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Oregon raised spending by 80%, math scores dropped

75 points by grantpitt 8mo ago

gitbit-org 8mo ago
Where is the money going? Isn't the average teacher pay down?
- readme 8mo ago
  exactly had that extra spending gone to pay math teachers the results might be different
- rngfnby 8mo ago
  Administration. Large institutions in the USA are grossly mismanaged and/or corrupt. Normalize the amount of public money pupils cost and it easily dwarfs most elite private schools. Multiply by class size and an elementary school class can cost $500k+. The teacher is not making $100k.
- JKCalhoun 8mo ago
  Publishers?
amanaplanacanal 8mo ago
Why was the headline changed? The story isn't about Oregon.
- confidantlake 8mo ago
  Yup this needs an answer.
- godelski 8mo ago
  As a reminder to everyone, here's what the guidelines say[0] > Otherwise please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize. There are reasons to edit the title other than this quote, but this article is not one of such cases. The original title "Hard Lessons from the New NAEP Results" is meaningful enough. Changing it has made it clickbait. I'm also a little surprised that more people aren't talking about it and that it hasn't been changed. There's definitely a culture shift happening in HN... If you've never read the guidelines, now is a great time. Seriously, it isn't that long and captures why many of us come to HN over other sites. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - grantpitt 8mo ago
    Sorry, my mistake. Thanks for the reminder. I don't think I can change it after 2 hrs.
    - godelski 8mo ago
      I'm curious, why did you make this change? The article isn't about Oregon. Plus, the claim itself is pretty disingenuous since it is including covid data, vastly exaggerating the effect[0] [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46919890 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46919890
      - grantpitt 8mo ago
        I quoted from the middle of the article what I found interesting. I don't submit on here much and I just put that in the title field without thinking. I'm glad that comment provides proper context on this.
Nevermark 8mo ago
All the fiascos in education raise a simple question. Why are big changes not arrived at by first gaining experience with them in in some reduced scale, then spreading the improvements incrementally as they continue to be validated. And why isn't this experimentation being done all the time, not randomly but competitively/cooperatively between school districts and individual schools? Each making small changes toward getting better results and sharing what they have learned. With most cross adoption happening naturally. Creating and managing the context for the latter is what people with power should be doing. Not making top-down decisions devoid of the bottom-up wisdom and visible exemplars that big changes need to succeed.
- actionfromafar 8mo ago
  Yeah, maybe we should have given a control group of kids infinite doomscrolling before we gave it to all them.
- servo_sausage 8mo ago
  If you make a change in only one school, you end up with selection effects where interested parents move their children into (or away from) catchment areas based on vibes. Then you can't really measure outcomes, because the strongest predictor of student performance is parents interest and resources. You also run into issues with teaching skills and standards, you need a high level of planning and adherence to the supplied plan in order to measure outcomes; otherwise it's just vibes based on individual teachers.
  - Nevermark 8mo ago
    Big studies have an important role. Especially for dramatically different approaches, such as the different approaches to teaching reading. The differences are so acute, that careful A/B, or A/B/Control studies are the best approach. But most improvements in any complex system happen iteratively, and benefit from clusters of subtle changes found to work well together. At some point enough experience is gained to characterize the change, and give others a chance to consider it. I suggested incremental adoption, and organic adoption, of successful changes, precisely because of this need for significant bottom up testing before spreading something widely. Success at one scale, and location, doesn't always translate directly to another context, or might not work in another context at all. > You also run into issues with teaching skills and standards, you need a high level of planning and adherence to the supplied plan in order to measure outcomes; otherwise it's just vibes based on individual teachers. You point out a very important concern. Good measurement doesn't make bottom-up improvement impossible, unnecessary, or any less important. The point of measurement is to make improvements easier to see, and not get in there way. This is what I was referring to when I said at the top, the job is to create a context where improvements can happen. One of the simplest ways to balance top-level and bottom-up concerns, is to communicate the actual top-level needs (not just current practices) clearly, then let front line educators propose changes to measurement practices, where they feel the current practice is holding them back. That gets both scales working together to enable improvements to happen, and to be seen. There is no (competent) conflict here, the opposite.
jeffbee 8mo ago
Maybe the Oregon people spent the money on art and music and sports and weren't trying to optimize some third-party academic's budget-to-test-scores efficiency metric.
- 9x39 8mo ago
  Admins, support staff, generally focusing on "access" instead of quality. There's a belief that the bottom 10-20% is more important than the top 80% to bother spending on, which I think is reflected in the budgets. https://www.commonsenseinstituteus.org/oregon/research/education/spending-more-achieving-lessoregonseducation-challenge https://www.commonsenseinstituteus.org/oregon/research/educa...
donohoe 8mo ago
What could possible explain this drop over the last ~10 years? Unrelated: schools with effective phone bans are seeing improved grades and less absences.
- deleted 8mo ago
  [deleted]
- JKCalhoun 8mo ago
  Unrelated?
- kjsingh 8mo ago
  You said it!
MrCurryCasino 8mo ago
[flagged]
drivebyhooting 8mo ago
Maybe we should copy what China is doing? Their class sizes are much higher - 40 kids for 1 teacher. But there is a lot more discipline, the teachers teach only a few classes, spending most of their time on curriculum preparation, and the children have 3 hours of vigorous exercise everyday.
- psyklic 8mo ago
  It's very possibly moreso a cultural issue. COVID caused continuing low attendance, there is currently an anti-education political trend, and AI advancements allow students to be lazy. If parents and peers don't value education, the students won't either.
- yorwba 8mo ago
  Don't forget about the examination system grouping students by ability and filtering out the worst performers altogether. Of ≈17 million students who took the zhongkao and graduated junior high school after grade 9 in 2024, ≈10 million were admitted to a high school, ≈4 million to a vocational school and the remaining ≈3 million disappear from education statistics, presumably directly entering the workforce. http://www.moe.gov.cn/jyb_sjzl/sjzl_fztjgb/202506/t20250611_1193760.html http://www.moe.gov.cn/jyb_sjzl/sjzl_fztjgb/202506/t20250611_...
- tstrimple 8mo ago
  > But there is a lot more discipline I think that would solve a huge number of issues. Teachers and admins seem to have no ability to kick repeated problem students out. My wife works as a para professional sub at our local elementary school. Twice this week a special needs girl was having a meltdown in a hallway and they essentially had to "quarantine" it until she calmed down. Students and teachers had to take other hallways to get where they needed to go. These children have educational needs that public schools cannot provide, but the burden largely falls onto them as an incredibly expensive (to the tax payer) babysitting service. Get them and the slowest students out of the general pipeline. They have been clogging it up and holding everyone back far too long. And no. I don't have an adequate solution to handle the bottom X% of students who are beyond help from the general system. I just know the system can't function effectively with them in it. There are all sorts of other systemic issues I've seen through her experiences. But this is a major one which impacts all of the students. Classes cannot move at the pace of the slowest and / or most disruptive student. The slowest students need to be left behind for others to thrive. If they cannot reach the already low minimum standards, they cannot advance in grades. If they cannot behave to the low minimum expectations, their parents need to find other accommodations.
sandworm101 8mo ago
Has anyone looked at the teacher's math scores? I have read in the past about about problems with basic numeracy amongst educators being transmitted to students. >> (2008) Primary school teachers in England are often scared of basic numeracy and should be required to study English and maths at A-level, a report suggests. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/education/8162803.stm http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/education/8162803.stm >> This lack of confidence on the part of teachers can be transmitted to students and result in their own lack of mathematical confidence https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ743586.pdf https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ743586.pdf
- boelboel 8mo ago
  In elementary school and early high school I liked older teachers more than younger teachers (just on average, I had many great younger teachers as well). I think 40+ years ago teaching in an elementary school and certainly in a high school was seen as a 'dignified' profession, causing many intelligent people who could've worked for better pay in private industry to work there. Knew some families where all kids (and they had many) either became lawyers, engineers, doctors or teachers. Teacher was seen as an equal option. I have a feeling many of my greatest teachers wouldn't take the same path today, a lot more burdens and enough other 'intellectual' jobs to go for.
- deleted 8mo ago
  [deleted]
- AngryData 8mo ago
  My highschool calculus teacher bragged that she only had to take calculus 101 and 102 three times to pass. We definitely didn't learn calculus that year. Of course teacher options are limited when the pay is the same as a walmart cashier.
kitesay 8mo ago
Focusing solely on the school isn't going be the answer. Students spend more time not at school. That has an effect.
chasd00 8mo ago
From my experience raising kids in public schools, adding money to a bad school only makes it worse.
ekjhgkejhgk 8mo ago
Politics and ideologies aside, just trying to be rational.... Can someone better informed about these metrics (the NAEP specifically) comment: how exactly do we know that we're comparing the same thing each year? Is the NAEP based off answering the same questions every year? Because if it's just like "average exam result" - those can change a lot. And can in fact trend, meaning change in the same direction for several years (e.g. becoming harder, becoming easier)
- rayiner 8mo ago
  Not everyone takes the same test. So you can repeat some questions on some tests year over year, or have some experimental questions that aren’t graded one year but used for establish norms for when it’s graded in future years.
Spivak 8mo ago
This article is super weird because it's looking at an issue from orbit where the only things you can see are vague things like "funding" where the problem is on the ground and probably can't be solved by the levers available from orbit. The lesson of funding having arguably no effect on outcomes should either be that we genuinely don't know what improves outcomes or that we do but schools are lighting money on fire buying other things. It means the problem is unfortunately local and you have to actually go to the schools and see what the issue is. Based on what my former HS spent money on I figure we will eventually find some commonalities: * New computer labs, laptops, digital textbooks, learning software licenses, smart boards, and other and other expensive crap that is at best neutral from a learning perspective. * Pointless building improvements that don't service education but instead service the prestige and egos of the administrators of the schools. * Chronic long-term understaffing and light-speed "just get through it" lesson plans that makes teachers not give a shit, and powerless to do better even if they do. I think "just blame the administrators" is too easy a cop-out because I've yet to meet one who isn't also underpaid and dying of stress. Although maybe I just don't have access to the real higher ups.
- wffurr 8mo ago
  >> * New computer labs, laptops, digital textbooks, learning software licenses, smart boards, and other and other expensive crap that is at best neutral from a learning perspective. I think we should be actively removing these things from schools, but it's a tough fight as parents against an entire well-funded EdTech industry pushing these things with a firehose of VC money. >> * Pointless building improvements that don't service education but instead service the prestige and egos of the administrators of the schools. This makes me crazy. We have a very fancy, very large new school building my city which is LEED platinum certified. I can't possibly imagine that that certification level is cost effective. I'm sure we could have built a very good school with a healthy safe learning environment and environmentally conscious decisions for heating, cooling, power, etc. for significantly less if the city were willing to forego the press release headline. This is also a really hard problem that pits taxpayers against a well-funded industry full of lobbyists. Both of these can be traced back to the principal agent problem, which really is blaming the administrators, because they're making decisions and then don't have to deal with the consequences (actually integrating and using EdTech in a classroom, paying more taxes for the same or worse education, etc.).
scrubs 8mo ago
Good grief! The bush admin tried to getting better scores by standard testing ... as a scheme in some ways by-pass local control by trading improvement for cash or removing cash. Mixed results. There's whining about standard testing .. . There's whining without it too. But states brought that on themselves. I raised two boys one a plain-joe kid, one with special needs. The older, regular kid got into and out of university in four years. Seeing what I see now, and what I saw over those years: - pay teachers more with commensurate increase in accountability. (You can't have only one.) - focus on academics only. Too much resources are wasted in our American daydreaming that schools can be some kind of utopia superceding home, family. Regretably, if parents don't care, there's a tiny chance only the kid will change in school. Here i mean anything that detracts from language, math, science, arts, sports. Having different makes and models of kids at school? That's great; i like that. My kids have got to see our house isn't the only game in town. - maybe eliminate all federal forms of funding by sending less money to the fed redistributed back later. Control and accountability has to be less complex with fewer regs from fewer places. Education is operationally local in the US and yet somehow the fed and national unions are big players too. We can't be serving two masters. - withhold kids by class until they succeed. Kids must be held accountable too. If you can't deal with algebra I you are not doing algerbra II so you can suck at that too. - contribute to kid's self esteem and confidence right: you're not graduating in this class, and I (as a teacher) will help you figure out a way forward by tackling what's in front of you. That's real success. That's real learning. That's better for kids. - put principals and teachers top echelon. If they want/need admin staff, fine counter balanced by cost & success on accountability side. US schools like US medicine is phenomenal at having paper pushers suck up resources. Yah, I'm not a fan of this to put it politely.
- lotsofpulp 8mo ago
  > - pay teachers more with commensurate increase in accountability. (You can't have only one.) I would bet 90% of the problem is the attitude towards learning at home and among the peer group, who also get their attitudes from home. Doesn’t seem effective or fair to hold teachers accountable for that.
  - scrubs 8mo ago
kbelder 8mo ago
Oregon is mentioned as an example of the general decline through the US. The article isn't really about Oregon specifically: Consider Oregon. Had it merely kept pace with inflation, it would have increased school spending by about 35 percent from 2013 to 2023. In actuality, it raised spending by 80 percent. Over the same period, math and reading performance tanked, with math posting a remarkable 16-point decline—the equivalent of 1.5 grade levels. Oregon is spending much more and achieving much less. I think that Oregon teacher salaries have gone up quite a bit more than the national average in the last 10 years, less so in the last couple. My youngest child is just starting high school at the moment, and for the last several years much of math education seems to have been farmed out to really crappy software and short video clips running on chromebooks. She'd really be suffering without parental intervention.
- grantpitt 8mo ago
  Yeah, the article links the source where every state can be viewed: https://edunomicslab.org/roi-over-time/ https://edunomicslab.org/roi-over-time/
- wffurr 8mo ago
  >> much of math education seems to have been farmed out to really crappy software and short video clips running on chromebooks Our local school committee is debating this currently. There was a book mentioned "Ditch That Textbook" about using EdTech to reimagine curriculums. I have a hard time imagining actual high quality math education not using a textbook, and I don't really see how crappy software (and I do not for a second doubt that most ed tech is crappy - almost all software is crappy really, it's a total tragedy and a separate discussion) can possibly do better. Personally I'd like to see fewer Chromebooks and iPads and such in classrooms and more textbooks and notebooks. I'm open to being convinced I'm just a curmudgeon, but it'll take real results in schools to do so.
  - grebc 8mo ago
    Colour me a curmudgeon too but a screen doesn’t need to be in front of a student all hours of the day to learn.
josefritzishere 8mo ago
Not to make a broad generalization, but all spend is not equal. If schools redirect that spend into administrative salaries I would not expect to see any positive effect on scores.
mrguyorama 8mo ago
Title has been editorialized. In terms of the continuing "education depression" as discussed by this article, we still haven't gotten rid of "No child left behind". Of course kids are less educated than they used to be, you don't need to be educated to graduate. Maine specifically is an important example. There has been no real change in education policy in the state, yet there is still significant reduction in outcomes. The much maligned unscientific way of teaching reading was adopted in Caribou Maine far far far earlier than educational outcomes started dropping. The neighboring town did not adopt that way of teaching reading. They did not see different outcomes. IMO, the outcomes clearly follow the generation of kids growing up in a school system where you cannot be held back for not doing the work. The entire time education outcomes have been going down, state highschool graduation rates have been going up. This is not because teachers like giving good grades to kids who don't learn things. "No child left behind" is a disaster. I know many people in the state who are looking to become teachers. Everybody always reminds them how terrible an idea that is for them in particular. Schools cannot hire people, because even with "Higher" salaries, the salaries are still bad. They have mostly been adjusted for inflation, so it seems like they have gone up a lot, but they have been adjusted from a point when they were already terrible and not a good salary. Meanwhile, my mother is a 40 year teacher here. The rich neighborhood school she switched to pays her well, but provides zero institutional support. They did not allow her to purchase anything. No textbooks, no test generators, no enrichment videos, nothing. They don't support her at all. She's one of the best educators I've ever known and every student she has taught agrees. She's so effective at being an educator that students who come from shitty families and cause disruption in other classes choose to spend time in her classes, and choose to spend time in her study hall to do their homework and become better students. This is true for thousands and thousands of students who went through her classes. She is the sole reason some northern maine kids know how to do math. She's a french teacher.
- prewett 8mo ago
  Do you have any idea what it is that makes her so effective, especially with kid who otherwise wouldn't care?
  - 8mo ago
beastman82 8mo ago
Reminder that correlation!= causation
ajross 8mo ago
OMG. It's the !?%!@# pandemic. All education statistics measuring across 2020 are horrifyingly polluted. Kids who stayed at home for a year are behind relative to the same cohorts before or since, AND YET WE KEEP FLOGGING THESE NUMBERS as if they're signal and not noise. I've seen this on the front page of HN like three times now.
- amanaplanacanal 8mo ago
  The article says that scores have been sinking since 2013, many years before the pandemic.
  - wedog6 8mo ago
    It says this but the numbers in the article actually show flatlining after 2013 with a huge drop off after 2020. 2022 8th grader cohort missed much of 6th and 7th grade. 2024 cohort missed 4th and 5th grade. These results are extremely in line with that effect, despite what people want to say about social media, teacher pay, etc.
    - nosuchthing 8mo ago
      Most studies are showing children with neurological damage from continued exposure to covid outbreaks in schools multiple times a year. Lockdowns did not last more than a few months for the vast majority of school districts in the US.
      - 7e 8mo ago
        Three-quarters of urban school districts were operating fully remote until late 2020. That may skew the results.
        nosuchthing 8mo ago
        New York City had hybrid in-person and remote as an option, so only about 4 months were remote for most students. Seems like a perfect A/B test case to test the theory that a remote learning was actually associated with cognitive decline 5 years later. Meanwhile every year since 2020 there have been studies published from nearly every country on the neurological and cognitive damage from mild covid cases. Seems to be more of a cognitive dissonance issue, that people don't want to confront the elephant in the room. 100 years ago when TB and Polio were taken more seriously than today, the common solution was fresh air. Schools today are even more sealed off to the point where a simple lack of oxygen starts to noticeably reduce cognitive ability after a few minutes.
throwaway85825 8mo ago
Almost no education research questions the quality of the students ability to learn. Students with an ability to learn will do so regardless of the resources expended, the ones that don't won't. Trillions wasted over the decades due to a preference to ignore reality.
- rfw300 8mo ago
  Well if only we had such thoughtful minds in the education space. How did no one ever think of "why don't we just give up on the children"?
  - lurking_swe 8mo ago
    you’re measuring the wrong thing. Spending more on education if a child’s home life is garbage is a waste of time. That’s controversial because it doesn’t sound nice, but it’s a fact. The real problem is not at school and school can only help so much. At a broad policy level, government should focus its effort in other areas of basic NEEDS first. Stable jobs for parents, housing and food needs met, etc. Being a successful student when your families basic needs are not met is an uphill battle.
  - 9x39 8mo ago
    It's just that politics outweighs systems thinking. Selling a narrative that money can fix, getting funds, and then allocating funds is comically easy and less risky than trying to fix something broken. You're capturing sentiment into political momentum, when you're the one who allocates money you are very, very popular and interesting and can make many things happen. You can do all of this and move on independently of any results in the problem statements that may or may not have been written to begin with. Contrast that with telling people hard truths like deified educators aren't effectual, or that per-capita pupil spending doesn't correlate with outcomes, or how parents and home culture are stronger effects than whether you offer rich IEPs or adopted Common Core - you can be tarred and feathered for rocking the boat before you get to make any change. It's not that anyone thinks we should give up on the children, it's that we should probably give up on direct democracy in some areas, and at best, these spending splurges are incompetence and at worst, outright wealth transfers to the PMC and NGOs or fraud.
naizarak 8mo ago
The reasons are obvious but acknowledging them is taboo. It's much easier and politically convenient to blame everything on funding, despite the fact that some school districts have the budget of a small country.
elzbardico 8mo ago
[flagged]
- teachrdan 8mo ago
  News flash: Massachusetts and Wisconsin came in tied at #1 for student performance, and teacher union density is about 100% for both states.
  - guywithahat 8mo ago
    Wisconsin has no collective bargaining for teachers and the unions can't require dues
    - teachrdan 8mo ago
      I stand corrected. Looks like "194 unions (56.2%) hitting the 51% threshold in 2021" after cursory searching. Having said that, it still belies the notion that teacher's unions are single handedly responsible for poor student test results.
      - guywithahat 8mo ago
        I mean the most important factor is the students and their backgrounds. Lots of places will never have good schools or will always have high ranking schools due to the kids attending just being smarter or less so. That said, the research is quite clear that unions hurt student performance, and if your only goal is improving student performance non-union charter schools seem to be the best option. By giving parents as much choice as possible, parents tend to pick better schools, and poorly run schools are force to lay off staff or go out of business, so better run schools can replace them.
  - 9x39 8mo ago
    Teachers are only one factor (students themselves are the other), and neither MA nor WI are winning the cost disease war - both states have slid with the rest in the last decade since 2013. We would need to compare private vs public schools but those could easily be more about the students than the teachers.
maerF0x0 8mo ago
Some thoughts: - Apathy is rampant in most workforces, presumably also teachers. - In unionized workplaces where greater performance != greater pay, and greater pay is guaranteed regardless... No surprise there wasn't better outcomes. - Not sure if this site has such a bent, but to me if the funding was going to rise 80% (twice as fast as inflation), it would have been nice to also see what market forces could have done via a voucher system. Edit: It will be really interesting to compare oregon public outcomes to something like this school in Austin https://nypost.com/2026/01/30/business/new-65k-private-school-uses-ai-to-teach-students-in-just-two-hours-a-day-in-silicon-valley-bid-to-shake-up-us-education/ https://nypost.com/2026/01/30/business/new-65k-private-schoo...
strawhatguy 8mo ago
Spending is the issue. That money is spent on something, and it isn't (all) teaching either. The chart in the link below shows employee vs students headcounts over 6 years. Even though student rolls went down almost all employment in the school system went up. Do we really need a +22% increase in Student Support Services when there are fewer students? Even teachers (only?) went up by 2.8% according to this (and again, students went down)? And why would librarians of all positions seem to be the ones whose positions were cut? Basically, 'education' is nothing more than a jobs program for the politically connected, as clearly the focus is not on kids. And education is safe, because it's hard to argue against it, even if you're not talking about actual teachers. Honestly I would expect if funding were cut, and particularly the admin, support, 'paraprofessional', and other non-teaching staff were fired, you'd find those test scores approach the pre-pandemic levels. Will that happen? Of course not. These are politically connected people after all. We should all be angry. https://x.com/johnfaig/status/2019108852365656477?s=20 https://x.com/johnfaig/status/2019108852365656477?s=20
swolios 8mo ago
Spending millions on tablets, chromebooks, promethium boards and otherwise does not improve learning. shocked
learingsci 8mo ago
The cost to produce many things in American is too high given the relative strength of the US dollar. If our corporations need educated workers, they can just import them, like we import everything else. Why would US workers be any different than cars or widgets? They aren’t. The labor market is globalized too. Everything is precisely as the economics dictate. If our businesses couldn’t so easily import workers, we’d see massive improvements in NAEP. We act as if things are how they were. It’s all very tiresome.
deleted 8mo ago
[deleted]
icegreentea2 8mo ago
You can go to the "nations report card" and play around with the NAEP score stats: https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/ltt/mathematics/scores-percentiles/?age=13 https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/ltt/mathematics/scores-per... For me, two things pop out in particular. Firstly, in math, if you look at how the percentiles break down, it seems clear that while there an overall drop in performance from 2020-2023, it also seems clear to that the top end of doing relatively ok. For example, at the 75th percentile, the we are basically flat from 2008 to 2020 (before dropping in 2023) - 2008: 305, 2012: 309, 2020: 307, 2023: 301 (net -4). This contrasts with the median which went from 2008: 283, 2012: 287, 2020: 282, 2023: 274 (net -9). This implies to me that whatever flaws are in the overall system (at least pre COVID), the top end was relatively durable. Secondly, if you go the "student group scores" section and click through all of the different sub-groupings, the only group that looks to have an overall flat score at all is "Private: Catholic". I think the combination of the upper end being pretty durable, as well as the higher scores in the only "self selecting" category in the dataset may support what a lot of people tend to grumble about - the distribution of domestic situations is not favorable.
- tzs 8mo ago
  The thing that popped out to me playing around with that is that when you look at most of these things from the late '70s through now, many show some modest growth or flatness through the '90s, then grew a little more up through the 2010s or so, and have pulled back a little in the last few years to roughly 2008ish levels. This is for both math and reading and for both 9 year olds and 13 year olds. Depending on what exactly you are looking at the places that it grew or was flat or declines change, but overall the big picture look gives me more "keep an eye on it" vibes than "we've got a crisis" vibes that some people seem to think are justified.
  - icegreentea2 8mo ago
    If we were spending the same effort and resources to stay flat, I'd agree with you. I think the "crisis" is that we've been spending more and more resources just to stay "flat".
tzs 8mo ago
Careful looking at their graphs. If you don't keep in mind that they are showing changes you could get a wrong impression. For example on the page they link to to get data from every state, https://edunomicslab.org/roi-over-time/ https://edunomicslab.org/roi-over-time/ , it shows the graphs for Massachusetts and Mississippi side by side. In Massachusetts 8th grade math is down about 17 points. In Mississippi math down about 2 points. (I'm using 2022 scores). That could give the impression that math scores are higher in Mississippi since the math line on the Massachusetts graph is way lower than the corresponding line on the Mississippi graph. But the actual scores those years were 284 for Massachusetts and 268 for Mississippi.
readthenotes1 8mo ago
This is not surprising. It has been well known for a while that the amount of money given to the school systems has very little to do with students learning. I think, in general, that the whole system is backwards and instead of giving money to school administrations to teach, we should be trying to figure out what are the obstacles to students learning.
fallingfrog 8mo ago
Have we looked at nutrition? Economic crises lead to sharp spikes in poor nutrition especially when social safety nets have been stripped back. A generation whose growth is stunted by malnutrition is a plausible outcome of "tough love" welfare reform. A lot of people either lost their jobs or had to quit to take care of their children during the crisis. And there was a much degraded safety net to catch them.
burnt-resistor 8mo ago
Hoover Institute propaganda. https://www.hoover.org/profiles/education-next https://www.hoover.org/profiles/education-next
snvzz 8mo ago
It should be well-known by now that throwing money at education doesn't solve a thing. How are they gonna fix education, if they cannot even grasp: If the method does not work, try a different method.
johnea 8mo ago
About a year ago there were a number of articles about how Alabama was greatly improving their public school math outcome with an elementary school teacher training program: https://www.npr.org/2025/03/17/nx-s1-5328723/alabama-math-learning-teaching-test-scores https://www.npr.org/2025/03/17/nx-s1-5328723/alabama-math-le... Was this misinformation? If not, I wonder why these results don't show in the nationwide aggregation?

75 points by grantpitt 8mo ago

gitbit-org 8mo ago

Where is the money going? Isn't the average teacher pay down?

readme 8mo ago
exactly had that extra spending gone to pay math teachers the results might be different
rngfnby 8mo ago
Administration. Large institutions in the USA are grossly mismanaged and/or corrupt. Normalize the amount of public money pupils cost and it easily dwarfs most elite private schools. Multiply by class size and an elementary school class can cost $500k+. The teacher is not making $100k.
JKCalhoun 8mo ago
Publishers?

amanaplanacanal 8mo ago

Why was the headline changed? The story isn't about Oregon.

confidantlake 8mo ago
Yup this needs an answer.
godelski 8mo ago
As a reminder to everyone, here's what the guidelines say[0] > Otherwise please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize. There are reasons to edit the title other than this quote, but this article is not one of such cases. The original title "Hard Lessons from the New NAEP Results" is meaningful enough. Changing it has made it clickbait. I'm also a little surprised that more people aren't talking about it and that it hasn't been changed. There's definitely a culture shift happening in HN... If you've never read the guidelines, now is a great time. Seriously, it isn't that long and captures why many of us come to HN over other sites. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- grantpitt 8mo ago
  Sorry, my mistake. Thanks for the reminder. I don't think I can change it after 2 hrs.
  - godelski 8mo ago
    I'm curious, why did you make this change? The article isn't about Oregon. Plus, the claim itself is pretty disingenuous since it is including covid data, vastly exaggerating the effect[0] [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46919890 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46919890
    - grantpitt 8mo ago
      I quoted from the middle of the article what I found interesting. I don't submit on here much and I just put that in the title field without thinking. I'm glad that comment provides proper context on this.

Nevermark 8mo ago

All the fiascos in education raise a simple question. Why are big changes not arrived at by first gaining experience with them in in some reduced scale, then spreading the improvements incrementally as they continue to be validated. And why isn't this experimentation being done all the time, not randomly but competitively/cooperatively between school districts and individual schools? Each making small changes toward getting better results and sharing what they have learned. With most cross adoption happening naturally. Creating and managing the context for the latter is what people with power should be doing. Not making top-down decisions devoid of the bottom-up wisdom and visible exemplars that big changes need to succeed.

actionfromafar 8mo ago
Yeah, maybe we should have given a control group of kids infinite doomscrolling before we gave it to all them.
servo_sausage 8mo ago
If you make a change in only one school, you end up with selection effects where interested parents move their children into (or away from) catchment areas based on vibes. Then you can't really measure outcomes, because the strongest predictor of student performance is parents interest and resources. You also run into issues with teaching skills and standards, you need a high level of planning and adherence to the supplied plan in order to measure outcomes; otherwise it's just vibes based on individual teachers.
- Nevermark 8mo ago
  Big studies have an important role. Especially for dramatically different approaches, such as the different approaches to teaching reading. The differences are so acute, that careful A/B, or A/B/Control studies are the best approach. But most improvements in any complex system happen iteratively, and benefit from clusters of subtle changes found to work well together. At some point enough experience is gained to characterize the change, and give others a chance to consider it. I suggested incremental adoption, and organic adoption, of successful changes, precisely because of this need for significant bottom up testing before spreading something widely. Success at one scale, and location, doesn't always translate directly to another context, or might not work in another context at all. > You also run into issues with teaching skills and standards, you need a high level of planning and adherence to the supplied plan in order to measure outcomes; otherwise it's just vibes based on individual teachers. You point out a very important concern. Good measurement doesn't make bottom-up improvement impossible, unnecessary, or any less important. The point of measurement is to make improvements easier to see, and not get in there way. This is what I was referring to when I said at the top, the job is to create a context where improvements can happen. One of the simplest ways to balance top-level and bottom-up concerns, is to communicate the actual top-level needs (not just current practices) clearly, then let front line educators propose changes to measurement practices, where they feel the current practice is holding them back. That gets both scales working together to enable improvements to happen, and to be seen. There is no (competent) conflict here, the opposite.

jeffbee 8mo ago

Maybe the Oregon people spent the money on art and music and sports and weren't trying to optimize some third-party academic's budget-to-test-scores efficiency metric.

9x39 8mo ago
Admins, support staff, generally focusing on "access" instead of quality. There's a belief that the bottom 10-20% is more important than the top 80% to bother spending on, which I think is reflected in the budgets. https://www.commonsenseinstituteus.org/oregon/research/education/spending-more-achieving-lessoregonseducation-challenge https://www.commonsenseinstituteus.org/oregon/research/educa...

donohoe 8mo ago

What could possible explain this drop over the last ~10 years? Unrelated: schools with effective phone bans are seeing improved grades and less absences.

deleted 8mo ago
[deleted]
JKCalhoun 8mo ago
Unrelated?
kjsingh 8mo ago
You said it!

MrCurryCasino 8mo ago

[flagged]

drivebyhooting 8mo ago

Maybe we should copy what China is doing? Their class sizes are much higher - 40 kids for 1 teacher. But there is a lot more discipline, the teachers teach only a few classes, spending most of their time on curriculum preparation, and the children have 3 hours of vigorous exercise everyday.

psyklic 8mo ago
It's very possibly moreso a cultural issue. COVID caused continuing low attendance, there is currently an anti-education political trend, and AI advancements allow students to be lazy. If parents and peers don't value education, the students won't either.
yorwba 8mo ago
Don't forget about the examination system grouping students by ability and filtering out the worst performers altogether. Of ≈17 million students who took the zhongkao and graduated junior high school after grade 9 in 2024, ≈10 million were admitted to a high school, ≈4 million to a vocational school and the remaining ≈3 million disappear from education statistics, presumably directly entering the workforce. http://www.moe.gov.cn/jyb_sjzl/sjzl_fztjgb/202506/t20250611_1193760.html http://www.moe.gov.cn/jyb_sjzl/sjzl_fztjgb/202506/t20250611_...
tstrimple 8mo ago
> But there is a lot more discipline I think that would solve a huge number of issues. Teachers and admins seem to have no ability to kick repeated problem students out. My wife works as a para professional sub at our local elementary school. Twice this week a special needs girl was having a meltdown in a hallway and they essentially had to "quarantine" it until she calmed down. Students and teachers had to take other hallways to get where they needed to go. These children have educational needs that public schools cannot provide, but the burden largely falls onto them as an incredibly expensive (to the tax payer) babysitting service. Get them and the slowest students out of the general pipeline. They have been clogging it up and holding everyone back far too long. And no. I don't have an adequate solution to handle the bottom X% of students who are beyond help from the general system. I just know the system can't function effectively with them in it. There are all sorts of other systemic issues I've seen through her experiences. But this is a major one which impacts all of the students. Classes cannot move at the pace of the slowest and / or most disruptive student. The slowest students need to be left behind for others to thrive. If they cannot reach the already low minimum standards, they cannot advance in grades. If they cannot behave to the low minimum expectations, their parents need to find other accommodations.

sandworm101 8mo ago

Has anyone looked at the teacher's math scores? I have read in the past about about problems with basic numeracy amongst educators being transmitted to students. >> (2008) Primary school teachers in England are often scared of basic numeracy and should be required to study English and maths at A-level, a report suggests. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/education/8162803.stm http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/education/8162803.stm >> This lack of confidence on the part of teachers can be transmitted to students and result in their own lack of mathematical confidence https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ743586.pdf https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ743586.pdf

boelboel 8mo ago
In elementary school and early high school I liked older teachers more than younger teachers (just on average, I had many great younger teachers as well). I think 40+ years ago teaching in an elementary school and certainly in a high school was seen as a 'dignified' profession, causing many intelligent people who could've worked for better pay in private industry to work there. Knew some families where all kids (and they had many) either became lawyers, engineers, doctors or teachers. Teacher was seen as an equal option. I have a feeling many of my greatest teachers wouldn't take the same path today, a lot more burdens and enough other 'intellectual' jobs to go for.
deleted 8mo ago
[deleted]
AngryData 8mo ago
My highschool calculus teacher bragged that she only had to take calculus 101 and 102 three times to pass. We definitely didn't learn calculus that year. Of course teacher options are limited when the pay is the same as a walmart cashier.

kitesay 8mo ago

Focusing solely on the school isn't going be the answer. Students spend more time not at school. That has an effect.

chasd00 8mo ago

From my experience raising kids in public schools, adding money to a bad school only makes it worse.

ekjhgkejhgk 8mo ago

Politics and ideologies aside, just trying to be rational.... Can someone better informed about these metrics (the NAEP specifically) comment: how exactly do we know that we're comparing the same thing each year? Is the NAEP based off answering the same questions every year? Because if it's just like "average exam result" - those can change a lot. And can in fact trend, meaning change in the same direction for several years (e.g. becoming harder, becoming easier)

rayiner 8mo ago
Not everyone takes the same test. So you can repeat some questions on some tests year over year, or have some experimental questions that aren’t graded one year but used for establish norms for when it’s graded in future years.

Spivak 8mo ago

This article is super weird because it's looking at an issue from orbit where the only things you can see are vague things like "funding" where the problem is on the ground and probably can't be solved by the levers available from orbit. The lesson of funding having arguably no effect on outcomes should either be that we genuinely don't know what improves outcomes or that we do but schools are lighting money on fire buying other things. It means the problem is unfortunately local and you have to actually go to the schools and see what the issue is. Based on what my former HS spent money on I figure we will eventually find some commonalities: * New computer labs, laptops, digital textbooks, learning software licenses, smart boards, and other and other expensive crap that is at best neutral from a learning perspective. * Pointless building improvements that don't service education but instead service the prestige and egos of the administrators of the schools. * Chronic long-term understaffing and light-speed "just get through it" lesson plans that makes teachers not give a shit, and powerless to do better even if they do. I think "just blame the administrators" is too easy a cop-out because I've yet to meet one who isn't also underpaid and dying of stress. Although maybe I just don't have access to the real higher ups.

wffurr 8mo ago
>> * New computer labs, laptops, digital textbooks, learning software licenses, smart boards, and other and other expensive crap that is at best neutral from a learning perspective. I think we should be actively removing these things from schools, but it's a tough fight as parents against an entire well-funded EdTech industry pushing these things with a firehose of VC money. >> * Pointless building improvements that don't service education but instead service the prestige and egos of the administrators of the schools. This makes me crazy. We have a very fancy, very large new school building my city which is LEED platinum certified. I can't possibly imagine that that certification level is cost effective. I'm sure we could have built a very good school with a healthy safe learning environment and environmentally conscious decisions for heating, cooling, power, etc. for significantly less if the city were willing to forego the press release headline. This is also a really hard problem that pits taxpayers against a well-funded industry full of lobbyists. Both of these can be traced back to the principal agent problem, which really is blaming the administrators, because they're making decisions and then don't have to deal with the consequences (actually integrating and using EdTech in a classroom, paying more taxes for the same or worse education, etc.).

scrubs 8mo ago

Good grief! The bush admin tried to getting better scores by standard testing ... as a scheme in some ways by-pass local control by trading improvement for cash or removing cash. Mixed results. There's whining about standard testing .. . There's whining without it too. But states brought that on themselves. I raised two boys one a plain-joe kid, one with special needs. The older, regular kid got into and out of university in four years. Seeing what I see now, and what I saw over those years: - pay teachers more with commensurate increase in accountability. (You can't have only one.) - focus on academics only. Too much resources are wasted in our American daydreaming that schools can be some kind of utopia superceding home, family. Regretably, if parents don't care, there's a tiny chance only the kid will change in school. Here i mean anything that detracts from language, math, science, arts, sports. Having different makes and models of kids at school? That's great; i like that. My kids have got to see our house isn't the only game in town. - maybe eliminate all federal forms of funding by sending less money to the fed redistributed back later. Control and accountability has to be less complex with fewer regs from fewer places. Education is operationally local in the US and yet somehow the fed and national unions are big players too. We can't be serving two masters. - withhold kids by class until they succeed. Kids must be held accountable too. If you can't deal with algebra I you are not doing algerbra II so you can suck at that too. - contribute to kid's self esteem and confidence right: you're not graduating in this class, and I (as a teacher) will help you figure out a way forward by tackling what's in front of you. That's real success. That's real learning. That's better for kids. - put principals and teachers top echelon. If they want/need admin staff, fine counter balanced by cost & success on accountability side. US schools like US medicine is phenomenal at having paper pushers suck up resources. Yah, I'm not a fan of this to put it politely.

lotsofpulp 8mo ago
> - pay teachers more with commensurate increase in accountability. (You can't have only one.) I would bet 90% of the problem is the attitude towards learning at home and among the peer group, who also get their attitudes from home. Doesn’t seem effective or fair to hold teachers accountable for that.
- scrubs 8mo ago

kbelder 8mo ago

Oregon is mentioned as an example of the general decline through the US. The article isn't really about Oregon specifically: Consider Oregon. Had it merely kept pace with inflation, it would have increased school spending by about 35 percent from 2013 to 2023. In actuality, it raised spending by 80 percent. Over the same period, math and reading performance tanked, with math posting a remarkable 16-point decline—the equivalent of 1.5 grade levels. Oregon is spending much more and achieving much less. I think that Oregon teacher salaries have gone up quite a bit more than the national average in the last 10 years, less so in the last couple. My youngest child is just starting high school at the moment, and for the last several years much of math education seems to have been farmed out to really crappy software and short video clips running on chromebooks. She'd really be suffering without parental intervention.

grantpitt 8mo ago
Yeah, the article links the source where every state can be viewed: https://edunomicslab.org/roi-over-time/ https://edunomicslab.org/roi-over-time/
wffurr 8mo ago
>> much of math education seems to have been farmed out to really crappy software and short video clips running on chromebooks Our local school committee is debating this currently. There was a book mentioned "Ditch That Textbook" about using EdTech to reimagine curriculums. I have a hard time imagining actual high quality math education not using a textbook, and I don't really see how crappy software (and I do not for a second doubt that most ed tech is crappy - almost all software is crappy really, it's a total tragedy and a separate discussion) can possibly do better. Personally I'd like to see fewer Chromebooks and iPads and such in classrooms and more textbooks and notebooks. I'm open to being convinced I'm just a curmudgeon, but it'll take real results in schools to do so.
- grebc 8mo ago
  Colour me a curmudgeon too but a screen doesn’t need to be in front of a student all hours of the day to learn.

josefritzishere 8mo ago

Not to make a broad generalization, but all spend is not equal. If schools redirect that spend into administrative salaries I would not expect to see any positive effect on scores.

mrguyorama 8mo ago

Title has been editorialized. In terms of the continuing "education depression" as discussed by this article, we still haven't gotten rid of "No child left behind". Of course kids are less educated than they used to be, you don't need to be educated to graduate. Maine specifically is an important example. There has been no real change in education policy in the state, yet there is still significant reduction in outcomes. The much maligned unscientific way of teaching reading was adopted in Caribou Maine far far far earlier than educational outcomes started dropping. The neighboring town did not adopt that way of teaching reading. They did not see different outcomes. IMO, the outcomes clearly follow the generation of kids growing up in a school system where you cannot be held back for not doing the work. The entire time education outcomes have been going down, state highschool graduation rates have been going up. This is not because teachers like giving good grades to kids who don't learn things. "No child left behind" is a disaster. I know many people in the state who are looking to become teachers. Everybody always reminds them how terrible an idea that is for them in particular. Schools cannot hire people, because even with "Higher" salaries, the salaries are still bad. They have mostly been adjusted for inflation, so it seems like they have gone up a lot, but they have been adjusted from a point when they were already terrible and not a good salary. Meanwhile, my mother is a 40 year teacher here. The rich neighborhood school she switched to pays her well, but provides zero institutional support. They did not allow her to purchase anything. No textbooks, no test generators, no enrichment videos, nothing. They don't support her at all. She's one of the best educators I've ever known and every student she has taught agrees. She's so effective at being an educator that students who come from shitty families and cause disruption in other classes choose to spend time in her classes, and choose to spend time in her study hall to do their homework and become better students. This is true for thousands and thousands of students who went through her classes. She is the sole reason some northern maine kids know how to do math. She's a french teacher.

prewett 8mo ago
Do you have any idea what it is that makes her so effective, especially with kid who otherwise wouldn't care?
- 8mo ago

beastman82 8mo ago

Reminder that correlation!= causation

ajross 8mo ago

OMG. It's the !?%!@# pandemic. All education statistics measuring across 2020 are horrifyingly polluted. Kids who stayed at home for a year are behind relative to the same cohorts before or since, AND YET WE KEEP FLOGGING THESE NUMBERS as if they're signal and not noise. I've seen this on the front page of HN like three times now.

amanaplanacanal 8mo ago
The article says that scores have been sinking since 2013, many years before the pandemic.
- wedog6 8mo ago
  It says this but the numbers in the article actually show flatlining after 2013 with a huge drop off after 2020. 2022 8th grader cohort missed much of 6th and 7th grade. 2024 cohort missed 4th and 5th grade. These results are extremely in line with that effect, despite what people want to say about social media, teacher pay, etc.
  - nosuchthing 8mo ago
    Most studies are showing children with neurological damage from continued exposure to covid outbreaks in schools multiple times a year. Lockdowns did not last more than a few months for the vast majority of school districts in the US.
    - 7e 8mo ago
      Three-quarters of urban school districts were operating fully remote until late 2020. That may skew the results.
      - nosuchthing 8mo ago
        New York City had hybrid in-person and remote as an option, so only about 4 months were remote for most students. Seems like a perfect A/B test case to test the theory that a remote learning was actually associated with cognitive decline 5 years later. Meanwhile every year since 2020 there have been studies published from nearly every country on the neurological and cognitive damage from mild covid cases. Seems to be more of a cognitive dissonance issue, that people don't want to confront the elephant in the room. 100 years ago when TB and Polio were taken more seriously than today, the common solution was fresh air. Schools today are even more sealed off to the point where a simple lack of oxygen starts to noticeably reduce cognitive ability after a few minutes.

throwaway85825 8mo ago

Almost no education research questions the quality of the students ability to learn. Students with an ability to learn will do so regardless of the resources expended, the ones that don't won't. Trillions wasted over the decades due to a preference to ignore reality.

rfw300 8mo ago
Well if only we had such thoughtful minds in the education space. How did no one ever think of "why don't we just give up on the children"?
- lurking_swe 8mo ago
  you’re measuring the wrong thing. Spending more on education if a child’s home life is garbage is a waste of time. That’s controversial because it doesn’t sound nice, but it’s a fact. The real problem is not at school and school can only help so much. At a broad policy level, government should focus its effort in other areas of basic NEEDS first. Stable jobs for parents, housing and food needs met, etc. Being a successful student when your families basic needs are not met is an uphill battle.
- 9x39 8mo ago
  It's just that politics outweighs systems thinking. Selling a narrative that money can fix, getting funds, and then allocating funds is comically easy and less risky than trying to fix something broken. You're capturing sentiment into political momentum, when you're the one who allocates money you are very, very popular and interesting and can make many things happen. You can do all of this and move on independently of any results in the problem statements that may or may not have been written to begin with. Contrast that with telling people hard truths like deified educators aren't effectual, or that per-capita pupil spending doesn't correlate with outcomes, or how parents and home culture are stronger effects than whether you offer rich IEPs or adopted Common Core - you can be tarred and feathered for rocking the boat before you get to make any change. It's not that anyone thinks we should give up on the children, it's that we should probably give up on direct democracy in some areas, and at best, these spending splurges are incompetence and at worst, outright wealth transfers to the PMC and NGOs or fraud.

naizarak 8mo ago

The reasons are obvious but acknowledging them is taboo. It's much easier and politically convenient to blame everything on funding, despite the fact that some school districts have the budget of a small country.

elzbardico 8mo ago

[flagged]

teachrdan 8mo ago
News flash: Massachusetts and Wisconsin came in tied at #1 for student performance, and teacher union density is about 100% for both states.
- guywithahat 8mo ago
  Wisconsin has no collective bargaining for teachers and the unions can't require dues
  - teachrdan 8mo ago
    I stand corrected. Looks like "194 unions (56.2%) hitting the 51% threshold in 2021" after cursory searching. Having said that, it still belies the notion that teacher's unions are single handedly responsible for poor student test results.
    - guywithahat 8mo ago
      I mean the most important factor is the students and their backgrounds. Lots of places will never have good schools or will always have high ranking schools due to the kids attending just being smarter or less so. That said, the research is quite clear that unions hurt student performance, and if your only goal is improving student performance non-union charter schools seem to be the best option. By giving parents as much choice as possible, parents tend to pick better schools, and poorly run schools are force to lay off staff or go out of business, so better run schools can replace them.
- 9x39 8mo ago
  Teachers are only one factor (students themselves are the other), and neither MA nor WI are winning the cost disease war - both states have slid with the rest in the last decade since 2013. We would need to compare private vs public schools but those could easily be more about the students than the teachers.

maerF0x0 8mo ago

Some thoughts: - Apathy is rampant in most workforces, presumably also teachers. - In unionized workplaces where greater performance != greater pay, and greater pay is guaranteed regardless... No surprise there wasn't better outcomes. - Not sure if this site has such a bent, but to me if the funding was going to rise 80% (twice as fast as inflation), it would have been nice to also see what market forces could have done via a voucher system. Edit: It will be really interesting to compare oregon public outcomes to something like this school in Austin https://nypost.com/2026/01/30/business/new-65k-private-school-uses-ai-to-teach-students-in-just-two-hours-a-day-in-silicon-valley-bid-to-shake-up-us-education/ https://nypost.com/2026/01/30/business/new-65k-private-schoo...

strawhatguy 8mo ago

Spending is the issue. That money is spent on something, and it isn't (all) teaching either. The chart in the link below shows employee vs students headcounts over 6 years. Even though student rolls went down almost all employment in the school system went up. Do we really need a +22% increase in Student Support Services when there are fewer students? Even teachers (only?) went up by 2.8% according to this (and again, students went down)? And why would librarians of all positions seem to be the ones whose positions were cut? Basically, 'education' is nothing more than a jobs program for the politically connected, as clearly the focus is not on kids. And education is safe, because it's hard to argue against it, even if you're not talking about actual teachers. Honestly I would expect if funding were cut, and particularly the admin, support, 'paraprofessional', and other non-teaching staff were fired, you'd find those test scores approach the pre-pandemic levels. Will that happen? Of course not. These are politically connected people after all. We should all be angry. https://x.com/johnfaig/status/2019108852365656477?s=20 https://x.com/johnfaig/status/2019108852365656477?s=20

swolios 8mo ago

Spending millions on tablets, chromebooks, promethium boards and otherwise does not improve learning. shocked

learingsci 8mo ago

The cost to produce many things in American is too high given the relative strength of the US dollar. If our corporations need educated workers, they can just import them, like we import everything else. Why would US workers be any different than cars or widgets? They aren’t. The labor market is globalized too. Everything is precisely as the economics dictate. If our businesses couldn’t so easily import workers, we’d see massive improvements in NAEP. We act as if things are how they were. It’s all very tiresome.

deleted 8mo ago

[deleted]

icegreentea2 8mo ago

You can go to the "nations report card" and play around with the NAEP score stats: https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/ltt/mathematics/scores-percentiles/?age=13 https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/ltt/mathematics/scores-per... For me, two things pop out in particular. Firstly, in math, if you look at how the percentiles break down, it seems clear that while there an overall drop in performance from 2020-2023, it also seems clear to that the top end of doing relatively ok. For example, at the 75th percentile, the we are basically flat from 2008 to 2020 (before dropping in 2023) - 2008: 305, 2012: 309, 2020: 307, 2023: 301 (net -4). This contrasts with the median which went from 2008: 283, 2012: 287, 2020: 282, 2023: 274 (net -9). This implies to me that whatever flaws are in the overall system (at least pre COVID), the top end was relatively durable. Secondly, if you go the "student group scores" section and click through all of the different sub-groupings, the only group that looks to have an overall flat score at all is "Private: Catholic". I think the combination of the upper end being pretty durable, as well as the higher scores in the only "self selecting" category in the dataset may support what a lot of people tend to grumble about - the distribution of domestic situations is not favorable.

tzs 8mo ago
The thing that popped out to me playing around with that is that when you look at most of these things from the late '70s through now, many show some modest growth or flatness through the '90s, then grew a little more up through the 2010s or so, and have pulled back a little in the last few years to roughly 2008ish levels. This is for both math and reading and for both 9 year olds and 13 year olds. Depending on what exactly you are looking at the places that it grew or was flat or declines change, but overall the big picture look gives me more "keep an eye on it" vibes than "we've got a crisis" vibes that some people seem to think are justified.
- icegreentea2 8mo ago
  If we were spending the same effort and resources to stay flat, I'd agree with you. I think the "crisis" is that we've been spending more and more resources just to stay "flat".

tzs 8mo ago

Careful looking at their graphs. If you don't keep in mind that they are showing changes you could get a wrong impression. For example on the page they link to to get data from every state, https://edunomicslab.org/roi-over-time/ https://edunomicslab.org/roi-over-time/ , it shows the graphs for Massachusetts and Mississippi side by side. In Massachusetts 8th grade math is down about 17 points. In Mississippi math down about 2 points. (I'm using 2022 scores). That could give the impression that math scores are higher in Mississippi since the math line on the Massachusetts graph is way lower than the corresponding line on the Mississippi graph. But the actual scores those years were 284 for Massachusetts and 268 for Mississippi.

readthenotes1 8mo ago

This is not surprising. It has been well known for a while that the amount of money given to the school systems has very little to do with students learning. I think, in general, that the whole system is backwards and instead of giving money to school administrations to teach, we should be trying to figure out what are the obstacles to students learning.

fallingfrog 8mo ago

Have we looked at nutrition? Economic crises lead to sharp spikes in poor nutrition especially when social safety nets have been stripped back. A generation whose growth is stunted by malnutrition is a plausible outcome of "tough love" welfare reform. A lot of people either lost their jobs or had to quit to take care of their children during the crisis. And there was a much degraded safety net to catch them.

burnt-resistor 8mo ago

Hoover Institute propaganda. https://www.hoover.org/profiles/education-next https://www.hoover.org/profiles/education-next

snvzz 8mo ago

It should be well-known by now that throwing money at education doesn't solve a thing. How are they gonna fix education, if they cannot even grasp: If the method does not work, try a different method.

johnea 8mo ago

About a year ago there were a number of articles about how Alabama was greatly improving their public school math outcome with an elementary school teacher training program: https://www.npr.org/2025/03/17/nx-s1-5328723/alabama-math-learning-teaching-test-scores https://www.npr.org/2025/03/17/nx-s1-5328723/alabama-math-le... Was this misinformation? If not, I wonder why these results don't show in the nationwide aggregation?