4 ms·

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 interest

• 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.