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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.'"
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.
Of course, you're assuming that test competency is a good thing. That assumes the test is fair, reasonable and actually has something to do with the student's knowledge base. Given what we know about standardized tests, a bit of skepticism is in order.
That said, the bottom feeders being the states we assume to be be bottom feeders when it comes to anything other than actually eating does give one pause.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
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.)
Not only is it a statement on the fallacy of the superiority of "progressive" regimes in schooling, but in funding as well. Utah spends far, far less per pupil, and gets much better results. Success in education comes from, first and foremost, an appreciation of getting an education, and second, the willingness to work for it. You'll get better results with a single, good teacher with nothing but a piece of chalk and a chalkboard, teaching a class of eager students, then you will with any expensive computerized, state of the art classroom that's been staffed with some guy waiting for his retirement age and a class of kids that don't give a damn.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
I'm not republican or democrat... but perhaps the data really requires a more careful analysis rather than just pointing fingers to the other side.
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.
Fine. Then don't expect my tax money to implement laws to protect you from having the rest of your money taken away from you by someone else because they want it.
Lets all devolve into a bunch of people living in armed compounds telling everyone else to fuck off. You don't get roads, you don't get electricity, you don't get laws, you don't get nothing that you can't get and keep yourself by force.
See, in your system, you want someone to help pay to enforce your rights, and you want to opt out of paying to help anybody else. Which means as long as you get what you feel you're entitled to, everyone else is on their own. Why should my taxes pay to preserve the rights of the rich?
It's not so much "society" and "civilization" as it is a collection of armed camps.
I sincerely hope you get the opportunity to experience life the way you think it should happen. I bet someone will decide you've got a pretty mouth.
All you drooling idiots who whine about the taxes being forcibly taken from you at gun point seem to conveniently forget there's a lot of those services you do make use of ... take those away, and you can have something like Somalia or the inside of a prison. Bet that would be fun.
Vouchers aren't going to help. The public school systems aren't broken, its society that is broken. Kids who are individually motivated and have parental support will do great in any school environment. Kids who lack motivation but have parental pressure may be forced into rebellion in their later teenager years or college, but they'll at least do well in grade school. Kids who have motivation but lack parental support are the ones who are trapped in the school system, and their parents won't take advantage of things like vouchers. And the kids who lack motivation and lack parental support will eventually drop out because we have no support system for them. Any increased funding needs not go to vouchers, but instead to parental education to encourage the unmotivated parents to be more involved in their children's lives.
Occasionally living proof of the Ballmer peak.
Right. There is no benefit to you at all from living in a country with an educated population. None.
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?
The Unions are the problem that stop advancement.
They are more interested in protecting their jobs, than making changes that help the students (such as firing bad teachers, or eliminating permanent employment via tenure). You can see the excellent ABC 20/20 documentary called "Stupid in America" on youtube. There's also a sequel produced for FOX which updates the older 20/20 report. And then a "part 3" sequel to the sequel.
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
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...
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.
Test competency in the sciences for an 8th grader probably is a good thing. From the article:
I have trouble believing that questions like these are somehow unreasonable, unfair, or biased against black/hispanic/asian kids, or somehow socioeconomically biased. These are fairly basic science questions, and there are some fairly clear boundaries between right and wrong answers. If your kid cannot answer these questions after taking courses which are supposed to teach the answers to these questions, I think it's safe to say that there's a rather large disconnect between the educational system's goals and its outcomes.
We can argue the merits of standardized testing, and "teaching to the test" until the cows come home, but if your school system has adopted the test as a measurement criteria, and structured its curriculum around that test, and still achieves remarkably low results... something is wrong.
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.