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No they can't all be above average. However, with effort we could move the, "average" up.
Via acquired knowledge metrics our kids are simply hammered by kids from many other countries. One example......on the 2015 PSIA math test US kids finished 31st out 35 OECD countries.
What we are doing now simply does not work well enough.
Considering that about 1/4 of children in the United States are growing up in homes below the poverty level, then I think we should be comparing ourselves to other countries with similar poverty-rate numbers. Most of the countries in the top 25 have very low levels of child poverty. Their children are better cared-for, so of course their achievement will reflect that.
Another factor is that in most of the United States, school funding is tied to the local tax base. This is not the case in most of the countries in the top 25 positions. They may have schools that serve poor children, but the schools themselves are not poor as they are here in the United States.
If you compared the achievement of the children in the United States who are NOT growing up in poverty, then I would expect our position to be much higher. Middle-class and wealthy children, in general, are doing much better than their disadvantaged counterparts. It's the poor kids who are dragging down our achievement ratings.
Considering that about 1/4 of children in the United States are growing up in homes below the poverty level, then I think we should be comparing ourselves to other countries with similar poverty-rate numbers. Most of the countries in the top 25 have very low levels of child poverty. Their children are better cared-for, so of course their achievement will reflect that.
Another factor is that in most of the United States, school funding is tied to the local tax base. This is not the case in most of the countries in the top 25 positions. They may have schools that serve poor children, but the schools themselves are not poor as they are here in the United States.
If you compared the achievement of the children in the United States who are NOT growing up in poverty, then I would expect our position to be much higher. Middle-class and wealthy children, in general, are doing much better than their disadvantaged counterparts. It's the poor kids who are dragging down our achievement ratings.
Several of your implied claims are dubious or false.
I get that a lot of what you are saying is holy writ to you and millions but in this context adds up to deflection. I'd recommend a half day sometime studying up on how EU poverty and at risk poverty numbers are calculated (often .6 times median income) and then compare that to median incomes per country and cost of living metrics. Then do the same for say Russia, China, Japan, Macau etc.
When you get through chewing on the data you'll find that places like France, the social welfare spending capital of the world at around 32% of GDP, has child poverty numbers close to The US. Many countries are worse and some far worse.
Beyond all that there is no data analysis needed to know the childhood poverty and deprivation numbers in Russia, Vietnam, Italy and some others that finished more or less tied with The US or better have worse childhood poverty than The US.
Further, places like Germany, Estonia and The UK who also beat US kids on the PISA all are about even with The US or worse in terms of real childhood poverty.
FWIIW, according to Poverty USA 16.2% of US children live in poverty (2018 numbers).
That's a long way of saying child poverty measures across much of the world are more relativistic than in The US and comparing dislike numbers is faulty.
The takeaway is US childhood poverty numbers in no way explain our kid's poor PISA performance. Vietnam, Russia and Portugal explode that thinking.
Considering that about 1/4 of children in the United States are growing up in homes below the poverty level, then I think we should be comparing ourselves to other countries with similar poverty-rate numbers. Most of the countries in the top 25 have very low levels of child poverty. Their children are better cared-for, so of course their achievement will reflect that.
Another factor is that in most of the United States, school funding is tied to the local tax base. This is not the case in most of the countries in the top 25 positions. They may have schools that serve poor children, but the schools themselves are not poor as they are here in the United States.
If you compared the achievement of the children in the United States who are NOT growing up in poverty, then I would expect our position to be much higher. Middle-class and wealthy children, in general, are doing much better than their disadvantaged counterparts. It's the poor kids who are dragging down our achievement ratings.
I know this is mantra among a segment, but is it really a cause or is it an effect of the same cause as many other problems in school? While an anecdote may not be proof, there area enough anecdotes to indicate there is something else at work than just claiming "poverty" as the cause of everything. For one anecdote, I grew up in a mill village. By today's standards, pretty much everyone would be considered poor. Yet they all kept their houses up, kept food on the table, and all had high standards of behavior and expectations for their kids. And the kids did pretty well. They didn't become billionaires, and not all went to college, but they were a diverse lot of military, college grads, teachers, scientists, mechanics, farmers, welders, etc. Most of the kids of my generation were, by common standards, successful. Yet they all came out of what would be considered poor.
In contrast in my volunteer work, I work with many kids who would be described as poor. But "poor" only in relative terms. Certainly better off than many of the families of my generation by economic standards, though officially "poor." The big difference however is way they fall into the poor category. Broken homes, drug addict and alcoholic parents. I feel for those kids. But pouring more money into their families won't fix the problem because money isn't the problem; it's the result.
There's enough out there that tells me it's not about money but about attitude. The attitude the parents have. The attitude their kids have. And unfortunately, for many kids, their parents simply don't give a flying rat's butt. Mainstreaming those kids into the regular classroom doesn't help them. They need more help, support, and a different kind of help than most teachers can give. All it does is pull resources, time, etc away from the majority of the students, disrupts class, and doesn't help anyone.
Several of your implied claims are dubious or false.
I get that a lot of what you are saying is holy writ to you and millions but in this context adds up to deflection. I'd recommend a half day sometime studying up on how EU poverty and at risk poverty numbers are calculated (often .6 times median income) and then compare that to median incomes per country and cost of living metrics. Then do the same for say Russia, China, Japan, Macau etc.
When you get through chewing on the data you'll find that places like France, the social welfare spending capital of the world at around 32% of GDP, has child poverty numbers close to The US. Many countries are worse and some far worse.
Beyond all that there is no data analysis needed to know the childhood poverty and deprivation numbers in Russia, Vietnam, Italy and some others that finished more or less tied with The US or better have worse childhood poverty than The US.
Further, places like Germany, Estonia and The UK who also beat US kids on the PISA all are about even with The US or worse in terms of real childhood poverty.
FWIIW, according to Poverty USA 16.2% of US children live in poverty (2018 numbers).
That's a long way of saying child poverty measures across much of the world are more relativistic than in The US and comparing dislike numbers is faulty.
The takeaway is US childhood poverty numbers in no way explain our kid's poor PISA performance. Vietnam, Russia and Portugal explode that thinking.
Quote:
Originally Posted by tnff
I know this is mantra among a segment, but is it really a cause or is it an effect of the same cause as many other problems in school? While an anecdote may not be proof, there area enough anecdotes to indicate there is something else at work than just claiming "poverty" as the cause of everything. For one anecdote, I grew up in a mill village. By today's standards, pretty much everyone would be considered poor. Yet they all kept their houses up, kept food on the table, and all had high standards of behavior and expectations for their kids. And the kids did pretty well. They didn't become billionaires, and not all went to college, but they were a diverse lot of military, college grads, teachers, scientists, mechanics, farmers, welders, etc. Most of the kids of my generation were, by common standards, successful. Yet they all came out of what would be considered poor.
In contrast in my volunteer work, I work with many kids who would be described as poor. But "poor" only in relative terms. Certainly better off than many of the families of my generation by economic standards, though officially "poor." The big difference however is way they fall into the poor category. Broken homes, drug addict and alcoholic parents. I feel for those kids. But pouring more money into their families won't fix the problem because money isn't the problem; it's the result.
There's enough out there that tells me it's not about money but about attitude. The attitude the parents have. The attitude their kids have. And unfortunately, for many kids, their parents simply don't give a flying rat's butt. Mainstreaming those kids into the regular classroom doesn't help them. They need more help, support, and a different kind of help than most teachers can give. All it does is pull resources, time, etc away from the majority of the students, disrupts class, and doesn't help anyone.
I appreciate what both of you are saying. And I appreciate the volunteer work that you do, tnff, with kids you may describe as poor.
From where I stand, I see a large number of schools and districts that are starved of resources. I have spent the last 28 years in such a school, and I can tell you that the money that is spent is often misspent, and that the efforts to improve are completely inadequate to even maintain our footing. I see the effects of generational poverty in the families I have worked with for nearly three decades, some of whom have made no progress economically. The houses are either projects or rentals, the kids on foodstamps may or may not benefit from them depending upon their parents, and standards of behavior are what you would expect in a city where many parents are in the criminal justice system.
There may be such conditions in the other countries that you mentioned, but few of those countries fund their schools based on the local tax base. Most of them have some kind of federal system to ensure that all schools receive similar resources. Most of those countries don't have a two-tiered health care system that relegates poor kids to second-rate care. While they may have parents that don't care for their children, there is universal early childhood care that helps children learn appropriate social behavior despite their parents' deficiencies.
With a math background, I can appreciate statistics and the trends they bear out. But on the ground, those statistics translate into high school children who don't have enough food for the week-end, because their cracked-out mother can't get it together enough to get through the foodstamp application process. Multiply that case times millions of others and you may have a better understanding of how the effects of poverty can cause a nationwide cascade of poor achievement.
Before decrying how poorly our children perform, we may want to consider how poorly we treat our children, especially the ones who didn't win at the parent lottery.
As I've been thinking recently, and it became clear to me that a schools purpose, and sole purpose is to educate a student with as much useful, and necessary knowledge as a school is able to. However, I see that every moment that a child spends stressing about school is another wasted moment that the child's focus is taken away from what really matters the accumulation of knowledge. It even destroys a child's understanding of why they are in school solely to aquire knowledge, and that acquiring knowledge isn't stressful, but opens up unlimited possibilities to improve our everyday lives.
Our society as a whole promotes stress, and the ability to deal with a lot of it. However, we stress because of the humans that have came before us and the ACTUALLY stressful world's they lived in. Our modern stress is a manifestation of their life or death situations experienced on a daily basis. This stress does drive us to achieve, but only just enough, and for all the wrong reasons. When human beings are stressed every little bit diminishes the clarity in winch we see the world around us, winch we still manage to survive, but it's actually in a sense blinding us and preventing us from understanding our world better.
The world we live in today is very very different from the world of our ancestors over eons humans hacking into those instinctual emotions is misguided, and counter productive foraking sure a child is actually learning in school. Most people understand. How a child that has a very stressful out of school life deminishes that child's ability to learn, but we seem to overall not understand how school induced produces the same results with the child just getting by on the bare minimum, and leads to students associating gathering knowledge with negativity, something it's not.
Knowledge no matter how big or small is positive and we keep students from seeing that when we expect them to be stressed out at school. I think it's time for an complete overhaul of our educational system, and to stop legitimizing complacency winch we as a society have done by allowing the few good examples of our modern system cloud the systemic problems.
Some small and infrequent stress is inevitable in some curricula, especially with big tests at the end of a quarter or semester. However, prolonged, chronic stress can definitely cause damage to a student’s desire to learn.
As I've been thinking recently, and it became clear to me that a schools purpose, and sole purpose is to educate a student with as much useful, and necessary knowledge as a school is able to. However, I see that every moment that a child spends stressing about school is another wasted moment that the child's focus is taken away from what really matters the accumulation of knowledge. It even destroys a child's understanding of why they are in school solely to aquire knowledge, and that acquiring knowledge isn't stressful, but opens up unlimited possibilities to improve our everyday lives.
Our society as a whole promotes stress, and the ability to deal with a lot of it. However, we stress because of the humans that have came before us and the ACTUALLY stressful world's they lived in. Our modern stress is a manifestation of their life or death situations experienced on a daily basis. This stress does drive us to achieve, but only just enough, and for all the wrong reasons. When human beings are stressed every little bit diminishes the clarity in winch we see the world around us, winch we still manage to survive, but it's actually in a sense blinding us and preventing us from understanding our world better.
The world we live in today is very very different from the world of our ancestors over eons humans hacking into those instinctual emotions is misguided, and counter productive foraking sure a child is actually learning in school. Most people understand. How a child that has a very stressful out of school life deminishes that child's ability to learn, but we seem to overall not understand how school induced produces the same results with the child just getting by on the bare minimum, and leads to students associating gathering knowledge with negativity, something it's not.
Knowledge no matter how big or small is positive and we keep students from seeing that when we expect them to be stressed out at school. I think it's time for an complete overhaul of our educational system, and to stop legitimizing complacency winch we as a society have done by allowing the few good examples of our modern system cloud the systemic problems.
It will depend entirely on the student.
I only perform well under stress. That is the only time I focus well. Without stress I tend to drift, procrastinate, lollygag. With stress, I perform above expectations. I know a whole lot of people just like me in that way, all are very successful by society's standards ("important" "high-level" jobs, make a lot of money, lots of influence, etc). If school were less stressful, we would have likely floundered and failed. Many people need pressure to perform.
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