This seems to be talking about he NAEP test scores: https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/profiles/stateprofile?sfj=NP&chort=1&sub=MAT&sj=&st=MN&year=2024R3
Calfornia is labelled as 233 while alabama is 236. I’m not very familiar with comparing this scores, but California is listed as significantly under the average (237) so I don’t think its a stretch to say California is also significantly under Alabama’s scores.
Yeah, it turns out a lot of recent changes in education (see Lucy Calkins, common core, etc) have actually been pretty hugely detrimental. Education is pretty fraught with fraudsters who sell school administrators these programs that aren’t backed by any kind of research, and turn out to not work at all.
The places that have avoided this the best are the Alabama’s and Mississippi’s of the US who, by stint of being hyper conservative, have basically said, “Fancy new types of city learnin’? No thanks. If it was good enough for my great grandpappy, it’s good enough for my kids.”
Turns out, this actually ended up being a really good thing, as a lot of that new stuff turns out to be straight fraud that’s ruined an entire generation of young people.
And yet the states with the highest scores are blue states that teach common core, and Alabama is consistently in the lowest 10-15 states.
The metric referenced in OPs meme is improvement, not raw scores. Alabama improved from really bad to below average. They’re not scoring better than NY or CA.
Alabama’s 8th grade math scores are literally 50th of the 50 states. The only lower grades are DC and PR.
In a normal reality, that’s what conservatism should be, a counterweight to the excesses of experimentation/reform/revolution. In our reality, slow clock, once in 10 years
Problem is that conservitism has never been that
I agree on what should, disagree on what is. Good comment otherwise.
If you work in procurement or education finance you see this so clearly.
Schools with a dozen different reading or math programs sitting in a closet with all their consumables. They sit their because someone high up in the district got sold it, but it doesn’t work so they don’t get used. You go back to your desk and out of curiosity look up some of the contracts and realize you were just looking at a closet full of a quarter million dollars worth of paper crap.
This doesn’t even get into the fact that most clerks pay their own school bills. So things like fake ink invoices get certified all of the time.
Stealing from schools is way, way too easy.
What. The. Fuck…
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC-Z8DHFnh_1yPQ5VhtJxgag
If you’re curious how bad it is getting
huh, common core is a fraud. who knew? /s
I have a friend who started teaching in a district that had just picked up CC practices. they attended a seminar and came back absolutely brainwashed and just kept praising it and vomiting the same bullshit at the seminar.
funny thing, the district they worked in continued to have the lowest scores even after they went all in on CC. worry not, all the surrounding districts also started to use CC and all their scores also stagnated or dropped.
personally I believe CC was part of a plan similar to that of project 2025 and was integral in ensuring the general voting populace was dumb and gullible.
So it sounds like these states that use common core tests scores have gone down, not Alabama and Mississippi test scores have gotten better.
Alabama and Mississippi teach common core math same as most other states.
So the post is comparing scores from different tests?
No, they’re saying one side got worse while the other stayed the same.
I’m out of the loop, why is common core bad?
I don’t fully trust this - the problems it lists mostly existed prior to common core and speak about education in a very idealized way. As if if we were not using common core these wouldn’t be issues but they very much were prior to common core, teaching flexibility seems to be touched on a lot and that hasn’t been a thing since standardized testing was introduced and most of these changes occurred then, the shifting away from concepts to focus on skills, homogenous learning, inflexibility etc. Strict educational norms are traditional, not new. I do think the point about focusing on fiction writing versus nonfiction is valid enough but that’s also fairly arbitrary since the courses the students take would actually be the deciding factor there. The criticism about it being a “top down” solution is just how education works in a bureaucracy, standards for curriculum will be set that’s just how it works.
I don’t think common core is perfect and I especially take issue with any form of teaching that stays from phonics when it comes to reading specifically but it’s not any more problematic than the systems that came before it and the only way to avoid these issues really is to tailor education to each individual student, which is how we should be spending our money to be clear we simply don’t live in that world right now.
I don’t actually know if the issues being attributed to CC stem from it directly or if this is simply a new leaf on our very broken educational system tree.
Yeah, I fully agree. Half of these are issues that education has always faced in one form or another, and the other half seem to be outright fabrications.
