20 ms·
2017 California school test scores: Why are they flatlining?
- SQL2219 9y agoGet the computers out of the classroom.
- carlisle_ 9y agoThis is the kind of comment that truly derails education. It's reactionary and doesn't have a real objective.
- bitxbitxbitcoin 9y agoI agree. There are definitely many scenarios, some of which are playing out already, where putting computers into classrooms will help not hinder.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- chroem- 9y agoThe wealthiest members of our society are on one hand sending their children to expensive private schools, specifically to avoid exposing them to computers in the classroom, while on the other hand lobbying for increased usage of computing in public education to support their businesses. This is a completely valid concern, and you are dismissing it without reason.
- fern12 9y agoAgreed. I don't have kids, but speaking for myself, the internet has shot my attention span to the single digit range. And I grew up in the 80s.
- benchaney 9y agoThis is a completely insane assertion. Private schools have computers in the classroom more frequently to private schools. I challenge you to find any evidence of anyone choosing a private schools because there aren't computers in the classroom.
- paxy 9y agoI can assure you there are no computers in classrooms where these failing students are from. You want to improve scores? Pay for school lunches. Pay for stationery and other basic supplies. Pay teachers more. It is ridiculous that costs of living and property values are skyrocketing across the state, but rather than more taxes going towards education there are budget cuts year after year.
- hkmurakami 9y agoThis despite soaring CA tax revenues.
- lloyddobbler 9y agoAnd yet... https://calmatters.org/articles/how-much-has-californias-education-spending-grown-in-last-5-years/ https://calmatters.org/articles/how-much-has-californias-edu... (Seems that per student spending is up almost 50% over the past 5 years.) ETA - Not to mention that (with the exception of 1 year in the past 50 years), K-12 education receives a larger portion of the CA general fund than it ever has (currently 42% of the state budget goes to K-12 education - and rising). As state tax revenues go up (as another poster suggests), K-12 education spending goes up at an even faster rate. https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/infocenter/california-expenditures-corrections-and-public-education https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/infocenter/california... I think the real world data paints a much different picture than you want to believe.
- paxy 9y agoFrom the same article – > According to Education Week’s annual state rankings on K-12 education spending, California was last in per-pupil when adjusted for regional cost differences in 2011. It moved up to 41st for 2013.
- lloyddobbler 9y agoSure. That was 2011, at the bottom of the recession - at which point CA's school funding was at the bottom of a dip. As the article also showed (& as you pointed out), its ranking improved dramatically in 2013. Since then, the per pupil spending has risen ~25%. Regardless, rather than more taxes going towards education there are budget cuts year after year. ...I just thought it important to point out that this statement is demonstrably false. Let's operate in the world of facts, not in the world of what "feels right." Only by doing that can we actually come to a solution that might work.
- curiousgal 9y agoNot being good at Math is not that big of deal but not being proficient at your own native language seems inexcusable.
- MichaelGG 9y agoIs English the native language for most of California?
- spaceseaman 9y agoWow, that's actually an element of these standardized tests I've never thought of before - that ESL folks would do a big part in shifting numbers around due to unfamiliarity with the language. Thank you.
- bitxbitxbitcoin 9y agoAre you curious to see Californian standardized testing acheivement excluding ESL students?
- silvertonia 9y agoYes-- it's about 65% English, 28% Spanish.
- avmich 9y agoNot only that, but also - language is more of a skill, a habit, which grows and evolves with circumstances, while math is a "study", with objects, operations, rules, processes, correctness criteria etc. Eventually both are needed - as well as computers - but how to get there, opinions can differ widely.
- urda 9y agoWhile there is no "official" language for the United States (and thus California), it is widely considered that English is the de facto national language. It is the majority language for both the country and California. So having difficulty with English is a really, really bad thing for these students.
- swivelmaster 9y ago"California isn’t alone in its stagnating scores and in fact compares favorably with the 12 other states, plus the U.S. Virgin Islands, that administered the same tests last spring from the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium. Scores decreased in every state, and California’s decline was about the smallest, retired educational testing specialist Douglas McRae said." This is the most important sentence in the article. It points to a problem in the test itself - California's students didn't just get magically stupider. Standardized testing isn't a particularly good way to gauge schools' ability to prepare students for college or for the 'real world.' Unfortunately, our K-12 public education system is broken and the politics of fixing it are even more broken, so this is what we get.
- bitxbitxbitcoin 9y agoIt's almost as if the standard of what is standard changes drastically as the world does.
- swivelmaster 9y agoOr the process by which they design and score the test isn't very good.
- lr4444lr 9y agoSo what's your recommended alternative metric? I don't doubt there is a good case to improve certain standardized tests, but that doesn't mean there isn't a valuable correlation even in a flawed one, nor that it's better to keep moving the goal posts into more subjective territory to explain away bad outcomes.
- swivelmaster 9y agoThey're mentioned in the article. Graduation rates, college acceptance, stuff like that. Some of the countries with the best education systems in the world don't have these kinds of standardized tests. Also, nobody's suggesting moving the goal posts to explain away bad outcomes. If every school suddenly loses three points on average from one year to another on what is supposed to be the same test, the only common variable there is the test itself. The test HAS to be different from year to year in order not to repeat questions, but it HAS to remain a comparable difficulty.
- navigator01 9y agoIt has everything to do with home life and environment. No classroom within the expected margins of quality can overcome a negative home life that does not value education and encourage student achievement. Wealth and cultural/familial values are the major culprits.
- bitxbitxbitcoin 9y agoLack of wealth and lack of cultural/familial values more so than their overwhelming presence - though some might argue against the cultural part. When will American culture praise and reward academic acheivement in the way that some other cultures do?
- derefr 9y agoI feel like the cultures that "praise and reward academic acheivement" are mostly the same cultures that value the concept of castes/genetic nobility (i.e. the idea that you can come from a "smart family", and the automatic association of a "noble" birth with inborn intelligence.) America, in trying to promote the idea that anyone can become anything, has quite thoroughly quashed the idea that it is of any benefit to come from a "cultured" background; and, thereby, has devalued the concept of acquiring a Liberal Arts education as a necessary stepping stone in dynasty-building. There are probably benefits to this, but there are also obvious drawbacks.
- zanny 9y agoWhen it stops being short-term profitable (in the forms of money or power) to systemically suppress intellectualism.
- TheAdamAndChe 9y agoI would argue that cultural influences do play a major role. Asian Americans on average make nearly $20k/yr more than whites. Almost 20% of billionaires are Jewish[1]. Those kinds of discrepancies don't come from nowhere, and absolutely show that upbringing and culture have a massive effect on future growth and goal attainment. Now look at popular US culture nowadays. People are told they can be whatever they want to be, and losers are given participation trophies. Comfort and inclusion is seen as more important than competition and self-control. Our culture is changing massively, and it's showing in our test scores. [1] https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/36760/were-48-of-american-billionaires-jewish-in-2014https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/36760/were-48-of-american-billionaires-jewish-in-2014 https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/36760/were-48-o...
- firefoxd 9y agoThe kids go to school to get homework from professionals trained in the art of teaching then the unqualified parent is the one that has to help the child do these homeworks. Now what is recommended is to sign up for the after school program where for a fee someone can help them with their homework. How about they teach and do the work during school hours?
- zanny 9y agoA large portion of students do not get parental help with homework. Their parents aren't around, or don't actively participate in their lives. And that certainly means they won't pay for after school tutoring. Those are the kids most in need of systemic reform, not those who have parents that value education, where their only problem is just the schools themselves sucking. They will almost always succeed as long as their parents support them (and given enough income more likely than not move them into charter school or some other option).
- cobookman 9y agoWhat is California's score if you get remove all the test scores of illegal immigrants. I'm sure that they drastically drop the scores. Being an ESL student would make school significantly harder. And would also explain he low English skills. And given that most illegals are manual labor and not high skilled jobs, the kids don't have parents who can help their kids with maths.
- cobookman 9y agoTo add, Asian and white students are ~2x the proficiency rate as black / Latino. http://www.mercurynews.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/sjm-l-calatests-0927-90.png http://www.mercurynews.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/sjm-l-...
- lsd5you 9y agoPlausible, simple explanations are dismissed while the intelectual 'elite' declare it either a mystery as to why it is happening or create a patchwork of complicated and inadequate explanations that don't stretch to similar phenonemon around the world.
- contergan 9y agoIt's really astonishing how intelligent people delude themselves into thinking intelligence is just magically distributed equally among all races and groups of humans that have developed in completely different environments mostly independent from each other over long periods of time. As if evolution somehow took a break when it came to the human brain. It's pretty much denial of evolution. And the IQ differences between Asians, Blacks, Hispanics and Whites in the US have been well studied for over a century now. It's really no surprise that the demographic changes in California have led to the stagnation regarding test scores. The same effect can be attributed to demographic changes in other countries, too, for example France: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160289615001221 http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160289615... And here in Germany, the two states that continuously rank worst education statistics, are those with the highest amount of immigrants. Still, we're told to just ignore the obvious pattern and if anyone dares to mention this pattern openly, they are socially ostracized for it.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- dragonwriter 9y agoHN title is editorialized inappropriately from source (and focus shifted to absolute results rather than trends and discussion of the reasons behind the trends, which include questions about the validity of the tests.) The source title is “2017 California school test scores: Why are they flatlining?”
- swivelmaster 9y agoAgree that the title should be edited. Still, the question of "why are the schools in and around Silicon Valley doing so poorly?" is worth discussing. We [residents of supposedly the most innovative region on the planet] should be able to solve these problems, and yet we either are unable to or haven't tried very hard.
- dragonwriter 9y ago> Still, the question of "why are the schools in and around Silicon Valley doing so poorly?" is worth discussing. It probably is but California is, by population or number of schools, mostly “in and around Los Angeles”, not “in and around Silicon Valley.”
- swivelmaster 9y agoThe data that the article highlights is from the Bay Area, though.
- dragonwriter 9y agoIt picks numbers from four Bay Area counties, but not really the four anyone would pick if they were concerned with “in and around Silicon Valley” (particularly, Contra Costa is included but not San Francisco.)
- dang 9y agoYes, we've fixed it now. The submitted title ("2017 California school test scores: fewer than HALF proficient in Math, English") was an egregious violation of HN's rules: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. It even put some caps in there to boot. Submitters: you can't use HN titles to editorialize. If you want to say what you think is important about an article, you need to do so in a comment, on a level playing field with everyone else. If you break this rule repeatedly you eventually lose submission privileges, so please don't break this rule.
- option 9y agoThese don’t include private schools, right?
- swivelmaster 9y agoThere's some passing information about charter schools in the article.
- adpirz 9y agoHeads up that many charter schools are public. Rocketship (mentioned in the article) is a network of public charter schools that serves primarily low income students, and that's true of many charter schools in the state and across the country.
- ThomPete 9y agoSuccess Academy is public, my son is there they are in the absolute top when it comes to math score. SA was started in Harlem and specialize in taking kids out of bad environments (their homes) and influence them to make an effort. It's a pretty hardcore school (7.45am - 4.0pm ish) but it definitely works well.
- eweise 9y agoTaking public funds does not make you a public school. Charter schools do not have the same public accountability as the public schools system.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- peterwwillis 9y agoOne of the reasons - probably one of the biggest reasons - for continuously lower test scores in America is the quality of the care these children receive. Over 40% of children in the US are born to unwed mothers, compared to 5% at the beginning of last century. About 70% of unwed childbirth is by black mothers, versus just 24% in 1965. The last two peaks of teenage pregnancy were 1991 and 2007 - so the children of teens have more children, whom are now 10 years old, with 26yr old parents, and whose grandparents are about 42yrs, with great grandparents about 70 years old. The financial and social strain on such families is intense. It's also difficult to be the best parent you can be when you yourself are still not an adult. And it virtually guarantees poverty for these children. There is almost no reasonable assistance given to the families of these children - assistance like food, shelter, access to education, daycare, transportation. Kids are getting left behind not by their school system, but a social system that has ignored them as part of a lower class of society that we'd rather starve and struggle than give assistance to. If you don't believe this, go into a [public] school in Philly, Baltimore, New York, and ask about the grade level of reading comprehension of the kids, what their family life is like, and their economic status. You will see a trend in all three: "poor."
- EdSharkey 9y agoI see the same things you are describing in my city. Are there other countries with high numbers of kids born to unwed, poor mothers that have been successful in educating those kids and getting them out of poverty though? What works? It seems like we have a cultural challenge with poor families to surmount before we can get a meaningful return on investment by increasing social programs for them.
- peterwwillis 9y agoIt obviously varies by country/region, but not all countries with high rates of unwed parents have the same rates of poverty and poor education. Access to jobs, transportation, lack of institutionalized racism, increased social services, and other factors vary the results. For example, in Europe the rates of unwed parents range from 18% to 55% by country. I think the solutions to problems faced by these parents in adequately raising their children will have to vary based on the impediments they face and the reasons for them.
- andrei_says_ 9y agoTreating learning as a process of moving information into children’s minds and then checking it’s quality via tests is an old, inefficient and misaligned with what we know about learning. It is a broken approach which makes sense in the context of training factory workers while providing childcare for their worker parents. Works so-so for the bean counters at the tremendous cost of crushing ebmveryone else. It is abysmal in the face of the pace at which the workforce moves and doesn’t even come close to what today’s kids actually need. Tests are just one of the symptoms.
- Pigo 9y agoWhat would be a new, efficient approach?
- andrei_says_ 9y agoEfficient from the standpoint of students? I’d recommend looking into democratic schools. Focusing on empowering learning to learn, self determination, intrinsic motivation, leadership, public speaking, project-based learning.
- ProfessorLayton 9y agoIt’s not too surprising considering the rising inequality in CA. Wealth is the largest predictor of educational attainment. https://cepa.stanford.edu/sites/default/files/reardon%20whither%20opportunity%20-%20chapter%205.pdf https://cepa.stanford.edu/sites/default/files/reardon%20whit...
- dogruck 9y agoYes, but wealth is also correlated with aptitude. I'm not saying our system is perfect. Plenty of rich bozos. On the other hand, in a perfect system, to me, it seems that the highest achievers would tend to both: 1. Succeed in school and 2. Acquire wealth.
- tptacek 9y agoWe're referring in this case to the wealth of parents, not of students. Students have very little control over which parents they're assigned.
- dogruck 9y agoMost students have the combined genetic material of their parents. Genetics are a key influence on aptitude. To be transparent, I personally benefited from public schools, and my parents were not wealthy (but they were graduates of public colleges). I'm not arguing that only wealthy people should have access to quality education. I'm just saying that it's a weak argument to point out that success in school is linked with wealth.
- maskedSlacker 9y ago>I'm just saying that it's a weak argument to point out that success in school is linked with wealth. Would you like to say that the Earth is flat, disease is caused by an imbalance of humors, and Adam and Eve tamed dinosaurs for use in ancient rodeos while you're at it? Because those would have more chance of being correct than what you're saying. Socioeconomic security correlates more strongly to educational outcomes than ANY other variable, including IQ.
- dogruck 9y agoIn my eyes, standardized tests are bad because they will always shine a bright light on differences between groups. We don't like to admit it these days, but humans are not identical. We can accept some basic differences, such as skin tone. We get extremely uncomfortable extending that notion to cognitive skills. To be clear, I'm not singling out any group -- I'm not linking skin tone to cognitive skill in any way. So, we bring in standardized tests to level the playing field. At first, those tests are deeply flawed and filled with bias, making them especially harmful. Then, we iterate, and remove those testing flaws. And we trick ourselves into thinking that will solve the problem. But, suppose we arrive at the perfectly fair test. Suppose the test is highly predictive of, say, success at a 4 year college. Now, what do you do if that test habitually ranks some group lower than other groups? To me, it feels like we are right back at square one. Personally, I would prefer to focus our energy on helping each other out. If one person, or group, is falling behind, you find a way to help, and also to integrate each group into the whole. I know I'm oversimplifying -- I just think standardized testing is a fruitless exercise.
- gizmo686 9y ago> If one person, or group, is falling behind, you find a way to help. And how do you know if a person or group is falling behind? To do this, you need some type of metric; and standardized testing is the best metric we have at scale.
- dogruck 9y agoOk, so you have your metric. What next? They plug all of your stats into the function, and it says, "you will never be a good NBA player." With the NBA, we're comfortable saying "meh, not too many of those anyway -- moving on to high stakes poker -- never liked playing basketball anyway." But when the metric is of something much more broad, such as "success at a 4 year college" we're not so comfortable doing that. I just don't see what problem the standardized test actually solves.
- gizmo686 9y agoWe want a well educated population. To do this, we have set up an educational system. However, education is a difficult problem, and it is not clear what works and what does not. What we need is some way of measuring how well things work. That is the problem that standardized testing is meant to solve. There are some tests that are intended to assist in accademic discrimination (eg. we only want good students here, so you need a good SAT score to get in), but that is not the usage we are talking about when we say California's are flatlining. Google A/B tests moving a pixel on their home page. Compiler writers performance test optimization passes. Educators want objective feedback too.
- toast0 9y agoI would really like to see results from testing that indicated progression. Since they test students in third through eighth grades and 11th grade, I think it would be more interesting to know of the students who scored in some range in 3rd grade last year, how did they do in 4th grade this year, and so on. You can sort of infer by looking at reports by grade level over time, but a lot of students don't stay at the same school, so it's hard to tell. For students who test below proficient in one year, it's not necessarily reasonable to expect one year of schooling to enable them to test proficient in the next, even if the instruction is amazing. If the majority of the students are coming in unprepared, the overall proficiency % is going to be low, and it doesn't reflect on the quality if the school.
- csa 9y agoWhen are we going to come out and admit that our schools are not providing our society with what it needs or wants? For a large chunk of HN, schools served us relatively well. But for a huge chunk of the US, school is just a waste of time. At best, it's free childcare for parents. Preparing everyone to college is overkill (n.b. having a way for everyone who wants to go to college an affordable way to go to a good school is +++++EV... totally different issues). Mandatory schooling should be for fundamentals in reading, communication (speaking and writing), and math -- if you want to get cheeky, teach them disciplinary approaches to history and science by using examples that currently exist in their communities. Most people don't need literature. Most people don't need algebra (or higher). Most people don't need history (esp. as it's currently taught). Most people don't need science (again, esp. not as it is currently taught). Why are we teaching these things on people who don't care about and will not use these potential skills? The resource sink is disgusting. We could easily educate people to a functional level by 8th grade. Then let people join the real world if they want. Let them work rather than keep them in a glorified prison. If they at some point decide they want more schooling, give them easy access cheaply. This would be much cheaper than all the wasted high school resources we have now, and many of those resources could be funneled towards people who actually want to learn at the secondary and tertiary levels, even if it's not on a classic timeline. It's time for a rethink of education -- our current system is ridiculously bad.
- bllguo 9y agoI agree with the general sentiment that education needs to be overhauled but I feel that you undervalue literature and history. Hopefully someone comes along that is more qualified than I am to speak about this. There must be better ways to teach algebra and higher math, science, history, literature, etc. But to say they are useless is bonkers to me. Especially at a time where menial jobs are at great risk due to outsourcing and automation. The solution has to be more and better education, not less. I don't know how you expect people who know basic math, reading, and writing to succeed.
- pirocks 9y ago>I agree with the general sentiment that education needs to be overhauled And that's the core of the problem. Everyone wants change, just not the same change as the next guy.
- FabHK 9y agoTwo notes: 1. I don't see anything about the statistical significance, or the natural fluctuation of the results, i.e. the standard error. Presumably lots of students are measured, and you could argue that your standard error (proportional to 1/sqrt(N)) is tiny, but then, the questions are different every year, so you have some date-specific (not student-specific) error. In other words, just looking at previous years, how much do results vary? And is this year's flatline maybe just a result of measurement error? (In other words: Q: "Why are they flatlining?" A: No reason.) EDIT to add: well, there is one sentence in the article: > “not a significant change,” spokeswoman Amber Farinha wrote in an email 2. It's a > computer adaptive test — meaning as the test progresses, questions become harder or easier depending on the student’s answers These have problems, in my view. I had a Spanish girl friend that studied for the GRE with me. The verbal section is largely a long vocabulary test, so we studied quite a bit (from the entertaining Princeton Review Word Smart book). Now, often she would know the "complicated" word being explained, as it had Latin roots and was the same in Spanish. However, she wouldn't know the "easy" explanation. (For example, "to lament" (ah, easy, like "lamentablemente, lamentar") was explained as "to mourn" (what?), "arboreal" is "arbóreo" (well, "tree dweller" is easy, too, but you get the idea).) Bottom line: we did several (actual old) practice exams, timed, and she would consistently score in a certain percentile range (with some variation, of course). Those were good old-fashioned paper tests, though. However, when she did the actual (adaptive) GRE, she scored much worse than in the practice exams, several standard deviations away. (And before you blame it on nervousness due to real test conditions, note that there was a significant drop only in the verbal part, not analytic or quantitative.) This appears to me a problem with the testing methodology: when she initially got something wrong, the CAT would give her "easier" questions, preponderantly words with Germanic roots, which she would also get wrong. The "hard" questions involving words with Latin roots, that she'd probably have gotten right, were never displayed to her. She got into a good school anyway, so it didn't really matter. But in my view, the claim that the CAT is just as good as the longer paper based test is predicated on assuming that test subjects come from the same population. I really wonder whether speakers of Romance languages where systematically disadvantaged by the switch from paper to CAT, and whether ETS (the producer of GRE) did any systematic study on that. (Note that it is conceivable that some Hispanophones got questions right at the beginning, and then got "harder" questions easier for them, thus getting better results than in the paper based test. If that is the case, it's conceivable that the average scores of both the Anglo- and Hispanophone group lines up with the non-adaptive and adaptive test, but Hispanophones suddenly show a much bigger variance in the adaptive test. Questions questions.)
- kolbe 9y agoHoly shitballs. This flatline is barely meaningful, and the number of HN members who want to treat this as an opportunity to soapbox some tangential agenda is nuts.
- bllguo 9y agoWe already know that there's a problem with education - there are many, many signs. US citizens being manipulated by false information, open bigotry, declining livelihoods of the lower economic class, political unrest and populism, educational metrics being substantially lower than other countries for years, etc. Whether this particular article is meaningful doesn't matter too much imo. It raises the issue. Plenty of discussion here doesn't focus on the supposed trend.
- kolbe 9y agoFirstly, let's just give you the benefit of the doubt that soapboxing about cliche, populist, non-tech/non-business topics is a good use of Hacker News. It's not, but I'll pretend for the sake of this conversation. We have something of a standard here for how statements need to be supported, and "we already know" and "there are many many signs" falls far short of those standards, and is eerily reminiscent of Donald Trump's instead. "US citizens being manipulated by false information." How is this different from any other time in history? Are we better? Are we worse? Is it even relevant? It's nearly tautological that it has happened, but how much does it happen? Can an educational system do anything about it? Is it worth it? "open bigotry." Ok. Welcome to the world. If this is a sign of a declining educational system, then virtually no place anywhere in the history of the world has had a good educational system. "declining livelihoods of the lower economic class." Really? Support this. And give evidence that "a problem with education" (again, supposedly fixable problem) is at least one of the causes. "political unrest and populism." Do I even need to at this point? "educational metrics being substantially lower than other countries for years." Oh my god, finally something that is commonly understood enough to warrant no citation. And something that is probably commonly understood to be linked to "a problem with education." But now, what are you adding with it? So, you've failed to even make a valid argument with four of your points by not bothering to support them, and the fifth is so commonly known and pointless to reiterate that there is no reason to include it here. So, why, in your mind, does this conversation belong here when we could be talking about all the cool, innovative, and interesting topics that HN was designed to support?
- gjem97 9y agoQ: Why are they flatlining? A: Random variation. But seriously, you shouldn't be allowed to announce a trend without giving some measure of historical volatility. Show me that this "flatline" is actually a major deviation from expected results (based on historical data). Even a chart would demonstrate this visually. This is clearly just axe-grinding.
- andlarry 9y ago> But persistently low achievement rates of African-American, Latino, poor, English-learner and disabled students, who together make up a majority of the state’s public-school students, fuel criticism of the educational status quo. Perhaps repealing the English only teaching requirement via prop 58 last year had something to do with harming English proficiency in underserved populations. Prop 227, which established the English only requirement (parents could opt out) seemed successful. > "Hispanic test scores on a range of subjects have risen since Proposition 227 became law." https://ballotpedia.org/California_Proposition_227,_the_%22English_in_Public_Schools%22_Initiative_(1998) https://ballotpedia.org/California_Proposition_227,_the_%22E...
- Dan_Nguyen 9y ago>Perhaps repealing the English only teaching requirement via prop 58 last year had something to do with harming English proficiency in underserved populations. It wouldn't have affected any of these test scores. Prop 58 was approved Nov 2016 and took effect July 2017[1], whereas the 2017 tests cited in this article were taken 2/3 of the way into the school year[2], which puts it in Spring for a normal school year schedule and months before Prop 58 ever took effect. Any effects of Prop 58 on testing scores won't be seen until this school year when students take the tests in early 2018. [1] http://downloads.capta.org/leg/Prop58_Support_FullAnalysis.pdf http://downloads.capta.org/leg/Prop58_Support_FullAnalysis.p... [2]https://www.cde.ca.gov/ta/tg/ai/assess1617testdates.asp https://www.cde.ca.gov/ta/tg/ai/assess1617testdates.asp
- DoodleBuggy 9y agoStandardized testing encourages teaching how to take standardized tests, why does anyone think that's a good idea?