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Scores decline again for 13-year-old students in reading and mathematics

• lettergram 3y ago
  It’s ironic to have this on the HN home page as https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36417252 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36417252 Pretty sure cognitive reasoning is declining too. School choice is the way to go. This does two things (1) forces parents to at least be involved enough to make a decision and (2) incentivizes schools to improve As a parent of quite a few kiddos, I’ve noticed a massive lack of involvement with most parents. It shows
  • misiti3780 3y ago
    I'm not sure why you are getting downvoted.
    • irrational 3y ago
      Maybe parents feeling guilty about their lack of involvement are downvoting.
      • alistairSH 3y ago
        I didn't downvote, but I suspect some of it could be because "school choice" probably doesn't solve the problems it claims to solve. After all, school choice already exists - just move to the district you prefer. Vouchers might allow a student to travel to a better school, but outside the densest urban areas, that means a lot of time spent on a bus (or parents driving even more than they do today) - not always feasible.
      • MrMan 3y ago
        [dead]
    • sixothree 3y ago
      I think “school choice” in most places is just a front for a movement to shut down public schools or at least kill funding for them. That’s my guess why he’s being downvoted.
      • karamanolev 3y ago
        For me, it might be a way to give richer parents access to further away nicer schools and limit choices for poorer parents by way of economics, therefore increasing inequality. And HN considers, AFAIK, inequality bad.
      • AnimalMuppet 3y ago
        I think “school choice” in most places is perceived to be just a front for a movement to shut down public schools or at least kill funding for them. But if you're a parent who wants decent schools for your kids, and your current schools are lousy, and you aren't a big enough fish to move the school board, and you can't afford private school... what else are you going to try to do other than push for school choice? (You could homeschool, I guess, but not everybody feels like they're cut out for that.)
    • mahathu 3y ago
      Because being able to choose schools is an incredibly privileged position many well-meaning parents and their kids aren't in.
      • adamwong246 3y ago
        And betrays how little those parents care for the children without which they share DNA. When the rich pull their kids and taxes away from the common good of public schools, it degrades that common good all the faster.
        • speakfreely 3y ago
          You're saying you prioritize the well being of strangers above your own family? That's not how the human brain works. We are tribal primates. In a zero sum game, you're going to pick your in-group over the out-group. Any insistence otherwise just virtue signaling with no credibility. The better question is why the US education system has become a zero sum game. But don't blame affluent parents for following the incentives the system has forced on them.
          • adamwong246 3y ago
            In some sense, can virtue signal all I want, because I have no children. It's very much in my interest that education be distributed evenly, rather than hoarded by a minority of monied families.
            • JohnClark1337 3y ago
              [dead]
            • speakfreely 3y ago
              > In some sense, can virtue signal all I want, because I have no children. Well, you're admitting there's no personal cost to your advocacy, which makes sense and I can't really argue you're not entitled to feel that way. Like in criminal justice reform, homelessness advocacy, etc. everyone is a liberal until the first time they get robbed, the first time someone smashes their car window, etc. Personal cost has a way to delivering reality to people who are disconnected from it. > It's very much in my interest that education be distributed evenly If there was no cost to the high performing students to keep everyone in public schools, I would actually 100% agree with you. But limiting the upper percentiles' outcomes to deliver almost negligible changes to the bottom percentile doesn't seem fair, either.
    • tastyfreeze 3y ago
      School choice is unfortunately the enemy of the teachers union. There is a horde of folks that believe school choice will be detrimental to schools.
    • MisterBastahrd 3y ago
      Because "school choice" is a euphemism for defunding public schools in favor of segregated parochial schools.
      • yieldcrv 3y ago
        So the specific term is the problem, but the verbatim plain reading is not? fascinating. isn't that we all do for higher education? some community colleges are free for nearby residents now, everyone that is privileged enough to go to a university is secretly into segregation!
    • nathan_compton 3y ago
      School choice is controversial because it is associated with right wing attempts to undermine public schools and, among other things, teacher's unions. In fact, the school choice movement as we know it goes back to desegregation in the south: https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2021/09/27/school-choice-developed-way-protect-segregation-abolish-public-schools/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2021/09/27/school-cho.... That is just one article about it, but someone close to me was involved in the original litigation on the subject. It was not uncommon in the south for districts to close public schools and almost literally give public land and equipment from those schools to private schools which could more easily remain segregated. There are other dimensions to school choice as well. In particular, some parents would prefer to "insulate" their children from information about sexuality or uncomfortable truths about american history. And, I admit, public schools often are struggling to teach, so its not entirely black and white. But school choice is politically fraught. But many people see it as the standard republican strategy: first, starve public services of funding, then claim that they are bad, and then get rid of them.
      • clnq 3y ago
        I come from a Nordic country, where many things are different from the US. When I was a kid, I could choose what public school I wanted to go to. I'm trying to understand the situation you describe better. First of all, are kids not free to choose which public school they will attend in the US? If so, is that by law? Do any US states allow a choice of public schools? If not, why not? Also, school curriculums were standardized where I was a kid, so there wasn't ever the problem of creating siloed "thought" schools. Isn't school curriculum standardized in the US? This was such a non-problem in my experience, I am honestly a bit surprised how controversial it is. It would be great if anyone gave more context, as that article relies on quite a lot of US life experience.
        • seanmcdirmid 3y ago
          America funds public education locally, so you are limited to public schools that you can attend by what schools are being funded by your property taxes. Some districts setup public choice schools in their districts, especially if the districts are large (e.g. Seattle, my son goes to an area choice school). Some states will also provide more equity to school districts (Washington state shifts education funding to east of the mountains from much richer Seattle area school districts), but in general you still aren't allowed to attend schools outside of your district without some kind of exception. Education is also governed largely locally with a few state/federal standards in the background that are often not seen as a good thing (e.g. Bush's No Child Left Behind).
  • jhedwards 3y ago
    > incentivizes schools to improve. Doesn't school choice divert funds away from public schools, depriving them of the means to improve?
    • wbronitsky 3y ago
      Yes, it absolutely does. It also uses public funds for private religious institutions, which I personally believe goes against the separation of church and state.
    • HDThoreaun 3y ago
      Not if families choose the public school. I think private school choice is unequivocally bad, but charters might be good depending on the situation. Charters have quickly risen to serve 1/4 of the highschoolers in my district because the public options available to poor families are legitimately violent, as in students being shot on campus. The school district was counting on poor families having no other choice so they allowed those schools to languish while they invested in the schools in wealthier areas in order to keep middle+ class families from fleeing for the suburbs. The charter schools have forced the district to at least attempt to serve the poor students.
      • alistairSH 3y ago
        Posted this in another response. Oklahoma is testing the waters with publicly-funded parochial charters. The end-game for many proponents of school choice, vouchers, and charters is absolutely a parochial education for everybody. Or at least parochial education for their family and friends, and everybody else can get fucked. https://www.politico.com/news/2023/06/05/oklahoma-approves-public-religious-charter-school-00100269 https://www.politico.com/news/2023/06/05/oklahoma-approves-p...
    • bitshiftfaced 3y ago
      > with school choice programs, public schools get to keep almost all of the federal and local tax dollars and usually a portion of the state funds allocated for each child https://www.edchoice.org/school-choice/faqs/how-does-school-choice-affect-public-schools-funding-and-resources/ https://www.edchoice.org/school-choice/faqs/how-does-school-... Since the fixed costs of running a public school are effectively covered, the public school saves the marginal cost of educating the student that has diverted their funds. The school then has the same means to improve on a per student basis. Also keep in mind that "improving" often means replacing costly and ineffective process with better ones.
  • jalk 3y ago
    How about letting kids earn screen time points through learning apps. The current time based blocking in iOS doesn’t mean the kids will do homework when device is locked.
  • bamfly 3y ago
    > (2) incentivizes schools to improve The largest factor in good v bad schools is already selection bias. Turning up the temperature on that (if you will) is not gonna help a thing, except the people itching like a goddamn meth addict at the prospect of getting a piece of those sweet, sweet public dollars. They'll benefit.
• asnyder 3y ago
  Related discussion on the NYT piece: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36417375 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36417375
• 11thEarlOfMar 3y ago
  IMHO, we should be able to train an AI to be a constant in-the-student's-ear teacher. The AI should be able to learn about the student's specific learning style and hence, the student and AI teach each other. If every student is taught in the style that they learn the most efficiently with, could we expect performance to increase dramatically overall? Would it work to close the socio-economic performance gap among schools? How would the role of human teacher change? I am sure there are people who've been focusing on this, it can't be novel, would appreciate to know what's being done in this realm.
  • 2OEH8eoCRo0 3y ago
    CGP Grey talked about it. "Digital Aristotle" If you were extremely rich and lucky in the time of Aristotle, you could have Aristotle as a tutor. Why can't everyone have their own personal digital 24/7 tutor? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7vsCAM17O-M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7vsCAM17O-M
    • UncleSlacky 3y ago
      Reminds me of the "Young Lady's Illustrated Primer" from Neal Stephenson's "Diamond Age", too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Diamond_Age https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Diamond_Age
  • eigh0xohyeib6Te 3y ago
    But instead we will train AIs to be constant in-the-person's-ear salesmen and propagandists.
  • sorwin 3y ago
    Sounds a lot like the "Mrs Davis" TV Show. Anyhow, this is not a good idea. We are having issues with their scores and performance declining. We have to find the root cause, not try to patch it with another band-aid by saying "Here, lets try this OTHER NEW THING", on top of the hundreds of other tools students already have.
    • cwkoss 3y ago
• EA-3167 3y ago
  How much of this is continuous decline and how much is sudden post-Covid decline? From the graphs it looks like a pretty sudden decline, and therefore not a systemic issue.
  • ren_engineer 3y ago
    it shows scores have been in decline for over 10 years before a sharp covid related decline. And worse is that scores are now back to where they were in the early 70s. So despite the massive increase in spending and in theory the fact that all the spending dedicating to researching how to improve education, results are the same.
    • basch 3y ago
      YouTube, Fortnite, cell phones. People worried about MTV rotting the brain back in the day but we really are frying attention spans with an arms race of color, editing, explosions, excitement, and fast movement. I’m willing to bet almost anything home reading is down. School has not caught up to other more engaging temptations. A question is, should it.
      • RC_ITR 3y ago
        > I’m willing to bet almost anything home reading is down. Your implication is that children, famous for their love of texting rather than calling, are reading less than a generation of tv watching phone callers? Don’t discount the idea that children are simply better at reading digital content and these tests are testing analogue reading skills. Keep in mind we just invented the machine that takes complex abstract writing and makes it easy to digest (and takes simple thoughts and expands them into rich texts).
        • brigadier132 3y ago
          Nobody became a genius from only reading cartoons and text messages between adolescents is of much lower academic and literary quality.
• andrewclunn 3y ago
  There's a problem. Don't every ask why though. The only acceptable solution is to throw more money to institutional authorities claiming to represent the best interest of children. Looking any deeper or suggesting any other solution is not acceptable. Now move along.
  • rootusrootus 3y ago
    It sounds like you have an opinion. Care to share it?
    • gemstones 3y ago
      I'm not the original poster, but I'll share an anecdote from tutoring in a bad public school district. The kids, in the first 5 minutes of class (and these are the supposedly good, motivated kids - in an elective CS class) make more trouble than would have been allowed in an entire school day in a class entirely composed of the biggest class clowns from my private high school. No amount of money fixes that culture problem. Better parenting does. I'm convinced that the only way to spend money to fix schools is to not give money to the actual school and put it towards social programs (which I am in favor of.)
      • theossuary 3y ago
        I've always believed that schools should see themselves as community centers. They should invite everyone in their tax base for activities, especially parents. They should do little BBQs, potlucks, have little plays or movie nights, etc. They should offer all children in their tax base breakfast, lunch, and/or dinner. They should encourage students to stay after for sports, to read in the library, or just to hangout. Basically schools should be like libraries or churches. I hate that the culture is moving in the other direction.
        • rootusrootus 3y ago
          Our school does much of what you suggest, but only for students. They are tightly locked away from the general public now, because some people think schools make a nice place for live target practice. I don't see this changing for the better anytime soon, it'll probably get worse. Guns are more popular than ever in the US, and with prevalence comes increased risk.
• ern 3y ago
  I recall reading/seeing that a lot of standardized testing in the US is gamed by schools, which focus on “teaching the test”. Could the decline in test scores be related to a shift im how schools approach these tests?
  • taeric 3y ago
    I also seem to recall that most concerns over "teaching to the test" were themselves misguided. Is like being worried that you are training to the sport, for kids that are getting into sports. Not that there isn't systemic cheating that can be done by some places. There can also be neglect of topics. That said, for the most part, if you can do the test, you have learned more of the topic than if you can't.
    • jewayne 3y ago
      This. If you're not "teaching to the test", what are you teaching, exactly?
      • karaterobot 3y ago
        It'd be a less flexible approach, with more lessons oriented around test problems than the underlying concepts they're meant to represent? So, an equivalent would be learning leetcode programming puzzles to pass an interview, vs. learning to be a well-rounded programmer.
      • detaro 3y ago
        Related skills that are useful outside the limited form the standardized test takes. To take a practical example, if you wanted to get a group of kids to get best high marks in my high-school CS final exams, it'd been very effective to have them drill a a few standard sorting algorithms and a pile of formal definitions, so they are certain to be able to perfectly reproduce them from memory when prompted. But I'm fairly sure the few extra weeks of messing around with graph algorithms, despite that not being material relevant for the exams, probably were more useful for everyone in the class despite someone typoing a heapsort or not remembering how UTF-8 bit encoding works under pressure and loosing some points on that.
• jeffbee 3y ago
  "Percentage of students missing 5 or more days of school monthly has doubled since 2020" seems like it might have some explanatory powers. How can you miss a quarter of the school days and keep up?
  • WalterBright 3y ago
    > How can you miss a quarter of the school days and keep up? Not a problem, as public schools move at a glacial pace. In 8th grade, the teachers were still going over the times tables with them. In high school "honors" class, the teacher spent an entire semester on the concept of "molar mass". My experience going through the bowels of the public school system was it was fun place to be with your friends. Any learning was incidental. Of course, the magnitude of this disaster made it very difficult for me to get my feet under me in college.
    • jeffbee 3y ago
      Your experience from > 50 years ago may not be relevant.
    • projektfu 3y ago
      I forget where you're from, but I know you're a little older than me. In my public school, 8th grade tracked some students into high-school math (New York Regents Course 1) and the others into math that they'd need for the next year. But in 7th grade, all students were solving some algebra problems, graphing and plotting, etc. basic geometry, some constructions, etc. 11th grade (Regents, not Honors) Chemistry had equilibrium problems, etc., although it was hit or miss whether the teacher could teach them. It was also not required, as only 2 years of science were required, and most students would have taken Earth Science/Geology and Biology. However, it shows that public schools can get teach it, and the standards can require it. I do wish people would give up on teaching Physics without Calculus. Kind of a wasted year for me, and everything made sense as soon as you added differentiation and integration. I think the two courses should be taught together in the same class. Presumably, the No Child Left Behind act and the Common Core curriculum are supposed to provide a baseline for the country that is well above "times tables in 8th grade". Common Core seems to me to suffer from a second-system effect, eschewing some of the tried-and-true for the experimental, but the motivation is a reasonable one. I never understood why they didn't take a successful state's curriculum and adapt it to all the states, but that's politics more than anything else. I'm pretty concerned though, now that I'll be having kids go through the system, that the parties involved (teachers, administration, politicians) will conspire to avoid doing work while avoiding responsibility. But that's local politics, not national.
• sfblah 3y ago
  I have a 13 and a 15 year old, and my opinion is it's the phones.
  • novalis78 3y ago
    Social media and computer games in general.
    • Buttons840 3y ago
      The scores have increased since the 70s until a peak in 2012. Social media may play a role, but "computer games in general" have existed for decades, and been blamed for decades, and in most of those decades test scores have improved. Leave blaming "computer games" to the 90s.
      • basisword 3y ago
        Games have changed significantly though. I feel like the PS4 in 2013 was the first games console to make online gaming widespread. Playing a self contained game by yourself or in person with friends is a very different experience to loot boxes, IAP’s, and games designed to make you play more and more. Maybe it’s not impactful but I don’t think you can dismiss it as easily as you have.
        • vanilla_nut 3y ago
          Agreed, but I would argue that the PS3/Xbox 360 generation was the first where the majority of console owners played online. I was an adolescent/teenager at the time and it was almost a guarantee that any other boys in my class had one of those consoles and played online. Almost invariably first person shooters. Very different from today's pay-to-win manipulative Skinner Boxes, but probably not very healthy. Living someplace where I couldn't physically hang out with other kids easily after school (thanks, car culture) it probably helped me build better social skills. But at the cost of my attention span and physical social skills. It certainly makes me wonder what skill tradeoffs today's video game kids are making.
      • 3y ago
• idlewords 3y ago
  At this rate, if two trains depart their depot at the same time, one leaving Wichita eastbound at 45 mph and the other departing St. Louis westbound at 58 mph, we may never know where they are going to meet, let alone how long it will take them to get there.
• taeric 3y ago
  "Sold a Story" paints a very compelling case for what went wrong with reading. I wouldn't be shocked to see some bleed in of that across to math, as well. In particular, decoding a word phonetically is a very "interact with the characters of the word" activity that many students weren't taught for many years. Literally teaching you to look around the word for context as a starting point for how to interact with a word. The same approach in math would reach similarly bad results, I'd wager. Edit: https://features.apmreports.org/sold-a-story/ https://features.apmreports.org/sold-a-story/, in case you don't know what I'm referring to.
  • AlanYx 3y ago
    There was a fantastic Hacker News discussion about Sold a Story a few months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35599181 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35599181 Apparently the same sort of analysis with math isn't quite as straightforward. There is some evidence that pure constructivism is not successful with struggling math students. But unlike reading instruction where skilled readers never use the strategies taught in things like three-cueing (for "decoding", anyway), skilled mathematicians do approach novel problems in an exploratory manner.
    • taeric 3y ago
      Oddly, I'd expect skilled readers do use cueing. But, I'd expect that understanding and interpreting the different cues around requires experience. I also expect that it is never done "blind" on the word. For example, if you see the word "sake", cues let you know if it is one or two syllables. But the cues alone are almost certainly not usable for determining what word would appear somewhere. (edit: LLMs and an interpretation of them being only the connection of cues not withstanding.)
  • scythe 3y ago
    It's a nice argument. But it probably isn't a great way to explain a decline in performance that was larger in math than in reading!
    • 3y ago
• brigadier132 3y ago
  Teaching philosophy in the US is deeply flawed. Memorization has been deemphasized and "understanding" is being promoted. Ask the proponents of "understanding" and "critical thinking" based education to explain what the terms actually mean. I have a simple definition of "understanding". Understanding is when you've developed an accurate, predictive, mental model for some topic. It's much easier to develop an accurate mental model when you memorize all the components of some topic. I think memorization is deemphasized because memorization is painful and benefits from having an invested family that will encourage and even force the student to practice.
  • alyandon 3y ago
    As a parent with a child in public grade school, the whole rote memorization of facts vs trying to help him understand and think isn't the real problem. The thing that makes him an A/B student (and sometimes almost C) instead of a straight A student is that my ability to help him is virtually nil because all his tests, classwork and even homework are done electronically. I never get to see an actual graded copy of anything that would tell me exactly where he is struggling. Instead, I'm supposed to trust that he is getting adequate guidance from his teacher when they review classwork but given a classroom size of 20+ students I have serious doubts that that is actually happening. I hate to say it - but I really am coming around to the idea that having computers in classrooms and digitization of tests, classwork and homework is actually a hindrance to learning because of the missing feedback loop. :-/
    • spywaregorilla 3y ago
      Why are you less able to ask to see the electronic version than the paper version? I don't think kids are eagerly sharing their graded papers with their parents otherwise.
      • alyandon 3y ago
        In most cases, it is a result of the teacher immediately "closing" the assignment/test after it has been submitted and you are only then able to see the final score. For the couple of teachers that actually use canvas properly, I am actually able to see his answers and see which ones he missed and work with him to help him better understand.
• bityard 3y ago
  My son and daughter both went to the same elementary school, but at different times. We chose this school in particular because was well-funded (for a public school anyway), had a good reputation, and was diverse. My daughter is now a teenager and is an A and B student. Zero problems academically, other than constantly forgetting to turn in already-completed assignments. Despite going to the same school and having the same teachers, parents, and home life, etc my son is really struggling, though. They're both bright kids, but what changed for him? Two things that I can see. One is that the COVID quarantine, while necessary for public safety, set most kids back developmentally at least a year, often two. It was far worse for younger kids than older kids because Kindergarten through 2nd grade are absolutely foundational points in their education. Kids who don't get a solid grasp of reading, spelling, and arithmetic at this point sometimes never catch up to where they should be. Hopefully my son will. The other is that around the time my son started at the school, they got rid of the special education (or whatever is the correct phrase) classrooms, laid off those teachers, and put the students in regular classes instead. This is going about as well as you'd think. The kids with emotional issues do not get the special attention and resources that they need, and the rest of the class is severely disrupted to the point that almost no learning gets done. According to my wife who works at the school, his class this year had four special-needs students in it. My son says that these students were constantly disrupting the classroom. They bullied the other students, they verbally and physically fought with everyone (including teachers), they scream when they don't get their way. The teacher is not allowed to send them to the office or another room. The whole class didn't get recess for over half the year because the teacher couldn't handle the kids outside. (One of them would just run right off the school grounds every time, apparently.) The school used to have a strong positivity vibe and a zero-tolerance anti-bullying policy. Now, when an emotionally-troubled child draws blood on my child (which happened), the response from the faculty and staff is so silent it's deafening.
  • woeirua 3y ago
    Why are you still sending your kid there? Those are atrocious conditions. Complain, loudly, to your school board and vote with your feet.
  • Glyptodon 3y ago
• kypro 3y ago
  I live in the UK, but a few kids in my family are around this age and we've had similar declines in test scores here too. I'll comment on a few things I've notice - at least as someone from my working class background. Covid lockdowns were brutal for kids of this age bracket. Kids in my family were mostly just locked in doors watching Netflix and playing video games during lockdowns and did next to no physical activity, socialising, or anything mentally simulating. A couple of kids in my family have also developed mental illnesses as a result of lockdowns – and I don't use this word lightly. For kids from my background school is really the only opportunity they get to experience normality. A space free from all the various social issues that plague families from this socioeconomic background. To be more specific here, one kid ended up becoming extremely anti-social during the lockdowns since violence is normal and common within his household. The other has develop extreme social anxiety and depression and now refuses to attend school. I'm sure other kids have developed post-Covid anxiety, but those kids probably have parents that care enough about their children to ensure they attend school. Obviously if they had better parents this stuff probably wouldn't have happened, but school is so important for people of my background. It's the only place in their life where order and discipline will be enforced. It's also the only place they get to socialise with normal people who are not criminals or drug users. And the only place they'll get to feel safe. I have no idea how much of this decline in tests scores is related to the pandemic, but if other kids took the pandemic as bad the kids in my family then I'm not surprised by this at all.
  • BizarreByte 3y ago
    > A couple of kids in my family have also developed mental illnesses as a result of lockdowns – and I don't use this word lightly. I've witnessed the same among several kids I know, they're really suffering and worse yet there's no supports for them. My province had some of, if not the strictest measures in Canada and honestly people just don't seem okay in general. I myself got to experience my first psychotic break in 2022 after never having had any such issues in my life. It is the single scariest thing I've ever gone through and it's not an understatement to say the last few years have permentantly changed me.
• comte7092 3y ago
  While the scores do appear to reflect a real decline (ie not just noise), we are talking about a 4 & 7 point decline for reading and math respectively on a 500 point scale. The reading scores in particular seem to reflect a fairly normal variance. Take that into account before posting your hobby horse narrative as to why society is falling apart.
  • SkyBelow 3y ago
    If the data is taken from a wide range of plentiful sources, then even a small variance can be very significant. What is the 95%, 99%, or 99.9% confidence intervals for this data?
    • comte7092 3y ago
      What do you mean by “very significant” “Significant” from a statistical perspective typically means “not 0 effect size”. It does not follow that the magnitude of the real life impact is particularly notable.
• Supermancho 3y ago
  I do not expect this trend to reverse, due to increases in carbon dioxide levels contributing to a decline in (the way we currently measure) intelligence, generation by generation.
• dayk995 3y ago
  Yet another anecdote here but I have an 8 year old that had a "covid kindergarten" as her teachers call it. She's now about to finish 2nd grade and is doing a summer reading program with her school because she's in the ~40% percent of her grade that are behind state standards. As her parent, I almost feel helpless here. I want her to enjoy reading. I try not to push her "too" hard at home to the point where it's a constant fight.
  • droopyEyelids 3y ago
    One thing that helped me as a kid was that my dad made time for us both to sit down and write a free form "story" (really a big paragraph) as kids. It could be on any topic but sometimes we'd all agree to write on the same topic if we were having trouble starting. My siblings, father, and I would all write one over half an hour, and then read them to each other and discuss them. I did fight it plenty, but in the end it was fun and helped make reading and writing more of a natural thing for me.
  • mensetmanusman 3y ago
    May help to go on regular walks with her while reading or listening to an audio book to reignite the love of stories.
• swarfield 3y ago
  https://www.wsj.com/articles/pandemic-learning-slide-continues-for-13-year-olds-making-full-recovery-unlikely-3fe4b085 https://www.wsj.com/articles/pandemic-learning-slide-continu... Looks like a lot of it can be attributed to covid.
• mrangle 3y ago
  Huge mystery. Will never be solved.
• Scubabear68 3y ago
  In our public school,the true tragedy is how the school union took advantage of Covid to push for teachers to have almost zero accountability or responsibility anymore. Remote learning was an obvious disaster, but problems continued post-Covid. Some teachers stayed remote (!), requiring assistants in the classroom. Teachers rely on a host of shitty online platforms and expect the kids to figure out how to navigate all of them. Class is often little more than an email “read chapter 7 and do the problems”. The icing on the cake was the grading system that gave kids a B for showing up. Ourselves and many parents didn’t know how bad it was until standard testing came up and our kids were scoring in the single digits in percentile. We have since moved to a private school for both. The first year was rough as they over came the Learning deficit and learned how to study again, but both are back as normal students with the kind of understanding in math, science, reading, etc they never would have gotten in public school.
  • Scoundreller 3y ago
    > rely on a host of shitty online platforms and expect the kids to figure out how to navigate all of them. This sounds like good real world preparation > Ourselves and many parents didn’t know how bad it was until standard testing came up and our kids were scoring in the single digits in percentile. Who was the comparator group here?
    • _aavaa_ 3y ago
      > > rely on a host of shitty online platforms and expect the kids to figure out how to navigate all of them. > This sounds like good real world preparation Or, we could push to have a better standard for them, and get them to see and treat the shitty software as something other than an unavoidable and unchangeable status quo.
    • Scubabear68 3y ago
      The comparator group is every kid in the state at the same grade level. It is very shocking to see an 8th grader with a 3.5 GPA come in at 9 percentile in multiple subjects.
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• GoodJokes 3y ago
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• basisword 3y ago
  I spent my summers at that age reading lots (probably a book per week) and spending 6 or more hours a day learning guitar and listening to the same handful of CD’s. If not doing those things I was out with my friends playing a sport in the street. I imagine if I was that age now I would be spending a huge amount of time on TikTok and the remainder on Netflix. I fall into the same traps as an adult with responsibilities despite wanting to spend more time reading, playing guitar, and hanging with my friends.
• Utkarsh_Mood 3y ago
  I have a brother who's 13 years old. Before the pandemic, he was a pretty smart kid, around the top half of his class, with an interest in learning for the sake of learning itself. During the pandemic, classes happened online(microsoft teams) and almost all his friends were playing video games while teaching was ongoing and disconnecting if asked a question(Not chastising him here, I did this too at times ha!) Back to school, he's been struggling with simple algebra and geometry, which should have been clear(in a normal scenario) a year ago. The desire to learn, has been replaced with other more short-term pleasures like watching yt,gaming etc. School teachers are ill-equipped to address this but thats a tangent I'll not go off right now. My parents have hired a private tutor for math to help him address the struggles he's facing right now, because the school sure as hell wont.
  • musicale 3y ago
    I understand the addictive and short-term-reward nature of video games. But for many, video games are also a gateway drug into technology! I tend to think that video games (and tabletop games) are educational on their own. For example, I think RPGs, strategy games, and puzzle games are pretty good for thinking and planning, while shooters and action games are good for eye-hand coordination and reaction time. I also think it's educational to build, configure, benchmark, and optimize a gaming PC. Also if gaming is something you do with friends (especially in-person), then it has social benefits as well. If he's interested, I'd encourage him to get involved in game programming and mods. I think that programming in particular can synergize with algebra (e.g. variables and expressions) and geometry (since logical reasoning is used in algorithms as well as geometric proofs, and graphics often require geometry and trigonometry.) Robotics and real-world computing and electronics can also be fun and game-like. For some (many?), hands-on activities can be more engaging than pure software. Maybe he might enjoy building robotics or electronics kits or projects, or building something at a local wood, metal, or machine shop or maker space. We live in such a virtual world of screens that it is often refreshing to work with our hands with physical things. Also sports and physical activity are good for getting away from youtube and improving the delivery of oxygen to your brain (excepting possible head injuries that are common in certain sports.)
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• itscodingtime 3y ago
  A common narrative is that a lot of kids were set back by the quality of remote or in person education due to a covid. Another common narrative is that these kids are screwed for life because of this setup back. I would just like to remind people Black Americans and poor whites often deal with lower quality of education compared to white and upperclass peers for their entire K-12 experience.
• alkibiades 3y ago
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• mrguyorama 3y ago
  I wouldn't claim I know "the reason", but it often feels like there's just a lot less enthusiasm for education and learning in the US, across the whole society. My relatives have been screamed at every day for decades that teachers are clearly overpowered by their unions, or that they are trying to undermine your authority as a parent because your local school teaches basic biology, or that they're pawns of the gay agenda and trying to turn your kids into trans or something, meanwhile actual small town school teachers are pretty fucking conservative, including being openly and vocally "covid is a hoax" in front of their whole class of first graders. Everyone is convinced they are the smartest one in the room even though they haven't read a book in a decade and their child can't even do their basic times tables. Meanwhile teachers are finally giving up after what amounts to direct abuse for at least 4 decades, with stagnant pathetic wages, zero support from administration, absurd requirements placed on them by people with ulterior motives, now bullshit book bans, outright parent hostile actions, and nevermind the fact that in many places the "requirements" to be a teacher is have an occasional pulse. Oh, and lets not talk about the abysmal state of education materials companies, which are hollowing out and rent seeking just like every other corp in the US, so it's not like we are even giving our kids helpful tools.
• techsceptic 3y ago
  It seems like we forgot the immense value of an ingrained culture of education, where practically all kids get some form of schooling. Where I live (Wales, UK), the government statistics on school attendance post-Covid are grim, if you are anything less than middle class.
• NickBeee 3y ago
  And nobody mentions brain damage (proved) from Covid, from each infection. Sure, it's because of Lockdowns, nobody ever saw that virus can infect some neurons.
• kaonashi 3y ago
  gotta wonder how much mental decline due to covid exposure is contributing https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8715665/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8715665/
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• whatscooking 3y ago
  Diet + Tech addiction. Where’s my Nobel prize?
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• TheCaptain4815 3y ago
  I can’t wait for Ai to replace most teachers.
• BeFlatXIII 3y ago
  How reliable is the data? Do the kids actually try on these tests?
• S_Bear 3y ago
  I've been a librarian for 20 years and have watched the decline of children's literacy firsthand. Here's my random thoughts: 1) No Child Left Behind really siloed the schools: Back in the early 2000s, partnering with schools for literacy was incredibly easy: teachers would walk kids over to the library and we'd work together to promote summer reading. Now talking to administration is like talking to a brick wall. Even if you make contact with a simpatico teacher, they are often forbidden to lose class hours to come over to the library. 2) The public schools in my area are physically crumbling, and there's no feasible method to replace them. I currently live in a very rural area. My small county (15k residents) has 5 school districts that all need new facilities. These facilities cost between $40-65 million dollars. Even if the new buildings get funded/constructed, enrollments are falling and it's impossible to convince new teachers to come out to the boonies. A school district in the next county is importing teachers from the Philippines because there are no local teachers to hire. 3) There has been a change in parental behavior for the worse. Children are a lot less free-range than they were in the early 2000s, so every library visit has a parent tapping their foot waiting for their child to finish. Sports have become ascendant, even though no professional players in anything have ever come from here. When we have literacy events like Summer Reading, the parents want to know what the prizes are and if they're good enough; if the prizes don't meet their standards, the child doesn't get to participate.