US Reading and Math Scores Drop To Lowest Level In Decades (npr.org) 248
The average test scores for 13-year-old students in the U.S. have decreased in reading and math since 2020, reaching the lowest levels in decades, with more significant declines in math. NPR reports: The average scores, from tests given last fall, declined 4 points in reading and 9 points in math, compared with tests given in the 2019-2020 school year, and are the lowest in decades. The declines in reading were more pronounced for lower performing students, but dropped across all percentiles. The math scores were even more disappointing. On a scale of 500 points, the declines ranged from 6 to 8 points for middle and high performing students, to 12 to 14 points for low performing students.
The math results also showed widening gaps based on gender and race. Scores decreased by 11 points for female students over 2020 results, compared with a 7-point decrease for male students. Among Black students, math scores declined 13 points, while white students had a 6-point drop. Compared with the 35-point gap between Black and white students in 2020, the disparity widened to 42 points.
While the scores show a drop from the pre-pandemic years, the results also show that there are other factors at work. The decline is even more substantial when compared with scores of a decade ago: The average scores declined 7 points in reading and 14 points in mathematics. The Education Department says plans are underway to address the learning loss. [...] The latest results are from the NAEP Long-Term Trend Assessment, traditionally administered every four years by the National Center for Education Statistics.
The math results also showed widening gaps based on gender and race. Scores decreased by 11 points for female students over 2020 results, compared with a 7-point decrease for male students. Among Black students, math scores declined 13 points, while white students had a 6-point drop. Compared with the 35-point gap between Black and white students in 2020, the disparity widened to 42 points.
While the scores show a drop from the pre-pandemic years, the results also show that there are other factors at work. The decline is even more substantial when compared with scores of a decade ago: The average scores declined 7 points in reading and 14 points in mathematics. The Education Department says plans are underway to address the learning loss. [...] The latest results are from the NAEP Long-Term Trend Assessment, traditionally administered every four years by the National Center for Education Statistics.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: And in other news... (Score:2)
1950s.
the irony is fantastic
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Also, equity -- as in Diversity, Inclusion, Equity -- has never been greater.
Re: And in other news... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:And in other news... (Score:4, Insightful)
Blaming the wrong thing is why this keeps getting worse.
The pandemic had a big effect, but the chronic problem is underfunding.
Re:And in other news... (Score:5, Informative)
Blaming the wrong thing is why this keeps getting worse.
The pandemic had a big effect, but the chronic problem is underfunding.
It's a problem, but math is not particularly affected by money, unless we're dealing with money in the math. 8^) And you are correct that people will trot out the same old tropes. But some times, blaming trans people for low math scores is sort of reflecting on the stupidity of the person trying to use that as an excuse.
I prefer a math related correlation. Common core math.
My son had common core math in school, and what it does and does very well, is make exceedingly simple math exceedingly difficult. Basic math is rote, will always be rote, and needs to be taught as rote.
Now is that the cause of the lowered scores? Some folks will reee about correlation is not causation. so in order not to upset them I'll make no such claim. Just note that if the basics are made overly complicated, one of the effects might be lowered math scores.
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Common Core in CA as an example ... (Score:3)
Blaming the wrong thing is why this keeps getting worse. The pandemic had a big effect, ...
There have been reports that the trend is long and consistent, that the pandemic made it worse but was not the main problem.
One example, California once had its own math curriculum standard developed by the faculty of Stanford University's math department in consultation with faculty from child development faculty. Today we have the brainchild of Washington DC politicians, the common core curriculum. Fail to adopt it, no federal grants for you.
"California’s adoption of Common Core caused an eart
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And with many states passing school vouchers (which primarily support wealthy families who were already sending their kids to private school), the inequities will continue to get worse.
Re: And in other news... (Score:3)
Okay but don't forget the pandemic statistics did skew in an unflattering direction for people living in glass houses.
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NO- participation = passing grade is what happened.
Fool parents demanded "results" and were placated when the solution was to make all the children repeat a grade or two. It doesn't do harm because ALL get held back; instead you ignored them learning nothing and continued like it all worked; when it failed. Plus the selfish thoughtless foolish demands parents had just shows how screwed society is.
time to start teaching the test again and cutting (Score:2)
time to start teaching the test again and cutting out stuff that is not on the test
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The sad bit is that this is very likely what they do already.
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Me: But because doing that would require hiring actual teachers who know their material and paying them to actually grade the tests (instead of funneling it all through a cheap decades old scantron machine) scores will continue to fall.
A
Re:time to start teaching the test again and cutti (Score:5, Informative)
It doesn't help when the test itself gives out all of the "acceptable" answers to the students. If you want that test to mean anything beyond "I got lucky with a few dice(6 sided No.2 pencil) rolls", you need to make the students actually come up with their own answers.
This shows a profound ignorance of what the federal assessment requirements are for states.
States are required to have normed assessments which they are required to statistically prove provide equal assessment to all student demographic groups. They have to demonstrate an alignment of these tests to their standards.
What you're describing tests understanding and technical skill. That's not what the federal government requires states to do in order to get federal education dollars. That's not what this assessment (NAEP) is doing.
And what you're describing is super hard to implement and grade, and takes a very, very long time to design and administer. Since there's no federal incentive to do this, states go with the lowest bidder to meet the federal testing requirements, with the shortest test they can get by with the shortest development time and least overhead.
That's why testing is what it is in the US.
To change that, you and a whole lot of other people need to be chatting with your congress critters and getting them to change the federal educational laws and testing and accountability requirements.
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A friend involved in that area said that Chinese kids are totally fucking up the system because so many of them skew very strongly to the right of the curve. That in turn somehow hurts funding.
Re: time to start teaching the test again and cutt (Score:2)
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The problem I see here is some conflation of the concepts of approach, solutions, and results.
At least at the academic level, the result is often not that important in exams, it's more important for students to show their approach, which lets people like me, who do grade exams now and the
Re:time to start teaching the test again and cutti (Score:4)
Teach then how to reason, how the underlying theories work, and how to reduce problems down to their base components so that they can see the inherent similarities, and you will see test scores improve.
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Teaching the test is very likely why these test scores are going lower and lower.
I think this is more likely than not. We've seen it in computing, so why wouldn't it apply to schooling in general?
In computing, there are all too many people who are trained on, for example, Microsoft Word. And not just Microsoft Word, but a specific version of Microsoft Word. When a different version is released, many of those people require fresh training. The vast majority of them are completely clueless when dropped into a different word processing program, because they never learned why particular opt
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They weren't clueless -- they just saw an opportunity to not work for a little while. I've seen people demand retraining because of superficial design changes ( corners are rounded slightly differently,minor color/gradient/etc difference). "Oh, I just can't figure it out! It's so different!", even though the interface is nearly identical, nothing was moved or removed.
They're not incompetent, they're just lazy.
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Teaching the test is very likely why these test scores are going lower and lower. When you teach students to perform by rote memorization, they cannot handle deviation. Unless the test is almost EXACTLY like the questions from class, those students who did not naturally develop the ability to generalize will fall down. Teach then how to reason, how the underlying theories work, and how to reduce problems down to their base components so that they can see the inherent similarities, and you will see test scores improve.
Sounds like common core math, where simple things get rather complicated?
Some things are simply rote. basic math is one of them. 2+2 = 4. Trying to adapt that to a reasoning process is what gets us this sort of genius https://thephilosophyforum.com... [thephilosophyforum.com]
Because we can turn out students who are universally confused if we like. Basic math answers that can be anything, as long as we've philosophized it to be what we want.
Teaching to the test? I take it that that is giving the students the answers or someth
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Time to start teaching again. Not mucking with politics about who is offended by history, not banning books, not letting parents interfere with the curriculum, getting politicians to stay away from it.
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This is probably the reason more than anything. I interviewed college students for jobs with my previous company, mostly at my alma mater. I could tell which classes students were taking in the spring semester of 2020 because their knowledge on that material was incredibly weak, even if they were good students. I don't know if those folks will pick it up on the job or if they'll just always be lacking knowledge in that area. If that was happening at the college level, then it's almost certainly worse wi
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Then why didn't it affect European schools? Education and student knowledge are back to pre-covid levels.
There's only one solution (Score:5, Funny)
Lower the standards so the students can pass the tests again.
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Actual statement in university-wide committee meeting in 2015:
"Our goal was to make a test that no one could fail, and we haven't succeeded, because some students are still failing. So we need to fix that."
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I think it would be easier to teach ChatGPT to pretend it's the student.
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Oh no, that's crazy talk!
Lower the standards. It worked in the past, didn't it?
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Hey it works for the baby boomers. They had literally everything handed to them in life and they didn't have to work one little tiny bit for it. And when it was time to pass the torch to their kids and grandkids they pulled the ladder up behind them and used a torch to set fire to the ropes.
The perfect post. Should be marked as troll, but the young'uns here believe it is +5 informative.
Well played sir, well played indeed.
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it works for the baby boomers. They had literally everything handed to them in life and they didn't have to work one little tiny bit for it. And when it was time to pass the torch to their kids and grandkids they pulled the ladder up behind them and used a torch to set fire to the ropes.
The perfect post. Should be marked as troll, but the young'uns here believe it is +5 informative.
The baby boomers got all kinds of subsidies that the rest of us didn't, and AGW is the end result of the culture of consumption they celebrate. School was cheaper. Housing was cheaper. Jobs paid more in real dollars (accounting for inflation) and transportation and food were cheaper. Food was literally more nutritious then — down to produce, we've depleted fields of minerals that we depend upon for survival, so now we have to take supplements which also cost money in order to get the same nutrition th
Meanwhile in Mississippi... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Why, did home schoolers let their kids go to school since they don't have to go there for real?
Re:Meanwhile in Mississippi... (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course. Phonics, the way to teach reading that actually works so of course the education community hated it for some reason. See also, new math which made me think long division was insurmountable until I got sent to a private school that taught it the "old fashioned" way.
I sort of get what some of these teachers are trying to do, but until you have the fundamentals, you can't explore. Phonics isn't even really new--they always told us to "sound it out". Yes, you can't do that with every word--there are rule breakers, but until you know what the rules are you can't tell the kids the word is a rule-breaker!
Then for the kids that have the spark, you can tell them *why* it's a rule breaker, which opens up the whole world of how English got cobbled together from ancient tongues and evolved. Not every kid will want to learn Latin, but the path that takes them there is well trodden, if only educators would lead them.
Screwed up priorities (Score:4, Insightful)
Kids these days can’t do math but they know about pronouns and 100 different genders.
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Sorry Desantis, but kids don't pay attention to that shit in school either, and if they did learning one thing doesn't preclude learning another.
If you want to criticise something, criticise the fucking bone-headed "Core maths" rewrite a few years back. The kind of math that taught kids that their lives will be spent counting change at Burger King and not to strive for anything better.
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So much this. It really looks like a group of 'experts' teamed up the find the most annoyingly baroque and meandering way you can possibly add 2 numbers and teach a whole generation of hapless kids that that is the right way.
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Sorry Desantis, but kids don't pay attention to that shit in school either, and if they did learning one thing doesn't preclude learning another.
If you want to criticise something, criticise the fucking bone-headed "Core maths" rewrite a few years back. The kind of math that taught kids that their lives will be spent counting change at Burger King and not to strive for anything better.
Why the hell you were downvoted is beyond me. Math is rote - unless a postmodernist is trying to philosophize it into weirdness like the 2+2 equals 5 crowd https://thephilosophyforum.com... [thephilosophyforum.com] Which some try to claim that adding the speed of light to the speed of light gives you the speed of light.
We aren't supposed to have basic stuff be complicated. We're supposed to learn the basics, then go on to much more interesting things.
dunno (Score:3)
Re: dunno (Score:2, Flamebait)
OK but (Score:2)
DEI / SEG (Score:4, Insightful)
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I agree. Let's start by removing that silly "pledge" bullshit and the rest of the flag waving nonsense that clutters our kids' day. If you want to stuff your kids' minds with ideology, do it at your own time. School's for teaching important stuff.
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I have a son in elementary school, his lesson plans have been pretty straight forward. They learn math differently than I did in the 80s but once I took some time to understand the process, it was actually quite easy. His social studies lessons are pretty typical from what I remember growing up.. focusing on only the good things important people in history did. I guess the biggest difference would be that growing up, I only learned about what white men did and now
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We are seeing the effect of pushing schools to focus on Diversity Equity and Inclusion under the Social Environmental Governance rather than on intellectual competence.
No we're not. Learning a social science does not mean your math skills need to drop. You don't go to school in the morning and say "I am able to learn one thing today, I wonder what it will be!".
Math and reading scores dropping are the result of a horrendously bad re-write in the standard curriculum for those two subjects a few years ago. We covered this extensively on Slashdot and many hear predicted exactly this outcome and back then people didn't even know what the word "woke" was.
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Mod parent up. suckers are falling for the current fearmongering again... woke or islam or gay or black.. it's always something and never close to the actual sources of problems.
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We do that stuff in BC and how test scores are pretty good, especially compared to America. Still things are changing, people showing up and making little girls cry as they scream at them to prove they're a girl. American type freedom, making little kids cry, is spreading.
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Our test scores, not how test scores.
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BS. A few days of pointless shit isn't replacing education - it's just another BS ritual to appease some demographic no different than xmas, Halloween, and the other stuff that "undermines" education and breaks the monotony.
The peak of US education was the 60s before education became a political priority and then both parties fought over it while 1 was bent to wage war on it because the educated didn't want to fight an idiotic war.
We have fads come and go and right now an intelligent debate needs to be had
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The reason why US reading and math scores are at their lowest level in decades is because parents are taking up so much of their kids' time with lessons on how to be irrationally fearful of brown skin, and how to never know what a pronoun is?
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The reason why US reading and math scores are at their lowest level in decades is because parents are taking up so much of their kids' time with lessons on how to be irrationally fearful of brown skin, and how to never know what a pronoun is?
Pretty much. Being busy getting indoctrinated doesn't leave much room for excelling in anything but bigotry.
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Do you have anything to support that theory? How much time could that possibly take out of a student's day? How could parents even distract their students for the hours they're in school and when they're supposed to be learning reading and math?
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Do you have anything to support that theory? How much time could that possibly take out of a student's day? How could parents even distract their students for the hours they're in school and when they're supposed to be learning reading and math?
Oh, it's in the same study that the OP uses to support their claim that diversity and acceptance of pride are the cause. Thin air and reinforcement bias. That was kind of my point.
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Hmmm (Score:2)
Stupid Parents Have Stupid Kids. (Score:2)
We basically vilified the idea of the family business and hence there weren't any one to teach the kids but a government entity on how not to have a family business and go to work for the man or worse yet join the military. If you had a family business and were armed you wouldn't need a government learning entity or a full blown military.
Carry on, morons.
Equity on the march. (Score:5, Insightful)
Like Communism, where everyone is poor together, the new equity-based education system will guarantee that we are all stupid together. Welcome to the new America, where every spark of distinction and show of individuality is ground into dust by our schools.
Quick! Think of a reason this is (Score:2, Funny)
Trump's fault and not because of the lockdowns!
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Well, the trend began several years before Covid...
God boomer trash dominiated this thread (Score:2)
Learn from home over a screen what can go wrong? (Score:4, Interesting)
Most students are just fine... (Score:2)
Well after all they only need one book (Score:4)
Good to know breathless moral panic still exists. (Score:2)
Stupid citizens are perfect (Score:2)
well they do need funding for guards and lockdown (Score:2, Flamebait)
well they do need funding for guards and lockdown systems to keep the people with guns out the of schools.
Re:well they do need funding for guards and lockdo (Score:4, Funny)
I carry a rock with me wherever I go. Never been attacked by a tiger in all these years.
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I carry a rock with me wherever I go. Never been attacked by a tiger in all these years.
Here in PA we have an Elephant dog. In the 5 years we've had him, we haven't had one elephant attack
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Re:Total opposite in Canada (Score:5, Insightful)
COVID grade inflation doesn't mean they learned anything.
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It helps, at least here on the left coast, our socialist government only shut down the schools for a few weeks at the beginning of the pandemic. For some reason the head of health thought the best thing for kids was to be in school., and the government listened to her.
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Some of it was bullshit, but my experience with my kids... who are a bit introverted and don't go crazy without plenty of social time... was yes, their grades improved drastically and it wasn't all (or even mostly) grade inflation.
Other kids, who really can't just sit in front of a laptop and focus... I have friends who say their kids suffered.
Re:Total opposite in Canada (Score:4, Interesting)
Canada also scores very highly on another metric, i.e. the world's biggest bullshitters, academically speaking: https://blogs.ucl.ac.uk/ioe/20... [ucl.ac.uk]
In contrast, if you look at performance on international early literacy testing, i.e. PIRLS, you see that most countries took a hit from COVID. However, Canada consistently scores above average (e.g. 22nd of 50 in 2021) but below the USA (15th). Which countries score the highest? Russia, Singapore, Hong Kong, Ireland, & Finland. In the most recent round of PIRLS, England jumped from 8th to 4th place, which dramatically reflects their education system's radical change in early literacy teaching methods. AFAIK, the USA & Canada are still relying heavily on now debunked reading instruction methods which explains their rather mediocre performance despite pouring $$$ into their reading programmes. (Meaning that money isn't the main issue.)
In short, the countries that follow & implement scientific evidence-informed reading instruction methods & train their teachers well get better results. This is regardless of which political party or administration is in power. (Poverty can be an issue but not as much as the quality & type of instruction that pupils get. I mean, if Russia can consistently stay on top with what they spend on education, it's well worth looking into what they're doing.)
Re:Let the Teachers Teach (Score:5, Insightful)
We do need standardized testing, otherwise college admissions will get even more stupidly unfair. To get into a top college nowadays, grades and knowledge barely count. They go by a lot of BS like "how involved in your community you are" .. your college essay .. letters of recommendation etc. At first that sounds cool, until you realize that it's the rich people that can game those. Rich kids can get daddy to fork over money to start a non-profit that is "active in the community". They can afford to take a safari in Kenya and write about how they made friends in Africa in their college essay. And they have consultants guiding them every step of the way. With a standardized test/college exam .. everyone knows what you need to do to get into a particular college. If you're poor you know exactly what to do, if you're rich you know that too. Doesn't matter how much money daddy has.
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The rich are always advantaged, that's what rich means. If you are rich you can give your kids private tutoring, or send them to better schools.
If being rich didn't give you an advantage why be rich?
The thing you need to do sure that being poor isn't an insurmountable disadvantage, by providing things like free quality education.
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That's my point. Standardized testing is open and the curriculum is well known. If you know SOHCAHTOA .. you pass. No BS. No bias. It might have its cultural bias, but at least the material is available. Whereas other criteria is highly gameable. We'll be optimizing for charlatans and luck rather than getting the best students into the most rigorous institutes. Disgruntled people who couldn't get into their college choice decided to make the criteria arbitrary.
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The rich are always advantaged, that's what rich means. If you are rich you can give your kids private tutoring, or send them to better schools.
If being rich didn't give you an advantage why be rich?
The thing you need to do sure that being poor isn't an insurmountable disadvantage, by providing things like free quality education.
While education is always highly recommended, simply educating people won't have them on the fast track out of being poor. In addition, it is pretty important to get that education in a field that offers decent renumeration. There are plenty of people out there who have opinion degrees. And some who have degrees that might be considered a red flag. The problem is, the job prospects most opinion degree hold are either replacing their professor, or the same prospects and abilities as the kid who dropped out o
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They go by a lot of BS like "how involved in your community you are" .. your college essay .. letters of recommendation etc. At first that sounds cool
No it never sounded cool. College isn't a popularity contest. The single aspect that should matter in perusing your education is your educational capability to the exclusion of everything else.
When I went through university the university never knew who I was. They were given a number (my grade) and I gave a preferential pecking order. Universities filled their positions starting with the student who got the best grade, and worked their way down until the class was full. If a student in the list had another
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The main problem with US education is the US.
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Government should But out of education and let the teachers do there job.
Yes, and this is a perfect example of why.
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going to loose karma
That’s lose karma
teachers do there job
Teachers do their jobs
Every student is different and learn at there own pace
At their own pace
opportunities to talk to teachers
Teachers are the stupidest fucking people I’ve ever met. I don’t have answers but I do have advanced degrees despite getting awful grades in high school wasting time with their bullshit.
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Those who can, do.
Those who can't, teach.
Re: Let the Teachers Teach (Score:2)
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Those who can, do.
Those who can't, teach.
And those who can't teach become politicians.
Re: Let the Teachers Teach (Score:2)
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I sincerely hope that your chosen subject is not English. I'm not a native speaker but even I could tell that there's room for improvement.
Re: Let the Teachers Teach (Score:2)
Itâ(TM)s âoeLoseâ not âoeLooseâ, and âoedo their jobâ, not âoedo their jobâ.
And âoe learn at their (sic) own paceâ.
Also: punctuation, is good, but run on sentences are not.
And proof readingâ"when youâ(TM)re talking about education from a university level, itâ(TM)s important.
Unless youâ(TM)re Kruger or Dunning.
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Government should But out of education and let the teachers do there job.
Where does the money come from?
STEM should be OPT in not forced upon every Student like they are all Little Einsteins.
You don't have to be a genius to benefit from some STEM education.
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Services are an awesome product, you can (usually) sell pure, raw workforce. No investment in raw materials needed. As long as you have unemployed workforce, you can crank out more services. Yay for full-employment!
Services have two major drawbacks, though. First, if your economy falters, the first thing people cut back on is services. If money gets tight, what can you do without, food or a haircut?
And second, it's terribly hard to export services. You can only do so if you can somehow convince people to co
Re:Worthy of note (Score:4, Insightful)
Perhaps if you would have gone to school, you would understand that you would have to find a causal relationship, in the statistics, between percentage of tea party in the county, compared to the change in school performance, two things happening at the same time does not even imply a correlation.
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Perhaps if you would have gone to school
You do know your GED doesn't qualify you as "educated", right?
you would have to find a causal relationship, in the statistics, between percentage of tea party in the county, compared to the change in school performance, two things happening at the same time does not even imply a correlation.
Your reading comprehension, as well as your apparent misunderstanding of the post hoc fallacy, would seem to imply you are a victim of this trend. Let me try and break down the implications of my post, what with you being incapable and all.
1. A group with a strong anti-intellectual streak began accumulating power in 2009.
2. The educational policy of this group can largely be summarized as "we don't care if you learn, we just need to mak
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What you're talking about is just a small part of a focused anti-education campaign that began in the sixties. Most of your comment is solid, but the idea that it began in 2009 is nonsense.