Comment by bilbo0s
21 hours ago
>Texas - K12
Uh..
I'd do Massachusetts K-12. Texas is pretty bad.
Massachusetts consistently ranks in the top 10 in the world on PISA. An exam which removes all the political "BS"-ability from the results and comparisons. It's just your students taking the same test as all the other students in the world, and the resultant scores being ranked.
Texas K-12 is horrible. Lived there from Katrina to a few years past Harvey. Our PISA scores were consistently horrible when we were ranked internationally.
Though, curiously enough, we were not "horrible" if you only compared us to the same test results in other US states. We were nowhere near Massachusetts. But we weren't Alabama/Florida/Mississippi either. Which means education in general in the US is pretty bad outside maybe the top 3 to 5 states by performance on the PISA exams.
Massachusetts is unusually good though, probably because of the high concentration of elite universities in Boston, which is also the capital of the state, which means politicians there take education most seriously - and don't forget the demographic effect of the number of professors and other highly-educated professionals.
Texas, California, and Florida are all fairly similar, with California doing somewhat worse than Texas and Florida. Unfortunately, the dedication of California to effective education is going down over time, while even the Deep South, which has consistently been at the bottom, is going up.
>while even the Deep South, which has consistently been at the bottom, is going up
Well their PISA scores haven't been going up. In fact they've been going down. So if their education is getting better, it's not showing up in the ability of their students to answer questions that other students seem to be able to answer.
That's kind of what I meant by PISA removing "BS"-ability from the equation. For some reason, on American standardized tests, all our children do great. Then we take PISA with all the other kids in the world, and the truth comes out.
That's also why I think we should all just take Massachusetts' education curriculum and implement it across the nation. Because you talk about demographics, but even when you control for income and race, kids in Massachusetts just flat out do better than our kids. Even just taking all kids at the bottom of the rankings in Massachusetts, they are still doing better than kids at the median of the rankings of many, many other states. (And think about the demographics of kids at the bottom in Boston, Brockton, or Springfield. Come on, admit it man. I'll try to stay politically correct here and just state that those very likely aren't professors' kids at the bottom of the rankings in Massachusetts.)
Massachusetts is so far ahead of all of us that I think I'd be comfortable just saying that they seem to have gotten it right, and we should simply copy it. Because right now, the gap is just getting wider and wider with every round of PISA testing.
Could you link where you're getting the PISA scores from? I've seen references that PISA was not conducted in all 50 states, at least recently. Also, I can't get a breakdown of "US States and Territories" for 2022 on the PISA website at https://nces.ed.gov/surveys/pisa/idepisa/report.aspx
Texas K-12 performance has decreased significantly in recent decades, largely due to massive poorly-educated Hispanic immigration.