There are schools FULL of kids who can do grade level math and beyond. So what did the DOE do to get them there? Nothing.
Its got nothing to do with the Feds and everything to do with unmotivated kids, poor families and poor school districts many times staffed with uncertified people in classrooms.
American high-school seniors’ scores on major math and reading tests fell to their lowest levels on record, according to results released Tuesday by the U.S. Education Department. Twelfth-graders’ average math score was the worst since the current test began in 2005, and reading was below any point since that assessment started in 1992. The share of 12th-graders who were proficient slid by 2 percentage points between 2019 and 2024—to 35% in reading and 22% in math. There also were drops in the proportion of students who were able to reach at least a basic level of performance, a tier below proficiency.
There are a LOT of stupid people out there in America.
Shame. The world needs ditch diggers too! No, seriously. Skip college, go in the trades. Go work for UPS. You will be part time for a while, can’t be a driver until you’re 21. By the time your peers are out of four years of college with a bunch of debt you will be in your second year of driving. Halfway to top rate. That’s $45 an hour atm. By the time you’re a driver it will be more than that. GOAT health/dental/vision. 401K. Pension, most companies have scrapped that. Be smart with your money, retire at 51. 30 years full time. Perhaps go into feeder driving, the big trailers. Top rate for that is 60-ish atm. Boom.
You sure love couriers. Yes, it's a fine career, but it beats a body up. It's not something people should do long term if they want to stay healthy.
Pretty much every state requires high school students to take at least three years of math to graduate. However, I know that at the school where I teach (30 minutes outside of a midsize midwestern city, gradually changing from rural to a rural/suburban mix), what we used to think of as one class, Algebra 1, can now be split into Algebra 1A and Algebra 1B. Average to below average kids take those during freshman and sophomore years. After that, they can take geometry and pretty much stop there, or take what are essentially math electives: things like "Intro to Financial Statistics" or similar.
However, just because students take those courses, it doesn't actually mean that they learned much. If they can scrape together enough participation/completion/retake points for a D, they can get credit for the course, even if they hardly understood much content, and certainly didn't retain it. Most colleges require students to take a placement test before enrolling in gen ed courses, or to submit ACT subject scores or AP scores as proof of basic proficiency. The kids that do poorly on the gen-ed placement test (because they never took an AP math class and got <21 on the math ACT) almost certainly took both algebra and geometry in high school, because they wouldn't have the requisite diploma to be in college otherwise. However, they came in lacking core foundational skills (memorized times tables, basic fraction fluency) and didn't add much to them during four years of high school.
This doesn't even get into the topic of "credit recovery" software, in which kids who flunked a class the first time sit on a computer program and either Google answers or get fed them by a study hall monitor for a few weeks until they magically show they they've "recovered" a full year's worth of content knowledge.
There is so much to be said for how low the standards are in many US high schools and how few people care or even realize it's happening.
This post is spot on, and this is from someone who teaches high school math. Schools are punished by state and federal government if they're 4-year graduation rates aren't high enough, so it becomes a frantic attempt to find any way to push a kid across the line. It has nothing to do with if they can do math, but everything to do with if we can cole up with creative ways to pretend they actually earned the credit. If we truly held kids accountable and didn't give them diplomas, we'd be punished severely by politicians who get embarrassed by low graduation rates. It's a lose-lose situation for schools.
Just imagine the true number when you take out East Asians/Indians from the pot. It's far worst. Avg SAT score for Asians is around 75 percentile so they're at least pulling their weight.
This is less of a problem with the Department of education, and more of a problem with the way we choose to conduct schooling in this country. We follow an industrial age model of schooling, in which mass numbers of kids are taught the same thing in the same way at the same pace. And then we’re shocked when it doesn’t work. There is no fixing our public school system. It is too far past gone, and our culture far too depraved to do anything about it. This is what I think, and I have the private school bills to prove it.
It sure isn't going to help these pathetic results to have the Republicans constantly working to make our education system worse by privatizing public school dollars mainly to throw money to politically connected charters and to subsidize rich kids--which costs the system billions in each big state that has tried it, cutting out extra spending on extra help for schools and students with underachieving students as "DEI," ending the Department of Education, which coordinated national programs and grants, breaking unions that work for better pay and hence, highly quality teachers, and constantly criticizing teachers and undermining faith in education as a leg up.
It sure isn't going to help these pathetic results to have the Republicans constantly working to make our education system worse by privatizing public school dollars mainly to throw money to politically connected charters and to subsidize rich kids--which costs the system billions in each big state that has tried it, cutting out extra spending on extra help for schools and students with underachieving students as "DEI," ending the Department of Education, which coordinated national programs and grants, breaking unions that work for better pay and hence, highly quality teachers, and constantly criticizing teachers and undermining faith in education as a leg up.
Yes, we should emulate Baltimore instead. They spend little yet have some of the best schools in the country. Great logic!
Everything in the USA is built to a price point. If the elites thought any of these statistics really mattered then education would be properly funded and teachers paid appropriately. The elites control the purse strings and process and math statistics are immaterial to what they perceive as their needs. Their kids go to private school and are educated at top universities. Who cares if a kid in a flyover state doesn't know calculus? Every student in the professional pipeline in the Ivy League, MIT, Berkeley does, so none of it really matters. The advent of AI makes it even more irrelevant so I wouldn't expect any change or progress. Hats off to the educators who really do care, but whose hands are tied by poor funding, the erosion of the traditional family, terrible behavior problems and a lack of societal support.
It sure isn't going to help these pathetic results to have the Republicans constantly working to make our education system worse by privatizing public school dollars mainly to throw money to politically connected charters and to subsidize rich kids-…
Yes, we should emulate Baltimore instead. They spend little yet have some of the best schools in the country. Great logic!
As far as logic goes, have you ever heard of a “false dichotomy” (false dilemma, false binary, either/or fallacy)?
Dude criticizes a version of privatization that wastes dollars and produces uneven results (which could conceivably be worse if you get more granular in examining results and projecting them at scale).
The reply: Well, we all know for a fact that the only two possible options are doing exactly that or emulating Baltimore! You idiot! Why would you choose the Baltimore option?
Sounds like GOP will be in power for the next 100 years.
Funny, I had the complete opposite reaction. I mean, take a look at Trump’s voting results in cities with terrible math scores (hint: he did not do well).
Pretty much every state requires high school students to take at least three years of math to graduate. However, I know that at the school where I teach (30 minutes outside of a midsize midwestern city, gradually changing from rural to a rural/suburban mix), what we used to think of as one class, Algebra 1, can now be split into Algebra 1A and Algebra 1B. Average to below average kids take those during freshman and sophomore years. After that, they can take geometry and pretty much stop there, or take what are essentially math electives: things like "Intro to Financial Statistics" or similar.
However, just because students take those courses, it doesn't actually mean that they learned much. If they can scrape together enough participation/completion/retake points for a D, they can get credit for the course, even if they hardly understood much content, and certainly didn't retain it. Most colleges require students to take a placement test before enrolling in gen ed courses, or to submit ACT subject scores or AP scores as proof of basic proficiency. The kids that do poorly on the gen-ed placement test (because they never took an AP math class and got <21 on the math ACT) almost certainly took both algebra and geometry in high school, because they wouldn't have the requisite diploma to be in college otherwise. However, they came in lacking core foundational skills (memorized times tables, basic fraction fluency) and didn't add much to them during four years of high school.
This doesn't even get into the topic of "credit recovery" software, in which kids who flunked a class the first time sit on a computer program and either Google answers or get fed them by a study hall monitor for a few weeks until they magically show they they've "recovered" a full year's worth of content knowledge.
There is so much to be said for how low the standards are in many US high schools and how few people care or even realize it's happening.
SAT math can be managed easily without knowing either algebra or geometry. You might not score high, but it won't be low enough to bar you from most average schools either.
I'm sure there are hordes of people graduating high school without passing any algebra or geometry courses. Some kind of "ok fine you can't do math" card that lets them off the hook to study other things.
It's not unwarranted, most people aren't cut out for it and won't use it even if they manage to pass the classes.
Pretty much every state requires high school students to take at least three years of math to graduate. However, I know that at the school where I teach (30 minutes outside of a midsize midwestern city, gradually changing from rural to a rural/suburban mix), what we used to think of as one class, Algebra 1, can now be split into Algebra 1A and Algebra 1B. Average to below average kids take those during freshman and sophomore years. After that, they can take geometry and pretty much stop there, or take what are essentially math electives: things like "Intro to Financial Statistics" or similar.
However, just because students take those courses, it doesn't actually mean that they learned much. If they can scrape together enough participation/completion/retake points for a D, they can get credit for the course, even if they hardly understood much content, and certainly didn't retain it. Most colleges require students to take a placement test before enrolling in gen ed courses, or to submit ACT subject scores or AP scores as proof of basic proficiency. The kids that do poorly on the gen-ed placement test (because they never took an AP math class and got <21 on the math ACT) almost certainly took both algebra and geometry in high school, because they wouldn't have the requisite diploma to be in college otherwise. However, they came in lacking core foundational skills (memorized times tables, basic fraction fluency) and didn't add much to them during four years of high school.
This doesn't even get into the topic of "credit recovery" software, in which kids who flunked a class the first time sit on a computer program and either Google answers or get fed them by a study hall monitor for a few weeks until they magically show they they've "recovered" a full year's worth of content knowledge.
There is so much to be said for how low the standards are in many US high schools and how few people care or even realize it's happening.
SAT math can be managed easily without knowing either algebra or geometry. You might not score high, but it won't be low enough to bar you from most average schools either.
I'm sure there are hordes of people graduating high school without passing any algebra or geometry courses. Some kind of "ok fine you can't do math" card that lets them off the hook to study other things.
It's not unwarranted, most people aren't cut out for it and won't use it even if they manage to pass the classes.
Have you taken or worked with the SAT (or ACT) recently? Both tests have undergone changes in recent years (though not necessarily in ways that make them more difficult). The College Board, who makes the SAT, says that the math section is ~34% algebra and ~16% geometry/trig. Do you mean to say that a person can manage a decent score on the math SAT without a solid grasp of Algebra 2? That could perhaps be true, but remember that Algebra 1 includes topics as simple as finding the slope of a line (y=mx+b) and solving other single-variable linear equations. Geometry questions can be as simple as finding the area of a trapezoid. Both of those examples require some algebra and geometry knowledge, and they would be some of the easier questions a student could encounter on the SAT.
Just using my state (Ohio) as an example, students are required to pass 4 math credits, with Algebra 2/Math 3* being the only required subject. A student can't really get to Algebra 2 before they get through Algebra 1, and most math paths have students take Geometry between the two algebra years.
Sure, the "or Math 3" part of the requirement could be doing some heavy lifting, but whatever counts as Math 3 almost certainly comes after Algebra 1, as Algebra 1 is considered the first year of math taken for high school credit (pre-algebra, often taken the year prior, can't be used for high school credit).
I'm not intending to be argumentative, but it's almost certain that a student who earns a high school diploma in Ohio has "passed" classes labelled Algebra 1 and Geometry. However, going back to my first post, passing does not necessarily equal learning. They could have taken and passed a class due to a combination of completion points, endless retakes, credit recovery alternatives, and pressure on teachers from administration to massage the numbers in order to make the school's graduation rate look better.
*Yes, the requirements also allow students to use certain career tech math classes or computer science classes in place of the Algebra 2/Math 3 requirement. However, the computer science kids are likely capable of getting beyond Algebra 1 and Geometry anyway, and even a career-tech math class would likely come after a student has fulfilled their Algebra 1 requirement. Again: Algebra 1 is considered the lowest/easiest math class that counts for high school credit (save for math electives like personal finance, but students typically aren't allowed to take those until they've given at least a couple attempts to the subjects covered on state end of course exams, which in Ohio are Algebra 1 and Geometry.)