John Halpin has two pleas for American education:
- No discrimination and ideology in America’s schools.
- Teach the basics—reading, writing, math, science, and fact-based history.
It made me wonder where he’s been for the last 50 years, as postmodernism and deconstructionism have made their way through American academic institutions. Had he been paying attention he would realize there is no such thing as “fact-based history”. Even science has not escaped.
Refocusing American education on what used to be called the “3 Rs”, is no joke. According to the ISBE Illinois Report Card for 2022 there were 30 Illinois high schools in which no students could read at grade level, 53 Illinois high schools at which no student could do math at grade level, and 10% or fewer kids could do math at grade level in a quarter of the high schools. That’s not explained by lack of spending. Quite a few of these underperforming schools have a per student spending level of $20,000 or more.
It can’t be explained by COVID-19, either—some of these schools were just as bad in 2019.
I should add that some of the lack of reading proficiency is easily explainable and should be taken into consideration. Almost 10% of K12 students have weak to non-existent proficiency in English. Expecting them to read at grade level in a language they don’t understand is a big ask.
Fact based history? Real facts or alternate facts? Think we can agree upon what counts as a lack of ideology?
Steve
So what do schools teach? It seems so manyâ€woke†curriculums today stress social justice themes, climate change advocacy without debate, gender transitioning, equity not equality kinds of racial justice. Gone is encouragement for critical thinking, or simply thinking out of the box of political correctness. Dumbing down to level the playing field of having too many bright kids, creating nothing but boring, cookie-cutter learning environments. That’s probably why more parents are becoming proactive and taking over school:boards, despite being labeled “Domestic Terrorists, or getting out of school, altogether, and homeschooling their kids.
Dave, I found this Twitter thread interesting in its implications for the problem of post-literate society. You might like it:
https://mobile.twitter.com/jmikolay/status/1622692617875226624
Drum actually has a nice post on this as opposed to my snark. Not commenting on Illinois, but at the national level kids read much better than they did in the 70s. This is true for all racial groups, especially minorities. Whatever we are doing education overall has gotten better. Maybe now that all of our teachers are gay, trans lesbians and spend all of their time grooming kids and spreading wokeness the kids are learning better.
https://jabberwocking.com/lets-declare-an-end-to-the-reading-wars/
Steve
steve;
you do understand that’s methodologically flawed? “At the national level” has no referent. What that’s saying is that kids in some states are doing better, even considerably better, but kids in other states are doing worse, as I’ve already illustrated.
There’s a simple way to improve education “at the national level”, even at the state level: dump the lowest-performing kids out of the system entirely. That’s inconsistent with a system of universal education. You educate the population you have not the population you’d like to have.
The most important part of Kevin’s post is the postscript:
The problems cited in my post are with high schools. It might be worth mentioning that studies of Head Start have found that gains promoted by the program have largely vanished by sixth grade. I also not that most of the improvement in 9 year olds in the graph in his post happened after 2000. Why so little progress from 1975 to 2000? One possibility is that the gains being reported after 2000 are false.
Piercello:
One of his claims early on is known not to be true—that control of fire promoted an increase in brain size. Believe it or not, that’s actually been studied. It didn’t happen that way. There’s a better argument that the development of language led to an evolutionary increase in brain size. My own suspicion is that the development of tools more generally was an important factor.
I think you are likely making a couple of wrong assumptions. First, those kids in Illinois are doing poorly. How does that compare with 50 years ago? I would bet they are doing about the same or that the percentage of kids doing poorly is about the same. Second, in any large study that shows overall improvement of course there are going to be areas that are going to actually be performing worse. That’s how numbers work at large scale. Rarely do you get across the board improvements.
So we see significant improvements over both time periods and your complaint is that should have been bigger during the first years? Why? Heaven shows that in the 70s and 80s we were still worrying about bussing and a lot off other stuff and not so much education.
So what we have is more evidence that the pre schools work and have a very positive effect. That education has gotten markedly better for our younger kids. What we need is a way to sustain that.
What’s with dumping the poorest performing kids? Where did that come from? I didnt suggest that.
Query- So from now on I assume GDP, unemployment rates, etc have no meaning for you as those are also national numbers with no referent?
Steve
Yes, you did. You just don’t know that you did and you didn’t intend to. When you start talking about “at the national level” the next step is how to improve the at the local level for the worst performing. The easiest way is better students.
And if you don’t think that keeping the worst performing kids from participating in standardized tests isn’t a strategy that’s being used already, you are more naive than I assumed.
There is an educator in Texas who has long written about the many steps taken in her state to hide the poor performing kids. Teachers cheating has been well documented in DC and other school systems, so I am aware of it. However, I dont have any reason to think that it has gotten any worse or that there is an organized effort to cheat across the nation. So when we are dealing with very large numbers like we are for these tests I think those likely become pretty insignificant.
The other option is that we just decide that all of the numbers are meaningless. Anyone can make any claim about anything and not have to worry about supporting their claims as all of the numbers are wrong.
Steve