6 ms·

Here’s the nugget that goes along way to explaining it, IMO > Ever since the federal education policy known as No Child Left Behind went into effect in 2002 an

Here’s the nugget that goes along way to explaining it, IMO > Ever since the federal education policy known as No Child Left Behind went into effect in 2002 and tied students’ test performance to rewards and sanctions for schools, achievement testing has been a primary driver of public education in the United States Intentionally or not, the No Child Left Behind Act has created (accelerated?) the practice of not only teaching to the test it has also encouraged the practice of schools being held to the outcomes of the standard tests for funding (failing schools can lose funding sources from federal grants and programs for example) therefore teacher livelihoods are at stake. Now it’s a situation where there is this thing, that if you don’t do well as a school (or schools district) you lose a big chunk of funding and may also make you ineligible for certain grants and other programs as well, but the state controls the means of which the standards are graded and reported, there are nothing but incentives through the entire system for this to be happening. Since federal funding and grants make up a healthy portion of a good many state education budgets, it’s no shock that gaming compliance is something that happens, and I imagine this goes beyond Texas

AuthorizedCust 1y ago
If the test is good, then “teaching to the test” is desirable.
- SketchySeaBeast 1y ago
  Have we found an exception to Goodhart's Law? "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure, except when the measure is good."
  - DougN7 1y ago
    … so if the test is good … Reading is such a basic skill it seems like a pretty reasonable thing to come up with a decent test.
    - SketchySeaBeast 1y ago
      "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure, except when the measure is something basic, like teaching reading"? Has the last twenty years of teaching to the test proven that out?
      - anon291 1y ago
        'Teaching to the test' has not caused the drop in literacy. Rather, it's teaching reading using bizarre methods, like whole word recognition instead of phonics. This has nothing to do with 'teaching to the test', since phonics would teach more to the test than whole word anything. A phonetically competent adult would be able to make out almost any English word. A whole word one would not.
        SketchySeaBeast 1y ago
        "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure, unless the teacher is poor"?
        anon291 1y ago
        This 'truth' is not always true. For binary questions, teaching to measure makes sense
        deleted 1y ago
        [deleted]
        SketchySeaBeast 1y ago
        Unfortunately, "is someone literate" is not a binary question. There's a whole range of possible answers there.
      - DougN7 1y ago
        Is there a way to teach reading, which increases reading test scores, that is bad? I’m having a hard time imagining what that would look like. Just because someone comes up with a pithy saying that some people call a “law” doesn’t make it a universal truth.
  - throwawaymaths 1y ago
    you trying to establish some sort of measure for Goodhart's law?
  - viraptor 1y ago
    I don't think so. You can still teach to a good test badly. For example: reading a variety of books and letting people do more on their own would be would be better overall than reading just things on the level of the test, asking just the test style questions and spending time learning the answering style to get 100%. It's kind of like those articles about young kids passing IT certifications. Those tests are reasonably good, but those kids just memorised lots of material and never actually worked as, for example, a networking engineer. Or like in IELTS style language test you can easily score higher (even than a native English speaker) if you learn the format enough.
- andrewflnr 1y ago
  The test is never that good.
  - larrled 1y ago
    In education, nothing is ever good enough.
    - no_wizard 1y ago
      This is my take: the real issue with education in the US goes back to trying to square two ideals. One is the meritocracy[0]. I believe that No Child Left Behind Act was sold to the public as a way to promote meritocracy in education and having some reasonably unbiased[1] way of doing so. The foundation of which is a way for parents to hold institutions responsible much more easily[2][3] The other is social and political stratification. This isn't merit based. Good examples of this would be the history of slavery, Jim Crow laws, the formerly legal practice of segregation by race, the drawing school district lines that keep students of wealthy parents away from folks who come from less economically advantaged backgrounds and enforcing this with district based school eligibility and funding. These two don't exactly square very well. Which is why the top level idea sold to the public - meritocracy - is used to sell these policies, but in practice they are using it to pull levers to further political and social stratification. [0]: Americans generally have a positive view of the term. I personally believe that most people don't have a proper understanding of the term to begin with, nor conceive what issues it could have in practice if they were given it. [1]: Leaving out the other half of the narrative, which is how much macro and micro levels of a students environment will influence how well they learn. [2]: Which made it easier for Republicans to continue to go after public education. They've been pushing for the voucher system for decades as a backdoor way to dismantle the public school system, reasons for wanting to do so vary but it all converges on this point. [3]: Not to mention, it completely ignores micro and macro issues that students can have, be it poverty, domestic issues, systemic issues and a whole host of other things.
      - throwawaymaths 1y ago
        > Which made it easier for Republicans to continue to go after public education. They've been pushing for the voucher system for decades as a backdoor way to dismantle the public school system, reasons for wanting to do so vary but it all converges on this point. in practice, republicans are perfectly happy with public schools when the schools are are "good enough" for their kids. so this caricature seems incorrect. there's a lot wrong with USA public schools, so something must be done. some very not-for-profit voucher schools have been doing excellent work where the public school systens have utterly failed, for example green dot animo in inglewood, or, dramatically, green dot locke in watts. what is not a caricature: the vast majority of policymakers who want to keep status quo in the public school system send their kids to private schools.
- reverendsteveii 1y ago
  that's a downright ponderous conditional at the beginning of this comment
- no_wizard 1y ago
  The problem with standardized testing in education is the following question: standardized for who?[0] The ultimate "sin", if you will, is that they tied test outcomes to funding and in practice is used to hold teachers to an arbitrary standard, not to help understand and guide the learning for students. For example, what could be done with standardized tests is that schools could use them at regular intervals to understand where each student is at, and adjust their learning resources accordingly to help students that aren't at grade level reach appropriate grade level academically, like if a student tests poorly in Math but not English Comprehension, it would make sense to adjust their schedule to give them more time to learn what they're struggling with and assigning resources appropriately, be it an extra half hour of math learning time with a tutor. That would actually make them useful. Instead, they're used to bludgeon teachers and school districts, and really the student outcomes are at best secondary to the whole operation, and since so much critical funding comes from sources tied to these outcomes, both good and bad outcomes mind you, hence the reason for the deliberate bell curve. Thats the real issue. In the US, education has become incredibly politicized to the point that I firmly feel it stopped being about actually educating students to be productive members of society and its about entrenched interests using it as a tool to push a broader political battle at the cost of student outcomes [0]: Not to mention that the pace of learning and aptitudes is varied by individual, some students will excel in X but not Y. This is a related, but for the purpose of this discussion, separate issue. Not to mention how much environment plays a role (a good home vs bad home situation for example).
  - potato3732842 1y ago
    >In the US, education has become incredibly politicized to the point that I firmly feel it stopped being about actually educating students to be productive members of society and its about entrenched interests using it as a tool to push a broader political battle at the cost of student outcomes I.e. exactly what those pesky naysayers decades ago said would happen eventually.
  - anon291 1y ago
    This nuance becomes reasonable in high school / college. For elementary schoolers, it's actually a great binary. Can you do two-digit addition or not is a pretty straightforwards question? Same with... can you identify grammar errors in this English sentence? Binary questions. The assessments to guide student learning are not the standardize tests meant to measure school performance and do state-level planning
- BobaFloutist 1y ago
  No, that's simply not true. You can very easily overfit even good metrics.
triceratops 1y ago
I actually didn't understand how NCLB incentivized failing a set percentage of students every year. Seems like it would do the opposite.
- coredog64 1y ago
  Allegedly, at the time of drafting and passage, it was understood that despite the name, the optimum number of children to leave behind was not zero. However, the optics of that were not great. The plan was to pass it as zero, and then update that value later. Here we are 20 years later and we haven't had the discussion about what the cutoff is.
- KennyBlanken 1y ago
  If all the students pass then someone is going to claim it's too easy, and thus administrators will need to make it more difficult, develop new curriculum, train teachers on it, and so on. All the while nobody learns anything except how to pass the test.
  - falcor84 1y ago
    That's a strawman argument. We don't have to change the system just because "someone is going to claim it's too easy". I personally have been claiming a lot of things about a lot of systems and the're very persistent in not listening to me, even though I'm sure it would make them better. Anyway, if someone is annoyed by their (or their kid's) test being too easy, we can just give them bonus test
mox1 1y ago
But this was doing the opposite...it was effectively making the test harder every year. If one wanted to game the No Child Left Behind Act, shouldn't you endeavor to make the test easier every year?
- sorcerer-mar 1y ago
  No it wasn't (or at least that is not stated/proven by the article). It says they were adjusting the scores, not in any one direction. If kids were doing worse and you have flat scores, that'd indicate the test being adjusted to be easier. If kids were doing better and you have flat scores, that'd indicate the test being adjusted to be harder. Because they've designed this to produce flat scores, it obscures which of those two statements is true.
  - riffraff 1y ago
    The shortened title on HN is misleading, "masking improvement" vs "masking whether the students improved". The former seems to say the students did improve but this was not visible.
  - 1659447091 1y ago
    The article makes statements that the test were getting more difficult: >> In addition, norm-referenced tests [STAAR] are designed so that a certain share of students always fail, because success is gauged by one’s position on the “bell curve” in relation to other students. Following this logic, STAAR developers use practices like omitting easier questions and adjusting scores to cancel out gains due to better teaching. Followed by: >> Ultimately, the STAAR tests ... were not designed to show improvement. Since the test is designed to keep scores flat, it’s impossible to know for sure if a lack of expected learning gains following big increases in per-student spending was because the extra funds failed to improve teaching and learning, or simply because the test hid the improvements. >> Texas’ educational accountability system has been in place since 1980, and it is well known in the state that the stakes and difficulty of Texas’ academic readiness tests increase with each new version, which typically come out every five to 10 years. What the Texas public may not know is that the tests have been adjusted each and every year – at the expense of really knowing who should “pass” or “fail.” What is not clear or known for sure is the gains, gained, from an increase of money spent per-student because the test, by it's nature, is designed to be flat and not show improvements. But the test itself is designed by the developers to cancel out gains by making it harder. Therefore, the test could not be used to assess that. It is just written a bit funny. This hurt the lower income students most as the wealthier schools with better teaching resources improved faster, it made the test more difficult for poorer performing schools. This is used as a measure to close or take over schools by the state. There's a bit of a kerfuffle going on currently about some schools getting F ratings and the state wanting to take them over, which in other states that might be okay, by here -- they are about to mandate that the 10 Commandments be displayed in classrooms[0]. They are also on track to getting rid of the STAAR test[1]. Hopefully the new assessment they replace it with will be better, supposedly it will be to show improvements, I fear it will then fall into the "no child left behind" trap that STAAR may have prevented by keeping scores flat, even with major investment in education; but it may also help lower income students who are hurt by the current testing practice in that they will receive the funds they earned for their improvement instead of losing them because wealthy districts outpaced them in gains -- even thou they both gained. Texas is weird sometimes. [0] https://www.texastribune.org/2025/05/24/ten-commandments-texas-schools-senate-bill-10/ https://www.texastribune.org/2025/05/24/ten-commandments-tex... [1] https://www.texastribune.org/2025/05/23/staar-test-texas-schools/ https://www.texastribune.org/2025/05/23/staar-test-texas-sch...
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
horns4lyfe 1y ago
My dad worked in education his whole career, from teacher up to district superintendent. No child left behind basically ruined the job for him, all the bad invectives and counterproductive rules made out too hard to actually educate.
bko 1y ago
What's the alternative? Should failing schools be given more money and discretion? Should we not have some kind of objective measures to aim for? Because if the alternative is just vibes or through money at the problem and pray for the best, then I'm not on board. I personally think school choice works best. If schools are bad, parents are the best to judge. And they should be allowed to send their kids elsewhere, new schools should open and bad ones should close. You know, how basically every other market system works
- kjkjadksj 1y ago
  If the school is bad because some of the children have a terrible home life, closing the poor performing schools to open new ones is just playing musical chairs with the issue at hand.
  - ryan93 1y ago
    Evidence that they would perform just as well as kids from “good homes” if they had good homes?
    - triceratops 1y ago
      The kids from good homes perform better.
    - watwut 1y ago
      Huh, it is pretty much settled that kids from "good homes" have better school results then the ones from "bad homes". The kids themselves are under less stres, they eat better, they sleep more, they have someone who cares about their school results. The parents have more resources (time, ability, inclination) to intervene when things go badly regardless of what school does.
    - bsder 1y ago
      The Gates Foundation documented that underperforming students tend to actually gain on the average throughout the school year. The problem is that those same students lose terribly over the summer break. Students from better socioeconomic strata gain over the summer break while those of lower socioeconomic strata do not. Thus, when the school year begins again, any gains made over the school year have been more than cancelled out over the summer. This is one of the big arguments for year-round school.
JumpCrisscross 1y ago
> therefore teacher livelihoods are at stake Does Texas fire underperforming teachers?
- BobaFloutist 1y ago
  If a school doesn't have money, it can't pay teachers.
  - JumpCrisscross 1y ago
    > If a school doesn't have money, it can't pay teachers I’m genuinely asking. In California and New York underperforming schools are almost never shut down on account of powerful teachers’ unions. When they are, the teachers are reässigned. Teachers’ livelihoods are thus never at stake.
    - BobaFloutist 1y ago
      In California, under performing schools get allocated more state funds, not less, to help them fix whatever's making them under perform. I can't speak to New York, but I know a lot of states have systems that financially penalize under performing schools with reduced funding, which is what I was referring to.
- josefritzishere 1y ago
  Texas needs to fire underperforming governors and representatives.
  - sieabahlpark 1y ago
    [dead]

AuthorizedCust 1y ago

If the test is good, then “teaching to the test” is desirable.

SketchySeaBeast 1y ago
Have we found an exception to Goodhart's Law? "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure, except when the measure is good."
- DougN7 1y ago
  … so if the test is good … Reading is such a basic skill it seems like a pretty reasonable thing to come up with a decent test.
  - SketchySeaBeast 1y ago
    "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure, except when the measure is something basic, like teaching reading"? Has the last twenty years of teaching to the test proven that out?
    - anon291 1y ago
      'Teaching to the test' has not caused the drop in literacy. Rather, it's teaching reading using bizarre methods, like whole word recognition instead of phonics. This has nothing to do with 'teaching to the test', since phonics would teach more to the test than whole word anything. A phonetically competent adult would be able to make out almost any English word. A whole word one would not.
      - SketchySeaBeast 1y ago
        "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure, unless the teacher is poor"?
        anon291 1y ago
        This 'truth' is not always true. For binary questions, teaching to measure makes sense
        deleted 1y ago
        [deleted]
        SketchySeaBeast 1y ago
        Unfortunately, "is someone literate" is not a binary question. There's a whole range of possible answers there.
    - DougN7 1y ago
      Is there a way to teach reading, which increases reading test scores, that is bad? I’m having a hard time imagining what that would look like. Just because someone comes up with a pithy saying that some people call a “law” doesn’t make it a universal truth.
- throwawaymaths 1y ago
  you trying to establish some sort of measure for Goodhart's law?
- viraptor 1y ago
  I don't think so. You can still teach to a good test badly. For example: reading a variety of books and letting people do more on their own would be would be better overall than reading just things on the level of the test, asking just the test style questions and spending time learning the answering style to get 100%. It's kind of like those articles about young kids passing IT certifications. Those tests are reasonably good, but those kids just memorised lots of material and never actually worked as, for example, a networking engineer. Or like in IELTS style language test you can easily score higher (even than a native English speaker) if you learn the format enough.
andrewflnr 1y ago
The test is never that good.
- larrled 1y ago
  In education, nothing is ever good enough.
  - no_wizard 1y ago
    This is my take: the real issue with education in the US goes back to trying to square two ideals. One is the meritocracy[0]. I believe that No Child Left Behind Act was sold to the public as a way to promote meritocracy in education and having some reasonably unbiased[1] way of doing so. The foundation of which is a way for parents to hold institutions responsible much more easily[2][3] The other is social and political stratification. This isn't merit based. Good examples of this would be the history of slavery, Jim Crow laws, the formerly legal practice of segregation by race, the drawing school district lines that keep students of wealthy parents away from folks who come from less economically advantaged backgrounds and enforcing this with district based school eligibility and funding. These two don't exactly square very well. Which is why the top level idea sold to the public - meritocracy - is used to sell these policies, but in practice they are using it to pull levers to further political and social stratification. [0]: Americans generally have a positive view of the term. I personally believe that most people don't have a proper understanding of the term to begin with, nor conceive what issues it could have in practice if they were given it. [1]: Leaving out the other half of the narrative, which is how much macro and micro levels of a students environment will influence how well they learn. [2]: Which made it easier for Republicans to continue to go after public education. They've been pushing for the voucher system for decades as a backdoor way to dismantle the public school system, reasons for wanting to do so vary but it all converges on this point. [3]: Not to mention, it completely ignores micro and macro issues that students can have, be it poverty, domestic issues, systemic issues and a whole host of other things.
    - throwawaymaths 1y ago
      > Which made it easier for Republicans to continue to go after public education. They've been pushing for the voucher system for decades as a backdoor way to dismantle the public school system, reasons for wanting to do so vary but it all converges on this point. in practice, republicans are perfectly happy with public schools when the schools are are "good enough" for their kids. so this caricature seems incorrect. there's a lot wrong with USA public schools, so something must be done. some very not-for-profit voucher schools have been doing excellent work where the public school systens have utterly failed, for example green dot animo in inglewood, or, dramatically, green dot locke in watts. what is not a caricature: the vast majority of policymakers who want to keep status quo in the public school system send their kids to private schools.
reverendsteveii 1y ago
that's a downright ponderous conditional at the beginning of this comment
no_wizard 1y ago
The problem with standardized testing in education is the following question: standardized for who?[0] The ultimate "sin", if you will, is that they tied test outcomes to funding and in practice is used to hold teachers to an arbitrary standard, not to help understand and guide the learning for students. For example, what could be done with standardized tests is that schools could use them at regular intervals to understand where each student is at, and adjust their learning resources accordingly to help students that aren't at grade level reach appropriate grade level academically, like if a student tests poorly in Math but not English Comprehension, it would make sense to adjust their schedule to give them more time to learn what they're struggling with and assigning resources appropriately, be it an extra half hour of math learning time with a tutor. That would actually make them useful. Instead, they're used to bludgeon teachers and school districts, and really the student outcomes are at best secondary to the whole operation, and since so much critical funding comes from sources tied to these outcomes, both good and bad outcomes mind you, hence the reason for the deliberate bell curve. Thats the real issue. In the US, education has become incredibly politicized to the point that I firmly feel it stopped being about actually educating students to be productive members of society and its about entrenched interests using it as a tool to push a broader political battle at the cost of student outcomes [0]: Not to mention that the pace of learning and aptitudes is varied by individual, some students will excel in X but not Y. This is a related, but for the purpose of this discussion, separate issue. Not to mention how much environment plays a role (a good home vs bad home situation for example).
- potato3732842 1y ago
  >In the US, education has become incredibly politicized to the point that I firmly feel it stopped being about actually educating students to be productive members of society and its about entrenched interests using it as a tool to push a broader political battle at the cost of student outcomes I.e. exactly what those pesky naysayers decades ago said would happen eventually.
- anon291 1y ago
  This nuance becomes reasonable in high school / college. For elementary schoolers, it's actually a great binary. Can you do two-digit addition or not is a pretty straightforwards question? Same with... can you identify grammar errors in this English sentence? Binary questions. The assessments to guide student learning are not the standardize tests meant to measure school performance and do state-level planning
BobaFloutist 1y ago
No, that's simply not true. You can very easily overfit even good metrics.

triceratops 1y ago

I actually didn't understand how NCLB incentivized failing a set percentage of students every year. Seems like it would do the opposite.

coredog64 1y ago
Allegedly, at the time of drafting and passage, it was understood that despite the name, the optimum number of children to leave behind was not zero. However, the optics of that were not great. The plan was to pass it as zero, and then update that value later. Here we are 20 years later and we haven't had the discussion about what the cutoff is.
KennyBlanken 1y ago
If all the students pass then someone is going to claim it's too easy, and thus administrators will need to make it more difficult, develop new curriculum, train teachers on it, and so on. All the while nobody learns anything except how to pass the test.
- falcor84 1y ago
  That's a strawman argument. We don't have to change the system just because "someone is going to claim it's too easy". I personally have been claiming a lot of things about a lot of systems and the're very persistent in not listening to me, even though I'm sure it would make them better. Anyway, if someone is annoyed by their (or their kid's) test being too easy, we can just give them bonus test

mox1 1y ago

But this was doing the opposite...it was effectively making the test harder every year. If one wanted to game the No Child Left Behind Act, shouldn't you endeavor to make the test easier every year?

sorcerer-mar 1y ago
No it wasn't (or at least that is not stated/proven by the article). It says they were adjusting the scores, not in any one direction. If kids were doing worse and you have flat scores, that'd indicate the test being adjusted to be easier. If kids were doing better and you have flat scores, that'd indicate the test being adjusted to be harder. Because they've designed this to produce flat scores, it obscures which of those two statements is true.
- riffraff 1y ago
  The shortened title on HN is misleading, "masking improvement" vs "masking whether the students improved". The former seems to say the students did improve but this was not visible.
- 1659447091 1y ago
  The article makes statements that the test were getting more difficult: >> In addition, norm-referenced tests [STAAR] are designed so that a certain share of students always fail, because success is gauged by one’s position on the “bell curve” in relation to other students. Following this logic, STAAR developers use practices like omitting easier questions and adjusting scores to cancel out gains due to better teaching. Followed by: >> Ultimately, the STAAR tests ... were not designed to show improvement. Since the test is designed to keep scores flat, it’s impossible to know for sure if a lack of expected learning gains following big increases in per-student spending was because the extra funds failed to improve teaching and learning, or simply because the test hid the improvements. >> Texas’ educational accountability system has been in place since 1980, and it is well known in the state that the stakes and difficulty of Texas’ academic readiness tests increase with each new version, which typically come out every five to 10 years. What the Texas public may not know is that the tests have been adjusted each and every year – at the expense of really knowing who should “pass” or “fail.” What is not clear or known for sure is the gains, gained, from an increase of money spent per-student because the test, by it's nature, is designed to be flat and not show improvements. But the test itself is designed by the developers to cancel out gains by making it harder. Therefore, the test could not be used to assess that. It is just written a bit funny. This hurt the lower income students most as the wealthier schools with better teaching resources improved faster, it made the test more difficult for poorer performing schools. This is used as a measure to close or take over schools by the state. There's a bit of a kerfuffle going on currently about some schools getting F ratings and the state wanting to take them over, which in other states that might be okay, by here -- they are about to mandate that the 10 Commandments be displayed in classrooms[0]. They are also on track to getting rid of the STAAR test[1]. Hopefully the new assessment they replace it with will be better, supposedly it will be to show improvements, I fear it will then fall into the "no child left behind" trap that STAAR may have prevented by keeping scores flat, even with major investment in education; but it may also help lower income students who are hurt by the current testing practice in that they will receive the funds they earned for their improvement instead of losing them because wealthy districts outpaced them in gains -- even thou they both gained. Texas is weird sometimes. [0] https://www.texastribune.org/2025/05/24/ten-commandments-texas-schools-senate-bill-10/ https://www.texastribune.org/2025/05/24/ten-commandments-tex... [1] https://www.texastribune.org/2025/05/23/staar-test-texas-schools/ https://www.texastribune.org/2025/05/23/staar-test-texas-sch...

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

horns4lyfe 1y ago

My dad worked in education his whole career, from teacher up to district superintendent. No child left behind basically ruined the job for him, all the bad invectives and counterproductive rules made out too hard to actually educate.

bko 1y ago

What's the alternative? Should failing schools be given more money and discretion? Should we not have some kind of objective measures to aim for? Because if the alternative is just vibes or through money at the problem and pray for the best, then I'm not on board. I personally think school choice works best. If schools are bad, parents are the best to judge. And they should be allowed to send their kids elsewhere, new schools should open and bad ones should close. You know, how basically every other market system works

kjkjadksj 1y ago
If the school is bad because some of the children have a terrible home life, closing the poor performing schools to open new ones is just playing musical chairs with the issue at hand.
- ryan93 1y ago
  Evidence that they would perform just as well as kids from “good homes” if they had good homes?
  - triceratops 1y ago
    The kids from good homes perform better.
  - watwut 1y ago
    Huh, it is pretty much settled that kids from "good homes" have better school results then the ones from "bad homes". The kids themselves are under less stres, they eat better, they sleep more, they have someone who cares about their school results. The parents have more resources (time, ability, inclination) to intervene when things go badly regardless of what school does.
  - bsder 1y ago
    The Gates Foundation documented that underperforming students tend to actually gain on the average throughout the school year. The problem is that those same students lose terribly over the summer break. Students from better socioeconomic strata gain over the summer break while those of lower socioeconomic strata do not. Thus, when the school year begins again, any gains made over the school year have been more than cancelled out over the summer. This is one of the big arguments for year-round school.

JumpCrisscross 1y ago

> therefore teacher livelihoods are at stake Does Texas fire underperforming teachers?

BobaFloutist 1y ago
If a school doesn't have money, it can't pay teachers.
- JumpCrisscross 1y ago
  > If a school doesn't have money, it can't pay teachers I’m genuinely asking. In California and New York underperforming schools are almost never shut down on account of powerful teachers’ unions. When they are, the teachers are reässigned. Teachers’ livelihoods are thus never at stake.
  - BobaFloutist 1y ago
    In California, under performing schools get allocated more state funds, not less, to help them fix whatever's making them under perform. I can't speak to New York, but I know a lot of states have systems that financially penalize under performing schools with reduced funding, which is what I was referring to.
josefritzishere 1y ago
Texas needs to fire underperforming governors and representatives.
- sieabahlpark 1y ago
  [dead]