst results with kids who accidentally did wrong thing and it has nothing to do with understanding of material, just a random chance.
Motivation to actually prepare yourself removes that random.
The exploitation of specific test, especially if you dont understand base material, gets you only so far compared to that.
>They had no weight to your grades and there was zero incentive to do well.
This doesn't seem like that bad of an idea. One of the bigger problems with tests is that they tend to become a terrible metric once people start preparing for them specifically (and test-prep can suck the oxegyn out of real education). If the students and teachers don't care about the test, it is much easier (but still difficult) to make a test that gives useful feedback to the school system. Of course, you want students to take it seriously enough while there taking it.
> This doesn't seem like that bad of an idea. One of the bigger problems with tests is that they tend to become a terrible metric once people start preparing for them specifically (and test-prep can suck the oxegyn out of real education). If the students and teachers don't care about the test, it is much easier (but still difficult) to make a test that gives useful feedback to the school system. Of course, you want students to take it seriously enough while there taking it.
I remember when I was a senior in college, my professor asked me to take a test one day. She said it had nothing to do with my grades and it was to compare the outcome of our college's program with other colleges (BS Math). I still gave it my best shot even though I don't remember if I got to see the result.
I don't like how you need so many licenses to be a teacher. Most college lecturers do not have a background in education and definitely don't have a license and we do just fine. The licenses just feel like a way to limit supply.
>I don't like how you need so many licenses to be a teacher. Most college lecturers do not have a background in education and definitely don't have a license and we do just fine. The licenses just feel like a way to limit supply.
Teaching adults who pay for the privilege of being in your class is VERY VERY different from teaching children who are forced to be in your class.
The latter requires a very special skill set that can only be described as 'managing psychopaths'.
The former just requires you to show up and tell them they're on "responsible for the material" (i.e. they're on their own).
> The latter requires a very special skill set that can only be described as 'managing psychopaths'.
And without exception, every teacher I've ever spoken with (including several in my family) has told me that this skill is something you have to learn on the job. All of them, regardless of what route they took to become a teacher, were unprepared for managing classroom discipline.
And it took all of them a year or two to learn how to manage classrooms (some teachers never learn this skill).
I strongly agree that the licensing is just a way to limit supply. I'm not against unions per se, but in this matter, the teacher's union is a serious impediment to educational achievement in this country. It should be much easier to hire and fire teachers in this country. And teachers should be much better paid.
Babysitters generally don't need to manage more 15 children all at once (none of which are related or have known each other for a very long time), in a setting that is not their home, for longer periods of time than they are with their families, for the purpose of education and not play.
There are transferrable skills, but they're transferrable in the way that making buildings out of LEGO is transferrable to building actual buildings. There are large differences and a whole host of other challenges.
[I'm not a teacher, but I have a few friends that are teachers or training to be teachers.]
> Babysitters generally don't need to manage more 15 children all at once
Sorry for going off-topic but I come from a small school and I don't understand how it is acceptable for class size to be huge (40+ students in a class is considered acceptable). I mean I get it if the class is led by someone extraordinary like Richard Feynman and everyone wants to be in his lectures but as others have said most teachers are not celebrities.
Plus, I don't think just because someone went through the motions of getting a license thirty years ago and all the certification conferences means that they are decent teachers today.
It boils down to lack of funding and lack of teachers. Lack of new teachers -- as well as absolutely insanely strong unions -- are also some of the reasons why teachers effectively have tenure at schools. In Australia, teachers can be moved around schools (in a given state) as well, which is even more flexible than just tenure at a university.
> It boils down to lack of funding and lack of teachers. Lack of new teachers -- as well as absolutely insanely strong unions -- are also some of the reasons why teachers effectively have tenure at schools. In Australia, teachers can be moved around schools (in a given state) as well, which is even more flexible than just tenure at a university.
So basically we have no friends. The unions are not our friends obviously but the people who want to break teacher unions are also not our friends because they want to profit at our expense.
There's nothing insidious about unions protecting workers that are members -- that's explicitly their whole purpose. More fields should adopt strong unions.
The problem is that education reform is an common empty promise in politics. Education is underfunded in most countries, and better funding (and then more education for teachers) would be very helpful.
That's the ideal. Except that in the status quo, only the good teachers need to get the kids that don't want to DO anything to DO anything, and the practical consequences for failing to motivate the slackers are nil.
Otherwise, there are two basic possibilities depending on the kid's parents. Either the kid is expected to try and DO something (and does), or the parent only expects child care. In the latter case, avoiding willful destruction and interruption is all that is required … tada, babysitting!
The manager analogy doesn't make sense because managers are much more directly accountable for whether the employees achieve anything for the company while clocking in. If managers' mostly subjective assessments were the only tangible output of employee time and other impacts were felt years later and weren't directly ascribable to an individual manager, then maybe the analogy would work.
Are you certain that most college lecturers do just fine? I have heard multiple complaints from students at California public colleges about lecturers who could barely speak English.
That complaint has been around as long as there have been lazy students. When lazy students find themselves in a class taught by a foreigner with a thick accent, they almost invariably blame the accent (barely speaks English) for their own failures, which, as often as not, probably have more to do with students' own laziness.
Not exactly. When a test becomes study-able, it becomes a good metric for how hard people try and how much time/effort people put into their studies/career. And that is arguably what people making tests were trying to or would want to measure.
I agree, it always seemed to me that most of us didn't want people to think we're stupid. It seems sad that you have to worry that a kid will just fill in whatever so they can go to lunch. That seems like a self-esteem or discipline problem, not a fault of test taking.
For all the complaining, I'm curious what a better solution would be for finding out how much kids are learning.
Please forgive what might be construed as quibbling, but I'm increasingly dismayed by the doxa that poor scores on tests reflect poor testing practices.
To be clear, testing practices in the U.S. are crappy, but so is the secondary education system in general (at least, compared to much of Western Europe).
More to the point: these results point to a problem either with the test or with the educational system, or with the cultural values surrounding education in the U.S.
My bet, having lived on both continents, is on the latter. I invite the reader to read Assimov's 1980 essay A Cult of Ignorance, as it provides a good description of what I believe to be the fundamental problem.
You're misunderstanding the entire point of my post. I'm not talking about the scores being bad, I'm talking about the scores miraculously shifting downward for every state that uses that test in the last year.
At least they haven't gone down the UK route where kids a rigidly prepared for the multiple tests and GCSE /A levels.
There was a recent scandal where half way through A levels (final two years of high Scholl) if you where not predicted to get a B you got kicked out to protect the schools ranking.
Easy solution: make the tests count for a significant chunk of the students' grades. Or at certain years, require a passing grade on the standardized tests to be promoted to the next grade.
First you have to make the case that it's actually a problem. Test scores didn't go up. So what? Is it actually a problem if the scores just stay the same? I mean, they can only get so high before you have to start screwing with the test to get different results. Why not just accept that the same scores year-over-year mean we're pretty much doing fine?
If we're going to have an enforced one-size fits all national curriculum, we can do better than the one we reverse engineer from some stupid standardized test.
Yes, boil the entire year down to one or two tests which have been shown to be a poor indicator of knowledge and performance. We'll just start holding back 25% of students. What could go wrong?
The numbers are half a percentage-point different from 2016 — down in English and up in math.
Scores didn't really do down, they stayed the same. Why would one expect them to go up? Kids didn't get magically smarter, schools didn't change. It's more suspicious that the schools got better every year under the previous test.
So what's your recommended alternative metric? I don't doubt there is a good case to improve certain standardized tests, but that doesn't mean there isn't a valuable correlation even in a flawed one, nor that it's better to keep moving the goal posts into more subjective territory to explain away bad outcomes.
They're mentioned in the article. Graduation rates, college acceptance, stuff like that. Some of the countries with the best education systems in the world don't have these kinds of standardized tests.
Also, nobody's suggesting moving the goal posts to explain away bad outcomes. If every school suddenly loses three points on average from one year to another on what is supposed to be the same test, the only common variable there is the test itself. The test HAS to be different from year to year in order not to repeat questions, but it HAS to remain a comparable difficulty.
Graduation rate strikes me as a dangerous metric because it could easily be maximized by lowering the bar. We want to graduate as many students as possible but we should not compromise quality to do so. It seems to me we need metrics on both.
I do admit to not knowing what I am talking about so maybe there is no danger in using the graduation rate metric.
Well the best metric is going to be something like annual pre-tax income a decade after graduation but that will never happen so we'll just need to figure out some kind of composite metric that avoids perverse incentives.
edit: This is not an entirely serious suggestion. See later comment below.
Should income really be the final metric? What about less tangible (measurable?) factors like happiness? If we program all of our students to maximize income do we really make the world a better place?
It's not a metric for the students though, it's for the school. If you average it among all students, you get a reasonable metric for the how the school is doing. Of course, this would likely fail if you applied it to arts schools...
Anyway, it wasn't a completely serious suggestion. It's got some problems. Happiness is a good thing to measure, but you'd want to still do some long term tracking of other metrics. Incarceration rates, income, college graduation rates, higher degrees and certifications, etc.
edit: I make the comment about arts schools having received a degree in film and taken a haphazard path into startups and programming that ultimately worked out pretty well. I absolutely encourage people to go to school for the arts if that's what you want to be doing.
> What about less tangible (measurable?) factors like happiness?
A primary goal of school is making kids smarter and ultimately a functioning adult. Including being employable.
I don't think "happiness" is the job of an educator. The parents, absolutely. The local government? Maybe.
But if "good citizen" is a desired goal, we might be able to measure that. With surveys of alumni about current events, employment rates, financial principles, etc. To measure whether well-equipped, life-long learners are produced.
But I'd rather schools stay out of holistic goals better reserved for families.
Ignoring all that the timeline for that is so long it's not really useful for evaluating any changes because it'll be 10+ years before you have any new data, depending on where the change happens. On top of that it's so broad that it can only really measure the whole system from elementary up through college/trade-schools so even once you get data you can only really evaluate the system as a whole.
Graduation rates and college acceptance were tinkered with in New York to dismal results. Educational administrators were perversely incentivized, and it has showed up in atrociously high failure of local students to test out of remedial courses in public colleges.
Just because the test mean drops does not mean the test is flawed. The educational inputs could simply have worsened, which is exactly what a reliable indicator should show.
Do you have a metric that doesn't require waiting until students are leaving high school to return results? Some of these scores are for primary school students. It's not very useful to their teachers to be told 5-10 years after they teach a student that the improvements in instruction they attempted had or failed to have an effect.
The existing test is privately developed, opaque, and the responsible policy makers in the states using it, including California, can't get information on the validation from the maker. And, regardless of previous trends, which varied, every state using it saw a drop in 2017. This is all mentioned in the article.
Either there was a common national effect that dropped real outcomes, all states using the test independently made simultaneously missteps that dropped real outcomes, or the 2017 test was changed in some way which produced the downward movement.
If it weren't for the opacity, it would be easy to eliminate the last possibility.
AFAIK, good test scores correlate well with college success, but don't say much about quality of life beyond that. There might not be a good metric. For a lot of people, one or two great teachers have more of an impact than anything that can be tested for.
"Standardized testing isn't a particularly good way to gauge schools' ability"
Maybe not the best, but it's still a measure, however crude, and that it's going down is a legitimate cause for concern.
It's not magic - basic reading and math comprehension, are probably fairly strongly correlated with all sorts of life outcomes, though as you point out maybe not as direct as we would like to think - it still matters.
As messed up and politicized as the teaching industry may be - at the core level, again, it's not rocket science: decent teachers, students who are somewhat motivated and want to learn, a classroom with a blackboard and some books etc. etc..
One thing I'm getting at here is that even if we discount things like demographic shifts, there is the factor that the kids are one year older and are getting the harder tests. The new grade 3 kids being tested are last year's grade 2; the 4's are last years 3rd graders and so on. If you don't teach the kids anything all year, push them onto the next grade and then test them at the next level, they will do worse. Based on this idea, a year-over-year performance should be able to detect a real, instantaneous problem.
When are we going to come out and admit that our schools are not providing our society with what it needs or wants?
For a large chunk of HN, schools served us relatively well.
But for a huge chunk of the US, school is just a waste of time. At best, it's free childcare for parents. Preparing everyone to college is overkill (n.b. having a way for everyone who wants to go to college an affordable way to go to a good school is +++++EV... totally different issues).
Mandatory schooling should be for fundamentals in reading, communication (speaking and writing), and math -- if you want to get cheeky, teach them disciplinary approaches to history and science by using examples that currently exist in their communities. Most people don't need literature. Most people don't need algebra (or higher). Most people don't need history (esp. as it's currently taught). Most people don't need science (again, esp. not as it is currently taught). Why are we teaching these things on people who don't care about and will not use these potential skills? The resource sink is disgusting.
We could easily educate people to a functional level by 8th grade. Then let people join the real world if they want. Let them work rather than keep them in a glorified prison. If they at some point decide they want more schooling, give them easy access cheaply. This would be much cheaper than all the wasted high school resources we have now, and many of those resources could be funneled towards people who actually want to learn at the secondary and tertiary levels, even if it's not on a classic timeline.
It's time for a rethink of education -- our current system is ridiculously bad.
I disagree with you here. I think it is a social benefit to expose everyone to a variety of disciplines. How many chemists or engineers or astronauts or authors found their calling in a classroom? I would wager there are a lot of them. Is it the only way? No, but for a lot of people it is how they find their way in life.
Giving everyone access to this kind of exploratory environment can yield huge benefits to society. Could we do a better job teaching these topics? Absolutely. Does that mean we should just give up in the name of maximizing resource efficiency? Not really, we have the resources, we just need to spend them properly.
I think it is unreasonable to expect that people will come to higher or secondary education on their own. Some will but for a lot of people they may go through life never realizing their potential because nobody challenged them and they never knew what was possible.
> I disagree with you here. I think it is a social benefit to expose everyone to a variety of disciplines. How many chemists or engineers or astronauts or authors found their calling in a classroom? I would wager there are a lot of them. Is it the only way? No, but for a lot of people it is how they find their way in life.
Interestingly, I think that we are in agreement here. Your underlying assumption is that the learner is someone who is already motivated to learn and lives in a community that values education. For these folks, sure, expose them to a wide range of ideas. In the US, that covers maybe 30% of the population. What about the other 70%?
> Giving everyone access to this kind of exploratory environment can yield huge benefits to society.
Again, I think we agree here. Access should be universal. That said, it should also be easily and cheaply accessible outside of the classic timeline (i.e., 5-18 years of age).
Note that providing access and actually having the learners learn are two completely different things. Access is fairly good right now, but learning is really low for a big chunk of the population since the available content lacks relevance for their lives. Note that I am not just talking about skill development for jobs, but also the developing universal critical thinking skills that resonate with the learners within their living contexts.
The resources used for child-care-masked-as-education could be used for post 8th grade learning for people who find themselves in a (often working) community that values things like more-than-basic knowledge of math, science, history, etc.
> I think it is unreasonable to expect that people will come to higher or secondary education on their own. Some will but for a lot of people they may go through life never realizing their potential because nobody challenged them and they never knew what was possible.
I guess my question is why do we think most people need secondary or higher (tertiary) education now. If they don't "come to it on their own", will it matter? For the most part, I don't think it will matter.
As for the "realizing potential" comment, I still think that you are still thinking in terms of people and communities that are already oriented towards higher ed. The other 70% or so go to school because they have to, and many of them will actively snub efforts to help them "realize their potential" because it will alienate them from their community.
Again, I really think that there needs to be cheap/free high quality education available to all throughout a liftetime. That said, I don't think we should force an anachronistic college-oriented curriculum down the throats of those who have no need or negative need for that type of education.
I'm advocating changing education so it works for "the other 70%". You seem to advocate just giving up on them because they can't be reached. This is our disagreement.
Your position seems to be that education should identify strengths and build on them at the exclusion of weaknesses. My position is that education should fill in gaps and make everyone more balanced. These are fundamentally different positions.
Also, made up numbers like "70% of people don't care about education" raise red flags for me.
> I'm advocating changing education so it works for "the other 70%". You seem to advocate just giving up on them because they can't be reached. This is our disagreement.
That's a fairly pedantic stance to take.
Would you still hold this belief if you talked to the students and parents and they basically said "we don't want this"?
I have asked this question to many people, and that is what they said. When asked what they do want, they said they wanted things that will get them (basically) money, power, and/or social currency (with an element of stability/consistency thrown in for each of these).
FWIW, I do not advocate giving up on anyone. That said, I don't agree with force-feeding them certain types of education because those are the types of learning that upper middle class people value. The short summary of the research in this area is that it doesn't work particularly well.
> Your position seems to be that education should identify strengths and build on them at the exclusion of weaknesses. My position is that education should fill in gaps and make everyone more balanced. These are fundamentally different positions.
Maybe at an abstract level, but I don't really see that in what I have said so far. My actual beliefs are quite the opposite -- fill the gaps. The issue is what is considered a "gap". What many educated folks call "gaps", less educated folks call "features" (e.g., creationism).
> Also, made up numbers like "70% of people don't care about education" raise red flags for me.
Meh, it's a little hand-wavy, but it's not far off from a literal perspective or from an eyeballing it perspective.
About 32% of any given cohort of high school aged people will graduate from college before they are 24. That's the source of my number. There are definitely arguments to be made around the periphery, but that's the target audience I refer to. I think the total college attending % is 50-something (stats say 66% of high school grads, but they leave out the 18% high school dropouts in their counts, so it's off by a bit), so feel free to use that if you like. I personally consider most of those folks who did not finish to be not a good fit for college from the get go (and that's totally ok for them not to be a good fit).
My overall point is that the modern high school curriculum was designed at a time when most of the folks who went to high school went to college or worked with people who did. For example, in 1900, only ~6% of the population graduated from high school, ~2% finished college, and a few more got "letters of instruction" after two years of higher ed. Basically, high school education was for the elite. Yet that curriculum oriented towards the elite is still used in practice today. Why?
I really encourage you to go to a school (probably inner city or rural) that has a very low college-attendance rate. Talk to the students. Talk to the teachers. Talk to the parents. Their perspectives are fairly valid -- they just want a good life for the students. The tricky question is what constitutes "good life" and what is the best way to get there. I personally don't think that our current system answers either question particularly well.
I'm not going to say that education is great as it is, but the worst attitude you can come across from a student or a person in general is the question "When am I ever going to need this?"
The most important point of school isn't accumulating facts or skills but teaching students _how to think_. How to reason, how to solve problems, the absorption of a diversity of ideas and topics. To expose everyone to the knowledge, and skills to be free in society. It isn't a trade skill to teach them precisely and only the things they will need for a specific job.
The thing they teach wrong very early to very many people is that learning is labor, and the key to success is following rules from an authority.
Back to the main point I'm trying to make is that school is about teaching children how to think. You don't achieve this by sending them to a seminar about thinking, you do this by exposing them to history, art, literature, mathematics, and all the rest. You learn how to think sideways by being exposed to knowledge and challenged to remember and analyze and master many different subjects in many different ways. It's been pushing increasingly more and more towards achieving certificates, honors, and test scores, and these things are poisonous to actual quality learning and as an effect quality life.
Just like in technology, optimizing for a poor metric makes you worse off than if you did nothing... and what YOU want to do is optimize for an even worse metric, myopic utility.
> The most important point of school isn't accumulating facts or skills but teaching students _how to think_. How to reason, how to solve problems, the absorption of a diversity of ideas and topics.
This is a rationalization. The real reason people learn literature, algebra and so on is a mixture of practical application and historical accident.
If the reason they teach algebra really were to teach "how to reason" they would teach actual mathematical logic. That's what they teach Computer Science students who actually need to know how to reason to do their jobs.
If the reason they teach literature really were to teach "how to think" they would teach how to properly read non-fiction books, not just fiction. If they really wanted to teach "critical thinking" they would teach actual rhetoric.
We can't expect to just teach kids a bunch of arbitrary useless things and expect that, as a pure side effect, they will end up learning what we want them to learn.
I would like to provide a counterpoint. I had absolutely no interest in Digital Arts until my high school forced me to take it. Now I do digital arts on the side. So, yeah, school can open new doors to career paths that you never thought of.
First let me say that if you read between the likes of my original post and some of my follow up posts, you will see that you and I agree on the idea of teaching people how to think (I call this disciplinary approaches to learning). The issues is the path. As such....
> but the worst attitude you can come across from a student or a person in general is the question "When am I ever going to need this?"
If you can't answer this question convincingly, you will get low learner engagement and virually no learning. It's not an attitude, it's a reality for many parents and educators.
> The most important point of school isn't accumulating facts or skills but teaching students _how to think_.
Actually, I largely agree with this.
> How to reason, how to solve problems, the absorption of a diversity of ideas and topics.
This is largely deferred to the community's beliefs on these topics. Most people actively avoid seeking out diverse viewpoints.
> [you go on to say a lot of things that are relevant for people who exist in educated communities]
I agree that these things are great for people who exist in educated communities. For most communities, challenging the standard ideas is a good way to get ostracized from that community.
> and what YOU want to do is optimize for an even worse metric, myopic utility.
Hmmm... I think you're putting words into my mouth here.
First, we largely fail at fundamentals of literacy and numeracy in the US for large swathes of the population. You might call this "myopic utility", but I call it mastering the fundamentals.
Second, I totally agree that we need to teach people how to think (i.e., disciplinary approaches to learning), but the question is in what context. Right now, we largely do not tailor education to the learners' contexts -- I think this would be a move in the right direction, but standardized tests get in the way. We currently teach people what to think (e.g., evolution over creationism, this art versus that art, this interpretation of history versus that interpretation of history, etc.), and this just doesn't go over well with people who don't already believe it.
We also try to force the high-brow canon of art and literature down people's throats, while at the same time denigrating contemporary forms of art (e.g., the small-minded English lit teacher saying that rap isn't poetry/art/music -- it happens).
Third, you seem to believe that utility in education is a bad thing. Why is that? I mean, it's great if a learner is open to being exposed to new and challenging ideas, but that does not describe most learners. That said, teaching utilitarian skills like literacy, numeracy, and communication have a high value for both the learner and society. Add fundamental ways of thinking about science, history, and art through the exploration of one's environment makes that person a massive winner in my book -- we just don't get there with many people these days.
Check out Robert Kegan's model of adult development The Evolving Self -- his Wikipedia page has a decent summary. Most people are in the imperial or interpersonal stage, while few are in the institutional or interindividual stages (fwiw, I like Loevinger's labels better). This is especially true when people are younger. Thinking about learners and learner contexts in terms of these stages presents some interesting perspectives/challenges.
I agree with the general sentiment that education needs to be overhauled but I feel that you undervalue literature and history. Hopefully someone comes along that is more qualified than I am to speak about this.
There must be better ways to teach algebra and higher math, science, history, literature, etc. But to say they are useless is bonkers to me. Especially at a time where menial jobs are at great risk due to outsourcing and automation. The solution has to be more and better education, not less. I don't know how you expect people who know basic math, reading, and writing to succeed.
> Especially at a time where menial jobs are at great risk due to outsourcing and automation.
This is what is so frustrating to me. Tons of people on this site say "more people should be going to college because the lower class is getting screwed," but fail to acknowledge that an enormous chunk of the population is mentally unable to obtain a degree, and that higher degree attainment rates doesn't help the issue because it devalues the degree and makes it where young people basically must get a degree to get a good job, forcing an entire generation into massive amounts of debt before even starting their career.
Instead of expecting the half of the population with IQs lower than 100 to suddenly get an advanced degree and move to a large city, we need to do something about the negative effects that globalization and capital concentration have had on our nation. We need to make it so that quality of life for our lower class goes up as time goes on, not down.
Right. These people are getting hammered. We have to find a way to let them be productive at something that isn't simple enough to be done by machines or laborers in developing countries. College is not feasible for them, but neither is neutered education.
> but I feel that you undervalue literature and history
Fair enough. I said folks don't "need" history and lit, but I probably should have said that they don't want them or care about them as they are currently taught.
As I mentioned, I think the history should be primarily local, and primarily focused on learning how to think and learn about history rather than just memorizing a bunch of facts.
I think literature should be salient to the audience rather than the (relatively) high-brow art that is the current canon. That would mean that "poetry" would probably look at more contemporary music lyrics (e.g., rap, country, rock, etc.). "Drama" would look at whatever TV series are popular rather than Shakespeare. This is the kind of stuff that people who are usually not interested in education would be very much engaged with.
Even something as off the wall as Judge Judy could be used to teach some basic law/civics.
> There must be better ways to teach algebra and higher math, science, history, literature, etc. But to say they are useless is bonkers to me.
They are useless as currently taught because most of the learners and their communities completely do not care about them -- the content is completely disconnected from many learners' day-to-day existence. Not only that, but for many learners who do show some interest in these topics, they will likely be ostracized.
As such, teaching these subjects better within the current paradigm (i.e., oriented towards college prep) is a bridge to nowhere.
None of these subjects will be highly engaged with by a learner until that learner's peers think that these subjects are important. At that point, learning can and will happen. Sadly, most people are not in a proper/efficient education setting at that point.
Feel free to follow up -- this topic needs to be discussed more by intelligent people. Your reply brought up several great points.
A problem, but not the core of it all. People have been compromising, and adjusting positions based on expert opinion, for quite awhile. I just wanted to raise the issue about the livelihood of the lower economic class.
> Especially at a time where menial jobs are at great risk due to outsourcing and automation.
Much of our post-automation world will largely consist of what might be called "menial" jobs.
Specifically, our economy will evolve such that things that are uniquely human will be where the jobs are. Specifically, jobs that require creativity, communication, and/or trust-building that is relatively easy for humans to do and relatively difficult for machines to do. In fact, I suggest that some of the best jobs today fall into this category -- entertainer, high-end sales (this includes professions like finance, accounting, lawyering, etc.), artisan, merchant, etc.
In the future, there may be way more mundane jobs along the lines of Walmart greeter, but those will be where the value-add is, imho. Note that this human element largely does not require knowledge of biology, Shakespeare, etc.
Basic, decent, somewhat cross-discipline education is the cornerstone of civilization.
Yes - it's to some extent daycare, yes, maybe too much focus on 'University for Everyone', yes, maybe too much focus on standardized education ...
But getting everyone reasonably literate and 'through high school' - is probably the #1 thing any nation could do to improve the standard of living in their citizenry.
> Basic, decent, somewhat cross-discipline education is the cornerstone of civilization.
Totally agree. This can be done by 8th grade. In fact, it was mostly done by 8th grade in the US until about 100 years ago.
> But getting everyone reasonably literate and 'through high school' - is probably the #1 thing any nation could do to improve the standard of living in their citizenry.
You say this based on what?
In every high school I have interacted with (usu. as an observer or researcher), high school is largely a holding pen for those who are not college bound (and even for many who are). There is very little education happening in the classroom since the content is largely decoupled from the learners' day-to-day existences (both present and perceived future).
The course content is largely college prep or reheated versions of middle school curricula. The main focus is usually on some sort of preparation for a test (of questionable validity) that the school will be judged on.
As I have mentioned before, schools (esp. high schools) serve most HN folks and their communities to a more or less acceptable standard. The other 70% of the (US) folks... I really don't think so.
Skilled building trades like carpentry require at least basic algebra and geometry. Failure to teach science effectively leads to ignorant voters who believe that anthropogenic global climate change and evolution through natural selection are lies.
> Skilled building trades like carpentry require at least basic algebra and geometry.
Great. Have that be part of carpentry training. Again, this type of training should be cheap/free and of high quality. I imagine a class of carpenters in training would be an incredible class to teach.
> Failure to teach science effectively leads to ignorant voters who believe that anthropogenic global climate change and evolution through natural selection are lies.
I guess your wiggle word there is "effectively".
Note that there are plenty of highly educated people who are ignorant voters, climate change deniers, and creationists. People seem to think that more and/or better education will change this -- it largely won't.
What matters for most people is what their community (esp. family) believes. The escape velocity required to break from those community beliefs is extremely high and generally involves the learner leaving that community to join another. This is a human condition and is not likely to change.
I personally think the best we can do is teach disciplinary approaches to topics such as science to everyone, and let them come to heir own conclusions. As a simple example, if a community of creationists are ever going to change, that change will come from within. Change will not come from consistent brow beatings from high-browed outsiders.
- The politicians you refer to tend to be very well educated. It's not a lack of science and history classes that formed their opinions on these matters.
- Some of the most racist and global warming denying people I know come from STEM backgrounds (mostly the TEMs, less the Ss, but still...). Smart people are just as capable (if not more so) than less smart people at experiencing cognitive dissonance/compartmentalization.
- Disciplinary approaches to science, history, and lit definitely need to be taught. They can be taught (and should be taught) in K-8. The classes in high school are largely college prep and often have little or no focus on the fundamentals of the discipline -- in fact, they often kill the passion of those who entered with passion due to this lack of disciplinary focus.
- We need WAY more education on critical thinking about politics. I think that the current levels of ignorance even among educated folks is a threat to our democracy.
Agreed, but it's a bipartisan habit to invoke the word "science" when you're in effect trying to call your opponents stupid. And it's a bipartisan habit to crush your opponents arguments under the weight of "history". As in "standing in the way of progress" or invoking historical bogeymen to end arguments (as opposed to making valid points).
All of the above are fallacious yet effective. Of course, good science and history classes would help explain those fallacies.
Point being, we need to be careful that we're not just indoctrinating people into our particular bad habits.
One of the reasons - probably one of the biggest reasons - for continuously lower test scores in America is the quality of the care these children receive.
Over 40% of children in the US are born to unwed mothers, compared to 5% at the beginning of last century. About 70% of unwed childbirth is by black mothers, versus just 24% in 1965. The last two peaks of teenage pregnancy were 1991 and 2007 -
so the children of teens have more children, whom are now 10 years old, with 26yr old parents, and whose grandparents are about 42yrs, with great grandparents about 70 years old.
The financial and social strain on such families is intense. It's also difficult to be the best parent you can be when you yourself are still not an adult. And it virtually guarantees poverty for these children. There is almost no reasonable assistance given to the families of these children - assistance like food, shelter, access to education, daycare, transportation.
Kids are getting left behind not by their school system, but a social system that has ignored them as part of a lower class of society that we'd rather starve and struggle than give assistance to.
If you don't believe this, go into a [public] school in Philly, Baltimore, New York, and ask about the grade level of reading comprehension of the kids, what their family life is like, and their economic status. You will see a trend in all three: "poor."
> There is almost no reasonable assistance given to the families of these children - assistance like food, shelter, access to education, daycare, transportation.
Yes, there is. You are arguing for more welfare, but welfare caused the problem in the first place:
Not too say that the website doesn't have anything useful to say, but is has some very extreme views like , "Muslim efforts to advance the hegemony of Islamic law in the United States by introducing it stealthily and incrementally into American society"
The website in question is produced by a conservative thinktank led by David Horowitz, who amongst other things, leads a blog called "Jihad Watch". As with most politically-aligned think tanks, the content is designed to convince someone of a particular argument or issue - in this case that "the left" is responsible for the systemic disenfranchisement of African Americans through welfare, rather than say, systemic racism and the gutting of real social welfare by conservatives.
Sorry, but this article is politically biased crap.
The assertion of the article that black women had more babies because they could afford to due to welfare is as laughable as it is insulting.
You know how much food assistance families get today? $1.50 per person per meal - when they get food assistance, as there's a variety of factors that prevent getting food assistance. As many as 12.3% of American households are food insecure. Food assistance programs are almost criminally underfunded when you consider the long term costs they have on the youth of the nation and the subsequent impact on the rest of society.
There has been a precipitous decline in "shotgun marriages" over the past 40 years as stigmas about unwed mothers changed, women became more sexually liberated, and men felt less need to raise their offspring. Combine this with a lack of jobs, a lack of access to contraceptives and basic sexual health information, a drug war, and institutionalized racism in housing, transportation, education, the judicial system, etc and you build up impoverished communities where unwed pregnancy is significantly more likely. Welfare did not create the oppression of African Americans, and certainly did not encourage unwed pregnancy in African Americans more than anyone else welfare is applied to.
Another common trope of this subject: "Just as welfare policies discourage marriage and the formation of stable families, they also discourage the development of a healthy work ethic". But many food assistance programs actually _require you to work_ or you get almost no food assistance - which again, exacerbates these problems, as if you could work, you wouldn't need as much food assistance, and many impoverished black communities don't have enough access to jobs.
Yet another ill-advised argument they propose is that some couples stay together and unwed in order to siphon benefits from the government. This is again, ridiculous, as marriage is not a detriment to food assistance. Dozens of states have social welfare programs dedicated solely for two-parent families, and many have programs incentivizing marriage.
We have far more unwed mothers, and they need more assistance than wed mothers, hence they receive more benefits. This is a sticking point for many conservatives because they use this as an example of how the "family unit" is being "attacked", with single parents receiving more benefits than married ones. But it only makes sense, as the single parent has less financial and organizational help in raising a child.
A huge percentage of welfare is dedicated to programs encouraging people to get married, and be abstinent. Who put these provisions in place? Conservatives, concerned about the lack of focus on the family unit. Google around and you will find thousands of websites talking about the "attack on marriage" that welfare has seemingly caused.
I think an excerpt like this sums it up well (from "Blame Welfare, Ignore Poverty and Inequality" (2006)):
The [1996 welfare reform] legislation asserts that public assistance (i.e.
welfare dependency), not poverty, reinforces personal moral failures, which
causes social pathologies. In other words, the consequence has become the cause.
Moreover, there is a subtext underlying the "family values" agenda. It is the
moral condemnation of alternaitve family structures and particularly the
degradation of poor single mothers of color.
"Family values" reinforce the racially motivated stereotypes of "poor ghettos",
which are supposedly charcterized by promiscuity, irresponsible parenthood, an
"epidemic" of teen pregnancies and debilitating welfare dependency. In fact,
poverty, unemployment, low wages, and lack of human and social capital are the
major causes of single parenthood and marital instability, teen pregnancy, and
stunted child development.
I see the same things you are describing in my city.
Are there other countries with high numbers of kids born to unwed, poor mothers that have been successful in educating those kids and getting them out of poverty though? What works?
It seems like we have a cultural challenge with poor families to surmount before we can get a meaningful return on investment by increasing social programs for them.
It obviously varies by country/region, but not all countries with high rates of unwed parents have the same rates of poverty and poor education. Access to jobs, transportation, lack of institutionalized racism, increased social services, and other factors vary the results. For example, in Europe the rates of unwed parents range from 18% to 55% by country. I think the solutions to problems faced by these parents in adequately raising their children will have to vary based on the impediments they face and the reasons for them.
Then you'd have to convince conservatives to pay for birth control. It's a double whammy: increased taxes, and giving women agency over their bodies. They hate the idea. (Also it would be tantamount to eugenics, which is pretty much not something anyone would or should want to get political traction on, except maybe from the Alt Right)
> But persistently low achievement rates of African-American, Latino, poor, English-learner and disabled students, who together make up a majority of the state’s public-school students, fuel criticism of the educational status quo.
Perhaps repealing the English only teaching requirement via prop 58 last year had something to do with harming English proficiency in underserved populations. Prop 227, which established the English only requirement (parents could opt out) seemed successful.
> "Hispanic test scores on a range of subjects have risen since Proposition 227 became law."
>Perhaps repealing the English only teaching requirement via prop 58 last year had something to do with harming English proficiency in underserved populations.
It wouldn't have affected any of these test scores. Prop 58 was approved Nov 2016 and took effect July 2017[1], whereas the 2017 tests cited in this article were taken 2/3 of the way into the school year[2], which puts it in Spring for a normal school year schedule and months before Prop 58 ever took effect. Any effects of Prop 58 on testing scores won't be seen until this school year when students take the tests in early 2018.
It has everything to do with home life and environment. No classroom within the expected margins of quality can overcome a negative home life that does not value education and encourage student achievement.
Wealth and cultural/familial values are the major culprits.
While I agree that this is a problem (i.e., one of suspect measurement), I don't think that it's the major problem. Tests that measure stuff that a not insignificant portion of the test taking population consider either irrelevant or (worse) antithetical to their lives are going to yield wonky results. The administrators claim to be measuring school or teacher effectiveness, while I would suggest that they are basically measuring SES.
Said another way, if you give tests that ask people about stuff that neither they nor most of the people they know care about, you shouldn't be surprised by bad and/or inconsistent results.
Lack of wealth and lack of cultural/familial values more so than their overwhelming presence - though some might argue against the cultural part. When will American culture praise and reward academic acheivement in the way that some other cultures do?
I would argue that cultural influences do play a major role. Asian Americans on average make nearly $20k/yr more than whites. Almost 20% of billionaires are Jewish[1]. Those kinds of discrepancies don't come from nowhere, and absolutely show that upbringing and culture have a massive effect on future growth and goal attainment.
Now look at popular US culture nowadays. People are told they can be whatever they want to be, and losers are given participation trophies. Comfort and inclusion is seen as more important than competition and self-control. Our culture is changing massively, and it's showing in our test scores.
Education is typically very important in a Jewish household, STEM, medicine, law, and business are likewise very respected, along with musical talent. I’m Jewish, and I’d say the cultural norm ranged from supportive of the things I mentioned, to extremely demanding of them. I’ve noticed similar patterns from childhood well into adulthood in my Asian friends, whether they’re Indian, Japanese, Chinese or Korean.
Drive matters. A family with expectations, and generations of educational aspirations matter, if you’re trying to excel.
I feel like the cultures that "praise and reward academic acheivement" are mostly the same cultures that value the concept of castes/genetic nobility (i.e. the idea that you can come from a "smart family", and the automatic association of a "noble" birth with inborn intelligence.)
America, in trying to promote the idea that anyone can become anything, has quite thoroughly quashed the idea that it is of any benefit to come from a "cultured" background; and, thereby, has devalued the concept of acquiring a Liberal Arts education as a necessary stepping stone in dynasty-building.
There are probably benefits to this, but there are also obvious drawbacks.
Treating learning as a process of moving information into children’s minds and then checking it’s quality via tests is an old, inefficient and misaligned with what we know about learning.
It is a broken approach which makes sense in the context of training factory workers while providing childcare for their worker parents. Works so-so for the bean counters at the tremendous cost of crushing ebmveryone else.
It is abysmal in the face of the pace at which the workforce moves and doesn’t even come close to what today’s kids actually need.
But seriously, you shouldn't be allowed to announce a trend without giving some measure of historical volatility. Show me that this "flatline" is actually a major deviation from expected results (based on historical data).
Even a chart would demonstrate this visually. This is clearly just axe-grinding.
The kids go to school to get homework from professionals trained in the art of teaching then the unqualified parent is the one that has to help the child do these homeworks. Now what is recommended is to sign up for the after school program where for a fee someone can help them with their homework.
How about they teach and do the work during school hours?
A large portion of students do not get parental help with homework. Their parents aren't around, or don't actively participate in their lives. And that certainly means they won't pay for after school tutoring. Those are the kids most in need of systemic reform, not those who have parents that value education, where their only problem is just the schools themselves sucking. They will almost always succeed as long as their parents support them (and given enough income more likely than not move them into charter school or some other option).
Most students have the combined genetic material of their parents. Genetics are a key influence on aptitude.
To be transparent, I personally benefited from public schools, and my parents were not wealthy (but they were graduates of public colleges).
I'm not arguing that only wealthy people should have access to quality education. I'm just saying that it's a weak argument to point out that success in school is linked with wealth.
>I'm just saying that it's a weak argument to point out that success in school is linked with wealth.
Would you like to say that the Earth is flat, disease is caused by an imbalance of humors, and Adam and Eve tamed dinosaurs for use in ancient rodeos while you're at it?
Because those would have more chance of being correct than what you're saying. Socioeconomic security correlates more strongly to educational outcomes than ANY other variable, including IQ.
This seems like kind of a low effort comment. Are you disputing any of these claims:
* IQ or other measures of aptitude contribute to success in school
* IQ/aptitude are heritable
* IQ/aptitude contribute to success in life
Because those all seem sort of reasonable to me, and would explain the top comment of "wealth is the largest predictor of educational attainment", without some sort of nefarious inequality good school / bad school thing going on. I think that's what GP was getting at.
I think you're arguing about magnitude of effect? That, while that's true, socioeconomic status effects educational attainment far more than natural aptitude? That also seems plausible to me, although not guaranteed to be correct. Do you have any sources on the relative effects of each contribution? I'd be curious to see.
SES and IQ are not orthogonal. In the limited studies we have, SES interventions generate durable IQ gains, gains substantially larger than the supposed gap between races. The grandparent comment is "not even wrong".
Oh, really? That's awesome. I was under the impression this wasn't possible. Do you have any resources on what the interventions were? I'm interested from a selfish parental perspective...
I read the Vox piece, and I don't find it logical. Do you think a fair summary is "nature has a larger impact on IQ than nurture?"
Note the article does concede that genetics impact IQ.
Somewhat related: I find it amusing when parents talk at length about how similar their children are to themselves and to past relatives -- and then pivot to essentially argue that every individual has equal capabilities.
I see irony when people make these simultaneous claims:
1. This test has deep bias and flaws because it shows a difference in groups
2. I know this is true because of the results of this other test that shows equality.
The comment is not "not even wrong". In fact you are not even really disagreeing.
People with high SES have children with high IQ, then those children's children also have high SES and IQ. Does it really matter if the high IQ was because of inherited genes vs inherited wealth? You both already believe that it is hereditary.
It matters very much, because the subtext of saying that school performance is effectively hereditary is that no intervention we can come up with will improve test scores, because the problem is intrinsic to the student. That's false.
School performance is in fact hereditary, possibly because rich people go to fancy schools and their parents can afford to help them with homework and so on. A good intervention might be to improve the schools that poor people go to.
But if poor students are just intrinsically more stupid for some biological reason, a good intervention might be to improve the schools that stupid people go to.
Since it turns out the bad students are poor students, the interventions end up looking mostly the same. For example, hire more teachers to reduce class size, provide more nutritious food, or remove lead from the paint and the pipes.
Just because something is "biological" doesn't mean it is immutable. In fact, as technology advances, we might end up wishing bad school performance was due to genetics so we can fix it with gene therapy instead of complicated finicky societal interventions.
If we agree about the needed intervention but for different reasons, our debate isn't going to be very productive. I agree that schools are doing a poor job of serving black and latino students.
Forget about "perfect". In a merely better system, "success in school" would be the last thing anyone thought about. The purpose of school is not to determine how well children navigate various arbitrary obstacles to learning. The purpose is to teach them, in whatever individual fashion best helps them to learn. If that doesn't happen it is a failure of the school, not of the child.
In a "perfect" system, the idea that anything about school would correlate with wealth would be viewed with deep suspicion. We're very far from that situation.
Did school teach you to over-interpret? I don't mention playgrounds, nor the "agency" of 6yos. Do you trust your 6yo's agency next to a busy highway? No? Then why is she responsible for dealing with her teacher's poor attitude and teaching habits?
Even though that may be true, I don't think for a moment that it's the driving factor.
I think that culture is it.
And the key one is the '5 major personality trait' - 'Conscientiousness'.
Parents who are thoughtful, considerate, value education (at least in a basic way), take care of their kids well, are stable providers - create children who are much the same in life.
I don't mean 'rocket science super parents'.
Just good, basic parenting.
This is strongly culturally ingrained.
It's at the level of family, community and ethnic group.
Good behaviours, consistently applied over a lifetime, over many people's lives, produce quality outcomes and a high degree of intelligent social organization among those people.
And of course more wealth helps.
Note: it seems that 'Private Schools' don't even provide for a better education when normalized for things like wealth [1]. So even that is not a thing.
...and wealth is also correlated with marriage rates. The thread replying to you goes on about socioeconomic indicators, but a lack of parental resources could be influencing both poverty and lack of educational success.
To put it another way, if there are more single parent households this year and educational indicators didn't change, that actually sounds like a success to me.
That's not to disparage single parents. It shouldn't be controversial to say single parents on average have less time, money, and energy to review homework, go on enriching family trips, go to PTA meetings, or fight the school district when they make bad decisions. Single parents deserve a lot of respect for parenting through difficulty, but the difficulty does exist.
Finally, the growing income achievement gap does not
appear to be a result of a growing achievement gap
between children with highly and less-educated parents.
Indeed, the relationship between parental education and
children’s achievement has remained relatively stable
during the last fifty years, whereas the relationship
between income and achievement has grown sharply.
By which presumably they mean they performed a multivariate regression, which allowed them to see the impacts of parental education and of parental income in isolation.
I would really like to see results from testing that indicated progression. Since they test students in third through eighth grades and 11th grade, I think it would be more interesting to know of the students who scored in some range in 3rd grade last year, how did they do in 4th grade this year, and so on. You can sort of infer by looking at reports by grade level over time, but a lot of students don't stay at the same school, so it's hard to tell.
For students who test below proficient in one year, it's not necessarily reasonable to expect one year of schooling to enable them to test proficient in the next, even if the instruction is amazing. If the majority of the students are coming in unprepared, the overall proficiency % is going to be low, and it doesn't reflect on the quality if the school.
Holy shitballs. This flatline is barely meaningful, and the number of HN members who want to treat this as an opportunity to soapbox some tangential agenda is nuts.
We already know that there's a problem with education - there are many, many signs. US citizens being manipulated by false information, open bigotry, declining livelihoods of the lower economic class, political unrest and populism, educational metrics being substantially lower than other countries for years, etc.
Whether this particular article is meaningful doesn't matter too much imo. It raises the issue. Plenty of discussion here doesn't focus on the supposed trend.
Firstly, let's just give you the benefit of the doubt that soapboxing about cliche, populist, non-tech/non-business topics is a good use of Hacker News. It's not, but I'll pretend for the sake of this conversation.
We have something of a standard here for how statements need to be supported, and "we already know" and "there are many many signs" falls far short of those standards, and is eerily reminiscent of Donald Trump's instead.
"US citizens being manipulated by false information." How is this different from any other time in history? Are we better? Are we worse? Is it even relevant? It's nearly tautological that it has happened, but how much does it happen? Can an educational system do anything about it? Is it worth it?
"open bigotry." Ok. Welcome to the world. If this is a sign of a declining educational system, then virtually no place anywhere in the history of the world has had a good educational system.
"declining livelihoods of the lower economic class." Really? Support this. And give evidence that "a problem with education" (again, supposedly fixable problem) is at least one of the causes.
"political unrest and populism." Do I even need to at this point?
"educational metrics being substantially lower than other countries for years." Oh my god, finally something that is commonly understood enough to warrant no citation. And something that is probably commonly understood to be linked to "a problem with education." But now, what are you adding with it?
So, you've failed to even make a valid argument with four of your points by not bothering to support them, and the fifth is so commonly known and pointless to reiterate that there is no reason to include it here. So, why, in your mind, does this conversation belong here when we could be talking about all the cool, innovative, and interesting topics that HN was designed to support?
In my eyes, standardized tests are bad because they will always shine a bright light on differences between groups.
We don't like to admit it these days, but humans are not identical. We can accept some basic differences, such as skin tone. We get extremely uncomfortable extending that notion to cognitive skills. To be clear, I'm not singling out any group -- I'm not linking skin tone to cognitive skill in any way.
So, we bring in standardized tests to level the playing field. At first, those tests are deeply flawed and filled with bias, making them especially harmful.
Then, we iterate, and remove those testing flaws. And we trick ourselves into thinking that will solve the problem.
But, suppose we arrive at the perfectly fair test. Suppose the test is highly predictive of, say, success at a 4 year college.
Now, what do you do if that test habitually ranks some group lower than other groups? To me, it feels like we are right back at square one.
Personally, I would prefer to focus our energy on helping each other out. If one person, or group, is falling behind, you find a way to help, and also to integrate each group into the whole.
I know I'm oversimplifying -- I just think standardized testing is a fruitless exercise.
So, eliminate competition because it's unfair? That does not to me seem like a recipe for success on a global scale. If anything, the thing which has made the culture in the US uniquely attractive to so many people from all over the world is the fact that we revel in competition in a way most other societies do not. We love to compete, and are unabashed about keeping score.
Let's assume for a moment that we focus exclusively on helping everyone get ahead and eliminate standardized testing. What happens when people get out in the real world and get the shock they never had in school that they don't quite measure up? To prevent that would require a complete restructuring of society, it'd look wildly different. Among other things it wouldn't be possible with a capitalist economy by which the "best" products in the market are rewarded financially and competition is the basis of business.
Even if they get a greater shock when entering "the real world", they would still be better prepared for it if they were more competent coming out of school.
It's a red herring to say that we would need to further restructure society to get any benefit from helping youth better overcome the challenges of school.
I'd say that probably depends on what you expect from them. But I don't think it's unfair to say that probably more students are left behind because of teaching/learning disabilities than there are people who simply will never be able to cope with the subjects at hand (because of cognitive limitations).
> If one person, or group, is falling behind, you find a way to help.
And how do you know if a person or group is falling behind? To do this, you need some type of metric; and standardized testing is the best metric we have at scale.
They plug all of your stats into the function, and it says, "you will never be a good NBA player." With the NBA, we're comfortable saying "meh, not too many of those anyway -- moving on to high stakes poker -- never liked playing basketball anyway."
But when the metric is of something much more broad, such as "success at a 4 year college" we're not so comfortable doing that.
I just don't see what problem the standardized test actually solves.
To do this, we have set up an educational system. However, education is a difficult problem, and it is not clear what works and what does not. What we need is some way of measuring how well things work. That is the problem that standardized testing is meant to solve. There are some tests that are intended to assist in accademic discrimination (eg. we only want good students here, so you need a good SAT score to get in), but that is not the usage we are talking about when we say California's are flatlining.
Google A/B tests moving a pixel on their home page. Compiler writers performance test optimization passes. Educators want objective feedback too.
We are not talking about the SAT. This article is talking about the CAASPP, which is intended to provide feedback and ratings for the schools, not the students.
Most things in life are not measured and evaluated with a standardized test. Instead, they are measured by aggregated choice or surveys/votes. I haven't used a scantron form in many years.
We could dispense with these tests and let people vote with their feet and wallets.
> We could dispense with these tests and let people vote with their feet and wallets.
If the policy goal was short-term satisfaction rather than achieving some educational result, and we wanted to weight results by people's ability to bear the extra cost of changing schools from the one most physically convenient to their current residence, sure, that would be sensible. But as problematic as then-current testing regime may be, it's at least in principle aimed at something resembling the public policy goal public education is held out to serve, whereas your option would not be.
Does CAASPP differ in any salient way from SAT? If someone from another nation took each of them without seeing the cover sheet, could she say that the tests were different in any important way?
1. I don't see anything about the statistical significance, or the natural fluctuation of the results, i.e. the standard error. Presumably lots of students are measured, and you could argue that your standard error (proportional to 1/sqrt(N)) is tiny, but then, the questions are different every year, so you have some date-specific (not student-specific) error. In other words, just looking at previous years, how much do results vary? And is this year's flatline maybe just a result of measurement error? (In other words: Q: "Why are they flatlining?" A: No reason.)
EDIT to add: well, there is one sentence in the article:
> “not a significant change,” spokeswoman Amber Farinha wrote in an email
2. It's a
> computer adaptive test — meaning as the test progresses, questions become harder or easier depending on the student’s answers
These have problems, in my view. I had a Spanish girl friend that studied for the GRE with me. The verbal section is largely a long vocabulary test, so we studied quite a bit (from the entertaining Princeton Review Word Smart book). Now, often she would know the "complicated" word being explained, as it had Latin roots and was the same in Spanish. However, she wouldn't know the "easy" explanation. (For example, "to lament" (ah, easy, like "lamentablemente, lamentar") was explained as "to mourn" (what?), "arboreal" is "arbóreo" (well, "tree dweller" is easy, too, but you get the idea).)
Bottom line: we did several (actual old) practice exams, timed, and she would consistently score in a certain percentile range (with some variation, of course). Those were good old-fashioned paper tests, though.
However, when she did the actual (adaptive) GRE, she scored much worse than in the practice exams, several standard deviations away. (And before you blame it on nervousness due to real test conditions, note that there was a significant drop only in the verbal part, not analytic or quantitative.)
This appears to me a problem with the testing methodology: when she initially got something wrong, the CAT would give her "easier" questions, preponderantly words with Germanic roots, which she would also get wrong. The "hard" questions involving words with Latin roots, that she'd probably have gotten right, were never displayed to her.
She got into a good school anyway, so it didn't really matter. But in my view, the claim that the CAT is just as good as the longer paper based test is predicated on assuming that test subjects come from the same population. I really wonder whether speakers of Romance languages where systematically disadvantaged by the switch from paper to CAT, and whether ETS (the producer of GRE) did any systematic study on that.
(Note that it is conceivable that some Hispanophones got questions right at the beginning, and then got "harder" questions easier for them, thus getting better results than in the paper based test. If that is the case, it's conceivable that the average scores of both the Anglo- and Hispanophone group lines up with the non-adaptive and adaptive test, but Hispanophones suddenly show a much bigger variance in the adaptive test. Questions questions.)
Heads up that many charter schools are public. Rocketship (mentioned in the article) is a network of public charter schools that serves primarily low income students, and that's true of many charter schools in the state and across the country.
I'm surprised I even have to explain this here but testing for basic language proficiency is not the only thing these types of tests are for. They test elements of writing, grammar, critical analysis, and vocabulary that students are still learning.
Unfortunately, I couldn't find any easy way to get example questions - they're all locked behind a login that requires student id.
Furthermore, this isn't entirely an ESL issue - according to the article, scores for African-American students were the lowest, and they're obviously native speakers. So we would need more information to figure out the origin of this disparity.
One final point - these numbers are the percentage of students who scored above a threshold, NOT their average scores. All of the scores for every ethnic group are likely on something like a normal distribution, shifted to the right or left. Of the groups who performed below the standard, it's likely that the majority of them performed very close to the standard even if they were just below it.
>scores for African-American students were the lowest, and they're obviously native speakers.
This isn't entirely true. There is a great diversity of dialects of English. Schools test and grade students on their abilities with "standard" English.
For historical and racist reasons, African American Vernacular English is considered by many to be "stupid English", which puts many African American students at a disadvantage [0].
Setting dialectal variations aside; no one speaks standard English. In fact, "standard English" (that is, "correct" written English) contains rules that are not, and have never been, part of any dialect of English that I am aware of. For example, in standard English you cannot split infinitives, and must use commas (which aren't a "thing" in spoken English) in certain places. Further, the phonology of standard (written) English is miles away from what anyone says. This result of this is that being a native speaker of English is not sufficient for anyone to learn standard English. To do so, one must be exposed to sufficient written material; and exposure to written material tends to correlate with class.
[0] Admitidally, it is true that, as far as English dialects spoken in America go, AAVE is relativly distinctive from standard English (likely due to our history of segregation).
I wouldn't throw out accusations of racism and make the discussion inflammatory when it's not particularly relevant. You can just mention the differences.
Knowing "African American English" still puts one at a severe advantage compared to immigrants who don't know English or American children who have immigrant parents who can barely speak English. There are noticeable and helpful similarities between the AAVE and standard English.
African Americans also have cultural advantages compared to immigrants and immigrant children because their parents and family all grew up in America. Knowing and understanding American cultural references helps them learn standard English vocabulary and concepts much quicker.
> The white and Asian population is passing with a high rate. It's not the schools failing then.
If the schools are only effectively serving White and Asian students, they are failing.
If the schools are effectively doing nothing and success is determined mostly by parents educational attainment which just correlates with race, then the schools are still failing.
So, no, I think your basis for concluding that the schools are not founding is inadequate to that conclusion.
Schools can't fix parents who don't value education.
I'll mention it has nothing to do with money. Instead it's a cultural values problem.
Jews & Chinese are two groups of people that went from poor to affluent over the course of a few generations. The primary cause of this socio economic change has to do with their value of education.
If they could do it, so can the Hispanic/African Americans.
In my city there are schools that are 80% white / Asian and schools that are 80% Latino / black. There’s almost nothing in between.
To go to one of the majority-white / Asian schools you need to live in neighborhoods where the houses are easily 3x the cost of the houses in Latino /black neighborhoods. There are few if any apartments to rent. These schools routinely have fundraisers where parents are asked to donate thousands of dollars to their specific schools. Stay-again-home mothers help teachers out in the classroom. There aren’t ESL classes, just Spanish or Chinese immersion classes.
So I wouldn’t be so sure that the schools don’t make a difference.
I’m not blaming the teachers for having to work with a lack of resources. And yes, you can place the blame upstream with policies, home prices, or something else. My point is merely that you can’t look at county-wide averages and say that children of all races receive the same education, as the OP was doing.
Yes. Most of the hispanics whose families arrived in California before the English speakers arrived have long since become native English speakers. As with most second-generation or later immigrants.
Though I have heard tales of Californians being native speakers of Lisp, this is probably just a rumor.
> Most of the hispanics whose families arrived in California before the English speakers arrived have long since become native English speakers.
That's true of most Californios, sure, but they are, by far, a minority of California Hispanics, who are mostly from families that immigrated much more recently.
English is a Germanic language, with vocab borrowed from lots of other sources but mostly French, Spanish is a Romance language (with, especially in it's Latin American form) a bunch of vocabulary borrowed from Nahuatl and Quechua. They are extremely dissimilar grammatically, and though they have some overlap and similarities in vocabulary, it's nowhere close to making fluency with either making you even minimally functional (much less halfway native) in the other.
This chart shows approximate linguistic distances between most European languages. It looks pretty accurate; in my experience Dutch speakers do indeed have an easier time learning English compared to native speakers of other languages.
There are enough similarities to give them significant advantages compared to immigrants coming from other parts of the language tree. English and Spanish have thousands of cognates. Having almost exactly the same alphabet is also a huge advantage. Having already learned thousands of permutations of the same alphabet letters (words) will make memorizing and learning the next thousand permutations much easier.
> There are enough similarities to give them significant advantages compared to immigrants coming from other parts of the language tree.
Depends which other parts. Disadvantaged compared to German or Dutch speakers, and even French speakers, but, sure, advantages compared to other, say, people whose only prior language is Mandarin. And, of course, a big disadvantage compared to immigrants who already speak English, even if it's not American English.
But still very far from starting off even functional, much less halfway to native fluency.
> but, sure, advantages compared to other, say, people whose only prior language is Mandarin
I wouldn't understate the significant advantages.
> And, of course, a big disadvantage compared to immigrants who already speak English, even if it's not American English.
Not necessarily. A large percentage of children of immigrants speak with their family (nuclear and extended) mostly in their native language even if their parents can speak decent English. The English skills don't transfer much unless the parents are very active in their child's English education.
Among immigrants and their languages, Spanish is about as close to English as you can get, though. Not a lot of German/Swedish/Dutch immigration going on to California.
I'm pretty sure it is. This seems to suggest most people speak english: "Nearly 43% of California residents speak a language other than English at home, a proportion far higher than any other state."
While there is no "official" language for the United States (and thus California), it is widely considered that English is the de facto national language. It is the majority language for both the country and California.
So having difficulty with English is a really, really bad thing for these students.
Having difficultu with English is definitely really bad. Especially in California, where poor English skills can continue to thrive in immigrant populations after schooling and lead to less opportunities in general.
Wow, that's actually an element of these standardized tests I've never thought of before - that ESL folks would do a big part in shifting numbers around due to unfamiliarity with the language. Thank you.
Not only that, but also - language is more of a skill, a habit, which grows and evolves with circumstances, while math is a "study", with objects, operations, rules, processes, correctness criteria etc.
Eventually both are needed - as well as computers - but how to get there, opinions can differ widely.
HN title is editorialized inappropriately from source (and focus shifted to absolute results rather than trends and discussion of the reasons behind the trends, which include questions about the validity of the tests.) The source title is “2017 California school test scores: Why are they flatlining?”
Still, the question of "why are the schools in and around Silicon Valley doing so poorly?" is worth discussing. We [residents of supposedly the most innovative region on the planet] should be able to solve these problems, and yet we either are unable to or haven't tried very hard.
It picks numbers from four Bay Area counties, but not really the four anyone would pick if they were concerned with “in and around Silicon Valley” (particularly, Contra Costa is included but not San Francisco.)
Yes, we've fixed it now. The submitted title ("2017 California school test scores: fewer than HALF proficient in Math, English") was an egregious violation of HN's rules: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. It even put some caps in there to boot.
Submitters: you can't use HN titles to editorialize. If you want to say what you think is important about an article, you need to do so in a comment, on a level playing field with everyone else. If you break this rule repeatedly you eventually lose submission privileges, so please don't break this rule.
The title I submitted with is an abbreviated version of the title actually used in the print edition of the paper (and on the front page, page A1). The Mercury often uses alternate titles on the website, and they can even vary between regional print editions under the Bay Area News Group umbrella.
What is California's score if you get remove all the test scores of illegal immigrants. I'm sure that they drastically drop the scores.
Being an ESL student would make school significantly harder. And would also explain he low English skills. And given that most illegals are manual labor and not high skilled jobs, the kids don't have parents who can help their kids with maths.
We can do without this kind of inflammatory conjecture on Hacker News. The bar for civility and substantiveness goes up when approaching controversial issues. It's not about whichever position you take—it's about being thoughtful enough to afford a reasonable follow-up discussion.
I can assure you there are no computers in classrooms where these failing students are from. You want to improve scores? Pay for school lunches. Pay for stationery and other basic supplies. Pay teachers more.
It is ridiculous that costs of living and property values are skyrocketing across the state, but rather than more taxes going towards education there are budget cuts year after year.
(Seems that per student spending is up almost 50% over the past 5 years.)
ETA - Not to mention that (with the exception of 1 year in the past 50 years), K-12 education receives a larger portion of the CA general fund than it ever has (currently 42% of the state budget goes to K-12 education - and rising). As state tax revenues go up (as another poster suggests), K-12 education spending goes up at an even faster rate.
> According to Education Week’s annual state rankings on K-12 education spending, California was last in per-pupil when adjusted for regional cost differences in 2011. It moved up to 41st for 2013.
Sure. That was 2011, at the bottom of the recession - at which point CA's school funding was at the bottom of a dip. As the article also showed (& as you pointed out), its ranking improved dramatically in 2013. Since then, the per pupil spending has risen ~25%.
Regardless,
rather than more taxes going towards education there are budget cuts year after year.
...I just thought it important to point out that this statement is demonstrably false. Let's operate in the world of facts, not in the world of what "feels right." Only by doing that can we actually come to a solution that might work.
The wealthiest members of our society are on one hand sending their children to expensive private schools, specifically to avoid exposing them to computers in the classroom, while on the other hand lobbying for increased usage of computing in public education to support their businesses. This is a completely valid concern, and you are dismissing it without reason.
This is a completely insane assertion. Private schools have computers in the classroom more frequently to private schools. I challenge you to find any evidence of anyone choosing a private schools because there aren't computers in the classroom.
This is the most important sentence in the article. It points to a problem in the test itself - California's students didn't just get magically stupider.
Standardized testing isn't a particularly good way to gauge schools' ability to prepare students for college or for the 'real world.' Unfortunately, our K-12 public education system is broken and the politics of fixing it are even more broken, so this is what we get.