Category: Education

A friend’s daughter is a passionate progressive and, after completing an expensive degree at an elite university, signed up as a public middle school engineering teacher. Things haven’t been going well. “What percentage of her students are easy-to-teach white or Asian native speakers of English?” “Zero,” answered her dad. “They’re all either Black or immigrants. Half of the students speak only Spanish.”

All of the work for the course is done in the classroom/lab and, therefore, no homework is required. At least half of the students did nothing, goofing off in class and turning nothing in. “I can’t grade their work because they didn’t submit any,” says the daughter, ” so at least half of the class should get Fs.” She talked to some of the veteran teachers, however, and they advised her to give everyone in the class at least a C. The paperwork associated with a D or F grade would be onerous.

The father is an Obama-style Democrat (bigger government, Rainbow Flagism, but not necessarily Biden/Harris-style open borders). He volunteered that the core problem with our public schools nationwide is chronic underfunding. He believed that in the good old days of American K-12 the schools had vastly more money per student. He and his daughter both thought that most of the problems would disappear if the class sizes were reduced to half of the current levels (i.e., double the number of teachers).

Urban Institute offers some trends. State and local governments now spend more on “public welfare” than on schools:

Public welfare is also the champion for inflation-adjusted spending growth (“health and hospitals” have also grown and would also have been considered “welfare” in the bad old days):

Inflation-adjusted spending on K-12 has grown by 136 percent compared to the purportedly good old days of school funding in 1977. (Perhaps it doesn’t matter for a growth comparison, but most numbers for “per-pupil spending” understate what society spends on K-12 because they don’t include the capital costs of building or renovating schools.)

Circling back to the grade inflation issue, I wonder if it is time to trot out my oft-expressed opinion that teachers shouldn’t grade their own students. There should be a neutral third party (maybe simply a teacher at another school) who does the grading while the teacher is purely a coach to assist students with doing well when they submit material to the neutral evaluator. (See “Universities and Economic Growth” from 2009, for example.)

Loosely related, a “Failure is not an Option” frame around an EDUKTOR license plate (Illinois), captured in the Juno Beach Pier parking lot:

See “Back to school in Chicago: fewer than 1-in-3 students read at grade level” for how, apparently, giving students the Ds and Fs when they’re at the D and F level of achievement is not an option.

Nature officially endorsed Kamala Harris for President and thus fully established their righteous bona fides. Here’s a recent tweet from the same folks:

They’re highlighting the inferior achievement/ability of a subset of humans. When did that become okay?

A no-paywall version of the article: https://archive.is/dY45U

Part of an i-Ready assignment for our third grader in the Palm Beach County Schools:

This is a description of a real-world endeavor that is also valorized by CBS:

“When we actually got into the classroom, the books were just mainly about white boys and dogs,” Dias said. … She started a book drive. The idea was simple, but ambitious – to collect 1,000 books about black girls. … The books began arriving and stacking up. By the time “CBS This Morning” visited, Marley had collected close to 1,300 books. Marley’s favorite among them is “Brown Girl Dreaming” by Jacqueline Woodson.

Woodson – who won both the prestigious Newbery Award and a National Book Award for “Brown Girl Dreaming” – knows the importance of identifying with characters in a book.

“Seeing a story on a page about a black child written by a black author not only legitimizes your own existence in the world, because you’re a part of something else. ‘Look, I’m here in this book,'” Woodson said.

Maybe one of today’s third graders will grow up to run a taxpayer-funded public library with books that are segregated according to the race and gender ID of the protagonist. #IHaveADream

High school seniors should have their acceptance/rejection notices by now. Thus, it is time to start thinking about how the younger kids will navigate the ever-more-brutal world of college admissions.

First, some group chat messages regarding the son of a friend who married a Taiwanese-American:

• He got into Dartmouth, Harvard, and Yale. Waitlisted at Brown
• He should go to Harvard then. People will think he is smart because he looks Asian and they know that an Asian kid has to work 10X as hard to get into Harvard. Harvard is the gold standard of Asian hate.
• Harvard has terrible teachers. Brown has terrible students.
• Yale is for gay homosexuals. [A South Park reference.]

Speaking of Asians… a few months ago, a Chinese immigrant friend hired a Boston-based college admissions counselor for her 16-year-old high school sophomore: $18,000 is the initial fee and it covers 30 hours of work. What can a college application counselor do for someone whose first college application won’t be submitted for nearly two years? “The counselor will help him select and apply for internships.” I mentioned this to some friends in a chat group and got a response from a Maskachusetts-based participant:

Man, poor people don’t have a chance. Elizabeth “the system is rigged” Warren was correct.

New York Times, 2019… “Inside the Pricey, Totally Legal World of College Consultants”:

For prices up to $1.5 million, parents can buy a five-year, full-service package of college admissions consulting from a company in New York City called Ivy Coach.

The service — all of it legal — begins as early as eighth grade, as students are steered toward picking the right classes and extracurriculars to help them stand out from the crowd. Then comes intensive preparation for the SAT or ACT, both “coachable exams,” explained Brian Taylor, the company’s managing director, followed by close editing of college essays.

“Is that unfair? That the privileged can pay?” Mr. Taylor asked. “Yes. But that’s how the world works.”

(If $1.5 million was the pre-Biden price, imagine what it costs in 2025!)

From the Ivy Coach web site:

The latest National Assessment of Educational Progress scores are out and American public school students are doing worse than ever. “American Children’s Reading Skills Reach New Lows” (NYT):

In the latest release of federal test scores, educators had hoped to see widespread recovery from the learning loss incurred during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Instead, the results, from last year’s National Assessment of Educational Progress, tell a grim tale, especially in reading: The slide in achievement has only continued.

The percentage of eighth graders who have “below basic” reading skills according to NAEP was the largest it has been in the exam’s three-decade history — 33 percent. The percentage of fourth graders at “below basic” was the largest in 20 years, at 40 percent.

There was progress in math, but not enough to offset the losses of the pandemic.

Recent reading declines have cut across lines of race and class. And while students at the top end of the academic distribution are performing similarly to students prepandemic, the drops remain pronounced for struggling students, despite a robust, bipartisan movement in recent years to improve foundational literacy skills.

“Our lowest performing students are reading at historically low levels,” said Peggy Carr, commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, which gives the NAEP exam. “We need to stay focused in order to right this ship.”

There is even worse news for this failing government-run enterprise (the per-state results don’t include private school kids, though the national results include some):

But the tumult of the new presidential administration may threaten that focus. The federal test scores began to circulate on the same day that many educators across the country fell into panic as they tried to discern how a White House freeze on some federal funding would affect local schools.

Our worst fear is that new bureaucrats might disrupt the proven-to-fail system.

I’ve surveyed a bunch of news articles about these scores and nobody seems to be willing to consider the possibility that a falling average IQ among Americans is primarily responsible for the drop in scores that are correlated with IQ. IQ is correlated with income and we have policies designed to ensure that America’s lowest income residents produce the most children (chart showing the effect of free family-sized housing for those who don’t work vs. brutal price competition for family-sized housing among the working- and middle-class (rich people can afford big houses so they have plenty of kids, but there aren’t too many rich people in the U.S. so the effect on demographics is small)):

In addition to encouraging our least productive and least conscientious natives to have more kids we’ve been aggressively importing humans from societies that have IQs lower than the previous U.S. average of 100. Examples, in alphabetical order (source):

• Afghanistan: 82
• Haiti: 81
• Mexico: 88
• “Palestine” (Rashida Tlaib): 78
• Syria: 74
• Somalia (Ilhan Omar): 68
• Venezuela: 83

IQ depends partly on education and environment, so presumably a Somali who grows up in Minnesota will have a higher IQ than one who grew up in Somalia. On the other hand, IQ is heritable so the children of immigrants from low-IQ societies, who make up an ever-increasing percentage of American K-12 students, can’t be expected to reach the previous American average.

Put another way: Suppose that Americans had an explicit goal of reducing average IQ in the U.S. What would the government do differently from our welfare state and immigration policies of the last 30 years?

I’m not sure if lower IQ is a better explanation than screen time, coronapanic, and unionized teacher apathy, but it seems worth including on the list of possibilities. (Coronapanic doesn’t seem to be explanatory because #Science-denying states with 2-month school closures, e.g., Florida, experienced similar test score declines to states with #Science-informed 18-month school closures (a little complicated to compare data across years because Florida has a recently introduced lavish school choice program in which parents of any income level can get $8000/year to send a child to private school).) Perhaps we’re unfairly blaming school systems and teachers when the decline in output is attributable to the decline in input. As Harvard President-turned-Professor Claudine Gay originally noted, “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, But in ourselves”.

Related:

• “Assessing the intellectual ability of asylum seekers” (Int J Dev Disabil. 2017): “there are theoretical reasons to suppose that if an individual comes to a developed country from a developing country, his/her measured IQ and true intellectual ability will increase. Both the individual’s health and diet may improve, they may be exposed to a more scientific/logical way of thinking (Flynn 2007) and they may get a better education. The evidence for whether this happens or does not happen is very scant.”