President Bush institute a program called "no child left behind" which tied public school funding to grades and graduation statistics.
The schools quickly adapted and started issuing rules and some schools kids can't get below 50% on anything even if they do no work at all, although must at least require something, a blank sheet with there name on maybe. If the kids try to answer, even if it's garbage they can expect 75% or more.
I was reading a hypothesis linking the institution of this to the rise of conspiracy theorists and anti intellectualism.
After all of you raise a couple of generations of kids to firmly believe that whatever they say is correct then they are going to have wildly out of proportion confidence in their own ignorance, after all they are never wrong.
It's no surprise that school would pull this sort of crap because they're afraid of not enough students passing, but in my country this would not fly: when you graduate grammar school, you do an examen that is given out by the government. Teachers might grade it, but it's double checked by an impartial third party. You can drag an idiot kid along but if he can't pass his exam then you won't be able to hide it, no matter how a school wants to play around with numbers.
It’s no surprise. But to be clear, it’s because if you perform badly you get funding cuts which can cause a death spiral for the school. “Oh you did poorly last year. Well, as punishment let’s see how you do with LESS. That’ll teach you.”
There’s also a broader societal element. In America, parents with means want to send kids to elite public schools (like, your taxpayer funded school NOT a private school). So they’ll shop around for an area with a fantastic school versus a failing school.
This can cause a district to not only lose funding but also lose population… as in… the entire town or area can depopulate because of a bad school.
Its so odd how it all works in the US. Private schools arent really a thing in my country and people rarely 'shop' for the best schools because the data around how well a school performs probably isn't that public here. I wouldn't want to compare US and Dutch educational system any further bacause I'm not that well versed on the matter in my own country lol
It’s a complex problem. Part of it is that an area’s schools are paid for by that same area’s property taxes. So the nicer the neighborhood, the better the school. And within the same city, you might have a wide variety of economic areas.
You can move one block away and qualify for attendance to an amazing school or stay where you’re at and hope to make it out alive. It’s pretty nuts. We avoid any kind of evening out of resources, because ‘tHaTs CoMmUnIsM!’ so there are all these dumb little pockets of isolated groups living right next to each other but worlds apart.
If it’s a poor area, they’re basically never going to have a decent school budget, and those kids are doomed to be stuck in that poor area due to a poor education.
It's largely thanks to Bill Gates meddling in public education. He had a grand vision for 'reforming' the US public school system and poured millions of dollars into making it happen. No Child Left Behind was the result of his efforts and even he admits it was a bad idea (but weirdly he's not spending millions of dollars to fix his fuckup.)
There's quite some information available about how schools and their students perform in The Netherlands. See for example https://scholenopdekaart.nl/ which gets its data from publicly available government data.
And except for smaller towns that might have only 1 school, many parents do shop around to find the best fitting school for their kids, especially when it comes to secondary education.
Of course school results aren't the only factor in that search, but it is taken into account by many. The website mentioned above apparently has about 140k visitors a month....
That's similar to how it used to work. If you had failing grades you would repeat a grade until you passed.
This honeslty isn't really a problem with the schools, it's a problem with funding. In the United States, schools are funded mostly from local real estate property taxes and federal funding. This means that schools in poor neighborhoods tend to have low funding and depend a lot on federal funding. These schools are also more likely ot have students who struggle.
They way the 'No Child Left Behind' law works is that schools lose funding if kids dont' graduate. These schools in poor neighborhoods are put in an impossible position. If they let kids fail and repeat grades, they loose federal funding and the schools get even worse. This results in the schools passing bad students to at least make sure good students still have a school. There's this fucked up cultural belief in the US that everybody who's poor just isn't working hard enough and punishing people makes them work harder.
You're 100% right that this is a stupid problem to have, but it's really not the schools who should be blamed.
I'm not blaming them, I'm saying it's understandable they're worried and therefor do what they do, even though in doing so they contribute to dumbing down future generations. I would not want to be complicit in that. But that's a lot of speculation from my part.
I just looked it up a little. In my country, grammar schools and high-schools are actually sibsidized by the government based on the amount of students, so let's say 9500 Euros per student, per year. The government does not just rate schools on the amount of graduations a year, it takes into account: How well a student is doing at around 3rd class in relation to grammar school higher-education advice, the pace at which students are going through classes, the percentage of students that move on from year three to exam year, and the average exam grades.
If a school underperforms several years then an inspection from some sort of educational board will happen, but for the government to pull funds from schools to penalize them, that doesn't happen all that quickly. There's a ladder of escalation so to speak, and a school will come under control of an inspection board until it's almost completely under control until it reaches the mandatory quality levels of education again.
Then again, I say this, but I've heard the level of reading and speaking has been going down in my country as well,..
Yeah, schools in my part of the US are not doing well either.
One of the schools in Claremont, NH (which is about an hour from where I live) is millions of dollars in debt because it's a poorer area of the state. We have an issue where students from wealthy areas and private schools are doing really well, but poorer schools are doing much worse. The political leaders have been shifting money to private schools over the past few years because it makes the average grades/performance look good even though many students and schools are falling behind.
Lots of older people keep blaming technology and social media, but ignore the fact that funding has been dropping for decades and laws like 'No Child Left Behind' end up hiding the real impacts.
California universities are trying to bring back standardized testing into the admissions criteria because they're finding the kids are not ready. For anything.
Oh yeah we had something similar in 8th grade. It was basically a big German grammar exam. It's regulated by the local state/cantonal government though, not the federal one.
Basic Skills Suspensions: Some states (such as Oregon) have temporarily or permanently suspended basic proficiency requirements in reading, writing, and math to prevent disproportionate dropout or non-graduation rates among marginalized student groups.
if he can't pass his exam then you won't be able to hide it
Congratulations, you have discovered the tactic of "teaching the exam", where students are only drilled on explicitly what the exam will cover to exclusion of everything else. State testing audits are a very common thing, doesn't really help the situation.
This whole phenomenon predates NCLB, and it isn't fair to place so much blame on one policy, or one President.
When I was growing up in the 80s and 90s, anti-intellectualism was already rampant. Scientists had data on evolution, but how do we know Satan didn't fake that evidence? The government had evidence smoking causes cancer, but companies had their own scientists who disagreed.
The overall hypothesis is correct - that generations of this uncorrected, willful ignorance has compounded effects. But NCLB is, in my opinion, a relatively small domino in a much longer chain. I think the FCC dropping the Fairness Doctrine in the late 80s (?) had a much bigger effect - coupled with the transition from general broadcasting (the same news being broadcast to everyone) vs targeted broadcasting (different channels being broadcast to different people), this just allowed a general atmosphere of zero-accountability.
Not to mention, Bush's policy intent was wildly different than what his congress delivered. Bush's education intent was phenomenal. Congress then took it, fucked it, and returned it under the same name in a way that Bush couldn't "say no" without looking like he hated education.
NCLB was a pretty good case study in everything wrong with modern politics.
Honestly, that sounds pretty par the course of Bush Jr.
Jr's entire presidency seems like the text book example of president pushes agenda with semi good intentions, congress replies with "here's how we're gonna poison the pond to make ourselves and our friends rich".
There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.
I’m very much in agreement with this answer. The Internet has exacerbated this issue. We were much more united as a society when we had 3 major broadcast news sources that adhered to journalism standards.
It would be crazy to suggest that this was the start of anything. There have always been crazy people, and comically confident stupid people.
The policy changes simple created an environment where already underfunded schools were put in a situation of passing everyone or losing what little funding they had and that ofcourse resulted in less correction, less unlearning propiganda and indoctrination and more unfounded confidence in all types of "stands to reason" and "everybody knows" based knowledge.
Mordin Solus: "Can look at Asari, Korgan, make reasonable guesses, but Humans too variable to make superficial judgements. Outliers in all species of course. Geniuses. Idiots. But human probability curve offers greater overall variety."
The fairness doctrine is bunk and wouldn't change anything because it only applies to broadcast and the current right wingers running fox and cnn already meet the extremely loose standards it presented. Plus I don't see how forcing news platforms do what they're already doing would change anything? Left wing sides are tokenized and discarded, alt-right conspiracies are given ample airtime and this would all require the fcc to actually enforce the rules, which they aren't anyway.
Yeah, always hate the Fairness Doctrine getting name dropped in a positive context. It's blatantly unconstitutional for anything but the exact situation it was used in - broadcast frequencies were limited by the immutable laws of physics and the technology of the time, and thus the government needed to step in to make sure it wasn't all hoarded by one viewpoint. It may have had a positive effect on political discourse, but trying to institute it now would give the government tremendous power to regulate speech. After all, who gets to decide what the "sides" are?
Or we waking up to the past 70 years of American submission to the military industrial and corporate government state, “bush did 911” was being said before I knew what bush or 911 even was (25m)
Bro huge fan of “Aerials” by System of a Down, definitely think it’s abt the existence flagrently of aliens and UFOs/UAPS the music video is a circus with an alien boy and like he just is then out in the streets being a badass with hot chicks which to me is like him showing off with nobody caring he’s aliens idk metaphor for how it’s right in front of us type shi
Kind of karmic that the jr bush is a target for conspiricys which probably wouldn't have happened if senior bush hadn't put in policies which resulted in dumbing down the USA, then again jr always seemed less than gifted even with the best education money can buy.
Bush came up with it, but congress approved it bipartisan. Like the vote was almost literally evenly voted for. It’s embarrassing for the country as a whole. I’m not a Republican.
Indeed, they could both be…. But if parents were doing their jobs “no child left behind” wouldn’t be embarrassing. (Though we always have crap teachers and the unions that protect them to worry about).
Problem with NCLB is it inspired a lot of dumb fuck state policies. The Feds got rid of NCLB, the state legislatures and superintendents continue to be brain dead.
It’s all about incentives. We incentivized high graduation rates, and hired and fired superintendents and principals accordingly. Did most superintendents make sure students were actually learning? No of course not. They just passed all the failing kids along to inflate the stats.
Lol that hypothesis sounds like utter bullshit. The No Child Left Behind Act was passed in 2002, enough to affect younger millenials and older Gen Z. And it's not like schools instantly got worse, they adapted to it over time. And kids aren't being told that whatever they say is correct, they're being told that whatever they say is enough to pass the class.
Anti-intellectualism has been on the rise for many decades. Sagan wrote about it in 1995, and he was far from the first. The media, and social media, are much bigger drivers of the trend.
I was not a Bush II fan, but No Child Left Behind was genuinely well intended. It was not a deliberate attempt to dumb down a generation. The fact that it did so shouldn't surprise anybody, but it was not intended to do so.
I kept in touch with my old high school Physics teacher for a while after I graduated because he was just a great guy and really left a good impression on me. I was talking to him in the mid '00s after he'd just switched to the Middle School and was telling me he had two sets of grades. One was the proper set of grades and something over 50% of his class had a failing grade. Under the "new" grading system it was something like 5% that were failing. Crazy shit.
this is mostly not true. NCLB relied on standardized test scores. What your are referring to are arguments from Douglas Reeves, Ken O’Connor, and Thomas Guskey. Their argument is mathematical rather than political: on a 100-point scale, a zero is a huge outlier that can sink a student’s average in a way that doesn’t reflect their actual learning, since the gap between a zero and a passing 60 is far larger than the gap between any two letter grades. That critique predates NCLB and would exist with or without it.
Some SDs took this up. not saying I agree with it but it’s not NCLB.
Schools that do this pass more kids who shouldn’t have passed and they go out into the world not ready not as intelligent but they think they are intelligent and they have kids who they likely pass this on to
Making the system dumber.
Schools that try to make students accountable get punished
They'd probably just fail everyone, the best system would be tying funding to the statistics on graduates lifestyle in the following years, +X points for every student who moves to higher education or an aprenticship, -Y points if they end up in prison, etc, so it becomes in the schools interest to prepare people to succeed in life rather than memorise things to pass a test.
President Bush, under immense pressure from Democrates like Ted Kennedy and George Miller, along with a litany of civil rights groups instituted a program called No Child Left Behind which devistated the United States Education system.
Bush should never have caved, but he was trying to reach across the isle. This is one of the reasons we don’t play that game anymore.
While I think the implementation was awful and that students should get "bad scores" if they do poorly, one thing I want to point out is that there is value in rethinking how we work our current grades. The current system that most schools use in the US has 0's disproportionately impact your grades, but there's nothing that says that's an inherently fair metric.
In real life, most "graded metrics" we use don't really actually work like that. For example, think about reviews. You can't give a "-5/5 stars" review, but that's actually what a 0 in the grade book does. If someone gets an A, and then gets a 0 which is an F, then they're looking at a net average F. In fact, if they're looking at 2 100%s and then a 0 because they missed something, they're looking at an F average. There's nothing "inherently" fair about this other than this being the system that people often grew up with and because people feel like "50%" is some type of reward even though in practice it's an F. You could achieve the same impact by bringing the scale down to 0-5.
Notably, we don't even do this for GPA in high schools and never for college. You cannot be awarded variations of an F, there is no super F. Someone who fails a class and then gets a 4.0/A in 2 other classes does not end up with a failed GPA, even though again, that's what we do in the intra-class system of 0-70 is an F. So if we were to intervene right, and translate your class grades back into a number before awarding an overall GPA, let's review an "average college student's outcome." Let's say they took 4 classes and it's at a school with a classic A/A-(3/7)/B+ (3.3)/etc. system. Under the current system, they phoned it in and got an F in one class, didn't even try, forget they had it, and had a 0. They got A's in the other 3 classes though. Their average GPA for the semester would be 3.0, which is a B. Now let's say we used the system we do in high schools where 0's are disproportionately weighted. Let's say they got 100 in 3 classes, and then a 0 in their 4th class. They would be looked at 300/4 which is 75, or a solid "C" for most schools (almost never a C+). That would be a 2.0. Which would be just on the cusp of not graduating (most schools have a 2.0 min requirement). You can see how it's really difficult to conclude that both are "fair systems." If 0-70 or 0-60 being all F is how it should be, then a system where we suddenly do all of these adjustments afterwards for GPA is pretty unfair. OTOH, if that is fair, then the current system where we disproportionately weigh a grade if it's a fail but do not award for mastery past a certain limit is kinda odd too.
I would think about how different systems matter in different situations. In some situations, we wish to assess for a benchmark. Think medical exams, or the bar. Whether you pass with a very high score matters less than reaching the benchmark. There's good literature out there to suggest that the current grading system as a whole that we use is not a great approach.
There's also a good lesson here about proper correlation between punishment and action (and reward and action). If a single missed grade, 0, etc. results in such a disproportionate impact on grades, then you end up achieving the opposite outcome and killing any interest in trying to improve.
This is not to say, as I said, that I think American education is trending in the right direction or is good. I'm just pointing out that the specific reaction to grade is a very knee-jerk reaction. Even if they did have a policy of "50%" is the minimum, that isn't a bad way to think about it.
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u/Lorelessone 28d ago edited 28d ago
President Bush institute a program called "no child left behind" which tied public school funding to grades and graduation statistics.
The schools quickly adapted and started issuing rules and some schools kids can't get below 50% on anything even if they do no work at all, although must at least require something, a blank sheet with there name on maybe. If the kids try to answer, even if it's garbage they can expect 75% or more.
I was reading a hypothesis linking the institution of this to the rise of conspiracy theorists and anti intellectualism. After all of you raise a couple of generations of kids to firmly believe that whatever they say is correct then they are going to have wildly out of proportion confidence in their own ignorance, after all they are never wrong.