I_Smell_Mendacious
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User ID: 1016
I_Smell_Mendacious
3mo ago
students in third grade repeat the year if they are not reading and mathing at grade level.
You think this is too heavy a thumb on the scale? I disagree. Perhaps the timing does optimize for Federal money, but that doesn't mean it doesn't also provide the benefits it seems to. I agree with you that holding a child back is much better; I think 3rd grade seems like as good a first benchmark as any. I could be convinced earlier would be better but not much later.
I'm no expert, but it's an astonishing thing to accomplish in 12 years. If they can game the metrics this badly and not improve education outcomes, the metrics were useless anyway.
I_Smell_Mendacious
3mo ago
Here's a convenient summary of the National Center for Education Statistics data on National Assessment of Educational Progress. To clarify, this does not include adult literacy, just students in grade school. Which I think is a better view of current education standings than adult literacy.
I_Smell_Mendacious
3mo ago
And why, just why, must nineteen out of twenty children's books feature anthropomorphic animals?
There is something fundamentally entertaining about an animal acting like a person to a vast swathe of humanity. Look at YouTube videos where a cat or dog is "talking" or using a doorknob. Or flushing a toilet. I don't personally get it, either, but YouTube view counts tell a compelling story.
I_Smell_Mendacious
3mo ago
do you think the people running your state are up to the task of taking on the responsibilities that the Fed is dumping on them?
In the field of grade school literacy, Mississippi jumped from the very bottom to top 10 over the last 10 years, entirely due to their state government taking the responsibility of educating their children into their own hands. I'd be very interested to hear the arguments from people insistent their state can't be expected to educate their children as well as Mississippi does.
I_Smell_Mendacious
3mo ago
In 2024, Alabama had a higher average literacy score than Maine, Vermont, Delaware, Texas, and California, to name a few. And the same or higher percentage of students at basic reading level. Who is getting a bad education because of dumb parents?
I_Smell_Mendacious
5mo ago
I don't think you're wrong on the broad impact on industry here, but your analogy falls a little flat for me. The difference in impact for poorly trained doctors versus poorly trained stock boys makes the idea of licensing requirements for one desirable and ridiculous for the other. It's possible the regulations on doctor training are overly burdensome and could be loosened without a corresponding increase in medical error induced mortality rates, but I'm not certain that's true.
I_Smell_Mendacious
5mo ago
I was under the impression that the AMA severely restricts the number of medical schools and the number of spots within those schools
The bottleneck in producing new doctors in America isn't the schools, it's the residencies. After graduation, all doctors go to some teaching hospital somewhere and serve a 4 year residency to learn how to actually practice medicine. This training program costs the teaching hospitals money, which is reimbursed by CMS. So in practice, the number of available residencies is determined by CMS; hospitals won't spend money out of their own pocket to train new doctors above and beyond what CMS reimburses.
The impact this has on healthcare costs, I don't know. I'm sure it's something, but is it a major component, or a drop in the bucket compared to other factors? I don't know.
I_Smell_Mendacious
7mo ago
you can't just go out and increase residency positions
This is the problem, but not for the reason you suggest, at least in the US. The issue is funding - training residents costs hospitals money, which is covered by CMS. Technically, I guess hospitals could fund residencies above and beyond their CMS allocations, but then they are spending money to train a future doctor that may or may not work for them. The financial incentives aren't there for hospitals to fund residencies themselves, so we end up with the number of residencies CMS is willing to fund. That number was mostly static for over 20 years, until Covid made stark how lacking in medical personnel the US is. So they've slowly been increasing the allocations over the last few years, but of course, at a much lower rate than general population growth.
I_Smell_Mendacious
8mo ago
Degrowth and environmental arguments will not be able to hold against the sheer awesomeness and vibrancy of space travel, I believe.
Anecdotally, I showed my wife the video of the Mechazilla catch yesterday. She was blown away at just how awesome it was. Previously, her opinion of Musk was "He's that billionaire that bought Twitter so he can troll people." After watching the video, she commented that if Musk was going to do amazing things like that, he gets a pass on all the Twitter trolling he cares to do. And she's not particularly "into" space flight and technology, it was just the sheer awesomeness that captured her attention.
I_Smell_Mendacious
8mo ago
I_Smell_Mendacious
11mo ago
Decimals upend people's naïve understanding that "more digits equals bigger number". My 6 year old still gets that confused sometimes.
I think grade level should be a measure of academic ability rather than age. Obviously, there will be some correlation between age and academic ability due to brain development; also obviously, some kids will develop slower than their peers. If other states are just passing those kids along because they think grade level should measure time served rather than academic achievement, yes that will obviously harm them in comparison to states that don't do that. But mostly because they are pretending they've educated these kids to grade level when they haven't. If Mississippi 10 years from now has measurably better educational outcomes for their high school graduates than they did 10 years ago, who cares if some of the graduates are 19 rather 18? Gaining an actual high school education by 19 (or 20) seems vastly preferable to being cut loose at 18 and functionally illiterate.
Mississippi's success implementing the obvious strategy of making students repeat material they haven't sufficiently mastered strikes me as evidence other states are doing it wrong. Maybe some of that effect is illusion based on gaming the metrics we use to measure success. But it's such an obvious strategy that has resulted in such success that I strongly doubt there is truly no meat on those bones.
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