Tag: dumbing down

Oregon Is Removing a Requirement for High School Students to Show ‘Essential Skills’ Before Graduating

Last week, the Oregon Department of Education unanimously voted to remove a requirement for Oregon high schoolers to demonstrate basic mastery in reading, writing, and mathematics in order to graduate. The requirement, which was most often met using students’ standardized test results, has been paused since 2020.

According to state documents, the “Assessment of Essential Skills” benchmark is typically met when a student meets a cutoff score in a statewide standardized test, though alternatives can be used for students who opt out of the test, such as samples of classroom work or scores from other tests like the SAT or ACT.

While score cutoffs have been unavailable since the pause in 2020, a state guide from the 2016-2017 school year lists the cutoff for one popular test, the Smarter Balanced test, which student take in their 11th grade year, as a score of 2515 for reading and 2543 for math. Based on score percentile data from 2017-2018, assessments would put those scores roughly in the 25th and 45th percentiles respectively (assuming no major changes in student performance over one year). 

While the math cutoff in particular might seem high, both ranges would barely put test takers just a few points into the “Level 2” range in Smarter Balanced’s 4-level scoring range. Level 2 scores are defined by the testing organization as meaning that a student has a “partial understanding of and ability to apply the knowledge and skills associated with college content readiness,” adding that a student in this level would need “support” to be ready for college.

While not every high school graduate can or should go to college, if a high school student can’t even demonstrate “partial” understanding of the subject matter of their classes, letting them continue on to their senior year and graduate high school without additional intervention is clearly irresponsible.

However, critics have framed the extra remediation many low-performing Oregon students receive as damaging. Department of Education officials opposed the policy in part because “higher rates of students of color, students learning English as a second language and students with disabilities ended up having to take intensive senior-year writing and math classes,” extra remediation that “denied those students the opportunity to take an elective,” according to The Oregonian. 

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California State Guidelines Discourage Schools From Offering Advanced Middle School Math

A small but growing number of American schools are reducing or delaying access to advanced courses. Most often, these changes have been enacted in the name of reducing achievement gaps between demographic groups. However, rather than helping marginalized students, these policies deny educational opportunities for gifted students of all backgrounds.

“Detracking” is an increasingly popular proposal among educators that attempts to reduce the degree to which students are separated by academic ability. It typically takes the form of removing advanced course offerings or delaying the introduction of these offerings. Supporters claim that marginalized students are often wrongly placed—or place themselves—in less advanced courses and that these students often stay on a less advanced curricular path.

In San Francisco, public schools have eliminated accelerated math courses in middle and high school since 2014, and several Seattle schools had rolled out detracking efforts by 2016. Earlier this year, a Detroit-area school district eliminated middle school honors math classes, while schools in Cambridge, Massachusetts, began phasing out advanced middle school math in 2017—though the district announced it would reverse course in August. Outrage erupted in February when one Los Angeles–area school eliminated honors English courses for ninth- and 10th-grade students.

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California School District Considers Removing Honors Courses For Sake Of “Equity”

A San Francisco Bay Area high school district is considering removing honors classes for high school students in an effort to streamline its courses and promote “equity” – a move that has sparked concern among students, parents, and teachers.

The Sequoia Union High School District’s board discussed the move during a six-hour meeting Sept. 20, but did not come to a decision on the matter.

District administration staff annually review courses based on students’ academic outcomes, and “typically in response to low scores … that have not improved over time,” according to a district analysis.

Arguing for equity, the analysis stated that eliminating certain honors courses and merging students taking “advanced” classes with those taking them at “grade-level” would “diversify” the classroom and could improve academic outcomes for students who “have historically experienced barriers” to advanced coursework.

Over the past several years, Sequoia Union has merged advanced freshman science with grade-level science courses and merged advanced freshman math courses with grade-level math districtwide.

At several individual high schools, advanced English, physics, and chemistry have additionally been merged with their respective grade-level courses.

The analysis said its study found such changes had little-to-no effect on the districts’ advanced-placement students—while students that have struggled saw academic improvement and higher rates meeting college entrance requirements.

“When students have greater access to rigorous coursework and are held to high standards, they are more likely to meet those expectations,” the analysis stated.

But SUHSD Students First—an advocacy group made up of students, parents, teachers, and community members—raised concerns about transparency, saying that the school community was not given an opportunity for input on the matter.

The group said they believed the analysis was “biased” toward merging despite their efforts to work with the district to get neutral data.

“We are disappointed the board did not ensure a neutral report and did not have any participation in the review of the data.  It is clear we should have advocated for an external contractor to conduct the research and prepare the report,” the group said in a statement on their website.

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California’s War on Math

“California is America, only sooner” was an optimistic phrase once used to describe my home state. The Golden State promised a spirit of freedom, innovation, and experimentation that would spread across the nation. And at the heart of the state’s flourishing was a four-letter word: math.

Math made California prosper.

It’s most obvious in top universities like Stanford, Caltech, Berkeley, and UCLA. Those schools funneled great minds into California STEM enterprises like Silicon Valley, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and aeronautical engineering. Both the Central Valley and Hollywood—America’s main providers of food and fodder, respectively—rely upon engineering to mechanize production and optimize output. 

All of this has made California’s GDP $3.6 trillion—making it the fifth largest economy in the world as of last year.

But now “California is America, only sooner” is a warning, and not just because of the exodus of people and jobs and the decay of our major cities, but because of the state’s abandonment of math—which is to say its abandonment of excellence and, in a way, reality itself. 

Perhaps you’ve read the headlines about kooky San Francisco discarding algebra in the name of anti-racism. Now imagine that worldview adopted by the entire state.

On July 12, that’s what happened when California’s Board of Education, composed of eleven teachers, bureaucrats, professors—and a student—decided to approve the California Mathematics Framework. 

Technically, the CMF is just a series of recommendations. As a practical matter, it’s the new reality. School districts and textbook manufacturers are already adapting to the new standards.

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Dumbing Down The SAT Perfectly Sums Up The State Of American Education

In a recent announcement, College Board expressed plans to make significant changes to the SAT that will go into effect in 2024. The test will be fully digital and shortened from roughly three hours to two. The reading passages will be made shorter and the math section will allow the use of a calculator throughout. In short, the test will be easier for both the testers and the person being tested.

According to College Board, the changes are meant to address concerns with access because of Covid and the lack of equity in the SAT, which some allege favors certain racial and socioeconomic groups. The complaint about equity has led a large number of colleges to stop using SAT scores as part of their admissions. Evidently, College Board is hoping that making the test easier and shorter will narrow these performance gaps and restore the usefulness of the SAT as an assessment for college readiness.

However, by working off false premises, College Board is coming to the wrong conclusion. All these proposed changes will simply lower the standard for everyone, hardly address problems with equity, and make the SAT all the more useless.

Any teacher or “data coach” who analyzes test results can attest to seeing this kind of logic play out in most state standardized tests. In the beginning, these tests were more challenging and designed to assess higher-level thinking skills. Over time, however, wave after wave of low scores and obvious performance gaps cause the test creators to lower standards dramatically. Finally, the test becomes a pointless hurdle for teachers and students to jump through, inviting calls for a new standardized test that actually says something.

Dumbing down a test is often subtle, but there are a few ways to spot it: make passages shorter with lower reading levels, simplify the math problems, allow a calculator, dictionary, and even provide some basic strategies for working through the test. Along with these changes, the scoring is often needlessly complicated with a series of formulas and algorithms replete with multipliers and random variables to supposedly indicate whether a student “meets” or “masters” expectations. Hence, standardized tests usually fill a whole sheet with a multitude of categories, bar graphs, tables, and color-coded labels to communicate a tester’s final score.

This was the evolution of Texas’s standardized test, the STAAR, which started in 2013. In its earlier days, it was highly regarded in terms of quality, and many students did poorly on it. These were the days of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) and Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), so mass failure on a campus often meant the threat of a school or district receiving a failing grade and being reconstituted. Naturally, this led to wailing and gnashing of teeth among administrators and educators, who were now having to shape up their instruction and pay attention to data.

To make matters worse, the data from STAAR indicated serious gaps between students of different races. Thus, even the more affluent campuses that had relatively high pass rates were still given low marks because the few students who failed were largely students of color. Thus, for the sake of equity, there was an effort among all campuses to teach to the bottom and get these few students to pass while stronger students were largely neglected.

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Washington’s Olympia School District to ax music classes for pushing ‘white supremacy’

A Washington school district is planning to cut music classes it believes promote “white supremacy culture” and “significant institutional violence.”

The Olympia School District — which is facing a budget shortfall of $11.5 million — voted last week to eliminate band and strings for fourth-graders in an effort to both save money and fight racism.

School Board Director Scott Clifthorne admitted during the meeting that research proves music classes are “healthy for young minds,” but that they are disproportionately rolled out across the district’s 12 elementary schools.

Students at some campuses are required to miss “core instruction” in order to attend music classes, he said, while some campuses offer longer instrumental class time than others.

“We also know that there are other folks in the community that experience things like a tradition of excellence as exclusionary,” Clifthorne said.

“We’re a school district that lives in and is entrenched in and is surrounded by white supremacy culture. And that’s a real thing.”

The board director told concerned parents that there was nothing “intrinsically white supremacist” about string or instrumental music, but warned that there are ways in which it could contribute to the racist culture.

“The ways in which it is and the ways in which all of our institutions — not just schools, but local government, state government, our churches, our neighborhoods — inculcate and allow white supremacy culture to continue to be propagated and caused significant institutional violence are things that we have to think about carefully as a community,” he said.

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Americans’ IQ Declining for First Time in Almost a Century, Study Finds

Americans’ average IQ is in decline for the first time in nearly a century, according to a new study, a finding that comes as many schools gut curricula standards to promote so-called equity and inclusion.

Young Americans between the ages of 18 and 22 saw the biggest decline in IQ, according to a new study published in the psychology journal Intelligence and reported on by Campus Reform. The study’s authors suggest that these IQ declines occurring between 2006 and 2018 may be due to poor-quality education.

The findings could indicate “that either the caliber of education has decreased across this study’s sample and/or that there has been a shift in the perceived value of certain cognitive skills,” according to the report.

The study comes as school districts across the country eliminate honors curricula from high schools in the name of racial equity. Culver City School District in Los Angeles caught backlash from parents of honors students who lost opportunities to enroll in accelerated programs.

“It’s not working and we’ve thrown the baby out with the bathwater,” said one Culver City parent.

Universities have also lowered their standards for admission, with the University of California, Berkeley, and Columbia University removing their entrance exam requirements.

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23 Baltimore schools have zero students proficient in math, per state test results

Baltimore City is facing a devastating reality as the latest round of state test scores are released.

Project Baltimore analyzed the results and found a shocking number of Baltimore City schools where not a single student is doing math at grade level.

“We’re not living up to our potential,” said Jovani Patterson, a Baltimore resident who made headlines in January 2022, when he filed a lawsuit against Baltimore City Schools. The suit claims the district is failing to educate students and, in the process, misusing taxpayer funds.

“We, the taxpayer, are funding our own demise,” Patterson said at the time.

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‘Slowing Rates of Disruption,’ Decline in Scientific Breakthroughs, Researchers Stumped

The rate of scientific breakthroughs has been falling over the years, especially in the fields of physics and chemistry according to a recent study, with researchers unsure what is causing the phenomenon.

In recent decades, there has been an “exponential growth” in the volume of new technological and scientific knowledge, which created conditions necessary for major advances in those fields, states the study, published in Nature magazine on Jan. 4. But contrary to such expectations, the study found that progress is slowing down in several fields.

“You don’t have quite the same intensity of breakthrough discoveries you once had,” said Russell Funk, co-author of the study.

The research team looked at 45 million papers and 3.9 million patents. They used a new quantitative metric called the “CD index” to identify how papers and patents “change networks of citations in science and technology.”

The team found that papers and patents are increasingly less likely to push science and technology into newer directions, a trend that is breaking away from the past.

“We link this decline in disruptiveness to a narrowing in the use of previous knowledge, allowing us to reconcile the patterns we observe with the ‘shoulders of giants’ view,” the study said.

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