The pandemic's toll on schooling emerges in terrible exam results | Hacker News Reader

The pandemic's toll on schooling emerges in terrible exam results

economist.com

20 pointspretext19 comments

Pretty strong title for "Across the OECD’s dataset there is a modest association between the length of time schools stayed closed and children’s subsequent performance in tests".

The PISA assessment has always been pushed way over its explanatory power, to force all kind of political decisions for schooling. Its like a yearly anniversary of education bullcrap.

The sad state of Western education in one graph, COVID just accelerated the trend.

Nah, kids are smarter than ever. Education is teaching stupid shit. What COVID did to knowledge worker brains with WFH, it did to kids with school. Lots of NOGAF and emperor wears no clothes going on.

Even in the U.S., the performance drop is not universal. I live in an area which has some of the best performing public schools in the country.

These districts were established 40+ years ago, and middle class families of all races and backgrounds have access to purchase a home at a premium to enroll in them. In the district I'm currently moving into, the student body is disproportionately made up of a diverse body of Asian Americans that grow up in households that set high expectations and are very involved in their education.

However, in recent years, the school district has started shifting priority from measures of performance from standardized testing to the inclusion of specific racial groups in schools. In one of the board of education meetings, a board member mentioned that they're aiming to make the racial makeup of schools in the district reflect that of the area, which they described as "one third white, one third black, and one third hispanic".

Additionally, on teacher surveys given by the school system, all questions related to assessing academic performance of the students were phased out. Here are some of the questions that took their place:

9. How comfortable are you discussing race/ethnicity-related topics with your colleagues?

15. At your school, how valuable are the antiracist- and equity-focused professional development opportunities?

16. When a sensitive issue of diversity arises in class/at work, how easily can you think of strategies to address the situation?

8. How often are students given opportunities to learn about people from different races, ethnicities, or cultures?

10. At your school, how often are you encouraged to think more deeply about race-related topics?

14. When there are major news events related to race/ethnicity, how often do adults at your school talk about them with students?

In a boundary change in a nearby school district, the average bus route distance was increased overall, but diversity measures were improved. When parents protested the changes, they were depicted as a group of angry bigots in national news. That district is now experiencing what local news is calling "a bus crisis" where kids are not making it to school on time.

I'm hoping at some point we will snap back to reality and prioritize performance, but my expectation is that I'll need to set aside money for private school.

what is the purpose of a teacher survey?

"surveys are important sources of information about the perceptions of the school learning environment. These findings can be used to monitor continuous improvement efforts and inform school improvement goals. Interpretation of this information should take into consideration the number (N) and percentage of survey respondents. Survey data best represent perceptions of the school environment when response rates are high."

idk, your line "questions related to assessing academic performance of the students were phased out" seems pretty weird to me. Like when I imagine a workplace survey, I think of things like "how do you get on with your colleagues", "do you feel safe in the environment" etc, not "are our clients good at their jobs". It's standard HR fare in every workplace.

I can't imagine how many questions about academic performance of students would ever have been crowbarred into a survey given to teachers about this sort of stuff in the first place.

Were it a question given to students, or about students in any way, I might be inclined to investigate a little further. But in general, there is a whole lot of outrage generated around school stuff, and every time I try to look into it, the claims usually just kinda dissolve and it turns out to have been entirely fine, usually something that I, you and everyone else experienced in school as part of normal expected curriculum sensationalized and passed through chinese whispers.

Is it legal for the school board to make that a goal, given the recent Supreme Court ruling on affirmation action?

USA elementary, middle and high school eductions are just plain terrible. Instead of learning useful technical skills needed in job market, they decided to do social agenda like critical race theory, very questionable history syllabus (especially on WW2), dumbing down math at least 3 years behind typical math syllabus in Asia, single language (if foreign/secondary language, useless in reallife but just good enough to score A in written exam). Heck even Havard to inflationary As with 40% of the class score one. This is why USA needs immigrants especially Chinese and Indians. Their core populations are truly dumb. Now that China and India actively stopping their smarts going over, I am wondering next gen smart immigrants probably coming from ganglands in South Ameticas or maybe fundamentalists from Middle Easts. Imagine this groups of people will run the trillion dollars economy and debts, fly F35, and operating nukes. It is gonna be scary for Americas in 2050 onwards.

Very few school systems implemented any actual critical race theory in their syllabi. Your other points may still stand, but CRT has been misrepresented in the media at best, and at worst has become a dog whistle (for certain groups) for anything in the education system that challenges a white supremacy narrative. Certain media outlets coughFOXcough have latched on to CRT and misapplied it to topics which already were in the syllabi, such as civil rights history, the leadup to the civil war, race riots and lynchings, voter suppression, institutional racism, etc.

1. I would argue that "useful technical skills" are not the goal of middle- or highschools.

2. What does a typical math syllabus look like in "Asia"? It's a big contintent with billions of people.

3. I'm sure there are plenty of idiots everywhere, but a "truly dumb" core population seems a bit rude and frankly wrong.

4. "Ganglands" in South Americas. Middle Eastern fundamentalists. Please take this Trump speak elsewhere.

The elephant in the room seems to be that maybe children perform much better in normal social environments, with pen and paper and with their peers etc, than with electronic gizmotry that is only ever a pale emulation of the real world.

Of course, adults are the same, but on a software forum we don't say that sort of thing.

Or the pandemic caused a lot of stress and anxiety for children, teachers, families, basically everyone on the planet and many are still suffering with it.. let's add in depression there as well.

Also moving to a completely new system without any real planning, infrastructure, or training is completely untenable.

--- EDIT ---

Not to diminish the general advantage that in-person communication throughput can bring.

In addition to: (1) Real world vs. Virtual (2) The Stress and Anxiety of the Pandemic, there's a (3) thing that I observed. Both my kid and my wife (who's going back to higher education) both experienced instructors who were very technically illiterate. Some instructors were very capable, but others were pretty unprepared and helpless when it came to making use of digital-only approaches. I think that's in line with your last statement, cpuguy83.

Who uses a pen and paper in the real world?

I write down my tasks each day, pen and paper has been shown to increase recall, which makes it a very useful tool.

That is true - writing things down improves your recall. I learned that in college - writing, not typing, notes during lecture helped me retain the knowledge. I didn't even have to always study those notes either! Just the simple act of writing it down helped me learn and retain the information.

The "elephant in the room" as you put it is sensible, forced lockdowns led to good results. Japan, Taiwan, and Singapore all had strict lockdowns, mandatory mask wearing laws, mandatory testing, and when available, mandatory vaccinations. This approach to the pandemic allowed them to keep their schools open.

The West? The West revealed itself to be in decay and unable to properly respond to the pandemic. By not being able to mandate lockdowns, mask wearing, and vaccinations we had to shut down our schools in order to prevent the spread.

Put another way, the West made their children pay for their freedom. To me that's a sign of a civilization in decline.

Finally, your assertion at the end is false. Children are not adults and both have different needs, especially social needs. But, you're a coward using a throwaway account so you probably know you're wrong.

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