Posted on 01/15/2015 3:02:08 AM PST by raybbr
As legions of parents nationwide know by now, the Council of Chief State School Officers and the National Governors Association have worked to create a states-led program called the Common Core State Standards. Common Core is intended to ensure that all American children receive a quality, rigorous education.
The hope is that the nation will stop losing ground among developed nations in promoting strong education for its children.
The U.S. still has a way to go, but based on this year’s edition of Quality Counts, released by Education Week, the nation is improving: It earned a C for its school systems, up from a C- last year. And no state scored a failing grade this year; last year, Mississippi did.
Education Week’s grading framework incorporates three components: Chance for Success, K-12 Achievement, and School Finances. According to Sterling Lloyd, senior research associate at the Education Week Research Center, the new index looks at a range of factors to assess education’s impact from “cradle to career.”
Income can play a major role in a child’s success in school. “Research tells us that students who are in stable communities and in higher-income families [tend to] have better educational success later on,” Lloyd said, though he cautioned that "we’re not talking about demography as destiny." While the relationship is far from simple, children from wealthier families are often exposed to more enriching activities and often have greater stability within their family lives.
Parents play perhaps the largest role in the development of their children. Just as a higher family income may help increase the advantages for students, well-educated parents can also often improve a child’s chance for success.
(Excerpt) Read more at homes.yahoo.com ...
Cost per student around $15K average.
MA is rated the highest and the Math and Reading proficiency rate for eighth graders is only 55%.
NJ squanders a lot on public education; our school taxes are outrageous and the schools get no results. Too many people place no importance on education, and now we have young teachers who don’t know the subject matter themselves. Those jobs are now the golden ticket into NJ’s upper middle class.
These liberals are always coming to the wrong conclusion. Here their implication is that children have family stability and higher educational attainment because their families have more higher incomes and more money. IOW they are ignorant because they are poor. Throw more money at people and they too will have family stability and higher educational attainment.
They never pause to consider that maybe the reason they are poor is because they are ignorant. They are poor and ignorant because they have no family stability. They have no family stability because the government pays them to not have it. Government dependency has robbed them of their culture.
It’s the fundamental disagreement between liberals and conservatives. Liberals think poverty creates social disfunction. Conservatives know that social dysfunction creates poverty. It is easily demonstrated. Observe what happens when an intact family is broken up through death or divorce - everyone is poorer. If one or both parents fall into addiction the family suffers financially. On the other hand, take any second or third generation welfare dependency case and hand them a million dollars. Think they’ll turn into Ozzie and Harriet living in a suburban split level? Think they’ll sit and help the kids with their homework? Maybe play some multiplication flash cards?
And most go on to university.
The Bell Curve is real.
6. Idaho Worst
> Overall grade: D+
> State Score: 67.7
> Per pupil spending: $8,123 (4th lowest)
> High school graduation rate: 84.0% (16th highest)
> Eighth graders proficient in math or reading: 36.5% (22nd highest)
9. New York Best
> Overall grade: B-
> State Score: 80.0
> Per pupil spending: $17,326 (4th highest)
> High school graduation rate: 78.0% (17th lowest)
> Eighth graders proficient in math or reading: 32.3% (18th lowest)
Idaho gets better results at half the price but Idaho is stuck at the bottom while NY is rated near the top all because of their spending levels.
From what I’ve seen from my granddaughters’ math homework, it’s more about concepts than getting the right answer. Lots of estimating answers. My answer to them is that “close enough” only counts in horseshoes, hand grenades and atom bombs. Now I have to add in government work.
BTW, nothing new under the sun. The prior generation had new math.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wIWaJ0sy03g
DC: 9th in per student spending, 49th in 4th grade math/reading, 51st in 8th grade math/reading. Not in the bottom 10. That should tell you everything about this list.
Typical leftist solution — Got a problem? Throw more money at it. Problem gets worse? You just aren’t spending enough.
I have to LOL at these types of rankings because one of the key criteria is how much money the schools in each state spend on a per pupil basis. States that spend the most money have a higher rank because they spend the most money.
Yes. But it is also true that academic achievement correlates strongly with intelligence, intelligence is largely inherited, and intelligence and academic achievement are major determinants of parental and family income. Children from wealthier families, on average, have smarter parents, and tend on average to be brighter themselves than children from poor families. (There are plenty of exceptions to this rule, of course, but on average this is the case.) But it is taboo to point this out.
So we ignore the 800 pound gorilla in the middle of the room. This might be a case where benign neglect is warranted, as there is no virtue in rubbing dullards' noses in the fact, except that the educrat lobby insists that remedial spending will equalize results. So the politicians and the schools set off to do the impossible, which is frightfully expensive, and do a great deal of damage in the process. Since they are perfectly aware of the reality, and ignore it for political reasons, the damage is malicious and intentional. Poor educational outcomes and blighted life chances are accepted as acceptable collateral damage in the cause of political correctness.
I remember reading an article years ago about the comparison of Catholic and public schools in a city (IIRC it was St. Louis). The Catholic schools spent much, much less than the public ones, the kids had a much higher graduation rate (and, IIRC college attendance rate, etc.) than the public schools did. The primary difference - the Catholic schools had far less administrators than the public schools did. The Catholic schools spent more on actually teaching the kids (classrooms may have been smaller, too). I don’t recall if this was included or not, but I think teachers in Catholic schools are paid less than in public schools and are not in unions.
My experience with Catholic schools in our area are that a) the teachers may be paid less; b) the parents participate more - -with their kids educations, participating in school activities (PTA, auctions, festivals, etc.), and the kids are taught to respect their teachers, etc. I also think uniforms are a good thing. My only experience is with Catholic schools, but I suspect the same is true of other Christian schools.
What a crock of BS. They only thing teachers do is teach to the state test. And Commoncore is more than math.
When a 7th grader can not write in Cursive he/she is not getting a good education. When that teacher can’t read it it is even worse.
I’m sick of having to PRINT so these under educated idiots can read a simply form. I learned to write cursive in the 3rd grade. We had 35 kids per classroom. No teacher’s aides, we ate lunch brought from home at our desks, and bought a 5 cent half pint of milk that the janitor brought into the class room.
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