Comment by VLM | Hacker News Reader

Comment by VLM | Hacker News Reader

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"it's optional."

LOL, no.

In the majority of states in the USA, districts in the state are not allowed to graduate students without taking both an econ class and a personal finance class. Kansas is one of the stricter states. I can only think of three off the top of my head that do not mandate econ/finance classes, Colorado, Massachusetts, and Washington. Pretty hilarious to claim MA has better education requirements than KS LOL when its the other way around. Also hilarious when the average SAT score in Kansas is 1256 vs a mere 1128 in Massachusetts, LOL. I can't immediately think of any way that the schools in MA are better than KS, which is pretty funny. Is there even one stat or requirement where MA beats KS? Maybe college sports scores...

That said, public schools are mandatory pass, and the kids know it.

I think the problem with education is the prepack solutions sold by politicians intentionally don't reflect reality, sometimes intentionally reflect the opposite, and are designed to be ineffective or even actively counterproductive.

Looking around, it looks like MA beats KS on most metrics. For example, 55% of MA students take the SAT, while only 2% of KS students take the test. There is a reason that MA always ends up at the top of lists that rank public education while KS is much lower. To be fair, KS has been improving in rankings quite a bit, which I agree MA has been unable to do.

MA did pass a personal finance requirement for schools earlier this year. Like many other states it doesn’t have to be, but can be a stand alone course. While it may seem like MA is lagging behind, the majority of those requirements have been put into place within the last 5 or 6 years, so this is pretty new in most places. And a lot of states have done things that seem counter productive, like allowing a personal finance course to replace core math requirements. MA typically lets schools figure out how to implement requirements, so as in most cases the wealthier areas will figure out a high quality way to do this, and the poor areas will do their best to meet the state requirements for the lowest cost, providing less benefits to the students than it should. (Yet another reason that relying so heavily on local resources for public education is a poor choice).

> 55% of MA students take the SAT, while only 2% of KS students take the test.

This makes me think an interesting metric would be total SAT points per 100k population.

If only 2% of Kansas students are taking the SAT, that's kind of shocking, actually. But maybe the state University there doesn't require it?

Likely it just means that college-bound students (which should be ~1/3 of young adults based off educational attainment levels in the US), strongly lean to taking the ACT.

Yeah it looks like 72% of students take the ACT with an average score of 19.3. While 7% of MA students take the ACT with an average score of 26.1

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