Just 26% of US 8th graders proficient in math, in biggest-ever setback

I taught summer school math to 8th graders for a brief spell. I was teaching them addition and subtraction. I shit you not.<p>It&#x27;s really sad.<p>And it did not matter how they performed, if they showed up for class, we passed them and sent them along. Also if they didn&#x27;t show up, we passed them and sent them along anyway.<p>We should be absolutely ashamed of the public school system in our country. It&#x27;d corruption and perverse incentives from the top all the way down. Disgusting.

Some teachers I knew during COVID reported that in some cases nearly half the kids stopped attending online class and just never returned. Parents wouldn&#x27;t respond to calls &#x2F; efforts to get them back into class. Some school districts were faced with wondering what to do? Fail huge % of the students?<p>They chose not to fail them.<p>My son reports that his math classes for the last two years &quot;are the same thing over and over again&quot;.

It&#x27;s hard for people without kids to realize just how much COVID-related school closures fucked everything up.<p>An entire generation of students is at risk of forever being behind. And even those that always attended online class, did all the work, and excelled given the circumstances are <i>still</i> going to fall behind because so many of their peers in the classroom are behind that entire curriculums are changing to accommodate those students.<p>I feel terrible for everyone involved, but especially the kids that have been set back literally years. And what&#x27;s more is that this is going to further the divide between lower income&#x2F;high income families. Those that were able to afford private tutoring, have one parent stop working to help educate their children, or afford to transfer their kids to a private&#x2F;prep school.<p>There may be nothing we take more for granted in this country than public education and the very foundations are crumbling beneath us.

Even without COVID the public education system is such a travesty. When I was in highschool, one year, I had a math teacher who clearly didn&#x27;t understand her own subject and would routinely get lost and contradict herself and was just generally useless in trying to teach what she did not know. In another year a math teacher may have known the subject but had zero control of the class and the students rebelled against him and there was never any real teaching because kids were acting out to an absurd degree. Basically, of my four years of high school math two were literally a complete waste. And that&#x27;s pre-covid.<p>The obvious culprit, to me, is teacher&#x27;s unions. Why don&#x27;t we fire bad teachers and hire good ones? Seems like the teacher&#x27;s unions prevent that. Compensating teachers based on tenure rather than performance is another teacher&#x27;s union problem.<p>I find the whole thing very discouraging. Society is allowing immense waste of time, effort, and potential over very obvious problems.

Many people were saying this would be a result of all the &#x27;virtual learning&#x27; during COVID however, states bowed to the teacher&#x27;s union, and this is where we&#x27;re at I&#x27;m not sure how you recover from that big of a deficit.<p>I&#x27;d be interested to see the numbers for other countries that implemented similar policies. It&#x27;d also be interesting comparing districts that were closed for a minimal amount of time vs districts that were closed the longest.<p>Although the previous numbers from 2019 show that there are much larger problems in education.

Coronavirus shutdowns meant that our children lost out on a year or more of education.<p>Remote learning does not work. It fundamentally does not provide necessary environmental aspects for the healthy development of a child, even if they can be cajoled into attending and focusing.<p>Note that losing a year is not as simple as simply being a year behind, either. Consider spending a year completely indoors from age 25-26, say. You don&#x27;t come out the same as your doppelganger who spent 25-26 living a normal and balanced life.

Looking at the graphs when I got the report to load they look pretty constant to me. No obvious change from 2003 to 2018 that I could see. Which makes me wonder what they’re testing for when 3&#x2F;4 of the kids in the states fail…. Is this stuff like set theory and geometry or is it basic math and simple algebra (word problems) or what? Any pointers to a sample test?<p>Any chance this is conflated with lousy reading skills as all testing relies on that.

The link they provide is to reading results, but the article is citing math results. Where are those? The reading is showing 4th and 8th grade levels are at exactly the level they were in 1992, which incidentally, is when I was in 6th grade. Telling me kids today are exactly as stupid as me doesn&#x27;t sound quite as alarming. I&#x27;m actually kind of surprised scores went up by 2019. Also, &quot;biggest ever&quot; is since 1969 since the assessment didn&#x27;t exist before then.

West seriously needs to forbid personal internet-capable devices from everyone under the age 16. We are in the middle of a global social experiment that nobody signed in for, and the results are looking very bad.

I know a lot of people are blaming it in COVID, but are we sure that social media, you tube, tik tok are also, even if partly, not to blame?

Down from just 34%<p>So 8% drop

what does proficient in math mean?

Is anyone surprised?<p>We have a sizable number of people in western academia saying math is racist.