Posted by grantpitt 2 hours ago
Consider Oregon. Had it merely kept pace with inflation, it would have
increased school spending by about 35 percent from 2013 to 2023. In
actuality, it raised spending by 80 percent. Over the same period, math
and reading performance tanked, with math posting a remarkable 16-point
decline—the equivalent of 1.5 grade levels. Oregon is spending much more
and achieving much less.
My youngest child is just starting high school at the moment, and for the last several years much of math education seems to have been farmed out to really crappy software and short video clips running on chromebooks. She'd really be suffering without parental intervention.
> I think that Oregon teacher salaries have gone up quite a bit more than the national average in the last 10 years, less so in the last couple.
Yeah, Covid is at the tail end of the time period but it would be an error to make assumptions about the rates of change being constant over these periods. We've all seen that El Nino graph that is used to misrepresent climate change by careful windowing...
But the article doesn't even cherry pick the window, but they do cherry pick the interpretation. How does anyone ignore the fact that from 2013 to 2020 is fairly flat in scores[0] and then sharply decreases after that. Similarly spending sharply increases.
It is so weird to do this because the main argument still exists when you account for Covid. It's the intellectual equivalent of taking a cookie, taking a shit on it, and then selling it for more because it has more chocolate. Who the fuck does that? It's manipulative and entirely unnecessary. From 2013 to 2020 scores are relatively flat and spending increases above inflation. It's still a lazy analysis since you don't analyze what the spending went to, but it's a million times better than pretending a shit cookie is made of chocolate.
But the title is also incredibly editorialized (against the guidelines[1]), but why are commenters not picking this apart? It's such an easy flaw to notice. This article contains zero evidence of their claims. You have to explain data, not just present it and conjecture.
[0] 2020 is as far down as 2015 was up. Normal variance?
Our local school committee is debating this currently. There was a book mentioned "Ditch That Textbook" about using EdTech to reimagine curriculums. I have a hard time imagining actual high quality math education not using a textbook, and I don't really see how crappy software (and I do not for a second doubt that most ed tech is crappy - almost all software is crappy really, it's a total tragedy and a separate discussion) can possibly do better.
Personally I'd like to see fewer Chromebooks and iPads and such in classrooms and more textbooks and notebooks. I'm open to being convinced I'm just a curmudgeon, but it'll take real results in schools to do so.
For me, two things pop out in particular.
Firstly, in math, if you look at how the percentiles break down, it seems clear that while there an overall drop in performance from 2020-2023, it also seems clear to that the top end of doing relatively ok. For example, at the 75th percentile, the we are basically flat from 2008 to 2020 (before dropping in 2023) - 2008: 305, 2012: 309, 2020: 307, 2023: 301 (net -4). This contrasts with the median which went from 2008: 283, 2012: 287, 2020: 282, 2023: 274 (net -9).
This implies to me that whatever flaws are in the overall system (at least pre COVID), the top end was relatively durable.
Secondly, if you go the "student group scores" section and click through all of the different sub-groupings, the only group that looks to have an overall flat score at all is "Private: Catholic".
I think the combination of the upper end being pretty durable, as well as the higher scores in the only "self selecting" category in the dataset may support what a lot of people tend to grumble about - the distribution of domestic situations is not favorable.
Mixed results. There's whining about standard testing .. . There's whining without it too. But states brought that on themselves.
I raised two boys one a plain-joe kid, one with special needs. The older, regular kid got into and out of university in four years.
Seeing what I see now, and what I saw over those years:
- pay teachers more with commensurate increase in accountability. (You can't have only one.)
- focus on academics only. Too much resources are wasted in our American daydreaming that schools can be some kind of utopia superceding home, family. Regretably, if parents don't care, there's a tiny chance only the kid will change in school. Here i mean anything that detracts from language, math, science, arts, sports. Having different makes and models of kids at school? That's great; i like that. My kids have got to see our house isn't the only game in town.
- maybe eliminate all federal forms of funding by sending less money to the fed redistributed back later. Control and accountability has to be less complex with fewer regs from fewer places. Education is operationally local in the US and yet somehow the fed and national unions are big players too. We can't be serving two masters.
- withhold kids by class until they succeed. Kids must be held accountable too. If you can't deal with algebra I you are not doing algerbra II so you can suck at that too.
- contribute to kid's self esteem and confidence right: you're not graduating in this class, and I (as a teacher) will help you figure out a way forward by tackling what's in front of you. That's real success. That's real learning. That's better for kids.
- put principals and teachers top echelon. If they want/need admin staff, fine counter balanced by cost & success on accountability side. US schools like US medicine is phenomenal at having paper pushers suck up resources. Yah, I'm not a fan of this to put it politely.
It is clear that public schooling in the US was originally designed to build obedient citizens and efficient factory workers. Horace Mann’s love of the Prussian model, the use of bells to condition timely synchronized movement between activities, the focus on testing and measurable output, etc… All other goals over the years were half-heartedly bolted on to that structure and it’s showing its age.
I would bet 90% of the problem is the attitude towards learning at home and among the peer group, who also get their attitudes from home. Doesn’t seem effective or fair to hold teachers accountable for that.
Obviously unions aren't designed to protect students, they represent workers, however their negative impact on the quality of schooling students get is often quite significant despite being overlooked.
In Massachusetts 8th grade math is down about 17 points. In Mississippi math down about 2 points. (I'm using 2022 scores).
That could give the impression that math scores are higher in Mississippi since the math line on the Massachusetts graph is way lower than the corresponding line on the Mississippi graph.
But the actual scores those years were 284 for Massachusetts and 268 for Mississippi.
And why isn't this experimentation being done all the time, not randomly but competitively/cooperatively between school districts and individual schools? Each making small changes toward getting better results and sharing what they have learned. With most cross adoption happening naturally.
Creating and managing the context for the latter is what people with power should be doing. Not making top-down decisions devoid of the bottom-up wisdom and visible exemplars that big changes need to succeed.
Then you can't really measure outcomes, because the strongest predictor of student performance is parents interest and resources.
You also run into issues with teaching skills and standards, you need a high level of planning and adherence to the supplied plan in order to measure outcomes; otherwise it's just vibes based on individual teachers.
What happens a lot:
1) Someone (a researcher, usually) comes in and tries some radical new program in some school.
2) (sometimes) It works! It works great, in fact.
3) This new system or approach or framework gets publicized. This may include dissemination through academic channels, but also (and especially if it's really going to take off) through a kind of reform-grifting network that turns the whole thing into a bunch of stuff that can be sold, for actual money (training, materials, consultants). Turns out being an education researcher pays dick-all, but selling a "system" pays real cash dollars—for many researchers, admin, and curriculum-design folks, getting a windfall from being part of one of these is their most promising path to "making it" before they're old.
4) Some districts adopt the new thing, often with initial pilot programs. Some spend a lot of money doing it.
5) Few of them spend much time considering whether there are material differences between their schools and the one(s) where the system was proven (the experimental program was proven in a troubled inner city school? Surely our middling suburban school can expect similar improvements!). Expertise of and authority granted to the person or persons implementing the system also isn't considered as a factor (one or both are usually lacking, compared with the case or cases on which the promise of the system is judged).
(My personal "here's what to do if you want to fix schools" is "fix our justice/corrections system, worker protections, healthcare, and our social safety net". I think the biggest improvements to our schools would be found there. It's all stuff outside schools. That's why we keep struggling to make headway by monkeying around with schools themselves. It's why more money for schools doesn't help much. That the US finds it basically impossible to do anything constructive about any of those problems is... a sign we can expect not to see any huge across-the-board positive changes in US public school performance any time soon, I reckon)
Meanwhile, within and among districts, individual schools do pilot new programs, et c. All this stuff happens. Does it always happen with everything that turns into a broader reform? No, not always. Is this kind of activity constant, and common, in schools? Absolutely. Frankly it happens way too much (because people are desperate and flailing around to find a path to improvement through school reform, but see above about why I think they are doomed to remain desperate). There's an absolute shitload of process and curriculum churn in schools.
Consider also that while all the above is going on, you have the usual incompetence and principal agent problems you see in any organization. Important tasks are handed to the person an assistant superintendent's having an affair with (god, so common) for whom they invented a paid position. Systems are picked apart and bits adopted piecemeal while ones admin find too uncomfortable or scary are dropped up-front without even trying them, while anyone used to analyzing systems like this can see that the parts their dropping support and are necessary for the success of the parts they're keeping, dooming the reform before it's even implemented. Empire-building happens. Things get hijacked for personal gain. Powerful folks' own inept efforts at breaking into the reform-grift industry get pushed on those under them, as they try to get their own success story to sell. Superintendents or principals fall for obvious bullshit at one of their drinking-and-driving retreats er I mean conferences, because frankly most of them are kinda dumb, and then a whole district gets to suffer for a couple years. Et cetera. Same crap you see in big corporations.
But! Despite all that, lots of people are out there running experiments and reform pilot programs just as you suggest, and for the right reasons, and sometimes even competently. It's just that as soon as it goes past that, it tends to get caught up in all the above. However, even the best-considered reforms that show promise in early experiments and trials are rarely broadly-applicable enough, and familiar enough, and simple enough, and easy enough, and effective enough, to survive that process of wider application without being destroyed. Plus (to repeat, and IMO) I just don't think there are many big wins to be had with educational reform on its own, without working on things outside schools that are resulting in lots of hard-to-educate-in-a-classroom kids.
Every now and then, though, you get a really solid improvement, like, "hey that Whole Language thing that sure seemed to a lot of us to be backwards-ass garbage that really looked like it was making kids worse readers, in-fact, whatever its proponents claimed? Yeah, turns out it is backwards-ass garbage, we can improve reading markedly by knocking that off". (see process and systemic pitfalls outlined above for how it ended up widely in-use in the first place)
Principal agent problem is a huge part of it. How do you keep school leadership accountable and effective? It's super hard in any organization.
Can someone better informed about these metrics (the NAEP specifically) comment: how exactly do we know that we're comparing the same thing each year? Is the NAEP based off answering the same questions every year? Because if it's just like "average exam result" - those can change a lot. And can in fact trend, meaning change in the same direction for several years (e.g. becoming harder, becoming easier)
Unrelated: schools with effective phone bans are seeing improved grades and less absences.
> Otherwise please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize.
I'm also a little surprised that more people aren't talking about it and that it hasn't been changed. There's definitely a culture shift happening in HN...
If you've never read the guidelines, now is a great time. Seriously, it isn't that long and captures why many of us come to HN over other sites.
The chart in the link below shows employee vs students headcounts over 6 years. Even though student rolls went down almost all employment in the school system went up. Do we really need a +22% increase in Student Support Services when there are fewer students? Even teachers (only?) went up by 2.8% according to this (and again, students went down)? And why would librarians of all positions seem to be the ones whose positions were cut?
Basically, 'education' is nothing more than a jobs program for the politically connected, as clearly the focus is not on kids. And education is safe, because it's hard to argue against it, even if you're not talking about actual teachers.
Honestly I would expect if funding were cut, and particularly the admin, support, 'paraprofessional', and other non-teaching staff were fired, you'd find those test scores approach the pre-pandemic levels.
Will that happen? Of course not. These are politically connected people after all. We should all be angry.
Large institutions in the USA are grossly mismanaged and/or corrupt. Normalize the amount of public money pupils cost and it easily dwarfs most elite private schools. Multiply by class size and an elementary school class can cost $500k+. The teacher is not making $100k.
had that extra spending gone to pay math teachers the results might be different