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We used to be able to assume that high school and college graduates could do elementary school math. Maybe what we used to do would be more palatable if we were

• paulpauper 11mo ago
  From what I have read online, failing high school is almost impossible. GPAs inflated to the point of useless.
  • cpursley 11mo ago
    My wife was a Title I teacher high school for a while, there was a LOT of pressure to “pass” kids out of the system for that sweet Federal money and other lets say, “political” reasons (like internal/local level, not left/right stuff). And she absolutely did her best to get them to pass on their own merit, but there’s only so much you can do if students don’t have the prerequisites + culture and motivation.
  • SonOfKyuss 11mo ago
    > From what I have read online... Don't believe everything you read online. My experience from actually having 2 kids currently in high school is that failing is damn near impossible, but GPA absolutely does mean something for most kids. There is definitely a group of kids at the bottom that in decades past would have been held back or dropped out and those kids are now just passed along. Is that better or worse than having them drop out? I don't really know, but the reality is that those kids likely wouldn't have been cut out for these jobs anyway. At the other end of the spectrum, the competition at the top can be fierce. My kids and their peers stress way more about their GPA than I ever did because competition for colleges has gotten tougher. The education is there for those who want to take advantage of it.
    • JumpCrisscross 11mo ago
      > Is that better or worse than having them drop out? I don't really know It's worse. If they'd been held back earlier, they might have graduated high school prepared for the sorts of trades jobs this article discusses. Instead, they're processed through the system as a number. Best case, they aren't constantly disrupting their classrooms.
      • SonOfKyuss 11mo ago
        Again, from my personal experience of having kids in school, they do hold kids back in elementary and even middle school, but less so in high school. From what I have seen, they will strongly recommend it if they feel that a student is not ready for the next grade, but won't force it if the parents disagree. There’s not a whole lot else they can do. There’s no other place in society to support these kids at the bottom and the schools aren’t funded well enough to give them the one on one attention to catch them up.
    • parpfish 11mo ago
      what happens to GPA if a kid is failed/held back a year? does it keep accumulating across the extra years? in my opinion, if you fail a year that whole year should be excluded from GPA and you just get a clean 'do over' on the repeat grade.
      • csa 11mo ago
        > what happens to GPA if a kid is failed/held back a year? For a kid who is held back a year, what good is any GPA? Genuine question. I’m sure that one could construct some sort of edge case or corner case in which a college-bound kid has a bad year. That said, for each of those cases, I’m pretty sure I could come up with a perfectly good way for that person to find a reasonable path to a very good university. That said, in most cases, the folks who are held back will have significant issues that will marginalize them anyway: social, psychological, cognitive, etc.
        • parpfish 11mo ago
          i could envision a situation where there's a kid that has a bad home-life situation that gets resolved or a stretch of bad mental health that could really turn things around from one year to the next.
          • csa 11mo ago
            > i could envision a situation where there's a kid that has a bad home-life situation that gets resolved or a stretch of bad mental health that could really turn things around from one year to the next. This happens. Usually they will not get held back. Usually the teachers will know what’s going on. A passing C (or even B) can be manufactured in these spots. This assumes that they are normally good students. Also note that most schools that reject people have a spot on their application where an applicant can explain any sort of extenuating circumstances (e.g., parents divorce, etc.), and a bad year will be overlooked as long as it’s clear that they are back on track and can perform. If someone has consistent performance issues and just happens to be smart, then they need to fix the performance issues. This is usually best done at a junior college and then a transfer to a four-year school (e.g., State U).
    • paulpauper 11mo ago
      There is definitely a group of kids at the bottom that in decades past would have been held back or dropped out and those kids are now just passed along. This is literally my point. What difference does it make if I heard it online Is that better or worse than having them drop out? it is worse given that it gives false signals for the job market and devalues the credential
• germinalphrase 11mo ago
  Alternatively, we have decades of credentials inflation such that our high school graduates can indeed do math - but we choose to pretend they can’t and instead insist that an expensive undergraduate degree is required for entry level work.
  • shtzvhdx 11mo ago
    Unlike the humanities, it is trivially easy to test if high school grads are just as good at math. Test them on the same questions. In fact, doesn't the SAT purposely include recycled problems to measure capability drift vs time?
    • xp84 11mo ago
      You'd better duck before the people who "don't test well" come for you. There are millions of people out there who swear they know a ton of things and have great skills in math/science/whatever, but when asked to demonstrate them in any verifiable way (a "test") they freeze up and perform poorly. I don't really think those people are all lying (it's probably an anxiety disorder) but the entire notion of being able to empirically measure knowledge/skills/aptitude is controversial to some people.
      • rahimnathwani 11mo ago
        I can bend spoons with my mind, but only when nobody is watching.
      • JumpCrisscross 11mo ago
        > don't really think those people are all lying They may not be lying. But it isn't that relevant. Someone knowing how to do something they can't perform isn't going to be useful as a mechanic.
        • mhb 11mo ago
          It's also not relevant because are there more of the anxious testers now?
• SonOfKyuss 11mo ago
  There are plenty of high school and college graduates that can do elementary school math. They are just going into more lucrative fields. If Ford wants those candidates, they need to offer more competitive salaries.
  • SoftTalker 11mo ago
    I mean, I’ve been in tech for over 30 years and I don’t make $120k. SV salaries are outlandish compared to many parts of the country.
    • ponector 11mo ago
      Don't worry, they are also not paying 120k to mechanics, it's just another CEO lie.
    • SonOfKyuss 11mo ago
      I'm not in SV either and $120k would be well below average for someone with 30 years experience in my area. Of course, "in tech" can mean a lot of things. From what I have seen, tech writers and IT help desk folk don't make nearly as much as SW developers.
    • tstrimple 11mo ago
      You're likely being underpaid. I'm in Iowa and regularly see software devs with offers higher than that. The last company I was at, they brought an intern back with a $140k starting salary. He was making more than an "architect" who had been at the company for 16 years.
    • queenkjuul 11mo ago
      That sucks, i learned JavaScript during the pandemic and make more than 120k at a corporate gig in Chicago (where salaries are certainly higher than Wichita but it's no SV). I don't even have a college degree.
• tw04 11mo ago
  Ahh, yes the key to mathematics being an issue is public education. We should privatize it so that half the population goes from under educated to completely uneducated. Or maybe we could go with the coal town model and have children accrue debt to a major corporation that they can literally never pay off in exchange for an education!
  • MBCook 11mo ago
    I don’t see GP proposing privatizating.
    • tw04 11mo ago
      He is literally proposing privatizing and has in the past. I can’t help your refusal to follow his statement to its logical conclusion. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45182657#45197662 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45182657#45197662
      • MBCook 11mo ago
        Wow. I managed to miss a single word despite reading three times to check. Ugh. Sorry.
        • deadbolt 11mo ago
          [flagged]
      • mhb 11mo ago
        I literally did not literally propose privatizing in these comments. Here all I said was that public schools are dysfunctional if they are producing high school and college graduates who can't do elementary school math. The solution to that dysfunction was outside the scope of this discussion. Literally.
        • tw04 11mo ago
          So what’s your solution?
• kritiko 11mo ago
  US has PISA scores that are roughly equivalent to Western Europe. I think the kids who can do math just get sorted into better jobs.
• nerdponx 11mo ago
  The most dysfunctional aspects of public education have less to do with the education and more to do with the home lives of the children we are trying to educate. In my town, most of the cost of education is just paying teachers. The school system is expensive because paying a lot of teachers is expensive, as is maintaining school buildings. And guess what? Teachers still don't make that much, especially because the union typically has to fight hard for the even basic cost-of-living raises, classroom materials are often not reimbursed by the school, and teachers have hours of unpaid non-overtime overtime work. And the funny thing about the cost of living raises? The costs are going up because of things like housing, food, and energy for heating. Corporate profits are at generational highs and wealth inequality is growing. So teachers, just like the rest of us, are subject to greater and greater consumer surplus extraction, effectively sucking wealth out of the towns where they live and work. And then taxpayers in those towns need to keep paying for their raises, but those same taxpayers are subject to the same consumer surplus extraction. Families with two working parents, families struggling to pay for rent and heat and food, families where everyone is addicted to social media... none of that is conducive to kids showing up and being ready to spend 8 hours learning stuff, not to mention drilling and retaining and developing an understanding of what they learned. Everything is politics and everything is economics. Society is a deeply interconnected ecosystem. School is dysfunctional because families are dysfunctional, suffering from degradation of social structures and severe economic pressure. School is expensive teachers are expensive, and teachers are expensive because they are suffering from the same economic pressure as the families who send their kids to school. Every household is a little capillary in a great circulatory system of money. Income goes in one end and spending goes out the other end. What's happening now is that most capillaries are receiving smaller and smaller shares of the total flow, while some special ones are swollen larger than we have ever seen before. When people say that the system is rigged, this is what they mean. Is it any surprise that the people with the power to change where the money flows are using that power to make sure more of it flows to themselves?
  • deleted 11mo ago
    [deleted]