ACT scores fall to lowest in 31 years (public school, paying, military)

[Dwatted Wabbit]

Originally Posted by redguard57

https://www.axios.com/2022/10/12/act...niors-covid-19

The pandemic closures caused a MESS.

This is the first cohort that had 2 whole years disrupted by Covid. I expect this is going to get worse before it gets better.

Just imagine a generation that makes Xoe, Obama, Moochie, Chuckie, Boinie, Adam Shiftless, Nanny, etc. look smart.

Pretty damn scary.

[Ruth4Truth]

Originally Posted by DAXhound;

it is no longer important to know how to multiply and divide.

Originally Posted by springfieldva

The higher pay angle tends to point the finger at the teachers as being the source of the problem - if teachers were only paid more they would teach better and I don't think that's fair. The reality is that parents own a good amount of the blame.

Barring a learning disability, why doesn't your kid know their ABCs by the time they get into Kindergarten? Why aren't you reading with your fist grader? What haven't you checked out classics for your 5th grader to read? Why haven't you done basic math practice with your kid like memorizing addition, subtraction, multiplication and division tables? Why isn't your kid doing their homework and submitting their assignments on time? Why is your kid skipping classes or not showing up to school at all? Why did your 8 year old stay up until 2am last night?

Teachers can only do so much.

There are "division tables"? And addition and subtraction tables? I've never heard of those. But it's come out in other discussions here, that schools are no longer having kids memorize multiplications table, because it's "old-fashioned", or something. I don't know if it's because kids were bringing calculators to school already in grade school (?), or if they wanted kids to learn to somehow work with the numbers to work out the multiplication (etc.) on their own. And I don't know if that decision was state-specific, or if it was part of a national trend.

[Dwatted Wabbit]

Originally Posted by Ruth4Truth

There are "division tables"? And addition and subtraction tables? I've never heard of those. But it's come out in other discussions here, that schools are no longer having kids memorize multiplications table, because it's "old-fashioned", or something. I don't know if it's because kids were bringing calculators to school already in grade school (?), or if they wanted kids to learn to somehow work with the numbers to work out the multiplication (etc.) on their own. And I don't know if that decision was state-specific, or if it was part of a national trend.

Holy moly.

Memorizing those tables is ABC stuff, apparently that's Old School now. But training the brain to memorize, to calculate, is important. I look for clerks and other help who are at least 40, if I can find them. Because they tend to be a lot brighter than the young ones.

Learning how to use a calculator and word processor does not require much intellectual power, nor does it develop much. Not compared to going to a library and going through the card catalogue and finding books that will give you information. There's something to be said for doing detective work. It's more complex than punching a few keys on a keyboard.

Schools have been going downhill for 100 years. My father learned Greek and Latin in elementary school. He was reading various Greek works, in Greek, long into his old age. He was born in 1905. He grew up in a little hick town in New England. But I'd hazard those hicks were 10x as smart and as learned as today's crop of sophisticated computer-literate hicks.

[Ruth4Truth]

Originally Posted by RamenAddict

I don’t think anyone is to blame here. The real issue is that suddenly teachers were expected to do e-learning, but most of the school system hadn’t fully implemented e-learning as a strategy at the time a pandemic came. Suddenly the school is forced to go to e-learning and the teachers were expected to use stuff like zoom and other methods to teach classes. Meanwhile, on the home front, parents find that they may have 2-4 kids at home each having to do online lessons AND share the space with mom and dad. Do they all have space to do the work? Do they have the technology for each child to be in class at the same time? Is the school/district providing help with that.

In low-income areas, it's common for there to be no computer tech in the home. I've seen local libraries inundated daily with kids after school gets out, doing their homework on the library computers. This even tended to morph into a teen social hang-out after the work was done. And libraries were closed during much of the Covid crisis, so I imagine lots of kids were cut off from school completely. I don't know how schools handled that.

Covid hit so unexpectedly, I don't know how you can blame school districts for not being prepared for e-learning. Was that something schools were developing on their own? And where would the money come from to buy computers for dozens of kids who didn't have their own at home? All that funding needed for every school in the district on short notice, when an unexpected pandemic hit. It doesn't seem realistic to expect the schools to be able to do that. The schools have computer labs on site, but those weren't accessible during a general lockdown.

What a mess.

[tnff]

Originally Posted by Ruth4Truth

In low-income areas, it's common for there to be no computer tech in the home. I've seen local libraries inundated daily with kids after school gets out, doing their homework on the library computers. This even tended to morph into a teen social hang-out after the work was done. And libraries were closed during much of the Covid crisis, so I imagine lots of kids were cut off from school completely. I don't know how schools handled that.

Covid hit so unexpectedly, I don't know how you can blame school districts for not being prepared for e-learning. Was that something schools were developing on their own? And where would the money come from to buy computers for dozens of kids who didn't have their own at home? All that funding needed for every school in the district on short notice, when an unexpected pandemic hit. It doesn't seem realistic to expect the schools to be able to do that. The schools have computer labs on site, but those weren't accessible during a general lockdown.

What a mess.

That was one of the big issues that was discussed when COVID first hit. Like around here, there are many places where there is no internet in the home. Or it's only on the phone. Even when the schools provided Chromebooks to every kid, they couldn't connect from their home. And yet there were also many here on CD that everyhome had access to high speed internet. There are so many people who have everything at their fingertip, they can't understand not everyone does.

And it's not just socio-economic. I worked with people every day, degreed engineers who used computers in their daily work, who couldn't work from home because the internet didn't go that far. One friend spent between $6 and $10K to have a line extended from the end of line to his home and got neighbors to join in so they could get it too.

Also, one of the real problems with giving every kid a computer (Chromebook) is how many simply couldn't take care of them. Our local district had, even before COVID, the dream of going fully electronic -- no textbooks but everything on the computer and issuing Chromebooks to every student. Supposed to be cheaper than replacing paper textbooks because the e-text could be updated easier. Didn't happen. Broken computers quickly cost more than the textbooks in terms of lifetime and updating e-texts was quite expensive.

In the end everything around here, work, schools, etc were back in person relatively quickly compared to other parts of the country.

[Ruth4Truth]

Originally Posted by Dwatted Wabbit

Holy moly.

Memorizing those tables is ABC stuff, apparently that's Old School now. But training the brain to memorize, to calculate, is important. I look for clerks and other help who are at least 40, if I can find them. Because they tend to be a lot brighter than the young ones.

Learning how to use a calculator and word processor does not require much intellectual power, nor does it develop much. Not compared to going to a library and going through the card catalogue and finding books that will give you information. There's something to be said for doing detective work. It's more complex than punching a few keys on a keyboard.

Schools have been going downhill for 100 years. My father learned Greek and Latin in elementary school. He was reading various Greek works, in Greek, long into his old age. He was born in 1905. He grew up in a little hick town in New England. But I'd hazard those hicks were 10x as smart and as learned as today's crop of sophisticated computer-literate hicks.

lol. I know. I got an old-school education, but there were no "tables" for addition, subtraction and division.

The bolded raises another point. Kids now are used to "asking Google" when they have homework requiring any kind of research. Or they "ask Google" rather than looking up answers in their own history textbooks. But parents complain that the kids are doing only very shallow research on the 'net. In fact, the complaints I've heard are about the internet itself being to blame (seriously). I've been told by parents, that you can't do in-depth research on the 'net, rather than that the kids aren't learning research and analytical methods to open up the vast storehouse of info, published scholarly articles, dissertations and even entire books available to them.

I can only conclude, that these are parents who have never done any in-depth research on the 'net themselves. Older Boomer parents and early Gen-X parents have no idea of the potential that it offers. And of course, they're not going to blame their kids for being lazy researchers. And I don't know what the teacher expectations are, when they assign history questions or whatever the assignment is. Are they requiring detective work and puzzling out all aspects of the topics raised?

[Ruth4Truth]

Originally Posted by Dwatted Wabbit

Holy moly.

Memorizing those tables is ABC stuff, apparently that's Old School now. But training the brain to memorize, to calculate, is important..

OK, I looked up the division tables, lol. I "asked Google". They're just the opposite of the multiplication tables. Once you know the multiplication tables, you don't need to memorize the division tables separately, because you already know how the numbers work. Right? There's no secret that needs to be memorized. My recollection is, that after working with multiplication for awhile so we were proficient at it, we went straight into long division using larger numbers.

[InformedConsent]

Originally Posted by redguard57

Do other countries' governments don't fail? But ours does?

Yes. Other countries sort their students by ability/achievement level and offer differentiated education, accordingly. Students take tests and then are admitted/assigned to schools and classes according to their test scores. In the US, government schools' mix everyone together and their goal is equal educational outcomes, which by necessity, dumbs down a significant percentage of students because the majority achieve at a below average level.

[InformedConsent]

Originally Posted by Arktikos

You will find that the private schools score higher. However, if a control for family income and parents’ level of educational achievement is applied then the advantage is eliminated.

Not exactly true. Studies indicate that even when adjusted for socioeconomic level, religious order private schools educate students better than public schools. Time Magazine published an article on it.

[RamenAddict]

Originally Posted by Ruth4Truth

lol. I know. I got an old-school education, but there were no "tables" for addition, subtraction and division.

The bolded raises another point. Kids now are used to "asking Google" when they have homework requiring any kind of research. Or they "ask Google" rather than looking up answers in their own history textbooks. But parents complain that the kids are doing only very shallow research on the 'net. In fact, the complaints I've heard are about the internet itself being to blame (seriously). I've been told by parents, that you can't do in-depth research on the 'net, rather than that the kids aren't learning research and analytical methods to open up the vast storehouse of info, published scholarly articles, dissertations and even entire books available to them.

I can only conclude, that these are parents who have never done any in-depth research on the 'net themselves. Older Boomer parents and early Gen-X parents have no idea of the potential that it offers. And of course, they're not going to blame their kids for being lazy researchers. And I don't know what the teacher expectations are, when they assign history questions or whatever the assignment is. Are they requiring detective work and puzzling out all aspects of the topics raised?

I think there are a lot of people who are proud of being technologically illiterate and consider it a feature instead of a bug. Instead the real issue is that kids will google, look on Wikipedia, and call it a day. They don’t actually consider that Wikipedia is open source and can be edited by anyone. It can be a good starting point, because there are cited sources you can visit for more information to see if the info is reliable. If no one is actually doing that, it is a problem. There are just so many articles that come out that interpret stuff for us. Media from both sides will come up with fantastical/biased interpretations, but if you read the actual source material, it often doesn’t say what any of those articles say it says. Realistically, the students should be taught to be critical thinkers who can use the internet to develop their own opinions based on all the evidence available.