It's actually pretty easy. Especially at that level. Everything is just plug n play numbers into said formula and it almost works itself out. Heck it's that way for half of highschool as well.
65% of 8th Graders not proficient in Reading; 67% not proficient in Math
- Thread starter Jadentheman
- Start date
That’s exactly what it is.
This was something Neil deGrass Tyson talked about once- even if you never had to use math in your life, the act of learning it is enough to apply logic skills and puzzle solving.
Besides, math is easier than reading anyway- just work out the steps and it applies to every culture. Language is much more subjective
Your posts in this thread actually explain a lot about your other posts on the forum as a whole. Holy shit.
This is something that needs to be fixed from the bottom up and it won't be cheap, but the education problem in the US is just as big a national security issue as climate change or whatever adversarial country currently tops our list imo. We're talking childcare, income inequality, universal healthcare, criminal justice reform, spousal/family unity at home, working culture, etc.
Kids with parents in the slammer, borderline poverty income at home (due to school loans, medical bills or a million other reasons), domestic disputes at home, one or two parents too busy working to instill good learning values at home will very likely suffer academically and fixing these issues will take a holistic approach, but it'll be every damn penny. American society has a lot of sickness in it and our obsession with cutting taxes is a big part of it.
Last edited:
Precisely
Dem boomers got this shit on lock :(
Oh trust me, I'm graduating with a Computer Science degree and I ALWAYS had trouble in math. I've suffered through hours and hours of practice and I wanted to quit at many times so I totally understand, but I think in the end I appreciate what I've learned even though it was brutal.
Agreed, be that as it may, the data from this report indicates an increase in performance on a national level since the early/mid 90s.
In 6th grade I tested at a college graduate reading level.
All of the nerds and I got our pictures taken for the yearbook and school magazine.
But to me, it was an imbalance.
Though I could read at a high level, my math skills were awful.
I don't even blame the "poor" education system ... I just think math was really boring and I could never focus.
Even in Uni. i barely scraped by in those Calc. classes. I was totally unprepared.
I wouldn't call these low-testing kids "dumb"... just unprepared.
All of the nerds and I got our pictures taken for the yearbook and school magazine.
But to me, it was an imbalance.
Though I could read at a high level, my math skills were awful.
I don't even blame the "poor" education system ... I just think math was really boring and I could never focus.
Even in Uni. i barely scraped by in those Calc. classes. I was totally unprepared.
I wouldn't call these low-testing kids "dumb"... just unprepared.
Eh, it just means the curriculum is tough and not coddling the kids. High school is a joke and these numbers are promising because we're finally seeing educators smarten up and start preparing students for the rigours of college coursework.
Grade inflation is very, very bad as it instills a false sense of confidence and competence in a lot of teens and then they get shellshocked when they bomb their first midterm.
Grade inflation is very, very bad as it instills a false sense of confidence and competence in a lot of teens and then they get shellshocked when they bomb their first midterm.
Well, a big part of it is the whole push for Charter schools with the GOP and economic and religious right wingers sabotaging the public school system over the last several decades along with other issues. So then you have sites like that who are going to push how our school systems are failing while their contemporaries have played a major role in it because they want education to be a for profit endeavor that they can steal from.
This falls on the parents as well, they should be encouraging their children to want to learn and helping them do so. I get the feeling that a lot of these parents are lazy arsebags who aren't taking an interest in their child's education. It's not good enough.
This is how it was for me 20 years ago. I want a deeper dive on wtf they are doing with these standardized tests lol.
Working in Baltimore City Public Schools, none of this surprises me. A lot of my kids are dealing with so much shit - broken homes, bullying, traumatic experiences, depression and other mental health issues, negligence, and just good ol fashioned ineffective parenting - that a lot of them can't even muster a fuck to give about school. Add in schools being understaffed, school buildings being in disrepair (we had to shut down all schools for a few days [some for a week+] in January because the parents were complaining so many of them were without heat), over-testing, etc. and trying to get students where they should does often feel like trying to ice skate uphill.
Here's the secret: most people on the internet don't read.
I read somewhere (might have been here lol) that the biggest problem with reading comprehension is that schools teach a methodology for it, but it turns out that just having background information on the topic that you are trying to analyze is the biggest factor in comprehension. So if you are doing a test in which you are answering questions based on a passage about a Mayan temple or someshit, having pre-existing knowledge in the subject of the passage is the most important thing, not some route methodology. So wealthier students who have a larger body of knowledge from attentive parents, tutoring outside of school, traveling, etc. will have a larger body of random knowledge and therefore always do better on these tests. I think there was one state that wanted to change the reading comprehension questions to be based on the existing history/social studies curriculum rather than just having random reading passages.
Common Core is actually splendid. The curriculum and objectives are great. The criticism comes from ignorance, ... and the fact that teachers (below High School level) are often shit in Math.
Last edited:
There are so, so many fields where math is essential to the day to day life. I use some sort of Calculus, Algebra and/or Trigonometry every day of my life as an electrical engineer.
Dude, seriously? It's literally called "Engineering". How do you think one knows the next building or bridge doesn't collapse, or how to make computer chips faster, or how to build machines? That's a shitton of Multivariate Calculus for modelling, optimization, it's Partial Differential Equations for simulation, it's Probability Theory for risk assessment, it's Linear Algebra and Statistics for data analysis.
Physics is just the world described in mathematical terms in order to get reliable results. It's not pure Mathematics or theoretical Computer Science / Physics where you can actually sometimes debate about usefulness. It's just applied Math basics an Engineer has to have in order to do his job. And btw., neither games, nor computers or the internet would exist without Math.
Last edited:
That's insane how widely standards in schools. In my eighth grade class, half the kids were already doing Geometry or Algebra 2, and one particularly talented chick was already in Calculus (she took it at a local community college). I'm pretty sure more than half of us were reading at the twelfth grade level as well.
Public school, no waiting list, couldn't test in. You were zoned into the school based on your neighborhood.
Public school, no waiting list, couldn't test in. You were zoned into the school based on your neighborhood.
This. I can tell the difference in my college students already. People that learned math "the old way" are slower at calculation and slower at actually understanding what's going on when they do the calculation. Common Core is a step in the right direction.
The reason the US military gets so much money is not to improve national security, it's due to corruption. Attempting to equate the importance of education, healthcare, or anything not already considered as key to national security is a waste of time until money is out of politics.
What? From what I've seen, most normal kids take algebra 1 in 7th grade or even 8th grade. From my experience, only those who aren't doing so well in school take algebra after 8th grade.
People’s experiences vary based on age and school district. As someone in his mid 30s my experience in school lines up with a few other posters in this thread. Algebra 1 in 8th grade. Geometry freshman year, then Algebra 2, Pre Calc and AP Calc.
It is depressing but the data from this very report shows that overall performance has been trending up since the early/mid 90s. I highly encourage everyone to look up the actual report and see the data.
What's wrong with charter schools?Alright, what the fuck is this? https://www.cnsnews.com/author/terence-p-jeffrey
This guy is literally advocating for Charter Schools. Look at this guy's work.
I don't think this article has much merit, genuinely.
Basically they have no real accountability or oversight even though they receive public funding that could be used for public schools
Also, Rs tend to use it as a mechanism to (further) defund public schools, by taking the money away with "vouchers" and, well, reducing enrollment numbers
I don't know why you say seriously, because your statement is true. A large part of this is the result of conservative's assault on education on multiple levels.
Why? I thought the goal is to keep Americans uneducated so the rich can continue to profit? And these numbers are before that DeVos lady. With more than 2/3rd of the general population either in prison or dumb or both things are looking good for the future of capitalism.
I should have phrased it "on topic" rather than seriously. Believe me, I meant what I said
There's a fundamental underlying cause to all of this: test-taking inherently measures the meta-skills that can be grouped as "test-taking ability". In a large part they measure the presence of certain attitudes and knowledge of the mechanics of the tests themselves. Students are not taught this, because the deconstructive attitude needed is seen as "disrespectful" of the authority of the curriculum's creator and implementer, and students are at the same time conditioned to believe that all information they are fed is always correct and equally valuable. This is not the case.
First, I want to explain what I mean by "disrespect" - I mean it as the view that any text you are handed in school is not derived from an absolute authority and crafted with the utmost skill. The text is there for you to question, for you to judge, for you to deconstruct, and for you to compare to past texts (that's why background knowledge is such a strong factor in test scores). Learning is a process of asking questions to develop an internal model of some complicated subject matter. We need this process, because our brains are smaller in capacity than the massive amounts of sensory information we gather from the world, so we develop effective forms of compression including "words".
A significant part of this is understanding the necessary degree of information fidelity that a particular class or standardized test will require - often times, pattern-matching a novel subject as a member of a superclass, then making educated guess from there. Or understanding what the "purpose" of a particular segment of the curriculum is, and using that knowledge to decide which information to prioritize remembering. And along a similar line, recognizing which material will be relevant to multiple questions and which details are so specific that they could really apply to a narrow set of questions that it is unlikely to see repeated on the same test. Most importantly, it is having the confidence to know when to cut a loss and focus on your strengths - you don't need to ever correctly answer 100% of the questions, especially on a standardized test where different grade demarcations are determined by clustering of the scores of the rest of the population. But you do need to answer all the questions, which is where all these heuristic methods shine and you can get some points by turning a 25% chance into a 50% chance, or reducing fidelity a few gradations and making the guess that corresponds to that superclass, or by having the vague recollection that this particular question asks about the piece of information who's purpose in the curriculum was to be an outlier and guessing accordingly.
And then the next step is to be able to decide when developing these skills will give you more value than trying to cram a few more details into your brain. But put less charitably, it means deciding when you know more than the school board officials and the less dedicated teachers, which they naturally do not like and do not want to encourage. If your goal is to pass the tests, it can be more efficient to study the generalizable skills of information processing versus class-specific information.
Ironically, the process of doing this will teach students better than most curriculums do, and from my experience it is those curriculums that lead students in this direction and tell them that it's okay to "disrespect" the system in this manner that have the best result. Not only are these meta-skills applicable to almost every subject, but they are critical in the real world where the truth of a statement is inherently contingent on its context or tautological. It is a shame that less dedicated teachers and school board members would see this as an attack on them, an attack on the validity of the system they have created - though I suppose in a way it is, haha.
However, attempts to teach this process usually fail because of the lack of the "disrespect" factor. "Find the main idea" is good advice - it is imperative to be able to quickly extract the purpose that a paragraph serves. But then students are taught to search for the topic sentence by highlighting words that are typically in "topic" sentences without explaining why, just that these words usually indicate that the sentence in question is a "topic" sentence. This is done for the purpose of answering the question on the standardized test "find the main idea". But now the students still aren't doing anything with the main idea, because telling students that they can use the main idea to construct a lightweight mental model of that paragraph, and then return to it to answer further questions that the recognize deal with the general idea of that paragraph.
Basically, schools are too afraid to tell students the truth that a) for schoolwork and tests you aren't supposed to "read" the material like you would read a book and b) not every single word in the material is equally valuable. And because of this, students are overwhelmed and never develop the fundamental logic and rhetorical skills that underlie most of the curriculum.
Of course, all of this applies because a student's worth is measured by a number, and therefore they are incentivized to either boost that number by any means or to give up because they put in a lot of effort and didn't get results, because no one told them they aren't actually supposed to put in that effort and that all the talk about hard work has an invisible qualifier that effort only matters when directed in a positive direction - that spinning your wheels gets you nowhere despite being even more tiring than just cruising along towards the goal. More penalties for not raising the number only works because it gives students more desperation to throw the notion of acquiring generalizable skills in the past to boost the number, which ironically lead them down the path of "disrespect".
This is what people mean when they say "the American education system destroys student's desire to learn" - it manages to turn the joy of discovery into a glorified exercise in sorting and pattern matching, where any effort put into exploring that doesn't lead to immediate quantitative results will always be outpaced by cynical deconstructions. We all love to say that "such and such famous inventor discovered one thousand ways to not accomplish their goals first!", yet also deride any instance of those "one thousand ways" in a number of different ways.
First, I want to explain what I mean by "disrespect" - I mean it as the view that any text you are handed in school is not derived from an absolute authority and crafted with the utmost skill. The text is there for you to question, for you to judge, for you to deconstruct, and for you to compare to past texts (that's why background knowledge is such a strong factor in test scores). Learning is a process of asking questions to develop an internal model of some complicated subject matter. We need this process, because our brains are smaller in capacity than the massive amounts of sensory information we gather from the world, so we develop effective forms of compression including "words".
A significant part of this is understanding the necessary degree of information fidelity that a particular class or standardized test will require - often times, pattern-matching a novel subject as a member of a superclass, then making educated guess from there. Or understanding what the "purpose" of a particular segment of the curriculum is, and using that knowledge to decide which information to prioritize remembering. And along a similar line, recognizing which material will be relevant to multiple questions and which details are so specific that they could really apply to a narrow set of questions that it is unlikely to see repeated on the same test. Most importantly, it is having the confidence to know when to cut a loss and focus on your strengths - you don't need to ever correctly answer 100% of the questions, especially on a standardized test where different grade demarcations are determined by clustering of the scores of the rest of the population. But you do need to answer all the questions, which is where all these heuristic methods shine and you can get some points by turning a 25% chance into a 50% chance, or reducing fidelity a few gradations and making the guess that corresponds to that superclass, or by having the vague recollection that this particular question asks about the piece of information who's purpose in the curriculum was to be an outlier and guessing accordingly.
And then the next step is to be able to decide when developing these skills will give you more value than trying to cram a few more details into your brain. But put less charitably, it means deciding when you know more than the school board officials and the less dedicated teachers, which they naturally do not like and do not want to encourage. If your goal is to pass the tests, it can be more efficient to study the generalizable skills of information processing versus class-specific information.
Ironically, the process of doing this will teach students better than most curriculums do, and from my experience it is those curriculums that lead students in this direction and tell them that it's okay to "disrespect" the system in this manner that have the best result. Not only are these meta-skills applicable to almost every subject, but they are critical in the real world where the truth of a statement is inherently contingent on its context or tautological. It is a shame that less dedicated teachers and school board members would see this as an attack on them, an attack on the validity of the system they have created - though I suppose in a way it is, haha.
However, attempts to teach this process usually fail because of the lack of the "disrespect" factor. "Find the main idea" is good advice - it is imperative to be able to quickly extract the purpose that a paragraph serves. But then students are taught to search for the topic sentence by highlighting words that are typically in "topic" sentences without explaining why, just that these words usually indicate that the sentence in question is a "topic" sentence. This is done for the purpose of answering the question on the standardized test "find the main idea". But now the students still aren't doing anything with the main idea, because telling students that they can use the main idea to construct a lightweight mental model of that paragraph, and then return to it to answer further questions that the recognize deal with the general idea of that paragraph.
Basically, schools are too afraid to tell students the truth that a) for schoolwork and tests you aren't supposed to "read" the material like you would read a book and b) not every single word in the material is equally valuable. And because of this, students are overwhelmed and never develop the fundamental logic and rhetorical skills that underlie most of the curriculum.
Of course, all of this applies because a student's worth is measured by a number, and therefore they are incentivized to either boost that number by any means or to give up because they put in a lot of effort and didn't get results, because no one told them they aren't actually supposed to put in that effort and that all the talk about hard work has an invisible qualifier that effort only matters when directed in a positive direction - that spinning your wheels gets you nowhere despite being even more tiring than just cruising along towards the goal. More penalties for not raising the number only works because it gives students more desperation to throw the notion of acquiring generalizable skills in the past to boost the number, which ironically lead them down the path of "disrespect".
This is what people mean when they say "the American education system destroys student's desire to learn" - it manages to turn the joy of discovery into a glorified exercise in sorting and pattern matching, where any effort put into exploring that doesn't lead to immediate quantitative results will always be outpaced by cynical deconstructions. We all love to say that "such and such famous inventor discovered one thousand ways to not accomplish their goals first!", yet also deride any instance of those "one thousand ways" in a number of different ways.
Last edited:
Yes, it is relevant how emblematic the rhetoric of social conservatives is to the fact that we fail to teach people the necessary underlying information processing skills to continue lifelong learning. Any time they express outrage over novel gender terminology or any form of diversity it usually boils down to "but I conflate semantic handles with the information I store in them and cannot think of either outside of the context of the other", "everyone who doesn't have the same mental model of a certain categorical schema as me is a wrong and only pretending to be different", or "I learned it this way in high school, and everyone knows that humans have never in history poorly developed categorization systems for anything, or "I learned it this way in high school, and my high school curriculum is the pinnacle of human understanding".
The real problem is that the questioning of the validity of information even has to be referred to by me as "disrespect", because social conservatives meltdown as soon as anyone questions the magical natural order that has been handed to them by The Old Ones. And so they project and view any attempt to challenge the validity of the alleged natural order as having a meltdown.
In fact, this is hilariously relevant to what I'm saying because there's a character in this skit cynically giving the teacher the answers she knows they want to hear. Because that's exactly what is actually has always been happening in a way that has nothing to do with self-identity, but social conservatives didn't mind because they were being given the answers they wanted to hear - and then calling that process of giving them the answers they want "intelligence".
It's also adorable watching them in the comments try to mock the rhetoric of questioning the validity of particular categorical schema without understanding the mechanics underlying it - almost as if they are "signalling their virtue" without grappling with the actual contents encoded in the words they mockingly repeat, or something along those lines. Hm, maybe I should coin that phrase?
All in all, if people want schools to more harshly punish failures to achieve sufficient test scores, they need to be ready for when people are more harsh about their own intellectual failures.
Last edited:
Can't be anymore embarrassing. You have yourself marked as an idiot. Congrats
Just out of curiosity i went to the NAEP's website to see if they had historical results and from what I saw, the numbers are about the same as past years and over the course of the last 30 years or so, they are actually trending UP.
You can see the historical results here for 2012 and prior years to get an idea how they compare with the latest results. The 8th graders are the Age 13 line, obviously.
Reading
Math
This should probably be added to the OP (although im pretty sure no one will read it) to provide some context. The scores aren't good, but blaming it on a particular administration or a particular piece of legislation isn't correct. Standardized test scores have always been kinda crappy, no matter what or who is in charge.
You can see the historical results here for 2012 and prior years to get an idea how they compare with the latest results. The 8th graders are the Age 13 line, obviously.
Reading
Math
This should probably be added to the OP (although im pretty sure no one will read it) to provide some context. The scores aren't good, but blaming it on a particular administration or a particular piece of legislation isn't correct. Standardized test scores have always been kinda crappy, no matter what or who is in charge.
And yet IQ test scores have been consistently rising at a rapid rate far outpacing that of evolution. This discrepancy suggests that "intelligence" is not nearly as easily quantifiable nor as discretely defined as the school system acts.Just out of curiosity i went to the NAEP's website to see if they had historical results and from what I saw, the numbers are about the same as past years and over the course of the last 30 years or so, they are actually trending UP.
You can see the historical results here for 2012 and prior years to get an idea how they compare with the latest results. The 8th graders are the Age 13 line, obviously.
Reading
Math
This should probably be added to the OP (although im pretty sure no one will read it) to provide some context. The scores aren't good, but blaming it on a particular administration or a particular piece of legislation isn't correct. Standardized test scores have always been kinda crappy, no matter what or who is in charge.