20 ms·

Largest score declines in NAEP mathematics at grades 4 and 8

80 points by supernova87a 4y ago

supernova87a 4y ago
NAEP (one of the few national standards we have in the US to consistently measure math/reading performance) shows a decline in 4th and 8th grade math performance since being measured in 1991. Lots of speculation of course as to contribution from Covid / school shutdowns, etc. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/24/us/math-reading-scores-pandemic.html https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/24/us/math-reading-scores-pa... ( https://archive.ph/vgaxR https://archive.ph/vgaxR )
hunglee2 4y ago
is this really important? US are top in global University rankings, top in global innovation metrics. Could it be that Math is overrated or that even education is overated?
- sanity31415 4y ago
  It isn't just about the top, the other 95% matter too.
- Loic 4y ago
  The current teachers and students at the top universities are from the time the scores were higher or on an improvement trend.
- AmVess 4y ago
  Students attending top colleges represent a small percentage of their particular demographic. Being able to read, write, and having a basic grasp of math is what an alarming number of kids are missing out on. These proficiency levels are appalling, and everyone responsible for them should be deeply ashamed of themselves...and I am not even addressing the decline due to covid.
- smt88 4y ago
  These aren't college students or engineers. These tests are measuring pretty rudimentary math skills, the kind you need to live everyday life. And the scores are important because they suggest to us how well education systems are working in the country, regardless of how "important" you may think the resulting knowledge is.
- murderfs 4y ago
  Of course it's not going to do anything immediately: what happens when these students are the ones in university, or performing the innovation?
fxtentacle 4y ago
In a world where emotionally charged lies generate higher profits than the truth, objective sciences like math are clearly appearing less and less useful. I mean I like math. But if I had to choose between "how to get 1 mio followers on tiktok" and "how to calculate the differential of log(x)", I'd still consider the first course to have a higher roi... Attention is easy to convert into money in today's economy. Math skills, less so.
- morelisp 4y ago
  While it's surely emotionally satisfying in the short term to blame it on people primarily seeking short-term emotional satisfaction, I think there are some easy candidates for more proximate and parsimonious explanations like nobody being in school reliably for >2 years.
- smt88 4y ago
  I'm not sure what you're on your soapbox about, but this decline is probably due to the enormous disruption in children's education caused by the Covid pandemic. The report even compares pre- and post-Covid achievement rates.
  - whoooooo123 4y ago
    > this decline is probably due to the enormous disruption in children's education caused by Covid lockdowns. FTFY
    - smt88 4y ago
      A distinction without a difference. Many parents were keeping children out of school regardless of lockdowns, so it wasn't only lockdowns that contributed.
- mach1ne 4y ago
  Given the number of slots available for 1 mil tiktok follower influencers versus those which require to calculate the differential of log(x), multiplied by resulting lifetime earnings, I differ with you and estimate that the latter's roi is actually higher.
keewee7 4y ago
Remote learning was a global catastrophe for children's learning.
- concordDance 4y ago
  Note that this was unplanned and sudden with not much help.
  - votepaunchy 4y ago
    It was unplanned because we had public health leadership which decided to ignore decades of pandemic planning and lessons learned, and a president who went along with it.
    - concordDance 4y ago
      This happened universally in the world, you can't blame the US leadership, here in the UK schooling suffered just as badly.
      - a_humean 4y ago
        Countries like Singapore, Taiwan, New Zealand, and South Korea suggest that with sufficient planning and political will, there were alternative outcomes available compared to what happened in the US and Europe.
      - FullStackAda 4y ago
        No it has not happened universally around the world, some countries only had the initial shutdown in April 2020 and then the schools were open again. See here https://covid19.uis.unesco.org/global-monitoring-school-closures-covid19/country-dashboard/ https://covid19.uis.unesco.org/global-monitoring-school-clos... France and Switzerland as an example.
- est 4y ago
  But it shouldn't be. Learning in theory should be a highly personal experience.
albertop 4y ago
Well quelle surprise - when you close the schools for two years you doom the generation of kinds.
- devwastaken 4y ago
  They're not doomed. If anything this will show the hyper fixation on academic schooling is misguided. Only the very few whom persue higher education may be required to take higher math that they will also not use. Most academics is for the enrichment of the school and instructors, not because it's an effective education.
  - Der_Einzige 4y ago
    You're downvoted but you're correct. Rates of people going to universities have collapsed, especially among men. They're having to start campus diversity for programs now in some places as a form of affirmative action in schools that became too gynocentric.
    - devwastaken 4y ago
      It's even worse actually - a school admin recently was removed because they dare question the effectiveness of diversity initiatives. It's a new Reagan era.
  - adamsmith143 4y ago
    > Only the very few whom persue higher education may be required to take higher math that they will also not use. This has to be one of the of the most worn out stupid takes. The point of teaching things like math and science which people "will never use in real life" is to teach problem solving and critical thinking. NO ONE actually thinks knowing the quadratic formula is useful in and of itself.
    - _aavaa_ 4y ago
      Idk how they're teaching the quadratic formula nowadays, but when it was taught to me it was taught as a fact to be used later on. The problem solving and critical thinking time could have been spent on working through and coming up with it
pavlov 4y ago
When the topic of school comes up on HN, there’s always a few people who believe that the school environment is in fact detrimental to children and everybody would be better off home-schooled with remote learning to fill the gaps. Does this result provide enough evidence to the contrary, or was the pandemic too much of a special circumstance?
- anm89 4y ago
  As someone who to some degree falls in the category you describe, I'd say you are potentially misunderstanding the argument. I certainly wouldn't argue that spending time in a public school math class correlates negatively with math learning. I have no doubt that some math education takes place in public school math classes. I think the argument is that it doesn't do a great job teaching most students most of the time while simultaneously having serious issues like requiring young children to sit still for extended stretches and punishing kids who aren't well suited to this. I'm not saying that's the whole argument, just an example
- jhanschoo 4y ago
  This is the first I've heard of such a position. But I do think that remote learning home-schooling with adequate supervision can be comparable. My understanding is that home-schooling with private tutors > the typical school environment > remote learning without supervision.
  - kajaktum 4y ago
    >My understanding is that home-schooling with private tutors > the typical school environment > remote learning without supervision. In pure academics, maybe. What about your children's social/well-being from not interacting with their peers?
    - Foobar8568 4y ago
      Have you seen today kids? Well-being is to be far away from them.
Cypher 4y ago
this is why 2+2 should be 5 so that kids can pass increasing the schores.
lynguist 4y ago
You might not believe me, but the decline of the insect population (also on the frontpage) and the fall of test scores and the fall of sperm quality since the 90s have the same single origin. And nothing is being done about it.
- mach1ne 4y ago
  What is this origin?
  - lynguist 4y ago
    The short explanation is insecticides: microtoxins to break the fertility of insects for higher crop yields. These same substances also affect humans, albeit on a different level: slightly lower intelligence because mothers are exposed to these substances and they transfer them to the womb, and they also decrease male fertility. Children of hairdressers or farmers have slightly lower IQ (controlled for all other variables) than others because the mothers are exposed to similar substances.
    - mach1ne 4y ago
      There is probably truth in that. It's difficult to say as to the magnitude of the effect however.
  - snakeboy 4y ago
    They are probably referring to some kind of large-scale environmental contamination, but as far as I'm aware it's quite difficult to make any of these theories fit with the timeline of international historical trends. Typically the differences in rates and magnitudes are apparent across borders and thus would more easily be explained with cultural factors rather than an environmental contaminant that is (largely) agnostic to cultural effects.
- infinityio 4y ago
  From this specific data, this viewpoint is hard to justify, because the scores were at or near their highest in 2019, and the data shows modest improvements since the 90s
DeathArrow 4y ago
Since the objective of learning switched from acquiring knowledge and build competencies to cather to emotional needs of different groups, and since when every participant gets a prize no matter what he/she does to not make him/her being left behind, I am not surprised at all of the outcome. Since the western society does not want to change the way learning is done, the path will lead us downwards. The only chance as a parent to build a better future for your own child is to fight the system and help the child learn. The decline in learning is yet another example of politics ruining things that work in the society.
- inglor 4y ago
  Or... you know, we go with the data. The data shows improvement until 2019 and then a decline in 2020/2021 coinciding with COVID, lockdowns and inability to attend schools physically. The global pandemic seems like a much better explanation to the data the article is showing.
  - moffkalast 4y ago
    You're saying it's the two years when kids almost entirely paused schooling to any notable degree because they had no local oversight, and not the participatory trophy nonsense that boomers have been complaining about for the past 20 years despite them being the ones that made it a thing in the first place? I'm shocked! Shocked I tell you!
- eesmith 4y ago
  This might make sense if: 1) I hadn't heard people making exactly the same argument since I was a kid in the 1970s, 2) I've read even older accounts making identical claims, 3) there was no correlation with covid, 4) western society hadn't actually had many changes over the last 150 years in the way learning is done. (My grandfather's high school education was very different than mine, as I describe out https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25574534 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25574534 .), and 5) education in the US, except of the children of the rich, has always been intimately connected with politics. If there were a golden era where education wasn't ruined, then it was because of politics.
someotherperson 4y ago
Not sure if I'm following: are we really applying VC growth demands to childhood education? It seems like it hasn't gone below the early 2000s levels, which is probably the level (or lower) that most people in this thread were on themselves?
club_tropical 4y ago
This whole exercise in mass mediocrity cannot end soon enough. We need to be measuring exceptions not averages. Just like an honest measure of public investment in "piano education" would be the ability to produce Mozarts, not enormous masses of people who can play a tune 8% better after decades of investment.
- satvikchoudhary 4y ago
  I could agree if this was a study on college students, but this is on 4 and 8 grades students. Basic mathematics is somewhat important in my opinion.
  - club_tropical 4y ago
    Is 13% increase in NAEP scores worth all the increased the public school math / STEM investment since 1990? And that's being charitable - believing that the increase is not due to mucking around with the "representative sample" or "accommodations" that have been granted. And why is classroom instruction important for basic maths anyways? People bought and sold goods, kept accounting books, had investment portfolios, mortgage-style debt instruments far before there was ever a "4th grade" education, much less a 4th grade NAEP score. The ones that need to learn such things will learn, far faster and better than in a decontextualized classroom. I highly doubt people got 13% wiser in managing money or whatever other pro-social thing this increased NAEP math average is supposed to be a proxy for. So, it doesn't produce more Galois' and Gauss' and it doesn't make people wiser with mathy things... literally what's the point. One should also mention the enormous costs - all the public expense diverted to this pointless endeavor, the stifling of the truly mathematically gifted in structured "lesson plans" fit for mass mediocrity, and torturing future truck drivers, dancers, janitors, and burger flippers for years with equations.
- cr4nberry 4y ago
  > This whole exercise in mass mediocrity cannot end soon enough. the point of developing "mass mediocrity" is to prepare the ground for the exceptions by having a strong education system to support them. Equal access to education is important for locating and helping the exceptional
edejong 4y ago
Although it is easy to attribute this to school closures, we should not dismiss the possibility of these results being caused by brain damage from (repeated) COVID infections [1, 2, 3]. [1] Douaud, G., Lee, S., Alfaro-Almagro, F. et al. SARS-CoV-2 is associated with changes in brain structure in UK Biobank. Nature 604, 697–707 (2022). https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-04569-5#citeas https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-04569-5#citeas [2] https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnins.2022.992165/full https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnins.2022.9921... [3] https://neurosciencenews.com/covid-microglia-21676/ https://neurosciencenews.com/covid-microglia-21676/ [3] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00415-022-11398-z https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00415-022-11398-z
- junofan 4y ago
  Wait, I thought we closed schools so kids wouldn’t get COVID.
  - edejong 4y ago
    Unfortunately, it was terribly ineffective for that purpose. We closed them to reduce peak hospital admissions in the older population.
    - Ensorceled 4y ago
      Also, we opened up the schools while COVID still was, and is, going on. We can argue about the pros and cons of doing that, but pretending COVID is over is just sticking our heads in the sand.
    - whoooooo123 4y ago
      We closed them because everybody else was closing them. Anything else is just post-hoc bullshit.
  - Ensorceled 4y ago
    In case you didn't notice, COVID is still making the rounds but kids are at school. Kids were at school, at least in Canada and the US, during the massive surge at the beginning of 2022. There are more than 93M reported cases. I'm amazed at the level of ignorance about a disease that has killed more than a million people in the US and Canada alone; thousands dead unnecessarily because this ignorance.
mkl95 4y ago
It looks like a whole generation needs to be coached into catching up with the system. It sounds expensive, but is it feasible? Also this is inevitably going to lead to a quality vs quantity discussion. Between grades 4 and 8 I had some brilliant mathematics teachers, and some mediocre ones.
- cr4nberry 4y ago
  > It looks like a whole generation needs to be coached into catching up with the system. It looks (to me) like the older generations are really, really eager to "coach" the upcoming generation
cr4nberry 4y ago
4th grade math dropped from 241 to 236, this puts us at around 2003 levels. 8th grade math has dropped from 282 to 274 which puts us at 1996 levels. 4th grade and 8th grade reading dropped slightly, but there's only slight improvement since the 90s tl;dr we pretty much lost 20 years of educational advancement. It probably isn't the end of the world, but there's a widening achievement gap and there's much work to be done. Hopefully it's resolved within the next couple years. Inability to course correct by that time would be far more troubling
rayiner 4y ago
“Remote learning” was a complete joke. My fourth grader is a Hermoine Granger type, very self directed, and even she would just stare out the window during Zoom school. She lost a whole year in reading. Luckily, we send her to private school. It reopened more quickly than public schools in many areas nearby (Fairfax VA and Montgomery MD). And once we were back in person, she got 1 on 1 reading instruction every morning until she caught back up. My wife sometimes resisted the expense of private school (we both went to public) but the pandemic totally confirmed why it was worth the money.
- c048 4y ago
  You did the right thing, the formative years as a child are crucial and shouldn't be squandered.
- quadrifoliate 4y ago
  - PubliusMI 4y ago
    We are currently living in a time when many people feel the need to dispute that rigorous education can have any meaningful impact on a child's abilities. Every chance to record and shares true facts, we should.
    - quadrifoliate 4y ago
      > Every chance to record and shares true facts, we should. Sure, but it seems to me that we should do so in a controlled and rigorous fashion. A few questions: - Are we sure that the tests are exactly the same difficulty each year? If not, what is the falloff? - Who decides the difficulty? - How do we think about tradeoffs between grasping concepts correctly versus doing test prep? - Do the increased test scores from 2003 to 2020 actually translate into meaningfully better further education or quality of life on average? If you are making confident statements about "test scores dropped and this is bad for children", you should know the answers to all these questions. I feel like most parents handwave this sort of stuff away when it comes to children's test scores and always assume that it's perfect – but would start asking this kind of stuff very quickly, for example, if they were asked to, say, do a similar test as adults to determine what their bonus for last year should be.
excsn 4y ago
All this confirms is that kids are unfocused and need someone to focus their attention. Remote learning requires you to take responsibility and takes getting used to. Parents generally aren't going to get involved in students learning, clearly, as this confirms. If you aren't motivated in some way, you will not do well. In person school was boring for me and wouldn't have made a difference for me since I always looked up youtube videos to learn math and science anyway. We can see here that remote learning needs more work and time in order to catch up to in person school scores.
- _aavaa_ 4y ago
  I disagree. "kids are unfocused and need someone to focus their attention" is simply not true on its own. I think it needs the caveat of "focus their attention on things they're not interested in". "Remote learning", or sitting in front of a computer and using it for a few hours in a row, is something many children do willingly and must be pried away from with continual arguments, see video games. I argue the problem, generally, isn't the fact that students need to sit at a computer, but that remote learning, much like current in-person learning as you say yourself, is simply boring.
  - apetresc 4y ago
    The fact that school is less addictive than modern video games is not as slam-dunk of an argument against schools as you seem to think it is.
    - _aavaa_ 4y ago
      A) I never said modern. Video games have been enthralling to people for decades. B) The word "addictive" gets bandied about very freely when it comes to video games. Unless we're talking about loot boxes or pseudo (or not so pseudo) gambling in video games, there's a pretty big difference between video game "addiction" and an alcohol/nicotine addiction. My hobbies are not "addictive", and nor are the things I find boring "anti-additive". Video games are designed primarily for the person playing them to want to be there, to learn what the games world has to teach, and in some cases to draw as much money out of the whales as possible. Standardised schooling is designed primarily to be quantifiable and scaleable.
tomohawk 4y ago
There are many homeschooling curricula that are tailored for remote learning or for parent assisted learning. The government schools tried to do remote learning just like a classroom, but remote. Big fail. Parents I know who switched to homeschooling with classes designed for that did quite well, except that extra curriculars were all shut down by government. The teachers unions insisted on schools being closed, despite no perceivable risk. It was known very early on that since ACE2 receptors kick in at puberty, there was very little if any risk to children. The disease needs those receptors. If you look at Sweden https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMc2026670 https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMc2026670 they kept schools open for up thru 10th grade, with no masks. The incidence of covid in teachers and other adult staff was pretty much the same as for the general population. The incidence of covid between 10th grade (in school) and 11th grade (remote) was indistinguishable. In other words, kids may get it, but get a weak case. The incidence of severe infection was like the flu, and we don't shut down everything for the flu. Also from this data, adults very rarely get a strong case from children. This was known by the end of term in 2020 (spring). There is absolutely no excuse that school systems should have been shut down going into fall 2020 with this as a known fact.

80 points by supernova87a 4y ago

NAEP (one of the few national standards we have in the US to consistently measure math/reading performance) shows a decline in 4th and 8th grade math performance since being measured in 1991. Lots of speculation of course as to contribution from Covid / school shutdowns, etc. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/24/us/math-reading-scores-pandemic.html https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/24/us/math-reading-scores-pa... ( https://archive.ph/vgaxR https://archive.ph/vgaxR )

hunglee2 4y ago

is this really important? US are top in global University rankings, top in global innovation metrics. Could it be that Math is overrated or that even education is overated?

sanity31415 4y ago
It isn't just about the top, the other 95% matter too.
Loic 4y ago
The current teachers and students at the top universities are from the time the scores were higher or on an improvement trend.
AmVess 4y ago
Students attending top colleges represent a small percentage of their particular demographic. Being able to read, write, and having a basic grasp of math is what an alarming number of kids are missing out on. These proficiency levels are appalling, and everyone responsible for them should be deeply ashamed of themselves...and I am not even addressing the decline due to covid.
smt88 4y ago
These aren't college students or engineers. These tests are measuring pretty rudimentary math skills, the kind you need to live everyday life. And the scores are important because they suggest to us how well education systems are working in the country, regardless of how "important" you may think the resulting knowledge is.
murderfs 4y ago
Of course it's not going to do anything immediately: what happens when these students are the ones in university, or performing the innovation?

fxtentacle 4y ago

In a world where emotionally charged lies generate higher profits than the truth, objective sciences like math are clearly appearing less and less useful. I mean I like math. But if I had to choose between "how to get 1 mio followers on tiktok" and "how to calculate the differential of log(x)", I'd still consider the first course to have a higher roi... Attention is easy to convert into money in today's economy. Math skills, less so.

morelisp 4y ago
While it's surely emotionally satisfying in the short term to blame it on people primarily seeking short-term emotional satisfaction, I think there are some easy candidates for more proximate and parsimonious explanations like nobody being in school reliably for >2 years.
smt88 4y ago
I'm not sure what you're on your soapbox about, but this decline is probably due to the enormous disruption in children's education caused by the Covid pandemic. The report even compares pre- and post-Covid achievement rates.
- whoooooo123 4y ago
  > this decline is probably due to the enormous disruption in children's education caused by Covid lockdowns. FTFY
  - smt88 4y ago
    A distinction without a difference. Many parents were keeping children out of school regardless of lockdowns, so it wasn't only lockdowns that contributed.
mach1ne 4y ago
Given the number of slots available for 1 mil tiktok follower influencers versus those which require to calculate the differential of log(x), multiplied by resulting lifetime earnings, I differ with you and estimate that the latter's roi is actually higher.

keewee7 4y ago

Remote learning was a global catastrophe for children's learning.

concordDance 4y ago
Note that this was unplanned and sudden with not much help.
- votepaunchy 4y ago
  It was unplanned because we had public health leadership which decided to ignore decades of pandemic planning and lessons learned, and a president who went along with it.
  - concordDance 4y ago
    This happened universally in the world, you can't blame the US leadership, here in the UK schooling suffered just as badly.
    - a_humean 4y ago
      Countries like Singapore, Taiwan, New Zealand, and South Korea suggest that with sufficient planning and political will, there were alternative outcomes available compared to what happened in the US and Europe.
    - FullStackAda 4y ago
      No it has not happened universally around the world, some countries only had the initial shutdown in April 2020 and then the schools were open again. See here https://covid19.uis.unesco.org/global-monitoring-school-closures-covid19/country-dashboard/ https://covid19.uis.unesco.org/global-monitoring-school-clos... France and Switzerland as an example.
est 4y ago
But it shouldn't be. Learning in theory should be a highly personal experience.

albertop 4y ago

Well quelle surprise - when you close the schools for two years you doom the generation of kinds.

devwastaken 4y ago
They're not doomed. If anything this will show the hyper fixation on academic schooling is misguided. Only the very few whom persue higher education may be required to take higher math that they will also not use. Most academics is for the enrichment of the school and instructors, not because it's an effective education.
- Der_Einzige 4y ago
  You're downvoted but you're correct. Rates of people going to universities have collapsed, especially among men. They're having to start campus diversity for programs now in some places as a form of affirmative action in schools that became too gynocentric.
  - devwastaken 4y ago
    It's even worse actually - a school admin recently was removed because they dare question the effectiveness of diversity initiatives. It's a new Reagan era.
- adamsmith143 4y ago
  > Only the very few whom persue higher education may be required to take higher math that they will also not use. This has to be one of the of the most worn out stupid takes. The point of teaching things like math and science which people "will never use in real life" is to teach problem solving and critical thinking. NO ONE actually thinks knowing the quadratic formula is useful in and of itself.
  - _aavaa_ 4y ago
    Idk how they're teaching the quadratic formula nowadays, but when it was taught to me it was taught as a fact to be used later on. The problem solving and critical thinking time could have been spent on working through and coming up with it

pavlov 4y ago

When the topic of school comes up on HN, there’s always a few people who believe that the school environment is in fact detrimental to children and everybody would be better off home-schooled with remote learning to fill the gaps. Does this result provide enough evidence to the contrary, or was the pandemic too much of a special circumstance?

anm89 4y ago
As someone who to some degree falls in the category you describe, I'd say you are potentially misunderstanding the argument. I certainly wouldn't argue that spending time in a public school math class correlates negatively with math learning. I have no doubt that some math education takes place in public school math classes. I think the argument is that it doesn't do a great job teaching most students most of the time while simultaneously having serious issues like requiring young children to sit still for extended stretches and punishing kids who aren't well suited to this. I'm not saying that's the whole argument, just an example
jhanschoo 4y ago
This is the first I've heard of such a position. But I do think that remote learning home-schooling with adequate supervision can be comparable. My understanding is that home-schooling with private tutors > the typical school environment > remote learning without supervision.
- kajaktum 4y ago
  >My understanding is that home-schooling with private tutors > the typical school environment > remote learning without supervision. In pure academics, maybe. What about your children's social/well-being from not interacting with their peers?
  - Foobar8568 4y ago
    Have you seen today kids? Well-being is to be far away from them.

Cypher 4y ago

this is why 2+2 should be 5 so that kids can pass increasing the schores.

lynguist 4y ago

You might not believe me, but the decline of the insect population (also on the frontpage) and the fall of test scores and the fall of sperm quality since the 90s have the same single origin. And nothing is being done about it.

mach1ne 4y ago
What is this origin?
- lynguist 4y ago
  The short explanation is insecticides: microtoxins to break the fertility of insects for higher crop yields. These same substances also affect humans, albeit on a different level: slightly lower intelligence because mothers are exposed to these substances and they transfer them to the womb, and they also decrease male fertility. Children of hairdressers or farmers have slightly lower IQ (controlled for all other variables) than others because the mothers are exposed to similar substances.
  - mach1ne 4y ago
    There is probably truth in that. It's difficult to say as to the magnitude of the effect however.
- snakeboy 4y ago
  They are probably referring to some kind of large-scale environmental contamination, but as far as I'm aware it's quite difficult to make any of these theories fit with the timeline of international historical trends. Typically the differences in rates and magnitudes are apparent across borders and thus would more easily be explained with cultural factors rather than an environmental contaminant that is (largely) agnostic to cultural effects.
infinityio 4y ago
From this specific data, this viewpoint is hard to justify, because the scores were at or near their highest in 2019, and the data shows modest improvements since the 90s

DeathArrow 4y ago

Since the objective of learning switched from acquiring knowledge and build competencies to cather to emotional needs of different groups, and since when every participant gets a prize no matter what he/she does to not make him/her being left behind, I am not surprised at all of the outcome. Since the western society does not want to change the way learning is done, the path will lead us downwards. The only chance as a parent to build a better future for your own child is to fight the system and help the child learn. The decline in learning is yet another example of politics ruining things that work in the society.

inglor 4y ago
Or... you know, we go with the data. The data shows improvement until 2019 and then a decline in 2020/2021 coinciding with COVID, lockdowns and inability to attend schools physically. The global pandemic seems like a much better explanation to the data the article is showing.
- moffkalast 4y ago
  You're saying it's the two years when kids almost entirely paused schooling to any notable degree because they had no local oversight, and not the participatory trophy nonsense that boomers have been complaining about for the past 20 years despite them being the ones that made it a thing in the first place? I'm shocked! Shocked I tell you!
eesmith 4y ago
This might make sense if: 1) I hadn't heard people making exactly the same argument since I was a kid in the 1970s, 2) I've read even older accounts making identical claims, 3) there was no correlation with covid, 4) western society hadn't actually had many changes over the last 150 years in the way learning is done. (My grandfather's high school education was very different than mine, as I describe out https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25574534 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25574534 .), and 5) education in the US, except of the children of the rich, has always been intimately connected with politics. If there were a golden era where education wasn't ruined, then it was because of politics.

someotherperson 4y ago

Not sure if I'm following: are we really applying VC growth demands to childhood education? It seems like it hasn't gone below the early 2000s levels, which is probably the level (or lower) that most people in this thread were on themselves?

club_tropical 4y ago

This whole exercise in mass mediocrity cannot end soon enough. We need to be measuring exceptions not averages. Just like an honest measure of public investment in "piano education" would be the ability to produce Mozarts, not enormous masses of people who can play a tune 8% better after decades of investment.

satvikchoudhary 4y ago
I could agree if this was a study on college students, but this is on 4 and 8 grades students. Basic mathematics is somewhat important in my opinion.
- club_tropical 4y ago
  Is 13% increase in NAEP scores worth all the increased the public school math / STEM investment since 1990? And that's being charitable - believing that the increase is not due to mucking around with the "representative sample" or "accommodations" that have been granted. And why is classroom instruction important for basic maths anyways? People bought and sold goods, kept accounting books, had investment portfolios, mortgage-style debt instruments far before there was ever a "4th grade" education, much less a 4th grade NAEP score. The ones that need to learn such things will learn, far faster and better than in a decontextualized classroom. I highly doubt people got 13% wiser in managing money or whatever other pro-social thing this increased NAEP math average is supposed to be a proxy for. So, it doesn't produce more Galois' and Gauss' and it doesn't make people wiser with mathy things... literally what's the point. One should also mention the enormous costs - all the public expense diverted to this pointless endeavor, the stifling of the truly mathematically gifted in structured "lesson plans" fit for mass mediocrity, and torturing future truck drivers, dancers, janitors, and burger flippers for years with equations.
cr4nberry 4y ago
> This whole exercise in mass mediocrity cannot end soon enough. the point of developing "mass mediocrity" is to prepare the ground for the exceptions by having a strong education system to support them. Equal access to education is important for locating and helping the exceptional

edejong 4y ago

Although it is easy to attribute this to school closures, we should not dismiss the possibility of these results being caused by brain damage from (repeated) COVID infections [1, 2, 3]. [1] Douaud, G., Lee, S., Alfaro-Almagro, F. et al. SARS-CoV-2 is associated with changes in brain structure in UK Biobank. Nature 604, 697–707 (2022). https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-04569-5#citeas https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-04569-5#citeas [2] https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnins.2022.992165/full https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnins.2022.9921... [3] https://neurosciencenews.com/covid-microglia-21676/ https://neurosciencenews.com/covid-microglia-21676/ [3] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00415-022-11398-z https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00415-022-11398-z

junofan 4y ago
Wait, I thought we closed schools so kids wouldn’t get COVID.
- edejong 4y ago
  Unfortunately, it was terribly ineffective for that purpose. We closed them to reduce peak hospital admissions in the older population.
  - Ensorceled 4y ago
    Also, we opened up the schools while COVID still was, and is, going on. We can argue about the pros and cons of doing that, but pretending COVID is over is just sticking our heads in the sand.
  - whoooooo123 4y ago
    We closed them because everybody else was closing them. Anything else is just post-hoc bullshit.
- Ensorceled 4y ago
  In case you didn't notice, COVID is still making the rounds but kids are at school. Kids were at school, at least in Canada and the US, during the massive surge at the beginning of 2022. There are more than 93M reported cases. I'm amazed at the level of ignorance about a disease that has killed more than a million people in the US and Canada alone; thousands dead unnecessarily because this ignorance.

mkl95 4y ago

It looks like a whole generation needs to be coached into catching up with the system. It sounds expensive, but is it feasible? Also this is inevitably going to lead to a quality vs quantity discussion. Between grades 4 and 8 I had some brilliant mathematics teachers, and some mediocre ones.

cr4nberry 4y ago
> It looks like a whole generation needs to be coached into catching up with the system. It looks (to me) like the older generations are really, really eager to "coach" the upcoming generation

cr4nberry 4y ago

4th grade math dropped from 241 to 236, this puts us at around 2003 levels. 8th grade math has dropped from 282 to 274 which puts us at 1996 levels. 4th grade and 8th grade reading dropped slightly, but there's only slight improvement since the 90s tl;dr we pretty much lost 20 years of educational advancement. It probably isn't the end of the world, but there's a widening achievement gap and there's much work to be done. Hopefully it's resolved within the next couple years. Inability to course correct by that time would be far more troubling

rayiner 4y ago

“Remote learning” was a complete joke. My fourth grader is a Hermoine Granger type, very self directed, and even she would just stare out the window during Zoom school. She lost a whole year in reading. Luckily, we send her to private school. It reopened more quickly than public schools in many areas nearby (Fairfax VA and Montgomery MD). And once we were back in person, she got 1 on 1 reading instruction every morning until she caught back up. My wife sometimes resisted the expense of private school (we both went to public) but the pandemic totally confirmed why it was worth the money.

c048 4y ago
You did the right thing, the formative years as a child are crucial and shouldn't be squandered.
quadrifoliate 4y ago
- PubliusMI 4y ago
  We are currently living in a time when many people feel the need to dispute that rigorous education can have any meaningful impact on a child's abilities. Every chance to record and shares true facts, we should.
  - quadrifoliate 4y ago
    > Every chance to record and shares true facts, we should. Sure, but it seems to me that we should do so in a controlled and rigorous fashion. A few questions: - Are we sure that the tests are exactly the same difficulty each year? If not, what is the falloff? - Who decides the difficulty? - How do we think about tradeoffs between grasping concepts correctly versus doing test prep? - Do the increased test scores from 2003 to 2020 actually translate into meaningfully better further education or quality of life on average? If you are making confident statements about "test scores dropped and this is bad for children", you should know the answers to all these questions. I feel like most parents handwave this sort of stuff away when it comes to children's test scores and always assume that it's perfect – but would start asking this kind of stuff very quickly, for example, if they were asked to, say, do a similar test as adults to determine what their bonus for last year should be.

excsn 4y ago

All this confirms is that kids are unfocused and need someone to focus their attention. Remote learning requires you to take responsibility and takes getting used to. Parents generally aren't going to get involved in students learning, clearly, as this confirms. If you aren't motivated in some way, you will not do well. In person school was boring for me and wouldn't have made a difference for me since I always looked up youtube videos to learn math and science anyway. We can see here that remote learning needs more work and time in order to catch up to in person school scores.

_aavaa_ 4y ago
I disagree. "kids are unfocused and need someone to focus their attention" is simply not true on its own. I think it needs the caveat of "focus their attention on things they're not interested in". "Remote learning", or sitting in front of a computer and using it for a few hours in a row, is something many children do willingly and must be pried away from with continual arguments, see video games. I argue the problem, generally, isn't the fact that students need to sit at a computer, but that remote learning, much like current in-person learning as you say yourself, is simply boring.
- apetresc 4y ago
  The fact that school is less addictive than modern video games is not as slam-dunk of an argument against schools as you seem to think it is.
  - _aavaa_ 4y ago
    A) I never said modern. Video games have been enthralling to people for decades. B) The word "addictive" gets bandied about very freely when it comes to video games. Unless we're talking about loot boxes or pseudo (or not so pseudo) gambling in video games, there's a pretty big difference between video game "addiction" and an alcohol/nicotine addiction. My hobbies are not "addictive", and nor are the things I find boring "anti-additive". Video games are designed primarily for the person playing them to want to be there, to learn what the games world has to teach, and in some cases to draw as much money out of the whales as possible. Standardised schooling is designed primarily to be quantifiable and scaleable.

tomohawk 4y ago

There are many homeschooling curricula that are tailored for remote learning or for parent assisted learning. The government schools tried to do remote learning just like a classroom, but remote. Big fail. Parents I know who switched to homeschooling with classes designed for that did quite well, except that extra curriculars were all shut down by government. The teachers unions insisted on schools being closed, despite no perceivable risk. It was known very early on that since ACE2 receptors kick in at puberty, there was very little if any risk to children. The disease needs those receptors. If you look at Sweden https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMc2026670 https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMc2026670 they kept schools open for up thru 10th grade, with no masks. The incidence of covid in teachers and other adult staff was pretty much the same as for the general population. The incidence of covid between 10th grade (in school) and 11th grade (remote) was indistinguishable. In other words, kids may get it, but get a weak case. The incidence of severe infection was like the flu, and we don't shut down everything for the flu. Also from this data, adults very rarely get a strong case from children. This was known by the end of term in 2020 (spring). There is absolutely no excuse that school systems should have been shut down going into fall 2020 with this as a known fact.