Young Americans are dumbs

[True Federalist (진정한 연방 주의자)]

I know I've said it before, but I think it bears repeating.  Feel free to call someone else's ideas idiotic, especially when they are, but when you go from attacking ideas to people, please don't.

[AggregateDemand]

In the US, a classroom of 25 students costs about $300,000 on average. The most profligate states will spend closer to $500,000 per 25 students. Less than 20% goes to the teacher.

The teacher's unions and school administrators are not spending the money on pertinent instruction. Instead, the money goes to various special support staff, consultants, special programs, legacy pension/benefit costs. As superfluous expenses are piled onto schools, the districts become desperate to contain costs so they pile on more fiscal service expenses and actuarial expenses.

The system is backwards. The people in the classroom should be well-paid. The ancillary support need to be contained.

[MaxQue]

In the US, a classroom of 25 students costs about $300,000 on average. The most profligate states will spend closer to $500,000 per 25 students. Less than 20% goes to the teacher.

The teacher's unions and school administrators are not spending the money on pertinent instruction. Instead, the money goes to various special support staff, consultants, special programs, legacy pension/benefit costs. As superfluous expenses are piled onto schools, the districts become desperate to contain costs so they pile on more fiscal service expenses and actuarial expenses.

The system is backwards. The people in the classroom should be well-paid. The ancillary support need to be contained.

For once, I agree with you, mostly. But I would say than the waste isn't into real support staff (which usually do a wonderful and important job), but all the office workers in the school boards HQ.

[krazen1211]

More useful purposes like what?

Some have suggested a cut in personal income tax rates. Some have suggested a fast train between 2 cities in the Central Valley. Some have suggested a repair of our roadways. It turns out that the government education industry complex devours enough resources to cover all of the above in some manner.

Mental care for the mentally ill? It would be beneficial.

Well, people like you provided $320 billion a year to the teachers unions instead. Consider that another example of those unions winning the treasury while the common man loses, if you wish.

I find that very hard to believe. You have any proof?

Their profits have been well documented and already linked.

[muon2]

Here's an opposing view:

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This brings up an important distinction in cohorts. Torie started by comparing the 55-65 cohort to the 16-24 group. The Sandia report is correct that the statistics of falling scores are best described by an expanding pool of test takers, but that compares students graduating in the 60's and 70's to those graduating in the 80's. That's essentially comparing today's 55-65 year-old cohort to today's 45-55 year olds. That doesn't get to a question of whether there are differences going forward.

I claim there is, though with the caveat that it is a narrow statistical slice. However, my findings have been echoed by others in higher ed over the last decade.

I have the opportunity to teach a broad slice of students fresh out of high school at a generic state university that is not selective. It is not unusual for me to work with 300 students a year that is well mixed with urban, suburban and rural backgrounds. Like many I often reuse questions and sometimes whole quizzes so I can norm a class in one year to one taught a few years before. Based on test scores and written course evaluations there is no doubt in my mind that graduates in the last decade lack a set of critical thinking skills that their peers had in the decade before.

What is most different is the way classes have to be taught in this era of evaluative testing in high school. Students are taught a broader array of topics to insure that they've covered the subjects of the standardized test, but give up the depth that is needed to tackle unfamiliar but related fields of knowledge. For example, I find students in introductory courses today are far less comfortable with science questions that require knowledge of relationships between concepts, but instead expect science questions that test the ability to follow a script that churns out a number from a calculator. In my experience there has always been some fraction of the students for whom that statement was true, but it was less prevalent at the beginning of this century.

Now let me pull this back to the OP article about middle class incomes. As you might guess some students who faced conceptual questions but wanted scripted exercises will come to complain. I would then ask them if they want to be engineers or other professionals to critically analyze a problem are they aiming for a job as an entry-level technician who only needs to follow a script. In general they all prefer the salary of the engineer, yet as we continue to talk it becomes clear that their high school has not prepared them for real problem solving. The culprit was the form of the test that was used to assess their school and the teaching designed to create success on that test.

[Torie]

So comparing the 45-55 cohort to the 16-24 cohort would be comparing apples to apples, in a way the 55-65 cohort to the 16-24 cohort would not?  When did the test taking pool stop expanding?  Is there any reasonable accurate way to "correct" for the "noise" of the expanding pool factor?

Thanks for your anecdote Muon2. That was very interesting. My anecdote is that I find that there has been a material decline in literacy skills in my lifetime. Folks who have spoken English all their life, as their first language, in general just don't seem to me to have the vocabulary and writing skills that older cohorts fitting in that category seemed to have.

[AggregateDemand]

For once, I agree with you, mostly. But I would say than the waste isn't into real support staff (which usually do a wonderful and important job), but all the office workers in the school boards HQ.

I find it remarkably sad that the education industry is setup so that talented people aspire to do something other than teach. Imo, the unions merely compound the problem by making talented people aspire to retire or work in different industries.

If the states ever get around to real education reform, they should look to Finland.

[MaxQue]

For once, I agree with you, mostly. But I would say than the waste isn't into real support staff (which usually do a wonderful and important job), but all the office workers in the school boards HQ.

I find it remarkably sad that the education industry is setup so that talented people aspire to do something other than teach. Imo, the unions merely compound the problem by making talented people aspire to retire or work in different industries.

If the states ever get around to real education reform, they should look to Finland.

That would require stopping to focus so much on testing.

[muon2]

So comparing the 45-55 cohort to the 16-24 cohort would be comparing apples to apples, in a way the 55-65 cohort to the 16-24 cohort would not?  When did the test taking pool stop expanding?  Is there any reasonable accurate way to "correct" for the "noise" of the expanding pool factor?

Thanks for your anecdote Muon2. That was very interesting. My anecdote is that I find that there has been a material decline in literacy skills in my lifetime. Folks who have spoken English all their life, as their first language, in general just don't seem to me to have the vocabulary and writing skills that older cohorts fitting in that category seemed to have.

Somewhere by the late 90's most schools had reached the point where everyone was taking the ACT or equivalent to assess how well the schools were teaching. At that point the expansion essentially ended. The best way to control for the expansion is to select a particular socioeconomic group that already had high test-taking rates and use that to benchmark the larger sample.

I found part of my anecdote particularly interesting since with 200-300 students a year over a span of more than a decade some of the trends have statistical relevance.

[Torie]

Did the SES of you class composition stay the same more or less over that period, Muon2?  That would be the other perhaps distorting factor, if it exists, that would need to be corrected for (as you suggest, when it comes to test scores).

[muon2]

Did the SES of you class composition stay the same more or less over that period, Muon2?  That would be the other perhaps distorting factor, if it exists, that would need to be corrected for (as you suggest, when it comes to test scores).

As far as I can tell my class demographics have changed little in the last 20 years. That's one advantage with data from classes at a generic (non-flagship) state university. They are relatively inexpensive and are intended to accept most students from the state with a HS degree. There are substantial remedial classes designed to bring students up to par if their HS program was lacking in English or math. So any demographic shifts would be mostly be due to shifts in the region of the state itself, and IL has not had a lot of growth to change the numbers over the last two decades.

[Torie]

Then that is pretty "clean" anecdotal evidence, and yes, rather more compelling than mine. Actually, might be more apropos. Sad.

[Small Business Owner of Any Repute]

Thanks for your anecdote Muon2. That was very interesting. My anecdote is that I find that there has been a material decline in literacy skills in my lifetime. Folks who have spoken English all their life, as their first language, in general just don't seem to me to have the vocabulary and writing skills that older cohorts fitting in that category seemed to have.

Communication by SMS text, along with app- and web-based instant messaging, are the prime way most Millennials communicate these days. Younger folks simply don't use their phones as a phone.

You can say that literacy skills are somehow in decline, but never before have younger Americans been doing so much reading and writing. And, of course, less anecdotally, illiteracy rates have dropped significantly since you were a kid.

[GaussLaw]

Yes, I would need to link the longitudinal studies for that. But the quality of teachers overall is shockingly poor - the C students from third rate schools as it were. When speaking to some of them, and reading their prose, the literary level they have is pathetic - and frightening. That has been my anecdotal experience, and what I have read elsewhere over the years.

As a physics teacher at a somewhat decent suburban high school, I concur with you greatly.  But the term "prose" is far too kind for the rubbish they write.  "Alphabet soup" is a better term for it.  They can't write in complete sentences and it's nearly impossible to discern whatever they're trying to convey.

[DemPGH]

Blaming unions is really a non sequitur. "Workers organize to ask for better conditions, therefore the quality of the product goes down." No. That was certainly never the case before, and to blame unions for the USA's slippage in educational readiness is just short-sighted ideology. After all, other first world countries are more unionized than we are, and in places where unions are weakest education is still poorer! I mean the South.

The actual problem is twofold, and I think I talked about this on here a long time ago.

1. Teacher training is terrible - a big digression, actually. Dumby down the curriculum, coddle the babies, everyone is right, let the kiddies teach themselves, and play / devise games are what teachers are taught to do. That actually gets me worked up, because I believe in content first. I didn't get much of an education until I was exposed to that awesome thing called a professor: A person with a PhD who knows what the hell he or she is talking about. And the really great ones encouraged thinking both in and outside the metaphorical box.

2. The quick fix is to attract scholars as teachers, but given the culture of schools and teacher training, that is highly unlikely. So, teacher training has to improve. We have to make teachers into something that looks like a scholar.

The core, fundamental problem is that teaching is not an attractive job, and continues year after year to be very high in turnover and low in retention.

[AggregateDemand]

Blaming unions is really a non sequitur. "Workers organize to ask for better conditions, therefore the quality of the product goes down." No. That was certainly never the case before, and to blame unions for the USA's slippage in educational readiness is just short-sighted ideology.

We're talking about services not goods. It is widely accepted that many service-sector unions, particularly public service-sector unions, have an adverse impact on the quality of service.

Teachers' unions should be pressured to improve. The US pays more than any other OECD nation for K-12 education. If anything, the unions are simply piling more administrators on to the system, while protecting mediocre teachers and failing to attract quality talent into the teaching profession.

[GaussLaw]

To all interested, I have conducted an item analysis on my last cumulative physics test that I gave my class, consisting primarily of 11th graders of average academic abilities. 

The following questions were missed by more than 50% of the students:
13. A catapult fires a projectile at a speed of 50 m/s 30 degrees above the horizontal.  What is the initial horizontal and vertical speed of the catapult? 
18. An object with mass 8 kilograms experiences a force of 20 N applied to it.  What is the acceleration of the object?
22. Find the angular momentum of an object with mass 7 kg, radius 2 meters, and velocity 10 m/s. 
27. Find the equivalent resistance of a 2-ohm resistor and a 7-ohm resistor connected in parallel. 

Anyone with any kind of physics background would realize how easy these problems are. 

Sigh.......it's nearly impossible to teach my students anything even remotely resembling physics.  They just refuse to learn or take responsibility for themselves, and they're fed this narrative that they're "so special" by their parents.  It's sickening.  It's not the unions that are the problem; it's the parents.  They just refuse to hold their kids accountable for anything.

[Fmr President & Senator Polnut]

I wasn't and I HATED physics... everyone can't be good at everything.

[MaxQue]

Gauss has it. The issue is clearly parents. They often think than they know better than everyone and accuse the teacher of hating their kid if he gets bad marks.

[Хahar 🤔]

Perhaps someone with that level of contempt for their students shouldn't be teaching.

[muon2]

To all interested, I have conducted an item analysis on my last cumulative physics test that I gave my class, consisting primarily of 11th graders of average academic abilities.  

The following questions were missed by more than 50% of the students:
13. A catapult fires a projectile at a speed of 50 m/s 30 degrees above the horizontal.  What is the initial horizontal and vertical speed of the catapult?  
18. An object with mass 8 kilograms experiences a force of 20 N applied to it.  What is the acceleration of the object?
22. Find the angular momentum of an object with mass 7 kg, radius 2 meters, and velocity 10 m/s.  
27. Find the equivalent resistance of a 2-ohm resistor and a 7-ohm resistor connected in parallel.  

Anyone with any kind of physics background would realize how easy these problems are.  

Sigh.......it's nearly impossible to teach my students anything even remotely resembling physics.  They just refuse to learn or take responsibility for themselves, and they're fed this narrative that they're "so special" by their parents.  It's sickening.  It's not the unions that are the problem; it's the parents.  They just refuse to hold their kids accountable for anything.

Cumulative tests highlight another difficulty. Many students assume that either there is a sheet of potential equations or there are a select few equations to memorize; equations they are told in advance to memorize. I don't know if you did either of those for your test, but I don't. As such easily half a class of calculus-based introductory students would get all but 18 wrong.

Problem 13 combines trigonometry with vector kinematics. Students have trouble combining the information from the two disciplines though they can follow it easily enough. The critical thinking skill to mix two fields to solve a problem has been lacking for many years.

Problem 22 might see half get it, but many students won't know whether the radius is of the object or of the trajectory. A lot of science problems require reading to get the context, and students expect to be handed a specific formula and then numbers to insert into the formula.

Problem 27 requires remembering both the formula and distinguishing the definitions of series and parallel. Students who didn't memorize the formula won't try to derive it, but they will usually make a guess that is more likely to something along the lines of the simpler series formula.

Problem 18 would break 50% at the college level primarily because the formula is one of direct division. The wrong answers would occur for those students who want to multiply rather than divide because they'll guess it's one or the other, or they'll get the units wrong or leave them off entirely.

I think the theme is clear. More work needs to go into earlier grades on how to synthesize knowledge, not just repeat it. To bring this back to political discussion, the math standards of the Common Core have significant parts designed to address this issue.

[True Federalist (진정한 연방 주의자)]

Another problem with those questions is the apparent lack of any context that would motivate them to learn it.  Aside from perhaps a youthful member of the Society for Creative Anachronism, I doubt any of them care about catapults.  Similarly, until and unless someone goes into electrical engineering or even an electrician, I fail to see why anyone would care about electromagnetism problems.  Yes, the math isn't all that difficult, but it's not a area of physics that ever would be of general interest like mechanics can be.  Even tho we may not realize it, lots of people have direct experience with mechanics on a regular basis.  Electromagnetism just is not of much use to ordinary people.  We use electricity all the time, but in a manner that requires most of us to know no more than to not touch a live wire and maybe to make certain you use the proper fuse in equipment that has a fuse.

Of course, it doesn't help that most students have but minimal everyday experience with metric units other than the liter.  Of course it could be worse.  I actually took a junior-level mechanics class in college taught by an old fogey of a professor who had us using an old book in which all the problems were in the FPS system of units.  If I had been a violent young man, I would have been tempted to slug him for that.

[muon2]

I find that the context often makes the problem harder. I could reframe question 18 as follows. I don't think this would improve the rate at which students solve it.

You look up some specifications for your little Smart Car and find that it has a mass of 800 kg with you inside. From the specifications you also determine that when you step on the gas the engine supplies 2000 N of force to the car. Find the acceleration you would feel under those conditions. Bonus part - how does that compare to the acceleration you would experience in free fall?

[dead0man]

Of course. Fire the incompetents, dump tenure, and reward the talented, like with 150K per year salaries in the tougher schools. And give them the disciplinary tools.

This combined with making it harder to get a degree to teach secondary education would do more to help than throwing many billions of dollars at the problem.

Sadly many people (especially the very pro union types) don't want to see bad teachers fired and good teachers rewarded.

[Fmr President & Senator Polnut]

Of course. Fire the incompetents, dump tenure, and reward the talented, like with 150K per year salaries in the tougher schools. And give them the disciplinary tools.

This combined with making it harder to get a degree to teach secondary education would do more to help than throwing many billions of dollars at the problem.

Sadly many people (especially the very pro union types) don't want to see bad teachers fired and good teachers rewarded.

I don't disagree with much - here but that's not the actual rationale.