Long-term NAEP scores for 13-year-olds drop for first time since testing began

https://www.the74million.org/article/naep-long-term-unprecedented-performance-drop-american-13-year-olds/

by Bostonian • 5 years ago

104 172 5 years ago

This is not going to improve the stereotype about Americans being bad at mental maths.

You mean we don't have math competitions like the spelling bee for language. I'm not convinced that there is a lot of value in being a human calculator. Knowing how to do the math is important, being able to do it all in your head is not.

rscho12• 5 years ago

It is. I couldn't do my job without it. Using a calculator would slow me down considerably.

smolder3• 5 years ago

There are math competitions. See Mathletes.

yumraj2• 5 years ago

Knowing how to do the math is important, being able to do it all in your head is not.

Respectfully that is such a myopic argument that it is not even funny. If all one knows is how to press buttons to get some answers, one doesn't truly understand what one is doing.

Also, what if one doesn't have a calculator and needs to do some math? Or, do it quickly as a sibling comment made...

reustle• 5 years ago

National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP)

kfprt• 5 years ago

I wonder if this has anything to do with the educational and social stunting caused by lockdowns.

thehoff• 5 years ago

The latest release comes from NAEP’s 2020 assessment of long-term trends, which was administered by the National Center for Education Statistics to nine- and 13-year-olds before COVID-19 first shuttered schools last spring.

SketchySeaBeast2• 5 years ago

And, as the article notes, this test could prove useful in testing against later COVID related effects:

The long-term assessment is a crucial piece of data for another reason: It was administered to students between October 2019 and March 2020, making it a final snapshot of academic trends before the emergence of COVID-19.

merpnderp• 5 years ago

It's curious that the planned 2016 tests were skipped just a few years after one of the biggest overhauls to the education system in recent history.

OldHand2018• 5 years ago

It is curious - according to the article the tests were cancelled due to budget issues. How expensive is this testing? Is it really believable that we couldn't actually afford it???

I notice the attempt to blame common core, but... Nobody ever actually implemented common core (No True Scotsman). The whole thing was completely messed up by educational corporations "buying" state boards of education.

corpdronejuly4• 5 years ago

There's mountains of paper, or proprietary software used for these tests. And that's before we pay for graders and monitors(and many schools need a few extra hands to do the test according to standard due to crowding).

ryathal• 5 years ago

Getting questions on a test is actually really expensive for a standardized test. It's been a while, but I believe it cost was in the $3-4k range per question for my state's tests. These test questions go through significant amounts of review for various biases and whether they actually measure understanding/mastery of the intended knowledge standard.

pwned1• 5 years ago

Why does the graph only show three data points? 1973, 2012, 2020?

fatnoah• 5 years ago

This is a very complicated thing to try to unwind, but the expectation of an increase in scores seems to rely on faith in the exam itself, and that changes in how school is taught would necessarily lead to improvement in scores.

Obviously there are a billion other things that could affect these scores, such as electronics or the general societal and technological trend (and I am as guilty as anyone) towards shorter attention span, lack of delayed gratification, etc.

lumost2• 5 years ago

I'm skeptical of the tests core result that reading performance has dropped to 1970s levels among thirteen year olds. 13 year olds today almost exclusively communicate through text, whereas in the 70s it was quite plausible for a 13 year old to simply not spend time reading.

I think its worth questioning the test and whether there has been a shift in reading/math skills since the last iteration which de-emphasizes skills the test pushes. Mental math in particular is a skill which was borderline relevant with the advent of calculators and is highly questionable when everyone has a calculating machine in their pockets 24/7.

We should expect that we need to adjust our educational standards from time to time less we continue to teach alchemy, or meta-physics.

kvathupo• 5 years ago

I was inclined to agree, but the questions seem to be as simple as "add 32 and 14" [1]. I doubt students failed to answer this question on the basis of what field the numbers belonged to :)

That said, the emphasis on rote memorization through multiplication tables has long been utterly useless. So, there is fault in the purpose of instruction as well. As an aside on this notion of rote learning, I recall some of my high school's top students (by GPA) could not solve a simple ODE, despite getting the highest score on the AP Calculus exams (granted, this doesn't mean much when such a score can be attained with a 70%)

[1] https://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/subject/field_pubs/sqb...

hungryforcodes4• 5 years ago

Maybe it's just me, but multiplication tables are one of the few useful things I got out of primary school. To this day I use this often, almost daily. I mean to call them USELESS is pretty severe mischaracterization of them.

rscho12• 5 years ago

My job involves 80% rote memorization including a lot of mental math. No being able to calculate simple stuff would slow me down at least 2X. It's a high-pay job.

xxxtentachyon2• 5 years ago

I wouldn't really expect them to be able to solve a simple ODE with just Calculus BC. It's been about a decade since I took it, but to my memory, it concluded with basic elements of real analysis after getting pretty far along with single variable integral calculus techniques. We never discussed ODEs as such, but some clever students would probably recognize how to solve them on sight without being acquainted with the broader fields of differential equations

jonas21• 5 years ago

"Add 32 and 14" is from the directions page of the test -- it's not an actual question. It's intentionally easy so as not to distract from the point, which is to tell students how to fill in answers.

You can find sample questions here: https://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/nqt

usaar3334• 5 years ago

If you deep dive into demographic groups (https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/reading/nation/groups/?gra...), you get a bit of a different story, showing a lot of the drop might just be Simpson's Paradox at play and the educational outcomes getting worse for the lower performing students.

For instance, non English language learner's reading scores are unchanged over the last 3 decade. It's crashing lower for ELL students.

Dive into other metrics and you see the pattern of the lower performing groups performing worse and better performing groups roughly holding.

SamBam• 5 years ago

Simpson's Paradox isn't really relevant here. All you're describing is the average going down because one group goes down a lot. But that's how averages generally work.

bmj2• 5 years ago

* 13 year olds today almost exclusively communicate through text, whereas in the 70s it was quite plausible for a 13 year old to simply not spend time reading.*

Comparing the way teenagers text to reading an actual book seems a bit ridiculous to me. Have you read a 13 year old's text thread? The standardized ways of measuring reading performance have much to with vocabulary and comprehension skills. Are you suggesting that if kids can read each other's texts, and maybe Instagram comments, they are in good shape?

lumost2• 5 years ago

No I am not, however I'm old enough to briefly recall childhood life before computers were commonplace. There was a time when I was in elementary school where getting children to read at all was an activity.

plopz• 5 years ago

They might be in fine shape, I remember back when we had to learn cursive in school because if you couldn't read or write cursive then you might as well have been illiterate. Does cursive have any relation to literacy now-a-days? Absolutely not. Whats to say that being able to read or write instagram comments doesn't fully encapsulate what literacy entails in the 21st century?

I love to read fiction, but for me its just a hobby. Is the ability to read an old book actually all that important? I never actually read any of my textbooks in high school or college and I even stopped buying them because I realized how pointless and expensive they were. I'm well into my career and haven't ever touched a book related to my field. Communicating with my boss through email or chat is far more important than any formal reading comprehension.

I'd say if anything, modern day literacy is more about understanding fragmented conversations, reading between the lines and conceptualizing meaning, understanding context and being able to converse with colleagues including familiarity with memes, recognizing clickbait and being able to sort through misinformation. All of which is are skills the older generations exceptionally lack. Perhaps they are the ones who are actually currently illiterate.

WillPostForFood3• 5 years ago

Mental math in particular is a skill which was borderline relevant with the advent of calculators and is highly questionable when everyone has a calculating machine in their pockets 24/7.

As someone with kids, I’d say the public school educators and teachers we dealt with very much mirrored your attitude, and that’s a big part of why scores are down. Lots of soft curriculum, math games, but no emphasis on learning things like multiplication, grammar, vocabulary, spelling.

redleggedfrog2• 5 years ago

Acectdotally, most of my wife's friends are teachers, mostly for private schools but a couple for public too, between grades 4 and 11, none less than for 15 years. Across the board they report declines in math and reading and just about everything else. Curiously some of them teach foreigners, so this is not just a U.S. phenomena.

When asked why they universally point the finger at phones. This affirms my confirmation bias but seems plausible as well.

newsbinator3• 5 years ago

When asked why they universally point the finger at phones

Teachers universally believe all sorts of things that turn out (or long ago turned out) to be false or detrimental. They may be right about phones or they may be wrong, but I'd guess their professional intuition on stuff like this is no better than random chance.

jessaustin2• 5 years ago

Don't assume they haven't performed experiments. If performance improves after removing devices from class, in multiple classes in various situations, teachers won't be relying on "intuition" to know what's going on.

rscho12• 5 years ago

"Don't listen to the professionals on the front lines. They know nothing"

Really?

Confiks• 5 years ago

Agreed. It's a good hunch, but no evidence.

"One such factor [of increasing ADHD prevalence] may be audiovisual media exposure during early childhood. Observational studies in humans have linked exposure to fast-paced television in the first 3 years of life with subsequent attentional deficits in later childhood." [1]

but also

"The diagnosis of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) among children and adolescents has increased considerably over the past decades. Scholars and health professionals alike have expressed concern about the role of screen media in the rise in ADHD diagnosis. However, the extent to which screen media use and ADHD are linked remains a point of debate. (...) The available evidence suggests a statistically small relationship between media and ADHD-related behaviors. " [2]

[1] https://www.pnas.org/content/115/40/9851

[2] https://www.pnas.org/content/115/40/9875

corpdronejuly4• 5 years ago

The role of attention in our ability to test well shouldn't be underestimated.

I bet the same children could produce great results with a complete gamified test that used various tricks to pull their attention back to it.

rscho12• 5 years ago

I strongly disagree. Math and other stuff such as reading or writing requires focus. That's what is degrading. Kids can't focus anymore, not by choice but because they're simply unable to do it (even for stuff they like).

Gibbon1• 5 years ago

Friend of mine teaches college English. She says teenagers don't write. They text sentence fragments back and forth with each other. As a result her students can't string two sentences together coherently.

jseliger• 5 years ago

I teach college English and while some students fit this stereotype, most don't.

brandonmenc• 5 years ago

She says teenagers don't write. They text sentence fragments back and forth with each other.

Ah yes, the old days before the mobile phone was invented, when teenagers everywhere were writing novels in their spare time.

Teenagers who didn't want to be writers weren't writing back then. Same as now. Although the average teen is almost certainly "writing" more than ever because the primary mode of communication now is typing, not talking.

burkaman• 5 years ago

Before phones, were teenagers writing full-length letters to each other in order to communicate? Were most of them writing at all, even just sentence fragments, outside of school? I wasn't alive so I can't say for sure, but I have a pretty good guess.

MisterTea• 5 years ago

They text sentence fragments back and forth with each other.

Before computers could fit into your pocket the same was done using paper and called "passing notes".

bawolff2• 5 years ago

My intuition, is that a phone is both a visual and written media, and extended exposure to writing via phones should improve reading skills. (I have nothing to back this up)

ungamedplayer• 5 years ago

r u sure of that m8 ?

bingohbangoh• 5 years ago

They didn’t think the pandemic and distance learning were a factor?

andruby4• 5 years ago

My wife is a teacher. She (and some of her colleagues) do blame phones somewhat, but they blame parents even more. Not necessarily the individuals themselves, but rather "parenting" and how society has changed that concept.

Society has changed a lot. Compared to a few decades ago, in more households both parents are working. Moreover, I would assume that we (parents) spend more time working or thinking about work when we are at home. Which leads to less time focussing on family.

My wife sees several symptoms of this: parents expect the school to fix/improve behavioral issues in their children (iso them). Parents now come with excuses for their children not doing their homework. Plenty more examples like this..

This could be the typical trope of "things were better when we were young". I do feel like parents these days spend less time raising their children. (which perhaps is partly due to.. phones, but I think is due to a much broader societal shift)

PeterisP2• 5 years ago

IIRC all the stats show that nowadays parents spend significantly more time raising their children than they did a generation ago.

E.g. here's one random analysis - https://qz.com/1143092/study-modern-parents-spend-more-time-...

mkotowski• 5 years ago

When asked why they universally point the finger at phones.

A smartphone is an easy scapegoat, but I think its role is greatly exaggerated. People simply like to complain about things they are not used to. It does not mean it is not the root cause, only that a “gut feeling” reasoning can easily be wrong. Not so long ago teachers were still trying to “correct” left-handedness.

That said there are certainly many issues surrounding modern use of smartphones (starting with microtransactions), but I doubt that it is the main issue there.

By the way: While I can’t find the website where I read it, there was supposedly a period before widespread TV, when reading too many books was considered a developmental issue for a child.

corpdronejuly4• 5 years ago

Remote learning that was "online first" reflected the erroneous idea that most American homes have internet access. We taught in a county where 50% of families don't have internet, and 20% don't even have a land line in 2020-2021.

The decline in learning was astonishing. Many of these children simply did not do any reading at all for a whole year.

geofft• 5 years ago

True, but this doesn't apply to the article:

The latest release comes from NAEP’s 2020 assessment of long-term trends, which was administered by the National Center for Education Statistics to nine- and 13-year-olds before COVID-19 first shuttered schools last spring.

43920• 5 years ago

The latest release comes from NAEP’s 2020 assessment of long-term trends, which was administered by the National Center for Education Statistics to nine- and 13-year-olds before COVID-19 first shuttered schools last spring.
The long-term assessment is a crucial piece of data for another reason: It was administered to students between October 2019 and March 2020, making it a final snapshot of academic trends before the emergence of COVID-19. Loveless said he hoped future analyses of how kids learned during and after the greatest disaster in K-12 history wouldn’t overlook the “deeper,” persistent stagnation that preceded it.

toast0• 5 years ago

So my school district's last day of in person instruction was March 12, 2020. Which leads me to wonder if the plan was to end testing in March 2020, or if testing was ended because schools were being shutdown and testing wasn't feasible.

If testing for the 2019-2020 school year stopped rather than completed, then you've got a data problem because it's not clear that tested performance is independent of scheduling.

Also, even if the testing was all completed as scheduled, COVID-19 was on at least some student's minds throughout February, which could reduce test scores. It can be difficult to focus on testing when a not yet declared pandemic is starting up.

newbamboo• 5 years ago

It’s always the sample.

paulpauper• 5 years ago

It seems like young people (particularly the 15-20 year-old range) are so much smarter and better informed than decades ago or even just 10 years ago. The fear about the US falling behind seems unfounded. Then again, I have to remind myself that Reddit and NH is not reality...these sites are probably only representative of the top 20% or so of ability. The bottom 50% are either less active online or more inclined to major social networks.

Snoozle2• 5 years ago

What makes you believe they are better informed? From my experience of: 1. being a not-quite-old person (33) 2. step son (16) 3. step daughter (15) 4. having a step mother teaching elementary school 5. my mother teaching middle and high school

I see kids as overly exposed to dramatic information. Both of my kids thought they were gay prior to hitting puberty and realizing they weren't. Both of my kids have taken political extremist positions, one identifying as communist and the other identifying as a libertarian. Most of the children I know are participating in very adult discussions without giving any hint of their age. Children are exposed much earlier to sex and pornography and fringe groups.

In addition to this, reading and writing skills have anecdotally declined considerably. When I was 16, I read at least one book per month, usually one per week. Most of the children I've had experience with will never read a book unless ordered to, and have no desire to read one either. Children are unable to write coherently; they pump out barely understandable slang prose, throw it through grammarly, and assume that it's good.

Hell, for one other anecdote, my wife is in college right now and I've been reading her peers' essays for English and History class and I can't imagine how these people are capable of operating in society with their absolute bottom of the barrel writing ability. Professors are having to give passing grades to what could be considered 6th grade writing levels in order to not fail the entire class.

Maybe things were the same when I was a child and I just wasn't exposed to it, but I don't have a lot of hope in the education of the future generations with access to social media. I do feel a lot of job security, however.

SketchySeaBeast2• 5 years ago

The question I have is how much of that is actually different and how much is worse? I knew lots of communist/libertarian high schoolers. Teenagers get extreme views.

Also regarding the rate of book reading - could it be that your childhood was not the norm? I too read a lot, but I was the only one on the school bus home who did, and it was so remarkable I was picked on for it. And complaining about a lack of book reading could be like lamenting we aren't all reading the newspaper anymore either - does that mean our reading and writing is worse? Is the general essay writing of this decade actually provably that much worse than a decade or three ago? Is the general population actually less literate or can we not remember decades past?

I'm not saying you're entirely wrong, but there's some "old man yells at cloud" vibes here too.

rscoots• 5 years ago

Among 13-year-olds, in 1984, 8 percent said they never or hardly ever read for fun, rising to 22 percent in 2012 and 29 percent in 2020.

http://archive.today/2021.10.14-112558/https://www.washingto...

Factorium• 5 years ago

Are these results broken down by race? If not, we could be seeing static or even improving results, hidden by the shifting demographics of the USA.

When you examine Goodschools data for a given area, there is a very high correlation between the White/Asian student population and the overall performance of the school, including for Black/Hispanic children.

Additionally, how much have politics impacted results for the worst performing students? Anecdotally, its a lot harder to expel or discipline certain consistently disruptive students now.

bmj2• 5 years ago

Yes. From the article:

More ominous were the results for 13-year-olds, who experienced statistically significant drops of three and five points in reading and math, respectively. Compared with math performance in 2012, boys overall lost five points, and girls overall lost six points. Black students dropped eight points and Hispanic students four points; both decreases widened their score gap with white students, whose scores were statistically unchanged from 2012.

usaar3334• 5 years ago

You can deep dive into the data here: https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/reading/nation/scores/?gra...

rscho12• 5 years ago

In my country, it was in the news that this year's language test for teachers (really basic stuff) resulted in 100% of the candidates failing. How is that even possible?

Foobar8568• 5 years ago

switzerland he.... That one is easy, useless education up to 8P, check the books used for these classes, it's a total joke. Add a fairly large non native language immigration, and you have kids up to 7 years old who can't speak more than one sentence in the local language (only my daughter could speak French properly in her class, in 4P, she is the only one who can actually read so far, her teacher says so to her class ffs).

Also don't forget that generally non science path are for the second rate students in europe, and the HES are generally also targeted to drop out students, and you get such results.

That particular test was funny as the students were arguing the course prepared them for another tests, yeah, correcting primary school level essay needs an actual course to find French mistakes. That tells everything on the so call great Swiss education.

Bud• 5 years ago

Gosh, it's almost like there are consequences to allowing the right wing and rich people to privatize education for the wealthy, take all that money out of the public education system, and replace it with...nothing.

welfare• 5 years ago

Don’t know where you live or what you refer to. Public schools where I live are paid through (very high) property taxes, anyone who wants to put their kids through private school needs to pay that tuition on top of what they’re paying in property taxes, essentially paying twice for schooling.

Maybe it’s different where you live?

istorical• 5 years ago

Spend time on the teachers subreddit. It's not so much money that's the primary problem. It's poor parenting, inability of teachers or administrators to actually implement any sort of punishment or discipline that a student would care about, and cultural decline.

bob1029• 5 years ago

This is the real answer and no one really wants to talk about it because solving it is easily one of the greatest challenges of our time.

It is very hard for most to take ownership of the fact that their child is a misbehaved little shit because they were raised from birth on iPad, YouTube and Fortnite instead of more enriching activities. Virtually everyone has a burned out dopamine loop at this point and it's impossible to get kids excited about education anymore. You want to talk about drug problems, this one is easily the worst.

phnofive• 5 years ago

...in a 2019-2020 assessment compared with the previous test which was completed in 2012.

Reviewing 'Trend in NAEP long-term trend reading average scores for 9- and 13-year-old students', we see the score has fluctuated between 255 and 263 for fifty years.

What am I missing?

TedShiller• 5 years ago

With the elimination of Gifted and Talented programs, expect the decline to sadly continue.

mensetmanusman6• 5 years ago

If the average is getting worse it’s not fair to let some get too far ahead. /s

gnicholas2• 5 years ago

California, the most populous state in the nation, removed the statewide mandate for these programs in 2014, so the timeline fits. That doesn't mean it's the predominant cause of the drop, or even a major contributing factor. But it sure doesn't help.

I've been shocked to see how little interest the public schools have in educating students who are more advanced. We live in Menlo Park, and it's like pulling teeth to get the school to allow our daughter to do advanced math. Many families are leaving the public schools because of this, and we're considering our options as well. This is a sharp contrast to my experience growing up and going to public schools in Sacramento, where there were (and still are) many good options.

raegis• 5 years ago

But have the Gifted and Talented programs been eliminated? My children are in LAUSD, the second largest school district in the country, where we have regular Gifted and Talented meetings, including one tomorrow. No one here speaks of eliminating the programs, but I do read about it in national news sometimes.

usaar3334• 5 years ago

If you dive into the data, the higher performing groups are stable. Lower performing groups are falling. (E.g. non English language learners are at stable reading scores, English language learners scores keep falling).

alliao• 5 years ago

can't help but link this with discussion associated with this article that was on hacker news not so long ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27746982

rp14• 5 years ago

I'm sure there are many causes of this. After recently looking for a home, I have my own theory: schools in the U.S. are absolutely terrible.

When looking for a home in the NYC metro area (one of the wealthiest in the country), I was absolutely appalled at the quality of the schools in 90% of the places I looked. As an affluent person with the means to choose, I chose to look elsewhere. The experience got me thinking, however: 90% of people go to terrible schools because they don't have a choice.

Taxes are continually cut. Districts are gerrymandered so the most residents don't get an equal say. Interest groups take over local and state politics and de-prioritize investing in the future in the name of profits and short-term political gains. If nations grow great when people sew the seeds of trees in whose shade they will never sit, then we're in the clear-cutting stage of our society.

This study provides quantitative evidence that something is wrong with education, but there is qualitative evidence as well. The frequent politicization of events and susceptibility to fake news indicates a lack of critical thinking skills.

silisili• 5 years ago

This is a direct result of elimination of the middle class, the relatively rich getting richer, and those below well, not.

The tax base just evaporates. I've seen literal unincorporated swapland turned into a subdivision, well more of a little city, for the 'haves', complete with its own elementary school. Top rated, of course.

Bussing attempted to solve this problem, in my belief in the wrong way. For a public good, especially one for non taxpaying class(children), the state should probably take the taxes and divvy it up fairly. I'm a big believer in personal property rights, hard work, all that jazz...but not that rich children deserve a better education than the less fortunate.

lsiebert• 5 years ago

Also studies of universal pre K suggests it more than pays for itself.

https://nieer.org/2019/01/31/research-shows-high-quality-pre...

WillPostForFood3• 5 years ago

Taxes aren’t going down in New York, and more is being spent on education than ever, even adjusting for inflation. The money just isn’t well spent, and doesn’t make it to the classroom.

https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/chart-of-the-day-administrati...

rp14• 5 years ago

Your chart shows that the student population increased 96%, teachers increased 252%, and non-teacher staff has increased by 700%. But what does that mean in terms of the typical school budget? Going from 1 to 7 non-teacher staff doesn't seem like that big of a deal. A baseline related to the school budget would make these stats more useful.

Also, the article clearly has a political axe to grind. For instance, they compare the Chicago BOE to the Japanese Ministry of Education. The Japanese Ministry of Education is actually called "The Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology." You can read their Wikipedia page, but they're not directly involved in providing education to the population, so it makes sense that they would have a small staff:

The Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (文部科学省, Monbu-kagaku-shō), also known as MEXT or Monka-shō, is one of the eleven Ministries of Japan that composes part of the executive branch of the Government of Japan. Their goal is to improve the development of Japan in relation with the international community. They are responsible for funding research under their jurisdiction, some of which includes: children's health in relation to home environment, delta-sigma modulations utilizing graphs, gender equality in sciences, and other general research for the future

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ministry_of_Education,_Culture...

m0zg4• 5 years ago

In my state we're already paying more than Finland per pupil: $13K/yr, with nowhere near the results. It's not the money that's causing this. It's that there are too much "administrative" and "service" staff feeding at the trough, and schools play political / virtue signaling games instead of relentlessly drilling STEM curricula into kids' heads.

acdha2• 5 years ago

These comparisons are also complicated by two other factors:

American school systems are expected to provide special needs care. One aide for a child with severe disabilities might cost as much as their teacher. This is one of the most common reasons for charter schools giving the impression of producing higher scores at lower cost – if you don’t have a robust program, the most expensive students won’t enroll.

American schools also enroll a very broad range of students with the expectation that they’ll make it all the way through high school. That includes children of recent immigrants who have very limited English proficiency, and the deeper poverty which the U.S. allows without tracking those kids into early graduation or a secondary system. When you compare international test scores among socioeconomic-matched students, the U.S. scores well – not Finland but solidly among our peers.

rp14• 5 years ago

This stat is largely meaningless without knowing the state. Salaries in certain parts of the U.S. are much higher than in Finland. The average salary in NYC is like 4x the average salary in Helsinki. Not sure why you’d expect the cost per student to be the same?

mensetmanusman6• 5 years ago

America typically spends up there in the top 10 of OECD countries in terms of dollars per capita on education.

Unfortunately it’s horribly spent. I wouldn’t mind testing a voucher program to see if that would add some innovation by letting parents choose how to spend the $13k allocated per their student. All spending instead is going to a snowballing administrative bureaucracy. Oh well.

bsder• 5 years ago

I am quite sympathetic about too much administration; however, the difference is more fundamental.

America doesn't "track" students and teaches everybody. Other countries flush away the lower performing students to non-academic education as the years progress.

We see what this does even here in the US. Every charter school always manages to claim to be "cost effective"--except that they always manage to do this by effectively flushing the lower performing (read "expensive") students back to the public schools. When you force the charter schools to accept via lottery so they can't cherry pick only the decent students, their cost effectiveness vanishes.

And, by the way, the Gates Foundation actually had solid research about this from following several programs. For middle school age and below students, you need to spend roughly $15K per student (and that was 5+ years ago--so adjust upward), hold class sizes at about 15 students maximum, and have 2 adults in the room. This allows you to bring poorly performing students up to average over several years.

ALL of those programs were eventually cancelled for lack of money. Everybody wants "educational excellence" until somebody hands them the bill--then everybody pisses and moans about cost.

The only people who don't moan about cost are the upper class--they fund the hell out of the schools their kids go to. Funny that.

tremon3• 5 years ago

America doesn't "track" students and teaches everybody. Other countries flush away the lower performing students to non-academic education as the years progress.

This study was about 13-year olds. Most countries "flush away" (thank you for using a gratuitously denigrating term here) their students after 13, not before.

PeterisP2• 5 years ago

The comparisons of education systems measure everybody, no matter how you track them. If measurements of a "tracking" system shows better results (measured on as average of everybody) than teaching everyone together, that doesn't imply a bad measurement, that implies that tracking may be beneficial.

Also, you yourself provide explicit examples of de facto "tracking" in USA, just the separation is based on parents' financial means instead of educational attributes.

superflit2• 5 years ago

Demographics are changing.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bell_Curve

gremloni• 5 years ago

Existing stable “demographs” saw a decrease from past numbers.

throwaway59553• 5 years ago

So how did the demographics of the USA changed since the 1970s?

jmpman• 5 years ago

Stupid people are having more kids?

avsteele• 5 years ago

No Child Left Behind passed in 2002. My understanding is that this mandated a lot more annual standardized testing that continues to this day.

Is the data from the NCLB tests consistent with the NAEP results?

axiosgunnar• 5 years ago

Is it smartphones and social media?

Long-term NAEP scores for 13-year-olds drop for first time since testing began

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