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65% of Public School 8th Graders Not Proficient in Reading; 67% Not Proficient in Math

Renae said:
Wait, you're blaming this on privatization? Wow, what the hell. I've heard it all.
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Depends on what you mean by blame. It's certainly not all due to privatization, but that's definitely had an effect. My ex-wife taught English and Art Education (she was intellectually flexible--MA in English with teaching cert and BA in art) at the middle school level, and private companies did provide funding to the school in exchange for being able to put up advertising and having some input into the curriculum, which emphasized some weird stuff. Example: the math curriculum (according to her conversations with the math teachers) went from an emphasis on getting students to understand what they were doing through applications like word problems, graphing equations, and so on, to just tons and tons of calculation--they actually reduced the pre-algebra, geometry, and algebra curriculum to focus on the sort of stuff that, when I went to school, we did in the third grade--fractions and decimals, averages, etc. But the same stuff, over and over and over and over and over and over. They also started "technology training," but she brought me home a syllabus, and it looked like nothing I recognized as actually doing anything that would help these students. They were learning bookkeeping software, mainly. No microsoft office stuff. Nothing about how to put together a powerpoint presentation. No adobe products, and nothing remotely about coding. And again, it was just the same exercises over and over and over and over. At the time it didn't make any damn sense to me. It makes perfect sense to me now, but it's definitely not good.

Dell had an assembly plant in the area and they're the ones that donated the money to fund those technology classes. They had representatives at all the school board meetings from then on--and they weren't the only corporate reps there. I went to a couple of those meetings, and the board just ate up whatever those reps told them. I did not personally witness them ever actually decide to de-fund English, History, creative writing, or the like. But that definitely happened. This started a couple years before no child left behind, but there was already agitation for privatization, reform of education, etc. in the national and state-level conversations at that time. To be clear, this was not only privatization at work, but that's a part of it. Employers want employees who are trained to keep their heads down, put up with boring tasks to be performed over long hours, and who don't think about how their lives could be better. That means people who have been trained to do repetitive tasks by rote without necessarily understanding what they're doing, with as little education in the humanities as possible.

Now, I think privatization is a cause of the erosion of education, but it's also a symptom of something deeper in recent cultural developments in our country, and to some extent around the world, which is why I say privatization is only partly to blame. What I think is really the problem is arrogance--it's no longer the case that we feel a responsibility to listen to those with whom we disagree and give them a fair, open-minded, and charitable hearing. That arrogance manifests itself differently among conservatives and liberals, but both have it in spades.
 
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All one needs to do is take a tour of the public school system in America to understand the problems in the American public school system....

BBC? National Geographic? Anybody?
 
ashurbanipal said:
Well, less money certainly hasn’t been working...

In my job as a professor, I see this daily. I pulled out some of my student papers from ten years ago and they’re just better than the ones being turned in over the last few years. There’s a lot that’s gone wrong, but one of the things that’s gone wrong is that teachers get the sole blame when students fail. So teachers have wised up, and they just pass students.

More insidiously, we no longer value or teach the humanities to anything like the level we used to. This is partly a result of the privatization movement that began under Reagan. Employers don’t want creative employees, for the most part. They want employees who will work boring jobs for long hours without daring to imagine that things could be different.

I could go on, but I think these are the two biggest problems. And they’re a damn disaster, and there’s nothing on the horizon to suggest things will get any better.
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As a high school teacher we are getting more and more kids that lack the ability to write basic paragraphs, to research and to compare and contrast, among a few. Like you said... ten years ago students just did better. Twenty years ago even more so...
 
Percentage of high school graduates who completed selected mathematics and science courses in high school: 1990 and 2009




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Look at the chart above. It's no wonder that our political leaders and various interest groups are able to convince folks of just about anything.


  • Statistics -- 11% even finish the damn class, and it's the easiest class that "nobody" takes. If there any one math class that's more practically useful than all the others, there's a very strong case for it being statistics. Every poll, any empirical study, tons of rhetoric, financial investment analysis, even just playing the lottery or gambling in a casino...all of that is best comprehended by those who have mastered statistics. The whole reason data mining and the data you provide to your social media site (Twitter, Facebook, etc.) is of value is because of statistics. And the thing is that with stats, the math itself isn't hard at all, and when one gets to the part of stats where the math gets cumbersome, nobody expect one to do it manually.
    • It's no wonder people think all sorts of things about the information presented in polls.
    • You know damn well if ~90% of students didn't take statistics, they damn sure haven't studied quantitative methods. It's no wonder people confuse the natures and implications of correlation and causality.


  • Calculus -- 16% finish the class.
 
CletusWilbury said:
I would say were finally getting some accurate test scores. Think back to your high school class, what percentage would you consider proficient?
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Uhm, that's early 90's hoss, I'd imagine better than that.
 
Bodhisattva said:
As a high school teacher we are getting more and more kids that lack the ability to write basic paragraphs, to research and to compare and contrast, among a few. Like you said... ten years ago students just did better. Twenty years ago even more so...
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Why am I not surprised that you say that? When there are teachers who don't properly compose basic sentences, it's no surprise that increasingly more students cannot compose basic paragraphs. Indeed, in my day, my math and science teachers were every bit as adept with composition and literature as were English and history teachers and English and history teachers were competent teaching math or science. They had to be because:
  • As a practical matter, the school school was small and isolated enough that when a teacher was sick or out for some reason, a different teacher had to sub for them. Sure, they'd try to have a "related subject" teacher sub as much as possible, but that didn't work for every section of a class, so the physics teacher would cover, say, calculus, but the history teacher might sub for geometry or algebra II.
  • They (the school's administrators and faculty) understood that a student develops kinship with whatever teacher they do and thus goes to that teacher for help. If one is the teacher a child solicits for help, it's incumbent on one to be able to do so and do so.
I could be mistaken, but I think pedagogical culture in many schools has changed dramatically from what it once. One way I think it's different is with regard to the sense of ownership teachers (more as professionals than as individuals) have. I might describe it as the practice of teaching approached as one might standardized exam taking and completing forms. I suspect that's a matter of how teachers are evaluated, but I don't know for sure. My only "traditional" teaching experience was as graduate teaching assistant and my teaching skills weren't scrutinized so long as my students performed, on average, as well as those of other GAs teaching similar (i.e., non-remedial) courses, though I did have to defend any midterm and final failing grades I assigned.

Texting, tweeting, Facebooking, Instagramming, etc., even discussion forums...where are people, especially youngsters, actually called to express themselves such that parsimony is less prized than completeness? No place where one's not paid to do so. Part of why one takes 12 years of English is so that afterwards, one can coherently express oneself. No one needs 12 years of English instruction to tweet, text or click on "like."

Notwithstanding the above, the problem itself isn't new. To wit, look at the letter Trump wrote to KJU. Written to anyone other than the head of an adversarial state, I'd have no issue with it, but it was addressed to the head of one of the U.S. most long-running and ardent adversaries. It's the sort of document/situation wherein no room for error or uncertainty exists. Who dropped the ball, as it were? I don't know. I just know it was dropped.

Sure as I have the perceptions I've above described, I have too seen data that militate for optimism and pride.

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I haven't examined the data closely enough that I can reconcile the drop in proficiency in math and English with the increase in average GPAs.
  • Are students avoiding more challenging course?
  • Are students at the top skewing the average higher?
  • Are teachers/schools overall teaching to a lower bar?
I don't know, but I suspect there's something, maybe several things, rotten in Denmark, as it were. College admissions professionals probably know what it is, but right now, I don't. I think something's "fishy" only because of some anecdotal info I came by:
  • Average matriculating freshman GPA (values obtained at a website called PrepScholar):
    • UCLA: 4.31
    • UVA: 4.23
    • Princeton: 3.9
    • Dartmouth: 4.06
    • University of Maryland College Park: 4.22
    • Williams: 4.04
    • MIT: 4.13

CletusWilbury said:
I would say were finally getting some accurate test scores. Think back to your high school class, what percentage would you consider proficient?
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Do you mean "what percentage of one's classmates were proficient in 'whatever?'" Or do you mean when one was in high school, how proficient was one with "whatever?" Perhaps the context I'm requesting is in the article from the OP?
 
Xelor said:
Why am I not surprised that you say that? When there are teachers who don't properly compose basic sentences, it's no surprise that increasingly more students cannot compose basic paragraphs. Indeed, in my day, my math and science teachers were every bit as adept with composition and literature as were English and history teachers and English and history teachers were competent teaching math or science. They had to be because:
...
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and they didn't have education majors.
...
  • ​

    I haven't examined the data closely enough that I can reconcile the drop in proficiency in math and English with the increase in average GPAs.
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  • A big reason for that is schools handing out grades of 5.

    ...
    Do you mean "what percentage of one's classmates were proficient in 'whatever?'" Or do you mean when one was in high school, how proficient was one with "whatever?" Perhaps the context I'm requesting is in the article from the OP?
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    The first.
 
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CletusWilbury;1068571064A big reason for that is schools handing grades of 5.[/QUOTE said:
??? I presume you're referring to the practice of weighting honors and AP classes so they push a student's GPA above 4.0?

If so, while I'm sure plenty of schools weight classes, to get a 5.0, there'd have to be enough students attending them and earing 5.0 GPAs for that to affect the national average of high school graduates' GPAs as measured at graduation. Getting higher than 4.0 is not common but it happens plenty (I finished above 4.0; so did all four of my kids), but getting a 5.0 is all but impossible save for in very rarefied subset of high schools.
  • The school applies enough weighting to enough classes offset unweighted classes in which one also earns the top grade (A or A+, depending on how the school assigns grades). For instance, since there's no AP PE class, an in PE is worth 4.0 in that class. Even if every other class one took is weighted to 5.0, one would still would not have a 5.0 GPA. Of course, plenty of high school classes are neither weighted nor weighted enough (weighted to more than 5.0) to make possible earning a 5.0 overall.
  • The school offers non-weighted classes as pass-fail classes and those non-weighted classes are allowed to be taken pass-fail (p/f). There again, it's possible that some classes are offered p/f, but required classes are not going to be offered that way and there's no such thing as AP algebra, or AP version of the first class in the foreign language sequence, or AP 9th grade history, or whatever other classes constitute the first classes one takes in any given progression that culminates in an AP course.
Are the kids who're taking honors and AP classes pushing up the national average? I don't know, but it's plausible they are; however, if they are, it stands to reason that there are materially more high performers taking those classes these days than there were in the 1990s, which, frankly, strikes me as a good thing. If, on the other hand, there aren't more kids these days taking those tougher classes, then the increase in the national average GPA is due to something else. Which it is, as I noted earlier, I don't know.


Note:
The terminology I've used above -- honors, AP, etc. -- reflects the schools I know well. Those schools offer regular, honors and AP versions of certain classes. AP will add a whole grade point whereas honors adds half a grade point.
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CletusWilbury said:
I would say were finally getting some accurate test scores. Think back to your high school class, what percentage would you consider proficient?
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I can't speak for the other member, but speaking for my own high school class, the answer is "everyone" was proficient in math up to calculus.

My school was one in which grades were posted on a bulletin board, so everyone knew everyone else's grades. Hell, the teachers handed back graded quizzes announcing each person's grade as they returned the quiz/test to you. We'd all get an occasional poor (less than an B) grade on something -- a quiz or graded homework assignment, sometimes a test or paper -- but nobody earned less than a B as a final grade in a class. Most people got either A-minuses or B-pluses (without hard data, I can't say which was more prevalent; it was a whole lot of both), after that, it was standard Bs, standard As, and about five or fewer kids would earn A-pluses, no easy task given that we were graded on the seven-point scale.

If you want to equate "proficiency" with what I call "mastery," that'd correspond to one's earning at least an A-minus and that amounted to about 35% of the class/school. (The one exception would be first formers and the occasional transfer student who needed a term or so to find their groove, as it were.) If you equate "proficiency to earning an A on a ten-point scale, that's something approaching 80% of the school because, for us, 90-92 was a B+. Then there's the matter that for math, almost everyone took at least one honors math class at some point in the process, be it prior to taking calculus or calculus itself because there was no way to get to calculus if one didn't take an accelerated class at some point.

(No, we didn't have to take calc. to graduate, but we knew too that without it, we'd be behind our peers. That mattered to most of us, but there were one to five guys in each grade who were destined to take over their family's business regardless of how well they did in high school and college so long as they graduated. Two in my grade didn't pressure themselves to take honors/AP math and didn't take calculus.)



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Xelor said:
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I can't speak for the other member, but speaking for my own high school class, the answer is "everyone" was proficient in math up to calculus.
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Thanks for the thoughtful reply.

On the part I quoted there, amazing. Do you mean everyone in your grade class at the whole school?
 
CletusWilbury said:
Thanks for the thoughtful reply.

On the part I quoted there, amazing. Do you mean everyone in your grade class at the whole school?
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I expressly mean everyone in my grade -- for instance, the whole of the form of which I was a member; the whole 8th grade class when I was an eighth grader, the whole 9th grade class when I was a 9th grader, etc. -- because I didn't look at the marks posted for exams and classes other than the ones I took. That said, I have no reason, beyond the exceptions I described, to think things differed in the other grades for I have no reason to think scholastic competence varied materially by grade/year.
 
Xelor said:
I expressly mean everyone in my grade -- for instance, the whole of the form of which I was a member; the whole 8th grade class when I was an eighth grader, the whole 9th grade class when I was a 9th grader, etc. -- because I didn't look at the marks posted for exams and classes other than the ones I took. That said, I have no reason, beyond the exceptions I described, to think things differed in the other grades for I have no reason to think scholastic competence varied materially by grade/year.
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That must have been an amazing school.

At my high school there were basically three tracks, I was in the middle track.
Didn't get anywhere near Calculus in high school. At our school in So Cal (Simi Valley) people who got to that level had to go to Cal State Northridge to take the class.

These days many schools, and students get to that level much earlier.
 
CletusWilbury said:
That must have been an amazing school.

At my high school there were basically three tracks, I was in the middle track.
Didn't get anywhere near Calculus in high school. At our school in So Cal (Simi Valley) people who got to that level had to go to Cal State Northridge to take the class.

These days many schools, and students get to that level much earlier.
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It is a great school, but it's not alone.

Yes, kids these days do take classes that strike me as far more narrow in topical scope than what a high schooler needs to take. Then again, in my day, the offerings were far more basic. For instance, we'd have read something by a feminist author, but we would not have had a class covering only feminist authors' works. I don't mind that schools offer such things; I just think it's very "collegiate" that they do.

My school, your school, some other school....the notion that there are students in the 8th grade who are not "proficient" (by the guidelines in the rubric article) in math or reading is just appalling. From what I read in the article, "proficient" is defined as:
Math​


  • [*=1]"Eighth-graders performing at the Proficient level should…understand the connections between fractions, percents, decimals, and other mathematical topics such as algebra and functions. Students at this level are expected to have a thorough understanding of Basic level arithmetic operations -- an understanding sufficient for problem solving in practical situations."
Reading/English
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  • [*=1]"When it comes to reading, eighth-grade 'students performing at the Proficient level should be able to provide relevant information and summarize main ideas and themes. They should be able to make and support inferences about a text, connect parts of a text, and analyze text features. Students performing at this level should also be able to fully substantiate judgments about content and presentation of content.'"
​
Now just from my experiences observing how some people on DB remark on various thread rubrics that people absolutely do graduate without being "proficient" at the above described reading skills. I can't tell you how often I read an OP, happen across a "response or three" and ask myself "what has that to do with 'the price of tea in China?'" I even asked one person if s/he is still in high school, fully expecting him/her to simply say "yes" because that'd have been a very natural and understandable reason for the nature of the member's remarks. [1]

At the end of the day, though, what makes a school (and teachers and parents) great is its ability to inspire or cajole kids into just doing the work of studying, which, really, is where/when the vast majority of actual learning happens. I think that because I know damn well that I and my classmates, with one or two exceptions, weren't (and aren't) especially brilliant/gifted; we just worked at it. Thinking back to high school, we all spent from about seven p.m. to 10 or 11 p.m. on weekdays studying, because there wasn't much else to do, and some 6-12 hours doing so over the course of the weekend. And through all that work, we still managed to fit in sports, and clubs, weekend mischief and planning the upcoming week's mischief, and the rest of what kids typically do.





Note:

  1. If you've got kids, you know the difference between the expressed thoughts of a child/teen and those of a mature adult. The problem on the web is that it's not clear whether one is at times talking to minors or adults with the minds of minors, which is a "thing" that I'm beginning to discover is a state of being that may exist in greater abundance than I'd have a year ago thought possible.
 
Xelor said:
It is a great school, but it's not alone.

Yes, kids these days do take classes that strike me as far more narrow in topical scope than what a high schooler needs to take. Then again, in my day, the offerings were far more basic. For instance, we'd have read something by a feminist author, but we would not have had a class covering only feminist authors' works. I don't mind that schools offer such things; I just think it's very "collegiate" that they do.

My school, your school, some other school....the notion that there are students in the 8th grade who are not "proficient" (by the guidelines in the rubric article) in math or reading is just appalling. From what I read in the article, "proficient" is defined as:
Math​


  • [*=1]"Eighth-graders performing at the Proficient level should…understand the connections between fractions, percents, decimals, and other mathematical topics such as algebra and functions. Students at this level are expected to have a thorough understanding of Basic level arithmetic operations -- an understanding sufficient for problem solving in practical situations."
Reading/English
​


  • [*=1]"When it comes to reading, eighth-grade 'students performing at the Proficient level should be able to provide relevant information and summarize main ideas and themes. They should be able to make and support inferences about a text, connect parts of a text, and analyze text features. Students performing at this level should also be able to fully substantiate judgments about content and presentation of content.'"
​
Now just from my experiences observing how some people on DB remark on various thread rubrics that people absolutely do graduate without being "proficient" at the above described reading skills. I can't tell you how often I read an OP, happen across a "response or three" and ask myself "what has that to do with 'the price of tea in China?'" I even asked one person if s/he is still in high school, fully expecting him/her to simply say "yes" because that'd have been a very natural and understandable reason for the nature of the member's remarks. [1]

At the end of the day, though, what makes a school (and teachers and parents) great is its ability to inspire or cajole kids into just doing the work of studying, which, really, is where/when the vast majority of actual learning happens. I think that because I know damn well that I and my classmates, with one or two exceptions, weren't (and aren't) especially brilliant/gifted; we just worked at it. Thinking back to high school, we all spent from about seven p.m. to 10 or 11 p.m. on weekdays studying, because there wasn't much else to do, and some 6-12 hours doing so over the course of the weekend. And through all that work, we still managed to fit in sports, and clubs, weekend mischief and planning the upcoming week's mischief, and the rest of what kids typically do.





Note:

  1. If you've got kids, you know the difference between the expressed thoughts of a child/teen and those of a mature adult. The problem on the web is that it's not clear whether one is at times talking to minors or adults with the minds of minors, which is a "thing" that I'm beginning to discover is a state of being that may exist in greater abundance than I'd have a year ago thought possible.
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I had the experience of substitute teaching math. Many seniors in high school don't meet those 8th grade requirements.
 
CletusWilbury said:
I had the experience of substitute teaching math. Many seniors in high school don't meet those 8th grade requirements.
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I'll take your word for that; however, doing so bids me to ask whether those seniors receive diplomas. If they do, that is every bit as much as travesty as is their having made to their senior year without mastering eighth grade math. They're different kinds of travesty....To my mind, both disasters need correcting. [1] Sadly, or at least by my estimation, the people proposing solutions for the country's/school system's and students' woes seek and pursue discrete solutions drawn from either end of the spectrum of possible solutions.

Given that we're talking about effecting change in human behaviors and resulting outcomes, I find it hard to believe that the solution(s) will be found at the margins. And insofar as we're talking high school education in basic topics like math and reading, there's no way in hell that the problem is one that money will solve, particularly in math. AFter all, what resources did Newton/Leibniz use to invent calculus? Far fewer and far less varied resources than any modern child has deployed in the effort to teach him/her far simler content.

I know it's not the only thing needed, but one thing I am convinced kids these days need to do to advance their learning ability is to get the hell out of the house and play with other kids, dig in the dirt, or make a fort in the woods, etc., experience the real world rather than the one on their phone/computer screens. I think computing devices are wonderful tools, but in a manner of speaking, kids seem to "live in their computers" rather than in the real world, the analog world. One can always use a pc do figure out the math, but the computer can't figure out what math one needs doing.





Note:
  1. If for no other reason, kids need to be good at math so they can advance to the point where they discover that math and thinking about it can be entertaining. I don't know about you, but the brief chuckles were just the release my brain needed after taking thirty minutes to read and make sure I understood what was being explained on a page in a math text. To get a sense of mathematician's humor, consider these paragraphs from a linear algebra text.
    1. We usually take x[SUB]1[/SUB], . . . , x[SUB]n[/SUB] to be unequal to each other because in a sum with repeats we can rearrange to make the elements unique, as with 2x + 3y + 4x = 6x + 3y. We sometimes include terms with a zero coefficient, as in x − 2y + 0z, and at other times omit them, depending on what is convenient.
    2. Each of the three operations has a restriction. Multiplying a row by 0 is not allowed because, obviously, that can change the solution set. Similarly, adding a multiple of a row to itself is not allowed because adding −1 times the row to itself has the effect of multiplying the row by 0. And we disallow swapping a row with itself. Besides, it’s pointless.
 
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