7 ms·

Just 26% of US 8th graders proficient in math, in biggest-ever setback

46 points by that 4y ago

cullinap 4y ago
what does proficient in math mean?
newaccount2021 4y ago
AustinDev 4y ago
Many people were saying this would be a result of all the 'virtual learning' during COVID however, states bowed to the teacher's union, and this is where we're at I'm not sure how you recover from that big of a deficit. I'd be interested to see the numbers for other countries that implemented similar policies. It'd also be interesting comparing districts that were closed for a minimal amount of time vs districts that were closed the longest. Although the previous numbers from 2019 show that there are much larger problems in education.
jleyank 4y ago
Looking at the graphs when I got the report to load they look pretty constant to me. No obvious change from 2003 to 2018 that I could see. Which makes me wonder what they’re testing for when 3/4 of the kids in the states fail…. Is this stuff like set theory and geometry or is it basic math and simple algebra (word problems) or what? Any pointers to a sample test? Any chance this is conflated with lousy reading skills as all testing relies on that.
duxup 4y ago
Some teachers I knew during COVID reported that in some cases nearly half the kids stopped attending online class and just never returned. Parents wouldn't respond to calls / efforts to get them back into class. Some school districts were faced with wondering what to do? Fail huge % of the students? They chose not to fail them. My son reports that his math classes for the last two years "are the same thing over and over again".
- maximus-decimus 4y ago
  I'm seen the elementary math curriculum in Ontario. It is the same year over year, but with bigger numbers, so your son's not wrong, but that doesn't really say if it's because the kids are behind.
- Mountain_Skies 4y ago
  During the first year of schools being shutdown, I was dating a middle school guidance counselor and her experience matched what you posted. She had a very difficult time contacting parents and if she was able to get in touch with them, most said there was nothing they could do about their child choosing not to participate in remote school. She was entirely powerless to do anything except offer remote tutoring services, which apparently no one accepted. I stopped asking her about work because it obviously distressed her to even talk about it.
  - mrguyorama 4y ago
    At the end of the day, if parents don't value education, there's nothing an educator can do to fix that. Even truancy laws can't force a kid to pay attention and do their homework.
    - prottog 4y ago
      Perhaps we can stop at least spending the public's money on parents who don't value educating their children.
      - bsder 4y ago
        Holy hell. Have some empathy. Shitty parents are not the fault of a CHILD. Offering a child a safe space, food, and possibly education is the least we can do as a society.
        prottog 4y ago
        You're absolutely right that children are not to be blamed for the sins of their parents. But in order to advance society we must work with human nature to make incentives aligned between disparate entities. One of the most fundamental parts of human nature is that parents want to see their children do well, and it's often the biggest reason why people toil and overcome great difficulties instead of settling for the minimum it takes to sustain themselves -- all so that their children might enjoy a life better than theirs. Once government steps in between that relationship and guarantees that children will be fine no matter what the parents do or don't do, you remove that important incentive. Should we let children born to poor parents starve or dumb parents stay uneducated? No, let's do what we can to alleviate that. But how far will you go to ensure that your parentage has no effect whatsoever on your life? Clearly it's not my fault that my parents aren't Yao Ming (7'6") and Ye Li (6'3"), but nevertheless I shouldn't expect to have the same chance at making the NBA as their children. Then why should a child who was born to parents who don't value the qualities it takes to succeed be equally successful as one who was born to parents who did? In other words, how high should your equalizing bar go, to remove the influence of parents on children, especially in the face of the fact that public educational outcomes in this country are stubbornly refusing to budge as the amount of money spent per pupil rises year after year? There is legitimate debate to be had here, beyond just downvoting me and calling me an unsympathetic child-hater.
nonameiguess 4y ago
The link they provide is to reading results, but the article is citing math results. Where are those? The reading is showing 4th and 8th grade levels are at exactly the level they were in 1992, which incidentally, is when I was in 6th grade. Telling me kids today are exactly as stupid as me doesn't sound quite as alarming. I'm actually kind of surprised scores went up by 2019. Also, "biggest ever" is since 1969 since the assessment didn't exist before then.
- hnburnsy 4y ago
  https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/highlights/mathematics/2022/ https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/highlights/mathematics/202...
DontchaKnowit 4y ago
I taught summer school math to 8th graders for a brief spell. I was teaching them addition and subtraction. I shit you not. It's really sad. And it did not matter how they performed, if they showed up for class, we passed them and sent them along. Also if they didn't show up, we passed them and sent them along anyway. We should be absolutely ashamed of the public school system in our country. It'd corruption and perverse incentives from the top all the way down. Disgusting.
- kazinator 4y ago
  I clearly remember that eight grade math was algebra: basic stuff with polynomials like multiplying (2x + 1)(3x + 4), or dividing single terms like 4x^2y/2xy = 2x. And that was likely behind where I would have been had I not immigrated to Canada from Europe, where I had been into basic one-variable linear equation solving by the end of fourth grade, plus other topics like sets. For instance we used a kind of set partitioning method to convert numbers into binary. When I came to Canada in the fifth grade, the teacher took me to a room and probed me on various arithmetic of increasing difficulty. She was blown away that I could do long division of like a five digit number by a three dight number, either leaving it with a remainder, or else continuing into the fraction.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- darthrupert 4y ago
  Please note that nearly every country in the West is facing similar downward curves. Also countries like Finland, who were at the top for several years. The US school system may have its separate problems, but the wider issue is not just there.
Proven 4y ago
yieldcrv 4y ago
Down from just 34% So 8% drop
- netsharc 4y ago
  Or is it a 23.5% drop? This is ironic, considering the title of the article.
  - w0m 4y ago
    thank you.
  - yieldcrv 4y ago
    8% lower number of 8th graders proficient in math I wasn't pointing out the delta
    - feoren 4y ago
      That's not correct. Taking the numbers at face value: out of 100 8th graders, previously 34 were proficient in math. Now 26 are. 23.5% fewer 8th graders are proficient in math. Saying it's an 8% lower number is wrong: the number of 8th graders proficient in math is 23.5% lower. The absolute percentage went down by 8, but who cares? To illustrate this, consider if 1% of all children were dying of Smallpox, and after the vaccine it dropped to 0%. Did we reduce Smallpox deaths by 1%? No! We eliminated Smallpox deaths; reduced by 100%. The irony of your statement is left as an exercise for the reader.
      - yieldcrv 4y ago
        > The absolute percentage went down by 8, but who cares? I do and that's why I wrote it The only remaining mystery is which semantical variation of that would you and others accept. Fewer? No. Lower? No. Absolutely percentage? Well its not even clear if others would accept that, or find a different way to say you’re ironically dumb. The purpose of language is to convey a shared concept. Whatever this conversation is has nothing to do with that.
ParksNet 4y ago
- AnimalMuppet 4y ago
  That sounds like you're saying that immigrants can't learn math. That sounds very much like racism.
- alvarlagerlof 4y ago
  "biological Intelligence" sounds very racist to me.
  - ars 4y ago
    It is racist, and also true. Which is a pretty tough conundrum for someone who doesn't want to be racist. The best option I can think of is to be race blind (just ignore the race component, and don't even report it), and test each individual, while recognizing the biological component. For the most part however, society has substituted "socioeconomic status" for "race", which sounds better, but, I think, doesn't work better.
- skyyler 4y ago
  >ability is formed by biological intelligence This is quite a claim. Do you have _any_ information to back this up? Because if you don't have studies about this very topic to quote, I'm going to assume you're just racist.
- Test0129 4y ago
  This comment is getting downvoted because of poor wording. The accusations of racism are excessive and it's obvious these people have a pointless axe to grind. I think what OP is trying to say is this: 1. There is a biological component to intelligence. This doesn't imply race. If it was possible to reach 200 IQ with hard work a lot more people would be there. 2. Breaking scores down by ethnicity may elucidate data that imply the poor level of education of this cohort in general may be leading to inappropriately reduced performance in schools. Anecdotally, I have family that teach at title 1 schools that deal with immigrants that have little command of English. The result is as expected, universally they do remarkably poorly on every test. Children of this cohort also do poorly. The schools, unfortunately, are punished severely. Not speaking English except at school has a dramatic effect on ones ability to learn if you have no command of the lingua franca. The cost to double classes and have special Spanish classes, for example, is not only expensive but does not prepare a child for existing in a world where everything is in English. I think OP could've worded things better but regardless there is some truth to it. If we extrapolate test scores from title 1 schools to this population it calls into question: are we doing enough and should we inappropriately punish schools for taking this additional burden on? It is clear immigration does not correlate to ability to learn. However, this cohort of amnesty recipients are a special case. I am convinced other comments cannot read, or willfully misread OP, in order to signal their virtue.
dcchambers 4y ago
It's hard for people without kids to realize just how much COVID-related school closures fucked everything up. An entire generation of students is at risk of forever being behind. And even those that always attended online class, did all the work, and excelled given the circumstances are still going to fall behind because so many of their peers in the classroom are behind that entire curriculums are changing to accommodate those students. I feel terrible for everyone involved, but especially the kids that have been set back literally years. And what's more is that this is going to further the divide between lower income/high income families. Those that were able to afford private tutoring, have one parent stop working to help educate their children, or afford to transfer their kids to a private/prep school. There may be nothing we take more for granted in this country than public education and the very foundations are crumbling beneath us.
- Test0129 4y ago
  > An entire generation of students is at risk of forever being behind. That ship sailed when Common Core was introduced. Teaching kids neat hacks instead of actual math will permanently stunt their progress.
  - SQueeeeeL 4y ago
    Yeah, it's really amusing that anyone expects anything innovation-wise out of the US when we basically put the minimum amount of money humanly possible towards education (for the majority of the country). Looking at Asia and the Nordic countries and how highly they value educators, it's clear where all the talent is going to be in the coming decades.
    - em500 4y ago
      The US spends $14k/student per year on primary and secondary education, more than almost any other country in the world: https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/cmd/education-expenditures-by-country https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/cmd/education-exp...
ALittleLight 4y ago
Even without COVID the public education system is such a travesty. When I was in highschool, one year, I had a math teacher who clearly didn't understand her own subject and would routinely get lost and contradict herself and was just generally useless in trying to teach what she did not know. In another year a math teacher may have known the subject but had zero control of the class and the students rebelled against him and there was never any real teaching because kids were acting out to an absurd degree. Basically, of my four years of high school math two were literally a complete waste. And that's pre-covid. The obvious culprit, to me, is teacher's unions. Why don't we fire bad teachers and hire good ones? Seems like the teacher's unions prevent that. Compensating teachers based on tenure rather than performance is another teacher's union problem. I find the whole thing very discouraging. Society is allowing immense waste of time, effort, and potential over very obvious problems.
- naijaboiler 4y ago
  That won't solve it. There are much much better paying jobs for any quantitatively minded individual than teaching. Many pay 2 to 5x what teaching does and you don't have to deal with bs. So math based subjects are left to those who aren't good at it or are otherwise rich enough and are only teaching out of passion.
- AngryData 4y ago
  Replace them with who is the real question. The pay is garbage, especially in already struggling schools in poor commmunities. So many great potential teachers leave to get far better paying jobs in any number of industries, and that leaves lots of bad teachers as the only qualified candidates that want the job.
  - ALittleLight 4y ago
    I disagree that the pay is garbage - especially when you take benefits, like summer vacation, into account. In the US, the average teacher (does vary by state) makes ~60k[1]. And, again, lots of days off. I think another obvious thing to do is make it easier for people to become full or part time teachers by removing requirements around licensing and education. If you can prove subject matter expertise - something that, frankly, current teachers should be required to do, and demonstrate an ability to teach then you shouldn't need the licensing and degree requirements that many public schools have. In my mind this would more like person X is curious about teaching. Maybe they are retired or underemployed or considering a career change. X is reasonably smart, knows math/science/writing/whatever to a high standard, and likes teaching. In our current reality X must either commit serious time and effort to getting the credentials required to start teaching, or just not do it. In my imagination X could easily pick up a role helping an existing teacher (after passing some subject matter tests). Maybe X is grading homework, helping prepare lesson plans, whatever the teacher needs. As X demonstrates their ability the teacher lets X take on more and responsibilities until X is either a full teacher, decides they don't like teaching, or is bounced for some reason. If it turns out we don't have enough people who want to be teachers then we can consider raising salaries - but, again, they are already higher than average and our current hiring practices are so bad we should try improving those first. One final thought regarding salaries - I think it really throws things off that teacher pay increases with their tenure. This results in a system where new teachers really are severely underpaid and old teachers are well paid. This can result in attrition among new teachers. Likewise, when teachers are laid off it is by reverse seniority. Again, this is due to the teacher's unions. In my opinion - if a teacher quickly ramps up to leading high performance classes then they should quickly ramp up to the top of the teacher pay scales as well - with performance bonuses thrown in. 1 - https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d17/tables/dt17_211.60.asp https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d17/tables/dt17_211.60.a...
sn0w_crash 4y ago
Is anyone surprised? We have a sizable number of people in western academia saying math is racist.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- lern_too_spel 4y ago
  Or rather, we have a sizable number of people outside of academia who are unable to comprehend the difference between people saying that instruction is racist by letting some people get lower standard education and people saying that math is racist.
  - sn0w_crash 4y ago
    ? Ive read this twice and have no idea what was said
yumraj 4y ago
I know a lot of people are blaming it in COVID, but are we sure that social media, you tube, tik tok are also, even if partly, not to blame?
throwaway22032 4y ago
Coronavirus shutdowns meant that our children lost out on a year or more of education. Remote learning does not work. It fundamentally does not provide necessary environmental aspects for the healthy development of a child, even if they can be cajoled into attending and focusing. Note that losing a year is not as simple as simply being a year behind, either. Consider spending a year completely indoors from age 25-26, say. You don't come out the same as your doppelganger who spent 25-26 living a normal and balanced life.
darthrupert 4y ago
West seriously needs to forbid personal internet-capable devices from everyone under the age 16. We are in the middle of a global social experiment that nobody signed in for, and the results are looking very bad.

46 points by that 4y ago

cullinap 4y ago

what does proficient in math mean?

newaccount2021 4y ago

AustinDev 4y ago

Many people were saying this would be a result of all the 'virtual learning' during COVID however, states bowed to the teacher's union, and this is where we're at I'm not sure how you recover from that big of a deficit. I'd be interested to see the numbers for other countries that implemented similar policies. It'd also be interesting comparing districts that were closed for a minimal amount of time vs districts that were closed the longest. Although the previous numbers from 2019 show that there are much larger problems in education.

jleyank 4y ago

Looking at the graphs when I got the report to load they look pretty constant to me. No obvious change from 2003 to 2018 that I could see. Which makes me wonder what they’re testing for when 3/4 of the kids in the states fail…. Is this stuff like set theory and geometry or is it basic math and simple algebra (word problems) or what? Any pointers to a sample test? Any chance this is conflated with lousy reading skills as all testing relies on that.

duxup 4y ago

Some teachers I knew during COVID reported that in some cases nearly half the kids stopped attending online class and just never returned. Parents wouldn't respond to calls / efforts to get them back into class. Some school districts were faced with wondering what to do? Fail huge % of the students? They chose not to fail them. My son reports that his math classes for the last two years "are the same thing over and over again".

maximus-decimus 4y ago
I'm seen the elementary math curriculum in Ontario. It is the same year over year, but with bigger numbers, so your son's not wrong, but that doesn't really say if it's because the kids are behind.
Mountain_Skies 4y ago
During the first year of schools being shutdown, I was dating a middle school guidance counselor and her experience matched what you posted. She had a very difficult time contacting parents and if she was able to get in touch with them, most said there was nothing they could do about their child choosing not to participate in remote school. She was entirely powerless to do anything except offer remote tutoring services, which apparently no one accepted. I stopped asking her about work because it obviously distressed her to even talk about it.
- mrguyorama 4y ago
  At the end of the day, if parents don't value education, there's nothing an educator can do to fix that. Even truancy laws can't force a kid to pay attention and do their homework.
  - prottog 4y ago
    Perhaps we can stop at least spending the public's money on parents who don't value educating their children.
    - bsder 4y ago
      Holy hell. Have some empathy. Shitty parents are not the fault of a CHILD. Offering a child a safe space, food, and possibly education is the least we can do as a society.
      - prottog 4y ago
        You're absolutely right that children are not to be blamed for the sins of their parents. But in order to advance society we must work with human nature to make incentives aligned between disparate entities. One of the most fundamental parts of human nature is that parents want to see their children do well, and it's often the biggest reason why people toil and overcome great difficulties instead of settling for the minimum it takes to sustain themselves -- all so that their children might enjoy a life better than theirs. Once government steps in between that relationship and guarantees that children will be fine no matter what the parents do or don't do, you remove that important incentive. Should we let children born to poor parents starve or dumb parents stay uneducated? No, let's do what we can to alleviate that. But how far will you go to ensure that your parentage has no effect whatsoever on your life? Clearly it's not my fault that my parents aren't Yao Ming (7'6") and Ye Li (6'3"), but nevertheless I shouldn't expect to have the same chance at making the NBA as their children. Then why should a child who was born to parents who don't value the qualities it takes to succeed be equally successful as one who was born to parents who did? In other words, how high should your equalizing bar go, to remove the influence of parents on children, especially in the face of the fact that public educational outcomes in this country are stubbornly refusing to budge as the amount of money spent per pupil rises year after year? There is legitimate debate to be had here, beyond just downvoting me and calling me an unsympathetic child-hater.

nonameiguess 4y ago

The link they provide is to reading results, but the article is citing math results. Where are those? The reading is showing 4th and 8th grade levels are at exactly the level they were in 1992, which incidentally, is when I was in 6th grade. Telling me kids today are exactly as stupid as me doesn't sound quite as alarming. I'm actually kind of surprised scores went up by 2019. Also, "biggest ever" is since 1969 since the assessment didn't exist before then.

hnburnsy 4y ago
https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/highlights/mathematics/2022/ https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/highlights/mathematics/202...

DontchaKnowit 4y ago

I taught summer school math to 8th graders for a brief spell. I was teaching them addition and subtraction. I shit you not. It's really sad. And it did not matter how they performed, if they showed up for class, we passed them and sent them along. Also if they didn't show up, we passed them and sent them along anyway. We should be absolutely ashamed of the public school system in our country. It'd corruption and perverse incentives from the top all the way down. Disgusting.

kazinator 4y ago
I clearly remember that eight grade math was algebra: basic stuff with polynomials like multiplying (2x + 1)(3x + 4), or dividing single terms like 4x^2y/2xy = 2x. And that was likely behind where I would have been had I not immigrated to Canada from Europe, where I had been into basic one-variable linear equation solving by the end of fourth grade, plus other topics like sets. For instance we used a kind of set partitioning method to convert numbers into binary. When I came to Canada in the fifth grade, the teacher took me to a room and probed me on various arithmetic of increasing difficulty. She was blown away that I could do long division of like a five digit number by a three dight number, either leaving it with a remainder, or else continuing into the fraction.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
darthrupert 4y ago
Please note that nearly every country in the West is facing similar downward curves. Also countries like Finland, who were at the top for several years. The US school system may have its separate problems, but the wider issue is not just there.

Proven 4y ago

yieldcrv 4y ago

Down from just 34% So 8% drop

netsharc 4y ago
Or is it a 23.5% drop? This is ironic, considering the title of the article.
- w0m 4y ago
  thank you.
- yieldcrv 4y ago
  8% lower number of 8th graders proficient in math I wasn't pointing out the delta
  - feoren 4y ago
    That's not correct. Taking the numbers at face value: out of 100 8th graders, previously 34 were proficient in math. Now 26 are. 23.5% fewer 8th graders are proficient in math. Saying it's an 8% lower number is wrong: the number of 8th graders proficient in math is 23.5% lower. The absolute percentage went down by 8, but who cares? To illustrate this, consider if 1% of all children were dying of Smallpox, and after the vaccine it dropped to 0%. Did we reduce Smallpox deaths by 1%? No! We eliminated Smallpox deaths; reduced by 100%. The irony of your statement is left as an exercise for the reader.
    - yieldcrv 4y ago
      > The absolute percentage went down by 8, but who cares? I do and that's why I wrote it The only remaining mystery is which semantical variation of that would you and others accept. Fewer? No. Lower? No. Absolutely percentage? Well its not even clear if others would accept that, or find a different way to say you’re ironically dumb. The purpose of language is to convey a shared concept. Whatever this conversation is has nothing to do with that.

ParksNet 4y ago

AnimalMuppet 4y ago
That sounds like you're saying that immigrants can't learn math. That sounds very much like racism.
alvarlagerlof 4y ago
"biological Intelligence" sounds very racist to me.
- ars 4y ago
  It is racist, and also true. Which is a pretty tough conundrum for someone who doesn't want to be racist. The best option I can think of is to be race blind (just ignore the race component, and don't even report it), and test each individual, while recognizing the biological component. For the most part however, society has substituted "socioeconomic status" for "race", which sounds better, but, I think, doesn't work better.
skyyler 4y ago
>ability is formed by biological intelligence This is quite a claim. Do you have _any_ information to back this up? Because if you don't have studies about this very topic to quote, I'm going to assume you're just racist.
Test0129 4y ago
This comment is getting downvoted because of poor wording. The accusations of racism are excessive and it's obvious these people have a pointless axe to grind. I think what OP is trying to say is this: 1. There is a biological component to intelligence. This doesn't imply race. If it was possible to reach 200 IQ with hard work a lot more people would be there. 2. Breaking scores down by ethnicity may elucidate data that imply the poor level of education of this cohort in general may be leading to inappropriately reduced performance in schools. Anecdotally, I have family that teach at title 1 schools that deal with immigrants that have little command of English. The result is as expected, universally they do remarkably poorly on every test. Children of this cohort also do poorly. The schools, unfortunately, are punished severely. Not speaking English except at school has a dramatic effect on ones ability to learn if you have no command of the lingua franca. The cost to double classes and have special Spanish classes, for example, is not only expensive but does not prepare a child for existing in a world where everything is in English. I think OP could've worded things better but regardless there is some truth to it. If we extrapolate test scores from title 1 schools to this population it calls into question: are we doing enough and should we inappropriately punish schools for taking this additional burden on? It is clear immigration does not correlate to ability to learn. However, this cohort of amnesty recipients are a special case. I am convinced other comments cannot read, or willfully misread OP, in order to signal their virtue.

dcchambers 4y ago

It's hard for people without kids to realize just how much COVID-related school closures fucked everything up. An entire generation of students is at risk of forever being behind. And even those that always attended online class, did all the work, and excelled given the circumstances are still going to fall behind because so many of their peers in the classroom are behind that entire curriculums are changing to accommodate those students. I feel terrible for everyone involved, but especially the kids that have been set back literally years. And what's more is that this is going to further the divide between lower income/high income families. Those that were able to afford private tutoring, have one parent stop working to help educate their children, or afford to transfer their kids to a private/prep school. There may be nothing we take more for granted in this country than public education and the very foundations are crumbling beneath us.

Test0129 4y ago
> An entire generation of students is at risk of forever being behind. That ship sailed when Common Core was introduced. Teaching kids neat hacks instead of actual math will permanently stunt their progress.
- SQueeeeeL 4y ago
  Yeah, it's really amusing that anyone expects anything innovation-wise out of the US when we basically put the minimum amount of money humanly possible towards education (for the majority of the country). Looking at Asia and the Nordic countries and how highly they value educators, it's clear where all the talent is going to be in the coming decades.
  - em500 4y ago
    The US spends $14k/student per year on primary and secondary education, more than almost any other country in the world: https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/cmd/education-expenditures-by-country https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/cmd/education-exp...

ALittleLight 4y ago

Even without COVID the public education system is such a travesty. When I was in highschool, one year, I had a math teacher who clearly didn't understand her own subject and would routinely get lost and contradict herself and was just generally useless in trying to teach what she did not know. In another year a math teacher may have known the subject but had zero control of the class and the students rebelled against him and there was never any real teaching because kids were acting out to an absurd degree. Basically, of my four years of high school math two were literally a complete waste. And that's pre-covid. The obvious culprit, to me, is teacher's unions. Why don't we fire bad teachers and hire good ones? Seems like the teacher's unions prevent that. Compensating teachers based on tenure rather than performance is another teacher's union problem. I find the whole thing very discouraging. Society is allowing immense waste of time, effort, and potential over very obvious problems.

naijaboiler 4y ago
That won't solve it. There are much much better paying jobs for any quantitatively minded individual than teaching. Many pay 2 to 5x what teaching does and you don't have to deal with bs. So math based subjects are left to those who aren't good at it or are otherwise rich enough and are only teaching out of passion.
AngryData 4y ago
Replace them with who is the real question. The pay is garbage, especially in already struggling schools in poor commmunities. So many great potential teachers leave to get far better paying jobs in any number of industries, and that leaves lots of bad teachers as the only qualified candidates that want the job.
- ALittleLight 4y ago
  I disagree that the pay is garbage - especially when you take benefits, like summer vacation, into account. In the US, the average teacher (does vary by state) makes ~60k[1]. And, again, lots of days off. I think another obvious thing to do is make it easier for people to become full or part time teachers by removing requirements around licensing and education. If you can prove subject matter expertise - something that, frankly, current teachers should be required to do, and demonstrate an ability to teach then you shouldn't need the licensing and degree requirements that many public schools have. In my mind this would more like person X is curious about teaching. Maybe they are retired or underemployed or considering a career change. X is reasonably smart, knows math/science/writing/whatever to a high standard, and likes teaching. In our current reality X must either commit serious time and effort to getting the credentials required to start teaching, or just not do it. In my imagination X could easily pick up a role helping an existing teacher (after passing some subject matter tests). Maybe X is grading homework, helping prepare lesson plans, whatever the teacher needs. As X demonstrates their ability the teacher lets X take on more and responsibilities until X is either a full teacher, decides they don't like teaching, or is bounced for some reason. If it turns out we don't have enough people who want to be teachers then we can consider raising salaries - but, again, they are already higher than average and our current hiring practices are so bad we should try improving those first. One final thought regarding salaries - I think it really throws things off that teacher pay increases with their tenure. This results in a system where new teachers really are severely underpaid and old teachers are well paid. This can result in attrition among new teachers. Likewise, when teachers are laid off it is by reverse seniority. Again, this is due to the teacher's unions. In my opinion - if a teacher quickly ramps up to leading high performance classes then they should quickly ramp up to the top of the teacher pay scales as well - with performance bonuses thrown in. 1 - https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d17/tables/dt17_211.60.asp https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d17/tables/dt17_211.60.a...

sn0w_crash 4y ago

Is anyone surprised? We have a sizable number of people in western academia saying math is racist.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
lern_too_spel 4y ago
Or rather, we have a sizable number of people outside of academia who are unable to comprehend the difference between people saying that instruction is racist by letting some people get lower standard education and people saying that math is racist.
- sn0w_crash 4y ago
  ? Ive read this twice and have no idea what was said

yumraj 4y ago

I know a lot of people are blaming it in COVID, but are we sure that social media, you tube, tik tok are also, even if partly, not to blame?

throwaway22032 4y ago

Coronavirus shutdowns meant that our children lost out on a year or more of education. Remote learning does not work. It fundamentally does not provide necessary environmental aspects for the healthy development of a child, even if they can be cajoled into attending and focusing. Note that losing a year is not as simple as simply being a year behind, either. Consider spending a year completely indoors from age 25-26, say. You don't come out the same as your doppelganger who spent 25-26 living a normal and balanced life.

darthrupert 4y ago

West seriously needs to forbid personal internet-capable devices from everyone under the age 16. We are in the middle of a global social experiment that nobody signed in for, and the results are looking very bad.