US students' reading and math scores at historic lows: 'Devastating trend'

[Hvizsgyak]

Bro, you shouldn’t be telling me, you should be telling the state, I’m not the audito

I wouldn't be surprised if they are in on the coverup too. The schooling system I feel is that corrupt and nobody wants to stand up and take the blame for it.

Blind memorization is good for short term memory, not long term education. It is an answer devoid of context and the idea behind school is to execute methodologies and concepts.

I don't mean to be disrespectful here but you are sounding like someone who feels these new ways to learn (that teachers need to adopt) are the greatest stuff in the world when all they do is get so-so achievements and are replace the following year by some other new teaching fad. You say memorization is good for short term memory - funny, I still know all the answers to my multiplication tables from 3rd or 4th grade. I still know how to spell almost every word that I was given in spelling tests. And so much more, all due to memorization.

This just reads again like somebody who doesn’t understand tech and is thus afraid of it and/or thinks it’s useless. If kids are learning the same thing they learned 45 years ago when you were in school, we will have surely failed them. No other country says that reversal of progress is the answer to educational advancement.

I graduated from college with a BS in Computer Science. I was a techie for the longest time. But I admit, there have been way too many advancements for me to keep track of so, I just learn what I want now. I'm all for technology in the classroom. I'm a person who learns more hands-on and visually and I suspect kids nowadays do that more so. Thats excellent but when students just sit there and oodle their IPhones all through class and do not pay attention to the teacher, there's a problem.

 

[keith99]

I love this. Thanks for sharing.

I don't ski but I kinda disagree about skiing. For the amount of money you spend on the mountains here in alberta and the amount of time going downhill? I personally dont' know if it's worth it. It's funy of course.

Not all skiing is downhill with expensive lifts. One can try cross country and have a blast. It is much better exercise and much less expensive.

 

[rambot]

Not all skiing is downhill with expensive lifts. One can try cross country and have a blast. It is much better exercise and much less expensive.

Its funny you say that cause I actually have a set of country skis and ski ...albeit infrequently. I do enjoy it foe thr most part but I have 0 downhill hill control so it feels limiting

 

[rambot]

Did you have a stroke, or does Canada have their own words too? I thought I could comprehend Canadian, but maybe only spoken Canadian and not the written form.

Keystroke
[Sad hollow rimshot]

 

[bèlla]

I think the way sports are treated in our schools is a major contributing factor in the education crisis. This is NOT to say I'm anti sports, far from it.

Nor am I. But unlike academic or musical talent sports are lucrative for schools. Which makes them more attractive to students and institutions.

I'm not anti-sports. I am against sports stars getting passing grades because they are sports stars. Or getting the kind of tutoring that translates to being slipped the answers for exams and having their papers ghostwritten. Real tutoring, heck yes.

It happens often and you’re dealing with a lot of egos and dollars and students are the biggest losers. Advocacy is a must when you’re dealing with kids in relation to sports. They’re not seeing the child and many live vicariously through them to accomplish their goals. You have to listen to your gut and a lot of parents get swept up in the possibility of fame or fortune.

Sports one continues after school are worth it, and even some that end with school. I ended up playing Rugby for 40 years. Toured England and Wales twice, Australia with a stopover in Fiji once and spent a season in New Zealand. I've managed to race against Gunnar Larson (Olympic Champion and world record holder) and play Rugby with and against a score of guys who played for their respective national teams.

You’ve had quite the experience! What did you enjoy the most?

But sports and other extra curriculars are the cherry on the top of the educational experience. When sports become more than that they become part of the problem. When they and other extracurricular activities are omitted, there is a good chance that they are a canary in a coal mine that is not singing.

Sports provide opportunities for physical activity, character development and team dynamics which are really useful. But I don’t believe it should become your identity or focal point to the detriment of other qualities or experiences. Back in the day parents encouraged their children to be doctors and lawyers for financial security. Now we’re seeing similar behavior with sports.

If I had a prodigy on my hands I wouldn’t prevent them from pursuing their passion at the highest levels if desired. But I wouldn’t try to create a Tiger Woods intentionally although I can see the draw.

~bella

 

[7thKeeper]

There are few things I can say that would set our city ablaze. Redistributing property taxes from more affluent areas to others is one of them. It’s an unfortunate birth lottery of sorts. As some of our schools are more akin to well heeled private ones than not.

I don’t have the answers and genuinely believe home instruction is best if you can make it work. I don’t have a lot of faith in the system and wouldn’t rely on it alone for a child.

~bella

It's kinda how the public schools are funded in Finland. Basically equal funding across the board to all schools, regardless of location and while there are mandated things that need to be taught, how they are taught is largely up to the school/teacher.

 

[keith99]

...


You’ve had quite the experience! What did you enjoy the most?



...

Definitely Rugby.

The huge part that remains and I expect to remain for at least a few more decades is that tradition that after a match there is a reception where you drink, eat and sing with the guys you were knocking heads with just an hour earlier. That is a part anyone who plays is sure to experience. When I stop to think about it I feel pretty good about some of the teams we played against. Occidental College, still under 2000 students and no athletic scholarships. But in the time I was there we beat Stanford and U.S.C.. We also played against Arizona, Arizona State, U.C.L.A., Long Beach State, San Diego State and several other division 1 schools.

In the gone but in the same spirit is summer rugby in the first decade that I played. A pick-up game during the summer. 20 minute quarters that kept going until almost everyone got their fill. A chance to play badly out of position. I played fullback a couple of times. That would be like a middle linebacker playing quarterback or wide receiver. But most memorable and indicative of the attitude was playing hooker where one of my props played for the U.S. national team and the other had first seen a rugby match that day. Oh, and the first summer match I played I ran myself into the hospital with heatstroke!

For single event I have to go with the one time I won man of the match. That was playing for Hora Hora Rugby club in New Zealand. I heard echos of that for years as it seems they were rather surprised an American could play rugby well, especially getting the technical parts right.

My playing days are over. I'm up this late because I am having trouble falling asleep after knee replacement. But there are still enjoyable experiences. I make it to a lot of the games and almost always to the reception afterwards. While my age is noticed, far and away the important thing is that I am a player. Inside rugby 'the generation gap' is as noticeable as the line between squares on the sidewalk.

 

[Stopped_lurking]

Party Affiliation Fact Sheet (NPORS)

Explore trends in partisan identification among U.S. adults using data from Pew Research Center’s National Public Opinion Reference Survey (NPORS).

www.pewresearch.org

I don't know, I think this says otherwise. Yes those 18-29 year olds may come out of college "all smart and cocky" in their newly founded liberal ways and lean more Democrat but once they meet the real world and get their heads out of their rear ends, they turn Republican. Both parties have their "not so smart" fan clubs which are there because they can't stand one thing or another in the opposing party but really have no clue as to why they hold that position.

The problem with students not learning these days is all about distractions: social media, video gaming, sports. Make these kids only watch Scooby Doo on Saturdays, play Monopoly, Battleship, Scrabble or Clue or run around outside or riding their bicycles the rest of the day and back to the books for studying (like we did when we were kids). No cell phones, no PlayStations and no professional sports for youngsters. Just have fun with the neighbor kids doing simple things.

When they are in school (especially elementary school) strict guidelines on how to act, what needs to be learned ad smoking only in the bathrooms (sorry, just kidding about that last statement ). Seriously, the students need to learn order at a young age (because a lot of times, they don't get it at home like they should) so when they reach the upper grades, they don't act like wild animals (like a lot of them do now and disrupt the class for all).

Am I missing or misreading something? If I click on your link and go down to "Partisanship by education", both the two-way and four-way comparison support that higher educational achievements correlate to democratic leanings. The big shifts occur for finishing a college education.

 

[Tuur]

Am I missing or misreading something? If I click on your link and go down to "Partisanship by education", both the two-way and four-way comparison support that higher educational achievements correlate to democratic leanings. The big shifts occur for finishing a college education.

That seems to be the trend. That said, in the ancient days when I was in college, there was a strong political divide between various departments. Go over to the English department, and it was decidedly liberal. Go over to the math and sciences, and it was decidedly conservative. In between it was a mix. My guess is that political leanings are doing to depend on the type of degree, and much of that more by association with various political viewpoint. Back then, there was very little outright indoctrination and maybe more that someone a student respected had this view point of that view point. Thus a survey about political leanings depends more of the degrees of those who were asked and who responded. "Who responded" is important because some in the more conservative fields wouldn't bother with a survey in the first place.

 

[Tuur]

Blind memorization is good for short term memory, not long term education. It is an answer devoid of context and the idea behind school is to execute methodologies and concepts.

Ah...no. Each of us have and use information that we memorized, going all the way back to our very names. Our language. How we calculate math problem. Phone numbers. Multiplication tables. The value of Pi to two or three decimal places. Memorized, with each memory reinforced by use. The only way to learn basic facts (the sine of an angle is the opposite side over the hypotenuse; to convert from feet to meters multiply by 0.3048) is by memorization. Failing to do so will make things more difficult. It's boring even if you make a game of it, but necessary.

This just reads again like somebody who doesn’t understand tech and is thus afraid of it and/or thinks it’s useless. If kids are learning the same thing they learned 45 years ago when you were in school, we will have surely failed them. No other country says that reversal of progress is the answer to educational advancement.

When I was in school, we have the latest technology. Vinyl records with lessons. Slide carrousels that advanced on an audible cue. Film strips. Movie projectors! The latest and greatest technology. And at the end of the day, the only way to learn that 7 x 6 = 42, or that the main body segments of an insect are head, thorax, and abdomen, or that Madison is the capitol of Wisconsin, or that M I S S I S S I P P I spells Mississippi comes from repetition. It takes less for the smart ones that the rest of us, but those repetitions are still required. So it is we had math homework, because it didn't matter if you saw a highly entertaining cartoon in class that explained it, if you didn't practice doing it, you wouldn't remember how.

All of this technology had/has one aim: To make the subject interesting to students. But that's like trying to add flavoring to medicine that doesn't taste good. Memorization is easier for some of us than others, but even the ones who find it easy have to do it. And when I bought teaching software for my children, unless there was repetition involved, they weren't going to remember it. That repetition is usually in the form of a game, but it's still repetition. Repetition is that I remember the Doomsday algorithm (which has to do with calculating the day of the week from the date) but have to refresh myself over calculating the date of Easter because almost every day I use the Doomsday algorithm as a convenient mental calendar and seldom calculate the date of Easter. It's the result of memorization with repetition to keep it fresh.

That's not going to change. One day we may have holographic figures in classroom as teaching aids, but unless there's memorization and repetition, students are only going to remember they had fun watching.

 

[Tropical Wilds]

I wouldn't be surprised if they are in on the coverup too. The schooling system I feel is that corrupt and nobody wants to stand up and take the blame for it.

Ah. So we’ve wandered into conspiracy territory. That’s when my eyes glaze over. The idea that things are the way they are because a vast network of people in all schools, spanning 50 states and the federal government have united together to secretly execute a directive is just too ludicrous for words.

I don't mean to be disrespectful here but you are sounding like someone who feels these new ways to learn (that teachers need to adopt) are the greatest stuff in the world when all they do is get so-so achievements and are replace the following year by some other new teaching fad. You say memorization is good for short term memory - funny, I still know all the answers to my multiplication tables from 3rd or 4th grade. I still know how to spell almost every word that I was given in spelling tests. And so much more, all due to memorization.

The reason you know how to spell your spelling test words is because you’re now in an advanced age and all those words were ones taught to small children. And the goal of spelling tests has shifted from simply just remembering how to spell “their” to logical deduction, that the rule that causes “their” to be spelled the way it is means that you can guess how words like thief, tier, and piece are also spelled. And instead of blind memorization of multiplication tables (which they still do, BTW), understanding how multiplication works so that when you hit 9x13, you can figure it out instead of parroting an answer. Especially since studies have shown that memorization of multiplication tables taps into sequential memorization, not actual concept memorization. Meaning, they can tell you 9x8 after going through 9x 1-7, but not when you ask them to give the answer without the sequence.

It’s why so many people believe in Terryology despite it being the dumbest concept on the planet. They don’t understand why 1x1=1, they simply memorized it, so when somebody says it actually equals 2, they believe it. It’s also why we have flat earth believers and people who dispute basic scientific facts… They were told “memorize this” and not “the world cannot possibly be flat because…” Memorization has its place, but using it now like you used it 45 years ago is lazy teaching.

I graduated from college with a BS in Computer Science. I was a techie for the longest time. But I admit, there have been way too many advancements for me to keep track of so, I just learn what I want now. I'm all for technology in the classroom. I'm a person who learns more hands-on and visually and I suspect kids nowadays do that more so. Thats excellent but when students just sit there and oodle their IPhones all through class and do not pay attention to the teacher, there's a problem.

If kids are playing with phones instead of listening to the teacher, that’s a problem with distraction, not teaching method. If it’s an iPhone, a note you’re writing to pass between class, a doodle you’re drawing in the margin, a book you’re clandestinely reading under your desk, you’re distracted and that will impact learning. That has nothing to do with teaching methods, but classroom behavior.

The idea that what worked 45 years ago to teach is what works today, however, is ludicrous. The world and what kids need to know has totally changed in 45 years. We are the only country who insists that what was good enough for us as kids is good enough for our kids and is comfortable with that level of educational complacency.

 

[Stopped_lurking]

That seems to be the trend. That said, in the ancient days when I was in college, there was a strong political divide between various departments. Go over to the English department, and it was decidedly liberal. Go over to the math and sciences, and it was decidedly conservative. In between it was a mix. My guess is that political leanings are doing to depend on the type of degree, and much of that more by association with various political viewpoint. Back then, there was very little outright indoctrination and maybe more that someone a student respected had this view point of that view point. Thus a survey about political leanings depends more of the degrees of those who were asked and who responded. "Who responded" is important because some in the more conservative fields wouldn't bother with a survey in the first place.

I thought the one I quoted was trying to use the link to tell the opposite story and couldn't get it straightened out in my head. To your second point, do we have any actual data if that effect would be larger for democrat or republican leaning respondents? Or across academic fields? If it is a general effect, it can be accounted for I guess.

 

[Hvizsgyak]

Ah. So we’ve wandered into conspiracy territory. That’s when my eyes glaze over. The idea that things are the way they are because a vast network of people in all schools, spanning 50 states and the federal government have united together to secretly execute a directive is just too ludicrous for words.

They aren't banning together and uniting in one big conspiracy. Now you are being facetious or very naive. What I'm saying is that nobody wants to come forward on this because jobs will be lost, reputations will be dirtied possibly in a statewide level. It's like how some police departments coverup their own bungling of a crime scene. The people directly involved in the bungling aren't going to say anything because it's their jobs on the line. In addition, if the police chief gets wind of the bungling, some try to cover it up because it's their jobs on the line and the reputation of that police force is shot. If the city council gets wind of the coverup, people get fired, reputations are tarnished forever and the town or city gets a bad reputation.

You know how it goes. Yes, there are many honest people who do come forward to identify the coverup but a lot of people just say to themselves, "It was a minor bungling of a crime scene, I'm not going to rock the boat. Let it go".

D.C.'s Scandal and the Nationwide Problem of Fudging Graduation Numbers

The revelations about District of Columbia schools have unleashed a wave of questions about the pressures and incentives built into U.S. high schools, and fueled nagging doubts that states’ rising high school graduation rates—and the country’s all-time-high rate of 84 percent—aren’t what they seem.

www.edweek.org

https://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/oakland-high-school-accused-of-falsifying-transcripts-to-boost-students-grades/1959637/

Why Teachers Fudge Their Students' Standardized-Test Scores

The motivations behind the practice—and its effects—suggest that little deception isn't always a bad thing.

www.theatlantic.com

Education Scandal Unveiled: Teachers Reveal Pressure To Inflate Grades

Allegations of grade-fixing in New Jersey schools spark statewide concern. Teachers reveal being pressured to falsify records. Lack of accountability and deteriorating classroom conditions highlighted. Is education integrity at risk?

nj1015.com

If kids are playing with phones instead of listening to the teacher, that’s a problem with distraction, not teaching method. If it’s an iPhone, a note you’re writing to pass between class, a doodle you’re drawing in the margin, a book you’re clandestinely reading under your desk, you’re distracted and that will impact learning. That has nothing to do with teaching methods, but classroom behavior.

The idea that what worked 45 years ago to teach is what works today, however, is ludicrous. The world and what kids need to know has totally changed in 45 years. We are the only country who insists that what was good enough for us as kids is good enough for our kids and is comfortable with that level of educational complacency.

Ok, if you say so . I can see you are one of those people who push for new ways (which usually don't work and frustrate the heck out of the teachers teaching the stuff and the parents who try to explain it to their children so they understand it) to try and educate our children. It may work on a few kids.

 

[Tuur]

I thought the one I quoted was trying to use the link to tell the opposite story and couldn't get it straightened out in my head. To your second point, do we have any actual data if that effect would be larger for democrat or republican leaning respondents? Or across academic fields? If it is a general effect, it can be accounted for I guess.

To the second, I don't know. What I observed was a clear divide based on outlook. There was low-key animosity between the English and math and science departments, and while neither pushed a select political view, at times things leaked out. I do know that one year, when CNN honored us with their presence during a presidential election, they were handing out surveys to those who voted, and almost to a person, those with a conservative viewpoint wadded it up and tossed it. Last time CNN came by - I wonder why.

That's all the data I have. Nothing more concrete than that.