People are ignoring the fact that America is now more diverse. Black and Hispanic kids do way worse than whites who do worse than Asian students.
I bet if you break it down, whites are scoring about the same. Asians are scoring about the same. Hispanics are doing about the same. Blacks are scoring about the same.
If you have more people who do bad in schools, it will bring down the overall average.
Oof. Although there’s a lot more to that, the general trend would likely play out that way. That said, historically Black (in regards to the US) schools likely have seen aptitude falls equal to the national average, so something is actually happening there to the populations, not just with the populations.
Also worth noting that your neighbour here in Canada has been seeing similar trends, and though a percentage of our population would also love to blame our Right party, that doesn’t play out as our politics is nationally usually controlled by the center left and provincial education is a pretty wide range despite fairly standard results.
There’s very likely a variety of easily identifiable causes inside any given classroom, but there’s probably an over-arching cause as well.
Some examples from areas I’ve lived in the last ten years that have been widely reported would be:
Mainstreaming. It was decided that removing special needs children from genera classrooms was detrimental to the developement of that minority of students, and so efforts are towards keeping them in regular classes. However, this would require a drastic increase in minders for those students (whatever their specific job title) which is more difficult. The end result has been a significant increase in violence towards teachers and teachers on temporary leave for such, and so a significant increase in classroom disruption for other students, having an overall negative effect on those students performance.
Grade Pushing. This one’s simple, it’s nearly impossible to actually fail, which means there’s no requirement to achieve aptitude before being progressed. If a student has failed to comprehend simpler courses, they will do worse the next year with more advanced courses, which they will fail, and be pushed up again. This is not apparent on stats like Graduation Rate, but is apparent on imposes standardized tests.
No Removal of Problem Students. Similar to the first point, if students are a distuption and negatively impact their classmates, their remaining then has a greater effect. They are not removed because their removal has a negative effect on their achievement (at least in terms of graduation, not necessarily in competence, as in the second point). This is exacerbated as, whatever cause is argued, these students are disproportionately whatever the worst performing racial demographic your area has.
No Advancement of Gifted Students. The argument here was that having good students in class helps bring up poor students, removing them hurts the class generally. This does not seem to be the reality. Gifted students will remove themselves when the opportunity arises (usually in Secondary school when they can select more advanced classes), even if they are prevented from doing so in Elementary school, but the dynamics of the classroom seem more tilted towards removal of disruptive/negative students for importance rather than retention of high achievers.
An example of of the over-arching causes would be:
Refusal to move away from faulty teaching theory of the 60’s and 70’s, which is based on ideological positions much more than scientific knowledge, so much so that those theories have even crossed from literacy to mathematics.
