PISA test scores for math were released today. As usual, the US trails just about everyone, a result I take with a grain of salt because I've always had some doubts about the PISA methodology. More interesting, I think, is the decline in scores from 2018 to 2022:
Whatever my doubts about PISA's methodology, it stayed the same from 2018-22. This means the change in scores is probably fairly reliable.
As you can see, the US did surprisingly well. France and Sweden, for example, reported keeping schools open at much higher rates than the US, but even so their test scores declined more than ours.
This fits with data suggesting that school closures had little effect on test score declines within the US. Put everything together and the evidence is pointing ever more strongly to the conclusion that COVID test declines were unrelated to school closures. The real cause of the declines, then, remains a bit of a mystery. Perhaps just overall stress from the pandemic?
Oh, and look at that. Japan and Taiwan, both of which had stricter measures in place for a longer time, had actually improved their scores. Go figure.
Yes, the NY Times story mentions Singapore, Japan, South Korea and Australia as doing better in math, which are among the countries which took drastic measures and had much lower death totals:
https://ig.ft.com/coronavirus-chart/?areas=usa&areas=jpn&areas=nzl&areas=sgp&areas=aus&areas=kor&areasRegional=usny&areasRegional=usnm&areasRegional=uspr&areasRegional=usaz&areasRegional=usfl&areasRegional=usnd&cumulative=1&logScale=0&per100K=1&startDate=2022-01-01&values=deaths
If anyone really wants to know how to minimize both deaths and school losses, they should study those countries carefully. But few people in the US seem interested in this - they would rather have political arguments.
Yeah but those countries drive their kids to suicide by doing so. Since anyone can get a gun here, if we tried it the unaliving would be astronomical.
+1 (Though Australia has just over half the suicide rate of the USA so you can't include them in that claim.)
"The real cause of the declines, then, remains a bit of a mystery."
Well, here's a hypothesis we can't test, but we can judge whether it conforms to our experience and expectation:
(1) Math is a hard subject for a significant percentage of students.
(2) Most students can do acceptably well, even in their hard subjects, by application of EFFORT. In other words, if they study hard they can do OK.
(3) Temporarily removing students from a school environment tends to reduce their motivation to study hard. Especially, the students who don't like the subject they have to study, and find it difficult anyway.
(4) And on top of that, providing a built-in excuse for poor performance further reduces the motivation to work hard at something they don't like anyway.
No data to support that; just my offhand hypothesis.
The old 'they just don't try hard enough' rationale.
While its always fun and easy to blame victims for their lack of effort, the lack of correlation between school closures and test scores might give us pause before we run with this hypothesis.
Lots of deaths and constant illness are pretty obvious factors that seem to be breezily overlooked in the quest to assign blame.
I work in the schools (not as a teacher). Discounting the "don't try" effect big fuckin time.
That's a primo load of b----. I recall being told this in school a bunch of times because I'd score really high on standardized tests but I had my own unique learning style and trouble with stupid stuff like spelling and horrible pennmanship. This was way before PCs were common. In hindsight I am dyslexic and likely have a touch of ADHD. I can handle math well even more complicated math but only in a settling where I can focus and not be rushed.
Or covid causes inflammation of the brain even in asymptomatic cases (proven fact) that prevents learning. (extreme cases are referred to as brain fog.)
How many thousands of articles need to be published on covid brain fog for people to realize that test scores fell because covid directly makes kids less able to learn and less able to write tests.
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