50% of American students read at a below-average level

[Feanorcurufinwe]

Poll question: 50% of American students read at a below-average level

[proud patriot]

1. Outrage

Reading/Comprehension is essential IMO

[UpsideDownFlag]

2. our society places very little value on reading.

unfortunately.

[Bozita]

7. ... and even less on critical thinking.

except in Lake Wobegon.

[LoZoccolo]

3. No big deal.

I'll let this go on a while before I say more. ;)

[Kathy in Cambridge]

4. A total outrage

[Vickers]

5. Hahahaha, you should write poll questions for CNN!

Very clever!

:toast:

[Eric J in MN]

6. 50% is by definition below avg., if no one is counted as exactly avg. (nt)

nt

[Jackpine Radical]

29. Brilliant analysis, Eric. Just brilliant.

And you from Minnysota too, where is found the remarkable little town of Lake Wobegon, where ALL the children are above average.

[TahitiNut]

51. "below median"

:shrug:

[LiberalBushFan]

8. this thread does not bode well for our math level. n/m

[Bill McBlueState]

9. average

By average, do you mean "mean" or "median"?

:dork:

It's crucial, I tell you!!

[WMliberal]

17. or mode, oh my!

[NightTrain]

10. I'm so-o-o glad I graduated from high school 20 years ago...

...before Reagan's assault on public education had a chance to kick in where I went to school.

[The_Casual_Observer]

11. Is is the bush "base" ?

[prodigal_green]

12. uh...wouldn't that be

the definition of...oh.

:evilgrin:

[mimitabby]

13. 49% should be below average!!

only 1% are exactly average
and the other 49% are above average.
that's what average means...

[kiahzero]

15. 99%?

Nope... there's no requirement for any of them to actually be average... you can have 50% above, and 50% below, with no one at the actual mathematical average.

There are probably a few people right at the average, but I'd hesitate to say that there are even 1%.

[phylny]

42. You obviously realize

that Bushco doesn't understand a bell curve, but the general public just doesn't get it. The premise behind "No Child Left Behind" is simply impossible - unfortunately, kids whose IQs are one standard deviation from the mean are gonna struggle, and those who are more than one standard deviation from the mean need to be educated differently, and for a different purpose - I work with these kids every working day. Not everyone is going to college, let alone going to be able to master schoolwork. Do we educate them? We sure do. Do we expect them to be able to pass tests? Not always.

[kiahzero]

14. No big deal

The outrage is that, at the time of this posting, 11 out of 18 DUers have piss-poor math skills.

[Dookus]

30. and the numbers seem to have gotten worse....

this is one of the funniest threads ever.

[rocktivity]

16. Turn off the TV and devote an hour or two a day to reading

It's said that your brain is more active when you're asleep than when you're watching TV. Even surfing the 'net is better because it's interactive and involves reading. Reading comic books and teen magazines are better than reading nothing at all.

:headbang:
rpoc

[juajen]

21. I do believe this can be traced to TV.

I love my television, but I have been an avid reader all my life, well since about six or seven years old. You do not learn sentence and paragraph structure, or spelling, from watching television. I have a grandson who is 14 and reads at college level. He does read some, but is more often on computer games or watching tv. So, I'm not sure if it's tv, but I certainly do not see the emphasis on reading that there used to be. The most prevalent words out of my grandchildren's mouthes are "I'm bored!" I was never bored. There was never enough time to read, so that when I got the time I was poring over books. Not much of that anymore.

[Serenades]

24. hmmmm

What exactly does it mean to read at a college level? I've never really understood how one determines whether he or she reads at an eigth grade level or a tenth grade level.

I think that I have heard somewhere that most college books are written on an eigth grade level. Is this true?

[quaker bill]

18. 50 percent of them also have below average IQ's

Don't argue with it, it is a mathematical identity.

(Later they register Republican!)

[TahitiNut]

52. Is IQ normalized? Hmmm?

Is the median equal to the mean?

[Protected]

19. hahaha, it looks like somebody has been reading too many CNN web-polls

:)

[morgan2]

20. the percentage of students below average is meaningless

think about what that means... If there was a bell curve of students reading level.. 50% would be below average and 50% above average. The percentage below average has to do with the distribution. Saying over 50% are below average could just mean 10% of students read at a much higer level and the rest are around the median.

[PartyPooper]

22. Duh! When Junior can't read worth a sh*t...who really cares?

:dunce:

[troublemaker]

23. I'm outraged, but only kind of average-outraged

[Orangepeel]

25. 40% of all sick days are taken on Monday and Friday

lazy employees!

;-)

[UdoKier]

26. LOL - you almost got me there!

nt.

[enki23]

27. we will not rest until every single american is above average

and has both a strong mother, and a good looking father.

[DrWeird]

28. Funny guy.

nt

[Bill McBlueState]

31. kick

this is too funny to let die.

[sangh0]

32. Yes, but 50% have above average mathematical skills

Though statistics may be weak point for some.

[Tight_rope]

33. If the US was a third world country then that would be acceptable!

[Jim__]

34. Ummmmmm ... I think all of our students should read at above average ....

... otherwise, the schools are clearly failing them. :-)

[Julien Sorel]

35. Leave the below average 50% behind!

There's no excuse for them falling behind in Republican America. They are simply lazy, and want to suck up welfare.

[Bridget Burke]

36. Except in Lake Woebegone...

Where ALL the children are above average.

[Spider Jerusalem]

37. Innumeracy is MUCH more common than illiteracy.

As the results of this poll amply illustrate.

[patcox2]

38. Some of these replies are very scary.

We are doomed as a society. Egalitarianism and equality do not require us to ignore the fact that people have differences in abilities and some are smarter, some are taller, some are faster, some are more charming. And some are not.

My entire perception of the so-called crisis in our schools is that the schools are "failing" at doing an impossible task which people unreasonably expect of them, which is making sure that everyone is above average. In the good old days, the dumb, the unmotivated, and the disruptors were simply made to leave school, a much lower percentage of kids actually finished high school than today. No wonder the schools did "better," they reasonably only tried to educate the educable. Now, this idiotic idea that everyone deserves a gold star for effort has the idiots dragging down the averages for all, and also dumbing down the curricula as we teach to the level of the slowest.

The world needs ditch diggers too. My progressivism requires me to add that ditch diggers should be paid a living wage which gives them access to health care and home ownership, and most of all, they deserve respect, because they that labor with their hands do as important a service to society as they that labor with their minds.

[Bandit]

39. Hmmmm wouldn't it be 49% read below average

Since fifty percent is average.

[ProfessorGAC]

44. It Would Really Be 49.9Repeating%, Actually.

If we had an infinite number of readers, we'd find the one person who reads EXACTLY at the average. The average isn't the 50%. The average is the reading score average, and 50% read at that or better, and 50% read at that or worse.

Actually, to be more statistically precise, it would be median, not mean. But, i think the post was meant to be a joke, so i don't want to get carried away.
The Professor

[Blue Wally]

57. If the results are perfectly distributed in a normal (bell) curve......

the mean, the median, and the mode would lie at the same point.

[ProfessorGAC]

62. People Are Almost NEVER Normally Distributed

That's why Poisson is so commonly used in social statistics. Also, human condition statistics usually show some extensive skewing and kurtosis due to the fact that there are upper and lower bounds based upon nature.

For instance, a person could(!) have an IQ of 240. One person could not possibly offset that incredibly gifted individual with an IQ of -60 because even a dead person has an IQ of zero. So, we've already skewed the curve to the right. (Higher values.) Also, since it will have a bulge toward the upper left, it will show kurtosis due the preponderance of values near the mean, simply because of that skewness.

A Poisson curve already provides for a distribution of extremes and a flattening near the center, which is how people tend to be distributed.

Now are you happy you got me started? Never get a statistical mechanist started, i always say.
The Professor

[ProfessorGAC]

40. No Big Deal! Nice Trick Question!

The Professor

[TahitiNut]

41. (lol!) It took me a minute ...

... to even realize it could be regarded as any more of a 'trick' than saying "water is wet." I guess the dictionary is full of 'tricks.' :silly:

[ProfessorGAC]

43. I Was Inferring The Posters Intent, I Guess

Yeah, you're right. I think i was assuming that the original post was meant as a trick question. I wouldn't do it, and i always hated when teachers did it. Who learns anything from that?
The Professor

[TahitiNut]

50. Except that technically, it's not necessarily true.

So it MIGHT be a decent exercise if the data are well-known.

For example, it would be incorrect to say that 50% of workers earn an above-average (i.e. above the mean) income. That's simply not true unless one interpreted 'average' as 'median.' (This was something my instructors hammered at me: that 'average' isn't a rigorous term. Maybe times have changed.) This was at a time when we looked at 'bounded' distributions, as I recall. It's been a while.

In something like grades that has some degree of forced normalization, I'm not at all clear how 'inflated' the data are.

Note: The median income is far below the mean income.

[ProfessorGAC]

55. See My Other Post About 49.9Repeating%.

I said the same thing.
The Professor

[Awsi Dooger]

56. Are 50% of the states above-average in population?

Here's another example to illustrate TahitiNut's point, and how misleading the supposed irony of this thread is. The incredible aspect is how seldom the word median has been used in these posts, if we are really concerned about a dividing line of 50% high and 50% low.

U.S. Population, 50 States, 2000 Census: 281,421,906

That's an "average" of 5,628,438 per state.

Now the breakdown by state:

1. California - 33,871,648
2. Texas - 20,851,820
3. New York - 18,976,457
4. Florida - 15,982,378
5. Illinois - 12,419,293
6. Pennsylvania - 12,281,054
7. Ohio - 11,353,140
8. Michigan - 9,938,444
9. New Jersey - 8,414,350
10. Georgia - 8,186,453
11. North Carolina - 8,049,313
12. Virginia - 7,078,515
13. Massachusetts - 6,349,097
14. Indiana - 6,080,485
15. Washington - 5,894,121
16. Tennessee - 5,689,283
17. Missouri - 5,595,211
18. Wisconsin - 5,363,675
19. Maryland - 5,296,486
20. Arizona - 5,130,632
21. Minnesota - 4,919,479
22. Louisiana - 4,468,976
23. Alabama - 4,447,100
24. Colorado - 4,301,261
25. Kentucky - 4,041,769
26. South Carolina - 4,012,012
27. Oklahoma - 3,450,654
28. Oregon - 3,421,399
29. Connecticut - 3,405,565
30. Iowa - 2,926,324
31. Mississippi - 2,844,658
32. Kansas - 2,688,418
33. Arkansas - 2,673,400
34. Utah - 2,233,169
35. Nevada - 1,998,257
36. New Mexico - 1,819,046
37. West Virginia - 1,808,344
38. Nebraska - 1,711,263
39. Idaho - 1,293,953
40. Maine - 1,274,923
41. New Hampshire - 1,235,786
42. Hawaii - 1,211,537
43. Rhode Island - 1,048,319
44. Montana - 904,433
45. Delaware - 783,600
46. South Dakota - 754,844
47. North Dakota - 642,200
48. Alaska - 626,932
49. Vermont - 608,827
50. Wyoming - 493,782

As you can see, only 16 of the 50 states are above "average" in population. The "median," as is often the case, is a dramatically different number, in fact more than 1.6 million fewer residents than "average." Given an even number of entries, the median is determined by averaging the two closest to the middle, namely #25 Kentucky at 4,041,769 and #26 South Carolina at 4,012,012. The median is 4,026,891.

[Maeve]

45. Face it, folks...50% of everything is below average

Comprehension of statistics is a skill strongly needed in a modern society.

[TahitiNut]

49. Well, half are below the median. Isn't that mean?

:evilgrin:

[Maeve]

53. About average, I guess

Mean, median, mode, meshugganah...lies, damned lies and statistics!

[KansDem]

61. As my uncle used to say...

"Average is the best of the worst and the worst of the best."

[hiphopnation]

46. Kick

:kick:

ps I've been dying to ask for a while. What is the meaning behind your posting name?

An anagram?

[Feanorcurufinwe]

48. my name is a character from tolkien

http://www.tolkienonline.de/etep/Tolkien/F/Feanor.html

[annabanana]

47. OTOH..

50% of American students read at an ABOVE-AVERAGE level.

lololol

c'mon kids

[serryjw]

54. 75% of Americans DON'T read at ALL......so how would anyone KNOW?

[Comicstripper]

58. Sightly funny

but mathematically flawed.
You're thinking about the median.

[slackmaster]

59. Not in Lake Wobegone, Minnesota

Because ALL the children there are above average.

:dunce:

[Ladyhawk]

60. Bell curves are stupid.

Students can never improve as long as the curve defines the "norm."

Teachers can spend all their class time teaching to a test and the national scores will never improve as long as the test defines what the norm is.

When I was getting my credential, I had a master teacher who emphasized critical thinking skills rather than rote memorization. She spent one day preparing kids for the standardized tests. They may not have done well on the tests, but they certainly were better and brighter thinkers than most second graders I've encountered.

Standardized tests don't measure critical thinking skills.