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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
A good education taught her how to teach. She has a 4 year degree, then some sort of 1-2 year program of being essentially an apprentice, and then you must take several college classes every few years to demonstrate your continued learning, and oddly IMO, the same school that was adopting weird and unproven teaching methods around reading was giving their teachers fairly good yearly workshops about how to teach.
She has a genuine-ness that is palpable, something that I've also inherited. My girlfriend describes it as "You have golden retriever energy" and it gets people engaged with you. She's a very fun teacher.
She treats kids like people, yet the way the interactions go and the way she gets to kids ensures that they still generally respect her. She also used to have an administration that recognized her talent and value, and would stand behind her when a kid was a serious problem. She has helped "bad" kids do better, and helped bullied kids, and has helped needy kids, and this gives her a sort of legendary status. Everyone knows and loves Madame.
She was well experienced dealing with stupid shitheads because she grew up next to my dad's family (lol small towns) and raised three kids that were pains in her ass in diverse ways.
She works her absolute ass off. She habitually showed up to work ten minutes late (ADHD runs in our family quite bad), but the admin ignores that when she is teaching every student in the school and grading assignments until 8pm most nights, and building the curriculum for all the other teachers. I once stayed up with her until early in the morning grading a writing project she had given. Hundreds of students, every year, and she would always know their name and lives and all about them even though she's bad at remembering names otherwise. She was willing to teach kids how grammar worked and how to diagram sentences when they came into her class and didn't know. She was also able because of her education.
She comes from a family tradition that treated education as a total good, something everyone should seek out as much as possible, and something that would lift you up, along with your family, despite ostensibly being a very rural lineage. We have the journal of a woman in our ancestry 200 years back talking about how she learned to read and write because that's just how great education was in general. We aren't nobility or anything that would traditionally do that kind of thing.
A crazy mix of genetics: We are all super neurodivergent and probably super inbred and the latest generation is experiencing crazy illnesses and autoimmune disorders, but my mom's family consistently scores above average on standardized tests and has done so for generations. So she has a good brain to use the things she learned, even though there's tons of "smart" things that isn't so good at. The role of a good educator just happened to really fit well with her mix of beneficial and problematic brain issues.
So, you know, luck. She picked this career path because she was 20 and her marriage failed and she suddenly had to support three kids. Turns out she's really good at it. We aren't ambitious people, but this general theme is the same for my entire extended family.
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.
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.
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.
- 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.
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.
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.
38 comments
[ 0.25 ms ] story [ 47.7 ms ] threadAnd 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.
Unrelated: schools with effective phone bans are seeing improved grades and less absences.
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.
>> (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
>> 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
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
She has a genuine-ness that is palpable, something that I've also inherited. My girlfriend describes it as "You have golden retriever energy" and it gets people engaged with you. She's a very fun teacher.
She treats kids like people, yet the way the interactions go and the way she gets to kids ensures that they still generally respect her. She also used to have an administration that recognized her talent and value, and would stand behind her when a kid was a serious problem. She has helped "bad" kids do better, and helped bullied kids, and has helped needy kids, and this gives her a sort of legendary status. Everyone knows and loves Madame.
She was well experienced dealing with stupid shitheads because she grew up next to my dad's family (lol small towns) and raised three kids that were pains in her ass in diverse ways.
She works her absolute ass off. She habitually showed up to work ten minutes late (ADHD runs in our family quite bad), but the admin ignores that when she is teaching every student in the school and grading assignments until 8pm most nights, and building the curriculum for all the other teachers. I once stayed up with her until early in the morning grading a writing project she had given. Hundreds of students, every year, and she would always know their name and lives and all about them even though she's bad at remembering names otherwise. She was willing to teach kids how grammar worked and how to diagram sentences when they came into her class and didn't know. She was also able because of her education.
She comes from a family tradition that treated education as a total good, something everyone should seek out as much as possible, and something that would lift you up, along with your family, despite ostensibly being a very rural lineage. We have the journal of a woman in our ancestry 200 years back talking about how she learned to read and write because that's just how great education was in general. We aren't nobility or anything that would traditionally do that kind of thing.
A crazy mix of genetics: We are all super neurodivergent and probably super inbred and the latest generation is experiencing crazy illnesses and autoimmune disorders, but my mom's family consistently scores above average on standardized tests and has done so for generations. So she has a good brain to use the things she learned, even though there's tons of "smart" things that isn't so good at. The role of a good educator just happened to really fit well with her mix of beneficial and problematic brain issues.
So, you know, luck. She picked this career path because she was 20 and her marriage failed and she suddenly had to support three kids. Turns out she's really good at it. We aren't ambitious people, but this general theme is the same for my entire extended family.
I've seen this on the front page of HN like three times now.
- 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-schoo...
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