15 ms·

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

104 points by Bostonian 5y ago

anshumankmr 5y ago
This is not going to improve the stereotype about Americans being bad at mental maths.
- annoyingnoob 5y ago
  You mean we don't have math competitions like the spelling bee for language. I'm not convinced that there is a lot of value in being a human calculator. Knowing how to do the math is important, being able to do it all in your head is not.
  - rscho 5y ago
    It is. I couldn't do my job without it. Using a calculator would slow me down considerably.
  - smolder 5y ago
    There are math competitions. See Mathletes.
  - yumraj 5y ago
    > Knowing how to do the math is important, being able to do it all in your head is not. Respectfully that is such a myopic argument that it is not even funny. If all one knows is how to press buttons to get some answers, one doesn't truly understand what one is doing. Also, what if one doesn't have a calculator and needs to do some math? Or, do it quickly as a sibling comment made...
    - annoyingnoob 5y ago
      Knowing the operations and being able to do them, say on paper, is important. In my teens I worked as a cashier, I was able to calculate change in my head - pretty straight forward and no one dies if I get it wrong. If I need to do something more complicated, or where a wrong answer would have a bad outcome, then I want to be sure I'm getting it right by using a machine to help me. I'm talking about knowing the math and recognizing that I'm human.
    - sureglymop 5y ago
      I don't think that this is what the person you're replying to meant.. For example, say you need to do matrix multiplication. What's more important, knowing how to do it and when to apply it or meticulously doing the whole computation without a computer? I chose this example because it's nothing more than a focus exercise and as the complexity increases, the chance of you making an error increases too. Most people know what multiplication and addition are but there would still be a high chance that they make small errors due to not paying attention. On the other hand if you come across this problem, know that you need to do this now and let the computer do the operation you decrease the chance of such mistakes. The same is true for many other concepts... What's more important, knowing every system call by heart or knowing how to look up their documentation? No, the important part is knowing what system calls are and when you might need them, for the rest it's just about looking up information. The thing is, you can study a lot of things so that you can do them by heart and it's just an exercise of remembering. But if you grasp the logics of something or start seeing patterns etc. that's ultimately more valuable. It's true for learning a language too.. of course you can learn everything by heart but if there are certain logical rules for how certain words are built up, those are more important.
      - yumraj 5y ago
        The context here is 13 year olds and doing Math in your head.
reustle 5y ago
> National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP)
kfprt 5y ago
I wonder if this has anything to do with the educational and social stunting caused by lockdowns.
- thehoff 5y ago
  >The latest release comes from NAEP’s 2020 assessment of long-term trends, which was administered by the National Center for Education Statistics to nine- and 13-year-olds before COVID-19 first shuttered schools last spring.
  - SketchySeaBeast 5y ago
    And, as the article notes, this test could prove useful in testing against later COVID related effects: > The long-term assessment is a crucial piece of data for another reason: It was administered to students between October 2019 and March 2020, making it a final snapshot of academic trends before the emergence of COVID-19.
pwned1 5y ago
Why does the graph only show three data points? 1973, 2012, 2020?
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
merpnderp 5y ago
It's curious that the planned 2016 tests were skipped just a few years after one of the biggest overhauls to the education system in recent history.
- OldHand2018 5y ago
  It is curious - according to the article the tests were cancelled due to budget issues. How expensive is this testing? Is it really believable that we couldn't actually afford it??? I notice the attempt to blame common core, but... Nobody ever actually implemented common core (No True Scotsman). The whole thing was completely messed up by educational corporations "buying" state boards of education.
  - ryathal 5y ago
    Getting questions on a test is actually really expensive for a standardized test. It's been a while, but I believe it cost was in the $3-4k range per question for my state's tests. These test questions go through significant amounts of review for various biases and whether they actually measure understanding/mastery of the intended knowledge standard.
    - alach11 5y ago
      That seems pretty cheap. That would mean designing the SAT would cost $0.6 million. Compare that to the $640,000 million we spend per year and it seems absolutely negligible.
  - corpdronejuly 5y ago
    There's mountains of paper, or proprietary software used for these tests. And that's before we pay for graders and monitors(and many schools need a few extra hands to do the test according to standard due to crowding).
fatnoah 5y ago
This is a very complicated thing to try to unwind, but the expectation of an increase in scores seems to rely on faith in the exam itself, and that changes in how school is taught would necessarily lead to improvement in scores. Obviously there are a billion other things that could affect these scores, such as electronics or the general societal and technological trend (and I am as guilty as anyone) towards shorter attention span, lack of delayed gratification, etc.
lumost 5y ago
I'm skeptical of the tests core result that reading performance has dropped to 1970s levels among thirteen year olds. 13 year olds today almost exclusively communicate through text, whereas in the 70s it was quite plausible for a 13 year old to simply not spend time reading. I think its worth questioning the test and whether there has been a shift in reading/math skills since the last iteration which de-emphasizes skills the test pushes. Mental math in particular is a skill which was borderline relevant with the advent of calculators and is highly questionable when everyone has a calculating machine in their pockets 24/7. We should expect that we need to adjust our educational standards from time to time less we continue to teach alchemy, or meta-physics.
- kvathupo 5y ago
  I was inclined to agree, but the questions seem to be as simple as "add 32 and 14" [1]. I doubt students failed to answer this question on the basis of what field the numbers belonged to :) That said, the emphasis on rote memorization through multiplication tables has long been utterly useless. So, there is fault in the purpose of instruction as well. As an aside on this notion of rote learning, I recall some of my high school's top students (by GPA) could not solve a simple ODE, despite getting the highest score on the AP Calculus exams (granted, this doesn't mean much when such a score can be attained with a 70%) [1] - https://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/subject/field_pubs/sqb/pdf/2020_sqb_ltt_mr.pdf https://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/subject/field_pubs/sqb...
  - hungryforcodes 5y ago
    Maybe it's just me, but multiplication tables are one of the few useful things I got out of primary school. To this day I use this often, almost daily. I mean to call them USELESS is pretty severe mischaracterization of them.
    - BoxOfRain 5y ago
      I often find myself wishing my mental maths was better in general, I'm pretty dreadful at it and while I'm never more than five seconds or so away from a calculator it's still sometimes a slowdown and context switch I could do without.
redleggedfrog 5y ago
Acectdotally, most of my wife's friends are teachers, mostly for private schools but a couple for public too, between grades 4 and 11, none less than for 15 years. Across the board they report declines in math and reading and just about everything else. Curiously some of them teach foreigners, so this is not just a U.S. phenomena. When asked why they universally point the finger at phones. This affirms my confirmation bias but seems plausible as well.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- newsbinator 5y ago
  > When asked why they universally point the finger at phones Teachers universally believe all sorts of things that turn out (or long ago turned out) to be false or detrimental. They may be right about phones or they may be wrong, but I'd guess their professional intuition on stuff like this is no better than random chance.
  - jessaustin 5y ago
    Don't assume they haven't performed experiments. If performance improves after removing devices from class, in multiple classes in various situations, teachers won't be relying on "intuition" to know what's going on.
    - newsbinator 5y ago
      If they have performed experiments, I'd like to read them: I'm easy to convince by a good experiment.
      - jessaustin 5y ago
        We call them "professionals" so we don't have to pay them overtime, but teachers are working people. Their mission is not to advance scientific understanding. Their mission is to impart knowledge to children. It's not as though the idea that modern smartphones are distracting is a novel result. No one who has observed distracted drivers on the highway would be surprised.
corpdronejuly 5y ago
Remote learning that was "online first" reflected the erroneous idea that most American homes have internet access. We taught in a county where 50% of families don't have internet, and 20% don't even have a land line in 2020-2021. The decline in learning was astonishing. Many of these children simply did not do any reading at all for a whole year.
- geofft 5y ago
  True, but this doesn't apply to the article: > The latest release comes from NAEP’s 2020 assessment of long-term trends, which was administered by the National Center for Education Statistics to nine- and 13-year-olds before COVID-19 first shuttered schools last spring.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- 43920 5y ago
  > The latest release comes from NAEP’s 2020 assessment of long-term trends, which was administered by the National Center for Education Statistics to nine- and 13-year-olds before COVID-19 first shuttered schools last spring. > The long-term assessment is a crucial piece of data for another reason: It was administered to students between October 2019 and March 2020, making it a final snapshot of academic trends before the emergence of COVID-19. Loveless said he hoped future analyses of how kids learned during and after the greatest disaster in K-12 history wouldn’t overlook the “deeper,” persistent stagnation that preceded it.
  - toast0 5y ago
    So my school district's last day of in person instruction was March 12, 2020. Which leads me to wonder if the plan was to end testing in March 2020, or if testing was ended because schools were being shutdown and testing wasn't feasible. If testing for the 2019-2020 school year stopped rather than completed, then you've got a data problem because it's not clear that tested performance is independent of scheduling. Also, even if the testing was all completed as scheduled, COVID-19 was on at least some student's minds throughout February, which could reduce test scores. It can be difficult to focus on testing when a not yet declared pandemic is starting up.
newbamboo 5y ago
It’s always the sample.
paulpauper 5y ago
It seems like young people (particularly the 15-20 year-old range) are so much smarter and better informed than decades ago or even just 10 years ago. The fear about the US falling behind seems unfounded. Then again, I have to remind myself that Reddit and NH is not reality...these sites are probably only representative of the top 20% or so of ability. The bottom 50% are either less active online or more inclined to major social networks.
- Snoozle 5y ago
  What makes you believe they are better informed? From my experience of: 1. being a not-quite-old person (33) 2. step son (16) 3. step daughter (15) 4. having a step mother teaching elementary school 5. my mother teaching middle and high school I see kids as overly exposed to dramatic information. Both of my kids thought they were gay prior to hitting puberty and realizing they weren't. Both of my kids have taken political extremist positions, one identifying as communist and the other identifying as a libertarian. Most of the children I know are participating in very adult discussions without giving any hint of their age. Children are exposed much earlier to sex and pornography and fringe groups. In addition to this, reading and writing skills have anecdotally declined considerably. When I was 16, I read at least one book per month, usually one per week. Most of the children I've had experience with will never read a book unless ordered to, and have no desire to read one either. Children are unable to write coherently; they pump out barely understandable slang prose, throw it through grammarly, and assume that it's good. Hell, for one other anecdote, my wife is in college right now and I've been reading her peers' essays for English and History class and I can't imagine how these people are capable of operating in society with their absolute bottom of the barrel writing ability. Professors are having to give passing grades to what could be considered 6th grade writing levels in order to not fail the entire class. Maybe things were the same when I was a child and I just wasn't exposed to it, but I don't have a lot of hope in the education of the future generations with access to social media. I do feel a lot of job security, however.
  - SketchySeaBeast 5y ago
    The question I have is how much of that is actually different and how much is worse? I knew lots of communist/libertarian high schoolers. Teenagers get extreme views. Also regarding the rate of book reading - could it be that your childhood was not the norm? I too read a lot, but I was the only one on the school bus home who did, and it was so remarkable I was picked on for it. And complaining about a lack of book reading could be like lamenting we aren't all reading the newspaper anymore either - does that mean our reading and writing is worse? Is the general essay writing of this decade actually provably that much worse than a decade or three ago? Is the general population actually less literate or can we not remember decades past? I'm not saying you're entirely wrong, but there's some "old man yells at cloud" vibes here too.
Factorium 5y ago
Are these results broken down by race? If not, we could be seeing static or even improving results, hidden by the shifting demographics of the USA. When you examine Goodschools data for a given area, there is a very high correlation between the White/Asian student population and the overall performance of the school, including for Black/Hispanic children. Additionally, how much have politics impacted results for the worst performing students? Anecdotally, its a lot harder to expel or discipline certain consistently disruptive students now.
- bmj 5y ago
  Yes. From the article: More ominous were the results for 13-year-olds, who experienced statistically significant drops of three and five points in reading and math, respectively. Compared with math performance in 2012, boys overall lost five points, and girls overall lost six points. Black students dropped eight points and Hispanic students four points; both decreases widened their score gap with white students, whose scores were statistically unchanged from 2012.
usaar333 5y ago
You can deep dive into the data here: https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/reading/nation/scores/?grade=12 https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/reading/nation/scores/?gra...
rscho 5y ago
In my country, it was in the news that this year's language test for teachers (really basic stuff) resulted in 100% of the candidates failing. How is that even possible?
- Foobar8568 5y ago
  switzerland he.... That one is easy, useless education up to 8P, check the books used for these classes, it's a total joke. Add a fairly large non native language immigration, and you have kids up to 7 years old who can't speak more than one sentence in the local language (only my daughter could speak French properly in her class, in 4P, she is the only one who can actually read so far, her teacher says so to her class ffs). Also don't forget that generally non science path are for the second rate students in europe, and the HES are generally also targeted to drop out students, and you get such results. That particular test was funny as the students were arguing the course prepared them for another tests, yeah, correcting primary school level essay needs an actual course to find French mistakes. That tells everything on the so call great Swiss education.
Bud 5y ago
[flagged]
- welfare 5y ago
  Don’t know where you live or what you refer to. Public schools where I live are paid through (very high) property taxes, anyone who wants to put their kids through private school needs to pay that tuition on top of what they’re paying in property taxes, essentially paying twice for schooling. Maybe it’s different where you live?
- istorical 5y ago
  Spend time on the teachers subreddit. It's not so much money that's the primary problem. It's poor parenting, inability of teachers or administrators to actually implement any sort of punishment or discipline that a student would care about, and cultural decline.
  - bob1029 5y ago
    This is the real answer and no one really wants to talk about it because solving it is easily one of the greatest challenges of our time. It is very hard for most to take ownership of the fact that their child is a misbehaved little shit because they were raised from birth on iPad, YouTube and Fortnite instead of more enriching activities. Virtually everyone has a burned out dopamine loop at this point and it's impossible to get kids excited about education anymore. You want to talk about drug problems, this one is easily the worst.
  - Bud 5y ago
    No. It's the robbery of resources from public education. Nice try, though!
    - dang 5y ago
      Would you please stop posting flamewar comments? You've been doing it repeatedly lately, and we've had to ask you this kind of thing multiple times in the past, going back years. That's really not cool. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful. Maybe you don't owe the pilferers of public resources better, but you definitely owe this community better if you're participating in it.
phnofive 5y ago
...in a 2019-2020 assessment compared with the previous test which was completed in 2012. Reviewing 'Trend in NAEP long-term trend reading average scores for 9- and 13-year-old students', we see the score has fluctuated between 255 and 263 for fifty years. What am I missing?
TedShiller 5y ago
With the elimination of Gifted and Talented programs, expect the decline to sadly continue.
- mensetmanusman 5y ago
  If the average is getting worse it’s not fair to let some get too far ahead. /s
- gnicholas 5y ago
  California, the most populous state in the nation, removed the statewide mandate for these programs in 2014, so the timeline fits. That doesn't mean it's the predominant cause of the drop, or even a major contributing factor. But it sure doesn't help. I've been shocked to see how little interest the public schools have in educating students who are more advanced. We live in Menlo Park, and it's like pulling teeth to get the school to allow our daughter to do advanced math. Many families are leaving the public schools because of this, and we're considering our options as well. This is a sharp contrast to my experience growing up and going to public schools in Sacramento, where there were (and still are) many good options.
  - raegis 5y ago
    But have the Gifted and Talented programs been eliminated? My children are in LAUSD, the second largest school district in the country, where we have regular Gifted and Talented meetings, including one tomorrow. No one here speaks of eliminating the programs, but I do read about it in national news sometimes.
    - gnicholas 5y ago
      There are zero GATE offerings here. At the district level, they said that students should be allowed to do math with the grade level that is appropriate for that student. But at the school level, the principal has fought us every step of the way. He didn't even want to do a math assessment, which the district had promised. He literally did not want to find out what level our child is at. And the teacher has said that she does not wish for our child to learn any new math skills this year. How do these people call themselves educators, when they aren't actually interested in educating students?
alliao 5y ago
can't help but link this with discussion associated with this article that was on hacker news not so long ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27746982 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27746982
rp1 5y ago
I'm sure there are many causes of this. After recently looking for a home, I have my own theory: schools in the U.S. are absolutely terrible. When looking for a home in the NYC metro area (one of the wealthiest in the country), I was absolutely appalled at the quality of the schools in 90% of the places I looked. As an affluent person with the means to choose, I chose to look elsewhere. The experience got me thinking, however: 90% of people go to terrible schools because they don't have a choice. Taxes are continually cut. Districts are gerrymandered so the most residents don't get an equal say. Interest groups take over local and state politics and de-prioritize investing in the future in the name of profits and short-term political gains. If nations grow great when people sew the seeds of trees in whose shade they will never sit, then we're in the clear-cutting stage of our society. This study provides quantitative evidence that something is wrong with education, but there is qualitative evidence as well. The frequent politicization of events and susceptibility to fake news indicates a lack of critical thinking skills.
- silisili 5y ago
  This is a direct result of elimination of the middle class, the relatively rich getting richer, and those below well, not. The tax base just evaporates. I've seen literal unincorporated swapland turned into a subdivision, well more of a little city, for the 'haves', complete with its own elementary school. Top rated, of course. Bussing attempted to solve this problem, in my belief in the wrong way. For a public good, especially one for non taxpaying class(children), the state should probably take the taxes and divvy it up fairly. I'm a big believer in personal property rights, hard work, all that jazz...but not that rich children deserve a better education than the less fortunate.
  - lsiebert 5y ago
    Also studies of universal pre K suggests it more than pays for itself. https://nieer.org/2019/01/31/research-shows-high-quality-pre-k-pays-off-now-lets-deliver-it https://nieer.org/2019/01/31/research-shows-high-quality-pre...
    - barry-cotter 5y ago
mensetmanusman 5y ago
America typically spends up there in the top 10 of OECD countries in terms of dollars per capita on education. Unfortunately it’s horribly spent. I wouldn’t mind testing a voucher program to see if that would add some innovation by letting parents choose how to spend the $13k allocated per their student. All spending instead is going to a snowballing administrative bureaucracy. Oh well.
- bsder 5y ago
  I am quite sympathetic about too much administration; however, the difference is more fundamental. America doesn't "track" students and teaches everybody. Other countries flush away the lower performing students to non-academic education as the years progress. We see what this does even here in the US. Every charter school always manages to claim to be "cost effective"--except that they always manage to do this by effectively flushing the lower performing (read "expensive") students back to the public schools. When you force the charter schools to accept via lottery so they can't cherry pick only the decent students, their cost effectiveness vanishes. And, by the way, the Gates Foundation actually had solid research about this from following several programs. For middle school age and below students, you need to spend roughly $15K per student (and that was 5+ years ago--so adjust upward), hold class sizes at about 15 students maximum, and have 2 adults in the room. This allows you to bring poorly performing students up to average over several years. ALL of those programs were eventually cancelled for lack of money. Everybody wants "educational excellence" until somebody hands them the bill--then everybody pisses and moans about cost. The only people who don't moan about cost are the upper class--they fund the hell out of the schools their kids go to. Funny that.
  - tremon 5y ago
    America doesn't "track" students and teaches everybody. Other countries flush away the lower performing students to non-academic education as the years progress. This study was about 13-year olds. Most countries "flush away" (thank you for using a gratuitously denigrating term here) their students after 13, not before.
  - PeterisP 5y ago
superflit2 5y ago
Demographics are changing. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bell_Curve https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bell_Curve
- gremloni 5y ago
  Existing stable “demographs” saw a decrease from past numbers.
throwaway59553 5y ago
So how did the demographics of the USA changed since the 1970s?
jmpman 5y ago
Stupid people are having more kids?
avsteele 5y ago
No Child Left Behind passed in 2002. My understanding is that this mandated a lot more annual standardized testing that continues to this day. Is the data from the NCLB tests consistent with the NAEP results?
axiosgunnar 5y ago
Is it smartphones and social media?

104 points by Bostonian 5y ago

anshumankmr 5y ago

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

annoyingnoob 5y ago
You mean we don't have math competitions like the spelling bee for language. I'm not convinced that there is a lot of value in being a human calculator. Knowing how to do the math is important, being able to do it all in your head is not.
- rscho 5y ago
  It is. I couldn't do my job without it. Using a calculator would slow me down considerably.
- smolder 5y ago
  There are math competitions. See Mathletes.
- yumraj 5y ago
  > Knowing how to do the math is important, being able to do it all in your head is not. Respectfully that is such a myopic argument that it is not even funny. If all one knows is how to press buttons to get some answers, one doesn't truly understand what one is doing. Also, what if one doesn't have a calculator and needs to do some math? Or, do it quickly as a sibling comment made...
  - annoyingnoob 5y ago
    Knowing the operations and being able to do them, say on paper, is important. In my teens I worked as a cashier, I was able to calculate change in my head - pretty straight forward and no one dies if I get it wrong. If I need to do something more complicated, or where a wrong answer would have a bad outcome, then I want to be sure I'm getting it right by using a machine to help me. I'm talking about knowing the math and recognizing that I'm human.
  - sureglymop 5y ago
    I don't think that this is what the person you're replying to meant.. For example, say you need to do matrix multiplication. What's more important, knowing how to do it and when to apply it or meticulously doing the whole computation without a computer? I chose this example because it's nothing more than a focus exercise and as the complexity increases, the chance of you making an error increases too. Most people know what multiplication and addition are but there would still be a high chance that they make small errors due to not paying attention. On the other hand if you come across this problem, know that you need to do this now and let the computer do the operation you decrease the chance of such mistakes. The same is true for many other concepts... What's more important, knowing every system call by heart or knowing how to look up their documentation? No, the important part is knowing what system calls are and when you might need them, for the rest it's just about looking up information. The thing is, you can study a lot of things so that you can do them by heart and it's just an exercise of remembering. But if you grasp the logics of something or start seeing patterns etc. that's ultimately more valuable. It's true for learning a language too.. of course you can learn everything by heart but if there are certain logical rules for how certain words are built up, those are more important.
    - yumraj 5y ago
      The context here is 13 year olds and doing Math in your head.

reustle 5y ago

> National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP)

kfprt 5y ago

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

thehoff 5y ago
>The latest release comes from NAEP’s 2020 assessment of long-term trends, which was administered by the National Center for Education Statistics to nine- and 13-year-olds before COVID-19 first shuttered schools last spring.
- SketchySeaBeast 5y ago
  And, as the article notes, this test could prove useful in testing against later COVID related effects: > The long-term assessment is a crucial piece of data for another reason: It was administered to students between October 2019 and March 2020, making it a final snapshot of academic trends before the emergence of COVID-19.

pwned1 5y ago

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

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

merpnderp 5y ago

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

OldHand2018 5y ago
It is curious - according to the article the tests were cancelled due to budget issues. How expensive is this testing? Is it really believable that we couldn't actually afford it??? I notice the attempt to blame common core, but... Nobody ever actually implemented common core (No True Scotsman). The whole thing was completely messed up by educational corporations "buying" state boards of education.
- ryathal 5y ago
  Getting questions on a test is actually really expensive for a standardized test. It's been a while, but I believe it cost was in the $3-4k range per question for my state's tests. These test questions go through significant amounts of review for various biases and whether they actually measure understanding/mastery of the intended knowledge standard.
  - alach11 5y ago
    That seems pretty cheap. That would mean designing the SAT would cost $0.6 million. Compare that to the $640,000 million we spend per year and it seems absolutely negligible.
- corpdronejuly 5y ago
  There's mountains of paper, or proprietary software used for these tests. And that's before we pay for graders and monitors(and many schools need a few extra hands to do the test according to standard due to crowding).

fatnoah 5y ago

This is a very complicated thing to try to unwind, but the expectation of an increase in scores seems to rely on faith in the exam itself, and that changes in how school is taught would necessarily lead to improvement in scores. Obviously there are a billion other things that could affect these scores, such as electronics or the general societal and technological trend (and I am as guilty as anyone) towards shorter attention span, lack of delayed gratification, etc.

lumost 5y ago

I'm skeptical of the tests core result that reading performance has dropped to 1970s levels among thirteen year olds. 13 year olds today almost exclusively communicate through text, whereas in the 70s it was quite plausible for a 13 year old to simply not spend time reading. I think its worth questioning the test and whether there has been a shift in reading/math skills since the last iteration which de-emphasizes skills the test pushes. Mental math in particular is a skill which was borderline relevant with the advent of calculators and is highly questionable when everyone has a calculating machine in their pockets 24/7. We should expect that we need to adjust our educational standards from time to time less we continue to teach alchemy, or meta-physics.

kvathupo 5y ago
I was inclined to agree, but the questions seem to be as simple as "add 32 and 14" [1]. I doubt students failed to answer this question on the basis of what field the numbers belonged to :) That said, the emphasis on rote memorization through multiplication tables has long been utterly useless. So, there is fault in the purpose of instruction as well. As an aside on this notion of rote learning, I recall some of my high school's top students (by GPA) could not solve a simple ODE, despite getting the highest score on the AP Calculus exams (granted, this doesn't mean much when such a score can be attained with a 70%) [1] - https://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/subject/field_pubs/sqb/pdf/2020_sqb_ltt_mr.pdf https://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/subject/field_pubs/sqb...
- hungryforcodes 5y ago
  Maybe it's just me, but multiplication tables are one of the few useful things I got out of primary school. To this day I use this often, almost daily. I mean to call them USELESS is pretty severe mischaracterization of them.
  - BoxOfRain 5y ago
    I often find myself wishing my mental maths was better in general, I'm pretty dreadful at it and while I'm never more than five seconds or so away from a calculator it's still sometimes a slowdown and context switch I could do without.

redleggedfrog 5y ago

Acectdotally, most of my wife's friends are teachers, mostly for private schools but a couple for public too, between grades 4 and 11, none less than for 15 years. Across the board they report declines in math and reading and just about everything else. Curiously some of them teach foreigners, so this is not just a U.S. phenomena. When asked why they universally point the finger at phones. This affirms my confirmation bias but seems plausible as well.

deleted 5y ago
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newsbinator 5y ago
> When asked why they universally point the finger at phones Teachers universally believe all sorts of things that turn out (or long ago turned out) to be false or detrimental. They may be right about phones or they may be wrong, but I'd guess their professional intuition on stuff like this is no better than random chance.
- jessaustin 5y ago
  Don't assume they haven't performed experiments. If performance improves after removing devices from class, in multiple classes in various situations, teachers won't be relying on "intuition" to know what's going on.
  - newsbinator 5y ago
    If they have performed experiments, I'd like to read them: I'm easy to convince by a good experiment.
    - jessaustin 5y ago
      We call them "professionals" so we don't have to pay them overtime, but teachers are working people. Their mission is not to advance scientific understanding. Their mission is to impart knowledge to children. It's not as though the idea that modern smartphones are distracting is a novel result. No one who has observed distracted drivers on the highway would be surprised.

corpdronejuly 5y ago

Remote learning that was "online first" reflected the erroneous idea that most American homes have internet access. We taught in a county where 50% of families don't have internet, and 20% don't even have a land line in 2020-2021. The decline in learning was astonishing. Many of these children simply did not do any reading at all for a whole year.

geofft 5y ago
True, but this doesn't apply to the article: > The latest release comes from NAEP’s 2020 assessment of long-term trends, which was administered by the National Center for Education Statistics to nine- and 13-year-olds before COVID-19 first shuttered schools last spring.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
43920 5y ago
> The latest release comes from NAEP’s 2020 assessment of long-term trends, which was administered by the National Center for Education Statistics to nine- and 13-year-olds before COVID-19 first shuttered schools last spring. > The long-term assessment is a crucial piece of data for another reason: It was administered to students between October 2019 and March 2020, making it a final snapshot of academic trends before the emergence of COVID-19. Loveless said he hoped future analyses of how kids learned during and after the greatest disaster in K-12 history wouldn’t overlook the “deeper,” persistent stagnation that preceded it.
- toast0 5y ago
  So my school district's last day of in person instruction was March 12, 2020. Which leads me to wonder if the plan was to end testing in March 2020, or if testing was ended because schools were being shutdown and testing wasn't feasible. If testing for the 2019-2020 school year stopped rather than completed, then you've got a data problem because it's not clear that tested performance is independent of scheduling. Also, even if the testing was all completed as scheduled, COVID-19 was on at least some student's minds throughout February, which could reduce test scores. It can be difficult to focus on testing when a not yet declared pandemic is starting up.

newbamboo 5y ago

It’s always the sample.

paulpauper 5y ago

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

Snoozle 5y ago
What makes you believe they are better informed? From my experience of: 1. being a not-quite-old person (33) 2. step son (16) 3. step daughter (15) 4. having a step mother teaching elementary school 5. my mother teaching middle and high school I see kids as overly exposed to dramatic information. Both of my kids thought they were gay prior to hitting puberty and realizing they weren't. Both of my kids have taken political extremist positions, one identifying as communist and the other identifying as a libertarian. Most of the children I know are participating in very adult discussions without giving any hint of their age. Children are exposed much earlier to sex and pornography and fringe groups. In addition to this, reading and writing skills have anecdotally declined considerably. When I was 16, I read at least one book per month, usually one per week. Most of the children I've had experience with will never read a book unless ordered to, and have no desire to read one either. Children are unable to write coherently; they pump out barely understandable slang prose, throw it through grammarly, and assume that it's good. Hell, for one other anecdote, my wife is in college right now and I've been reading her peers' essays for English and History class and I can't imagine how these people are capable of operating in society with their absolute bottom of the barrel writing ability. Professors are having to give passing grades to what could be considered 6th grade writing levels in order to not fail the entire class. Maybe things were the same when I was a child and I just wasn't exposed to it, but I don't have a lot of hope in the education of the future generations with access to social media. I do feel a lot of job security, however.
- SketchySeaBeast 5y ago
  The question I have is how much of that is actually different and how much is worse? I knew lots of communist/libertarian high schoolers. Teenagers get extreme views. Also regarding the rate of book reading - could it be that your childhood was not the norm? I too read a lot, but I was the only one on the school bus home who did, and it was so remarkable I was picked on for it. And complaining about a lack of book reading could be like lamenting we aren't all reading the newspaper anymore either - does that mean our reading and writing is worse? Is the general essay writing of this decade actually provably that much worse than a decade or three ago? Is the general population actually less literate or can we not remember decades past? I'm not saying you're entirely wrong, but there's some "old man yells at cloud" vibes here too.

Factorium 5y ago

Are these results broken down by race? If not, we could be seeing static or even improving results, hidden by the shifting demographics of the USA. When you examine Goodschools data for a given area, there is a very high correlation between the White/Asian student population and the overall performance of the school, including for Black/Hispanic children. Additionally, how much have politics impacted results for the worst performing students? Anecdotally, its a lot harder to expel or discipline certain consistently disruptive students now.

bmj 5y ago
Yes. From the article: More ominous were the results for 13-year-olds, who experienced statistically significant drops of three and five points in reading and math, respectively. Compared with math performance in 2012, boys overall lost five points, and girls overall lost six points. Black students dropped eight points and Hispanic students four points; both decreases widened their score gap with white students, whose scores were statistically unchanged from 2012.

usaar333 5y ago

You can deep dive into the data here: https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/reading/nation/scores/?grade=12 https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/reading/nation/scores/?gra...

rscho 5y ago

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

Foobar8568 5y ago
switzerland he.... That one is easy, useless education up to 8P, check the books used for these classes, it's a total joke. Add a fairly large non native language immigration, and you have kids up to 7 years old who can't speak more than one sentence in the local language (only my daughter could speak French properly in her class, in 4P, she is the only one who can actually read so far, her teacher says so to her class ffs). Also don't forget that generally non science path are for the second rate students in europe, and the HES are generally also targeted to drop out students, and you get such results. That particular test was funny as the students were arguing the course prepared them for another tests, yeah, correcting primary school level essay needs an actual course to find French mistakes. That tells everything on the so call great Swiss education.

Bud 5y ago

[flagged]

welfare 5y ago
Don’t know where you live or what you refer to. Public schools where I live are paid through (very high) property taxes, anyone who wants to put their kids through private school needs to pay that tuition on top of what they’re paying in property taxes, essentially paying twice for schooling. Maybe it’s different where you live?
istorical 5y ago
Spend time on the teachers subreddit. It's not so much money that's the primary problem. It's poor parenting, inability of teachers or administrators to actually implement any sort of punishment or discipline that a student would care about, and cultural decline.
- bob1029 5y ago
  This is the real answer and no one really wants to talk about it because solving it is easily one of the greatest challenges of our time. It is very hard for most to take ownership of the fact that their child is a misbehaved little shit because they were raised from birth on iPad, YouTube and Fortnite instead of more enriching activities. Virtually everyone has a burned out dopamine loop at this point and it's impossible to get kids excited about education anymore. You want to talk about drug problems, this one is easily the worst.
- Bud 5y ago
  No. It's the robbery of resources from public education. Nice try, though!
  - dang 5y ago
    Would you please stop posting flamewar comments? You've been doing it repeatedly lately, and we've had to ask you this kind of thing multiple times in the past, going back years. That's really not cool. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful. Maybe you don't owe the pilferers of public resources better, but you definitely owe this community better if you're participating in it.

phnofive 5y ago

...in a 2019-2020 assessment compared with the previous test which was completed in 2012. Reviewing 'Trend in NAEP long-term trend reading average scores for 9- and 13-year-old students', we see the score has fluctuated between 255 and 263 for fifty years. What am I missing?

TedShiller 5y ago

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

mensetmanusman 5y ago
If the average is getting worse it’s not fair to let some get too far ahead. /s
gnicholas 5y ago
California, the most populous state in the nation, removed the statewide mandate for these programs in 2014, so the timeline fits. That doesn't mean it's the predominant cause of the drop, or even a major contributing factor. But it sure doesn't help. I've been shocked to see how little interest the public schools have in educating students who are more advanced. We live in Menlo Park, and it's like pulling teeth to get the school to allow our daughter to do advanced math. Many families are leaving the public schools because of this, and we're considering our options as well. This is a sharp contrast to my experience growing up and going to public schools in Sacramento, where there were (and still are) many good options.
- raegis 5y ago
  But have the Gifted and Talented programs been eliminated? My children are in LAUSD, the second largest school district in the country, where we have regular Gifted and Talented meetings, including one tomorrow. No one here speaks of eliminating the programs, but I do read about it in national news sometimes.
  - gnicholas 5y ago
    There are zero GATE offerings here. At the district level, they said that students should be allowed to do math with the grade level that is appropriate for that student. But at the school level, the principal has fought us every step of the way. He didn't even want to do a math assessment, which the district had promised. He literally did not want to find out what level our child is at. And the teacher has said that she does not wish for our child to learn any new math skills this year. How do these people call themselves educators, when they aren't actually interested in educating students?

alliao 5y ago

can't help but link this with discussion associated with this article that was on hacker news not so long ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27746982 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27746982

rp1 5y ago

I'm sure there are many causes of this. After recently looking for a home, I have my own theory: schools in the U.S. are absolutely terrible. When looking for a home in the NYC metro area (one of the wealthiest in the country), I was absolutely appalled at the quality of the schools in 90% of the places I looked. As an affluent person with the means to choose, I chose to look elsewhere. The experience got me thinking, however: 90% of people go to terrible schools because they don't have a choice. Taxes are continually cut. Districts are gerrymandered so the most residents don't get an equal say. Interest groups take over local and state politics and de-prioritize investing in the future in the name of profits and short-term political gains. If nations grow great when people sew the seeds of trees in whose shade they will never sit, then we're in the clear-cutting stage of our society. This study provides quantitative evidence that something is wrong with education, but there is qualitative evidence as well. The frequent politicization of events and susceptibility to fake news indicates a lack of critical thinking skills.

silisili 5y ago
This is a direct result of elimination of the middle class, the relatively rich getting richer, and those below well, not. The tax base just evaporates. I've seen literal unincorporated swapland turned into a subdivision, well more of a little city, for the 'haves', complete with its own elementary school. Top rated, of course. Bussing attempted to solve this problem, in my belief in the wrong way. For a public good, especially one for non taxpaying class(children), the state should probably take the taxes and divvy it up fairly. I'm a big believer in personal property rights, hard work, all that jazz...but not that rich children deserve a better education than the less fortunate.
- lsiebert 5y ago
  Also studies of universal pre K suggests it more than pays for itself. https://nieer.org/2019/01/31/research-shows-high-quality-pre-k-pays-off-now-lets-deliver-it https://nieer.org/2019/01/31/research-shows-high-quality-pre...
  - barry-cotter 5y ago

mensetmanusman 5y ago

America typically spends up there in the top 10 of OECD countries in terms of dollars per capita on education. Unfortunately it’s horribly spent. I wouldn’t mind testing a voucher program to see if that would add some innovation by letting parents choose how to spend the $13k allocated per their student. All spending instead is going to a snowballing administrative bureaucracy. Oh well.

bsder 5y ago
I am quite sympathetic about too much administration; however, the difference is more fundamental. America doesn't "track" students and teaches everybody. Other countries flush away the lower performing students to non-academic education as the years progress. We see what this does even here in the US. Every charter school always manages to claim to be "cost effective"--except that they always manage to do this by effectively flushing the lower performing (read "expensive") students back to the public schools. When you force the charter schools to accept via lottery so they can't cherry pick only the decent students, their cost effectiveness vanishes. And, by the way, the Gates Foundation actually had solid research about this from following several programs. For middle school age and below students, you need to spend roughly $15K per student (and that was 5+ years ago--so adjust upward), hold class sizes at about 15 students maximum, and have 2 adults in the room. This allows you to bring poorly performing students up to average over several years. ALL of those programs were eventually cancelled for lack of money. Everybody wants "educational excellence" until somebody hands them the bill--then everybody pisses and moans about cost. The only people who don't moan about cost are the upper class--they fund the hell out of the schools their kids go to. Funny that.
- tremon 5y ago
  America doesn't "track" students and teaches everybody. Other countries flush away the lower performing students to non-academic education as the years progress. This study was about 13-year olds. Most countries "flush away" (thank you for using a gratuitously denigrating term here) their students after 13, not before.
- PeterisP 5y ago

superflit2 5y ago

Demographics are changing. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bell_Curve https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bell_Curve

gremloni 5y ago
Existing stable “demographs” saw a decrease from past numbers.

throwaway59553 5y ago

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

jmpman 5y ago

Stupid people are having more kids?

avsteele 5y ago

No Child Left Behind passed in 2002. My understanding is that this mandated a lot more annual standardized testing that continues to this day. Is the data from the NCLB tests consistent with the NAEP results?

axiosgunnar 5y ago

Is it smartphones and social media?