if about 17k kids take it for 192 million, it's about $11K per taker. Is that good or bad? You need to create the test (though maybe not a new one each year) and proctor it (maybe 1 proctor per thirty takers?).
Okay so about $1300 per kid? That seems reasonable to me. Though it's still hard to argue against--'how long have you been collecting this data? Is teaching demonstrable better now? No?'
No, typically about 400,000 students per year take an NAEP test, so it's like $450 per student.
They typically make up about 3 tests per year, which is a big part of their fixed cost.
If this was a private company you were thinking about buying, you could probably find an employee who could tell you how you could do it cheaper, for which you would give him a big bonus. But you can't give federal employees big bonuses or stock options, so what are their incentives?
How to figure out how to do it cheaper? Occasionally you have a person in the department who has been around forever and spends his free time complaining about inefficiency and telling everyone how things could be fixed if only. Of course, identifying that guy and getting him to tell you, sans bonus would be difficult.
You could also go the management consultant route; embed some systems thinkers for a year and get a report. My impression is most of those people suck and get paid hugely to give the boss a report telling him he should do what he already wanted to.
So maybe Musk has it right. You fire twenty five percent and yell at the remaining ones until they figure it out?
Based on $450 IMO that doesn't apply here. You either think the test is worthwhile or you don't.
Oregon's big problem is that Portland, Portland's suburbs, Eugene(University of Oregon) and Corvallis(Oregon State University) run the whole state. Nutty people all.
Last time I checked only Norway and Luxembourg spent more per pupil on education than the United States.
I’m sure if we simply spent a few thousand more per student…perhaps add new artificial turf to the football field, our NAEP results would rocket upwards.
Yes, consider what could have been, if instead of an unmanaged immigration system that favors family unification, token efforts at saving the world and low-cost drug-distribution, we had put in place selective managed immigration.
There seems to be an endless stream of "DOGE Throws Baby Out With Bathwater" stories, from MSM to social media to random forums. Feels a lot like astroturf to defend the permanent bureaucracy from any trimming. And the Managerial Class cultists seem to be lapping it up.
It's almost as if DOGE wasn't carefully planned ahead of time to focus first on the worst examples of waste and fraud, which allows bureaucrats to easily sabotage its efforts with bad PR. Trump often cancels DOGE's worst mistakes, but not until after DOGEists dream up why, actually, that wasn't a mistake that was 4D chess.
The workforce culls have been mostly a disaster, from any standpoint beyond just making 'em sweat because they're Dems.
Buyouts? Those people were going to quit anyway - half to retire, half to jump to the private sector.
Probationary culls? You're disposing of the young and recently-promoted while keeping those who've been in the same job for thirty years.
It's probably the only way they could have actually made things worse. A better approach would be to abolish the disparate-impact consent decree (which they are trying to do), implement a cognitive test for all new hires, and drastically ramp up performance assessments.
The federal DoE is redundant of the DoEs, Boards of Regents, and school boards of every State. But I can hear the Left screaming that NOBODY will be running education anymore. School operations will grind to a halt.
The NAEP could be administered by a federal commission staffed by States' bureaucrats. All the federal extra-Constitutional Departments could be eliminated and replaced by federal commissions made up of State bureaucrats that promulgate standards and metrics.
Apparently a big part of the federal DoE's ops is administering the federal student loan program, which is probably among the most economically injurious federal programs ever.
In Oregon, high school students do not need to prove basic proficiency in reading, writing, and math to earn a high school diploma until at least 2029.
"Chanting is an excellent way for children to learn mathematics tables and letters. However, people old enough to be getting doctorates in education are embarrassed to do it, so it gets said it doesn't work."
Siegfried Engelmann's Direct Instruction methodology, which is the foundation of *Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Lessons*, uses highly scripted exchanges between teachers and students; it's not far from a kind of Black church call-and-response pattern. As you say, most education 'experts' absolutely loathe it, and teachers whine that it's suppressing both their students, and their own, 'creativity'. But there's mountains of evidence that it works extremely well with younger children, who aren't embarrassed by it at all, and who actually find it fun.
Little children like asking questions, and getting straight answers. They also like being asked questions, and being able to respond with the right answer, and getting praised. That's pretty much the basis of Direct Instruction right there.
But this goes against over a century of essentially Romantic fantasizing about children and how they learn.
The reason teacher resistance plays an ongoing role in the perpetual suppression of phonics-based reading instruction in favor of the hugs-n-hope approach is pretty obvious if you listen to the Sold A Story podcast: the teachers in early elementary grades when this is an issue are overwhelmingly female. The gurus of the 'whole language' approach over the past several decades: all women. The editors at the textbook publishers: I'll let you guess.
This is a hard problem to overcome, as so much of the solution is deeply, deeply counterintuitive to most of the principals. That is, lots of women go into teaching squirrelly first-graders because they really love kids. They are therefore going to be highly sympathetic to a reading 'expert' who tells them what they need to do is just be super enthusiastic about reading, give kids lots of encouragement, read plenty of their own favorite story books aloud to little circles of wide-eyed youngsters, avoid telling the darling mites they're wrong when they mess up words, design cosy reading 'nooks' where the budding flowers can curl up on fluffy cushions to 'experience' colorful picture books, and so on.
These teachers are *not* going to like some dude named Siegfried coming along and telling them, nah, skip all that time-wasting crap, and instead line up the kids in rows of desks, follow the word-by-word (for teachers and students) 'scientific' script I'm supplying to you, and get those little miscreants shouting out the RIGHT answers in perfect unison! It's going to sound like Siegfried is just Sieg Heil.
But the problem is that first approach doesn't work for lots of kids, whereas the second approach works for pretty much all of them.
The university textbooks in sociology state in the introduction that sociology was founded by Karl Marx. Then they add other leftist Jewish icons as contributors: Sigmund Freud and Herbert Marcuse.
Page after page is Marxist propaganda presented as "science." One example: People started frying meat in the Stone Age to show that they could afford to waste some of their food, because food shrinks when you fry it, and frying meat has no nutritional value. (Reality: You fry meat to get rid of impurities, and because it makes it easier for the body to absorb nutrients. For example, boiled and fried eggs make you absorb more calories than from a raw egg.)
Also, the Soviet Union may have had some political messaging in the media, but they "corrected that" in time, and had "varied" media.
Steve says there are sociology studies that don't confirm leftist thought. What does that matter? The textbooks that everyone reads are full of leftist thought. Whatever study someone publishes somewhere will hardly be read. If Steve disagrees with this, maybe he can take a look at the actual doctoral dissertation handed in at the universities. See what it is the students have absorbed and what they are allowed to write about to get the degree.
Same in West European universities, which all use the U.S. textbooks.
Same in states like Estonia, where the dissertations are identical to the sociology crap in the U.S. The Marxists control the sociology departments, and the textbooks come from the leading Marxist country today, the U.S.
"much like DOGE doesn’t seem to have time for much else in the way of useful analysis."
I want to give them the benefit of the doubt, and perhaps I am being fed very selective information, but this is my impression too. It's like they decided all previous attempts at cutting government got coopted so we'd better just slash and burn and assume it will all work out because government sucks anyway.
"On the other hand, every time the NYT dubiously asserts that Trump is about to do something stupid, Trump cultists dreams up all sorts of ideas why, actually, that would be a genius 4-D chess thing to do."
It's getting harder to do that with some of his things. I understand that history shows tariffs are not universally bad (contrary to what we were all taught based on a single example from the great depression) but it's all haphazard. And why does he keep up with this 'Canada should be a state" nonsense? That's more pro wrestling than 4d chess.
While I'm at it, what about disappearing that Palestinian Columbia student protester? Were it up to me we never would have let him in nor given him a green card in the first place. Still, we can't give up on due process or use the power of government to fuck with people we don't like. Am I missing something about that story?
It's not hard for outside buyers to make big cuts in employment in private industry (e.g., Twitter) because the newcomer takeover artists can find good executives within the organization who will make smart cuts because you offer them a big bonus, a promotion, stock options, etc.
But you aren't allowed to do much of that with federal employees, so it's hard to find experienced managers who understand exactly what is going on within their organization and can make smart cuts.
This is a great point -- most private sector organizations of any size have auditors, money guys, etc., who (at least periodically) swoop in to identify waste in order to raise profits.
But NGOs and government agencies are full of people who have dedicated their education/research and careers to grubbing for as much grant money as they can possibly get their hands on, and then spending, spending, spending. And they end up as 'managers' who don't know how to do anything else.
The Twitter thing was a surprise. If you look at fora like HackerNews there were a lot of arguments about why big social media companies have so many employees and the side in favor of all the employees would usually make two points 1)You're outside the company so you don't know that they aren't needed and 2) arguing for startup levels of staffing for a large mature company with a huge attack surface is just ignorant. The consensus was that most of the employees were essential and huge cuts would be a disaster.
That turned out wrong. I don't think Musk is a genius manager. I think he got lucky there. Most of the time when outside buyers make the big cuts, sure they might get lucky and have some good managers prepared to turn things around. They often have another trick to fall back on-- borrow on the joint's credit and bust it out Goodfellas style. DOGE doesn't have that option.
Specifically about the Columbia student, the charge (and reason posited for deportation) is that he provided material support for a terrorist organization, Hamas, as well as engaged in violence. Those are legal, legitimate reasons for revoking a green card. We can argue about whether the accusations are accurate, but he is *not* being threatened with deportation for simply expressing himself.
I'm not even opposed to threatening him with deportation if those are proven. I'd even accept a preponderance of evidence standard for tossing him. It's dirty pool to whisk him away to Louisiana or wherever and not give him due process.
He's scum. His being here is a net negative. Fuck his "due process". We're too far down the shitter to worry about that. Get rid of him by any possible means. And I don't mean ship him to Louisiana. Not far enough away.
I recommend the 'Sold a Story' podcast. Since about 2/3 of the US reading teachers believe in 'balanced' language principles, Id say the Department of Education has experienced some regulatory capture. And the textbook publishers selling programs based on these unscientific theories are selling a defective product, which has harmed children.
The shocking thing about the podcast is that practicing teachers are discovering the underlying 'science of reading' from a journalist. They have been to teacher's college, tested, and licensed. Education is heavily regulated, and the entire activity is overseen by accreditation institutions, Teacher's Colleges, state and local boards. Maybe we need to get Youtube and TicToc involved.
But the phonics reform is up to second grade and it could be fixed, leaving the same Education Bureaucracy running things...who have proven themselves to be indifferent to quantatative based improvement. In business, process improvement is staple of vanilla management. And quality programs are ubiquitous: Kaizen, meaning "continuous improvement" in Japanese, is a philosophy and methodology that focuses on making small, incremental changes to processes and systems to achieve significant long-term improvements. You dont need theory or deep insight to improve stuff...you just need to measure stuff and use the information.
Why in the world do we need the federal government involved at all? We spend between $10,000 (Utah) and $33,400 (New York)/student. 100% of that money should be available to parents to spend on any school they want.
The NAEP is given to 2500 to 3000 students per test per state, so that's a big enough sample for Oregon parents to see that their kids are getting the fuzzy end of the lollipop.
I'm sure that helps the few diligent parents, but I can't imagine many parents saying, "Gee, Johnny been making straight A's in high school but the NAEP scores show that they haven't challenged him enough. Maybe he's not ready for a tough college?"
"... Could Make It Hard to Know"? Note Betteridge's law of headlines - "Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no." It is named after Ian Betteridge, a British technology journalist,[1] although the principle is much older.
I propose a corollary to Betteridge's law -- when a headline says something 'could happen' the smart even money bet is that the something won't happen.
I’ve been suspecting for a while now that Steve is a closet liberal. I don’t understand why he dislikes Trump and Musk so much. I legit think he would’ve been happier if Trump lost. Trump makes mistakes but cmon man, lately you’re been advocating for the opposite of what you spent most of your career advocating for. Why the switch? Is Trump that different from Pat Buchanan, someone you’ve said you admire?
Thinking that the Feds will run a good research program whose results are predictive AND whose methods are reproducible AND applied in Oregon AND they will see the predicted benefit …. I predict we will end up in the same place as we are today. Maybe it’s time for Oregon parents to take responsibility for educating their own kids. Maybe it’s also time to give up on one size fits all education: the Oregonian and the Floridian must have the same education, or the rich and poor must have the same outcomes. My kids are in college or recently graduated and I am quite disappointed in the quality of their education (at very high cost). If I divide what they’ve learned into ideology (equality of outcomes) and knowledge, most of the knowledge that is “correct” falls into the camp of commons sense. Something’s that is obvious when it is said. In a parliamentary system, the governing coalition runs the government, in the US system we can have gridlock. If you want your product to sell, put it at eye level, not on the top or bottom shelf. Poor kids have a lot of environmental problems.
“The NAEP costs somewhere between $150 to $192 million per year, which is not cheap, and perhaps could be done more efficiently. “
Perhaps, but it comes in at 0.0014% of total spending by government in the US.
I shudder to think what flights of fancy education professors would go of on in the absence of this kind of data.
if about 17k kids take it for 192 million, it's about $11K per taker. Is that good or bad? You need to create the test (though maybe not a new one each year) and proctor it (maybe 1 proctor per thirty takers?).
No, the sample sizes per test per class are about 2500-3000 per each of the 50 states.
Okay so about $1300 per kid? That seems reasonable to me. Though it's still hard to argue against--'how long have you been collecting this data? Is teaching demonstrable better now? No?'
No, typically about 400,000 students per year take an NAEP test, so it's like $450 per student.
They typically make up about 3 tests per year, which is a big part of their fixed cost.
If this was a private company you were thinking about buying, you could probably find an employee who could tell you how you could do it cheaper, for which you would give him a big bonus. But you can't give federal employees big bonuses or stock options, so what are their incentives?
Oh, I was going with 3000x50.
How to figure out how to do it cheaper? Occasionally you have a person in the department who has been around forever and spends his free time complaining about inefficiency and telling everyone how things could be fixed if only. Of course, identifying that guy and getting him to tell you, sans bonus would be difficult.
You could also go the management consultant route; embed some systems thinkers for a year and get a report. My impression is most of those people suck and get paid hugely to give the boss a report telling him he should do what he already wanted to.
So maybe Musk has it right. You fire twenty five percent and yell at the remaining ones until they figure it out?
Based on $450 IMO that doesn't apply here. You either think the test is worthwhile or you don't.
Oregon's big problem is that Portland, Portland's suburbs, Eugene(University of Oregon) and Corvallis(Oregon State University) run the whole state. Nutty people all.
I just hope they fire the employee with all the DoE bathroom keys.
Last time I checked only Norway and Luxembourg spent more per pupil on education than the United States.
I’m sure if we simply spent a few thousand more per student…perhaps add new artificial turf to the football field, our NAEP results would rocket upwards.
The US scores quite well on the PISA when broken down by race, but at a very high expense.
Yes, consider what could have been, if instead of an unmanaged immigration system that favors family unification, token efforts at saving the world and low-cost drug-distribution, we had put in place selective managed immigration.
There seems to be an endless stream of "DOGE Throws Baby Out With Bathwater" stories, from MSM to social media to random forums. Feels a lot like astroturf to defend the permanent bureaucracy from any trimming. And the Managerial Class cultists seem to be lapping it up.
It's almost as if DOGE wasn't carefully planned ahead of time to focus first on the worst examples of waste and fraud, which allows bureaucrats to easily sabotage its efforts with bad PR. Trump often cancels DOGE's worst mistakes, but not until after DOGEists dream up why, actually, that wasn't a mistake that was 4D chess.
The workforce culls have been mostly a disaster, from any standpoint beyond just making 'em sweat because they're Dems.
Buyouts? Those people were going to quit anyway - half to retire, half to jump to the private sector.
Probationary culls? You're disposing of the young and recently-promoted while keeping those who've been in the same job for thirty years.
It's probably the only way they could have actually made things worse. A better approach would be to abolish the disparate-impact consent decree (which they are trying to do), implement a cognitive test for all new hires, and drastically ramp up performance assessments.
The federal DoE is redundant of the DoEs, Boards of Regents, and school boards of every State. But I can hear the Left screaming that NOBODY will be running education anymore. School operations will grind to a halt.
The NAEP could be administered by a federal commission staffed by States' bureaucrats. All the federal extra-Constitutional Departments could be eliminated and replaced by federal commissions made up of State bureaucrats that promulgate standards and metrics.
Apparently a big part of the federal DoE's ops is administering the federal student loan program, which is probably among the most economically injurious federal programs ever.
In Oregon, high school students do not need to prove basic proficiency in reading, writing, and math to earn a high school diploma until at least 2029.
You had to involve the Moties, didn’t you.
"Chanting is an excellent way for children to learn mathematics tables and letters. However, people old enough to be getting doctorates in education are embarrassed to do it, so it gets said it doesn't work."
I think they’re easily bored, and not gratified by the fact that it works.
Siegfried Engelmann's Direct Instruction methodology, which is the foundation of *Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Lessons*, uses highly scripted exchanges between teachers and students; it's not far from a kind of Black church call-and-response pattern. As you say, most education 'experts' absolutely loathe it, and teachers whine that it's suppressing both their students, and their own, 'creativity'. But there's mountains of evidence that it works extremely well with younger children, who aren't embarrassed by it at all, and who actually find it fun.
Little children like asking questions, and getting straight answers. They also like being asked questions, and being able to respond with the right answer, and getting praised. That's pretty much the basis of Direct Instruction right there.
But this goes against over a century of essentially Romantic fantasizing about children and how they learn.
Teachers tend to be theater kids so part of their compensation is that they get to be creative performers on the job.
The reason teacher resistance plays an ongoing role in the perpetual suppression of phonics-based reading instruction in favor of the hugs-n-hope approach is pretty obvious if you listen to the Sold A Story podcast: the teachers in early elementary grades when this is an issue are overwhelmingly female. The gurus of the 'whole language' approach over the past several decades: all women. The editors at the textbook publishers: I'll let you guess.
This is a hard problem to overcome, as so much of the solution is deeply, deeply counterintuitive to most of the principals. That is, lots of women go into teaching squirrelly first-graders because they really love kids. They are therefore going to be highly sympathetic to a reading 'expert' who tells them what they need to do is just be super enthusiastic about reading, give kids lots of encouragement, read plenty of their own favorite story books aloud to little circles of wide-eyed youngsters, avoid telling the darling mites they're wrong when they mess up words, design cosy reading 'nooks' where the budding flowers can curl up on fluffy cushions to 'experience' colorful picture books, and so on.
These teachers are *not* going to like some dude named Siegfried coming along and telling them, nah, skip all that time-wasting crap, and instead line up the kids in rows of desks, follow the word-by-word (for teachers and students) 'scientific' script I'm supplying to you, and get those little miscreants shouting out the RIGHT answers in perfect unison! It's going to sound like Siegfried is just Sieg Heil.
But the problem is that first approach doesn't work for lots of kids, whereas the second approach works for pretty much all of them.
The university textbooks in sociology state in the introduction that sociology was founded by Karl Marx. Then they add other leftist Jewish icons as contributors: Sigmund Freud and Herbert Marcuse.
Page after page is Marxist propaganda presented as "science." One example: People started frying meat in the Stone Age to show that they could afford to waste some of their food, because food shrinks when you fry it, and frying meat has no nutritional value. (Reality: You fry meat to get rid of impurities, and because it makes it easier for the body to absorb nutrients. For example, boiled and fried eggs make you absorb more calories than from a raw egg.)
Also, the Soviet Union may have had some political messaging in the media, but they "corrected that" in time, and had "varied" media.
Steve says there are sociology studies that don't confirm leftist thought. What does that matter? The textbooks that everyone reads are full of leftist thought. Whatever study someone publishes somewhere will hardly be read. If Steve disagrees with this, maybe he can take a look at the actual doctoral dissertation handed in at the universities. See what it is the students have absorbed and what they are allowed to write about to get the degree.
Same in West European universities, which all use the U.S. textbooks.
Same in states like Estonia, where the dissertations are identical to the sociology crap in the U.S. The Marxists control the sociology departments, and the textbooks come from the leading Marxist country today, the U.S.
"Oregon’s educators are massively screwing up what ought to be pretty easy: the education of its heavily white population."
Alternative hypothesis: Oregon has the worst white people. Some place has to. That's just stats. Discuss.
West Virginia would like a word.
Ha! I still think Oregon is a better place for a white separatist ethno-state. If only I could figure out a way to surround it with Arabs. :)
"much like DOGE doesn’t seem to have time for much else in the way of useful analysis."
I want to give them the benefit of the doubt, and perhaps I am being fed very selective information, but this is my impression too. It's like they decided all previous attempts at cutting government got coopted so we'd better just slash and burn and assume it will all work out because government sucks anyway.
"On the other hand, every time the NYT dubiously asserts that Trump is about to do something stupid, Trump cultists dreams up all sorts of ideas why, actually, that would be a genius 4-D chess thing to do."
It's getting harder to do that with some of his things. I understand that history shows tariffs are not universally bad (contrary to what we were all taught based on a single example from the great depression) but it's all haphazard. And why does he keep up with this 'Canada should be a state" nonsense? That's more pro wrestling than 4d chess.
While I'm at it, what about disappearing that Palestinian Columbia student protester? Were it up to me we never would have let him in nor given him a green card in the first place. Still, we can't give up on due process or use the power of government to fuck with people we don't like. Am I missing something about that story?
It's not hard for outside buyers to make big cuts in employment in private industry (e.g., Twitter) because the newcomer takeover artists can find good executives within the organization who will make smart cuts because you offer them a big bonus, a promotion, stock options, etc.
But you aren't allowed to do much of that with federal employees, so it's hard to find experienced managers who understand exactly what is going on within their organization and can make smart cuts.
This is a great point -- most private sector organizations of any size have auditors, money guys, etc., who (at least periodically) swoop in to identify waste in order to raise profits.
But NGOs and government agencies are full of people who have dedicated their education/research and careers to grubbing for as much grant money as they can possibly get their hands on, and then spending, spending, spending. And they end up as 'managers' who don't know how to do anything else.
The Twitter thing was a surprise. If you look at fora like HackerNews there were a lot of arguments about why big social media companies have so many employees and the side in favor of all the employees would usually make two points 1)You're outside the company so you don't know that they aren't needed and 2) arguing for startup levels of staffing for a large mature company with a huge attack surface is just ignorant. The consensus was that most of the employees were essential and huge cuts would be a disaster.
That turned out wrong. I don't think Musk is a genius manager. I think he got lucky there. Most of the time when outside buyers make the big cuts, sure they might get lucky and have some good managers prepared to turn things around. They often have another trick to fall back on-- borrow on the joint's credit and bust it out Goodfellas style. DOGE doesn't have that option.
I think. I guess I don't know for sure.
Specifically about the Columbia student, the charge (and reason posited for deportation) is that he provided material support for a terrorist organization, Hamas, as well as engaged in violence. Those are legal, legitimate reasons for revoking a green card. We can argue about whether the accusations are accurate, but he is *not* being threatened with deportation for simply expressing himself.
I'm not even opposed to threatening him with deportation if those are proven. I'd even accept a preponderance of evidence standard for tossing him. It's dirty pool to whisk him away to Louisiana or wherever and not give him due process.
He's scum. His being here is a net negative. Fuck his "due process". We're too far down the shitter to worry about that. Get rid of him by any possible means. And I don't mean ship him to Louisiana. Not far enough away.
I agree with your second sentence, but "his due process" is for us all.
OTOH- the constitution says life, liberty, or property and remaining in the country is none of those.
I recommend the 'Sold a Story' podcast. Since about 2/3 of the US reading teachers believe in 'balanced' language principles, Id say the Department of Education has experienced some regulatory capture. And the textbook publishers selling programs based on these unscientific theories are selling a defective product, which has harmed children.
The shocking thing about the podcast is that practicing teachers are discovering the underlying 'science of reading' from a journalist. They have been to teacher's college, tested, and licensed. Education is heavily regulated, and the entire activity is overseen by accreditation institutions, Teacher's Colleges, state and local boards. Maybe we need to get Youtube and TicToc involved.
I've continued looking at the reading wars podcast, sold a story. And my comment in the first paragraph...that the balanced reading programs sold by publishers are a defective product...which could be reformed using that rationale...has actually happened!! https://www.apmreports.org/story/2024/12/04/lawsuit-calls-heinemann-reading-curriculum-deceptive-defective
But the phonics reform is up to second grade and it could be fixed, leaving the same Education Bureaucracy running things...who have proven themselves to be indifferent to quantatative based improvement. In business, process improvement is staple of vanilla management. And quality programs are ubiquitous: Kaizen, meaning "continuous improvement" in Japanese, is a philosophy and methodology that focuses on making small, incremental changes to processes and systems to achieve significant long-term improvements. You dont need theory or deep insight to improve stuff...you just need to measure stuff and use the information.
Why in the world do we need the federal government involved at all? We spend between $10,000 (Utah) and $33,400 (New York)/student. 100% of that money should be available to parents to spend on any school they want.
Having a federal NAEP test lets parents know whether the state tests are rigged or not.
Checks and balances.
I thought it was only given to a few thousand per state. How does that help parents?
The NAEP is given to 2500 to 3000 students per test per state, so that's a big enough sample for Oregon parents to see that their kids are getting the fuzzy end of the lollipop.
I'm sure that helps the few diligent parents, but I can't imagine many parents saying, "Gee, Johnny been making straight A's in high school but the NAEP scores show that they haven't challenged him enough. Maybe he's not ready for a tough college?"
"... Could Make It Hard to Know"? Note Betteridge's law of headlines - "Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no." It is named after Ian Betteridge, a British technology journalist,[1] although the principle is much older.
I propose a corollary to Betteridge's law -- when a headline says something 'could happen' the smart even money bet is that the something won't happen.
Ref.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines
I’ve been suspecting for a while now that Steve is a closet liberal. I don’t understand why he dislikes Trump and Musk so much. I legit think he would’ve been happier if Trump lost. Trump makes mistakes but cmon man, lately you’re been advocating for the opposite of what you spent most of your career advocating for. Why the switch? Is Trump that different from Pat Buchanan, someone you’ve said you admire?
Thinking that the Feds will run a good research program whose results are predictive AND whose methods are reproducible AND applied in Oregon AND they will see the predicted benefit …. I predict we will end up in the same place as we are today. Maybe it’s time for Oregon parents to take responsibility for educating their own kids. Maybe it’s also time to give up on one size fits all education: the Oregonian and the Floridian must have the same education, or the rich and poor must have the same outcomes. My kids are in college or recently graduated and I am quite disappointed in the quality of their education (at very high cost). If I divide what they’ve learned into ideology (equality of outcomes) and knowledge, most of the knowledge that is “correct” falls into the camp of commons sense. Something’s that is obvious when it is said. In a parliamentary system, the governing coalition runs the government, in the US system we can have gridlock. If you want your product to sell, put it at eye level, not on the top or bottom shelf. Poor kids have a lot of environmental problems.