Slashdot Mirror
Only 22% of California 8th Graders Pass National Science Test
bonch writes "22 percent of California eighth-graders passed a national science test, ranking California among the worst in the U.S. according to the 2011 National Assessment of Educational Progress. The test measures knowledge in Earth and space sciences, biology, and basic physics. The states that fared worse than California were Mississippi, Alabama, and a tie between the District of Columbia and Hawaii. 'Nationally, 31 percent of eighth-graders who were tested scored proficient or advanced. Both the national and state scores improved slightly over scores from two years ago, the last time the test was administered.'"
I can see states like Mississippi, Alabama doing poorly because they are run by Republicans and republicans hate spending money on kids. (Yes I just heard a guy on MSNBC say that last night.) But California is a Democrat-run state. Their students should be the best and brightest and most well-funded. Like Democrat-run Maryland. Hmmmm.
(Note: I'm being sarcastic. I think Democrats suck just as badly as Republicans. None of them know how to run anything.... not the schools, not the MVA, not the Amtrak, nor the post office.)
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
Refer to Einstein's famous quip.
This news will undoubtedly be used as the basis for calls to shovel more money into a broken system despite decades of funding increases failing to show results, all the while modest Chinese budgets are sufficient for creating public K-12 education which outranks us.
The public schools have become a jobs program contaminated by labor politics.
We can't reward success without screaming from those who fear being held accountable for their failures.
We can't make better use of technology and automated learning because of perennial votes for make-work teaching positions.
The whole thing stinks, the public doesn't understand the system stinks, and poison politics will prevent the problems from being corrected.
Competition means pressure to achieve, and that means some people won't do as well as others.
We need school choice vouchers so some people can rescue their kids from a _permanently_ and irretrievably broken system.
(It's heresy to admit it's broken and that given the REALITY of the public DEMANDS which broke it, that it WILL NEVER be fixed.)
Vouchers would allow secularists who value education to rescue their offspring from the mediocrity of public schools and from frequently toxic public school students. (I was so rescued and fortunate enough to finish my education in good boarding schools.)
Vouchers would also allow Superstitionists to send THEIR kids to religious schools, but that's actually a good thing since it rescues publics schools from them.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
When California passed laws limiting property taxes, local funds for schools decreased. They were never fully replaced with state funds. The problem is, sadly, democracy driven by greed. In California, laws can be made by referendum - direct voting by the people, who voted to keep their money and to hell with the school systems. I don't blame them. I have no children and don't particularly want to pay to school any, but this is the result.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
This is an absolutely terrible thing to say. I'm not a teacher, but i do support a better public school system. You can't automatically assume that all public schools are terrible and directly accuse teachers or board members. There are many public school in the nation which can give an amazing education, many of the best schools in the nation are public.
Do creationists really have much of a foothold in California? I wouldn't have expected that to be the case, but I wouldn't know. It seems to have the reputation of being a fairly liberal state though.
As much as I may dislike the Christian Right trying to inject their belief system into public education, it's not like the Right (or any subset of it) has a monopoly on ruining education with their ideas and beliefs.
It seems to me that the coddling don't-hurt-their-self-esteem attitude that is churning out kids that have screwed up expectations, inadequate educations, and a distorted view of their own competence is a product of a subset of liberal thinkers.
That 40% contains varying degrees of ability to speak, read, and write English but it is safe to say most of them will be at a disadvantage when taking a test in a language they are not fluent in.
That being said, we (California) still have crappy public schools and this is still a huge problem. However, it isn't just a problem of bad science education, it is also a language barrier problem.
Until you have parents willing to (a) help their kids outside of school (b) become involved in helping their local school succeed and (c) make their children accountable for learning it won't matter what the curriculum is, how much teachers get paid, or what the facilities of the school system are like. You simply cannot spend 3-4 instructional hours a day spread over a class of students for half the year (180 days), then give them no assistance outside of that and expect any significant fraction of them to succeed.
Yes, there are motivated students. Yes, there are fabulous teachers. Yes, coming to an open, inviting, and technologically advanced facility makes for a positive atmosphere.
We help my daughter every night with her homework. She's just at the end of 4th grade, but there are parts of her math that my wife knows how to do, but doesn't know well enough to teach. I'm pretty lousy at my local history (I didn't grow up here, but I was never a history buff anyway). Between the two of us, she has all the tools she needs to succeed. I cringe at a couple of the kids in her class that don't get any help on their homework; it makes me feel awful for them because I know how difficult some of the concepts were for my daughter, and how we might have spent an extra hour (or three) working though problems so that she understood them. For a 9 or 10 year old confronted with a completely foreign concept and nothing but a 30 minute class discussion and two (sometimes poor) examples it's got to be frustrating beyond belief. In two years time, I expect those kids will be in the bottom groups, failing these national tests, and not caring any more because they don't have the resources to be able to make it. Don't even get me started on the kids who parents take them on mini-vacations when they get out-of-school suspension because the parents figure if they have to take off work they may as well have some fun. Or the ones who blame the teacher when their kids get poor grades.
The problem isn't the system, or the money, or the tests...it's the parents. All the money and great teachers and fabulous facilities do is set the stage for learning. If the parents can't do their part, it will - by and large - be wasted.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
That's the point. He passes muster, but the content is hollow.
We let out kids grow up without critical thinking skills. It leads to things like believing in angels, buying magnetic bracelets, watching Fox News, and scapegoating innocent parties for your own problems.
I hate these kind of reports because it'll likely just force teachers to "teach the test" and not the material/reasoning/importance/usage beyond what the test requires...
The "simple facts" are a pre-requisite for the rest. How can you whine about being unable to teach anything else but the basics when you clearly haven't even covered the basics?
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
What makes everyone think it's the schools that are causing bad test results. Perhaps it's society itself. Maybe the kids just aren't interested.
The "simple facts" are a pre-requisite for the rest.
No, they aren't. The "rest" is the logic and reasoning that makes those facts make sense, without which students lack a framework to put those facts into in an organized manner.
I have no children, and cannot imagine I ever will (I didn't like kids, even when I was a kid). However I gladly support taxes for education. Why? Well to put it simply I don't want to die poor. I want this nation to continue to get richer and more prosperous and for that to happen we must have an educated populace.
There are all sorts of specifics as to why an uneducated populace would make life suck from the simple like your surgery example to the complex like social unrest and revolution due to an underclass. The long and short of it is I want none of that, I want a good life and that requires that others have a good life and THAT requires good education.
The "simple facts" are a pre-requisite for the rest.
Not in the sense you're saying. I can have you memorize the most seen test dictionary words so you'll know the various definitions when they appear on your tests. Or I can teach you latin roots so you can devise the meaning of most words without having seen them before. Math and science are easier: if you have the theory of something, you can generally divine specifics as necessary. Granted, 8th grade math tests only touch upon the most basic algebra, but as long as the students have a simple understanding of equations and the most rudimentary math, they can figure things out. I'm not saying kids are going to be able to plot a bicycle jump from two unequal platforms, but they'll be able to answer: 3x+5 = 20. Solve for x.
The only place you need to truly memorize things (in the 8th grade) is history.
Bad private schools get better, or die.
Or reject or expel students that make them look bad.
~Anguirel (lit. Living Star-Iron)
QA: The art of telling someone that their baby is ugly without getting punched.