The table above was sampled from Joanne Jacobs’s post about the recent NAEP English and math test results for this year. Quoting another article she implores:
Tell parents the unpleasant truth about learning loss, writes Andrew Rotherham in a story on the state NAEP scores in the The 74. “The disaster and inequity of pandemic policies is now in clear focus,” he writes. Despite a few outliers — Department of Defense and Catholic schools — “it’s an across-the-board disaster for the United States.”
“Students already furthest from success in school were most impacted,” he writes. “Thirty-eight percent of eighth-graders are at a level in mathematics that leaves them functionally unprepared to fend for themselves in the world, let alone pursue success in various college and career opportunities.”
You may recall that at the time I pointed out two things. First, that the public schools serve two constituencies: students and their parents on the one hand and teachers and school staffs on the other. Second, that the needs of both constituencies could be satisfied by distinguishing between teachers who were at greater risk for contracting COVID-19 from those who weren’t. That flies in the face of long-standing union rules but needs must when the devil drives.
Well, it looks like the needs of one constituency completely overwhelmed that of the other and, as should not be surprising, the triumphant constituency was teachers and staffs. I am strongly reminded of Jerry Pournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy:
in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people: those who work to further the actual goals of the organization, and those who work for the organization itself. Examples in education would be teachers who work and sacrifice to teach children, vs. union representatives who work to protect any teacher including the most incompetent. The Iron Law states that in all cases, the second type of person will always gain control of the organization, and will always write the rules under which the organization functions
It is not necessarily true that lost years of learning can be remediated. It has been well known for a century that there are center crucial periods in child development in which if certain skills are not learned they never will be.
We’re not just in competition with each other anymore. We’re in competition with everyone in the world. The students who’ve wasted a year will feel the gap keenly in their later lives.
crucial periods:
Particularly mathematics where catching up would mean taking a remedial course in the base knowledge necessary for study of the current course, simultaneously.
Not gonna happen.
Send them back two grades?
Not gonna happen.
They will find a way to pass them through.
The only nu#bers that You need are in the Ten COmmandments! Our Lord Trump will put forth the truth and my caps lock isn’t working. B dammit can somebody fix this
It’s going to take parent involvement.
We were ready to hold our kids back a grade but they were still at or above grade level so we didn’t.
I don’t think anyone should expect educational bureaucracies to do anything. That’s the way bureaucracies are. It’s up to parents.
Cowen had posted a study claiming that 2/3 of the losses have been made up already. The bright kids will figure it out and those are the ones we need to succeed.
Steve
Much could be done, but a green poultice of loosely audited federal money, pay raises all around and a revision of the norms to make everyone look good.
One piece of information is missing, they stopped testing 12th grade students in 2019. The test was skipped for two years, but only resumed for 4th & 8th graders in 2022. Looks to me like they don’t want to know. Don’t want to know the high school drop-out rate either.
No. These results come from the hard-wired genetics of the populations tested. There is no way that blacks with an average IQ of 85 (genetically fixed) will ever perform at the level of whites, never mind Jews or East Asians. If you don’t understand that, you are the problem.
I a modern economy, blacks, or at least half of them, survive only on white charity. About 1/6 of whites are in the same category, and maybe half of hispanics, too.
What is preventing you from understanding basic human biology? Are you that brain-washed?
Jesus Bob, your “hard-wired” racist bullshit is…bullshit. And this is coming from a guy who definitely doesn’t subscribe to the blank slate theory.
Interestingly enough, large numbers of people, especially AA’s are thriving in industries that were only hobbies at emancipation.
Chanting performance artists strut, snarl, and growl for the camera and are rewarded with millions of dollars, bling, cars, mansions, and a revolving stable of ho’s.
Doesn’t THAT take the cake!!
And I’ll give it to you that Jews are smart, which might help explain the worldwide persistence of Anti-Semitism, you needn’t BE a Jew if you are able to hire them, ask Donald Trump.
All I meant is that if you skip trig, you won’t get calc.
You can still succeed at something.
Look at Ye, he can’t even read.
That’s not exactly true. There have been professional entertainers for millennia. What is true is that there are fewer professional entertainers today relative to the population than there were a century ago and that a handful of those who remain are paid a lot more.
Data from the past says the learning loss isn’t fully reversible. At work, I was in a meeting on future risks where a presenter said one risk is the odds of a deterioration in the quality of the future hires based on the sudden decline in test scores during and after the pandemic — that was jarring.
On professional entertainers — isn’t that an outcome to increasing productivity. Before modern communication technology, distribution was the limiting factor in entertainer productivity. On the other hand, the total number of people working in the entertainment industry is higher then ever, but mostly in the “backend” (makeup artists, directors, sports statisticians, special effects technicians) instead of the “frontend”.
Since I think this is mostly related to the new NAEP scores we should take a long term, historical look. Link below goes to long term NAEP scores. So first of all it is not clear to me if it is the absolute scores or the relative scores of these kinds of tests that relate to later in life outcomes like employment. I suspect it is more the latter than the former so I dont really expect to see much in long term effects.
Second, kind of reinforcing my first idea, we have had fairly significant improvements in scores, especially in math. Even with this drop, scores are on par with what they were 15-25 years ago and much better than they were 30-35 years ago. This goes against the popular narrative which is that our schools keep getting worse and worse. So if the popular narrative is correct, we now have test scores compatible with a time when education was better.
I think the popular narrative is actually wrong. Education has gotten better. This is a small step back but not likely to have permanent effects.
https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=38
Steve
Consider the implications of the optimistic historical view you advocate. All of the improvement took place prior to 2012. The question before us is whether the decline constitutes a trend? We won’t know the answer to that for two years.
By then there will be a considerable number of young people who aren’t able to read or figure. My concern is more about the individuals affected than it is with historical perspecctive.
I don’t think that any comparison between the United States and Canada on the subject of elections is reasonable for many reasons:
1. California alone has more registered voters than Canada.
2. Complexity rises faster than linearly.
3. We are far more diverse than Canada.
4. The Canadians trust their government more than we do ours, probably for good reason.
1) We are more diverse but the difference isnt huge and is narrowing. See link. Census puts us at 59% white. In Canada that is 69%. (They use the term visibly European.)
2) The comparisons are useful. We have a system where every state does something different. It is a recipe for abuse and mistrust. People in states where their team won the election look at the states where their team lost and blame the election methods, even (or maybe especially) when they dont have evidence for their beliefs. In Canada everyone follows the same rules. They generally try to make it easier to vote (imagine government actually being helpful) but everyone follows the same rules and they all have the same access so you dont have the huge disparities in wait times and the inability to make it to the polls.
3) Dont you know any actual Canadians? Talk with them about voting. The ones I know wonder why we make it so hard to vote.
Steve
https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/statistics-canada-immigration-census-1.6629861
I shouldn’t need to explain it to you but let me explain non-linear growth to you. With non-linear growth in complexity a 20% difference in diversity doesn’t mean a 20% increase in complexity. It could mean a 100% increase in complexity or even greater.
I grok that but let me explain where we are at the starting line. The US has a complexity of about 1 million because each state has its own rules. The rules are carried out at the local levels when it comes to enforcement. Determining stuff like how many voting machines a place get is determined by states plus local conditions like how many and what they can afford.
Canada starts off with a complexity of about 10. One entity sets the rules, enforces them and stuff like voting machines, as I understand it, are also equal and not subject to ability to pay. Increase the complexity of Canada’s system due to size by 1000% and its still not as bad as the US.
Steve
I have no idea how one makes the claim its unlikely to have permanant effects. Unless one defines permanant as in longer than 70 years until all the affected children have lived out their lives.
The historical data from where it has happened doesn’t support such a claim — school closures in China during the cultural revolution, West Africa during Ebola, Europe during WW2 all had measurable impacts on those school cohorts. Both in absolute skill attainment and relative success to the generations before and after who were not affected.
Even on a theoretical level it doesn’t make sense. Even if you don’t assume skills must be learned at a certain age or it becomes very hard; and assume skills take a specific amount of time to learn — which is consistent with how education has been done for millennia. Losing 1-2 years of education is bound to affect how much one can learn before one is finished school. For bright kids who can skip grades; losing a year of education means they just graduate on time. But for the median child who isn’t skipping grades, they either graduate older than expected (and lose time spent working), or simply learn less.
None of those seem anything like covid and when you look at the scores I think you see that. The drop just isn’t that large. It puts kids at the same levels they were about 20 years ago. Significantly better than 50 years ago. Most kids were out for a year or so. Most had at least OK internet access. When they went back to school those schools were functional as was the society around them. Not like WW2. Ebola maybe comes closest but with Ebola you also had a lot of younger people die and its Africa where education isn’t really that good anyway.
Steve
20 years of progress is not something to be sneered at, considering the amount of money that was spent to get that progress.
That the math score had never dropped in over 50 years until the pandemic should be large warning bell.