I taught summer school math to 8th graders for a brief spell. I was teaching them addition and subtraction. I shit you not.
It's really sad.
And it did not matter how they performed, if they showed up for class, we passed them and sent them along. Also if they didn't show up, we passed them and sent them along anyway.
We should be absolutely ashamed of the public school system in our country. It'd corruption and perverse incentives from the top all the way down. Disgusting.
I clearly remember that eight grade math was algebra: basic stuff with polynomials like multiplying (2x + 1)(3x + 4), or dividing single terms like 4x^2y/2xy = 2x.
And that was likely behind where I would have been had I not immigrated to Canada from Europe, where I had been into basic one-variable linear equation solving by the end of fourth grade, plus other topics like sets. For instance we used a kind of set partitioning method to convert numbers into binary.
When I came to Canada in the fifth grade, the teacher took me to a room and probed me on various arithmetic of increasing difficulty. She was blown away that I could do long division of like a five digit number by a three dight number, either leaving it with a remainder, or else continuing into the fraction.
Please note that nearly every country in the West is facing similar downward curves. Also countries like Finland, who were at the top for several years.
The US school system may have its separate problems, but the wider issue is not just there.
Some teachers I knew during COVID reported that in some cases nearly half the kids stopped attending online class and just never returned. Parents wouldn't respond to calls / efforts to get them back into class. Some school districts were faced with wondering what to do? Fail huge % of the students?
They chose not to fail them.
My son reports that his math classes for the last two years "are the same thing over and over again".
During the first year of schools being shutdown, I was dating a middle school guidance counselor and her experience matched what you posted. She had a very difficult time contacting parents and if she was able to get in touch with them, most said there was nothing they could do about their child choosing not to participate in remote school. She was entirely powerless to do anything except offer remote tutoring services, which apparently no one accepted. I stopped asking her about work because it obviously distressed her to even talk about it.
At the end of the day, if parents don't value education, there's nothing an educator can do to fix that. Even truancy laws can't force a kid to pay attention and do their homework.
It doesn't necessarily have anything to do with valuing education. Not everyone got to work from home during the pandemic. Those in the lower economic class had to continue to work 8 or more hours a day to put food on the table. It is hard to make a kid pay attention to school when they don't want to if you aren't there.
Even if there's nothing an educator can do to fix it, what they can do is give the student a failing grade for failing to complete the course. It is a slap in the face to every student who shows up and does the work to "socially promote" kids who don't do the work. Combined with the ongoing elimination of standardized tests, we are left with no metrics to judge students. It is no surprise that our colleges and other "higher educational institutions" are filled with people who should not be there, because they don't even have a basic education.
You're absolutely right that children are not to be blamed for the sins of their parents. But in order to advance society we must work with human nature to make incentives aligned between disparate entities.
One of the most fundamental parts of human nature is that parents want to see their children do well, and it's often the biggest reason why people toil and overcome great difficulties instead of settling for the minimum it takes to sustain themselves -- all so that their children might enjoy a life better than theirs. Once government steps in between that relationship and guarantees that children will be fine no matter what the parents do or don't do, you remove that important incentive.
Should we let children born to poor parents starve or dumb parents stay uneducated? No, let's do what we can to alleviate that. But how far will you go to ensure that your parentage has no effect whatsoever on your life? Clearly it's not my fault that my parents aren't Yao Ming (7'6") and Ye Li (6'3"), but nevertheless I shouldn't expect to have the same chance at making the NBA as their children. Then why should a child who was born to parents who don't value the qualities it takes to succeed be equally successful as one who was born to parents who did?
In other words, how high should your equalizing bar go, to remove the influence of parents on children, especially in the face of the fact that public educational outcomes in this country are stubbornly refusing to budge as the amount of money spent per pupil rises year after year?
There is legitimate debate to be had here, beyond just downvoting me and calling me an unsympathetic child-hater.
We aren't spending the money on the parents though, we are spending it on their children, who deserve that attempt even if they aren't able to fully take advantage of it.
Ruthlessly optimizing use of "the public's money" is not inherently virtuous, but providing the universal opportunity for education is. If it is spent to offer an education, and that offer is not accepted, it is still money well spent.
I'm seen the elementary math curriculum in Ontario. It is the same year over year, but with bigger numbers, so your son's not wrong, but that doesn't really say if it's because the kids are behind.
It's hard for people without kids to realize just how much COVID-related school closures fucked everything up.
An entire generation of students is at risk of forever being behind. And even those that always attended online class, did all the work, and excelled given the circumstances are still going to fall behind because so many of their peers in the classroom are behind that entire curriculums are changing to accommodate those students.
I feel terrible for everyone involved, but especially the kids that have been set back literally years. And what's more is that this is going to further the divide between lower income/high income families. Those that were able to afford private tutoring, have one parent stop working to help educate their children, or afford to transfer their kids to a private/prep school.
There may be nothing we take more for granted in this country than public education and the very foundations are crumbling beneath us.
Wait, can you please share these studies and data with me? I'm really tired of all my liberal friends telling me that just because someone grew up "without internet", that means there somehow unprivileged. Why don't parents just take them to the library, lol
Yeah, it's really amusing that anyone expects anything innovation-wise out of the US when we basically put the minimum amount of money humanly possible towards education (for the majority of the country). Looking at Asia and the Nordic countries and how highly they value educators, it's clear where all the talent is going to be in the coming decades.
And when you look at tertiary education, the amounts we spend are shocking.
Education in the U.S., like healthcare, and even defense, is an example of spending way too much money for the quality of the outcome. For a variety of reasons, we have little public capacity to efficiently provide government services compared to what the rest of the world does. This is even true for things like public works spending.
Anyone that tells you we are "not spending enough" has either no idea how much less the rest of the world spends, or they are just lying to you (usually it's the former).
Just because Khan Academy teaches it doesn't mean it's the most effective, most useful, or even correct method. They too are victims of needing money. Teaching what is currently being taught has been their bread and butter since the early days.
I can only speak from examples I've seen from young ones in my family "acing" early math and suddenly struggling with trivial stuff like Geometry, more advanced fractions, factoring, etc.
Common tricks like so-called "number bonds", "colored numbers", excessively complicated math for simple arithmetic by using shapes, preferring "regrouping" to carrying, etc.
All of these are valid, and with the correct level of sophistication a student can learn these tricks fast and use them correctly. The issue is you're dealing with kids who haven't gotten any sophistication yet. The reason things are initially taught rote is not because of some shibboleth of mathematics but rather mathematics can be useful without always knowing exactly why something works. There are some examples of common core problems floating around the internet that border on introductory number theory. The premise of it is ridiculous. Your child arrives to high school or college with a cobbled together book of poorly learned tricks that end up having profound influence over their ability to digest actual complicated math.
To drive the point home a "common core" version of calculus would have you learning real analysis long before you even understood a derivative. It's asinine.
Even without COVID the public education system is such a travesty. When I was in highschool, one year, I had a math teacher who clearly didn't understand her own subject and would routinely get lost and contradict herself and was just generally useless in trying to teach what she did not know. In another year a math teacher may have known the subject but had zero control of the class and the students rebelled against him and there was never any real teaching because kids were acting out to an absurd degree. Basically, of my four years of high school math two were literally a complete waste. And that's pre-covid.
The obvious culprit, to me, is teacher's unions. Why don't we fire bad teachers and hire good ones? Seems like the teacher's unions prevent that. Compensating teachers based on tenure rather than performance is another teacher's union problem.
I find the whole thing very discouraging. Society is allowing immense waste of time, effort, and potential over very obvious problems.
That won't solve it. There are much much better paying jobs for any quantitatively minded individual than teaching. Many pay 2 to 5x what teaching does and you don't have to deal with bs. So math based subjects are left to those who aren't good at it or are otherwise rich enough and are only teaching out of passion.
Replace them with who is the real question. The pay is garbage, especially in already struggling schools in poor commmunities. So many great potential teachers leave to get far better paying jobs in any number of industries, and that leaves lots of bad teachers as the only qualified candidates that want the job.
I disagree that the pay is garbage - especially when you take benefits, like summer vacation, into account. In the US, the average teacher (does vary by state) makes ~60k[1]. And, again, lots of days off.
I think another obvious thing to do is make it easier for people to become full or part time teachers by removing requirements around licensing and education. If you can prove subject matter expertise - something that, frankly, current teachers should be required to do, and demonstrate an ability to teach then you shouldn't need the licensing and degree requirements that many public schools have.
In my mind this would more like person X is curious about teaching. Maybe they are retired or underemployed or considering a career change. X is reasonably smart, knows math/science/writing/whatever to a high standard, and likes teaching. In our current reality X must either commit serious time and effort to getting the credentials required to start teaching, or just not do it. In my imagination X could easily pick up a role helping an existing teacher (after passing some subject matter tests). Maybe X is grading homework, helping prepare lesson plans, whatever the teacher needs. As X demonstrates their ability the teacher lets X take on more and responsibilities until X is either a full teacher, decides they don't like teaching, or is bounced for some reason.
If it turns out we don't have enough people who want to be teachers then we can consider raising salaries - but, again, they are already higher than average and our current hiring practices are so bad we should try improving those first.
One final thought regarding salaries - I think it really throws things off that teacher pay increases with their tenure. This results in a system where new teachers really are severely underpaid and old teachers are well paid. This can result in attrition among new teachers. Likewise, when teachers are laid off it is by reverse seniority. Again, this is due to the teacher's unions. In my opinion - if a teacher quickly ramps up to leading high performance classes then they should quickly ramp up to the top of the teacher pay scales as well - with performance bonuses thrown in.
Many people were saying this would be a result of all the 'virtual learning' during COVID however, states bowed to the teacher's union, and this is where we're at I'm not sure how you recover from that big of a deficit.
I'd be interested to see the numbers for other countries that implemented similar policies. It'd also be interesting comparing districts that were closed for a minimal amount of time vs districts that were closed the longest.
Although the previous numbers from 2019 show that there are much larger problems in education.
Coronavirus shutdowns meant that our children lost out on a year or more of education.
Remote learning does not work. It fundamentally does not provide necessary environmental aspects for the healthy development of a child, even if they can be cajoled into attending and focusing.
Note that losing a year is not as simple as simply being a year behind, either. Consider spending a year completely indoors from age 25-26, say. You don't come out the same as your doppelganger who spent 25-26 living a normal and balanced life.
Looking at the graphs when I got the report to load they look pretty constant to me. No obvious change from 2003 to 2018 that I could see. Which makes me wonder what they’re testing for when 3/4 of the kids in the states fail…. Is this stuff like set theory and geometry or is it basic math and simple algebra (word problems) or what? Any pointers to a sample test?
Any chance this is conflated with lousy reading skills as all testing relies on that.
The link they provide is to reading results, but the article is citing math results. Where are those? The reading is showing 4th and 8th grade levels are at exactly the level they were in 1992, which incidentally, is when I was in 6th grade. Telling me kids today are exactly as stupid as me doesn't sound quite as alarming. I'm actually kind of surprised scores went up by 2019. Also, "biggest ever" is since 1969 since the assessment didn't exist before then.
West seriously needs to forbid personal internet-capable devices from everyone under the age 16. We are in the middle of a global social experiment that nobody signed in for, and the results are looking very bad.
That's not correct. Taking the numbers at face value: out of 100 8th graders, previously 34 were proficient in math. Now 26 are. 23.5% fewer 8th graders are proficient in math. Saying it's an 8% lower number is wrong: the number of 8th graders proficient in math is 23.5% lower. The absolute percentage went down by 8, but who cares?
To illustrate this, consider if 1% of all children were dying of Smallpox, and after the vaccine it dropped to 0%. Did we reduce Smallpox deaths by 1%? No! We eliminated Smallpox deaths; reduced by 100%.
The irony of your statement is left as an exercise for the reader.
> The absolute percentage went down by 8, but who cares?
I do and that's why I wrote it
The only remaining mystery is which semantical variation of that would you and others accept. Fewer? No. Lower? No. Absolutely percentage? Well its not even clear if others would accept that, or find a different way to say you’re ironically dumb.
The purpose of language is to convey a shared concept. Whatever this conversation is has nothing to do with that.
Typically you would say it's a drop of X percentage points, or just "points", or a decrease of Y percent. Using X instead of Y is simply wrong - whether it's wrong mathematically or verbally is philosophical.
Or rather, we have a sizable number of people outside of academia who are unable to comprehend the difference between people saying that instruction is racist by letting some people get lower standard education and people saying that math is racist.
It's really sad.
And it did not matter how they performed, if they showed up for class, we passed them and sent them along. Also if they didn't show up, we passed them and sent them along anyway.
We should be absolutely ashamed of the public school system in our country. It'd corruption and perverse incentives from the top all the way down. Disgusting.