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US High school students' scores fall in reading and math

• jjice 1y ago
  Curious what the causes are and how their weighted. Seems like it'd be too complex to actually figure out what's causing the most damage, but it's very interesting. There are so many factors I'd argue are probably negatives: - Always online phone access (and everything that comes with it) - Generative AI for doing assignments without thought - The COVID year or two that they had to learn from home couldn't have helped develop good habits (I know it would've for me)
  • bee_rider 1y ago
    It started in 2013. If we have to blame technology, social media seems more likely than AI, I guess.
    • pixl97 1y ago
      From 2011 to 2013 smartphone adoption in the US went from 35 to 55%, and by 2016 was 75%. While not proof of causation, the correlation is very strong.
    • weweersdfsd 1y ago
      Social media AND smartphones became popular around that time. I think it's the toxic combination that's the worst - easy, low effort dopamine hits that are available everywhere via your phone, whenever you are bored.
      • username332211 1y ago
        In 2013 social media was still a textual medium, right? There was Vine, but that died pretty quickly, from what I remember. If social media and smartphones are the problem, I would have expected that results for English proficiency would be steady until the advent of TikTok, right?
    • Der_Einzige 1y ago
      Pfft, it started in 2007. Kids couldn’t deal with the orange box, cod4, halo3, all coming out at once.
      • bee_rider 1y ago
        Actually, it is a good point that this is a lagging indicator.
  • SoftTalker 1y ago
    Phones/screens is one I'm not sure about. On the one hand, to use a mobile phone, and social media, and messaging apps, you have to read and write. I certainly spent a lot less time reading and writing messages to my friends in the 1980s than the typical kid does today. We just talked, in person or on an old-fashioned phone call. On the other hand, it's shallow. Messages are short, and filled with shorthand and emoticons. There's no deep reading or expression of complicated ideas in written form.
    • BeetleB 1y ago
      There's a difference between reading and writing, and reading and writing well. I would expect the tests to expect higher proficiency than what is expected in your usual text messages.
      • Der_Einzige 1y ago
        The quality of most text msgs is higher than what passes for “quality literature” in many lit classrooms. Texting is unironically a better use of time than reading infinite jest, or gravities rainbow, etc.
        • fiforpg 1y ago
          While you can certainly argue that some texts have more substance to them than these literary works, you cannot deny that most texts have worse prose than the books.
        • realo 1y ago
          Hum... "R U OK" is sooo much better than ... “How do you feel, Jake?” “Fine, it doesn’t hurt much.” “Are you all right?” ... (Hemmingway)
        • BeetleB 1y ago
          > The quality of most text msgs is higher than what passes for “quality literature” in many lit classrooms. First: Your HS kids hang out with a different crowd than my HS kids :-) Second: This is about reading ability (comprehension, etc), not literature. Whether the quality of a text message is superior/inferior to whatever they use in literature classes is irrelevant.
  • iteria 1y ago
    As always with these things, I'm curious what are the results by state. I wish I could find it again, but I saw some results by state and some of our states scored the same as the top rank nations and some score with 3rd world nations. I would be interested if this is a nationwide trend or the bad performers are performing even worse. Especially since from my memory, this is mostly a poverty issue. Not a school funding issue, but that per capita income was a good indicator of where that state would score.
    • ginko 1y ago
      Sure, but you could do the same in pretty much any country.
      • agentcoops 1y ago
        I’m originally from a US state that currently sits at a 40% literacy rate, but I’ve lived for the last decade in various European countries. I say this only because, even if still anecdotal, I feel like I have a decent basis for comparison. Certainly there are educational disparities from center to periphery and across income brackets everywhere, but I have never lived somewhere that the division was as stark as the US. France — with all its problems — ensures the same incredibly high standard of curriculum across the country and perhaps most importantly it is actually expected that top university performers who will become researchers teach at high school in the periphery. It’s even a nation-wide competition by discipline (look up the “aggregation”) to obtain these highly sought positions. The idea is something like you teach high school outside Paris while preparing your doctorate and then either return triumphant to the big research institutes or continue teaching in the provinces. Something like this in the US would have immeasurable impact, since probably one of the biggest issues is just convincing well-educated people to teach in rural areas.
        • bluGill 1y ago
          from https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/us-literacy-rates-by-state https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/us-literacy... "California’s 23.1% of adults lacking basic prose literacy skills make California have the lowest literacy rate of 76.9%". I don't know where you are from with a 40% literacy rate, but it isn't any US state.
  • Fade_Dance 1y ago
    How about the quality of the education and curriculum itself?
    • Night_Thastus 1y ago
      The curriculum can be amazing, but it doesn't matter if the students don't care. And frankly, a lot of them don't. Some of that is cultural, some of that is due to parenting. A lot of parents aren't involved in their kids education. Frankly, a lot of them are barely involved in parenting in general.
      • pixl97 1y ago
        But I mean, I remember hearing this back in the 80s, so in itself is not a great indicator unless we can see something that would point at why parents stopped caring as much. Now, if someone came with a headline that said "Parents not involved in childrens education because they've been ragebaited into spending all their time yelling on social media" my biases would tend to lend me to believe it's true, even without sufficient evidence. There are other correlations, like cellphone ownership in the population. Just having social media itself doesn't seem to be an exact fit, but that tells us nothing about the algorithms that social media was using at the time.
        • bluGill 1y ago
          It is just as true today as the 1980s - parents have long been the largest indicator of how well kids do in school. What isn't known is how to get parents to do better. Or lacking that, how to get kids to do better anyway. (there have been some successes, but nothing seems to be repeatable)
          • pixl97 1y ago
            But that's just punting the original question. Obviously parents aren't getting better, they are getting worse. Why is the question.
  • Night_Thastus 1y ago
    This trend of decline significantly predates either COVID or GenAI.
  • 2OEH8eoCRo0 1y ago
    I think it's all of the above and probably more. It might be difficult to find a biggest culprit since they all feed each other. As an example: COVID forced people inside onto their screens and now that people are more screen addicted they use more gen ai or lost the skills to solve things themselves. Gen ai reliance leads to more gen ai use as skills wither.
  • Kapura 1y ago
    early on in the bush (ii) administration, they passed a bill called "no child left behind" that would cut funding from schools that couldn't achieve desired standardized test scores. while this may seem to align incentives, in reality a school that has struggling students needs MORE resources, not less. the outcome, in reality, is an extreme desire to "teach to the test," where developing actual skills is secondary to learning the structure of test problems and how to answer them correctly enough to keep the school from being obliterated. teachers are one of the most valuable, most undervalued positions in society. my mother taught elementary school for 20 years; when she retired, i was making 3 times her salary doing my computer job. this is the sad but inevitable outcome from the policies put in place by a class of people that can afford to educate their children outside of the systems forced upon the working class.
    • username332211 1y ago
      The no child left behind act was enacted in 2001. If you check the article, it has a nice little chart, showing a decline that starts in 2015. Prior to 2013, the results show a clear trend of improvement (in regards to the percentage of students achieving a minimum level of proficiency). How would you explain that temporal gap? If the No Child Left Behind Act is the problem, why was the trend positive for the first 12-14 years of the time it's been in force?
      • programjames 1y ago
        Gifted programs dropped from ~72% of elementary schools to ~65% by 2013, and probably have continued declining. Given it takes 10+ years to educate a child, the school culture to change, and so on, we should expect to see quite a lag between policy and outcomes.
    • m00x 1y ago
      The Obama administration reversed this in the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) in 2015. Many of the schools with the most funding per student, like Washington D.C. and NYC currently underperform. NYC has a spending of $36-40k per student with only 56% ELA, ~47% Math. Washington DC has $27k-31k of spending per student and only 22% proficient in reading and 16% in Math. Charter schools have been the best bang for the buck. The best all-income schools are catholic schools, averaging at 1 grade level higher. Then private schools do even better, but aren't accessible to everyone, and then the top spot is left to selective high-performing schools, unsurprisingly.
  • brightball 1y ago
    The US has been on a steady decline in global education rankings since the 70s IIRC. Can’t remember where I saw the stat.
  • agentcoops 1y ago
    I’m from a US state with a 40% adult literacy rate (=above eighth grade reading level). At least there, none of those three things are even close to the root causes. The average school in the US outside of the big cities, especially the farther you get from the coasts, is just not fit for purpose — and funding only seems to ever go down (not that throwing money at the problem alone would solve it). Honestly — and I’m not being at all utopian/overvaluing the present state of the technology — I think AI is one of the few prospects for even just marginal improvement, especially since it’s accessible by phone. Much as I wish it wasn’t the case, it’s hard to even imagine all the things that would have to change (from funding, to legislation, undoing all the embarrassing “teaching the controversy” curriculum, to say nothing of staffing) for a “non-technical solution.”
  • yoyohello13 1y ago
    It’s decades of defunding schools. I used to work in education and I have never in my career experienced “more” money coming in. It’s always, cuts, cuts, cuts. That and the culture of anti-intellectualism in the US. I’m completely unsurprised we are falling behind.
    • m00x 1y ago
      NYC, DC, and LA all have over $20k of funding per student, with NYC projecting to hit $42k/student this year and are scoring at 12-56% ELA and Math. It's definitely not just funding.
    • jandrewrogers 1y ago
      How can it be "defunding" while the US spends far more per student than just about any other country in the world?
    • treis 1y ago
      Except for a brief blip around the housing crash inflation adjusted per pupil spending has steadily increased for decades.
    • terminalshort 1y ago
      Do you have evidence of this? I have never seen a shred of it even though the claim is repeated endlessly. I think it's a conspiracy theory.
    • phil21 1y ago
      Education spending by all metrics has only gone up - beating inflation nearly every single year since I've been alive. It might not make it down to teacher salaries or more educators, but the money is absolutely being spent at massive levels. The best schools where I grew up and around me today have the lowest per-pupil cost. There is basically no correlation between budget spent on education until you get to the extremes on both ends.
  • bpt3 1y ago
    To add to your list, in my kids' school district, they spent about 4 - 5 years trying to compensate for kids who didn't do well during COVID by basically slowing every class down to the pace of the kid who struggled the most. Combine this with an emphasis on single-tracking students and a de-emphasis of grading in general, and it's not surprising to me that scores are declining.
• aredox 1y ago
  Adults can't dismiss experts and expertise all the time on every topic (climate, health, economy) and worship know-nothings, and expect their children to invest time and effort to learn stuff. The kids may become dumber but they aren't stupid.
  • dr-detroit 1y ago
    [dead]
  • apples_oranges 1y ago
    You think they are better at detecting the know-nothings than the adults?
    • aredox 1y ago
      Who said "the king has no clothes" in the classic tale?
• pfannkuchen 1y ago
  I know we’re not supposed to think about this, but is this controlled for region of origin? That has been changing, and so if that impacts school performance (schools designed by westerners, mind you, in a societal model designed by the same), then we would expect this to change as well right?
  • Simulacra 1y ago
    It depends, is this a federal problem, or a local problem? Because I don't see the federal department of education has really done anything to improve scores. So this may be a local issue, and of local resources.
    • bluGill 1y ago
      There are very large regional effects. We talk about Finland's scores being great, but I have no idea what France's scores are... We should compare US scores to all of the EU if we want to fair comparison.
  • add-sub-mul-div 1y ago
    Net immigration has been trending down for a decade, but I'm not cynical enough to think we're not churning out some pretty smart kids of our own!
    • trynumber9 1y ago
      Perhaps, but the percentage of Americans foreign-born is at a 100 year high. And the percentage of under 18s who have a foreign-born parent is at an all-time high (25.6% of students, the previous peak was 21.6% in 1920). And if their children are underperforming in schools it would be important to know.
  • ninetyninenine 1y ago
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• drivebyhooting 1y ago
  Just looking at the picture triggered me. Why are the students sitting in groups and cutting paper with scissors? There’s a huge teaching gap between USA and Asia. See for yourself: https://youtu.be/wIyVYCuPxl0?si=f6wFv2G3Iru7QFTy https://youtu.be/wIyVYCuPxl0?si=f6wFv2G3Iru7QFTy https://en.wikipedia-on-ipfs.org/wiki/James_W._Stigler https://en.wikipedia-on-ipfs.org/wiki/James_W._Stigler Edit: since it may not have been clear from the video, this is my interpretation: * in the Japanese math class the teacher teaches at the board and then walks around the class to look at the students. Students are not sitting in large groups. * in the American class the teacher spends practically 0 time at the blackboard, the students sit in large groups, the teacher spends most of the time with one or two groups.
  • Eddy_Viscosity2 1y ago
    I think this is because Asian governments want their populations to more educated and American governments want their populations to be less educated. For the former I'd guess its because they have very strong control on people's behaviors so they just want them more capable to innovate, grow economy, etc. For the latter I'd guess its because they fear a more educated population will be harder to manipulate and hence erode government power.
    • koolba 1y ago
      > I think this is because Asian governments want their populations to more educated and American governments want their populations to be less educated. On the American side it’s not that they want people to be less educated. It’s the adversarial system of education being run by people whose interests are not aligned with students excelling. Teacher’s unions, which predominantly exist in the public school system, are not in the business of educating children. They’re in the business of raising costs (their salaries and benefits) and lowering requirements (the work they actually have to do). They’re against measuring progress. They’re against firing for lack of progress. Compare that to a private system where you only stay employed if you’re actually doing a good job of educating kids. There’s also the advantage of private schools being able to fire their students, but that’s more of an anti-disruption thing.
• lucideng 1y ago
  The majority of the public school system has devolved into day-care, not education. Most parents just watch TV, stare at their phones and don't want to be bothered by anything that requires effort. A major societal shift needs to happen for this to be reversed. It's many factors... the parents, the food system, various inequalities, social media, technology, healthcare... the solution is multi-pronged. But if I had to choose id start with social media, smart phones, tablets, etc. Technoloy needs to be seen as a tool and a resource, not primarily as the brainwashing entertainment that it is, and brainwashing them with entertainment is how most people introduce tech to their kids.
  • captainkrtek 1y ago
    Not to be too pessimistic, but it feels like this is impossible given how hyper-optimized our devices are to retain our attention. They’re beyond “tools” now and profits of countless companies are tied to our fixation on our phones.
    • timacles 1y ago
      One day we will look at social media, end less scrolling algos, 5 second clips as we do at cigarettes. It might not be causing cancer, but there is going to be a generation of people lacking emotional regulation because their dopamine circuits have been fried since they were 3 years old
  • AlwaysRock 1y ago
    > Most parents just watch TV, stare at their phones and don't want to be bothered by anything that requires effort The point is that students are doing worse, even though ^ is likely true today just like it was true 5, 10, and 20 years ago.
    • hungmung 1y ago
      The generation raised by iPads are in HS now and American IQ tests scores are in decline, especially in the last 10-15 years.
• EcommerceFlow 1y ago
  Unless this accounts for the change in population demographics, it's a pointless study, or are we still pretending that doesn't exist at a macro level?
  • medvezhenok 1y ago
    Yup, more article slop without accounting for demographic data. Same with the constant drumbeat of "Americans are getting shorter".
  • chabons 1y ago
    I'm missing something. What change in demographics are we talking about, and why would that influence math results?
    • throwway120385 1y ago
      I don't intend this as a dig against Spanish-speaking students. But many school systems in the US have tons of Spanish-speaking students who know very little English. But all of the homework, readings, and classroom instruction are given in English. If you don't know the language of instruction then it puts you at an immediate disadvantage. This might be what they're referring to.
      • nielsbot 1y ago
        Curious what percentage of school districts fall into this purported category. And is that number continually increasing? Share some data on this please.
      • cpursley 1y ago
        Even second generation Latin American folks who speak English fine often perform poorly. It's cultural but we're not supposed to talk about it. Saw a lot of it first hand via the family business; it's truly bewildering and even disheartening.
        • 1y ago
• beardyw 1y ago
  You need to look at who the kids look up to. What attributes do their role models have?
  • gre 1y ago
    A head singing through a toilet seat
    • avs733 1y ago
      They used to look up to professional athletes. It is more statistically realistic for them to want to be a successful influencer than it is for them to be a professional athlete.
• mrandish 1y ago
  There's a longer trend but also a clear inflection point around the rise of mobile phones and social media. N=1 but we delayed getting a phone for our kid until a few months after she turned 13, which was a good choice because now we wish we'd gone longer. We can see how social media and app snacking clearly have negative effects on attention span, attitude, etc. Also choosing to close schools during COVID was as catastrophic as many predicted. Our kid was in 7th grade during COVID and teachers each year report the effects are still being felt across many students. Of course, naturally great students recovered quickly and innately poor students remained poor but the biggest loss was in the large middle of B/C students.
  • stephendause 1y ago
    Jonathan Haidt has a lot of good material on this. He is leading the charge in encouraging parents to delay giving their child a phone until high school and not allowing them to have social media accounts until age 16. https://www.goodmorningamerica.com/family/story/author-suggests-guidelines-parents-kids-phones-social-media-108509992 https://www.goodmorningamerica.com/family/story/author-sugge...
    • echelon 1y ago
      How do Asian countries and top-performing countries deal with this? We should do whatever they do. On that note, we should also segregate kids by academic desire and achievement like Japan and China. The bullies and underachievers hold back those who are academically excellent. We do this in limited instances, but not enough to really count.
      • kridsdale1 1y ago
        I only know through cultural osmosis and not real data but it sure seems like the expectation is for the kids to be up till midnight grinding away on homework.
      • barbazoo 1y ago
        As someone with difficulties early on in life and thus showing behavioral issues (what you describe as bullies and underachievers), I went through a system like this and I despised it. N=1 but segregating children at early age based on the behavior they're showing, i.e. the difficulties they're having, felt kinda cruel. It worked academically I guess, I ended up ok, but for many it just meant they just simmered in an environment of mediocrity and rarely made it out.
• simpaticoder 1y ago
  The final answer to the perennial question "What is algebra good for?" is found in the success or failure of society as a whole. The same can be said for many other oft-questioned values, like "What does it matter if I'm a hypocrite?" In truth no-one really knows what the future will bring - it's always possible to construct a scenario where ignorance and irrationality will save society from extermination. But in the "horses, not zebras" sense it pays, I think, to play the odds and consider the most likely scenarios that put a society at risk: invasion, revolution, natural catastrophe, and then ask those questions again. Much of history can be read as a set of experiments testing various social theories, and the failure modes of not knowing algebra (Cambodia), or not caring about logical consistency or truthfulness (Russia) are well-known. Education is an insurance policy against a threat that may occur a generation or two in the future, and so the feedback loop is very long. This says, to me, that any change to education policy or practice should be very slow, incremental, and based not in aesthetics or ideology, but on the need for society's continued existence. It would be optimal to have many parallel longitudinal incremental educational experiments going on all the time, and then adopt the changes that bear fruit. It would be optimal to require that ALL educational policy makers be experts in history.
• softwaredoug 1y ago
  We’re also trying to force the dropout rate lower. So naturally test scores will decline. Gone are the days you are held back. It’s a classic Goodharts Law problem. We’ve focused on one metric and lost site of the bigger picture. States improving performance (Mississippi of all places) now are holding you back at certain milestones. IE at 3rd grade if you can’t read, 8th grade for math deficits, etc.
• s5300 1y ago
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  • mquander 1y ago
    If kids could do math they would be able to divide the yearly American military aid to Israel ($18b last year) by the American population (340m), so they probably wouldn't conclude that fifty bucks per year per person was the main reason why their classmates are poor or their parents can't afford healthcare.
    • s5300 1y ago
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• cosmic_cheese 1y ago
  Education in the US as a whole may be on the decline, but for math specifically I’m not sure that we ever figured out teaching methodologies that work for all children. Every math teacher I’ve ever had was very theory-minded and could barely understand students who weren’t — those who learn through practical example and hands-on activity for instance usually get left in the dust. Reading teaching on the other hand was for the most part figured out a long time ago but trendy experimental methods keep getting cycled regardless.
  • BergAndCo 1y ago
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  • hbosch 1y ago
    >I’m not sure that we ever figured out teaching methodologies that work for all children. This is a fundamental problem with all learning: it's difficult to get entire group to do something the same way with equal effectiveness... that being said, teaching methods are evolving and it's really on the school system to embrace those changes. My kids are young, and their school teaches math with the Singapore Math system and literacy with the UFLI program. They have both been highly effective. Their class sizes are also 12:1 students:teacher ratio, and 6:1 in Pre-K/Kindergarten. So that's also probably important.
    • lif 1y ago
      "Their class sizes are also 12:1 students:teacher ratio, and 6:1 in Pre-K/Kindergarten. So that's also probably important." Absolutely.
  • password54321 1y ago
    Every teaching method you can think of has been tried. What you are describing is called scaffolding with manipulatives which you can find dozens of for maths. Schools have also tried making worksheets catered to multiple skill levels within the same classroom. The harsh reality: most children infamously still have a hard time even being able to tell the time on an analogue clock. You can try every method under the sun but if a child has a hard time understanding a system with two different base numbers it is usually because they just don't have the capacity. All the handholding in the world isn't going to change that.
• josefritzishere 1y ago
  I have thought that The "Mississippi Miracle" was a successful model for what could be done in other areas in other states. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mississippi_Miracle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mississippi_Miracle
  • bpt3 1y ago
    It is, and it shouldn't be surprising that introducing or increasing the amount of rigor in education improves outcomes. But that flies in the face of educational trends in the US overall, so adoption is slow.
• runjake 1y ago
  - The Pandemic really set that generation of kids back, particularly kids who were in elementary during that time. - Public school is essentially daycare. They try to integrate special education students more into the regular classrooms, but the teachers end up spending disproportionate time dealing with them and their behavioral issues, which hurts learning for regular students. - I don't have strong, set in stone opinions about Common Core, but it's approach is certainly hard for parents trying to catch their own children at home. Eg. there is no emphasis on memorizing multiplication tables, but rather it's on learning rather esoteric and hard to remember (albeit valid) math algorithms. - The teachers are generally poorly trained, poorly motivated, poorly paid, poorly educated, and poorly adapted to teaching students. - Learning high school math has been enjoyable. I only took up to geometry in high school, but they are doing much more advanced math. I don't know any of it, and they barely do. So it's been fun learning it and then having to teach it to them in the matter of a day or two. Being a programmer has been exceptionally useful in that regard.
  • clipsy 1y ago
    If public school is essentially daycare, why did the pandemic set a generation of kids back?
    • e-khadem 1y ago
      It's a cascading failure. I live in another part of the world, and we have been witnessing the actual toll of the pandemic unravel in the past couple of years.
    • ddtaylor 1y ago
      Because it was essentially solitary confinement of children. It's not normal for developing brains to be isolated like that.
  • programjames 1y ago
    This was trending long before the pandemic.
  • adrr 1y ago
• naasking 1y ago
  If you can't fail students and hold them back, poor students will continue and pull down the average of later grades. News at 11.
• bediger4000 1y ago
  My youngest is now 19, but all of my kids had "common core" math in Denver Public Schools. That was an utter travesty. I had the tail end of the "new math", and it was obvious even then that arithmetic drills were monumental wastes of times. Apparently, the common core folks had not heard of pocket calculators, or calculator apps on cell phones. If "math" does not account for reality, of course people are going to treat it as a meaningless barrier to be overcome rather than learned. Also, math is more than arithmetic. Using picture of coins. For Chrissake.
  • chithanh 1y ago
    For the first years of school, it is actually very beneficial to pretend that calculators don't exist. Students must be accustomed to do simple arithmetic without the help of a calculator, or else their mathematical abilities will be negatively impacted. Same for learning multiplication tables, recognizing the associations between the numbers is important. Only when they begin to calculate things which exceed the number of mental tokens that they can handle, then they can start using a calculator with no ill effects.
• farceSpherule 1y ago
  I am not sure why this is news. Classic economic warfare. Parents with higher education and stable incomes have the resources, time, and knowledge to supplement their children's education. This includes tutoring, enrichment programs, monitoring social media and phone use, and advocating within schools, as well as sending their children to smaller, private schools. Most Joe Six Pack parents hand their children unrestricted iPhones and let the schools raise and baby sit them, while the parents sit back getting fat soaking up social media and TV.
  • teekert 1y ago
    Well, it's put in a bit of a disrespectful tone, but I think you are right. Unrestricted access to a smartphone will lead to 6 hours + a day screen time. And it's all addictive junk. That can't be good. One also sees the "educational" difference. Here a study was published concluding that poorer areas have twice the number of snackbars compared to areas with "higher educated" people. Bad food is also very cheap. It's also very easy to never read about the effects of screens on childeren and I see people with kids of ~1 sitting on the back of a bike with a smartphone blaring... Why not let the kid enjoy and learn from the surroundings? My kids loved riding a bike with me.
• crises-luff-6b 1y ago
  The answer NYC schools have come to is to relax /TEACHER/ basic knowledge requirements: https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-education/the-teachers-who-oppose-tests https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-education/the-teach... Without bonus points, DEI-hires at the school would not survive; these racist school districts need a way to ensure these lousy teachers create entire generations of people hostile to learning! The whole system needs to have an emergency cut over to vouchers.. $27k/year/pupil in NYS to get a teacher that looks like me but is functionally illiterate. These public teachers aren't heroes, they are actively keeping us behind with their pro-union/anti-student behaviors.
• AfterHIA 1y ago
  American high school is just preparation for prison: anyone that's been in the joint tell me that American public schools and prisons don't, "kind of smell the same." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discipline_and_Punish https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discipline_and_Punish https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/School-to-prison_pipeline https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/School-to-prison_pipeline
• oxag3n 1y ago
  Most of my friends have no idea what math and reading curriculum is used in their kids public schools. It's different with friends whose kids attend private schools - most knew it was Singapore Math. You may like it or not - but it requires parent effort to make sure your child uses their most valuable time to learn something.
  • Argonaut998 1y ago
    My parents didn’t care about the details of my education yet I did well. I don’t think most parents ever cared so it doesn’t explain the decline. I had discipline instilled in me however, and I am guessing that’s what is lacking nowadays.
• beej71 1y ago
  Good source of factory labor.
• ck2 1y ago
  it's about to get worse, maybe every year https://www1.racgp.org.au/newsgp/clinical/how-covid-19-leaves-its-mark-on-the-brain https://www1.racgp.org.au/newsgp/clinical/how-covid-19-leave... note even infections with no symptoms
• nphardon 1y ago
  We have a powerful right-wing political party that is aggressively anti-academic.
• tenarchits 1y ago
  Most of the comments are focused on the supply of education. But I don't think the supply side is the problem, irrespective of teachers and high schools. There is more and cheaper education available than ever before. Nearly every highschooler has more access to learning that kings and emperors would have fought wars for less than 200 years ago. However,the United States, particularly in the last 50 years, seems to have fostered a culture averse to education. I believe the years long decline in test scores is a symptom of that cultural shift.
  • PartiallyTyped 1y ago
    Not just education but overall intellectualism. It’s a purely cultural issue that can be observed by looking at demographics.
    • ars 1y ago
      > intellectualism It's interesting to blame anti-intellectualism because Republicans are usually labeled with that. But simultaneously it's Democrats that will dumb down classes to make sure even the worst performing student will pass. And this is also anti-intellectualism, but of a different sort. The combination is failing our students, doesn't matter the political orientation. I'm involved in education, I see this every day - I spoke with someone taking a class on how to reach students, and due to no-child-left-behind, this is actually a class on how racism holds back black students and what to do about it (answer: Make simpler, easier classes). It's completely silent on any other type of student.
      • doritosfan84 1y ago
        A Republican promoted and implemented No Child Left Behind though? Maybe I’m misunderstanding your point.
        • ars 1y ago
          My point is that Democrats are implementing it by making classes worse for everyone. Republican states aren't doing that. It's not the concept of No Child Left Behind that is bad, it's the implementation (and it's used as a reason to worsen classes).
• benmw333 1y ago
  When I think of all my teachers I had throughout K-12 public school, not one of them stands out as having meaningfully impacted my life. In fact I would argue many of them were a net negative to my learning achievements (or lack thereof). So yeah, defund public schools as much as possible. That will get my vote.
  • 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 1y ago
    "America is bad and should be destroyed without regard to the people living there" The worst leftists (handshake) the worst right wingers
    • cindyllm 1y ago
      [dead]
    • benmw333 1y ago
      How is America destroyed if people own their labor (money) and where they invest it?
  • chrisco255 1y ago
    That's unfortunate, I had at least 6 or 7 I could point to from that time that were outstanding teachers who instilled passion into their subject.
    • benmw333 1y ago
      That is good to hear. In which subjects? Did that carry out throughout your entire life so far? Or did one particular subject end up taking more of your time, and if so, do you attribute that to specific characteristics of those who mentored you? Do you know if those mentors were elevated over time in their organizations?
  • exoverito 1y ago
    I had a number of good teachers at the various public schools I attended, though the best ones were at a private school. Instead of defunding, we should institute a voucher system where parents can choose between a local public school if it's good, charter schools, or towards a private school tuition and pay the difference.
• tehjoker 1y ago
  The kids are not doing as well at home, the parents are struggling economically, the teachers are struggling, and the government doesn't care. Perfect storm. Don't forget the brain eating virus we loosed on the population, that probably doesn't help.
• ashton314 1y ago
  Some amount of this has got to be due to Covid. I used to tutor a middle school boy, and he was probably two years behind where he should have been. Because of this, he was lacking the foundation that he needed to progress. It was so bad.
  • adrr 1y ago
    Tiktok also gained popularity the same time as covid. Someone needs to do a study on screen time over the last 5 years for school age children. We do know screen time is correlated to poor academic performance.
• mensetmanusman 1y ago
  Nearly half of kids aren’t being raised with their parents in the home. This was rare 50 years ago, and all the research shows that home dynamics matters the most. Education spending has shot up per student because people think it will solve cultural ills.
  • ihsw 1y ago
    It's worse than that, the only authority figure in most kids' lives are women -- there are no male authority figures for over 80% of their upbringing between the ages of 0-18 years old, and most years it is 100%.
  • xyst 1y ago
    I wonder why parents are not in the home. Could it be a rising cost of living far outpacing the wage increases? Decades of wage stagnation? Decades of boomers ripping up our safety nets? Decades of Reaganomics that have eroded trust in our government? We have decades of evidence yet these types of comments still pop up. Why aReNt PaReNts HomE eNoUgH? Are they stupid??
    • ndriscoll 1y ago
      25% of kids in the US don't have a father present.
  • empath75 1y ago
    > Nearly half of kids aren’t being raised with their parents in the home. This was rare 50 years ago, and all the research shows that home dynamics matters the most. Every thread about something like this is full of people just blaming it on whatever social trend annoys them personally. But also this statistic is absolute bullshit. 71% of kids in the US have two parents at home, and the number is going up.
    • mensetmanusman 1y ago
      60% of kids are growing up with their biological parents. This matters due to the statistics on time allocation from other arrangements. 60% is nearly half, especially when you factor in absenteeism that happens at home due to other social ills. Our country has never been as unhealthy.
• xyst 1y ago
  We are in an kakistocracy. Nobody cares about merit anymore. Just grift your way through life like the Pedophile of the United States. Become a jester/influencer. Smell your own farts on a live stream and pump your engagements. Be a clown. It clearly pays to do so.
• thelastgallon 1y ago
  The Average College Student Is Illiterate. Students are not what they used to be. The crisis is worse than you think: https://www.persuasion.community/p/the-average-college-student-is-illiterate https://www.persuasion.community/p/the-average-college-stude... Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43522966 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43522966 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43537808 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43537808
• lqstuart 1y ago
  The fact that there’s even a debate about banning smart phones in classrooms tells you all you need to know. Cell phones were de facto banned in school in like 2002, not sure when it became the norm but it seems like a no brainer.
  • nonethewiser 1y ago
    This is what I thought of immediately as well. I remember being shocked to learn that phones were allowed. Of course thats not going to work out well. There are so many factors to the negative education outcomes but this policy is just obvious. I guess its actually the parents who insist on being able to reach their kid at any moment?
  • elric 1y ago
    To some extent this is one of the recommendations of the PISA 2022 report, but it comes with a big caveat: > 4. Limit the distractions caused by using digital devices in class >Students who spent up to one hour per day on digital devices for learning activities in school scored 14 points higher on average in mathematics than students who spent no time. Enforced cell phone bans in class may help reduce distractions but can also hinder the ability of students to self-regulate their use of the devices. I don't think a simple blanket ban on smartphones in schools is likely to solve much.
  • QuantumNoodle 1y ago
    Agreed. The argument "I want to know if my child is safe in an emergency" is incredibly flawed. God forbid there is a shooting, kids should be listening to their teachers to be instructed to safety not distracted. And their phones should not make noise when they are hiding. If the emergency is on the outside of school, parents still need to go through the main office to pull kids out of school, so contacting them is also unnecessary. These helicopter parents smh
• narrator 1y ago
  The biggest irony is that spending more money is not going to help things.
• Spooky23 1y ago
  Everyone wants to shit on teachers and schools. Both get alot of blame. I’m fortunate to send my kid to an excellent private school that is excellent at what it does. They have problems too. I blame technology. The pivot from books to the lowest common denominator Chromebook homework, reading and testing is a joke.
• deleted 1y ago
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• philip1209 1y ago
  Cal Newport talked on his podcast this week about declining IQs, too - a reversal of a decades-long trend: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_zzkQJq_V0w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_zzkQJq_V0w He cites and directionally agrees with the decline of reading as the cause.
• programjames 1y ago
  The core problem is actually very simple. Education studies do not measure what they claim to measure. When they say, "education outcomes improve when..." they usually mean the pass rate, i.e. they only measured a signal among the bottom 20% of students. When they say, "test scores improve when..." they are, at best, measuring up to the 90th percentile. When they say, "the white/black attainment gap," or "socioeconomic disadvantages," they're usually just fishing for funding money, and their study will not actually attempt to measure either of those things. From a review of the literature on No Child Left Behind (NCLB) in 2015: > Only one study specifically examined the achievement gap for students from low socioeconomic backgrounds (Hampton & Gruenert, 2008) despite NCLB’s stated commitment to improving education for children from low-income families. African American students were often mentioned in studies of general student achievement but none of the reviewed studies focused specifically on the effects of NCLB for this subgroup. Again, this is a curious gap in the research considering the law’s emphasis on narrowing the Black-White achievement gap. Other groups of students underrepresented in the research on NCLB include gifted students, students with vision impairments, and English proficient minority students. ("A Review of the Empirical Literature on No Child Left Behind From 2001 to 2010", Husband & Hunt, 2015) Everything you see going wrong is downstream of this. Yes, harmful ideologies have done a lot of damage to the education system, but it could easily survive this if we had actual signifiers of success.
  • empath75 1y ago
    Test scores do not measure directly what they purport to measure. They are a proxy, and when you have a system designed to optimize for a proxy of the thing you want to improve, then the system will always find ways to exploit the difference between the proxy and the underlying thing. You can call it "juking the stats" or "overfitting", or whatever. https://sohl-dickstein.github.io/2022/11/06/strong-Goodhart.html https://sohl-dickstein.github.io/2022/11/06/strong-Goodhart....
    • programjames 1y ago
      We can only ever have proxies. The issue (at least here) isn't Goodharting, it's that the proxy does not even measure what the researchers claim it measures. For example, pretty much the only study of its name, "High-Achieving Students in the Era of NCLB" (Lovelass, Parkas, Duffett) uses the NAEP, which only releases 10th, 20th, ..., 90th percentile scores. Gifted programs are ~95th percentile. Or, look at this lovely graph of 36 ACT scores: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Percent_ACT_Composite_Scores_of_36.svg https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Percent_ACT_Composite_S... When it increases by 30x in 30 years, it becomes very apparent that standardized tests are simultaneously being gamed by the students and the testwriters. Students (and school districts and states) are choosing the "easier" tests that make them look proficient, so testwriters are making their tests easier to get a bigger market share. And all along, the tests that only care about separating out the top show declining scores every year... - [AMC Historical Results](https://artofproblemsolving.com/wiki/index.php/AMC_historical_results https://artofproblemsolving.com/wiki/index.php/AMC_historica...)
• Glyptodon 1y ago
  Not limiting myself to just high schools: Elephant in the room in my state is definitely chronic absence. Depending on source it's when student misses something like 15+ or 20+ school days a school year. More affluent areas have numbers 15% and lower. Less affluent ones it can be well above 50%. And nobody is doing anything. Test scores substantially mirror this bifurcation. It is substantially worsened by charter and voucher schools. Which interact with the whole mess in complex and negative ways.
• deleted 1y ago
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• wiredpancake 1y ago
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• HumblyTossed 1y ago
  I think too much is done on computers and not pencil and paper.
  • armageddon 1y ago
    My daughter's math is all on tablet. I don't even know how to help. I feel like it was better when we had a book. We would read a couple pages on the lesson and then move on to the problems. We could go back and reference earlier topics. Now they just click through quizzes on some app or a website for extra help.
• ironman1478 1y ago
  The article mentions the chronic absenteeism which is mind blowing: https://apnews.com/article/school-attendance-sick-day-chronic-absenteeism-270f6d07041760e90bf84d9f4108aa4d https://apnews.com/article/school-attendance-sick-day-chroni... I don't see how somebody can learn when they're missing school so much. Math and reading require so much repetition and if you're not in school, you're not getting that time to sit down and do the exercises required to ingrain these topics. It doesn't even matter how a school teaches if the student isn't in class. They're just not going to retain things well.
  • Retric 1y ago
    I think you’re overestimating how much actual education takes place each day. Most kids can catch up fine on double the workload after some extended break even without in class lectures. Just abstractly the extreme example is someone skipping a full grade, but consider the huge middle ground between that and needing to be in class essentially every single day. That said a significant fraction of kids really do need all the help they can get, but catering to them means leaving a lot of slack in the schedule.
  • tyoma 1y ago
    Chronic absenteeism is a huge misnomer. The statistic covers both excused and unexcused absences. The reason it’s since covid up is because (more) parents stopped sending their kids to school when they are sick. Last year I got a semi-threatening letter from the district for “chronic absenteeism” because I didn’t want to send a sick child to school. To their defense, they did say that the state (California) requires them to send the letter.
• shadowtree 1y ago
  [flagged]
• btown 1y ago
  This 2019 article about how reading strategies have shifted in recent decades away from phonics to "three cueing" - which attempts to incentivize reading by encouraging students to interpolate words they don't understand from context, but may lead to bad practices that skip over the ability to recognize words in isolation - may be related to this trend. https://www.apmreports.org/episode/2019/08/22/whats-wrong-how-schools-teach-reading https://www.apmreports.org/episode/2019/08/22/whats-wrong-ho... > For Goodman, accurate word recognition was not necessarily the goal of reading. The goal was to comprehend text.8 If the sentences were making sense, the reader must be getting the words right, or right enough. These ideas soon became the foundation for how reading was taught in many schools. > The whole language movement of the late 20th century was perhaps the zenith of the anti-phonics argument.26 Phonics instruction was seen as tedious, time-consuming and ultimately unnecessary. Why? Because — according to the three-cueing theory — readers can use other, more reliable cues to figure out what the words say.27 > "To our surprise, all of our research results pointed in the opposite direction," Stanovich wrote. "It was the poorer readers, not the more skilled readers, who were more reliant on context to facilitate word recognition."13 > The skilled readers could instantly recognize words without relying on context. Other researchers have confirmed these findings with similar experiments. It turns out that the ability to read words in isolation quickly and accurately is the hallmark of being a skilled reader. This is now one of the most consistent and well-replicated findings in all of reading research.14 It's interesting to wonder whether LLMs may struggle with similar issues - while they can intuit a distribution over held-out tokens from context, they famously can't count the number of r's in "strawberry" because they don't have a concept of letters. Are we holding our LLMs back much the way we are holding back students - or are we holding back students much the same way we're holding back our LLMs?
• BobbyTables2 1y ago
  I find it funny that schools took away textbooks and then wonder why scores went down. Textbooks cohesively presented material. Random printouts and notes glued into a notebook do not. Similarly, we read a whole lot more in Literature classes than kids do now.
• graycat 1y ago
  Spent a lot of time in education, K through Ph.D and as a college professor. Net, it seemed that the keys to good or better quality K-12 public school education was simply the parents, their quality that also showed in careers, income, standard of living, socialization, etc. A lot of that quality gets inherited, and Darwin wins again. But here is a surprise: In college my wife made both PBK and Summa Cum Laude, won both NSF and Woodrow Wilson graduate fellowships, and got her Ph.D. Her high school? Her family lived in Indiana, in a house her father built from some plans in Good Housekeeping magazine, on a 33 acre farm, surrounded by farms raising mostly corn, soy beans, wheat, and chickens. The local town consisted of a church, a school, and a tavern. The school building was a good accomplishment by the community, big enough for the number of students, taught grades 1-12, but had fewer than 12 classrooms and fewer than 12 teachers! Net, the facilities were poor, but the parents made sure the schooling was good. The school I went to was relatively large, the pride of the city with a quite good Principal for 1-6 and another for 7-12, no bad teachers, and some good ones. They taught Latin, Spanish, and French and had a good math program. The year before me three guys went to Princeton and two of them ran against each other for President of the Freshman Class. In my year, myself and two others did the best on the Math SATs, all went to college, one MIT. In both of the schools, 100% of the students were well behaved, i.e., no disruption in classes; this was just expected and without any particular efforts. I really liked math and physics and wanted much more than the classes offered. So, the classes were beneath me and mostly taught myself from the books. So the school put up with that independent approach and sent me to a Math Tournament and some summer enrichment programs, which was good education: The good parents wanted good education. Later there were some race riots with that school a target. So, the city changed to teaching cosmotology, etc. and picked another school to be a good one. Net, with good parents, a school can be plenty good with modest facilities.
• tarkin2 1y ago
  It's consuming rather than creating, it's products aimed at sating short attention spans, it's superficial social media rather than books, it's instant answers from LLM rather than thinking through. We created this, and its fallout throughout society and politics. Yet we refuse to fess up.
• zkmon 1y ago
  I don't see what's new here. This trend is not unexpected with our goals as a society. The overall goals are in the other direction. We don't want to work hard or think hard. That's precisely what is driving tech, business and lifestyle here. We have outsourced all of our hard work and hard thinking to machines and cheaper workforce elsewhere. For some reason, it seems to work fine. With all the dumbness and weakness, we still seem to be doing well as a country. So, why the concern? Oh, you say that, we are losing some human abilities. Well, Prosperity and easy food removes the need for abilities or hunting. It is all cyclic. Each cycle is a few generations long.
• favflam 1y ago
  Rent is out of control. I am amazed that anyone can afford kids, much less afford to dedicate the time necessary for kids to succeed in school. Then you have the brain rot that has infected youth and efforts to defund public schools. I have not seen a good track record of states privatizing education through the use of charter schools. In the South (US), I have come to view that as a backdoor segregation and religious indoctrination attempt on top of some old-school grifting.
• teekert 1y ago
  Maybe 6 hours of tiktok a day is not giving the brain the rest it needs to process and store any learned skills?
• ropable 1y ago
  Accepting the premise, this outsider's view of the US is that there seems to be an increasing reluctance to fund "public" goods (e.g. infrastructure, population healthcare, etc) of which public education is one such service. Is this decreasing investment an actual thing, and could it (in aggregate) cause an overall drop in achievement?
  • Fade_Dance 1y ago
    US spend per student per year is $16,000. Fairly high investment on the international playing field, especially when adjusted for the poor results. The view that the education institutions are bloated and inefficient is a fairly mainstream (because some things like low pay for the actual teachers in the classrooms is quite publicly apparent). I'd hazard to say that there's some truth to it, after taking in the first point into account. Tl;Dr money is part of the problem on some levels, but it's not primarily a money problem.
• visarga 1y ago
  It's because they don't allow GPT in exams. Students are accustomed to using it.
• p1dda 1y ago
  Watch the movie Idiocracy for the entertaining answer
• matrix87 1y ago
  The US is just one giant corporate playground that companies force people to move to for the regulatory climate. It isn't meant for raising a family. People will either be transplants or neo-feudal serfs working in kitchens. The whole thing will turn into the Bay Area People will get to choose between a vibes-based "equity" ideology where achievement is disregarded or the republican woodchipper of austerity. Either thing leads to the same outcome: everything becomes stupider and shittier. The whole system is moving of its own accord towards enshittification. People should just get the grieving over with and leave
  • csomar 1y ago
    It's fine. The required and qualified people for the upcoming jobs will be imported from the bountiful overseas.
• OhioMan2943 1y ago
  I think part of this is we don't know where progress will lead us right now- partly because the "ai" hype is choking natural social communication and organisation. What's the point in being educated in an uneducated society with no intellectual future?
• elric 1y ago
  Looking at the PISA 2022 results (2022 is the most recent report, PISA is the Programme for International Student Assessment), this is clearly a way bigger problem than just the US. Many Western countries have a downward trend in maths, reading, and science scores, including Canada, France, the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, ... Scores for reading & science had actually been trending upwards in the US, while maths has been trending downwards for some 20 years. Report: https://www.oecd.org/content/dam/oecd/en/publications/reports/2023/12/pisa-2022-results-volume-i_76772a36/53f23881-en.pdf https://www.oecd.org/content/dam/oecd/en/publications/report...
• obscurette 1y ago
  As someone old (60+) who was a teacher in school and thinking a lot about it: - It's mostly a cultural shift in the western world – we don't value personal responsibility any more. When I was in school in seventies, it was my responsibility to study no matter what since grade 1. It didn't matter whether I liked a teacher, topic or whatever. It's not the case any more. - Since nineties there has been a shift in educational sciences and practices from "old school" memorizing as "rote learning" and explicit instruction toward "critical thinking skills". Sounds nice for many, but in practice it doesn't work. Barb Oakley has a wonderful paper about it "The Memory Paradox: Why Our Brains Need Knowledge in an Age of AI"[1]. - Smartphones, social media etc certainly contribute and the rise of LLMs will make it even worse. [1] - https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5250447 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5250447
  • jampekka 1y ago
    Personal responsibility was on the rise until 2013, after which it started to decline?
    • obscurette 1y ago
      Every cultural/policy/etc change in society has huge delays. Especially in education - changes you implement have an impact 10+ years later. Culture, even if it's dying, dies slowly. Here in Estonia where I live at the moment educational systems is falling completely apart – overworked and bullied teachers escape from schools in unprecedented rate, there is 20% less teachers than there is a need etc. But Estonia is still in top of the PISA. Why? Because this culture of personal responsibility and valuing education is still alive in the generation of todays parents. But it's certainly dying here as well.
    • pcurve 1y ago
      It became politicized because politicians latched onto it as a way to cutback entitlement spending which is unfortunate.
  • noobermin 1y ago
    I've related this story here before. I was a first year in physics grad school, and my professor told me he heard rumours of students telling each other memorising formulae was a waste of time, and that as a physicist one should just be good at deriving results. The professor scoffed at that and sardonically surmised that may be the person who said that was intentionally trying to stiffle their competition in the class. Memorisation while limited in some ways is a part of the whole in addition to creative and critical thinking. Without facts and ideas in your mind, you have nothing to think criticall about.
• MangoToupe 1y ago
  I offer another explanation: we simply don't value educated people. Kids have few role models who are educated or value knowledge. Careers emphasize narrow expertise. Business leaders often show very little understanding of the world outside of squeezing money out of others. We live in an age where access to knowledge is prioritized over knowledge itself, and dogma is difficult for most to tease from contradictory observations. We no longer portray reading or discovery as pleasureful in itself. Why would we? There is no money in showing the complexity of the world. Simply put, if you were a child now, why should you care about education when it doesn't appear to be the key to anything you want? Money has taken the place of knowledge. On further inspection, this should not be a surprise to anyone who has bought into the dogma of a transaction-oriented reality. Children these days are raised just as much by a culture that never figured out how to resolve the contradiction between making money and having values. Blame is futile, though. Hold your children close and raise them the best you can, for there is no reversing the tide.
• deleted 1y ago
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• lan321 1y ago
  Outside of the US but past the daycare, covid, etc issues that have been mentioned everywhere I see a focus on money making. Highschoolers are still kids but I feel the new generation is more aware of the fact that the end goal is making as much money as possible, so if they feel like learning something they lean more towards reading/watching about investing/hustling which doesn't translate well into academia.
• odwyerrich 1y ago
  [flagged]
• ath3nd 1y ago
  OpenAI Study Mode will fix it. https://openai.com/index/chatgpt-study-mode/ https://openai.com/index/chatgpt-study-mode/. Oops, it won't: https://tech.co/news/another-study-ai-making-us-dumb https://tech.co/news/another-study-ai-making-us-dumb
• blitzar 1y ago
  They should add more A1 to the classrooms. Their steaks are obviously inadequetly sauced.
• spicymaki 1y ago
  Almost all of the comments have someone’s pet theory about the cause of the decline in achievement. The truth is we don’t actually know why there is a decline or how to stop it.
  • thrance 1y ago
    Maybe start with ousting the most anti-intellectual administration in existence? Whatever the solution is, they won't be the one to implement it.
  • coolKid721 1y ago
    [flagged]
  • posed 1y ago
    The truth is obvious, you just don't like the solution.
  • 1970-01-01 1y ago
    FTA: "While the pandemic had an outsize impact on student achievement, experts said falling scores are part of a longer arc in education that cannot be attributed solely to COVID-19, school closures and related issues such as heightened absenteeism. Educators said potential underlying factors include children’s increased screen time, shortened attention spans and a decline in reading longer-form writing both in and out of school."
  • hamza_q_ 1y ago
    We do know; it's just not in the popular conscience yet. Read a bit of Marshall McLuhan.
• ransom1538 1y ago
  Lol. Any parent immediately knows. iPhone. Just passive entertainment and sweet sweet dopamine hits. Nothing else for 12 hours a day + both days on the weekend. This also decreases the kids ability to ask questions, go outside, meet people. The problem is obvious. I don't think people will admit the problem - so this is the new normal.
• Dilettante_ 1y ago
  My completely unfounded theory about why education is declining: Teachers don't get to beat kids anymore. (I'm not saying they ought to). If it's one mentally completely exhausted adult doing nothing but "use their words" against 25 kids/teenagers with nothing but energy, and a feeling that the system, which the teacher is the agent of, is their enemy, the power balance flips radically. Forcing kids to go to school only works as long as you actually have any force at your disposal. (And convincing them that going to school is in their best interest similarly requires that to actually be the case. Kids who start off bright-eyed and bushy-tailed will quickly reverse their position when they're either below or above the bell curve and their educational needs/welfare are being completely and obviously disregarded.)
  • MisterSandman 1y ago
    This is not just an unfounded theory but a completely insane theory. Many (all?) of the countries ahead of the US in test scores also don’t “beat their kids” because that is absolutely fucking insane. It’s such an American thing, to blame something on a lack of violence.
    • Dilettante_ 1y ago
      I'm not referring to the gap between the countries, I was focused on the historic development of the one population. The old paradigm produced results(arguably?), but was "gutted". By this train of reasoning, this old, and still "current" teaching paradigm simply does not work without violent coercion is the point I was really trying to drive.
  • myroon5 1y ago
    Teachers still beat kids: https://www.economist.com/united-states/2023/01/19/it-is-still-legal-to-hit-children-in-school-in-19-american-states https://www.economist.com/united-states/2023/01/19/it-is-sti... and looking at state maps, beatings look negatively correlated with test scores: https://reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/1krxcco/oc_ranking_of_us_states_and_dc_by_standardized/ https://reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/1krxcco/oc_ranking_of_...
• thrance 1y ago
  > There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge. - Isaac Asimov The cult of ignorance now rules the country, simple as that. To half the nation, teachers are now all insane satanists out to trans their kids. As a result, they're paid dirt poor and the state, controlled by that anti-science reactionary wave, is making their work harder and less rewarding everyday. Vaccine mandates are ended on religious grounds, public research is destroyed to save pennies in tax cuts to the wealthy, and foreign researchers are arrested at the borders for no reason but to assert American dominance over them and satisfy the racist folk fueling the machine. This is what it looks like, witnessing the end of an Empire from the inside.
• miki123211 1y ago
  Do we know how much of this decline is US-specific versus a global phenomenon? The article cites no data on that score. This kind of thing is unfortunately pretty common in American publications, and it drives me up the wall. If you don't compare US statistics to global ones, it's hard to separate out political / local factors from global trends (and to be fair, this is exactly what some journalists want.) In particular, I'd be interested in statistics from countries with different lockdown policies, as well as those that banned smartphones in school. Beyond US politics, lockdowns and Tiktok seem like the two most likely factors that may influence this.
• AvAn12 1y ago
  I wonder if red state forcing bible curriculum, alternative history, and erasing factual information will help improve scores…
• mhb 1y ago
  Milton Friedman was there, signed the guest book, and left. Public Schools: Make Them Private - Milton Friedman https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45197646 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45197646
• breakyerself 1y ago
  The US is practicing a mass production approach to education still. Drill students with excessive facts and expect them to remember it. 3 minute passing periods, 15 minutes for lunch, scolded for socializing. Etc. It's intensive and counter productive. Now there's an over reliance on tech that degrades rather than improves the experience. A link in Google classroom to an exercise that expires after a day, a PDF instead of a handout. Etc
• jmpman 1y ago
  My son is taking a woodworking class in high school. First week, he came home and I asked him what he was doing in his woodworking class… “Disassembling the library bookcases”. “Why???” “Because they’re getting rid of the library”. Apparently the school board decided to save money by cutting the librarian, and then decided to just move the books out of the school library and into the “nearby” public library. In reality, there were 95 books in the school library which were being questioned by some parents. Instead of removing just those books, and being accused of book banning, they just removed the entire library. For all intents and purposes, it was a book burning. Yet the football team is fully funded, and the baseball diamond is kept up. This society has priorities which aren’t education.
  • breakyerself 1y ago
    Wish I could say we were moving in the right direction, but it's going to be getting worse for the foreseeable future. What part of the country is this?
  • monkeyelite 1y ago
    I went to a high school with lots of kids that read and nobody ever checked out a book from the school library. Their interests were specialized and they got their books online or from larger collections not offered at a school. It’s fine - libraries aren’t sacred. If nobody uses them we don’t need them. The joke about football is often made but they pay for it, because people use it. > “Disassembling the library bookcases” I am skeptical. This is not the subject of wood working. And why would the school entangle students with a task to be performed by professional vendors.
    • inetknght 1y ago
      > why would the school entangle students with a task to be performed by professional vendors. Why pay a vendor to do it when you can get the students to do it for free?
      • monkeyelite 1y ago
• chrsw 1y ago
  Isn’t contemporary education just a preview of the highly competitive white collar rat race? Constant grading, judgement and ranking? And for what? For some coveted yet mind-numbing tech job so can stay one step ahead of your peers and afford a decent place to live? And that’s nearly the best realistic future. Why wouldn’t students internalize this and start mentally checking out?
• viccy-kobuletti 1y ago
  I'm 24 and I've used internet heavily completely unsupervised since around 7-ish years old. As I've grown older I notice myself using my phone and be on the web less and less, it is a conscious decision. My access to youtube is blocked except on my laptop, though I have noticed not watching any videos for weeks now. My phone is B&W and has it's browser disabled. Being more mindful of technology use is definitely a positive trend within my generation. But as I near parenthood, I feel conflicted. I'm still young enough to remember my state of mind in the early teen years. I remember being surprised at the amount of attention the level "No Russian" from MW2 got. I thought - "It's just a game, why would anyone be offended by this?". Now, having seen similar things happen in my lifetime, it seems very distasteful to me. Even seeing a kid with a realistic looking toy gun gives me mixed feelings. The idea of having my kid being on tiktok for 6 hours unsupervised with all the people feeding their agenda to young impressionable minds makes me uneasy. And I was the one who spent good portion of his day being on 4chan. My question is to parents of HN - how does one find balance within their parenting? I don't want to be a helicopter parent who blasts their child for not falling in line with all their demands, torturing them with endless extracurricular activities for their own good. At the same time I want them to learn a little discipline and not hate me for forcing things on them. I had zero limits on my screen time, and I'd say I turned out perfectly fine, though I did poorly in school and was a troublemaker. I found my love for studying only after I turned 18 and had some time with my thoughts after I moved out and stopped hanging out with deadbeats. Frankly, I'd say my upbringing was a little too lax. Younger me would feel betrayed by my changing attitude towards raising kids , and that's what worries me - the disconnect that leads to the repeating cycle of parent-kid conflict. I don't think a parent usually thinks that they'll try to be the world's shittiest parent, yet so many of them are.
• OhMeadhbh 1y ago
  But at least we're not paying teachers as much as we used to (in real dollar terms): https://www.nea.org/resource-library/educator-pay-and-student-spending-how-does-your-state-rank https://www.nea.org/resource-library/educator-pay-and-studen... [If you note the slight whiff of sarcasm, that is intentional.]
• mathattack 1y ago
  This is interesting data. For all the talk of bringing up the bottom and "No child left behind" this suggests we're still succeeding. And as anyone in California will tell you, schools are doing this at the expense of the top students. I get that COVID is part of the cause. Forcing one instructor to teach to 30 kids of widely varied abilities makes it worse. In that model, nobody learns.
• stego-tech 1y ago
  Adding to the swath of anecdotes here so wiser policymakers and teachers than myself have more perspectives to draw from in addressing the ongoing learning crisis. I was in High School for the first full class of the new millennium (2000-2004). Being gifted at the time (now we know I just had OCD and hyperfocus), I’m cruising through on Honor Roll and knocking even difficult content out of the park. It’s to the point that I’m sleeping through English with a perfect GPA and have been politely asked by my Social Studies teacher to stop answering questions (to give other students a chance to learn) and just work on my homework in his class while he teaches. Everyone is super chill, happy to teach, and has no compunction failing students who don’t grasp the material and fail to seek help. January 8, 2002. Social studies is my last class of the day. The teacher storms in, angry, and flips his desk in rage. Alright, you have our collective attention. He points furtively at the class while facing the chalkboard before turning around. “Congratulations, you’re the last group of students to get a decent education. Starting next semester, No Child Left Behind means we’ll be teaching to tests and not covering the material, and every single class after you is going to be dumber as a result. You better pay attention, because this is the last good world history class you’ll likely ever have.” I could not hope to appreciate his wisdom at that moment, but in the years since? Dude was 100% correct. I learned about context and nuance to discuss on essay exams; my siblings who came after me learned rote dates and events for a standardized test. The irony is that they have superior college credentials (MS and BA) than I do (AS), but all three of us are fairly even in footing in our overall intelligence, seeking of new knowledge and data, and ability to teach others. I can anecdotally credit my superior education pre-NCLB for preparing me to succeed in the real world compared to younger peers who have required far more (expensive) education to get to the same point. Introducing KPIs alone won’t fix the problem, it will require rekindling a passion for learning in the hearts of students, teachers, and parents alike to restore our basic comprehension scores. And before people ask: yes, we too had the dreaded issues of defunding everything to fund the football team. My school closed auto, metal, and eventually wood shop classes to create three more weight training rooms for the sports teams, and cancelled HomeEc in lieu of letting bankers do an hour lecture on credit cards to Seniors.
• mrbonner 1y ago
  Out of all the taxes I pay, the one I would put more money in is for public library funding. This funding is indiscriminate of races, wealth, and social status ear mark. Everyone would receive the benefits from a library.
• ToDougie 1y ago
  After moving my kids out of a bad elementary school and into a fantastic district with a highly ranked school, the differences are obvious. The good school has smarter kids with better parents. The bad school had dull kids with bad parents. The kids at the new school do their homework, read, play outside. The kids at the old school skipped homework, played call of duty, and could hardly read. The new school has fun exercises like the "word of the week" -- and they swear they will rarely assign homework. The old school had mandated trips to the library so kids could take home books and ignore them, alongside a minimum of 1hr of homework per night. In the bad school, a class of 24 had 11 kids who would not behave themselves, ever (one of the kids would often pick up his chair and hit other students and his aide). In the good school, a class of 24 has 1 kid with limited behavioral issues. Anyways, the people make the place -- and that includes kids.
  • bdcravens 1y ago
    In your discussion of "bad kids", it seems like there's a subtext you're not saying out loud.
    • ainiriand 1y ago
      I have not read that subtext, maybe is your own unconscious bias...
      • bdcravens 1y ago
        The commenter suggested the old school was filled with bad kids and bad parents, and by definition, this would include the commenter and their kids. Unless they are suggesting they weren't the bad ones, and were somehow unfairly placed with the riff raff. If that's the case, some analysis of why that is seems in order.
        • nervousvarun 1y ago
          From the commenter: "The good school has smarter kids with better parents. The bad school had dull kids with bad parents. The kids at the new school do their homework, read, play outside. The kids at the old school skipped homework, played call of duty, and could hardly read." That appears to be their observation of the two schools they had direct experience with. What else are you asking they provide here in terms of analysis? Maybe average student test scores? Likely available as it appears they are talking about public schools here. If the new school has significantly better scores would that satisfy your analysis requirement? If the test scores within their household subsequently follow this trend would that be sufficient analysis? In general active/concerned parents are going to try to get their kids the best education available right? Also can you elaborate on where you got the "unfairly placed" part? All that was actually said was they moved from one school district to another. People buy homes for school districts all the time...there's a section dedicated to school rankings on Zillow for a reason.
• calebm 1y ago
  I just made a new Math Education tool called https://fuzzygraph.com https://fuzzygraph.com. Hope it will increase interest in math.
• OhMeadhbh 1y ago
  Regardless of the arguments, it's encouraging to see people interested enough in public education to take the time to comment (even if it's a comment I don't agree with.)
  • deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
• honkycat 1y ago
  I mean, is it any question it's about money? And I don't mean money spent on education. People are too poor and harried to care anymore. When I was growing up, you could strive for a white collar job and get one, and we assumed it would lead to a decent life. Now, what are kids supposed to look forward to? Tech is in the toilet, everything is going overseas, everyone is broke. So many of my friends are unemployed, LinkedIn is filled with people desperately posting looking for jobs. Of COURSE this is going to affect early education as well.
• wyattblue 1y ago
  There cannot be a coherent discussion on this topic without also taking race-adjusted scores in account. America's demographics are changing and this must be understood by all.
  • casey2 1y ago
    Bringing race into it will surely increase the coherence of the discussion.
• casey2 1y ago
  There are 3 grade levels and 9 subjects giving 27 possible groups. It seems entirely inappropriate to pick out 3 and highlight the fact that (on a different test of students studying a different curricula) the results went down. Especially when the NCES Data Usage Agreement clearly states "Use the data in any dataset for statistical purposes only." As an example 4th grade reading has on a scale from 0 to 500 been between 213-223 for 20 years with of course this year (215) not being the lowest point. This is a test where many jurisdictions have 10+ point swings from test to test. There really isn't that much signal in the noise here.
• hamza_q_ 1y ago
  Taking bets on how fast Marshall McLuhan re-enters the public conscience :)
• Rakshith 1y ago
  [dead]