10 ms·

Large Percentages of American Students Perform Above Grade Level

50 points by tokenadult 10y ago

tokenadult 10y ago
An additional data point on this issue is from a few years ago, the discovery that students surveyed by the federal National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP), known informally as "the Nation's Report Card," often self-report that their school lessons are so easy that school is mostly boring. https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/education/report/2012/07/10/11913/do-schools-challenge-our-students/ https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/education/report/201... On my part, having lived in another country (Taiwan), I have long suspected that most United States pupils could handle more challenging school lessons, if only those were on offer in United States schools. For example, in almost every other country in the world, it is routine for pupils to begin foreign language study while still in elementary school, and in many countries (including Taiwan and Singapore, a generation ago) the majority of school pupils are attending school with a language of instruction that is not the same as the language they speak at home with their parents. Yet most United States high school graduates are resolutely monolingual English speakers, unless they grew up with another home language besides English. International comparisons suggest that there is still plenty of room at the top for achievable higher standards for United States students, and that students would enjoy school better if their lessons were more challenging.
- jonlucc 10y ago
  I don't have any data to back this up aside from personal anecdote, but it seems that while many students would benefit from more rigorous courses, the ones who don't keep up are very expensive. They'd need almost twice as many classes, and as someone who was on the TaG (Talented and Gifted), AP, and IB track at my school, I am always nervous about further separation from other classmates.
  - maxerickson 10y ago
    Classroom time doesn't need to be the primary social time for kids. A lot of the problems that people squawk about for mixed ages are only problems because they are tacitly tolerated. Discard social promotion and you don't need to worry about age group separation.
    - jessaustin 10y ago
      You've identified yet another social dysfunction for which we can blame the automobile: Americans think children ought to be stuck in their homes when unsupervised. The kids simply must socialize in school, since there's no way we could allow them to ride bikes a few miles to visit friends after school. This may be less of an issue now, with social media. In third grade, I was in a mixed third/fourth grade classroom. It may have been the least boring year I spent in elementary school, although frankly that isn't a high bar to clear.
      - r00fus 10y ago
        Why would the helicopter-parent syndrome be less of an issue with social media?
        emp_zealoth 10y ago
        At least the kids can talk to some other human beings instead being locked in solitary confinement
      - dsfyu404ed 10y ago
        I'd blame that squarely on overprotective parents. If it was the cars fault "uphill both ways in the snow" stories would have died off about two generations ago. It's no longer socially acceptable for a parent to allow their kid(s) much freedom of movement ("no you can't ride your bike to your friend's house because crossing the street is too dangerous") and social media steps in to fill the void.
        jessaustin 10y ago
  - bradleyjg 10y ago
    The larger the pool of people being drawn from the better tailoring that can be done. If you have 24 kids total in the district, then maybe you put them all in one classroom regardless of age and teach that way. If you have 300 kids in the school district now you can do separate classes for each age. If you have 900 kids, now each grade can have 3 classes and maybe one of them in each grade can be set aside for advanced students and one for slower students. If you have 25,000 kids in the district, now you can start doing things like an entire G&T school, and/or a school for the students interested in performing arts, and/or a specialized vocational high school. Unfortunately, the trend in the US is towards micro-catchment areas mostly as a legacy of racial segregation efforts and because of the continuing desire to have socio-economic segregation.
- learc83 10y ago
  There is a reason students in other countries learn additional languages at a young age--it's more beneficial for them. The ROI for learning English as a second language is incredibly high. The ROI for learning any second language as an American is comparatively much lower. The average American who learns a second language also lacks the ability/need to use that language day to day, so even if they do learn, they'll rapidly lose proficiency once they leave school.
  - Broken_Hippo 10y ago
    In the US, the average student could benefit from learning Spanish. In some areas, they wouldnt get a chance to use it as much, but in many cases, they would be able to. If anything, they'd be able to use spanish language programming to help them learn. Which is ironically the same sorts of things that younger kids from other countries learning english have to learn from.
    - learc83 10y ago
      >In the US, the average student could benefit from learning Spanish. There are some secondary benefits from learning a second language [1]. But learning Spanish outside of a few areas in the US brings little direct benefit. There just aren't enough Spanish speakers who don't also speak English in the vast majority of the US. Furthermore, Immigration from Mexico is falling off, and the percent of Hispanic households who speak English at home is rapidly rising. This means that any direct benefit to learning Spanish will diminish over time. >If anything, they'd be able to use spanish language programming to help them learn. Which is ironically the same sorts of things that younger kids from other countries learning english have to learn from. Not even remotely comparable. The amount of material available only in English dwarfs the material available only in Spanish. To sum up, sure kids in American can learn Spanish, and many do. But there are real tangible and financial benefits to learning English as a second language that dwarf any of the benefits American kids get from learning Spanish. Once you recognize that, it makes perfect sense that Americans are more likely to be monolingual. [1] Studies show, there are cognitive benefits to bilingualism, but they also show there are benefits to monolingualism. Usually you'll find more benefits to bilingualism over all, but larger single-language vocabulary and faster retrieval time are definitely advantageous. Studies also don't show that the cognitive benefits of learning a second language outweigh the cognitive opportunity costs of studying something else instead. Additionally, the majority of these cognitive benefits are recorded in children and adults who spent a fair amount of time speaking in both languages. It's unlikely that learning a language in school and then forgetting it later will have the same beneficial effects.
- Retric 10y ago
  If you look more closely at the eastern model you find they cover a lot of completely useless material. Which is the core issue we could have people say memorize the first 4 digits of the square and cube roots of every number from 1 to 100. And yes it's more useful than you might think. However, not enough that students are going to remember it in 15 years. Quick, what year did the french revolution start and end?
  - zhemao 10y ago
    Basically. I remember talking to a younger cousin in China, and he asked if I ever had to recite texts in language class. As in, memorize a passage verbatim and regurgitate it on the exam. I said "No, what would even be the point of that? You'll just forget it afterwards." Then I asked him if they ever discussed the meaning of the text in class. He said they did not. The East Asian system gets a few things right. We definitely could give students more challenging material (especially in math and science), but the focus on rote learning and endless drudgery (they get soooo much homework) is not something I'm too keen on being introduced here.
  - tokenadult 10y ago
    I wouldn't say that about a comparison between math problems in textbooks in China and math problems in textbooks in the United States. (I have math textbooks in English, and math textbooks in Chinese, a language that I read well as a second language.) The focus on deep conceptual understanding and open-ended problem-solving in math is actually much better in east Asia than in the United States. http://condor.depaul.edu/sepp/mat660/Askey.pdf http://condor.depaul.edu/sepp/mat660/Askey.pdf (I can well believe, however, that any current with a current one-party dictatorial government, something Taiwan had the first time I lived there and something China still has today, will lag in teaching history. Critical thinking about history is bad for dictators. Taiwan thoroughly revised the history textbooks after it had its peaceful transition to democracy.)
    - schoen 10y ago
      > I can well believe, however, that any current with a current one-party dictatorial government, something Taiwan had the first time I lived there and something China still has today, will lag in teaching history. Multiparty liberal democracies allow much more scope for debating and interpreting history, but they still commonly encourage a teleological interpretation that glorifies the nation and its current political system. I also get the feeling that understanding history in a meaningful way is hard, and that educational systems generally aren't making much headway against this problem, maybe somewhat independently of how much debate or criticism they permit. One difficulty is the conscious and semiconscious propagandization of many historical issues by many parties, together with the desire to see historical figures or groups we identify with in a positive light and those we don't identify with in a negative light. Another thing is the truth of the "past is a foreign country" observation: https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/L._P._Hartley https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/L._P._Hartley Getting inside of the minds and cultures of people from the past is really difficult!
- schoen 10y ago
  Americans are also often shocked to see how challenging lessons actually are in other places, and sometimes kind of frightened by it. I feel like there's a whole genre of Internet posts of what students are allegedly learning in other countries. ("Cheryl's birthday" from Singapore is a famous recent example, but there are plenty of others.) I had a physics teacher in high school who came from Russia and was always frustrated at the lower standards for science education here in the U.S. He would describe what people in Russia were supposed to know by a particular grade level and it was commonly years ahead of Americans -- and he claimed students were expected to take much more time studying overall (although that's not necessarily always useful, and there are presumably also many different kinds of schools in Russia, as there are in the U.S.). We can surely find some possible tradeoffs and disadvantages of particular educational methods and approaches used in other countries. (People often complain about the rote-memorization issue with the associated lack of conceptual understanding or creativity, and, when we see very difficult educational materials from earlier eras in the U.S., there's the observation that students then may have had to learn many fewer subjects at a time.) But it seems like there's a lot of indication that huge numbers of U.S. students could be learning at a more challenging pace than they are today.
  - sliverstorm 10y ago
    It's kind of hard to tell what's real anymore thanks to said genre of posts, after hearing the whole gamut up to things to the order of "Well Russian children are expected to know calculus by 8, group theory by 9, and complete their mastery of theoretical physics by 11"
    - selimthegrim 10y ago
      I would post the quote from Vladimir Arnold where he said he taught sixth graders group theory but that would probably be depressing.
  - tbihl 10y ago
    I only spent a semester in another country (in Madrid), but I felt that the lessons were not all that challenging, but they were thorough. Meaning, in my courses there we were expected to know a lot, but once we knew that material we weren't asked to manipulate it in any way that really pushed us. Confounding my interpretation is that one of my courses, as a computer engineering student, was a fluid mechanics course in the aerospace department. Then again, my US undergrad is probably pretty atypical. My school had very heavy core requirements (at least for engineering), so you had a lot of classes each semester. It tends to be a top-ranked US school, but the classes really weren't very challenging, and because of how many we took, they never seemed to go into much depth. On another note, it's not often that I reminisce longingly on my childhood, but that's exactly what happened while I was doing Cheryl's birthday. My favorite things growing up were math and logic puzzles in their pure forms, un-obscured by the tedium that accompanies them in real life. I remember Math 24 from Elementary school, Math Counts in middle school, and some brain teasers and logic puzzles sprinkled throughout both times. If you're needing some for late elementary children, I highly recommend "The Lady or The Tiger and Other Logic Puzzles"
- Broken_Hippo 10y ago
  I only spoke English until a couple years ago, despite having taken a bit of French and German in high school. I could have never actually used it. Couple years ago, I moved to Norway. And the kids here are amazing with language. Not only do they understand dialects well and learn both official types of Norwegian, they are expected to understand Danish and Swedish. They start learning English their first year in school, and many wind up taking an additional language in high school. There is no homework in elementary school (and less at higher levels), no grades, and no holding kids back a grade. The school days are shorter. If a kid is needing help, there are programs to help them catch up. A smart kid will make good grades (and work for them): Average actually means average, and that is OK. Good marks mean a kid is learning over and above what is expected of them. If too many students are getting high marks (instead of average) on the national tests, they adjust the tests so they are harder. A few kids find school boring, but the system itself leaves room for kids to excel as well as makes provisions for those that aren't - which seems like one of the fallbacks of the American system. You are expected to make A's and B's and there simply isn't room for the high acheiver to work for anything.
  - pc86 10y ago
    > [there are] no grades > A smart kid will make good grades
    - mgkimsal 10y ago
      maybe that's the two types of Norwegian seeping through?
    - jdmichal 10y ago
      I read that as "there are no grades (levels)", especially as the following point is "there's no holding back a grade (level)".
      - dalke 10y ago
        I think it's a switch from grades/marks for elementary school vs. grades/marks for secondary school. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education_in_Norway#Primary_school_.28Barneskole.2C_Grades_1.E2.80.937.2C_ages_6.E2.80.9313.29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education_in_Norway#Primary_sc... says, of primary school: > No official grades are given at this level. However, the teacher often writes a comment, analysis, and sometimes an unofficial grade on tests. Tests are to be taken home and shown to parents. There is also an introductory test to let the teacher know if the student is above average or is in need of some assistance at school. > ... When the students enter lower secondary school, at age 12 or 13, they begin getting grades for their work.
- serge2k 10y ago
  > Yet most United States high school graduates are resolutely monolingual English speakers, unless they grew up with another home language besides English So? Oh my god, I'm such a bad person for only speaking English. How can I suffer such a life. /s But I agree with your point, the challenge offered by schools is too low.
aresant 10y ago
"Between 11% and 37% of California students scored at or above the next grade level . . . of their current grade level. The percentages tend to be higher for students in the older grades." It's a pipe dream to believe that the public education system is going to adapt to be a one-size-fits-all, especially in California's gigantic public schools system which has a "minimum" budget of ~$70,000,000,000 allocated to it every year. As a parent there is clear responsibility to help our kids outside of this structure - what strategies does HN undertake with their kids (or what did your parents undertake with you) that helped to close this gap? (1) http://www.cde.ca.gov/fg/fr/eb/budletter15-16.asp http://www.cde.ca.gov/fg/fr/eb/budletter15-16.asp
- SixSigma 10y ago
  Private school
- tokenadult 10y ago
  It's a pipe dream to believe that the public education system is going to adapt to be a one-size-fits-all May I take it that you mean "It's a pipe dream to believe that the public education system is going to adapt to be SOMETHING OTHER THAN a one-size-fits-all"? As a parent (of four children, two now adults) and as a voter and taxpayer, I am of course interested in general improvements in the education systems of all countries, and especially in the country I now live in, the United States. I think it will be helpful for advocacy of thoughtful improvements in education policy to be aware of how much young people do and can learn, whether or not their schools set high standards. I think setting more ambitious standards will make school less boring and more meaningful for the plurality of young people in the United States, and quite possibly for the majority of young people here. As a parent, I chose to homeschool my children early on. That seems (according to my oldest son's testimony, sent to me by email) to have been helpful for my oldest son's career as a hacker. My second son may pursue a programming career too, although he has plenty of other interests. I'm still interested in discussions of education policy, the issue that drew me to Hacker News, here because I can still adjust the educational plan for my two younger children some more, and because this matters for all of us, childless or not. But so far I have found it expedient, in a high-income school district with high parental educational levels, to homeschool my children for their elementary education. They then go to the friendly local high school (which has improved its academic standards recently by dint of competition from Minnesota's public school open-enrollment policy) and take lots of AP classes and do lots of academic extracurricular activities with friends who have open-enrolled from the territory of other school districts. It isn't perfect, but it's a trade-off that works well enough for us.
wnevets 10y ago
Pretty obvious side effect of lowering standards.
dragonwriter 10y ago
Unsurprising. Under NCLB and related measures, schools are incentivized not to promote advanced students faster than their age peers, since they are rewarded for improvement in (and punished for insufficient improvement or backtracking in) the percentage of students performing at or above grade level, so students that would otherwise have been advanced in grade ahead of their peers are held back to the normal advancement rate to make the schools' results look better. You get what you pay for.
- Afton 10y ago
  I'd like to know about this. Can you link to something about the incentive programs? I thought that they were heavily regional, but I admit that I haven't looked too deeply.
  - dragonwriter 10y ago
    > Can you link to something about the incentive programs? Well, the negative side is mostly the consequences for failing to make Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) under the NCLB. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adequate_Yearly_Progress https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adequate_Yearly_Progress
    - jtnews 10y ago
      AYP is out. The goals looked good on paper, made good sound bites for the news, but weren't realistic. NCLB is out too. The new thing is the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA).
      - dragonwriter 10y ago
        Right, but ESSA is less than a year old; NCLB and its AYP-based incentives spent nearly a decade and a half shaping American school outcomes (and many of the state and local laws and policies established in order to meet NCLB requirements and the incentives of the AYP system haven't been revised.) ESSA, OTOH, maintains the basic structure of NCLB, including the same kind of accountability system, but leaves detailed setting of standards and interventions to the states. It may weaken, but seems unlikely to eliminate, the pressures against advanced promotion (particularly in grades 3-8, where it continues the requirement for annual testing) created by NCLB and its AYP-based interventions.
dboreham 10y ago
The public school my kids attend routinely teaches the N+1 th grade math material in grades 7 and 8 so I suspect it is well known that the official syllabus has been pushed to allow score inflation. Same thing as all airline timetables having 10-20 minutes padding to reduce the probability of a late arrival.
- tokenadult 10y ago
  I suspect it is well known The submitted article suggests that this is not at all well known, and is an understudied issue. That's my impression too from years of doing research on education policy--most American teachers and school administrators have NO IDEA how much more young people could be learning in the school context, and indeed no idea how much learning the brighter kids do in the summer when they are away from school reading on their own.
- dspillett 10y ago
  I wouldn't say that is the same thing. The airlines aren't trying to be the best by a measure of getting to the destination absolutely the fastest and basing their efforts and predictions on that, they are trying to be predictable (and therefor reliable) by building in some contingency. The school wants the pupil to get the best score it possibly can and there is no "too good". The airline doesn't need to get the plane home in absolutely the best time, just reliably within a specified time, in fact arriving too early is potentially a problem for various reasons (you as a passenger only see the single nominal arrival time published, internally they will be working to a time window aiming to arrive "at or after YY:YY" as well as "at or before XX:XX").
panglott 10y ago
What real argument for age-based grades can there be?
- erikpukinskis 10y ago
  Another question for me is: what is the argument for a single grade across subjects? Why not let a kid be in Math 7, while still staying in Literature 5, and Physical Education 3, while another kid the same age is in Physical Education 12, Literature 6, and Math 2? If you mixed it up enough you could substantially lessen the stigmas of both being ahead and behind.
  - dragonwriter 10y ago
    > Another question for me is: what is the argument for a single grade across subjects? Prior to middle school / junior high (starting usually between 6th and 8th grade, depending on the particular school system), the norm in the US isn't to have distinct subject-matter classes, but classrooms with a single teacher for all subjects for one grade, which may not use a strict fixed allotment of time slots for each subject, and even where they do it may not be the same time slot for the same subject area in different classrooms in different grades in the same school (and even the set of subjects may change somewhat in different grades.) This makes per-subject variations in grade level for a student logistically difficult to accommodate. OTOH, once you get to middle school with per-subject classes being the norm, this is fairly easy to accommodate, and its just a scheduling and resource problem (e.g., in a middle school, do you have enough qualified students to support a Calculus class) at that level.
    - peter303 10y ago
      I reread the Ingall-Wilder Little School House series recently and was impressed with how one room school house operated with kids of all grades in the same room. Villages were not large enough for multiple teachers. Basically education in those days was memorizing and doing all the exercises in various primers. Teachers were often just teenage girls, not much older than the oldest students. Older people were too busy working or running households.
elchief 10y ago
If I were a billionaire my kids wouldn't go to school. I'd fly in experts and pay them top dollar. Want to learn about the web today? Here's Tim Berners-Lee to show you. I guess I'd make them do team sports so they didn't end up weird though...
- dragonwriter 10y ago
  > I guess I'd make them do team sports so they didn't end up weird though... People are quite capable of ending up weird having done team sports while growing up.
  - pc86 10y ago
    His (pretty clear) point was that socialization is important, and if you spend your formative years in a room interacting only with your family or a tutor you're not going to be a well-functioning adult.
    - dragonwriter 10y ago
      And my (I thought pretty clear) point was that "team sports", especially as the primary peer-interaction socialization venue, are far from a panacea for that problem.
      - TillE 10y ago
        Yes, team sports is a bit of a weird environment, and not just in America. Socialization is also possible while participating in 1v1 sports, or even something like chess club.
- rayiner 10y ago
  My kid is only 3, and my dissatisfaction with public school is already starting. We sent her to a Fairfax County (one of the top public school districts in the country), VA preschool for a few months while we lived with my parents while looking for a new place in D.C. They gave her a ton of worksheets and reading exercises. Flashbacks to my horrendous experience with FCPS. She goes to a Montessori preschool now, where they do about an hour and a half of real work a day and spend the rest of the day on the playground.
sandworm101 10y ago
Grade inflation. Talk to highschool students in western canada/us. They talk of 90% as a below-average score. My highschool grades, if I applied to university today, wouldn't qualify me for anything. There is an old skier's adage: If you aren't falling you aren't improving. By already knowing everything, these kids learn nothing. Then after all their As these now adults hit my classroom with reading issues and a fear of curiosity. Anything not on the exam is to be actively ignored. Don't read anything that might confuse the issues. Stick to the outlines. And when the prof asks you to pick a paper topic on your own, something not already in the outline, inundate him with panicked emails asking what you should and shouldn't find interesting .
tgarma1234 10y ago
Pretty sure we are all above average now. But seriously, it seems like schools have really drifted towards programs that enhance self-esteem and build confidence rather than making school the narcissistic insult it was when I was kid. I think that is fine. For the most part you can learn everything you actually want to know or need to know yourself later in life. It would be great if every kid left school thinking they were really good at things and had the confidence to get out there and try.
WalterBright 10y ago
American public schools don't have much to offer highly capable students. On the other hand, they don't stand in the way of them, either. I met many such in college, and they found ways to get what the wanted.
- dragonwriter 10y ago
  Generalizations about "American public school's" features are usually wrong. Many American public schools have a lot to offer highly-capable students. OTOH, many American public schools actually do quite a bit to stand in their way (often, at a minimum, forcing them to spend a large portion of the day in classes far below their ability is pretty significantly standing in their way.)
  - WalterBright 10y ago
    I'm sure there are some outstanding public schools. But the generalization still applies. As for forcing them to be in slow moving classes, that is not really standing in the way. The student (and I know many who did) can be doing other things at his desk, and certainly a lot of students are doing other things in class :-) Some teachers also allow their highly capable students to spend class time in the school library instead.
    - tbihl 10y ago
      The generalization was stated as an absolute, and that's why you're getting well-deserved objection. On your second point: it is true that the students are not chained down and kept from self-study, but some might say that school should be a nurturing environment, and not just not_a_jail. These students are learning the value of waiting around without doing much of anything, and are praised for their achievements despite having expended little effort. And I think it would be pretty easy to get the impression that having a 4.0 GPA indicates that you're doing well; but if you're starting the school year far ahead of the evaluation criteria, then it's false feedback.
      - 10y ago
ommunist 10y ago
At the same time India has more kids with IQ over 120 than total amount of kids in the US.
aaroninsf 10y ago
As a parent I will respond with the general observation that what most kids in my city (SF) need is more sleep and less rote work. I will _opine_ that what they need is more time outside. Out of the classroom. Out of the house. On the beach and in the forest etc etc. Unfortunately quantity of work [sheets] and number of hours invested are a convenient proxy for 'challenging' in public education. Fortunately my daughters go to a charter school which is ahead of the curve on contemporary research into education and learning, and compared to their peers in mainline SFUSD, they are relatively insulated from that false equivalence. The cliché but oft-recounted 'tiger mom' childhood saturated completely by academics sounds to me frankly like hell, and I would work hard to ensure that mirroring its excesses in the US does not become the fad. Me, I'd far rather we have a generation of rounded kids with experience of the physical (especially, natural) world, than a cadre well trained from birth for knowledge worker jobs which may not even exist when they become adults.
- jdmichal 10y ago
  I've already decided that my son won't have homework when he gets to elementary school. Studies have shown it to be a questionable practice, and I would rather him play and explore things he's interested in instead. If that means that he asks me about his school work, I'll be happy to talk with him about it, and maybe even do some of the homework together. But if he's interested in extracurricular things, then that's where we're going to spend his extracurricular time.
fragola 10y ago
My parents believed in "radical unschooling", i.e. they didn't formally teach us anything at all. I had to ask to learn to read. I entered the public school system for high school and did not find myself at all behind. Much of the history kids had learned was wrong (Columbus, anyone?), I was reading better because I basically read fantasy novels 24/7 for the last seven years, and I caught up in math in one semester even though I started high school not knowing division. I have a BS in CS from Georgia Tech now. I am not surprised that students are bored in elementary school. I am also skeptical of everyone commenting here to say things like "but in Russia/Singapore/China/Norway school is so much harder!" etc. Any motivated kid can catch up pretty easily. The big fear, IMO, is that you will burn your kid out, bore your kid to death, and crush their curiosity. I am pretty sure all school systems are capable of doing this, albeit in different ways.
meestaplu 10y ago
Students may perform above grade level in reading and math, but tests in these areas fail to measure the skills involved in learning how to learn. No Child Left Behind and its ilk focus on proficiency and remediation, but actually risks leaving bright students behind. When children can breeze through their assigned work because it’s so easy for them, they end up ill prepared for facing challenge and failure when it finally comes. They are left with poor study habits and time management skills because they never needed good ones before. I’m not sure how to measure these skills but doing so may give a more complete picture of a student’s learning situation — maybe a picture that incentivizes challenging students according to their abilities.
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50 points by tokenadult 10y ago

An additional data point on this issue is from a few years ago, the discovery that students surveyed by the federal National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP), known informally as "the Nation's Report Card," often self-report that their school lessons are so easy that school is mostly boring. https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/education/report/2012/07/10/11913/do-schools-challenge-our-students/ https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/education/report/201... On my part, having lived in another country (Taiwan), I have long suspected that most United States pupils could handle more challenging school lessons, if only those were on offer in United States schools. For example, in almost every other country in the world, it is routine for pupils to begin foreign language study while still in elementary school, and in many countries (including Taiwan and Singapore, a generation ago) the majority of school pupils are attending school with a language of instruction that is not the same as the language they speak at home with their parents. Yet most United States high school graduates are resolutely monolingual English speakers, unless they grew up with another home language besides English. International comparisons suggest that there is still plenty of room at the top for achievable higher standards for United States students, and that students would enjoy school better if their lessons were more challenging.

jonlucc 10y ago
I don't have any data to back this up aside from personal anecdote, but it seems that while many students would benefit from more rigorous courses, the ones who don't keep up are very expensive. They'd need almost twice as many classes, and as someone who was on the TaG (Talented and Gifted), AP, and IB track at my school, I am always nervous about further separation from other classmates.
- maxerickson 10y ago
  Classroom time doesn't need to be the primary social time for kids. A lot of the problems that people squawk about for mixed ages are only problems because they are tacitly tolerated. Discard social promotion and you don't need to worry about age group separation.
  - jessaustin 10y ago
    You've identified yet another social dysfunction for which we can blame the automobile: Americans think children ought to be stuck in their homes when unsupervised. The kids simply must socialize in school, since there's no way we could allow them to ride bikes a few miles to visit friends after school. This may be less of an issue now, with social media. In third grade, I was in a mixed third/fourth grade classroom. It may have been the least boring year I spent in elementary school, although frankly that isn't a high bar to clear.
    - r00fus 10y ago
      Why would the helicopter-parent syndrome be less of an issue with social media?
      - emp_zealoth 10y ago
        At least the kids can talk to some other human beings instead being locked in solitary confinement
    - dsfyu404ed 10y ago
      I'd blame that squarely on overprotective parents. If it was the cars fault "uphill both ways in the snow" stories would have died off about two generations ago. It's no longer socially acceptable for a parent to allow their kid(s) much freedom of movement ("no you can't ride your bike to your friend's house because crossing the street is too dangerous") and social media steps in to fill the void.
      - jessaustin 10y ago
- bradleyjg 10y ago
  The larger the pool of people being drawn from the better tailoring that can be done. If you have 24 kids total in the district, then maybe you put them all in one classroom regardless of age and teach that way. If you have 300 kids in the school district now you can do separate classes for each age. If you have 900 kids, now each grade can have 3 classes and maybe one of them in each grade can be set aside for advanced students and one for slower students. If you have 25,000 kids in the district, now you can start doing things like an entire G&T school, and/or a school for the students interested in performing arts, and/or a specialized vocational high school. Unfortunately, the trend in the US is towards micro-catchment areas mostly as a legacy of racial segregation efforts and because of the continuing desire to have socio-economic segregation.
learc83 10y ago
There is a reason students in other countries learn additional languages at a young age--it's more beneficial for them. The ROI for learning English as a second language is incredibly high. The ROI for learning any second language as an American is comparatively much lower. The average American who learns a second language also lacks the ability/need to use that language day to day, so even if they do learn, they'll rapidly lose proficiency once they leave school.
- Broken_Hippo 10y ago
  In the US, the average student could benefit from learning Spanish. In some areas, they wouldnt get a chance to use it as much, but in many cases, they would be able to. If anything, they'd be able to use spanish language programming to help them learn. Which is ironically the same sorts of things that younger kids from other countries learning english have to learn from.
  - learc83 10y ago
    >In the US, the average student could benefit from learning Spanish. There are some secondary benefits from learning a second language [1]. But learning Spanish outside of a few areas in the US brings little direct benefit. There just aren't enough Spanish speakers who don't also speak English in the vast majority of the US. Furthermore, Immigration from Mexico is falling off, and the percent of Hispanic households who speak English at home is rapidly rising. This means that any direct benefit to learning Spanish will diminish over time. >If anything, they'd be able to use spanish language programming to help them learn. Which is ironically the same sorts of things that younger kids from other countries learning english have to learn from. Not even remotely comparable. The amount of material available only in English dwarfs the material available only in Spanish. To sum up, sure kids in American can learn Spanish, and many do. But there are real tangible and financial benefits to learning English as a second language that dwarf any of the benefits American kids get from learning Spanish. Once you recognize that, it makes perfect sense that Americans are more likely to be monolingual. [1] Studies show, there are cognitive benefits to bilingualism, but they also show there are benefits to monolingualism. Usually you'll find more benefits to bilingualism over all, but larger single-language vocabulary and faster retrieval time are definitely advantageous. Studies also don't show that the cognitive benefits of learning a second language outweigh the cognitive opportunity costs of studying something else instead. Additionally, the majority of these cognitive benefits are recorded in children and adults who spent a fair amount of time speaking in both languages. It's unlikely that learning a language in school and then forgetting it later will have the same beneficial effects.
Retric 10y ago
If you look more closely at the eastern model you find they cover a lot of completely useless material. Which is the core issue we could have people say memorize the first 4 digits of the square and cube roots of every number from 1 to 100. And yes it's more useful than you might think. However, not enough that students are going to remember it in 15 years. Quick, what year did the french revolution start and end?
- zhemao 10y ago
  Basically. I remember talking to a younger cousin in China, and he asked if I ever had to recite texts in language class. As in, memorize a passage verbatim and regurgitate it on the exam. I said "No, what would even be the point of that? You'll just forget it afterwards." Then I asked him if they ever discussed the meaning of the text in class. He said they did not. The East Asian system gets a few things right. We definitely could give students more challenging material (especially in math and science), but the focus on rote learning and endless drudgery (they get soooo much homework) is not something I'm too keen on being introduced here.
- tokenadult 10y ago
  I wouldn't say that about a comparison between math problems in textbooks in China and math problems in textbooks in the United States. (I have math textbooks in English, and math textbooks in Chinese, a language that I read well as a second language.) The focus on deep conceptual understanding and open-ended problem-solving in math is actually much better in east Asia than in the United States. http://condor.depaul.edu/sepp/mat660/Askey.pdf http://condor.depaul.edu/sepp/mat660/Askey.pdf (I can well believe, however, that any current with a current one-party dictatorial government, something Taiwan had the first time I lived there and something China still has today, will lag in teaching history. Critical thinking about history is bad for dictators. Taiwan thoroughly revised the history textbooks after it had its peaceful transition to democracy.)
  - schoen 10y ago
    > I can well believe, however, that any current with a current one-party dictatorial government, something Taiwan had the first time I lived there and something China still has today, will lag in teaching history. Multiparty liberal democracies allow much more scope for debating and interpreting history, but they still commonly encourage a teleological interpretation that glorifies the nation and its current political system. I also get the feeling that understanding history in a meaningful way is hard, and that educational systems generally aren't making much headway against this problem, maybe somewhat independently of how much debate or criticism they permit. One difficulty is the conscious and semiconscious propagandization of many historical issues by many parties, together with the desire to see historical figures or groups we identify with in a positive light and those we don't identify with in a negative light. Another thing is the truth of the "past is a foreign country" observation: https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/L._P._Hartley https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/L._P._Hartley Getting inside of the minds and cultures of people from the past is really difficult!
schoen 10y ago
Americans are also often shocked to see how challenging lessons actually are in other places, and sometimes kind of frightened by it. I feel like there's a whole genre of Internet posts of what students are allegedly learning in other countries. ("Cheryl's birthday" from Singapore is a famous recent example, but there are plenty of others.) I had a physics teacher in high school who came from Russia and was always frustrated at the lower standards for science education here in the U.S. He would describe what people in Russia were supposed to know by a particular grade level and it was commonly years ahead of Americans -- and he claimed students were expected to take much more time studying overall (although that's not necessarily always useful, and there are presumably also many different kinds of schools in Russia, as there are in the U.S.). We can surely find some possible tradeoffs and disadvantages of particular educational methods and approaches used in other countries. (People often complain about the rote-memorization issue with the associated lack of conceptual understanding or creativity, and, when we see very difficult educational materials from earlier eras in the U.S., there's the observation that students then may have had to learn many fewer subjects at a time.) But it seems like there's a lot of indication that huge numbers of U.S. students could be learning at a more challenging pace than they are today.
- sliverstorm 10y ago
  It's kind of hard to tell what's real anymore thanks to said genre of posts, after hearing the whole gamut up to things to the order of "Well Russian children are expected to know calculus by 8, group theory by 9, and complete their mastery of theoretical physics by 11"
  - selimthegrim 10y ago
    I would post the quote from Vladimir Arnold where he said he taught sixth graders group theory but that would probably be depressing.
- tbihl 10y ago
  I only spent a semester in another country (in Madrid), but I felt that the lessons were not all that challenging, but they were thorough. Meaning, in my courses there we were expected to know a lot, but once we knew that material we weren't asked to manipulate it in any way that really pushed us. Confounding my interpretation is that one of my courses, as a computer engineering student, was a fluid mechanics course in the aerospace department. Then again, my US undergrad is probably pretty atypical. My school had very heavy core requirements (at least for engineering), so you had a lot of classes each semester. It tends to be a top-ranked US school, but the classes really weren't very challenging, and because of how many we took, they never seemed to go into much depth. On another note, it's not often that I reminisce longingly on my childhood, but that's exactly what happened while I was doing Cheryl's birthday. My favorite things growing up were math and logic puzzles in their pure forms, un-obscured by the tedium that accompanies them in real life. I remember Math 24 from Elementary school, Math Counts in middle school, and some brain teasers and logic puzzles sprinkled throughout both times. If you're needing some for late elementary children, I highly recommend "The Lady or The Tiger and Other Logic Puzzles"
Broken_Hippo 10y ago
I only spoke English until a couple years ago, despite having taken a bit of French and German in high school. I could have never actually used it. Couple years ago, I moved to Norway. And the kids here are amazing with language. Not only do they understand dialects well and learn both official types of Norwegian, they are expected to understand Danish and Swedish. They start learning English their first year in school, and many wind up taking an additional language in high school. There is no homework in elementary school (and less at higher levels), no grades, and no holding kids back a grade. The school days are shorter. If a kid is needing help, there are programs to help them catch up. A smart kid will make good grades (and work for them): Average actually means average, and that is OK. Good marks mean a kid is learning over and above what is expected of them. If too many students are getting high marks (instead of average) on the national tests, they adjust the tests so they are harder. A few kids find school boring, but the system itself leaves room for kids to excel as well as makes provisions for those that aren't - which seems like one of the fallbacks of the American system. You are expected to make A's and B's and there simply isn't room for the high acheiver to work for anything.
- pc86 10y ago
  > [there are] no grades > A smart kid will make good grades
  - mgkimsal 10y ago
    maybe that's the two types of Norwegian seeping through?
  - jdmichal 10y ago
    I read that as "there are no grades (levels)", especially as the following point is "there's no holding back a grade (level)".
    - dalke 10y ago
      I think it's a switch from grades/marks for elementary school vs. grades/marks for secondary school. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education_in_Norway#Primary_school_.28Barneskole.2C_Grades_1.E2.80.937.2C_ages_6.E2.80.9313.29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education_in_Norway#Primary_sc... says, of primary school: > No official grades are given at this level. However, the teacher often writes a comment, analysis, and sometimes an unofficial grade on tests. Tests are to be taken home and shown to parents. There is also an introductory test to let the teacher know if the student is above average or is in need of some assistance at school. > ... When the students enter lower secondary school, at age 12 or 13, they begin getting grades for their work.
serge2k 10y ago
> Yet most United States high school graduates are resolutely monolingual English speakers, unless they grew up with another home language besides English So? Oh my god, I'm such a bad person for only speaking English. How can I suffer such a life. /s But I agree with your point, the challenge offered by schools is too low.

aresant 10y ago

"Between 11% and 37% of California students scored at or above the next grade level . . . of their current grade level. The percentages tend to be higher for students in the older grades." It's a pipe dream to believe that the public education system is going to adapt to be a one-size-fits-all, especially in California's gigantic public schools system which has a "minimum" budget of ~$70,000,000,000 allocated to it every year. As a parent there is clear responsibility to help our kids outside of this structure - what strategies does HN undertake with their kids (or what did your parents undertake with you) that helped to close this gap? (1) http://www.cde.ca.gov/fg/fr/eb/budletter15-16.asp http://www.cde.ca.gov/fg/fr/eb/budletter15-16.asp

SixSigma 10y ago
Private school
tokenadult 10y ago
It's a pipe dream to believe that the public education system is going to adapt to be a one-size-fits-all May I take it that you mean "It's a pipe dream to believe that the public education system is going to adapt to be SOMETHING OTHER THAN a one-size-fits-all"? As a parent (of four children, two now adults) and as a voter and taxpayer, I am of course interested in general improvements in the education systems of all countries, and especially in the country I now live in, the United States. I think it will be helpful for advocacy of thoughtful improvements in education policy to be aware of how much young people do and can learn, whether or not their schools set high standards. I think setting more ambitious standards will make school less boring and more meaningful for the plurality of young people in the United States, and quite possibly for the majority of young people here. As a parent, I chose to homeschool my children early on. That seems (according to my oldest son's testimony, sent to me by email) to have been helpful for my oldest son's career as a hacker. My second son may pursue a programming career too, although he has plenty of other interests. I'm still interested in discussions of education policy, the issue that drew me to Hacker News, here because I can still adjust the educational plan for my two younger children some more, and because this matters for all of us, childless or not. But so far I have found it expedient, in a high-income school district with high parental educational levels, to homeschool my children for their elementary education. They then go to the friendly local high school (which has improved its academic standards recently by dint of competition from Minnesota's public school open-enrollment policy) and take lots of AP classes and do lots of academic extracurricular activities with friends who have open-enrolled from the territory of other school districts. It isn't perfect, but it's a trade-off that works well enough for us.

wnevets 10y ago

Pretty obvious side effect of lowering standards.

dragonwriter 10y ago

Unsurprising. Under NCLB and related measures, schools are incentivized not to promote advanced students faster than their age peers, since they are rewarded for improvement in (and punished for insufficient improvement or backtracking in) the percentage of students performing at or above grade level, so students that would otherwise have been advanced in grade ahead of their peers are held back to the normal advancement rate to make the schools' results look better. You get what you pay for.

Afton 10y ago
I'd like to know about this. Can you link to something about the incentive programs? I thought that they were heavily regional, but I admit that I haven't looked too deeply.
- dragonwriter 10y ago
  > Can you link to something about the incentive programs? Well, the negative side is mostly the consequences for failing to make Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) under the NCLB. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adequate_Yearly_Progress https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adequate_Yearly_Progress
  - jtnews 10y ago
    AYP is out. The goals looked good on paper, made good sound bites for the news, but weren't realistic. NCLB is out too. The new thing is the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA).
    - dragonwriter 10y ago
      Right, but ESSA is less than a year old; NCLB and its AYP-based incentives spent nearly a decade and a half shaping American school outcomes (and many of the state and local laws and policies established in order to meet NCLB requirements and the incentives of the AYP system haven't been revised.) ESSA, OTOH, maintains the basic structure of NCLB, including the same kind of accountability system, but leaves detailed setting of standards and interventions to the states. It may weaken, but seems unlikely to eliminate, the pressures against advanced promotion (particularly in grades 3-8, where it continues the requirement for annual testing) created by NCLB and its AYP-based interventions.

dboreham 10y ago

The public school my kids attend routinely teaches the N+1 th grade math material in grades 7 and 8 so I suspect it is well known that the official syllabus has been pushed to allow score inflation. Same thing as all airline timetables having 10-20 minutes padding to reduce the probability of a late arrival.

tokenadult 10y ago
I suspect it is well known The submitted article suggests that this is not at all well known, and is an understudied issue. That's my impression too from years of doing research on education policy--most American teachers and school administrators have NO IDEA how much more young people could be learning in the school context, and indeed no idea how much learning the brighter kids do in the summer when they are away from school reading on their own.
dspillett 10y ago
I wouldn't say that is the same thing. The airlines aren't trying to be the best by a measure of getting to the destination absolutely the fastest and basing their efforts and predictions on that, they are trying to be predictable (and therefor reliable) by building in some contingency. The school wants the pupil to get the best score it possibly can and there is no "too good". The airline doesn't need to get the plane home in absolutely the best time, just reliably within a specified time, in fact arriving too early is potentially a problem for various reasons (you as a passenger only see the single nominal arrival time published, internally they will be working to a time window aiming to arrive "at or after YY:YY" as well as "at or before XX:XX").

panglott 10y ago

What real argument for age-based grades can there be?

erikpukinskis 10y ago
Another question for me is: what is the argument for a single grade across subjects? Why not let a kid be in Math 7, while still staying in Literature 5, and Physical Education 3, while another kid the same age is in Physical Education 12, Literature 6, and Math 2? If you mixed it up enough you could substantially lessen the stigmas of both being ahead and behind.
- dragonwriter 10y ago
  > Another question for me is: what is the argument for a single grade across subjects? Prior to middle school / junior high (starting usually between 6th and 8th grade, depending on the particular school system), the norm in the US isn't to have distinct subject-matter classes, but classrooms with a single teacher for all subjects for one grade, which may not use a strict fixed allotment of time slots for each subject, and even where they do it may not be the same time slot for the same subject area in different classrooms in different grades in the same school (and even the set of subjects may change somewhat in different grades.) This makes per-subject variations in grade level for a student logistically difficult to accommodate. OTOH, once you get to middle school with per-subject classes being the norm, this is fairly easy to accommodate, and its just a scheduling and resource problem (e.g., in a middle school, do you have enough qualified students to support a Calculus class) at that level.
  - peter303 10y ago
    I reread the Ingall-Wilder Little School House series recently and was impressed with how one room school house operated with kids of all grades in the same room. Villages were not large enough for multiple teachers. Basically education in those days was memorizing and doing all the exercises in various primers. Teachers were often just teenage girls, not much older than the oldest students. Older people were too busy working or running households.

elchief 10y ago

If I were a billionaire my kids wouldn't go to school. I'd fly in experts and pay them top dollar. Want to learn about the web today? Here's Tim Berners-Lee to show you. I guess I'd make them do team sports so they didn't end up weird though...

dragonwriter 10y ago
> I guess I'd make them do team sports so they didn't end up weird though... People are quite capable of ending up weird having done team sports while growing up.
- pc86 10y ago
  His (pretty clear) point was that socialization is important, and if you spend your formative years in a room interacting only with your family or a tutor you're not going to be a well-functioning adult.
  - dragonwriter 10y ago
    And my (I thought pretty clear) point was that "team sports", especially as the primary peer-interaction socialization venue, are far from a panacea for that problem.
    - TillE 10y ago
      Yes, team sports is a bit of a weird environment, and not just in America. Socialization is also possible while participating in 1v1 sports, or even something like chess club.
rayiner 10y ago
My kid is only 3, and my dissatisfaction with public school is already starting. We sent her to a Fairfax County (one of the top public school districts in the country), VA preschool for a few months while we lived with my parents while looking for a new place in D.C. They gave her a ton of worksheets and reading exercises. Flashbacks to my horrendous experience with FCPS. She goes to a Montessori preschool now, where they do about an hour and a half of real work a day and spend the rest of the day on the playground.

sandworm101 10y ago

Grade inflation. Talk to highschool students in western canada/us. They talk of 90% as a below-average score. My highschool grades, if I applied to university today, wouldn't qualify me for anything. There is an old skier's adage: If you aren't falling you aren't improving. By already knowing everything, these kids learn nothing. Then after all their As these now adults hit my classroom with reading issues and a fear of curiosity. Anything not on the exam is to be actively ignored. Don't read anything that might confuse the issues. Stick to the outlines. And when the prof asks you to pick a paper topic on your own, something not already in the outline, inundate him with panicked emails asking what you should and shouldn't find interesting .

tgarma1234 10y ago

Pretty sure we are all above average now. But seriously, it seems like schools have really drifted towards programs that enhance self-esteem and build confidence rather than making school the narcissistic insult it was when I was kid. I think that is fine. For the most part you can learn everything you actually want to know or need to know yourself later in life. It would be great if every kid left school thinking they were really good at things and had the confidence to get out there and try.

WalterBright 10y ago

American public schools don't have much to offer highly capable students. On the other hand, they don't stand in the way of them, either. I met many such in college, and they found ways to get what the wanted.

dragonwriter 10y ago
Generalizations about "American public school's" features are usually wrong. Many American public schools have a lot to offer highly-capable students. OTOH, many American public schools actually do quite a bit to stand in their way (often, at a minimum, forcing them to spend a large portion of the day in classes far below their ability is pretty significantly standing in their way.)
- WalterBright 10y ago
  I'm sure there are some outstanding public schools. But the generalization still applies. As for forcing them to be in slow moving classes, that is not really standing in the way. The student (and I know many who did) can be doing other things at his desk, and certainly a lot of students are doing other things in class :-) Some teachers also allow their highly capable students to spend class time in the school library instead.
  - tbihl 10y ago
    The generalization was stated as an absolute, and that's why you're getting well-deserved objection. On your second point: it is true that the students are not chained down and kept from self-study, but some might say that school should be a nurturing environment, and not just not_a_jail. These students are learning the value of waiting around without doing much of anything, and are praised for their achievements despite having expended little effort. And I think it would be pretty easy to get the impression that having a 4.0 GPA indicates that you're doing well; but if you're starting the school year far ahead of the evaluation criteria, then it's false feedback.
    - 10y ago

ommunist 10y ago

At the same time India has more kids with IQ over 120 than total amount of kids in the US.

aaroninsf 10y ago

As a parent I will respond with the general observation that what most kids in my city (SF) need is more sleep and less rote work. I will _opine_ that what they need is more time outside. Out of the classroom. Out of the house. On the beach and in the forest etc etc. Unfortunately quantity of work [sheets] and number of hours invested are a convenient proxy for 'challenging' in public education. Fortunately my daughters go to a charter school which is ahead of the curve on contemporary research into education and learning, and compared to their peers in mainline SFUSD, they are relatively insulated from that false equivalence. The cliché but oft-recounted 'tiger mom' childhood saturated completely by academics sounds to me frankly like hell, and I would work hard to ensure that mirroring its excesses in the US does not become the fad. Me, I'd far rather we have a generation of rounded kids with experience of the physical (especially, natural) world, than a cadre well trained from birth for knowledge worker jobs which may not even exist when they become adults.

jdmichal 10y ago
I've already decided that my son won't have homework when he gets to elementary school. Studies have shown it to be a questionable practice, and I would rather him play and explore things he's interested in instead. If that means that he asks me about his school work, I'll be happy to talk with him about it, and maybe even do some of the homework together. But if he's interested in extracurricular things, then that's where we're going to spend his extracurricular time.

fragola 10y ago

My parents believed in "radical unschooling", i.e. they didn't formally teach us anything at all. I had to ask to learn to read. I entered the public school system for high school and did not find myself at all behind. Much of the history kids had learned was wrong (Columbus, anyone?), I was reading better because I basically read fantasy novels 24/7 for the last seven years, and I caught up in math in one semester even though I started high school not knowing division. I have a BS in CS from Georgia Tech now. I am not surprised that students are bored in elementary school. I am also skeptical of everyone commenting here to say things like "but in Russia/Singapore/China/Norway school is so much harder!" etc. Any motivated kid can catch up pretty easily. The big fear, IMO, is that you will burn your kid out, bore your kid to death, and crush their curiosity. I am pretty sure all school systems are capable of doing this, albeit in different ways.

meestaplu 10y ago

Students may perform above grade level in reading and math, but tests in these areas fail to measure the skills involved in learning how to learn. No Child Left Behind and its ilk focus on proficiency and remediation, but actually risks leaving bright students behind. When children can breeze through their assigned work because it’s so easy for them, they end up ill prepared for facing challenge and failure when it finally comes. They are left with poor study habits and time management skills because they never needed good ones before. I’m not sure how to measure these skills but doing so may give a more complete picture of a student’s learning situation — maybe a picture that incentivizes challenging students according to their abilities.

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