This seems to contradict everything we've ever heard about the subject

Report: American students' reading, math scores climbing
John Hildebrand

American students' reading and math scores have been climbing for more than 50 years, with Black, Hispanic and Asian students showing greater gains than white classmates, according to a report newly published in a Harvard magazine.

The report is based on reviews of more than 7 million tests taken by U.S. students born between 1954 and 2007. The analysis drew on results of five different national and international testing programs, including two administered by the National Assessment of Educational Progress, which tracks achievement trends for the U.S. government.

Researchers, whose report is headlined “A Half Century of Student Progress Nationwide,” said their findings contradict numerous studies that have labeled U.S. schools as failing and students as falling behind. The newly released study covers achievement in ...

https://www.newsday.com/long-island/edu ... g-w0t6svti

I couldn't access the article, but I do wonder. Have the tests/guidelines changed? Have they "dumbed down" some things to make scores more favorable?

No way to tell from the article. It does say


The only positive thing that can be concluded from that is the authors aren't basing their conclusions on tests administered by the individual schools (or school boards).

Check out PISA scores. The US should be much better.

This data from 2007- I'm sure there has been movement in the opposite direction since Trump and COVID

COVID is an issue - we've definitely got an entire year (or two?) in all grades whose education has "suffered" - exactly how much is still an open question.

I seriously considered starting a new thread for this

A New Ranking for Education Freedom
Florida and Arizona lead the way in liberating families from woke bureaucracies.
James Freeman

Historic declines in math and reading scores during the lockdown era plus an embrace of anti-American propaganda by the educational establishment have left many U.S. parents desperate for new school options. They want public funding to go to the schools they choose for their children, rather than being automatically routed to local government monopolies. With impeccable timing, the Heritage Foundation is launching a new ranking of educational freedom among the states. Heritage’s inaugural report card, due out on Friday, finds that Florida, Arizona, Idaho and Indiana are America’s most parent-friendly jurisdictions across a number of measurements. Taxpayers may also find these states appealing.

The Heritage report, edited by Lindsey Burke, Jay Greene, Jonathan Butcher and Jason Bedrick, plainly states the problems with U.S. K-12 education:

Parents are rightly upset when schools indoctrinate their kids with woke racial and gender ideologies that do not reflect their values and contradict the ideals that make our republic great. School lockdowns contributed to greater mental health problems among students and forced masking disrupted learning. Parents are fed up with these oppressive and divisive policies coupled with lower achievement...

The pandemic made it abundantly clear that families need more education options than our rigid district school systems offer or education elitists allow.

The U.S. Department of Education’s recent release of data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress shows that American 9-year-olds are posting the worst math and reading scores since the 1990s. Meanwhile, the teaching that still occurs is often highly politicized. The Journal’s Nicole Ault and Megan Keller recently offered a chilling report on the destructive ideology embedded in ...

https://www.wsj.com/amp/articles/a-new- ... 1662659868

This is a far more complex issue. The religious right is acting like it's all about them, but I am neither and I also wish there were more choices for education. I also don't believe in test scores as the best or accurate measure of the growth and potential of our students to succeed and excel in life. Waldorf Schools and Sudbury Valley Schools ( free democratic schools) have alumni who get into their first choice of colleges an go on to do great things, Neither of these models participate in testing at all. I chose a private alternative school because I was worried about what was happening to schools under Bush and no child left behind. Thank heavens she was in college before DeVos and Trump got a hold of things.

Back in the day we had many lively discussions on this board about such things between my hippie school experiences and Sooz working on the magnet school project and Chaos dealing with radiational schooling. Mac and I have some off the board conversations when he was trying to decide what to do for his son. Maybe it does need its own thread.

My wife (retired primary) believes in testing but as a measure of the teachers, not the students.

Does this one deserve its own thread?

GEN Z NEVER LEARNED TO READ CURSIVE
How will they interpret the past?
Drew Gilpin Faust

It was a good book, the student told the 14 others in the undergraduate seminar I was teaching, and it included a number of excellent illustrations, such as photographs of relevant Civil War manuscripts. But, he continued, those weren’t very helpful to him, because of course he couldn’t read cursive.

Had I heard him correctly? Who else can’t read cursive? I asked the class. The answer: about two-thirds. And who can’t write it? Even more. What did they do about signatures? They had invented them by combining vestiges of whatever cursive instruction they may have had with creative squiggles and flourishes. Amused by my astonishment, the students offered reflections about the place—or absence—of handwriting in their lives. Instead of the Civil War past, we found ourselves exploring a different set of historical changes. In my ignorance, I became their pupil as well as a kind of historical artifact, a Rip van Winkle confronting a transformed world.

In 2010, cursive was omitted from the new national Common Core standards for K–12 education. The students in my class, and their peers, were then somewhere in elementary school. Handwriting instruction had already been declining as laptops and tablets and lessons in “keyboarding” assumed an ever more prominent place in the classroom. Most of my students remembered getting no more than a year or so of somewhat desultory cursive training, which was often pushed aside by a growing emphasis on “teaching to the test.” Now in college, they represent the vanguard of a cursiveless world.

Although I was unaware of it at the time, the 2010 Common Core policy on cursive had generated an uproar. Jeremiads about the impending decline of ....

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/ar ... ry/671246/

Wee anecdote. When my wife was in hospital she had her travel clock. At one stage she couldn't see it as she was immobilized and asked
the nurse the time. The nurse had to go out into the hall to see it digitally as she couldn't tell the time on a conventional clock with hands.

I've heard stories like that before - kids not being able to tell time on a conventional clock.

Saw on Facebook and thought it was appropriate here..

This fits here

This generation does not need to be able to read cursive. They need to learn a computer language and read and write code. No one can read cursive- everyone's handwriting sucks. Doctor prescriptions are electronic as are signatures on bank records. I learned cursive and it's still a struggle to read historical documents. We all know what they say now.
Not much use for an analog clock either. When the time changes and everything in your smart home automatically changes from the internet all the clocks agree and you don't have those annoying ones on the coffeemaker, stove, and microwaves each off by a minute or two.

Pity they won't be able to read original material - only someone else's interpretation, which ay or may not be accurate.

Oskar, it's a struggle to read the originals because they are written in script that is different from the cursive alphabet we all learned. Popel are pretty good at decoding itbecause our minds are trained to make up for the missing letters- I'm sure you've seen the memes on the internet.

I've read originals. They're boring to some and fascinating to others but they are accurate. Perfect example would be multiple reinterpretations of convenience of the Bible.

Looking back to my grade school days, every teacher I had wanted us to form certain letters differently so every year you had to learn a few new letters.

That's one of the reasons I switched to taking notes in block capitals (no cursive). Of course then I had to learn how to write a "z" so it didn't look like a "2" (put a stroke thru it).

I see being able to read cursive as the equivalent to learning a language.

From another board ....



Let’s not get into the fact that CRT is not taught is k-12 school, or the fact that SEL is NOT a vehicle for teaching CRT; SEL is an important part of teaching a child to become a well-rounded, functional adult, not to mention its benefits to young students in the short term.

When I was studying to obtain my doctorate, a group of my peers were doing research on an affluent, and deeply red, school district near my university. They were studying its SEL integration, but a group of conservative parents decided they did not want people talking to their children about emotions, and got the entire study canceled, as well as any SEL being taught district wide. This district has the highest rate of teen suicide in my state, something SEL has been shown to help with.

I just can’t with this idiocy…

Link to article: https://www.npr.org/2022/09/26/11240828 ... gainst-crt

"Last week, I asked readers to tell me what people don’t get about their job," writes Derek Thompson. "No category of workers wrote back more than teachers and professors."

What Americans Don’t Understand About Teachers and Professors
Given that education has become polarized and politicized, it makes sense that educators feel misunderstood and underappreciated.
Derek Thompson

Last week, I asked readers to tell me what people don’t get about their job. In an economy with thousands of occupations and hundreds of sectors, and where many people within the same large company have no idea what their colleagues do all day, I thought hearing from dozens of people about the reality of their work would be valuable.

I received several hundred replies—from opera singers, TV screenwriters, chefs, neuroscientists, and more. However, no category of workers wrote back more than teachers and professors. Given that education has become polarized and politicized, it makes sense that educators feel misunderstood and underappreciated.

By a wide margin, the most common reply among college and university professors was that teaching is just a small part of the job. “Standing in front of a classroom full of undergraduate students represents about 5 percent of my time,” said a tenured geology professor in Canada. He continued: ...

https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters ... rs/671590/

SEL is kindergarten 101. Don't hit people, use your indoor voice, be nice, work out your problems, bargain with others, take turns, there are lots of ways to act when you are angry (sad, scared, happy ) geez do they think its phonics and multiplication tables from day one?

At N.Y.U., Students Were Failing Organic Chemistry. Who Was to Blame?
Maitland Jones Jr., a respected professor, defended his standards. But students started a petition, and the university dismissed him.
Stephanie Saul

Sign Up for the Education Briefing From preschool to grad school, get the latest U.S. education news. Get it sent to your inbox.
In the field of organic chemistry, Maitland Jones Jr. has a storied reputation. He taught the subject for decades, first at Princeton and then at New York University, and wrote an influential textbook. He received awards for his teaching, as well as recognition as one of N.Y.U.’s coolest professors.

But last spring, as the campus emerged from pandemic restrictions, 82 of his 350 students signed a petition against him.

Students said the high-stakes course — notorious for ending many a dream of medical school — was too hard, blaming Dr. Jones for their poor test scores.

The professor defended his standards. But just before the start of the fall semester, university deans terminated Dr. Jones’s contract.

The officials also had tried to placate the students by offering to review their grades and allowing them to withdraw from the class retroactively. The chemistry department’s chairman, Mark E. Tuckerman, said the unusual offer to withdraw was a “one-time exception granted to students by ...

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/03/us/n ... ition.html

One sentence in the article stands out



In other words, it's all about the money - education standards be damned.

If 42% of your class is failing you are failing and yes, it is about the money- why am I paying for a teacher who can't teach his students enough to pass the course?