The NAEP has released brand new results for its long-term reading and math tests. The long-term test is a special version of the NAEP that strives to stay the same from year to year so it produces scores that can be compared over time. Here's the main takeaway:
Despite the pandemic, reading scores didn't go down much, but the scores in mathematics were fairly disastrous. Math showed a decline of nine points in three years, sending scores back to their 1990 levels. Despite their small absolute drop, reading scores were back to their 1975 levels.
Score drops were significantly different for different racial and ethnic groups:
Using the rough rule of thumb that 10 points equals one grade level, white students lost about half a grade level while Black students lost 1½ grade levels. Native Americans lost an astonishing two grade levels.
Similar trends could be seen among different performing students. The highest performing students lost 7 points while the lowest performing students lost 15 points. Students in the middle lost 8 points.
So scores were down and the racial gap went up. It doesn't get much worse than that. There's considerably more reason to panic now than there was for last year's scores, which I predicted kids would make up in the next test. I was wrong.
Home schooling for everyone? Not a good idea.
While the children were (presumably) learning from home, it was not the same thing as implied by “home schooling” …
2012 is when it all started going downhill. Any guesses why? Sure, covid made it drop faster, but it was already on the decline. My guess will be that lockdowns take the blame and the causes of the 2012 decline will be ignored if even investigated.
No, that is not obvious - see my comment below.
I can't figure it out. My reading and math skills are just as good now as they were prior to the Covid pandemic. It must be some kind of measurement fluke.
So we all had to stay home to protect the lives of our cherished elderly, and the kids suffered. Funny how few people seemed to care, if it wasn't all about Granny in the Nursing Home.
Okay, that was unkind. However, the disproportionate channeling of resources towards the very old versus children is a thing, and not a great long run strategy.
I know the American tendency is the Glibertarian idea that "Well, their PARENTS ought to be responsible!" In spite of knowing that many don't act that way, others are financially less able, and helping children to become stronger adults is in everyone's best interest.
Funny that, your use of the passive voice. Also funny that you see fit to assume a particular counterfactual without bothering to argue it. But there's a lot of that going around these days. Note, BTW, that I'm a teacher of (older) kids myself, so don't go hanging your hat on that peg.
What a dumb way to frame the situation.
Guess who else suffered:
- Kids who died
- Kids who are still sick
- Kids who lost family and friends
- Kids whose family are still sick
But Salamander gives literally no cares about these kids. Giving no cares about anyone in the name of 'think of the childre n!!!' has long been a easy way to advocate for awful ideas.
"gives literally no cares about these kids"? What do you mean? My whole comment was a gripe that NOT ENOUGH care had been given to the young. Look how long it took to develop a vaccination that was approved for children v the ones for the elderly, and later on, people younger than elderly?
Clearly, I need to learn to write to where people are more likely to understand what I'm saying.
You know _exactly_ what they meant when they said you didn't care for those children, just as you knew exactly what I meant. If you want to convince people you're not a troll you're going about it 100% the wrong way.
Under 2000 children died of COVID in the US. The vast majority who died or became seriously ill had preexisting comorbidities. There was no legitimate reason to shoot down schools. But the teachers' unions wanted a paid holiday for their members.
Troll. If the teachers are dead from COVID they can't teach the children.
That was basically the approach Sweden took: let everything stay open and let the olds die. And die they did -- in droves. But while there are fewer pensioners on the welfare rolls now, it turns out that Sweden also now has Europe's highest rate of childhood diabetes, which has been linked to Covid exposure. *And* their economic growth still lags behind that of their Scandinavian neighbors, despite having avoided widespread lockdowns.
https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2022-03-31/sweden-covid-policy-was-a-disaster
Very interesting. This is an experiment that would never have been approved, for obvious reasons, but with any luck, people may learn from it.
Yeah, it's easy for me to say. But data is data.
Why the 8-year hiatus between 2012 and 2020? How do we know that scores weren't already trending down somewhere in that interval? On the other hand, if math scores followed the long-term trend up to 2019 the drop after that could be even worse than it appears.
What do other tests say about that interval?
I believe the longer than usual break between 2012 and 2020 LTTs was a funding issue. Note that the 2020 LTT student assessment period for 13-year-olds was Fall 2019, so those data are definitely pre-pandemic. Assessment of 9-year-olds was underway when the shit hit the fan, and assessment for 17-year-olds was canceled.
The most recent data are the result of an ad hoc decision to take advantage of the opportunity presented by the timing of the original LTT-13 assessment to be able to obtain immediate pre- and post-pandemic data for comparison.
Meanwhile, over at Mother Jones: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2023/06/maga-groups-claim-schools-are-too-woke-to-teach-reading-correctly/
So the smart kids snd the average kids did basically the same but the stupid kids fell off a cliff? Yeah that tracks.
But I guess I'd also say that maybe if kids basically lost a year of teaching then they didn't get any worse they just weren't taught the concepts in x grade, they had to learn it in x grade+1. Since math instruction is usually done before the end of HS they'll eventually equalize
That has been the experience of multiple friends of mine who teach K-12. Myself, I'd either hold them back a grade, but apparently that's considered cruel and inhumane by large numbers of people, few of them teachers themselves.
Looks like a big chunk of parents who think the school system is there to babysit their kids didn't do their job. Okay ... what could have been done about this? Nothing, on acount of the fact that a large percentage of these parents are already a drag on the body politic anyway.
Remote learning was absolutely worthless for my kids. Most of the teachers had no idea how to adapt their lessons to a remote classroom (and why should they have? -- that's not what they were trained to do) and sitting staring at a computer screen at the kitchen table is no way to learn. They would zone out after about 3 minutes.
But I also didn't want them bringing home Covid, particularly before vaccinations were widely available, so I don't know if there is anything else we could have done. In the end, we did of course get Covid in 2021 when my oldest brought it home from, you guessed it, school. But by then we were all vaxxed and boosted, so it wasn't a huge deal. But closing schools for a semester in 2020 undoubtedly saved untold thousands of lives even as it set back learning quite a bit.