Math Scores Fell In Nearly Every State, Reading Dipped On National Exam (nytimes.com) 196
U.S. students in most states and across almost all demographic groups have experienced troubling setbacks in both math and reading, according to an authoritative national exam released on Monday, offering the most definitive indictment yet of the pandemic's impact on millions of schoolchildren. The New York Times reports: In math, the results were especially devastating, representing the steepest declines ever recorded on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, known as the nation's report card, which tests a broad sampling of fourth and eighth graders and dates to the early 1990s. In the test's first results since the pandemic began, math scores for eighth graders fell in nearly every state. A meager 26 percent of eighth graders were proficient, down from 34 percent in 2019. Fourth graders fared only slightly better, with declines in 41 states. Just 36 percent of fourth graders were proficient in math, down from 41 percent.
Reading scores also declined in more than half the states, continuing a downward trend that had begun even before the pandemic. No state showed sizable improvement in reading. And only about one in three students met proficiency standards, a designation that means students have demonstrated competency and are on track for future success. And for the country's most vulnerable students, the pandemic has left them even further behind. The drops in their test scores were often more pronounced, and their climbs to proficiency are now that much more daunting.
Reading scores also declined in more than half the states, continuing a downward trend that had begun even before the pandemic. No state showed sizable improvement in reading. And only about one in three students met proficiency standards, a designation that means students have demonstrated competency and are on track for future success. And for the country's most vulnerable students, the pandemic has left them even further behind. The drops in their test scores were often more pronounced, and their climbs to proficiency are now that much more daunting.
change is a process (Score:3, Insightful)
Lucky it was not far worse (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Lucky it was not far worse (Score:5, Insightful)
Most families only internet access was by mobile phone
Citation needed, and as you get your citation make sure you don't pick an article that only focuses on the shittiest slums in America.
And while you complain about classes being sad, the biggest issue wasn't the classes, it was the discipline of the children. Funny how they don't pay attention as much in math class when immediately before that they were playing Fortnite and spend the entire math class thinking only about how quickly they can go back to playing Fortnite.
Kids don't have the discipline of focus in a distracting environment, and sadly most parents didn't help. It's quite to blame zoom meetings but one thing that the wife noticed is that in her maths classes the grade spread was larger. There were less mediocre kids, and more kids acing / failing miserably. The former put down to multi-learning approach pre-recorded videos + written work + classes structed almost entirely as personal question time helped the good kids become great kids. Lack of being forced to sit in a room away from the xbox made the average kids become crap kids.
Blaming zoom alone is silly.
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We also should have prioritized opening schools safely rather than prioritizing opening restaurants, bars,
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Businesses generate tax revenue, and schools consume it. Therefore the government priority was to reopen all businesses first, and schools last.
Re: Lucky it was not far worse (Score:2)
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And why exactly should they? Grades don't mean jack shit anymore. Everyone's a winner! Hurray! You have perfect attendance? Get on the honor roll!
And then you get out of school with your diploma, only to realize that it's worthless. Everyone has one. You're more in debt than someone who bought a fucking house to have a sheet of paper that certifies that you're stupid enough to waste six digits on it and nothing else.
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Let the mod point hate flow! (Score:4, Insightful)
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You remember we tried to tell y'all this shit two years ago, right?
I don't think anyone thought that remote learning would be just as effective, that's why we had schools in the first place.
The question is whether those costs were justified in light of the risks of the COVID pandemic.
It looks like school lockdowns were one of the more effective interventions [nature.com]. However, considering the costs I wonder if there instead could have been an investment made in making an earlier switch back to in-person using better school ventilation, higher quality masks, and hybrid learning mode
Parental involvement (Score:2, Informative)
What this shows is the general lack of parental involvement in American education.
It would be telling if similar statistics come out for Asian countries that also had experienced lockdown, my bet is they wouldn't see as much of a drop, because Asian parents are generally more involved with their children's education and won't easily let them slack off simply because they are attending classes at home.
A similar trend was already observed in the ethnic breakdown, according to the NYT article: "And Black and H
Re:Parental involvement (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Parental involvement (Score:5, Interesting)
The only part I was personally exposed to was my nephew, whose grades plummeted through the floor (he's literally a straight-F student right now, which is pretty impressive)
I get little Steam popups telling me all the games he's playing throughout the school day... I've got to assume his mother just let's him do whatever the fuck he wants up in his room. They're not poor. They're pretty well off. So it's not a 1:1 on well-to-do:giving a shit.
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The only part I was personally exposed to was my nephew, whose grades plummeted through the floor (he's literally a straight-F student right now, which is pretty impressive)
A future Delta Tau Chi pledge!
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While there are individual exceptions, this is part of a general cycle. It's not - as one commenter suggested - that poor parents have no time to spend with their kids. It's that people who are poor tend to be poorly educated themselves, and do not see the value of education for their kids. So their kids are the ones who never study, and generally disrupt school for everyone else. Remote schooling just made goofing off all the easier. The cycle perpetuates, because those kids grow up with a poor education,
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Poor people have poor ways. Still generally true today.
Re:Parental involvement (Score:4, Interesting)
It's that people who are poor tend to be poorly educated themselves, and do not see the value of education for their kids
This is a stereotype about poor people and education. In fact, if you look at evidence, you will see:
-Poor school districts (based on income and property value) often tax themselves at higher rates than wealthier neighborhoods to support their schools, indicating people who live in lower-income areas do not value education less.
-Poor families are often more involved in supporting learning at home, while wealthier families may have more free time to use volunteering at school or may have their absence dismissed as being for 'legitimate' reasons.
-Poor families work just as hard, and often harder, then those in higher income brackets. They may also be more likely to have jobs outside of the traditional 8-5 hours, making it difficult to participate in evening school events or activities.
-Poor people, and single parents, are effective, caring, and pay careful attention to the needs of their children. Given the lower income, however, meeting these needs can be difficult.
https://theathenaforum.org/sites/default/files/WaPo-five-stereotypes.pdf
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My cousin (a teacher at a "good" / wealthier school district) noted that most of their kids were doing just fine during online learning thank you very much. Of course they had a lot of money to spend on teachers, all of the kids (down to grade 1) already had laptops they used everyday, bett
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My wife is a teacher and says the declines were not evenly distributed - kids from good families did ok or slipped a bit, kids from families without much parenting just plummeted.
Yep. It ain't the schools. It's the kids.
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If by "broken" you mean single parent households, then yes it's no stereotype just a statistical fact that 3 in 10 solo parents are black [pewresearch.org] Now if you think pew == Stormfront, then by all means return your head to the sand or your anus whichever is more comfortable. Also do some research on the the Irish, Poles, or Italians when you write something so dumb as white people have never been
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On the contrary, one of the main reasons white leaders promote white supremancy, xenophobia, etc. is to keep the poor white people down while giving them an "other" to feel superior to and to blame for their woes. Or did you think that the average white guy in the antebellum south was rich enough to own a bunch of slaves?
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I don't know exactly what "good families" meant, but I too took the overall context of the comment to refer to poverty as opposed to race. It's a battle that even MLK waged in the latter part of his life: to get poor whites to realize that they are in the same boat as poor blacks. That's still true today in a lot of cases, including education.
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No. The kids were not home schooled, they were still the responsibility of the school.
The problem is quite obvious. We were not prepared to teach kids remotely, we didn't have proper tools for it etc. If we had something like Khan academy in place when it all started, math scores would have probably just gone up. Oh right, we had Khan academy. Why didn't we use it?
New courses at university, High school Algebra (Score:2)
It was suggested by the board as a way to offer courses to the incoming classes... It's difficult to not be cynical about it, regarding *both* the overt (Students need it) and the unspoken (means to admit more Students).
Just a personal take: University is expensive. If one is going to "liter
Not really a surprise (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Not really a surprise (Score:5, Insightful)
The schools aren't massively under resourced. They're massively over administratored.
I live in Alabama. We're not known for spending a lot of money on kids.
Our state spends about $8900 a kid a year and our average classroom size is 29. $8900 x 29 = $258,100 per classroom.
Other states metrics look just as bad.
Re:Not really a surprise (Score:5, Insightful)
> Our average classroom size is 29,
You are massively under resourced. Classroom size should be below 20. I've been teaching (15-19 year olds, pre-university), and the difference between having 18 and 24 students is massive. If I have 16-18, I can usually keep up with what everyone's doing, how they're doing, who's ahead and needs more challenging stuff to keep interested, and who's behind and needs some extra help. With 24, that's impossible for me. Or if I identify those students, there's just not enough time available to help them individually.
Re: Not really a surprise (Score:2)
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So, you did well in large classes, congratulations.
But that doesn't make it a good learning environment, especially for teenagers (although some students success regardless).
From my experience (> 15 years of teaching), I judge that roughly 20-30% of the student body will cope with any conditions, and about a 10%-20% will do somewhat poorly, no matter how many resources you spend on them. It's the large majority in between that will greatly benefit from small classes, good learning environments and highly
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There is enough money going into the system to do that. The problem is that education has been ran as a socialist government system, simply throwing bad money after bad decisions.
The problem is that the life is being choked out of education by administrators and the contractors that they hire, who are paid multiples of what the educators are paid. The administrators have their own union, they aren't in the same one as the teachers, so their goals aren't aligned. To wit, the administrators want to be important and well-paid, and the teachers want to get paid enough to survive and to not have to buy school supplies with their own money.
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$250k per classroom doesn't sound unreasonable. How much do you pay teachers?
Electricity, HVAC, cleaning, equipment including computers and textbooks, general maintenance including the other shared parts of the building... There will be some admin overhead, but we would need a breakdown to know if it's too much.
Whatever the teachers are being paid should probably be doubled too.
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Baltimore public schools spends $21,606 per student, with around 25 students per class. That's more than half a million per class. But their results are among the among the very lowest in the country across the board.
Maybe it's not the funding that is the issue.
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> Our state spends about $8900 a kid a year and our average classroom size is 29. $8900 x 29 = $258,100 per classroom.
That seems like $260K per cadre, not per class. Each kid has 6-8 classes. Each teacher probably has 4 classes/day. So now we're at $130K per 'classroom' aka per teacher + overhead. Salary.com says avg Alabama high school teacher salary is $58K. Multiply by 2x to cover benefits/admin/overhead and that's $116K, about a match.
Certainly not enough to provide higher teacher pay, more non-
Re:Not really a surprise (Score:4, Insightful)
No examples I see. I'm guessing that's because you're making things up.
Re:Not really a surprise (Score:5, Insightful)
In fairness though it's much more time efficient to take a mishmash of Fox News and Daily Mail shouting points than to, you know, know stuff.
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I remember this. [chicagotribune.com]
So they might learn something about Alan Turing while studying WWII? Oh noes!
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what does one's sexual preference have to do with the importance of their contribution to society?
Nothing, which is why it's so odd that their contributions are ignored. Can you think of any reason why that might be?
What's next, classes about people in history who preferred dogs over cats?
Wow, you're not every trying here. This isn't about adding a separate class. This is about including LBGT people the same way we already include straight white men in the curriculum. We've done this before with other marginalized groups.
Maybe I'm smarter than I think I am
It doesn't look that way.
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No examples I see. I'm guessing that's because you're making things up.
This is from the UK but I can give you an example.
Every British teacher is now required to demonstrate, each term, how they are teaching classes in accordance with British values and culture. Sure, I can see that as a priority for social studies (history, geography, language and the like) but my mate teaches chemistry.
This law was enacted by a conservative government as ultra-conservatives complained about "evil leftist indoctrination". Educators did get their own back by making "tolerance" a British
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When I was at school several decades ago there was "political bullshit" under every rock. At the time I never thought anything of it but more recent bleating about politicising of the curriculum just makes me think "hasn't it always?"
Predominantly in the word problems instead of a "Steve" you'd find a Vikhram, John Q Businessman was either replaced by Jane Q Businesswoman or John was having problems managing his finances while Jane always had the solution that you had to determine for yourself to find out h
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Predominantly in the word problems instead of a "Steve" you'd find a Vikhram, John Q Businessman was either replaced by Jane Q Businesswoman or John was having problems managing his finances while Jane always had the solution that you had to determine for yourself to find out how right she was.
Oh no! Names have changed and females no longer belong in the kitchen and can potentially understand finance. What "political bullshit" this is! /s
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"Yeah, what's a million extra deaths anyway? No big deal, stop with all the drama."
What's wrong with you?
Re:Not really a surprise (Score:4, Informative)
I downloaded the same weekly dataset, and added up the "Excess Estimate" column for the whole United States from the start of the pandemic (late March 2020) thru today (early Oct 2022). I end up with 1.15 M, not 350 K. Could you explain your methodology?
Brought to you by the Teachers' Unions (Score:2, Insightful)
They were chiefly responsible for keeping the kids out of the classroom.
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Fuck teachers, I don't want the germ spreaders brats delivering stuff to everybody except single people who don't go outside their basement. Can't think of a worse situation - largely immune kids being disease carriers. My town had parents knowingly sending their infected brats out so they didn't miss sports practice! At least the parents at fault have long COVID; but they should get charged with a crime.
School should have been slowed down (almost daycare) and everybody REPEAT 1 year of school. Parents f
Re:Brought to you by the Teachers' Unions (Score:4, Informative)
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Don't you mean COVID? Teachers don't like teaching remotely any more than
students like taking classes that way.
Except that long after states started opening back up, teacher's unions were continuing to demand lockdowns and remote classes.
the kids have been screwed for awhile now (Score:2)
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Name one actual thing wrong with common core. I expect you to directly cite the standards you think are "terrible".
I don't want to here some nonsense you heard from another idiot who doesn't know anything about it either.
Dropped from zero? (Score:2)
Wait two years and visit the people who hit 90% or above and offer them $100 as a reward for each point scored over 85% if they took it again without studying. I'm pretty sure you wouldn't be paying much.
I have rarely met parents capable of helping their children in school pa
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You don't have a clue. We lead the world in science, technology, and innovation. You don't get that with an uneducated population.
Our education system isn't perfect, but it's a lot better than you're pretending.
If you really want to improve American education, it's not really that hard. We have a lot of easy solutions that we know work. For example, free and reduced school breakfast & lunch can have a significant positive impact. Free breakfast programs are often overlooked, but incredibly beneficia
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those standardized tests don't make any sense, they're just about regurgitating ready made answers...
Nothing to see here, everything according to plan (Score:3)
https://www2.lbl.gov/Publicati... [lbl.gov]
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Nothing to see here, everything according to plan
On the other hand, I've been hearing all my life how the country is doomed because of shitty schooling. We're talking all the way back to conversion vans and shag carpet and disco days. And yet we still Intel and Google and Goldman Sachs the rest of the world into submission. I suspect that this is because of the Pareto Principle: most of the graduates can be useless shit as long as you have those 20 percent of go-getters that actually makes things happen. Some of it is recruiting foreign talent, but I'd b
Covid is as much to blame as for many deaths (Score:3)
If you are already deathly sick, a breeze will blow you over. If your health is already close to failing, even what would otherwise be a mild course of Covid will kill you (mind you, I've seen healthy people get into trouble due to that damn disease, but most people who die in ICUs are bloated blobs of human flesh that were already hacking and wheezing when climbing a flight of stairs before).
Same with the US school system: It was at death's door, hacking and wheezing whenever it had to do any kind of lifting (not even heavy lifting). Now it's getting pushed over that threshold.
The general state of education in the US was already appalling at best, but more closely described as a total catastrophe. And I'm not talking about post-Covid. Kids were handed high school diplomas that could barely read and write their own name or count to 10 using all extremities available. Just because, well, it's getting kinda hard to explain when the student is older than the teacher, you can only repeat a class so often.
The teaching profession is SO unattractive that the only people you get to remain teaching are the ones that are essentially unemployable in any other way. The old saying "those who can, do, those who can't, teach" used to be a joke, today, it's just reality. Anyone who actually is a teacher and worth that label is in adult training, earning far more money for far less stress, less snooty brats, less political bullshit and less frustration with people who don't want to be there.
But now we have Covid to blame. Thank god, else we would have had to deal with the actual problem. Now we can say "sorry, nothing we can do, it's Covid".
Entirely unnecessary (Score:3)
We had strong evidence even by May [yahoo.com] of the pandemic that children were at low-risk from covid and that schools were not contributing [sciencedaily.com] to community spread. We also were already discussing the significant learning loss that could occur from keeping schools closed [nih.gov].
Why did we fail given we knew this so early? Short answer, Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers. The teachers unions pushed against reopening and even were able to object to and have revised CDC guidance on reopenings [nypost.com]. The unions first insisted that they couldn't possibly reopen until the teachers were vaccinated, and negotiated being put ahead of essential workers on the vaccination schedule. Then, when they were vaccinated first, they still insisted it "wasn't safe" to reopen. Any places where teachers unions had strong political influence, learning remained remote or hybrid long past when the evidence was clear that lessons should be occurring in person.
This political ridiculousness was a uniquely American phenomenon. Most other countries were learning in person, and without masking elementary schoolers.
Life has never been better for the ignorant masses (Score:2)
The Government with it fiscal and monetary policy has become the biggest wealth stream. Businesses have rushed to capture a slice of that. The most lucrative and successful businesses have positioned themselves as middlemen between cheap overseas manufacturing and domestic deficit-fueled consumption. The biggest technology houses (Google, Amazon, Meta, etc) are about sales and marketing. Elon Musk is the sole example of innovation and manufacturing, and when he came about it caught everybody by surprise.
Who
meanwhile, in China (Score:2)
they're pumping PhDs at an ever increasing rate...
tell me the US ain't a dying empire again
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I work with 3 Chinese PHD's (computer science equivalent). They aren't idiots, for sure, but they also aren't demonstrably more capable in any category than the rest of the workforce which is mostly composed of BS/BA CSCI educated people.
Most of our best, not just in implementation, but in actual creation or optimization of algorithms/problem sets, are western educated. Often western educated immigrants.
Something Doesn't Add Up... (Score:2)
What could possibly have caused this? (Score:4, Insightful)
Still wondering?
no surprise since nobody is allowed to fail (Score:2)
It's not the quality of teaching or the resources committed, it's the fact that teachers cannot demand effort in any sense. Everyone has an excuse for their kid failing and those excuses must be respected or else lawsuits and unpleasantness for the teacher ensue. So path of least resistance it to just let everyone go through the system whether they have met the standard or not. And when testing happens all the failures of that approach are revealed.
A slightly deeper look (Score:2)
Supposedly, the SAT scores in California haven't suffered lately, an observation that no doubt some people will point to as evidence of some bogus hypothesis. But the reality is that since California colleges no longer require SAT scores, high-school student who would have otherwise done poorly chose not to take the test. Those that did would have done well anyway mainly because they want to go to colleges that do require it. Ergo, the average score went up.
The impact of a viru, er I mean math. (Score:2)
Most of us felt comfortable heading back to school after a nice long summer break and advancing into the next grade and level of teaching...except for every time you felt like an utter moron when the math teacher starts the new year with with a "stuff you know already" review, while you sit there wondering how the hell your brain turned into a sieve in less than 3 months.
Sure, we can sit here and speculate as to how a global pandemic has affected these scores, but I'd rather lean on the tried and true fact
Wait! Wait! (Score:2)
Remote learning is also a failure contributing to this, but let's keep doing that too.
Also, we need more administrators instead of people teaching.
How long before 'math' class is replace with an 'the ethics of using math' or 'equal math for all' class?
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Before drawing any conclusions it'll be interesting to see the equivalent for other countries. I have a suspicion...
Re: DUH! (Score:5, Insightful)
Like Sweden that didn't shut down?
False. Sweden did shut down [washingtonexaminer.com], but not quite to the extent other countries did.
"It is a clear and sharp signal to every person in our country as to what applies in the future. Don't go to the gym. Don't go to the library. Don't have dinner out. Don't have parties — cancel!" Lofven explained. "It's going to get worse."
Further, as a result of not taking preventitive measures early on, Sweden's death rate was substantially higher [businessinsider.com] than its neighbors.
You can't compare a country like Sweden with only 10 million people to a country such as the U.S. where a few cities combined have more people densely packed than does all of Sweden.
Also, unlike the U.S., Sweden didn't have right-wing nutjobs bleating about their DNA being changed by vaccines, or microchips, or anything else we had to endure, and still endure, because the people of Sweden aren't brainwashed by stupidity and instead trust their government. On the whole they followed their government's directives for social distancing, limited large gatherings, and so on. However, as shown above, not closing things down for a short time lead directly to more deaths than their neighbors.
Re:Education too important to be led by Educators (Score:5, Insightful)
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If educators controlled it instead of politicians, education in this country might not be in such bad shape.
First of all, they're teachers. "Educators" is "Garbage Man to Sanitation Engineer" shit.
Second, it depends on the teachers. There are really good ones, and really shitty ones. And your Education Majors... itself a bad idea for the most part... were routinely amongst the lowest scoring ACT/SAT students in college. Some states have low teacher pay, some states have very good pay, and there doesn't seem to be a correlation, as states like California spend a LOT on teacher pay, and still get shit results, whil
Generalizing heavily there... (Score:5, Insightful)
Education major here, taught for eight years, plus 17 years as a K-12 tech director. Still have an active teaching license. Scored a 30 on my ACT. And on the record, I'd like to say that teachers are not stupid. They are required to get a college education, which I've learned from experience takes a pretty disciplined mind to earn. Not saying everyone is a member of MENSA, but they are definitely trend above the median.
That off the table, parent poster has a point. Politicians are screwing up our schools. Every year or two (depending on your state), some new bloke with an ego the size of Cleveland walks into the capital building thinking they know how to fix public education. Sometimes they pass a few laws making some changes (in my home state of Minnesota, we like to call them "unfunded mandates"). Other times they have to mess around with the curriculum writers (because heaven forbidwe let social studies teach a liberal agenda [startribune.com]). All the while, all the dirty work gets left to the MN Department of Education to figure out how to make all the crazy work. Instead, what we should have is a stable professional Department of Education led by educators who set licensing and curricular standards with political oversight, but not political interference.
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Oh no, _blue_ hair!? Children using... hair dye? Is the apocalypse upon us?
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That's an odd conclusion to come to after reading an article showing kids math scores dropped when when being home-schooled instead being taught by professional educators.
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That's an odd conclusion to come to after reading an article showing kids math scores dropped when when being home-schooled instead being taught by professional educators.
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Trying to make teaching into a profession is the problem. Nobody is skilled at teaching. People can be knowledgeable about topic(s) and have some amount of skill in communications. If they have both skills, they can teach that topic. Doesn't mean you can teach anything else though. If you don't understand it, you can't teach it.
Got it, so we need to hire more teachers for elementary school, one per topic. Luckily, we don't need to have them have any skills related to knowing how to handle children, disciplinary procedures, safety procedures, or understanding how children learn, so that should make it easier to find. And because each would only be working about 2 hours a day, we don't need to pay them a full time salary.
If you don't understand it, you can't teach it.
You do know that in most places for teaching you need to be certified to teach specific topics. Most places don't
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"Nobody is skilled at teaching." (Score:2)
What the hell are you talking about? Teaching is absolutely a skill. There are plenty of masters of their craft who cannot train a disciple. And there are plenty of people who nuture others into achieving greater than themselves in a field. Teaching is a skillset - a very complex one, comprised of things not needed to execute in the actual field of study.
Re: Education too important to be led by Educators (Score:4, Insightful)
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That's an odd conclusion to come to after reading an article showing kids math scores dropped when when being home-schooled instead being taught by professional educators.
They're weren't "home schooled" in the traditional sense, with a parent or group of parents doing the teaching with supplementary tutors in some areas. They were doing school AT home, but in a program run by the school system, and instructed by their teachers. To compare the Covid schooling shitshow to real homeschoolers... who routinely score at or above public AND private school students.... is horseshit. In everything from spelling bees to college admissions, homeschooled kids do pretty well.
Re: Everyone Was Supposed to Die! (Score:2)
Re:Remember folks (Score:5, Insightful)
A democracy REQUIRES an educated population as they are part of the governing process. Parents have no right to cripple their child's mind than their body. Forced education is far better grounded than the forced birth debate going on today.
The supreme court ruled a century ago that your right to risk small pox does not trump society or the right of somebody who does not want it or die of it because you want to be a typhoid Mary.
If I shoot you passively (and I own a gun;) such as by sneezing, too bad for you! No manslaughter for me, it's my freedumb! The bullet in this case is like a virus (sorry, I had to explain because somebody named RightwingNutjob is not smart.) Forced vaccinations in a pandemic is the logical policy; sane people would agree, the delusional would not. We force delusional people to do things all the time and they might not even be harmful to others; yet we do it.
You can argue all you like but when the majority's common sense goes against your minority you have to abide by the tyranny of the majority (which serves the most people... don't blab about mobs, the majority can rewrite whatever hurdles that are placed to counter fads.)
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A democracy REQUIRES an educated population as they are part of the governing process.
Actually, that isn't true. At least it wasn't true for the first 100 years of the US when very few people were educated. What is required is a middle class with a high degree of ownership (in that day it was land, today it would probably be equity in S&P 500 companies). The reason for this is that you need a lot of people with a stake in the future of the country or even better a stake in the future of where they live. It also helps if there isn't a foreign country who dumps money into every radical
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So you don't want poor people to vote.
How pathetically transparent...
Ah, the unhinged Russian troll weights in. How's the weather in St Petersburg. Gotten a draft notice yet?
Nobody said anything about suffrage. I was talking about how you get a population to stay engaged in politics. See an engaged populace keeps a functioning democracy working. If that engagement breaks down, you descend into autocracy like Russia did. In Russia, almost nobody owns anything except for a small elite. That's why the population isn't engaged in politics, because why bother. If the lea
Re: Remember folks (Score:2)
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Can you demonstrate that you've been unable to "disagree, challenge, and vociferously argue against foolish policies cooked up by the political class."?
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My employer, taking its cues from the media/political environment in 2020 and 2021, made it perfectly clear that public expression of opinions contrary to the company policy re: covid and rioting would result in termination. The clarity was by means of speedy firings of a handful of examples for the rest of us peons.
I'm quite certain that there is, and always has been, a quite large list of things you can't publicly express at work and keep your job.
Your freedom of speech does not bind anyone from expressing how they feel about your speech. That can be an argument, a fist, or a firing. Nobody was ever given a promise that their speech was without consequence, so I don't quite see the equation between an employer exercising their rights and dictatorship.
The federal government and several state and municipal governments instituted similar policies. Individuals contesting the policies weren't just shown the door, they were publicly shamed by both elected officials and their media allies.
The government as an employer is different than the government as
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3 years? When has it not been like this in the US?
Unless you're rich, that's basically what your life is like in the US.
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In a democracy, you get to disagree, challenge, and vociferously argue against foolish policies cooked up by the political class. In a dictatorship, the unwashed masses have stuff done to them, and the only acceptable answer is "thank you, may I have another?"
Firstly, no, in a democracy, you get to vote for laws and/or representatives, broadly speaking. It doesn't mean you get to do whatever the fuck you want to, including harming others simply because you have a vote.
Secondly, you always were and are free
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Because claiming the 2020 election was stolen isn't prohibited? You're free to claim that all you want. You can even file dozens of lawsuits over the issue (though if you want to win said lawsuits, you'll need to, you know, actually provide evidence). What you're not free to do (or shouldn't be free to do, anyways) is call up a governor and tell him he needs to "find" a bunch of extra votes for you, or make specific defamatory claims about a voting company, or, you know, assault a nations capitol and threat
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In a democracy, you get to disagree, challenge, and vociferously argue against foolish policies cooked up by the political class
and not automatically go to prison/camp. Also, the unwashed masses have stuff done to them, and the only acceptable answer is "thank you, may I vote for you again?"
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In a democracy, you get to disagree, challenge, and vociferously argue against foolish policies cooked up by the political class. In a dictatorship, the unwashed masses have stuff done to them, and the only acceptable answer is "thank you, may I have another?"
But this is exactly what you are doing right now, no? The difference is that in a dictatorship, people can go to prison or worse for questioning current laws, whereas in a democracy, people can freely argue against them, even if some people's arguments may be misguided. However laws and their enforcement are still a thing in a democracy, you can't shoot somebody in the face just because you don't like them (even in the US).
Measures taken against covid were extreme but they were needed. Now we have multiple
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like the idea that humans have more sexes than just male and female
LOL! No one is making that claim. Do I really need to explain this shit to you?
No. You know you're full of shit. You just don't care. You're just an obvious a troll out to spread easily debunked disinformation.
Re:Never false advertise your ignorance. (Score:2)
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"no, you cannot teach my kids how to use apps to hookup with adult gay men"
Damn straight, they should learn that at church.
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Question- did it hurt when you pulled those examples out of your ass? Or did you happen to be listening to some RWNJ on
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Unless of course someone can show a legit case where schools were "teaching kids to use apps to hookup with adult gay men" ?
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You're complaining about things you very obviously don't know anything about. There is no such thing as a "woke math class". Don't be an idiot.
We, as a society, need to ask for more information
That's a riot coming from someone as poorly informed as you.
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