"Percentage of students missing 5 or more days of school monthly has doubled since 2020" seems like it might have some explanatory powers. How can you miss a quarter of the school days and keep up?
Not a problem, as public schools move at a glacial pace. In 8th grade, the teachers were still going over the times tables with them.
In high school "honors" class, the teacher spent an entire semester on the concept of "molar mass".
My experience going through the bowels of the public school system was it was fun place to be with your friends. Any learning was incidental.
Of course, the magnitude of this disaster made it very difficult for me to get my feet under me in college.
I do wish people would give up on teaching Physics without Calculus. Kind of a wasted year for me, and everything made sense as soon as you added differentiation and integration. I think the two courses should be taught together in the same class.
Presumably, the No Child Left Behind act and the Common Core curriculum are supposed to provide a baseline for the country that is well above "times tables in 8th grade". Common Core seems to me to suffer from a second-system effect, eschewing some of the tried-and-true for the experimental, but the motivation is a reasonable one. I never understood why they didn't take a successful state's curriculum and adapt it to all the states, but that's politics more than anything else. I'm pretty concerned though, now that I'll be having kids go through the system, that the parties involved (teachers, administration, politicians) will conspire to avoid doing work while avoiding responsibility. But that's local politics, not national.
I took every honors class in high school. Everything they had. I was terribly, woefully underprepared for college. It took a year and a half before I had my legs back under me. It was a wonder I didn't flunk out.
But I had a great time in high school. I had little responsibilities, a little money, and lots of friends to hang with.
Washington state has the option for kids to take some college courses in HS. I hope my kid can take advantage of that (but he just graduated from Kindergarten, so we are a ways off from determining anything).
> In high school "honors" class, the teacher spent an entire semester on the concept of "molar mass".
This is not the case everywhere.
Average test scores seem to be about the same from then to now.
This may be true, but there is absolutely a correlation between days attended and amount learned.
It gets annoying as a parent: the kid wants to be in school, they aren't really sick (well, above the normal level of snifflies a kid has during much of the winter), but the system is ultra conservative right now.
Really? When I was in school I always wanted to NOT be in school, same for all my friends. It's always weird now hearing people my age or older saying things like this when my personal experience was completely the opposite.
There are lots of kids who would rather be at school than home. It is not that they really liked school, just that being home watching soap operas isn't very fun at all (in my case, this is before the internet).
In middle school I missed quite a bit of school, even more in high school (sometimes missed entire weeks at a time) . It's not really that difficult, most of the time was spent on fluff. I passed with nothing lower than a B if my memory serves me, got accepted to every school I applied to so I was definitely performing well enough.