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.
The problem with that “culture” explanation is that white kids in America do fine in international educational comparisons. In the 2018 PISA assessment, 15 year old white american students were near the top in reading (behind only Singapore and some Chinese SEZs) and in the top echelon in science (comparable to Japan). Their weakest performance was math, where they’re around the middle, behind the top asian countries but only modestly behind Finland: https://nces.ed.gov/surveys/pisa/pisa2018/pdf/PISA2018_compi....
Insofar as the US had a “culture averse to education,” surely that affects white americans as much as it affects anyone else. But, on average, they are not the ones who are behind their peers internationally.
I knew (second hand) a teacher in a rural area of a low population state. All white kids, she'd have kindergartners cussing her out. Very little hope for any academic future for the other grades as things didn't get better with the older kids.
I knew a white kid who lived in a trailer park whose mom was upset he was getting tutoring after school for his dyslexia because she told him he'd never amount to anything.
My mixed race friend mentioned he was accused of "acting white" in school because he actually tried to get good grades.
What do all of those things have in common? Poverty, yes, but blended with hopelessness. The kids were surrounded by people who didn't have much, didn't think they'd get anywhere, and didn't believe the kids would ever have a chance at a better life.
That last part is what separates them from kids in third world countries who still manage to achieve academic success. Hope and optimism aren't guarantees; they aren't a replacement for social support. They are, however, a necessary ingredient for the intrinsic motivation necessary for personal growth.
I don't appreciate reading anecdata in response to cited findings. It cheapens the discussion. Now everyone is going to spend time writing knee-jerk responses to you.
At least the parent commenter had the grace to reply with another source instead of falling for it.
Whose to say "cited findings" have any more value than "anecdata".
The institutions that build these national and international statistics do so with bias and goals, or without complete data. For example, how can a bureau make a national statistics on crime accurate when cities intentional report crime incorrectly to look better in statistics.
To think "cited findings" is gospel truth is naive. I know it's highly desired here, but I stand by what I'm saying. Data is lovely, but garbage in, garbage out, and most national-level data is complete garbage with an agenda or bias or naivety.
Anecdotes are not a very useful tool in discussions about generalisations. They provide little evidence aside from saying that it's a category of event that can exist. No one at any point has said citations are gospel. Just that anecdotes aren't adding much to the discussion at hand. If you've got issues with the cited data, be precise instead of casting general aspersions on academia.
Given that this is just a discussion between random strangers on an internet forum, I personally find both statistics and clear anecdotes, which GP provided, valuable in creating the richest perspective.
This isn't Proceedings of Hacker News or parliament: we're writing ephemeral internet words and trying to enrich each other.
The parent commenter’s “source” makes no claims about race related performance whatsoever - it measures by just about everything but that, and then sorts by country. So maybe this is one of those darned reflexive knee jerk responses.
Ethnicity is way too coarse-grained to answer questions about culture and family wealth/connections. That’s lumping together a kid from an old-money family in New Haven with a kid from a trailer park in Virginia.
> My mixed race friend mentioned he was accused of "acting white" in school because he actually tried to get good grades.
Unless you are taking skin colour very literally, which is obviously not it (someone's academic performance is not going to change if they get a heavy tan or use s kin whitening cream or take a drug that changes skin colour etc.).
I interpreted "white" to mean an ethnic identity, not a literal description.
"Poverty blended with hopelessness" sounds about right. I'd like to emphasize that it's not just poverty, since there are plenty of recent immigrant families who live in poverty but the kids are at the top of their class. Unfortunately, though, there's a certain kind of degeneracy some families live in: the parents have largely failed in their every endeavor, and they'll become absolutely furious if they see the kids starting to rise above that, get their lives together, and accomplish things. If you live in communities like that, it's part of the deal: no one is allowed to escape, lest they make the rest of them look bad.
Even in those states you mention, the number of students managing basic proficiency in maths fell by over 10 percentage points in the past 10 years. You can use the year selection on the site to see the picture change over the years. Texas dropped by over 20 points.
Nationally, seems to be mostly demographic change plus covid. For white 13 year olds, NAEP reading and math scores dipped a point from 2012-2020. Then they dipped 5-6 points from 2020-2023: https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/highlights/ltt/2023/
Interesting! Yeah, this is a significant decline across the board. I'm curious what it is in the US in particular that's driving such sharp declines. Because many places in the world did things like shut down schools during COVID, have internet/social media, ongoing obesity epidemics, major immigration from low education sources, demographic/fertility issues, and so on. Yet somehow looking at the latest PISA (2022) [1], the US now sits between Malta and Slovakia in math. And if these scores are any indicator, we're probably looking at a further decline in the next PISA results, which should be released this year.
Honestly this is one of the biggest bullshit I've ever heard. Assuming that this mentality is quite widespread(not necessarily universal) among non White, then any attempt to introduce affirmative action or other equalizer practice would be futile.
That kind of mentality must be purged hard from yesterday.
Not t true. I don’t have the reference, but I read 10 or more years ago about an affluent community in the midwest whose black students greatly underperformed their white counterparts. The parents hired a black researcher and his final report said exactly that, that many black students didn’t want to appear white and also there were negative consequences for trying to do well. The parents thought it had to be racism and wouldn’t accept the results. The guy was a sociology professor at a college in CA.
For more annectdata, this same thing was happening at Berkeley High School around the same time. First hand knowledge from parents of students.
Teenage boys everywhere have a widespread bias against putting in the effort to get good grades.
They might call it "gay" or "sissy" or "acting white" or whatever, but the root cause is usually their perception of what masculinity should look like.
The men they look up to are anti-intellectual. This exists in all communities, race is not the main problem here.
Lack of role models, right? What men do they look up to?
I guess primary school teachers in the US are predominantly women as they are in most countries? So boys without intellectually inclined men at home or in their social circles do not have role models for educated masculinity.
I'd like to see what a "full-spectrum crackdown" on anti-intellectualism in the US would look like, given that most of its population struggles to discern fact from fiction in the news cycle, healthcare and legal proceedings. The introduction of generative AI has only made that worse, pushing more distrust of any information that didn't come from a source counted among "one of us." Our problem stems from an intentionally poorly educated populace that still heavily relies on idolatry, allowing whatever demagogue with the means to rise and essentially manipulate the masses.
I'm pretty sure, at this point, this was intentional, individuals and orgs with the resources to create finely tuned systemic problems having been at it since the country's inception.
Media from mainstream to alternative march in tune with pro intellectualism messages. Any works of art that espouse anti intellectualism would be swiftly and immediately canceled (including its authors) without hesitation. Do this for a generation or two minimum.
I cannot think of any single ethnocultural group in the West that highly values education and, at the same time, has bad outcomes doing so. We have invested a lot of money and effort into our educational systems.
Even traditionally oppressed groups like the Jews or the Chinese (Chinese Exclusion Act anyone?) or descendants of Russian muzhiks or Indian untouchable castes do have good outcomes if they actually motivate their kids to learn.
The groups that are systematically out (in Czechia, the part of the Roma that lives in ghettos - contrary what people tend to think, a lot of the Roma marry into the wider society, mix with it and live quite comfortable self-sufficient lives) tend to be the ones that despise schooling, and it will take a century or so of concerted efforts to change the attitudes.
Jews were motived to achieve because they were oppressed.
How do Indian low castes do compared to higher castes in the same country? They often continue to suffer from discrimination from higher castes in the west. I can believe they do better than some other groups, but how to they compare to higher caste Indians?
I do not buy this poverty argument for the simple and clear argument that not only were much of humanity’s knowledge developed by “poor” people by that standard, but also equally poor different racial groups perform very differently, your anecdotal stories notwithstanding.
And yes, skin color itself is irrelevant, it is simply a convenient identifier for underlying significant biological differences. There is absolutely zero reason one would rationally conclude that biological differences would somehow magically stop at the brain. And that goes without saying that it’s not even “just skin color”, since even the most naive child can identify the race of any person where the skin color has been changed with photoshop. Have you seen those images where whites/asians have been made black and vice versa, etc?
We really need to move past these infantile ideologies like that we are all the same. The smart people can clearly see that has always been a gaslighting lie.
> And yes, skin color itself is irrelevant, it is simply a convenient identifier for underlying significant biological differences
No, its a terrible identifier.
If you group people by genetic similarity (which is of dubious usefulness) you essentially end up with three different black African races, one Australian, Pacific and Native American, and one everyone else.
> it is simply a convenient identifier for underlying significant biological differences
It's actually not. Skin color does not correlate well with the genetic diversity among humans at all. It's just one particular trait that is very easy to identify by eye.
> There is absolutely zero reason one would rationally conclude that biological differences would somehow magically stop at the brain.
There is absolutely zero reason to rationally conclude that a random physical trait that happens to be easy to distinguish by eye correlates with brain function at all.
On the other hand, there are massive socioeconomic disparities that arise from the history of slavery, which easily explain both the disparities and the reasons why racists such as yourself want to boil things down to skin color.
All this demonstrates is that outcomes are not uniform, not that the culture explanation is necessarily wrong.
Schools in many urban districts where we see this same disparity control for teacher qualifications and per pupil student funding. In fact, various anti-poverty measures and intensive interventions on low performing schools even tip the scale in their favor on thr "supply" side.
Education isn't just something "delivered" like manufactured product; it is something that had to be properly received and used.
We have to start asking some better questions to uncover what's going on, and they will be a lot tougher to quantify.
I don't think that disproves the culture argument. American culture is segmented. (Modern marketing and politics have leaned heavily into this segmentation by the way.) For example, if you grow up exposed to ghetto culture you will probably not value education. The PISA assessment doesn't tell us that white kids who grew up in the ghetto are magically competing with Singapore's best. And we know that the ghetto is less white than the rest of America. Ergo in aggregate, US whites outperform. There are of course a million exceptions to this i.e. grow up in a certain type of Asian immigrant household and you will probably do great on these tests and maybe learn piano, violin etc. as well.
Now whether ghetto culture or ghetto economics is the main contributor to poor academic performance... I will leave that finer point up for debate, but my point here is the US has big differences in educational outcomes based on NEIGHBORHOOD, if your neighborhood is high crime and the schools are broke, your educational outcomes tend to be bad.
If there is a culture related problem, I think it's that the people pushing this trashy culture, for example music that glorifies rape, drugs and gangs, code it as black culture and use that as a way to deflect criticism. You're a racist if you don't like hip hop! It would be an understatement to say that many black Americans want nothing to do with that lifestyle or image and have evolved well beyond it, yet it still gets called black culture. It is a cultural weakness that we don't see rape, drugs and gangs as bad stuff to promote and reward, full stop, and not a thing we should be educating the next generation with, regardless of the skin color of the performer, or its roots.
BTW for whatever it's worth I'm white and I grew up in the ghetto. My parents forced me to take a public bus for an hour each morning to a magnet school in the rich part of town. Years later I met up with my white childhood friend from down the road who had gone to our local high school. I had a bunch of academic achievements and a college scholarship, he had a gunshot wound in his stomach. He was a smart guy when I knew him but the ghetto had its own plans for him.
Remind me when Vivek told his followers that American education need ti be more rigorous to compete with China and other Asian nations he got owned so hard, practically quiting from DOGE before it started.
Culture argument can be argued effectively as follows:
If a cohort in Japan has a median score of X at median household income Y, the American cohort with same median score X has income closer to 1.25Y or 1.5Y.
Whether you want to define your American cohort based on geography or ethnicity doesn't really matter-the result will be preserved up to a point.
That’s just because Americans are richer across the Board than Japanese. But would we expect PISA scores to track absolute income across different developed countries? I don’t think that follows. For example, Sweden’s median household income (PPP) is 2.6x higher than Poland’s. But the two countries had very similar scores on the 2018 PISA: http://hechingerreport.org/what-2018-pisa-international-rank...
The racial achievement gap is probably one of the most significant problems educators in the US think about. I think one of the biggest obstacles to improving it (not causing the problem, but making solutions difficult or ineffective) is that low-performing urban school districts tend to correlate strongly with strong teachers' unions and big, mismanaged school administrations where things are too bureaucratic and incompetent for anybody to be able to really effect significant change.
I'm not sure I support charter schools as a universal good, but they've actually proven to be pretty consistently effective at improving the educational attainment of low-income black/hispanic students [0-1]. When the local school system is a political quagmire and objectively failing in its mission to educate students, it's probably the only way out.
The meta-problem is that the people most actively involved in improving the racial educational achievement gap are precisely the type of people to reflexively dislike charter schools (because it's "right wing", although I see it more aligned with the centralization vs decentralization axis) and maybe even feel overtly threatened by them (because of their union job). Also, charter schools have to actually figure out how to get buy-in from low-income black and hispanic parents, figure out how to serve this community better, and can't hide behind the excuse of cyclical poverty + orwellian bureaucracy anymore.
I think a lot of educators really would rather work in a system where bad outcomes are guaranteed and thus not their fault, than one in which they actually have the ability to make more than just performative progress in serving the needs of their underprivileged student body.
Why do you assume racial achievement gaps indicate problems with schools? For example, Asian students perform much better than white students. We don’t say that indicates a problem with how schools educate white kids. Instead, most people see it as a predictable consequence of asian immigrants being filtered for higher education. By that same token, why would we treat Hispanic students having lower scores as indicative of a problem with the schools? The U.S. Hispanic population is subject to the same immigrant filtering effect, but in the opposite direction. Both immigrant groups largely arrived in the last 50 years. Why would we assume the effects of the initial filtering would disappear so quickly?
Here’s a modest proposal: American schools are actually quite good across the board.
I wouldn't trust any data about charter schools that came from the Hoover Institute. Plenty of red states with weak labor laws have awful educational systems.
At least near me the biggest problems facing the "urban" district compared to suburban ones is declining student populations as long time homeowners age in place and the maintenance costs of 100 year old buildings compared to 10-20 year old ones in the suburbs. Teachers tend to get paid the same or less in the city district and administration counts are higher but fairly close on a per student basis compared to the burbs.
This is before you get into the socioeconomic factors that make one student population more susceptible to starting and falling behind.
Wouldn't a declining student population mean more money per student? And it seems like it would often (but not always) be cheaper to maintain existing buildings vs building new ones?
I'm also wondering how much of the new suburban buildings are financed with debt, and the costs just haven't really caught up to them yet.
> At least near me the biggest problems facing the "urban" district compared to suburban ones is declining student populations as long time homeowners age in place and the maintenance costs of 100 year old buildings compared to 10-20 year old ones in the suburbs
The building maintenance is a red herring. I believe in my district, it's about 10% of the budget on average.
There is no shortage of young naive newly minted teachers who are eager to go into those low performing urban schools and help turn things around. But very few of them last more than a few years in those schools, they get badly burned by reality. The ones who last almost inevitably become callused and bitter, having lost all of the hope they had at the start. The biggest problem with those schools is the students themselves, and the families of those students. They're incredibly dysfunction and stymie all well intentioned efforts to help them.
Insofar as charter schools can help, it's because giving enough of a shit to apply for and go to one weeds out enough of the lost causes that would only disrupt everybody else. In fact, I think the best ways to improve those public schools is even simpler; make attendance optional. Families who give a shit will still attend, while all the trash will voluntarily stay home.
Hell no. Making attendance optional sacrifices way too much.
It's like reducing incarceration rates by never jailing people for anything short of murder. Sure, it improves on that one metric. Obviously. But the adverse effects elsewhere make it a nonstarter.
If you could trust self-selection to only ever stop the "lost causes" from attending? The absolute worst, most disruptive, least likely to ever benefit from education students? Then maybe.
But in practice, for every student like this there would be ten more who would benefit from school education if they attended, but wouldn't attend if it was optional.
And for those missing students, the difference between getting the classes and being left to their own devices might be the difference between becoming functioning adults, low in income but stable, and being locked in a vicious cycle of poverty, substance abuse, violence and crime.
Which is bad for the students in question, and even worse for the society.
> Insofar as the US had a “culture averse to education,” surely that affects white americans as much as it affects anyone else. But, on average, they are not the ones who are behind their peers internationally.
Education outcome massively depends on economic status of the parents. And that, no matter the country by the way, is very closely tied to immigration history and ethnicity.
When parents struggle to afford basic school supplies (to the tune that many teachers have to pay for their students' needs out of their own measly paychecks [1]), that's not exactly conductive to good learning outcomes. When parents don't have the time to sit down with their children and help them with learning because they have to work two jobs to make rent (remember, even two minimum wage jobs is not enough [2]), the kids are put further behind. And they certainly can't afford private after-school tutoring.
The last part is the environment itself - aka the quality of housing (mold, cockroaches and other health impacts) or when gangs lure in kids with the promise of striking it rich by dealing drugs or whatnot...
And different individuals within those cultural groups also have different values and priorities. A good education system supports everyone equally in achieving their goals.
Take that to its logical conclusion and we'd have individual, personalized tutors for each student. We don't have the resources for that, so some groups are going to get shafted. The question is which.
That's not what the article is discussing (decline over time). We (all?) know white American have over average performance due to whatever reasons. The question is: Are they declining alongside the overall group. That might suggests that the reason(s) for this decline is cross-culture/ethnic/race.
(I'm not american) so I don't have a horse in this race.
These reports are becoming to find because measuring racial differences is considered racist, so you'd be asking for something that would not be acceptable in modern studies.
If you compare a country where most people are one ethnicity or where wealth and race are not as correlated as in the US, then it's a bit of an unfair comparison.
Does the comparison hold if you segment the white Americans, Chinese, Singaporeans, Japanese, etc. by economic class?
I think it’s the opposite—it is a fairer comparison. White Americans are a relatively homogenized population that reflect the entire spectrum of economic class, where immigration effects have been attenuated by time. Is it unfair to compare the median white american to the median Japanese, just because the U.S. also has a large Hispanic population that mostly descends from low-education post-1970 immigrants from impoverished Latin American countries?
All humans are the same species, and in a vacuum, have no ideas or inherent behaviors beyond base instinct.
Culture is simply a byproduct of the environment around a segment of humans.
Hence, filtering by white kids in the US simply measures the result of higher average economic status (same as filtering by Asian kids).
American outcomes would look better if the populations they economically disenfranchised historically stayed in other countries like Europeans did with the colonial system (vs importing populations as slave labor domestically in the US). The economic class stratification that still lingers as a result of this in the US is such a unique factor as to make comparisons that don't take this into account worthless.
My kids don't get textbooks in public school, are comingled with highly disruptive kids (except in the limited gifted classes) and the curriculum is accelerated way past where it was when I was younger.
So my anecdotal theory is that the (public) education system is optimized to the edges, abandoning the middle entirely, resulting in majority decline.
They do get computers with TONS of dumb-ass apps and zero reference materials.
My daughter had no textbook for Freshman physics, which is obviously the hardest class she is going to have in high school (or top 2). It was ridiculous. We wound up supplementing learning materials and paying a tutor, but it all felt like making up for piss-poor course structure. Her (very intelligent but distracted) teacher barely knew where to send me for supplemental materials. And this is in the "advanced" high school that is very hard to get into.
Your average teacher is about as intelligent, motivated, and skilled as your average American.
How much initiative do you think a random office or retail worker would put into solving a problem they were presented with that they couldn't answer immediately and had no impact on their lives?
> So my anecdotal theory is that the (public) education system is optimized to the edges, abandoning the middle entirely...
Yep. Those edges are pushed by very vocal parents, usually backed by large communities and interest groups.
And the modern-day politics of American public schools (which generally have very low voter engagement) dictate that only the squeaky wheels get the grease.
My kids' schools are optimized for the lower edge, while providing some (but significantly less than the lower edge) additional support for the upper edge who almost exclusively come from upper income families who are assumed to be able to fend for themselves.
I want all people to live fulfilling lives and reach their potential, but we are pouring limited resources into a bottomless pit while intentionally de-emphasizing the fundamentals of education that worked well for decades (or longer), and any question of those methods receives an extremely hostile response.
It's no wonder that people are choosing to opt out in some form or another, or that the results are suboptimal.
That's kind of what I think but feel free to poke holes. It seems like there are three tiers. There's a closed off top tier of kids who get into top ranked universities. They go to highly ranked schools like selective high schools with high Ivy placement ranks. Those schools have different materials and more opportunities than most. These high schools are geographically mostly on the coasts. It's a totally different culture too where there's this years long effort.
Then there's a middle tier, the majority of people, where they might end up at a university but it's not top rated. Increasingly it's not worth the money and simultaneously it seems like our country has become more credentialist about prestigious jobs. But a degree probably isn't necessary for most careers that don't have gatekeepers so for these people the education doesn't really have a big payoff and their education might get de-emphasized.
Then there's the bottom tier which is self explanatory.
In my experience, the "top tier of kids" is more cultural than school-specific. Even in schools like TJHST there's usually 10–30 students in the school that really care about achieving, while the other 90% don't put in much effort (beyond your typical public schooler). There are a few feeder (public) schools on the coasts, but most of the private schools differentiate by extracurriculars (fencing, rowing, horseback riding) rather than academic excellence.
Accelerated tracks would produce the top tier, which begin in elementary school - so it's a matter of how much your parents invested in your education before school. Any child can technically enter the accelerated track at any grade. The later they join, the more untaught expectations there are. The other students went over these things already in previous accelerated classes. There's no on-ramp.
In the normal track, you don't eventually take calculus in math, learn much about labwork in science, or even learn how to write a research paper until the last year of classes at 18. (Source: class of 2005, USA)
So my anecdotal theory is that the (public) education system is optimized to the edges, abandoning the middle entirely, resulting in majority decline.
Based on my anecdotal experience, this is the explanation that makes the most sense to me. I've been hearing constantly for at least a decade how atrocious American public education is, which I can't reconcile at all with my experience as a 2010 graduate of McLean High School. Either my experience was so far outside the national norm that I have no useful perspective on this issue, or the national discourse has been totally corrupted by vocal minorities and political agendas.
Personally, my teachers were consistently amazing and brilliant (RIP Mr. Bigger), curricula were rigorous, and I learned a ton that prepared me well for my life and career after high school. Every time I hear about some factoid or perspective that American schools supposedly don't teach because they're propaganda farms designed to churn out uncurious low-skill workers, I roll my eyes as I vividly recall how it was explicitly covered in my classes. It's possible my experience may have been more the exception than the rule, given that most of my classes were advanced/AP/post-AP, but I also had some of my favorite teachers in regular and honors classes and never felt like I was receiving insufficient value for my time. Maybe I just got incredibly lucky, but I really have nothing but good things to say, and can't relate at all to the picture of American public education that's been painted in the media and social media. Granted, a lot can change in 15 years, and my perspective is already going to be skewed by having attended a top-ranked school in a wealthy district.
On the flip side, my public elementary school experience was the polar opposite. In kindergarten I was tutoring third graders who needed help learning to read, but by second grade I'd been kicked out more or less for being bored with the level and pace of the course material. (Effectively. Specifically, the principal was going to move me to special ed unless my mom agreed to find a doctor willing to put me on Ritalin for my nonexistent ADHD. The 90s were wild.) So there's that. Luckily there are some great private schools in the area which my mom was able to make sacrifices to afford, but I can't help but wonder how many other kids weren't as lucky and had their whole life trajectories sabotaged from an early age. Granted, that particular principal was fired a few months after my de facto expulsion (for many very good reasons), so maybe this was all genuinely just an anomaly and very far outside the norm for completely different reasons than my high school experience.
I think it’s so weird that your level of education in the US (and most of the world really) seems to depend on which specific school you went to.
The Netherlands has settled on three levels of schooling and within that level (according to capacity, and desire to learn) most of the schools show relatively little variation.
The same thing continues into university, with pretty much 99% of all the universities in the Netherlands being public.
You don’t select a university based on level of theoretical educational attainment, you select one by virtue of proximity, or which of them teaches the specific courses you are interested in.
Dutch PISA scores have fallen badly, though. We moved here from Ireland and the basisschools seem kinda mediocre compared to what we had in Ireland. My eldest certainly learned to read much better.
Schoelenopdekaart shows pretty wide variation in how many students go on to vwo etc.
#261 in National Rankings
#8 in Virginia High Schools
#11 in Washington, DC Metro Area High Schools
#5 in Fairfax County Public Schools High Schools
#302 in STEM High Schools
Are you seriously saying you can't reconcile how America has bad public schools after having gone to to a school ranked #261 in the country?
Can you, just for a moment, consider the situation here and try to reconcile this? It is important for me that you be able to do this.
> I've been hearing constantly for at least a decade how atrocious American public education is, which I can't reconcile at all with my experience as a 2010 graduate of [top 10 HS in state].
> Either my experience was so far outside the national norm that I have no useful perspective on this issue, or the national discourse has been totally corrupted by vocal minorities and political agendas
> Every time I hear about some factoid or perspective that American schools supposedly don't teach because they're propaganda farms designed to churn out uncurious low-skill workers, I roll my eyes
> It's possible my experience may have been more the exception than the rule
> Maybe I just got incredibly lucky, but I really have nothing but good things to say, and can't relate at all to the picture of American public education that's been painted in the media and social media
Can you just clarify for me once more: what exactly can you not reconcile? Be very, very specific, please.
I'm not really sure what your problem is, but okay. My experience is a counterexample to the claim that American public education is bad. Maybe some public schools are bad, but not all. I chose to share a positive anecdote to balance out the negativity.
No, you chose to share the experience of a top 10 high school in a state and then proceed to say you don't understand how other people can say any of the other 25,000 public high schools in the country are bad.
I don't have a problem. I went to a well ranked public high school and am grateful for that privilege. It isn't lost on me that many, many, others are less fortunate than I am. But to say you can't reconcile these things is, at worst, tone-deaf, and at best, incredibly ignorant.
No, I didn't proceed to say anything of the sort. You're attacking a straw man.
Even if you choose to believe there's some interpretation of my original phrasing that could mean what you're suggesting, I've now clarified several times that the idea you're making a fuss over does not reflect my sentiments.
> No, you chose to share the experience of a top 10 high school in a state and then proceed to say you don't understand how other people can say any of the other 25,000 public high schools in the country are bad.
While that might be your cultural understanding of, or personal reaction to, what he said - he actually did not say that.
If this subject is sensitive for you, or useful communication just isn't happening, then it might be better to drop it and move on.
To expand on that a bit, based on my observations, I'd suggest the following conclusions:
1. Any reform effort needs to ensure that early education isn't overlooked. Elementary schools need capacity, processes, and expertise to appropriately deal with kids of all different knowledge/intelligence levels and backgrounds/skillsets in a personalized way, and they need oversight to ensure that lazy/incompetent/malicious teachers and administrators aren't making poor/abusive decisions that could have lifelong negative impacts on students.
2. AI will be a critical element of future reform. It's too incredibly useful of a learning and scaling tool to sleep on. Of course it's easy to misuse, but that's exactly why responsible use needs to be taught as part of research and fact-checking lessons. If they haven't already, schools need to start running small-scale experiments with incorporation of AI tools into curricula asap.
Imagine how much more you could have learned with a virtual TA in your pocket on call 24/7 for those 13 years, with human teachers in the loop to help guide any self-directed learning you might have chosen to undertake. That bright-eyed kid who never stops asking "why?" will finally have a conversational partner who never tires of answering. All the panic about hallucinations sounds like the same sensationalist takes I grew up hearing from adults about the internet and Wikipedia — a perfectly valid concern, but not sufficient to negate the value of the resource in competent hands.
I'd learn zero just like every other boy who would be 100000% distracted by technology and currently uses up tons of willpower every day to avoid playing games on their mandatory-issue-device.
So, basically the general distribution strikes again? I guess the floor fell out, but what evidence do we have that the ceiling also went up? Could just be the same or lower when we normalize for grade inflation and requirement destruction.
I don't know about this. In my community at least most kids want to do the best they can in school and feel more pressure than ever for admission to top schools - who are more selective than ever. Particularly since competition for knowledge economy jobs is tighter than ever.
> However,the United States, particularly in the last 50 years, seems to have fostered a culture averse to education.
I always find it interesting that the anti-schooling mentality is so prevalent here on HN, too. It’s most obvious in threads about cheating, where a popular topic of discussion is to defend cheating as a rational reaction because school doesn’t matter, a degree is “just a piece of paper”, and you’ll learn everything on the job anyway.
It also shows up in the tired argument that college is only really about networking, not learning.
I’ve had some on and off experience mentoring college students in the past. Those who adopt these mentalities often hit a wall partway through college or even at their first job when their baseline intelligence runs out and they realize they don’t have the necessary foundation because they’ve been blowing off coursework or even cheating their way through college for years.
I’m afraid that LLMs are only going to enable more of this behavior. It’s now easier to cheat and students are emboldened by the idea that they don’t need to learn things because they can always just ask ChatGPT.
The difference is that you can, quite successfully, keep "cheating" with an LLM while at a job. And people do, not just in lower-importance roles, but at law offices, etc.
I work in tech and I see this more and more every day. By "cheating", I mean deciding that you don't want to do the thinking or even spot-check the result; you just ask an LLM to vibe-write a design doc, send it out, and have others point out issues if they care.
Your very last point though is where it all falls apart. If you have people who know what they're doing, co-mingled with "LLM cheaters", its very obvious they're cheating. Before long, they're found out and fired. It's not sustainable.
I don't think it's a disdain for education, but a disdain for the educational system that currently exists in the US.
If you have kids and experience it first hand, it's extremely underwhelming. If you were an outlier in any way as a student (and I bet a majority of people here are), it's extremely underwhelming.
My wife and I have advanced degrees and place a very high value on education, and I have very little that's positive to say about the state of education in our very highly ranked public schools. They've completely lost the plot. But any criticism is presumed to be hostility to teachers (and their union) or flat out racism by a vocal and increasingly large segment of the population.
> There is more and cheaper education available than ever before.
The real issue isn’t the availability of learning materials, but the healthy pressure and right push from experienced teachers. People tend to overestimate how self-driven most students are. The truth is, most students aren’t naturally motivated to learn. They need society to give them a sense of purpose, and they need teachers to challenge them with problems that keep them just outside their comfort zone. Sadly, the U.S. school system provides neither. Take my kid as an example: even though he’s in a decent public school, he thinks his schoolwork is tough and the SAT is challenging. Yet the SAT wouldn't even measure up to the high-school graduation exam in my country, let alone the college entrance exam. In the end, it’s the broad middle of students who suffer from low standards. With the right motivation and push, they could learn so much more, but instead they end up wasting precious time in high school.
> The real issue isn’t the availability of learning materials
Well, some people claim in these comments that their children don't get textbooks. Not saying that you're wrong, but it's gonna take a lot of 'healthy pressure and right pushes' to account for the fact that they don't have educational material.
In my kids' schools, the textbooks haven't been removed due to cost, they have been replaced with even more expensive online material that no one properly consumes.
Educators have been brainwashed into believing "computers are the future!" and don't seem to be able to even contemplate that reading something on a screen is a poor substitute for physically interacting with something (a pen and paper, a book, or the actual thing being described in a video).
I regularly have to tell my kids to stop doing math and science problems on their computer and get out a pencil and paper to do the work so they can organize it and understand it. They argue at first because their teachers tell them not to (so they say), but stop when they actually see it working.
It’s culture led by phones and other screens. Most teens are addicted to the screens. The need them for school and for socialization with friends and they end up on TikTok or another network and zombie there for most of their best brain years. They lack the ability to focus necessary to learn because the brain is used to constant screen simulation. Letting your child be babysat by a screen is absolutely the worst thing you can do to ever raise an adult.
I hear what you are saying, but I feel like this is related more to both parents working or single parent households. The more time parents work, the harder it is to get ahead, the more screen time kids will get.
From my conversations with 20-year-ago school students, American schools are culture led by sports, and football most of all. No surprise many parents don't see a reason for their kids to excel in STEM.
Mediocre by what metric? American STEM education seems to objectively be doing pretty well in terms of Nobel prizes, scholarly journal articles, patents, technology product revenue, etc. Of course there's always room for improvement.
> American STEM education seems to objectively be doing pretty well in terms of Nobel prizes, scholarly journal articles, patents, technology product revenue, etc.
I hate to break it to you, but a lot of our most valuable research is produced by people who did their primary education outside the US. Just go to a STEM research lab at any US university connected to a Nobel prize or Fields medal in the last 10-20 years, and it will be almost completely made up of internationally educated students / professors / etc.
Something that isn’t obvious to non-Americans or non-parents is just how diverse the US education system is. Even within a medium size city you’ll find multiple schools that might have completely different cultures.
Some schools are sports centric. Others have to work hard to get students interested in sports.
I think the implication that sports are bad is also misleading. Sports programs, when run well, can do a good job of getting kids into routines, out of trouble, and keeping them accountable to their peers for something. The TV and movie style sports culture where the football players aren’t expected to even attempt to pass their classes doesn’t actually exist in most schools.
This is true (and they do take a large amount of things like money and resources), but these cultural influences are also very loud. You will find that the majority of the kids in the cafeteria really don't give a crap about any of that, and that goes for the parents as well.
It really depends on the town, the school, and the social circle of the parents. If you live in a wealthy Boston suburb, academics are emphasized much more than sports, and expectations for students are very high. If you live in rural Appalachia, then football is king.
That’s certainly true but at the same time, when I was a kid in the early 90s, we watched TV but cartoons ended (we did not have cable or a computer). I came home from school, ate a snack, watched TV for about an hour with a friend, cartoons were over and we went outside. With the internet and YouTube etc. you’re never “done”
yeah but you get home at 4, watch an hour of anime, it's 5pm, you do homework for half an hour, then you have dinner with family until about 7, then you have about an hour of getting ready for bed/chores and that gets you to 8pm. At most you have one more hour of studying. So 90 minutes of education-related stuff at home a day in your ideal past where kids "only" spent an hour on TV.
Much like extending the workday past 10 hours there must be a point of diminishing/negative returns to expecting multiple hours of study per night. Also, those times you list seem indicative of elementary school kids. Most high schoolers are going to be up way past 9pm. Of course, they also probably aren't getting home before 6pm and don't have the luxury of an hour long family dinner every night either.
That's true, the arguments were also made for television, movies, radio, and fiction books. However, during the times of movies, television, radio, and written books being introduced, the trend line of student performance seemed to be going upward. It now seems to be trending downward. It's harder to convincingly make the argument that cell phones are no worse than TVs when student performance was increasing during the TV era and is decreasing during the smartphone era. Even if the correlation is totally spurious, it's an uphill climb to ignore it.
Don't expect much when (from what I see) most adults are properly addicted to their screens. If parents are already not up to the bar kids will seldom be, leading by example and all that.
Now show me parents, hell even here on HN, who openly admit that they are addicted to the screens and various 'social' cancers and consider it something profoundly bad and damaging, and that they as parents should really do better and actually try. A rare sight, mostly its brushed off and some even brag how 'digital' and modern their kids are.
But its fine, we all know how these things really are. This is one area where even otherwise disadvantaged parents (ie due to their poor upbringing or ie coming from undeveloped places) can raise their kids to be well above sea of future desperate population with severe social anxieties and addictions (lets not forget addictions ball up since they change personality for the worse).
Think how much lack / minimization of those will give them various advantages in their adult lives, be it professional (focus on work, ability to better socialize and communicate in person) or personal (all kinds of relationships, and finding one's purpose and drive in life). I just mentioned basically whole core of adult existence, no small things by any means.
And its not that hard, we do it with our kids and often see it around us in their peers, just need to put a bit more effort and spend more time with them instead of doom scrolling or binge watching TV. Which are anyway good parenting advices, but one needs to start like that from beginning and lead by example.
Nay, not "seems", but has indeed subverted education. Hofstadter's Pulitzer-winning book was published 62 years ago [0] and now, in 2025, even the highest office is unrecognisable.
Not sure in the US but where I am from thats very much the case; they went to the paid per graduated student vs just student and students having loans vs state money (to study forever) and it turned the focus on churning out graduates from providing academic rigor. I saw the shift sharply studying and then teaching from late 90s to early 00s and as I see my nephews doing cs degrees now: it's really easy I would say, not the rigorous (not very practical outside academics) learnings I started with. Not sure if its good or bad, just an observation. We already had technical schools for exactly this purpose, but I guess the unis were running steep losses for the gov while not enough prominent research and related companies came out of them.
If you read his whole comment it was about how education is "just a piece of paper you need to get a job". That mentality could totally lead to worse proficiency and more degrees awarded.
If you punish teachers solely on passing percentage you get the same result. It might be the teacher is bad but if you teach a difficult course it might be the students.
The cultural shift is secondary to the demographic shift. Young Americans have been squeezed at one end by mass immigration from countries with lower educational performance and literacy rates, higher crime rates, higher gang participation rates, etc., which accelerated to such an extreme that native English speakers are now a minority in our local school district. And they’re squeezed at the other end, forced to compete for college admissions, jobs, and housing against a hungry and ambitious global population vying for H-1Bs and student visas. We sold out the younger generation, our own children and grandchildren, and it wasn’t at all driven by political and corporate machinations. No, it was for some greater good, and if you dare question that you’re a fascist.
Looking at the amount of contracts I have to read to even start software it should. Looking at how many people buy lottery tickets I guess the same for math.
Particularly, the biggest incentives are test scores and passing rates, which incentivize attention only to the bottom 50% and 20% of students (respectively). This means:
- You do not diversify classrooms by academic ability---the high-performing students can be free tutors to the low-performing students.
- You inflate the GPAs and implement no-zero policies.
- You teach to the standardized tests, and don't worry about the material.
- You make lessons "fun and engaging" because you need the attention of the students least likely to give you their attention.
- You eliminate gifted or honors programs, because that's wasted money not improving your bottom line (bottom students).
Needless to say, these are not effective ways of teaching remedial and underperforming students.
Those pupils will generally need very structured lessons that directly provide clear information (often in a form that can easily stick in memory and be repeated, even word for word), and straightforward instructions that can immediately inform their practice no matter what their level. I.e. the exact opposite of a so-called "fun and engaging" approach. (Which of course ignores the fact that such students tend to derive the most fun and engagement from being taught in a clear and effective way!)
The underlying issue is that the "progressive" educational strategy taught in Ed Schools is very explicitly a "sink or swim" approach where the student is supposed to be teaching themselves and the teacher isn't doing any real work. The hidden attitude here, coming directly from the "Progressive" era of the late 19th and early 20th century, is that many students will indeed fail but this is not an issue because clearly they were not worthy of entering the educated class with the very best.
(Special Ed is the one remaining niche that still teaches more effective educational methods, but obviously not every remedial student is a Special Ed student, and we should not expect them to be.)
And constraints. To call this a cultural issue is insane. I have firsthand seen the structural problems with institutional education. My scholastic experience was hell and anti-intellectual from day one, and it was all institutional issues.
The fact that these institutions can exist at the low-performing state they do is a direct reflection of the culture of the people who run them, send their kids to them, pay taxes to support them, etc.
The schools can only do what they do to the degree that people aren't willing to put up with it.
Institutions are supposed to protect culture, but they have failed due to the actions of a small elite class. It's like blaming a child for not having parents.
Or are they dutifully resisting cultural shift that threatens the "don't think critically, just go to work, pay your taxes, don't question the system, don't do drugs, go to college, get a job, lease a new car, buy a condo, cross your fingers that stonks go up enough for you to retire" late 20th early 21st century status quo "ideal citizen" and "ideal culture" that they were built to foster (and who are the kind of people who fill out the majority of the system)?
The way I see it peddling blue state bullshit and red state bullshit (depending on a given school district's location) is simply a common sense adaptation districts are making to garner support from local populations who were willing to support the system so long as it provided useful education at a non-insane cost but are more critical now that the deal is worse.
People choose based on grades, success stories, safety, and exclusivity, not political alignment. But public schools aren't competitive, so they don't have any incentive to offer any of those things. That makes them a useful and susceptible hot bed for the least desirable part of an education; politics.
As a member of several of the {{{small, elite class[es]}}} you might be describing, which of us do you mean? Certainly those of us with a PhD don't want the schools to be shitty for our kids.
I mean our politicians and the idiots they manufacture with idpol in order to maintain power at the cost of degrading our communities. So, probably not you.
For example, in my state, it is an annual tradition to slash the budget of schools and/or libraries and funnel the money toward political goals and police retirement funds.
I attended the best public school in the state at one point and literally watched the Governor text someone for 10 minutes and then fall asleep in the middle of a budget presentation specifically put together in order to convince him not to cut more funding the next year, as it would mean the school would have to begin taking federal money and compromising on its values.
I also attended the worst public school in my state, a harrowing and illuminating experience which I've spoken about here a few times before. [0]
I also had my collegiate education robbed from me by a vindictive teacher who illegally falsified my grade out of spite, and an administration who protected her. I was homeless since 16 was and attending high school on my own in a rural community with no economic opportunity.
Due to my circumstances, her falsified grade meant I had to rescind a full-ride scholarship which had been offered to me including boarding and a job, but on condition that my credits included that core class. I had no adults in my life to fight for me, and even though I met with my guidance counselor, the principal, several teachers and the school board, I was not helped and fell through the cracks, despite high standardized test scores and a high GPA.
Instead, I continued to be homeless from 18 to 21 and struggled very badly, starving and sick. I am now employed in my field of choice despite these circumstances, but I overall had a very traumatic experience with the public school system. The institution ultimately failed me, despite my intellect and perseverance.
So I share your concerns deeply! I want nothing of the sort to happen to my kids or anyone else's.
Your work looks very interesting, by the way, leafing through one of your papers.
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.
Which I agree we should do, carefully. The federal government has no constitutional authorization to create educational standards for the country. Therefore, let those standards be set by the states.
Not sure where the UK stands on enviable results, but education is a devolved matter where the constituent countries can make independent decisions as opposed to there being a central government department that makes all decisions nationally.
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).
What you're describing is a fad that has subsided a bit over the last few years. Cambridge MA stopped teaching 8th grade algebra because they didn't like the racial disparity between students in advanced vs non-advanced math. There was a significant backlash from parents, and now they're bringing back 8th grade algebra. The debate now seems to be much more about how to offer more advanced math than whether to offer it at all. A similar dynamic seems to be playing out in other towns as well.
I don’t understand why this became about politics, but I will bite.
Republicans want to dismantle department of education, have cut funding for education, food stamps, free meals, etc. they are by definition against education for the outgroup and “the poors”. So I think that label is apt.
On the other hand, Dem leadership is quite racist and has a saviour complex. They identified the right issue — children from impoverished areas that don’t see a future for themselves through education are underperforming — but instead of treating the problem they push stuff like no child left behind. In their defence though, republicans simply don’t allow any legislation that would improve education to go forward, mainly because they benefit from it.
Unfortunately it’s a real thing among leftists (not necessarily Democrats in general).
The belief is that any advanced classes increase the achievement gap. People who subscribe to this also believe that advanced placement testing is discrimination and must be eliminated. They want equity of outcome, so reducing the curriculum to a single class at a single level that everyone the same age takes is their preference.
It has been implemented in several places with predictable backlash.
One is the observation that first- and second-generation black immigrants have much higher share of college admissions than their share of the black population, despite similar socio-economic status to African Americans with longer family history in the US.
Isn’t it obvious? Children of immigrants do way better. Children of Asian households do way better than other ethnicities, and children in impoverished areas do a lot worse.
All of this is cultural and anyone who thought I implied race — which looks like you did — is a moron and a racist.
Just look at HN. Nominally an educated crowd, but talk about physics, and you immediately see terms like "ivory towers" or "return on investment", despite the fact that most on HN doesn't understand in fundamental science works.
A lot of the complaints here about physics have to do with focusing so heavily for decades on string theory (or M-theory) which hasn't produced much in the way of practical results. At some point we have to quit throwing good money after bad and redirect funding towards other lines of inquiry.
Yes, but this is cartoon shit. String theory was a major research program in theoretical physics for a few decades but theoretical physics involves quite a lot more than string theory and physics involves quite a lot more than theoretical physics and if you stacked up all the budgets you'd find that string theory is a minor footnote. And also, its been a few decades since people took it very seriously as a strong candidate for a TOE.
I really don't get it. As a total amount of any budget from any perspective, string theory has always been a blip whose cultural impact is much wider than its actual budgetary one. Like this critique about string theory is just a thing that people who are physics "enthusiasts" say and even to the extent that it is true, its really been more than a decade since it was a problem.
There are _plenty_ of areas in physics where investment is paying off. Condensed matter physics, optics, material research and so on.
We mostly question the fundamental subatomic particle physics that is not producing any returns on the investment. E.g. the galvanic effect was discovered in 1780, and there were long-distance telegraph lines by 1845 - so 65 years.
The last major theoretical advance in particle physics was around 1965 (Higgs mechanism). That's already 60 years ago.
>She is speaking about physics in a very narrow sense.
In what respect? Did you bother to actually watch the video or read a transcript or did you just watch the first minute and a half and assume that was the point? It wasn't. the ensuing thirty-two minutes serve to debunk the idea that there hasn't been progress in physics over the past seventy years.
Which GP claimed was the case. GP is wrong.
And she covers a wide array of physics areas -- she even mentions that she could have gone year by year starting in 1953 and cover at least one advancement per year, but she limited it to just her top ten which was pretty wide ranging.
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.)
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.
Personal responsibility, or lack thereof always seemed to me like one of these memes that are used to explain phenomena in a handwavy fashion.
Does anyone have any data points that could help me update my world model here?
I certainly feel personally responsible for things and so do many people that I know.
Additionally, it feels like people like to blame systemic issues on lack of personal responsibility in the general public, while ideally, elected officials should take personal responsibility for fixing the system.
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.
I grew up being told by my peers in school that memorising things was a waste of time and critical thinking was all that mattered. Now I use Anki to literally memorize programming language syntax and ideas and facts that are relevant to my job (like data structures and algorithms). I wish I'd valued memorization when I was in school, because it's such a foundational thing to have knowledge upon which to build everything else.
- memorising names and birthdates of relevant people - private life and work life
- anything I’m looking up more than ~5 times can go in Anki
- spelling of words I often misspell (eg bureaucracy)
- when reading anything technical I need for my work or study I have Anki open and type in what I learn in QnA format, and I will never forget it but have it easy within reach for an investment of only a few minutes per QnA over its (and my) life time
- just for fun, the cantons of Switzerland, landskap of Sweden, provinces of Canada, and states and capitals of the USA
- NATO phonetic alphabet which comes in useful more often that you’d think
Life-changingly useful program for every aspect of my life, when I can finish it every day
My top tips:
- put all decks in a master “daily” deck using the :: syntax in the deck names. Otherwise you feel “done” when having finished one deck, and feel like not starting the next. Have only one goal - finishing today’s Anki
- for that master deck (and every other deck) go Study Options > Display Order > New/review order > Show after reviews. Otherwise it’s hard to ever catch up when slipping behind. With this setting, the system becomes somewhat self correcting
My only regret is not being able to pay more than $25 to the developers
And creativity is often putting seemingly unrelated things together. If you don't have the required things floating around in your mind at the same time, it is not possible.
The way of getting those facts and ideas into your head can be very different, though.
You can either mechanically memorize them, which is a boring and mindless activity, or you can be challenged, participate in discussions, projects, and activities that engage the parts of your brain involved with critical thinking.
Both will technically get you to pass a test, but the latter will be better for retaining information, while developing skills and neural pathways that make future learning easier.
The problem is that most academia is based on the memorization approach. Here are a bunch of ideas and facts we think are important; get them into your head, and regurgitate them back at us later. This is not a system that creates knowledgeable people. It doesn't inspire or reward curiosity, creativity, or critical thinking. It's an on-rails pipeline that can get you a piece of paper that says you've been through it, which is enough to make you a tax-paying citizen employed by companies who expect the bare minimum as well.
I get that the alternative approach is more difficult to scale, and requires a more nuanced, qualitative, and personal process. But that's how learning works. It's unique for everyone, and can't be specified as a fixed set of steps.
After all, what is the point of teaching people to be idea and fact storing machines, if machines can do a far better job at that than us? Everyone today can tell you a random fact about the world in an instant by looking it up in a computer. That's great, but we should be training and rewarding people for things computers can't do.
Your first point is a favorite of a lot of people, but doesn’t make a lot of sense to me: how is your generation with the ostensibly correct culture producing a generation with the wrong culture?
Parents are apparently raising their children wrong en masse, so was the parents’ generation rotten too? Which raises questions about the character of the generation that raised the parents…
I think social norms in child rearing have changed drastically, though I think, at least in my neighborhood, they are swinging back.
Growing up in the 80s, I remember having a lot of free time and autonomy. I had soccer or baseballaybe twice a week and guitar lessons once a week, but the other days, I was doing what I wanted, I was expected to get my homework done, but once that was done,I was free to roam the neighborhood or my backyard.
This parenting mindset changed, by the late 80s early 90s and kids started getting more and more scheduled activities and less free time.
Even personally, 6 years ago my wife was very apprehensive about letting our oldest who was then 8, walk to his friend's house who was a 1/4 mile away in the neighborhood. Our youngest, who is 7, walks or bikes to his friend's house the same distance away. And we have other neighborhood kids that also go between people houses. That is the childhood I remember.
I don't think HW I got in elementary school necessarily helped me learn more, but the act of being given work with expectation that I would complete it on my own was a growth activity for me, and that is something that is starting to come back in elementary school, homework for the sake of learning how to do homework.
I think this just kinda sounds like a retroactive rationalization if I’m honest. Imagine if the order was reversed: if you had filled your childhood with mandatory activities and todays kids were mostly left to do what they want.
Wouldn’t you just say “When I was young we were forced to adhere to a tight schedule which taught us to be dependable. Todays kids are allowed to do what they want, which means they never learn any responsibility.”
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.
Similarly there's a bunch of talk of "source criticism" in Swedish schools, but when you look closer at what is actually taught it sounds more like conspiracy theory or dogma and never anything actually useful.
Imo source criticism is only a thing if you have a well grounded model of the universe. And if you DO have that, then source criticism just falls out naturally and you don't need to discuss that at all anyway.
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.
> Most parents just watch TV, stare at their phones and don't want to be bothered by anything that requires effort.
No?
Most of the parents around me are busy each working a full time job and doing their best to raise their kids.
They now spend some of their free time reading on the phones instead of a newspaper, magazine, or book. Some listen to books while they mow the lawn, clean the house, or do other chores like laundry. They also hang out a mix of kids and parents nearby, both inside and out, in front of bonfires and kitchen tables. RN I'm commenting on HN while my kids and neighbor kids turn dinner into an imaginary cooking show at the table.
Parents around here are also often tending to elderly parents or physically/mentally challenged relatives.
Too few can afford to have one parent stay home fulltime.
Of course there have always been parents neglecting their kids to do anything else: bowling, drinking, partying, traveling, tinkering, obsessively reading, etc. The fact that more activities are behind screens isn't the catch all explanation it's often promoted to be.
People always want to blame the new thing in culture. Some collective sin if only we had better self control. Every generation has one.
Usually it’s just institutional failure at multiple levels and a whole bunch of people who don’t care about the institution’s output sufficiently.
Every time I read about new education stories they’re busy trying to solve wider social issues instead of being the best place to get an education. Just like how libraries turned into homeless shelters instead of being a place for the community to learn and read.
Yes? You mention it too - parents glued to their phones, part of the problem. Kids seeing their parents reading a book vs being glued to their phones really isn't the same thing, far from it. They can come and see pages of printed text in a book, vs some endless tiktok/instagram feeds of shallow video entertainment. Guess which they will stay around and stare endlessly without even blinking.
Screens and especially active content are incredibly addictive and small kids have no way of being rational and throttle their use. If they see the same behavior in their parents that's it.
Its not about having stay-at-home parent, but about spending the time with kids to be 100% physically there for them and them only, no running screen of any type anywhere in sight. Lets be honest, this is a rather rare sight.
People like that guy like to jerk off to their thoughts and think they alone know the issue, and that it’s because people are lazy!!
Reality check, income inequality makes it so that parents have to slave away to earn the bar minimum to survive, participate in the gig economy, and then deal with tax cuts that give the richest of the rich even more money, while suffocating social services in their neighborhoods.
This is end stage capitalism, squeeze the rubes for every cent they have and damn their kids
Maybe. I've definitely seen that anecdotally in some cases. But the school system is also problematic for the families that do value education and the kids that could excel in the classroom.
Our district has eliminated programs for the kids at the top end in the name of equity. They've also eliminated separate spaces for kids with learning and behavioral issues for the same reason. So everyone is in the same classroom and most of the teacher's time is spent on a handful of kids causing trouble and the rest of the class learns nothing.
We can't afford private school, so we're doing a bunch of extra lessons at home to keep them on pace, engaged, and challenged. But really, there are only so many hours in the day and I want them to be outside playing too!
At a certain level “homeschool” is going to be more effective. Ive seen parents get together with 3-6 similar aged students, and then do a combination of hiring a teacher/tutor for them and splitting duting to making it tenable.
This is an empirical claim and there's statistics already available. Almost every study of student performance dramatically favors homeschool over American public school. I'm not saying this in support of homeschool, but as an indictment of public school. It's wild that schools spend many millions of dollars on hundreds of professionals, materials, and centuries of institutional knowledge, and yet are trivially outcompeted by just a mom who puts in the hours with a curriculum from the internet.
To be fair: that mom gets to pick and choose which kids to teach. She probably wouldn’t get the same result if she had to apply the same techniques to inner-city Detroit kids six hours a day and five days a week.
>She probably wouldn’t get the same result if she had to apply the same techniques to inner-city Detroit kids six hours a day and five days a week.
I think you're thinking of it backwards. Inner city Detroit kids probably struggle in school precisely because there maybe isn't a mom at home who's passionate and available to educate them (among plenty of other reasons, to be sure).
Inner city Detroit kids (not gonna lie, feels like a euphemism) aren't just inherently hard to teach for no reason
Obviously that's the case, which is why it's not fair to claim homeschooling parents "trivially outcompete" the public school system. That was my point.
> (not gonna lie, feels like a euphemism)
Are we still doing not-so-subtle claims of "I think you're a racist?"
Pick any demographic group that gets overwhelmingly bad results and depends on the public school system. Look at the statistics. We aren't going to fix problems we can't acknowledge. Urban public school districts are among the most impacted by bad public schools.
As a homeschooler raised ~20 years ago, the key insight is that outcomes are bimodally distributed based on an overlayed function of parental socioeconomic status and student talent.
Check the private schools a few more times - some offer quite competitive financial aid packages that even people who feel they’re “high wage” can take advantage of.
Are your kids old enough to run amok at home instead of going to school? Would the police arrest you if you left them home alone instead of sending them to school?
I live in the US in New Jersey, and here a big problem was the State flooded school districts with money during Covid with no material oversight of its spending.
The end result was huge increases in spending. But not on education. The money was spent on more MacBooks, more iPads, more buildings, more smart TVs, more consultants, more School Bullshit System as a Service, more scoreboards, more $50,000 signs in front of schools.
Meanwhile the good teachers are fleeing the system and test scores are plummeting as schools focus more on day care and “social justice”, and a declining emphasis on teaching core subjects and learning in general, coupled with social promotion where everybody gets a C or higher, and 80% of the school gets on the honor roll (spoiler alert: our district is not some outlier where 80% of the kids are geniuses).
Schools have very little to do with teaching, and really are just about baby sitting and trying to correct social issues.
Oh, and endless buckets of tax payer money with meaningless oversight.
> Schools have very little to do with teaching, and really are just about baby sitting and trying to correct social issues.
Is that wrong? The government takes away your kid for 12 years, every weekday all day, they might as well solve social issues in the country even if that means, say, kids are 1 year behind Asian kids, or their parents 30 years ago. If they figure out how to solve personal issues, that's even better.
I think there is a logical fallacy here. People assume that the only purpose of school is education. The more the education the better, even if that means deepening social issues, or making kids unhappy (BTW being a kid is like ~20% of someones life, not insignificant in itself). I think they assume it just because 'school' is called 'school', but I don't think the name of an object should determine its purpose.
- - -
When I look at the social issues in my country, I think the school system would be a very natural place to start to solve them (and arguably the current school system just worsens them). Even at the cost of "fall in reading and math scores".
I fully hear you on this. I miss the days where a simple phone call or email communication would occur when needed. Now it's a deluge of daily updates via 2 separate 'apps' for 2 different schools, and a requirement to login to 'app' or website to read the 'email' that they've sent out. Nevermind contacting someone that isn't directly associated with your child at the school -- Guess that's all need to know basis.
New Jersey is probably the most socioeconomically segregated state in the country, mostly based on its school districts. It has crazy real estate prices precisely so parents can get their children into specific, high-performing school districts. These districts bring the state average up very high, but best of luck if your district is in the bottom 50%.
> The majority of the public school system has devolved into day-care, not education.
I resisted that narrative for years, thinking it was just a media-hyped scare tactic to get clicks. However, my niece started high school a few weeks ago (in mid-August, which is weird to me); her experience blew my mind.
Her new high school is considered one of the better public high schools in the area. When I asked her how it was going, did she like being a high-schooler, I was expecting her to complain about the course load or something like that. However, she told me that after 2 weeks, they haven't spent one minute on actual education. She said they've been going over rules and policies for 2 weeks. Things like no bullying, inclusiveness, fire safety, bring your own water bottle, how to pray (they have a room dedicated to prayer), etc. Best/worst of all, they did an entire day on active shooter drills - the windows are now bullet-proof!
So yeah, unfortunately, I'm fully onboard with this narrative now. While kids in Taiwan and Japan are learning calc, kids in the US are doing active shooter drills and staring at the Ten Commandments. USA! USA! USA!
In what state are public high schools allowed to "how to pray"? It sounds like her new high school isn't that good. I have a daughter at a good public high school in California in a quite liberal area. There was none of what you mentioned. One day of reviewing the syllabi and rules and quizzes in most subjects starting less than a week later.
The law is extremely specific about this one, and this is constitutional law that overrules all other laws.
A government institution cannot promote any one religion. It's fine to have a multi-denominational non-secular common worship area. You can also promote religion as a general concept, but not a specific religion.
Whether this rule is followed or enforced properly is an entirely separate problem that we are apparently still grappling with.
Well our insane Supreme Court ruled a few years ago on a case involving a football coach praying at games that schools are forced to allow religious employees to do their weird religious ceremony at school events.
Why shouldnt the football coach be able to pray on the field, alone, without forcing their belief on others? That seems extremely reasonable. Making students also pray would be bad,but he didnt do that.
Because he’s a football coach and there is almost always an implication that you toe the line or face reprisal.
It’s also in poor taste. Jesus himself commented on performative piety:
“Whenever you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, who love to stand and pray in the synagogues and on street corners so that others may observe them doing so. Amen, I say to you, they have already received their reward. 6 But when you pray, go into your room, close the door, and pray to your Father in secret. And your Father who sees everything that is done in secret will reward you“
> Because he’s a football coach and there is almost always an implication that you toe the line or face reprisal.
This sounds like nobody in a position of power should be allowed to openly do anything that people around them have the right to not do. Which would be kinda bs.
Very much not an accurate description of what was actually happening, despite what the court’s majority claimed (egregious and surely, at least often, willful factual errors in majority opinions are a hallmark of the Roberts court)
Luckily there are both witness accounts and photos in this case, so it’s pretty clear what was really going on.
I strongly encourage you to glance at the dissents for that case. That is very much not the case. The Supreme Court willingly ignored very important evidence that was the case.
Because he's an employee being paid to do what he's told and the school told him not to because it was causing a disturbance. Why does he have to practice his religion on his employer's time? Let's say he was cussing during school hours, would it violate his 1st amendment rights if the school told him to stop?
True enough, but that has always been true. Something has changed on the institutional side such that it is no longer willing and/or able to simply reject batshit insanity and continue teaching children such that they are as well informed or better informed and capable as the last generation. What results is a positive feedback loop where a poorly educated public puts increasing pressure on an institution who's members are themselves poorly educated. The result is paralysis, and eventually, societal death.
>When great controversy surrounds the curriculum, the safest way to keep the gravy train rolling to teach is nothing at all.
I fixed your verbiage to be more descriptive. They are teaching nothing specifically because they don't want to kill the golden goose. If there wasn't so much money at stake we wouldn't be having this discussion.
>> kids in the US are doing active shooter drills and staring at the Ten Commandments. USA! USA! USA!
>Not a thing at public schools (despite some attempts to force it)
>Between this and the prayer comment, I suspect this comment is either exaggerated or mixed with internet anecdotes rather than actual experience.
Actually, it is a thing in Texas. And unfortunately, it's not exaggerated at all.
From Wikipedia[0]:
"S.B. 10 requires public schools to display the Ten Commandments anywhere clearly visible. The law requires the display to be framed or a poster, and include the exact text of the Ten Commandments provided in the law without alternatives. It must also be at least 16 inches (41 cm) wide and 20 inches (51 cm) tall.[13]"
From the office of the Texas Attorney General:
“In Texas classrooms, we want the Word of God opened, the Ten Commandments displayed, and prayers lifted up,” said Attorney General Paxton. “Twisted, radical liberals want to erase Truth, dismantle the solid foundation that America’s success and strength were built upon, and erode the moral fabric of our society. Our nation was founded on the rock of Biblical Truth, and I will not stand by while the far-left attempts to push our country into the sinking sand.”
Senate Bill 11, passed by the Texas Legislature this past regular session, allows school boards to adopt policies setting aside time for voluntary prayer and the reading of the Bible or other religious texts. The law requires that the board of trustees for each ISD in Texas take a record vote on whether to adopt a policy to implement these periods no later than six months after September 1, 2025. Student participation in these periods requires parental consent."
Unfortunately, no. My niece's mom, my sister, called her school to ask wtf was going on. They gave her a lame, lawyer-approved response about their responsibility to protect children and the drills are mandated by the state, blah blah blah. So yeah, my niece said they practice how to respond (call 911, not your parents?), what to do if the teacher is shot (they don't use the word "shot", though), and they talked about tactical gear, like bullet-proof backpacks, which my niece wants now.
Can I guess.. "bulleted"? Similar to how the creators of brainrot content say "unalive" or "seggs" because they want to make sure their content can go viral, and there's the belief words like "kill", "died" or "sex" will trigger Zuck and Co.'s censorship?
That's wild. My daughter just started public high school last week and they haven't had any meaningful talk about safety, no active shooter drills, nothing like that. They did waste several days on orientation and how class will be organized, stuff like that, but since she's a freshman I guess maybe that makes sense. This week she's been assigned homework.
But this is a boring suburban town on the edge of a midsize metro in the PNW, which is not exactly the most exciting place in the country.
What else do you expect government run schools to teach if not "engage the government at any/every opportunity"?
Looking back on my own education what a disservice some of those behavior patterns (not specifically that one) they tried to teach us would be in adult life.
I don’t think advising kids to make their first and possibly only call to an emergency number where someone’s all but guaranteed to pick up quickly and dispatch help instead of to a parent who might not pick up for any number of reasons and can’t personally dispatch emergency responders (but will surely just themselves turn around and call 911) is, like, a Big Government propaganda conspiracy. Seems more like plain old good advice.
While probably appropriate for a shooting, "when shit's going down, call the government first" is generally not a terrible way to handle things as an adult as it tends to reliably turn N-figure problems into much more complicated N+1 or N+2 figure problems. Running your situation by a cooler head not immediately involved is almost always better and the government is always slow enough to show up that you don't lose anything if you do go that route.
Likewise, I think it is very ill-advised to cram kid's heads full of "dial 911" at the young vulnerable age where repeated messaging goes into the kind of memory that's all but impossible to overwrite.
Given the recent school shooting where police waited around outside as the shooting was happening and parents were the only ones to intervene, it doesn't seem like such good advice.
Yeah, I wouldn't mind seeing the LE leadership at that particular, ah, event, plus maybe many of the other law enforcement folks present, subjected to some... consequences. Whatever the victims' parents want, really, I'd be pretty open to anything. I have ideas but I'd not suggest my preferences matter here, and would rather leave it to them, even if they settled on "nothing".
And ACAB, yeah, sure. Basically true, I agree.
That's still your best first move if there's a mass shooting. Anyone you call's just going to call 911 anyway (god, I hope). You do want hospitals on alert and calling in trauma surgeons, and ambulances on the way. And usually the police aren't that astoundingly useless in these cases, even if their outcomes are mixed.
I do think more often than not police are, in general, a net-benefit and force for "good", if you will, when called in for a mass shooting, and I don't think it's a particularly close call. Though yeah sometimes they are pretty bad even for that purpose (and they're often bad for other purposes, sure), and in the case of Uvalde they were disgustingly bad, and I here employ "disgustingly" with its full force and not flippantly.
Still, like... probably call 911 first if someone's shooting up a school?
At the early stages memorization is essential for some subjects. I still benefit greatly - like many - from very early having to memorize the complete lower multiplication table (12x14, 15x15 and all that, the 20-square). I actually need that in daily life all the time (and I'm old and skeptical about teaching too much stuff that just drowns kids and prevents deeper understanding because they are always chasing the next subject with little time to let anything sink in deeper). What is sine, tangent, cosine. At least a few digits of pi. Language and grammar too.
Lots and lots of stuff that just has to be memorized. It becomes easier the more experiences one gets over time using those, merely memorizing the words alone ofc. is useless and also very inefficient, without other knowledge to create a network the brain will throw pure sentence-memorization out. So you still start the lessons with some memorization, then deepen it by using it in class. But in the end you will still remember those many little "facts".
I wish this narrative that memorization is bad would die. Yes, understanding concepts is also important, but memorization is incredibly useful for learning and applying knowledge. The faster you can recall "trivia" the better you are able to make connections.
I say this as someone you drank the "no memorization" koolaid. Now I always start new things with memorization first and I learn so much faster.
Yep, the most obvious example (besides language) would be of math. Despite what kids (and unfortunately, some adults) say, it's worth memorizing the tables from 1->10 despite the ubiquity of calculators because the process of memorizing them helps with seeing the patterns that provide a deeper understanding, and it's much faster than pulling out a calculator and plugging the numbers in.
There are some subjects where the emphasis on memorization that some places have is detrimental, but that doesn't make memorization bad in general.
Doing math without memorizing some basic arithmetic facts is like reading without knowing what the hundred most common words in the English language mean, and having to look them up every time you encounter one. Sure I guess you can do that, but… you definitely shouldn’t.
As a kid, and probably still now, I was very reluctant to memorise things, for some reason I never understood but that may be connected with distrust of authority. I still remember how long and hard I fought my parents and grandparents who tried to make sure I would eventually memorise multiplication tables. Instead, I had to develop many tricks to be able to retrieve the proper results without memorisation, effectively discovering patterns to retrieve quickly all the tables from very few memorised numbers. Years later, I remember having done a similar thing in history classes, refusing to learn any dates, so instead finding tricks to tell which events must have occurred before or after another, thus again getting more engaged with the material as a result.
Sure, some material do require pure memorisation, like language learning (that I still hate with a passion), but overall I believe memorisation gets the bad rep it deserves.
I find this attitude to be really frustrating. Based on my experiences teaching math a student is not going to learn how to do the impressive things that you might call thinking if they don't have a solid foundation in how to do the basics. Imagine saying that learning the alphabet or spelling rules is just rote memorization and therefore not worth doing. If a person needs to spend all of their brain power thinking through elementary operations then they will have very little left over for the things that we might call thinking. I have seen too many kids who struggle with Algebra not because they can't understand the concepts but because they cannot do basic things like multiply 3x4 without needing to add 3 to 3 to 3 to 3.
1. We pay teachers like shit and treat them even worse. Even if you wanted to do a good job as a teacher, it's fundamentally impossible because:
2. Our schools are structured and run by busybodies that have absolutely no business being within 100 yards of a school. Curricula is set by politics and ideology, not established science. We have book bans and helicopter parents suing teachers for talking about dinosaurs or evolution or even for simply existing as a queer person in any capacity.
Teachers have been fleeing in droves for years, and many states and locales are further reducing the qualifications required to teach, leading to a downwards sprial.
There's also the intentional and systematic disassembling of our education system by the federal government, as a means of voter suppression. This whole situation was created on purpose to keep Americans dumb and complacent.
America is fucked six ways from Sunday and it's hard to even think about a way out of this mess. It's going to take several generations for our society and government to recover, if it ever does.
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 we had actual signifiers of success.
Where my wife works the average salary is over 100K per year, so not bad for 9 months of work. This is in California where the test scores are some of the worst in the nation. I would not lean too hard at political party affiliation, California politics is heavily influenced by Teachers Unions, and yet we score near the bottom of the entire US.
> This is in California where the test scores are some of the worst in the nation
I read your post and thought it was BS, so I did a little research. According to this, California public school test scores are better than Texas and closing in on New York and Florida.
> California politics is heavily influenced by Teachers Unions, and yet we score near the bottom of the entire US.
California scores better than Texas, a completely Republican-run state where the teacher's unions have almost no influence. How do you account for that?
Texas, Mississippi, and others partially achieve this by holding students back.
Mississippi, for example, has a third grade reading gate. Texas holds black kids back at a nearly twice the rate of white kids. These kids are older and have repeated the grade so they do better in the 4th grade NAEP assessment.
This is possibly working as intended. However, you can achieve the same results by redshirting your kid or having them repeat a grade.
So the claim from the blog post that
> but Texas has a slight edge for Hispanic students and a huge advantage for Black students.
says that the Texas results are driven by a demographic that's aggressively held back.
Isn’t that a good thing? Should students be promoted to a higher grade if the aren’t doing well. It’s really difficult to do this in California. My wife has dealt with high school seniors who are functionally illiterate. Maybe if they were held back they might catch up.
I'm not making a judgment about whether it's a good or bad thing for the kid. I don't know the literature to have a position. I'm just contextualizing the data.
In practical terms, the states kind of have different definitions of what it means to be in 4th grade. And that's one way of increasing your score on this particular measurement.
I think the right thing to do is intervene before students are held back. But that costs money and might make your NAEP scores worse if the student just squeaks by this year rather than staying behind a year. But I don't have the data on how much they're attempting to intervene in cases where students look like they're going to be held back.
Adjusted for income its really bad. Income is the strongest causes of academic performance, so if you adjust for them California is doing way worse than other states.
CA also scores middle of the pack on nominal poverty rate (OPM), but last in the country on cost of living adjusted poverty rate (SPM). If anything though, that means backwards from what I would expect for income controlled education scores... ?
It's not hard to be in the median yet one of the worst states, if NY/CA/FL/TX all have shit scores (I have no idea if that's the case). You could conceivably be at the median while being one of the worst 5 or 10 states.
>It's not hard to be in the median yet one of the worst states, if NY/CA/FL/TX all have shit scores (I have no idea if that's the case). You could conceivably be at the median while being one of the worst 5 or 10 states.
I wonder where you went to school. Median means that half of the sample is above and half the sample is below.
To explain (and I'll use small words so you'll be sure to understand), the median of the fifty states is that 25 are above the median and 25 are below it. See how that works?
Here's a simpler example in case you're still confused:
Steve makes $5/hour
Bob makes $8/hour
Reggie makes $11/hour
Sylvana makes $14/hour
Benoit makes $17/hour
The median wage is then $11.00/hour. Get it now?
Check out this very complex page[0] (let me know if you need help with the bigger words) that discusses this idea. Good luck. I suspect you're gonna need it.
> Curricula is set by politics and ideology, not established science.
This is part of it. A friend is a teacher and is now in an admin position where he manages teachers. His big gripe is the higher ups have no formal system - every time a new person comes in they bring with them their system and politics, burning down the previous efforts while doing little to nothing for students. Then they leave for greener pastures and the next ideologue comes along with their matches.
Parents need to take responsibility for outcomes. Education happens as much at home as it does in school. You need engaged teachers AND parents.
Teacher salaries need to keep up. The problem is teacher salaries aren’t a state or a national setup. They depend on the school district you’re in. If you’re in a high income district where higher taxes are afforded. Teacher salaries are good. But then these places also have VERY engaged parents - which makes the scores much better.
If you want rural and inner city scores to improve it will need real funding - 1. For teachers to want to move to small town USA and teach there, 2. Or for them to risk life and limb going to inner cities and 3. Having an extremely high teacher to student ratio - probably 5-10 per teacher to compensate for lack of engagement at home.
It's a pipe dream.
I live in a fairly high income district.
The school's attitude is my way or the highway. Neighboring municipalities do not fare any better in this department. From my experience, schools will fight tooth and nail to defend the status quo.
I gave up.
Chicago public school teachers salaries will reach over $110,000 by 2029 or earlier. Just going by the track record, this will not result in a better quality of education.
Schools are dominated by leftwing CRT ideology. It's the rare exception when there is real pushback against dinosaurs or evolution. I very much doubt that you are as angry about Islamic pushback against sex topics in school.
The reward structures, the dumbing down of courses, removing accelerated courses, passing everyone, the move against merit, the removal of structure, discipline, and punishment for bad behavior all come from liberal ideas on teaching.
Anyone who demands standards, values merit, values hard work with high expectations is labeled a fascist, colonizer, or some other pejorative. "Ways of knowing" is an idea that permeates modern teaching where we can't judge or grade anyone for what they know or don't know because different people just "know" differently. Grades are racist. Expectations are racist. Math is racist.
Parent here with school-aged kids. I think this sub-thread blaming the parents is particularly depressing and not founded in reality. Here is the way I see it. The social media companies with quasi infinite resources have won. They hired the best and the brightest engineers to hack our minds and steal our attention and they have succeeded beyond expectations. As evidence look that the market capitalization of Meta, etc. The data showing that children are reading way less compared to when I was growing up is consistent with what I see, but I did not an infinite ocean of distractions available via device that has become indispensable for modern living (i.e., the smart phone). By the time I was thirteen, I had read the Lord of the Rings to completion, but if I had grown up in present times I doubt that would be the case.
My friend has kids, 8 and 10, who run around outside and play with neighborhood kids as well as read books. They are very active in their kids lives and constantly bring them to events and other social gatherings. This keeps them active physically and socially making things like screen time seem boring.
The shitty parents are the ones who let meta and the like hack them to the point where their children are just following by example - if you stare at the screen all day, so will they.
If the system is such that you have to be an exceptional parent not to fuck up your kids, the system is the problem. Like I applaud your friend with kids, but I think its worth considering that their might be an issue if you need to be working very hard to give your kids a stimulating, healthy, childhood.
Of course kids are reading less. When I was growing, there was frequently not much else to do. Reading was replaced by movies and shows on demand and wont come back no matter what educators or parents do.
It is cheaper, easily available and more fun.
Sure kids also use social networks. But the role reading had was mostly taken over by Netflix, youtube, disney and such.
>Reading was replaced by movies and shows on demand and wont come back no matter what educators or parents do.
... huh?
I'm a parent and this just isn't true. My wife and I have phones, our young children do not. We do not own a tablet. Our children have never known what it's like to have the option of resorting to a screen to keep them busy when we're out of the house. TV time is limited on the weekends, extra limited on the weeknights.
My oldest absolutely loves reading, and I watched her sit in the corner for 90 minutes on Sunday with a pile of books and a massive grin on her face the whole time. My youngest is still too young to read, but I'm hoping for results within the same realm.
Your comment about there frequently not being much else to do? It's up to parents to, for lack of a better phrase, teach kids how to be bored.
Edit:
>It's cheaper, easily available and more fun.
What's super fun, easily available and free for us is going to a park on the weekend to play and have lunch, and then driving around to a bunch of Little Free Libraries in the area. Drop off books we don't want, see if the kids or parents find anything that strikes our fancy. Our kiddos love it and so do we, it's great family time.
I wish people would understand that their personal experience doesn't automatically generalise to collective trends.
It's great that your kids are reading, but clearly a lot of kids, and even more adults, aren't.
It's not just "up to parents" because the media, in all its forms, sets collective values.
And the strategic problem in the US is that reading - and culture in general - is caught between a number of competing ideologies, most of which are destructive to what's usually understood as education both in and out of school.
What individual parents do is downstream of all of those cultural influences. It's heavily dependent on socioeconomics, opportunity, and status, with error bars that depend on a random range of individual values.
The US is a competing patchwork of wildly incompatible cultures and traditions, some of which are directly opposed to each other, and all of which - in practice - are suspicious of traditional educational goals.
Put simply, no one is driving the bus. So it's stuck in a ditch, with its wheels spinning. And it's about to burst into flames.
There's only so much individual parents can do to fix that. The problems are strategic and political, not individual, and they're much harder to fix than they seem.
>Fewer than 1 in 5 (18.7%) 8- to 18-year-olds told us that they read something daily in their free time in 2025, again, the lowest levels we've recorded, with daily reading levels decreasing by nearly 20 percentage points since 2005.
Your kids are small. They wont have other kids in school to talk about books with and to show them different books. The discovery of books and social aspect of it ends with you. It is completely different social environment compared to what I had. There used to be cheap junk book stories, journals about books, things like that. These do not really exist anymore, but similar structures exist for movies.
Assuming they will social, they will have friends to talk with them about anime shows and they will go visit them to watch those shows in their house. The kids in school will talk about anime, about netflix shows, but not about books.
> It's up to parents to, for lack of a better phrase, teach kids how to be bored.
You have full control while they are small. That goes away quickly and obviously even should go away.
But even more importantly, my parents and parents of my peers did not had to put that much work into us reading. They did not had to make the one big family project, they could have spend their weekends working in garden or going to play golf ... and generally speaking kids ended up reading a lot more anyway. They would read, because it was easily available and only fun thing to do.
> What's super fun, easily available and free for us is going to a park on the weekend to play and have lunch, and then driving around to a bunch of Little Free Libraries in the area.
It is not fun except for small kids. All these stats are about kids with agency which yours do not have yet.
- There's also a reward issue, in that reading, especially long form is "soft punished." It's not directly punished, yet there's very little reward, mostly a lot of struggle, not much of the candy feedback of TV, movies, and video games. It requires personal imagination and visualization of often difficult concepts rather than simply taking what someone else has "imagined correctly" for you. If you've never seen the Lord of the Rings movies, imaging what Frodo, Aragorn, and the rest are actually doing, where they're going, and the struggling through Tolkien's complicated prose is quite challenging. And socially, there's also significant peer pressure issues involved, that evoke “epidemic” or “contagion” comparisons. Once large numbers of peers discount reading, then the population on average starts receiving negative feedback. Notably, if peers are high achievers, then students who interact with these peers may also adopt those habits. [1]
- Part that's less nefarious, like a teen highlights about the difficulties of reading in this paper [2] (pg 34.) "You can’t ask a book to explain what it means right now. I go to people because of their interactive nature."
- The social media companies and the world wide web culture in general have also implemented a form of reading detriment. There's little reward to blogging, writing, or reading long form writing. Incendiary writing and rage-farming was long ago found to be an extremely effective tactic compared to informative discussion. And a lot of the time, almost all you can look forward to with your informative post is your contribution being aggressively scraped, while being compensated nothing, and then churned out to make someone else money.
- There's actually a few positive though, apparently teen and juvenile literature is actually increasing in sales somewhat from [2] compared with adult literature sales. Young adult books have been the fastest-growing category over the last 5 years, with print unit sales jumping by 48.2% since 2018. 35.03 million print copies of young adult (YA) books are sold each year as of 2022. [3]
- You may be slightly down biasing how much people read Lord of the Rings. The Hobbit edition from 2007 has 76,000 ratings and 12,000 reviews on Amazon. [4]
I wonder how much of the YA uptick is driven by adults who prefer less-challenging reading. If that's the case it just makes the picture appear even more bleak.
It’s mostly that. Basically the only genres that still sell meaningful numbers are YA (with lots of adult readers, and if we want to count that as its own genre) and romance (99.9% of which isn’t more challenging than average YA, and usually has even less going on as far as ideas and theme—not to knock it, I mean hell, it’s no worse a use of time than tons of other things).
Adult genre fic, even, is dying, and lit-fic has long been in decline and has pretty much just been for a few nerds since roughly the turn of the millennium.
I think the decline of reading is exactly what’s pushed publishers and agents to favor easier and easier books: you have to pursue as much of the market as possible to make money now because the whole market’s not that big, so you can’t afford to exclude readers. That means favoring ever-easier books as readership declines.
The only other route to make a living is aiming straight at film/TV adaptation, which is very hard to break into but a handful of authors have successfully specialized in that. Their books do OK but they’re watched, as it were, way, way more than they’re read.
The level of tolerance for phone use in the classroom in the last decade blows my mind. It would be like letting kids pull out a GameBoy back in the 2000s, which where I was would have it promptly confiscated.
I was thinking about that recently. I don’t anyone ever pulling out a Game Boy in elementary or middle school in the 90s, even though many of us had them at home.
It’s not that we all got a lecture about no video games in school. It just very self-evidently wasn’t a place you would play video games. It would be like getting a pizza delivered to you at the doctor’s office. Just absurd.
I remember a kid with a Game Gear on the elementary school bus and even that being, well, unusual enough I remember it. Kind of similar to how kids will always remember seeing someone’s family pet run on the bus, because it blows their minds that it can even happen.
by the time i was in elementary school, it was common enough for geeky kids to have game boys at school. this was the height of the pokemon craze, after all.
not in class, of course, but at lunch and on the bus, it was fair game.
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.
Is there any study or evidence supports that MOST parents "watch TV, stare at their phones and don't want to be bothered by anything that requires effort?"
This is a common trope but I've never seen any evidence.
If I'm in those situations and staring at my phone, it's because I forgot to bring a book. Staring into the middle distance while my kid sits on the bench for fifteen minutes and a bunch of kids I don't know ineptly play soccer, or closely watching my 500th hour of kids playing "tag", is a last resort. Hell sometimes I'll just start trying to find weird bugs or something.
I do also play with them, but I'm not one of the parents who's always playing with them any time they're playing, they also need space to figure their own stuff out. Adults can do other things a lot of the time, it's fine.
Parents aren’t supposed to be engaged when kids are engaging in free play at the playground or under the supervision of a coach. That’s the definition of a helicopter parent.
Taking your kid to a playground is a parents chance to get a break! Everyone judges parents constantly and blames them for everything, parents in general are doing their best.
It's legit kind-of great, because you can't be doing much productive, so the dozen things you should be doing (most of them due to kids...) if you were at home are out the window. You can just chill for a long stretch of time, without concern. Taking your kids to the park or whatever is awesome, it's one of the best breaks a parent gets during daylight hours.
Or you can knock out some schedule stuff or teacher-emailing or bill-paying or whatever that you'd otherwise have to cram in some other time, that's nice too.
I find restaurants more eye-opening. Amount of toddlers being fed while their mind is zombified with a screen are astonishing. Parents don't want to put effort in engaging the child and screen is an easy legal drug.
Gen x’er. My parents didn’t help me with homework. I was expected to be independent. There was a culture shift in 2000s and we are involved daily with our kids and their homework. This is all anecdotal and I can’t find any studies on the subject.
I graduated from high school less than ten years ago. I'm sure screens have become a big issue in many (or most) schools, but that was not the case at my high school. It still was mostly daycare, not education, so banning screens will not be enough.
> Most parents just watch TV, stare at their phones and don't want to be bothered by anything that requires effort.
You must live in a very sad place. This does not describe the average parent of any of the kids around me. I know these people exist, but it’s not the norm at least in my state.
The most common complaint among my teacher friends is about helicopter parents who are too involved.
I generally agree. However, I don't think most parents are neglectful for using a screen. The ones that can't be bothered would just be drinking, reading gossip magazines, going to bars, or whatever else they felt like if screens simply stopped existing.
Admittedly my kids get more screen time than I'd like, but we try to make it educational. An observation that I made that is on topic for this thread, is that there are very few modern US shows that seem to fit our criteria of being educational and not over-stimularing. It seemes there are many more international shows that are better.
It’s a function of time. For far too many people, the existence of modern life consumes more time than it did a generation ago. We work more hours, we work harder hours, we consume entertainment for more hours.
The costs of this societal shift fall on those who can’t compete for time. Student’s go unparented and unmentioned.
>Most parents just watch TV, stare at their phones and don't want to be bothered by anything that requires effort
This lazy "answer" to every parenting problem makes me roll my eyes nowadays. It's the equivalent of an umbrella hypothesis, a convenient excuse for not having to consider things in-depth, further justified by seeing parents when they are taking a break and assuming they're always like that.
Not only that, but it's a dead end for societal policy. Even if a person actually believed parents deserve the most blame for kids' educational outcomes, that person should recognize there's no real way to influence this (short of dystopic levels of forcing kids into foster care). They would then find the second most blame-worthy cause to fix.
> Most parents just watch TV, stare at their phones and don't want to be bothered by anything that requires effort
Citation? I've routinely seen statistics suggesting the opposite, that parents are moreI involved with their children in the modern time and more likely to play and engage with children.
I’ve seen stay at home parents who put their kids in daycare so they can spend the day shopping and effectively have someone else raise their kids. Their kids end up largely just being status symbols. I’ve also seen parents that go everywhere with their kids, schedule every moment of their day and won’t even let them stand at the school bus stop by themselves. The parents build their entire lives around their kids and live vicariously through them.
IMO, kids need a proper balance and I don’t think a lot of them are getting that.
what you are suggesting means that economic activity will decrease. we are a consumerism driven society, we want people looking at screens and watching ads. that's how we grow the economy.
I think the root of the problem is that education is no longer seen as a fundamental foundation to a better life. Kids aren't doing well because kids don't care. They don't care because their parents don't care.
Why don't they care? I think for many, they have given up any hope that a better life is possible. So education isn't the key, because nothing is the key, because the door doesn't even exist.
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.
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.
I followed a different approach with my son. We gave him a phone pretty early, and didn't even have a lot of rules around it (no family controls, etc).
The agreement I had with him: "Scroll all day, play video games, etc. That is my side of the agreement. And you also do your school work, learn, practice for exams, homework, etc. That is your side of the agreement. I'll trust you. If your grades get worse, i.e. you need help managing device time, we'll review/change this agreement."
We also sat down many times looking at content together, in attempt to teach him what's trust-worthy and what isn't, what's "healthy" and what isn't, etc. And of course we do other things together as well.
So far (knock on wood) my son has managed well - he is 16 now. He organizes his own time, and has learned when to play and when to work. And crucially he has learned when to disconnect from his devices to do what's necessary.
No kid is the same. I am not saying my approach is best or even right, I just offer it as another data point.
We did something similar with our now 12yo. She self-regulates and tries to stay off the worst doom scrolling garbage sites, and tries to explore different sites and such like Pinterest cards and so on. She knows intellectually that the apps and services are designed to suck away attention. This kinda broke my heart but the other day she made a "bored jar" probably based on a Pinterest card which is a jar filled with little scraps of paper with ideas for what to do when you're bored. It felt like I was watching a drowning person trying their best to stay afloat if that makes sense.
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.
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.
In Japan and China, high-stakes entrance exams come earlier and play a stronger role than in the U.S. In China, the zhongkao (high school entrance exam, around age 15) and gaokao (college entrance exam, age 18) largely determine access to selective schools and universities. In Japan, competitive entrance exams for high schools (age 15) and universities (age 18).
That's really underselling it. Gaokao determines where you can live, where you can work, who your friends are, occasionally how much your family values you. They shut down airspace and conduct military/police patrols during examinations to sniff out cheaters. It's only the very wealthy who can just uproot their lives and send their kids to an Ivy/Stanford/Oxbridge/MIT and just skip the whole thing.
Responding to the OC, this is a downright awful solution to the current education problem in the U.S.
I grew up a white kid in a very (90+%) Asian community. IMO, the biggest difference I observed comparing my white friends from other communities to my Asian friends in my community was the expectation of excellence. For the Asian kids, either they were succeeding, above and beyond, or they were a failure. "B is for 'Better not come home tonight', A is for 'Adequate'", as the jokes went.
And some of those kids still struggled. But the response was to push harder. Didn't get adequate grades that school year? You're not doing anything fun this summer, you're studying. Needless to say it was a culture shock going to college and meeting people who were shockingly cavalier about potentially failing classes.
Cultural pressure towards education, and phone bans left and right. Also, people are still addicted to their phones, including kids. But more controlled, I guess.
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.
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.
I get it especially with younger ages, but on the other hand if the student is persistently disruptive they should be removed for the sake of the other students. It's also unfair that 1 student hinders the education of 20+ others.
Segregating overachievers and underachieves essentially means we should have separate schools for boys and girls. Let the boys crash and have the girls excel. However, people tend to get upset when you tell them that the strongest predictor for academic success is gender so they quickly abandon that idea. :P
I do agree there's a disparity between educational outcomes in men and women - but I don't think you can immediately draw your conclusion:
Baked into it is the assumption that current education models fit both genders equally. Boys respond better to active learning and competitive techniques than the more passive techniques used currently. (Could we just as easily draw the opposite conclusion if our current educational culture was geared towards boys?)
Another thing to consider is the various programs that incentivise/enable girls to get into various subjects (in my n=1 experience I had much fewer programs (programming, robotics, maths, etc.) to join despite being already very interested and strong in those subjects).
By comparing age groups directly we are also not controlling for the fact girls mature faster making them better students earlier in life. We are also not considering tail effects of a normal distribution: e.g. top 5% of all students are male, but majority of students in the top 50% are female.
Maybe the solution is to segregate schools on gender, but that doesn't immediately equate to boys crashing and girls excelling.
I agree and I don't think gender-segregated schooling is a wise idea. But the argument is Kryptonite to those who favor school segregation because they realize that they more likely than not would end up in the loser group. Works wonders on race baiters too, who has to come up with "reasons" why girls beating boys is the result of "unfairness" while whites beating blacks is "natural".
We did something similar. My daughter got her first phone last month, just in time to start high school. And I'm happy to say that the school district adjusted their mobile phone policy this year from being pretty restrictive, to an outright ban. I completely support that.
We've got one locked-down shared phone for our kids, for scheduling stuff with friends and calling & texting relatives or whatever. We almost have a teen so we'll see how long we can keep that up, but we only relented that much within the last year and a half, zero phones before that (which seems like it should be normal, but there are a lot of e.g. 4th grade classrooms out there where most of the kids have phones, seems super popular especially among the Fussellian middle class, I think in part for status reasons, like, "well if my kid doesn't have a phone people will think it's because we can't afford it!" which of course Fussell's upper-middle and higher don't give a shit about, so there's less child phone-ownership among them)
> e.g. 4th grade classrooms out there where most of the kids have phones, seems super popular especially among the Fussellian middle class, I think in part for status reasons, like, "well if my kid doesn't have a phone people will think it's because we can't afford it!" which of course Fussell's upper-middle and higher don't give a shit about, so there's less child phone-ownership among them)
Great onservation and great Fussell reference.
Some/much of the content in Class is a bit dated now, but imho it is still very directionally correct.
Having learned a bit about adult developmental psychology, many of his observations are found in and predictable by modern cognitive psychology.
Fussell was such a fun read, and so useful in little (also fun) ways.
I distinctly remember seeing, several years ago, a photo of one of (I swear this is going to be basically apolitical) Trump's kids with their family, including one or more kids with toys, sitting in some kind of living-space with this perfectly spotless mirrored-on-all-sides table, and I was like "FUSSELL!!!!". Or all the gold in photos of that family in their home environments (a signal aimed squarely at Fussell's "Middle", which thinks "gold shit everywhere" is an "upper" signal, which it is not—unlike the mirrored table, which is Upper, because nobody who ever does their own cleaning would willingly deal with a fingerprint-magnet like that)
I guess one could quibble about the effectiveness of testing, but the longer trend was… upwards. Eyeballing the math graph, we’re at 55% basic competence. The peak was 65%. But doing a totally informal eyeball projection, we ought to be above 70% by now.
We're seeing more districts ban cell phones in the classroom. It makes sense; in my day, the most you could do is text and play Tetris. We didn't have apps that were weaponized to capture our attention and memory like the kids do now.
People keep talking about how catastrophic it was to close schools during COVID. We keep having catastrophes and no one does anything about it. If the kids missed school, make them go back longer. Large chunks of the country still have 2-3 months where the kids don't do anything; send them back then. If they are already doing year-round schooling, cancel after-school athletics and make them learn with that time instead.
It's weird to me that cell phones in the classroom is even controversial. When I was in school, some kids had Walkmans, CD players, and game boys. You could bring them to school but they weren't allowed in the classroom without prior approval. In class, you were expected to pay attention to the teacher, even if you didn't want to. If you got caught with a device instead of listening, the teacher simply took it away until after class. If you kept bringing it in, you'd lose it until the end of the week, semester, or school year.
This doesn't seem to be a thing anymore, and there probably multiple sad reasons why.
To be very blunt: trashy parents with too much time on their hands will become enraged and raise a huge stink if their kid can't text them or answer their calls(!) while in class. So many will do this that schools just gave up.
That's why it's nice when states just make it a law. That shuts those people up (or at least forces them to go complain somewhere else, where they're more easily ignored and it takes more effort so they'll probably just give up).
(That's the middle-class schools—in really rough schools, teachers have to pick their battles because actual violence is on the table as a response, even among lower elementary kids, and admin's too busy dealing with things way more serious than some kid texting in class to back teachers up on small stuff like that)
To be fair, there’s also a set who think their kid needs a phone on them at all times so they can make a call if there’s a school shooting. This doesn’t make any statistical sense as a justification (it might if more “school shootings” were indiscriminate mass shootings, but only a very tiny fraction are—not to downplay them, at all, but there are a couple statistical sieves here filtering for “a personal cell phone a student had saved a life” and the very first one is already filtering it down to almost nothing) but it’s a little easier to sympathize with the basic impulse, at least.
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.
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.
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?
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.
- 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.
My oldest has done both common core math(kinder and 1st grade) and Singapore math(2nd through 5th). Both emphasize understanding over procedure and repetition. I do think in the long run it's more valuable since she has an understanding of concepts instead of just having things memorized. She never really her learned her multiplication tables as it was never required, her homework is real world word problems that challenge even me. I think it's much more valuable than rote memorization that traditional math education focused on. It's just a lot of work from both the teacher and the student. That's the challenge teaching these types of math educations over traditional math.
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.
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.
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?
It does. I went down a rabbit hole for this once and yes children of immigrants underperform for math and reading testing v immigrant groups. Can go dig up the .gov links assuming they didnt go away
That’s a strange one. The highest performing public schools are generally where Chinese and Indian origin kids are a significant minority - I.e. around 20-30%.
Every immigrant I've known that's around my age has told me basically the same story. When they came to the US as a child, and got put into public school, they struggled with reading (they could barely speak English, much less read it), but they excelled at math. I've heard this from people born in China, Taiwan, Mexico, Iraq, Iran, Japan, etc.
Is every immigrant you've known about your age someone you met through work / school and do you work in tech / on a STEM degree? If so then your sample is obviously biased.
Not supposed to think about it according to whom? Who's telling you that? Why are you listening to him?
The US has some of the best public schools in the world. The US also tops the world on spending per student, especially in poorly performing areas. The education crisis disappears when you control for demographics.
It's right to notice that and remains right no matter how much pushback you get from people who've been pushing the same broken solutions for 50 years.
Congratulations for adopting an independent perspective here. We need more of you.
Are you serious? Because I've heard it argued that this is one of the fundamental differences in the approach between left and right. The left thinks money can solve all problems if we just spend more of it in the right place. The right thinks there is a cultural problem to be solved.
I'm generally quite progressive but I am beginning to appreciate that the right may have a good argument.
> The right thinks there is a cultural problem to be solved.
That's also the left. The right holds the differences are genetic, not likely to change, and the only problem to solve is how to keep them out of the country.
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.
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.
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.
Regardless of the colorability of your argument, you're responsible for how it hits and shapes the thread, and whether you intended to or not, you led off with a a clause that comes across "tee-hee aren't I edgy", which makes it difficult to read good faith into the rest of the comment. If you're writing something that could be misread as a step into a racewar thread, longstanding HN norms (let me know if you need admin cites) put the onus on you to write carefully so you won't be misread, and, in some cases, there's no way to effectively prevent those misreadings and you simply should not write the comment.
We just need to compare with country of origin performance. If a family relocates from a place with low scores to a place with high scores, can you explain why you think we would expect their scores to rapidly increase to match the new place? I can think of many factors that would work against this that have nothing to do with race or genetics.
If the study is not controlled for this, then the education system at large may not have the kind of problem we would think about if we ignored this aspect. That seems pretty important to the discussion, I think?
I don't think it necessarily does come in! I just think you have to be careful about this stuff, and the comment you wrote wasn't careful. I wouldn't care, except it spawned a gnarly thread --- that thread is what I noticed first, not anything you wrote.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I guess your teachers failed you, since that's a hasty generalization (your experience isn't universal) and a non sequitur (defunding public schools wouldn't address the problem of poor schooling).
It's hard to talk about public education on HN because so many people posting here live in exclusive and expensive Bay Area communities with some of the best public schools in the world.
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.
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.
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.
What is the video supposed to suggest? I think it's extremely hard to conclude anything from a plot of the teacher's position over time throughout the classroom.
Is staying at the front a sign that the teacher is lazy and not helping students? Or is it that the students are competent enough without aid? That could be good if it indicates your students have been taught well enough to master the material. But it could also be bad, indicating your school does not offer enough incremental challenge, and students who are beyond their current level, but not high enough for the next level (honors or whatever), never reach their full potential.
There's far too many uncontrolled variables here. Also, it seems the wikipedia-on-ipfs page for Stigler is down.
Ignoring your huge generalisations based on one silly picture and a bunch of Asian clichés, I think you have a point when it comes to the group thing.
When I was in school, most work & learning happened on the individual level. Sometimes in pairs, where we would have to check each other's answers. But from what I see among my younger relatives and friends with children, there's a lot of group learning going on these days. Groups of five doing all kinds of projects in pretty much any class on any subject. Maybe it's fun to collectively build a diorama of ancient rome for history class, but I doubt you'll improve your maths skills much in this way.
Is this a consequence of a teacher shortage? Are kids in these groups supposed to help other kids? Are they supposed to learn cooperating with (or leeching off) others, at the cost of learning useful skills for themselves?
If it's not clear, arts and crafts sessions are occasionally included in classroom material, especially at younger ages. A single picture is not indicative of how most classrooms operate, or even how this particular classroom operates most of the time. It looks like a quick group project for a basic presentation on some subject matter.
> Why are the students sitting in groups and cutting paper with scissors?
Because paper cutters are too easy to disassemble as re-use as a shiv machete? And anyway, it's pretty hard to make cloudy curves with a paper cutter.
> 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.
When someone links to a video I assuming that the video was heavily edited and cherry picked to show whatever point they want. I'm not wrong often enough to bother clicking on yours.
I find it interesting that James W Stigler doesn't even have a wikipedia page. I'm not sure what that means, but he somehow isn't very notable despite having written popular books and being a university professor. (or he is so controversial that they can't agree on one - which is a sign to not take him too seriously)
Well, someone has to write the page. They don't self-manifest. The draft is currently here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Draft:James_W._Stigler but was rejected for mainspace because it was written too promotionally. It will take some work, but he looks to be notable enough to deserve the article.
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.
> 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.
It's easy to blame the teachers unions, but if their goal was to only raise their own salaries and benefits, they are doing a very poor job at it. Teachers do not get paid well. They also tend to get paid more at the elite private schools. So if you want to compare, then you would be advocating for public schools to match private school salaries.
While not always the case, "measuring progress" makes things worse because they tried this and what you get is standardized tests and teachers teaching to the test (Goodhart's law). Most (not all, there are crap teachers out there) are doing their best despite the rules imposed on them by local schoolboards (which are often a shitshow), and by curriculum mandates which they have no say in. And when given too large classes and next to no resources or support, they are then blamed when the kids don't prosper in that environment. There's grade inflation also, this happens at private schools too. Which teacher is more likely to get fired/disciplined; one who fails a lot of students and hardly ever gives and A, or one that hands out A's like candy and the worst non-performing students get a maybe C- (brought up to a C or C+, once the parents come in to complain to administration).
> It's easy to blame the teachers unions, but if their goal was to only raise their own salaries and benefits, they are doing a very poor job at it.
They do a pretty good job at it when you factor in long term pensions and health care.
> Teachers do not get paid well.
Teachers get paid too much. They create artificial barriers like requiring multiple years of certifications to purposefully limit the pool of competition. Most teachers unions are closed shops that mandate membership.
> They also tend to get paid more at the elite private schools. So if you want to compare, then you would be advocating for public schools to match private school salaries.
If I could waive a wand to immediately increase public teacher’s salaries by 25% in exchange for the elimination of all tenure (which does not exist at K-12 private schools), I would do it immediately.
> While not always the case, "measuring progress" makes things worse because they tried this and what you get is standardized tests and teachers teaching to the test (Goodhart's law).
There’s plenty of objective things to measure in math and science. If little Johnny can’t do basic arithmetic or solve 3x+2=11, you can’t fake that during an exam.
At least with teaching to the test, the kids learned the material on the test.
If you don’t measure things, you will not improve it. And teachers unions are adamantly against measuring things. Because they know it can and will be used against them. It’s an inherent conflict of interest.
> They do a pretty good job at it when you factor in long term pensions and health care.
They only get good pensions and health care because school districts refuse to give them better salaries instead. And good health care (really, health insurance) is crucial because health care costs can obviously bankrupt you in America.
> They create artificial barriers like requiring multiple years of certifications to purposefully limit the pool of competition
How is requiring the equivalent of a master's degree an "artificial barrier"? Surely, new teachers should have some experience and theoretical background before standing in front of 30-100+ students and being responsible for their education?
Florida passed a law making it possible for veterans to teach without even having a bachelor's degree. Does that sound like a good idea to you? Would requiring even a bachelor's degree be an "artificial barrier" in your opinion?
I'm not as familiar with the US, but Australia moved from requiring teachers to complete a 1-year graduate diploma, to a 2-year master of education. This is effectively doubling the commitment for someone to transfer into teaching from another field.
Requiring anything at all is by definition an artificial barrier. Some are justified and some are not. In this case, I question whether a longer education necessarily benefits students.
An average teacher salary in Chicago projected in their new contract is $110,000, plus pensions and heathcare on top of that. What better salary do you have in mind? An average individual salary in Chicago is about 45k.
They are still wining about this number and go on strikes pretty much every other year.
> Teacher’s unions, which predominantly exist in the public school system, are not in the business of educating children
I'm always surprised and disappointed to see such lazy thinking on HN. If teachers' unions were responsible for poor educational outcomes, you would see an inverse relationship between strong teachers' unions and K-12 rankings.
But New Jersey and Massachusetts consistently rank in the top 2 K-12 rankings in the US. And they have ~100% union density among K-12 public school teachers!
Let's test the rest of your little theory. If you believe that pesky teachers' unions are responsible for poor outcomes, then surely states with less teacher's union density and union power will be the epitome of strong K-12 outcomes.
But who ranks at the bottom? New Mexico at #50, Alaska at #49, Oklahoma at #48...
You might, at this point, sensibly say that's due to residents having less money and other disadvantages. But at that point you have to admit that teachers' unions have no correlation to K-12 outcomes.
> Just looking at the picture triggered me. Why are the students sitting in groups and cutting paper with scissors?
So, I'm going to flag this as a perfect example of legibility vs. legitimacy[0]. You, probably AP's writers, and much of the public perceive learning as ocurring in a certain way. That isn't the way that 'the best' learning occurs, its the way that most closely resembles where we think learning occurs. Going further, it is much easier to interpret a lecture hall as a learning activity because it is easy to perceive what is being 'learned'. You sort of say it yourself. you are asking a why question about what is being learned - it is less legibile - and that is leveraged into an inference that less is being learned - i.e., it is less legitimate.
The problem is that the comparison you are making is false - but deeply embedded in our minds. Students *feel* like they learn more in lectures than in 'active learning' classes.However, when their actual knowledge is tested the oppostie is actually true. The students perception and actual learning are at odds and mediated by the environment[1]. It is, again, easy to sit in a lecture and overstate (i.e., feel like) you're learning because you are watching someone who is an expert talk about something. No metacognitive monitoring is required on the student's part. In contrast, it is really easy to perceive yourself as struggling in a class where your learning process and your failures in that process become visible. Students are taught to view failures/wrong answers as bad - so they view their process of learning as evidence of not learning.
Pedantically, no one in the picture you reference is cutting paper with scissors. There are scissors on the table, no one is cutting. You made an inference - inferences are important but difficult to test. They are working in groups to learn with peers (a science based best practice). I don't know exactly but I can infer it is related to math, possible learning to calculate area and estimate. Making that tangible, creating and measuring simple then more complex shapes helps them learn - its not arts and crafts. It leads to better conceptual understanding than an abstract explanation.
It may look different, but my hobby horse problem with US education is that everyone's vibes are treated as equivalent to actual scientific evidence. We regularly crator efforts to fix these problems simply because they don't look like the school that the parents went to. We had one parent try and ban school provided laptops (which are used for 20minutes / week) from my daughter's preK class because her kids are zero screen time. I can't imagine a parent in Japan or China even trying that.
As a CODA - measuring learning is shockingly hard. As an analogy, it is not deterministic it is quantum. Data tells us that if I ask demographic questions before a test, certain groups score lower than if I ask them at the end. If I ask a math question using a realistic scenario, students show higher conceptual understanding than if I ask them a fully abstracted question. If a student is hungry or tired that day, they will score lower. None of those are measuring the latent construct (e.g., math ability) that we need to estimate, even if it is a high variability measure.
They are cutting paper. You can see scraps of paper on the desk.
Of course “active” learning is better than passively sitting in a lecture. But these kids are not learning. They’re sitting in a group with scissors and markers making a X-y coordinate graph.
Your long diatribe fails to recognize the obvious: that middle school math class has turned into an art and hand labor class / day care.
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?
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.
Intuitively, I can understand that English Second Language students would struggle in classes other than English, but are the demographics really shifting enough to explain the drop in attainment shown in the article?
The above shows the share of "Non-Hispanic White alone" children (who I'll assume speak English as a first language) going from 52% to 48% from 2015-2024, and the percentage of "Children who speak a language other than English at home" staying flat at 22% from 2013-2023. From 2015-2024, math attainment goes from 62% to 55%.
At a glance, it would seem that the shift in math attainment cannot be explained by demographics/language alone.
The NAEP site has performance by student group sections. It includes breakdowns for Hispanic and English/non-English learners and includes a section on demographic changes (ctrl+f Group Population Percentages).
Hispanic population has shifted (+3-4%/report) and English learners have shifted (1-3%/report). [Note that reports have variable number (~2-5) of years between them]
English learner scores went up (or stayed the same) and non-English learner scores went down.
The big caveat of course that the English learner average score is still much lower than the non-English learner so if that population increased enough it still drags down the average. (Click the English learners to see their scores or see the National Student Group Score Distributions section for graphs that make this apparent).
But it has to be more complicated than "the English-learning Hispanic population increased" because if you look within racial groups: all groups except Asian are down within their own group.
Or, for example, girls' scores are down more than boys' scores even though girls' scores are still better than boys' on average in Reading (but worse in Math).
I think it's probably multiple factors all adding together.
For example, % of public charters has increased but public charter schools have worse scores than public non-charter. % of economically disadvantaged has increased and economically disadvantaged students have worse scores than those not. % of students with disabilities has increased and students with disabilities have worse scores than those without.
The weirdest thing to me is how the population statistics are different between reading and math. From 2019->2024 the reported Hispanic 12th Grade population shifted 3% for Reading but only 1% for Math?
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.
Florida has a huge hispanic population but is ranked #2 in K12 education rankings. Kids are actually remarkably fast at picking up on English even if they were born and raised in Spanish speaking homes or in Spanish speaking countries.
Curious what percentage of school districts fall into this purported category. And is that number continually increasing? Share some data on this please.
Using a metric like SAT math scores, the demographic breakdown is: Asian > White > Hispanic > Black.
The youth population is becoming less White and more Hispanic, therefore we should expect lower math scores.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
> 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?
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.
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.
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.
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%.
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)
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.
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.
> The best all-income schools are catholic schools, averaging at 1 grade level higher. Then private schools do even better
These are not equal comparisons. People who send their kids to a private school are choosing that, and thus care about the education their kids get. While Catholics are all income and choosing for religion reasons, generally catholic implies cultural care for education. Public schools take everyone including those who don't care about education.
In general public schools in the US are very good. However a small number in every school are kids that would be kicked out of private (including catholic) schools. There are also significant variation between schools with richer areas of a city doing better - despite often spending less on education.
> Charter schools have been the best bang for the buck.
That is a lot easier when you can require a transcript from the prospective student, review it, and say, "Uh, no thank you".
There's a private technical college near here that offers EMT and paramedic training. They "guarantee" "100% success in certification and registration" for their students.
How do they get there? They boot students out after they fail (<80%) their second test in the class.
I'm not necessarily opposed to such a policy. It is, however, intellectually dishonest of them to try to tout it as a better school for that reason. Charter schools are free to reject students who will bring their grade averages down.
Yeah, that's very selective. Catholic schools on the other hand just require you to be Catholic and be somewhat involved in the Parish and score much higher.
I believe this is not only restricted to Catholic schools though they are the most common. Most religious schools have higher scoring students.
If nothing else, parental involvement correlates with higher test scores and being enrolled in a non-default school correlates with parent involvement. So it's no surprise that being enrolled in a non-default school correlates with higher test scores.
IMHO, we always hear about such and such school (system) has X% kids proficient with $Y/year per pupil. But what I would really want to know about a school is how does a year change at the school change the proficiency of the class. If the class of 3rd graders starts the year at 20% proficient at 2nd grade level, and ends at 22% proficient at 3rd grade level, that might be a good school, even though a single point in time check says 22% proficient. But the numbers we get aren't really useful for that; a cohort analysis would be better; there's real privacy implications, but that doesn't make the numbers we get useful. :P
Catholic schools in Australia don't required you to be Catholic. Although, I'm sure most kids are. And enrolling there will expose you to Catholic teaching.
I wonder if USA schools are similar. It's next to impossible to require belief.
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?
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.
I'm sorry but some F rated schools getting closed down needed to happen.
There are institutions either so toxic at the administrative level or so heavily populated with kids with behavioral issues that it's impossible to fix without divvying up the student population into other schools that can better handle the load.
NCLB had some flaws but that wasn't one of them. Before NCLB you were stuck in the poor school district your likely single parent could afford to live in, inevitably doomed to poor education.
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.
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.
from 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.
That's by design. France has a cabinet with full control over education in the entire nation. In the United States, education is in the hands of locally elected school boards and the role of the federal and state secretaries of education seems to be mostly limited to dumping money on those people. (And attaching conditions to that money in general seems to be fairly controversial, as the present discussion shows.)
There's no way such a system can produce uniform results.
(The wisdom in forcing voters to elect all sorts of local commissions is another matter entirely. I struggle to see how anyone can make an informed choice, in ballots with 10 or more elected positions, but they seem normal in America.)
The US has always had a state-run or private education system, since even before it was founded as a country. And the U.S. is among the top 10 most educated countries in the world, with over 50% of population having at least a bachelor's degree.
It's pretty simple to vote on local offices: are you happy with the current state of education in your district? Good, keep the incumbents around. Otherwise change out school board members until you achieve the desired results.
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.”
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
There is also quite a difference between being able to type out and read short messages to friends like "who wants to go to the park today" or read a menu and know if a sandwich has mustard on it or not and being able to have deeper inferential and evaluative understandings of written thoughts and ideas.
I think back to some college peers who even in some more basic classes could clearly read the words of the assigned writings, they couldn't then parse out the deeper meanings behind the assignments. They weren't illiterate, you could ask them to read a passage, and they'd be able to say all the words. You could ask them face value questions about the text, and they'd probably be able to answer most questions right. But any deeper analysis was just beyond them. So, when the professor would ask deeper questions, they'd say "I don't know where he's getting this, the book didn't talk about that at all".
Agree, but I'm not sure how much worse this is today?
I avoided English Lit in college but thinking back to High School I recognize the "I don't know where he's getting this" reaction. I just rarely engaged with the so-called "classic" stuff we had to read, and like you say I had no trouble reading the words but struggled with deeper meanings or even just getting past the archaic language. And this was in the early 1980s, no chance it was influenced by social media or mobile phones or AI. My parents probably blamed television.
At least we now have AI, where a student could (if motivated) ask questions about the meaning of a passage and get back a synthesis of what other people have written about it. Back then I used Cliffs Notes to do that.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Yeah, if kids could do math they’d probably be asking questions like “why are we subsidizing Israel with billions and billions of dollars while my friends are on food stamps and free school lunches and still go hungry”
Or “why can’t my parent afford their health treatment while we give Israel billions of billions of dollars and they still want more”
If they could read, they’d probably read the Talmud & study the Torah, and realize that letting some small group schizophrenics inbreed for thousands of years was probably a bad idea.
I wonder who’s in charge of setting these standards in education for our children.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
The problem with that “culture” explanation is that white kids in America do fine in international educational comparisons. In the 2018 PISA assessment, 15 year old white american students were near the top in reading (behind only Singapore and some Chinese SEZs) and in the top echelon in science (comparable to Japan). Their weakest performance was math, where they’re around the middle, behind the top asian countries but only modestly behind Finland: https://nces.ed.gov/surveys/pisa/pisa2018/pdf/PISA2018_compi....
Insofar as the US had a “culture averse to education,” surely that affects white americans as much as it affects anyone else. But, on average, they are not the ones who are behind their peers internationally.
Skin color isn't it, actually.
I knew (second hand) a teacher in a rural area of a low population state. All white kids, she'd have kindergartners cussing her out. Very little hope for any academic future for the other grades as things didn't get better with the older kids.
I knew a white kid who lived in a trailer park whose mom was upset he was getting tutoring after school for his dyslexia because she told him he'd never amount to anything.
My mixed race friend mentioned he was accused of "acting white" in school because he actually tried to get good grades.
What do all of those things have in common? Poverty, yes, but blended with hopelessness. The kids were surrounded by people who didn't have much, didn't think they'd get anywhere, and didn't believe the kids would ever have a chance at a better life.
That last part is what separates them from kids in third world countries who still manage to achieve academic success. Hope and optimism aren't guarantees; they aren't a replacement for social support. They are, however, a necessary ingredient for the intrinsic motivation necessary for personal growth.
I don't appreciate reading anecdata in response to cited findings. It cheapens the discussion. Now everyone is going to spend time writing knee-jerk responses to you.
At least the parent commenter had the grace to reply with another source instead of falling for it.
Whose to say "cited findings" have any more value than "anecdata".
The institutions that build these national and international statistics do so with bias and goals, or without complete data. For example, how can a bureau make a national statistics on crime accurate when cities intentional report crime incorrectly to look better in statistics.
To think "cited findings" is gospel truth is naive. I know it's highly desired here, but I stand by what I'm saying. Data is lovely, but garbage in, garbage out, and most national-level data is complete garbage with an agenda or bias or naivety.
Anecdotes are not a very useful tool in discussions about generalisations. They provide little evidence aside from saying that it's a category of event that can exist. No one at any point has said citations are gospel. Just that anecdotes aren't adding much to the discussion at hand. If you've got issues with the cited data, be precise instead of casting general aspersions on academia.
Given that this is just a discussion between random strangers on an internet forum, I personally find both statistics and clear anecdotes, which GP provided, valuable in creating the richest perspective.
This isn't Proceedings of Hacker News or parliament: we're writing ephemeral internet words and trying to enrich each other.
The parent commenter’s “source” makes no claims about race related performance whatsoever - it measures by just about everything but that, and then sorts by country. So maybe this is one of those darned reflexive knee jerk responses.
Pages 16, 32, 50 and 62 have breakdowns of mean score by ethnicity actually.
Ethnicity is way too coarse-grained to answer questions about culture and family wealth/connections. That’s lumping together a kid from an old-money family in New Haven with a kid from a trailer park in Virginia.
> Skin color isn't it, actually.
Is contradicted by this
> My mixed race friend mentioned he was accused of "acting white" in school because he actually tried to get good grades.
Unless you are taking skin colour very literally, which is obviously not it (someone's academic performance is not going to change if they get a heavy tan or use s kin whitening cream or take a drug that changes skin colour etc.).
I interpreted "white" to mean an ethnic identity, not a literal description.
Please save us from sharing your racist delusions
"Poverty blended with hopelessness" sounds about right. I'd like to emphasize that it's not just poverty, since there are plenty of recent immigrant families who live in poverty but the kids are at the top of their class. Unfortunately, though, there's a certain kind of degeneracy some families live in: the parents have largely failed in their every endeavor, and they'll become absolutely furious if they see the kids starting to rise above that, get their lives together, and accomplish things. If you live in communities like that, it's part of the deal: no one is allowed to escape, lest they make the rest of them look bad.
It's not the poverty; it's the learned helplessness.
Sadly, there are a variety of such family, community, and social and peer group motivations and behaviors -
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crab_mentality
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crab_mentality#See_also
Rural low population states actually have pretty good test scores: https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/profiles/stateprofile?sfj=...
That's an understatement. Sort that by at or above basic and the top 5 states in the US are: North Dakota, South Dakota, Minnesota, Utah, Wisconsin.
Even in those states you mention, the number of students managing basic proficiency in maths fell by over 10 percentage points in the past 10 years. You can use the year selection on the site to see the picture change over the years. Texas dropped by over 20 points.
Nationally, seems to be mostly demographic change plus covid. For white 13 year olds, NAEP reading and math scores dipped a point from 2012-2020. Then they dipped 5-6 points from 2020-2023: https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/highlights/ltt/2023/
Interesting! Yeah, this is a significant decline across the board. I'm curious what it is in the US in particular that's driving such sharp declines. Because many places in the world did things like shut down schools during COVID, have internet/social media, ongoing obesity epidemics, major immigration from low education sources, demographic/fertility issues, and so on. Yet somehow looking at the latest PISA (2022) [1], the US now sits between Malta and Slovakia in math. And if these scores are any indicator, we're probably looking at a further decline in the next PISA results, which should be released this year.
[1] - https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/pisa-scor...
>"acting white"
Honestly this is one of the biggest bullshit I've ever heard. Assuming that this mentality is quite widespread(not necessarily universal) among non White, then any attempt to introduce affirmative action or other equalizer practice would be futile. That kind of mentality must be purged hard from yesterday.
Not t true. I don’t have the reference, but I read 10 or more years ago about an affluent community in the midwest whose black students greatly underperformed their white counterparts. The parents hired a black researcher and his final report said exactly that, that many black students didn’t want to appear white and also there were negative consequences for trying to do well. The parents thought it had to be racism and wouldn’t accept the results. The guy was a sociology professor at a college in CA.
For more annectdata, this same thing was happening at Berkeley High School around the same time. First hand knowledge from parents of students.
Teenage boys everywhere have a widespread bias against putting in the effort to get good grades.
They might call it "gay" or "sissy" or "acting white" or whatever, but the root cause is usually their perception of what masculinity should look like.
The men they look up to are anti-intellectual. This exists in all communities, race is not the main problem here.
Lack of role models, right? What men do they look up to?
I guess primary school teachers in the US are predominantly women as they are in most countries? So boys without intellectually inclined men at home or in their social circles do not have role models for educated masculinity.
That must be dealt with full spectrum crackdown on national level.
I'd like to see what a "full-spectrum crackdown" on anti-intellectualism in the US would look like, given that most of its population struggles to discern fact from fiction in the news cycle, healthcare and legal proceedings. The introduction of generative AI has only made that worse, pushing more distrust of any information that didn't come from a source counted among "one of us." Our problem stems from an intentionally poorly educated populace that still heavily relies on idolatry, allowing whatever demagogue with the means to rise and essentially manipulate the masses.
I'm pretty sure, at this point, this was intentional, individuals and orgs with the resources to create finely tuned systemic problems having been at it since the country's inception.
Banning TikTok could have been a great first step, but too may people were cooked by the algorithm to stop it.
FWIW, my friend was accused of acting white probably around the year 2000 or so, well before anything algorithmic.
Not to say that tiktok is innocent, but it certainly isn't the root cause.
Burning books and censoring media has rarely been a path to fostering intellectualism.
You call it an app ban, but really it’s just press censorship.
Media from mainstream to alternative march in tune with pro intellectualism messages. Any works of art that espouse anti intellectualism would be swiftly and immediately canceled (including its authors) without hesitation. Do this for a generation or two minimum.
Get sydney sweeny to date alec radford, make sure there's lots of PDA.
More delusion you are a part of.
Building things requires a sustained effort and understanding. You and your fellow Amaricans are drifting further and further from it.
How do you propose to do that?
I cannot think of any single ethnocultural group in the West that highly values education and, at the same time, has bad outcomes doing so. We have invested a lot of money and effort into our educational systems.
Even traditionally oppressed groups like the Jews or the Chinese (Chinese Exclusion Act anyone?) or descendants of Russian muzhiks or Indian untouchable castes do have good outcomes if they actually motivate their kids to learn.
The groups that are systematically out (in Czechia, the part of the Roma that lives in ghettos - contrary what people tend to think, a lot of the Roma marry into the wider society, mix with it and live quite comfortable self-sufficient lives) tend to be the ones that despise schooling, and it will take a century or so of concerted efforts to change the attitudes.
Jews were motived to achieve because they were oppressed.
How do Indian low castes do compared to higher castes in the same country? They often continue to suffer from discrimination from higher castes in the west. I can believe they do better than some other groups, but how to they compare to higher caste Indians?
I do not buy this poverty argument for the simple and clear argument that not only were much of humanity’s knowledge developed by “poor” people by that standard, but also equally poor different racial groups perform very differently, your anecdotal stories notwithstanding.
And yes, skin color itself is irrelevant, it is simply a convenient identifier for underlying significant biological differences. There is absolutely zero reason one would rationally conclude that biological differences would somehow magically stop at the brain. And that goes without saying that it’s not even “just skin color”, since even the most naive child can identify the race of any person where the skin color has been changed with photoshop. Have you seen those images where whites/asians have been made black and vice versa, etc?
We really need to move past these infantile ideologies like that we are all the same. The smart people can clearly see that has always been a gaslighting lie.
> And yes, skin color itself is irrelevant, it is simply a convenient identifier for underlying significant biological differences
No, its a terrible identifier.
If you group people by genetic similarity (which is of dubious usefulness) you essentially end up with three different black African races, one Australian, Pacific and Native American, and one everyone else.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_genetic_clustering
> it is simply a convenient identifier for underlying significant biological differences
It's actually not. Skin color does not correlate well with the genetic diversity among humans at all. It's just one particular trait that is very easy to identify by eye.
> There is absolutely zero reason one would rationally conclude that biological differences would somehow magically stop at the brain.
There is absolutely zero reason to rationally conclude that a random physical trait that happens to be easy to distinguish by eye correlates with brain function at all.
On the other hand, there are massive socioeconomic disparities that arise from the history of slavery, which easily explain both the disparities and the reasons why racists such as yourself want to boil things down to skin color.
All this demonstrates is that outcomes are not uniform, not that the culture explanation is necessarily wrong.
Schools in many urban districts where we see this same disparity control for teacher qualifications and per pupil student funding. In fact, various anti-poverty measures and intensive interventions on low performing schools even tip the scale in their favor on thr "supply" side.
Education isn't just something "delivered" like manufactured product; it is something that had to be properly received and used.
We have to start asking some better questions to uncover what's going on, and they will be a lot tougher to quantify.
I don't think that disproves the culture argument. American culture is segmented. (Modern marketing and politics have leaned heavily into this segmentation by the way.) For example, if you grow up exposed to ghetto culture you will probably not value education. The PISA assessment doesn't tell us that white kids who grew up in the ghetto are magically competing with Singapore's best. And we know that the ghetto is less white than the rest of America. Ergo in aggregate, US whites outperform. There are of course a million exceptions to this i.e. grow up in a certain type of Asian immigrant household and you will probably do great on these tests and maybe learn piano, violin etc. as well.
Now whether ghetto culture or ghetto economics is the main contributor to poor academic performance... I will leave that finer point up for debate, but my point here is the US has big differences in educational outcomes based on NEIGHBORHOOD, if your neighborhood is high crime and the schools are broke, your educational outcomes tend to be bad.
If there is a culture related problem, I think it's that the people pushing this trashy culture, for example music that glorifies rape, drugs and gangs, code it as black culture and use that as a way to deflect criticism. You're a racist if you don't like hip hop! It would be an understatement to say that many black Americans want nothing to do with that lifestyle or image and have evolved well beyond it, yet it still gets called black culture. It is a cultural weakness that we don't see rape, drugs and gangs as bad stuff to promote and reward, full stop, and not a thing we should be educating the next generation with, regardless of the skin color of the performer, or its roots.
BTW for whatever it's worth I'm white and I grew up in the ghetto. My parents forced me to take a public bus for an hour each morning to a magnet school in the rich part of town. Years later I met up with my white childhood friend from down the road who had gone to our local high school. I had a bunch of academic achievements and a college scholarship, he had a gunshot wound in his stomach. He was a smart guy when I knew him but the ghetto had its own plans for him.
Wow it's almost like racism is systemic
That’s crazy man! Hey, I don’t suppose it was controlled for income as well as race, was it?
>culture averse to education
Remind me when Vivek told his followers that American education need ti be more rigorous to compete with China and other Asian nations he got owned so hard, practically quiting from DOGE before it started.
Culture argument can be argued effectively as follows:
If a cohort in Japan has a median score of X at median household income Y, the American cohort with same median score X has income closer to 1.25Y or 1.5Y.
Whether you want to define your American cohort based on geography or ethnicity doesn't really matter-the result will be preserved up to a point.
That’s just because Americans are richer across the Board than Japanese. But would we expect PISA scores to track absolute income across different developed countries? I don’t think that follows. For example, Sweden’s median household income (PPP) is 2.6x higher than Poland’s. But the two countries had very similar scores on the 2018 PISA: http://hechingerreport.org/what-2018-pisa-international-rank...
I think one of the biggest factors comes down to single parent vs intact families.
Sweden has the highest proportion of single-parent households at 34% whereas Poland is near the bottom at 9% [1].
[1] https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-eurostat-news/-/e...
I'm interested; do you have any good stats for that?
The racial achievement gap is probably one of the most significant problems educators in the US think about. I think one of the biggest obstacles to improving it (not causing the problem, but making solutions difficult or ineffective) is that low-performing urban school districts tend to correlate strongly with strong teachers' unions and big, mismanaged school administrations where things are too bureaucratic and incompetent for anybody to be able to really effect significant change.
I'm not sure I support charter schools as a universal good, but they've actually proven to be pretty consistently effective at improving the educational attainment of low-income black/hispanic students [0-1]. When the local school system is a political quagmire and objectively failing in its mission to educate students, it's probably the only way out.
The meta-problem is that the people most actively involved in improving the racial educational achievement gap are precisely the type of people to reflexively dislike charter schools (because it's "right wing", although I see it more aligned with the centralization vs decentralization axis) and maybe even feel overtly threatened by them (because of their union job). Also, charter schools have to actually figure out how to get buy-in from low-income black and hispanic parents, figure out how to serve this community better, and can't hide behind the excuse of cyclical poverty + orwellian bureaucracy anymore.
I think a lot of educators really would rather work in a system where bad outcomes are guaranteed and thus not their fault, than one in which they actually have the ability to make more than just performative progress in serving the needs of their underprivileged student body.
[0] https://hechingerreport.org/proof-points-charter-schools-hav...
[1] https://www.kqed.org/news/11953408/charter-schools-show-gain...
Why do you assume racial achievement gaps indicate problems with schools? For example, Asian students perform much better than white students. We don’t say that indicates a problem with how schools educate white kids. Instead, most people see it as a predictable consequence of asian immigrants being filtered for higher education. By that same token, why would we treat Hispanic students having lower scores as indicative of a problem with the schools? The U.S. Hispanic population is subject to the same immigrant filtering effect, but in the opposite direction. Both immigrant groups largely arrived in the last 50 years. Why would we assume the effects of the initial filtering would disappear so quickly?
Here’s a modest proposal: American schools are actually quite good across the board.
I wouldn't trust any data about charter schools that came from the Hoover Institute. Plenty of red states with weak labor laws have awful educational systems.
At least near me the biggest problems facing the "urban" district compared to suburban ones is declining student populations as long time homeowners age in place and the maintenance costs of 100 year old buildings compared to 10-20 year old ones in the suburbs. Teachers tend to get paid the same or less in the city district and administration counts are higher but fairly close on a per student basis compared to the burbs.
This is before you get into the socioeconomic factors that make one student population more susceptible to starting and falling behind.
Wouldn't a declining student population mean more money per student? And it seems like it would often (but not always) be cheaper to maintain existing buildings vs building new ones? I'm also wondering how much of the new suburban buildings are financed with debt, and the costs just haven't really caught up to them yet.
A school's budget is tied directly to attendance. Less students = less budget.
> At least near me the biggest problems facing the "urban" district compared to suburban ones is declining student populations as long time homeowners age in place and the maintenance costs of 100 year old buildings compared to 10-20 year old ones in the suburbs
The building maintenance is a red herring. I believe in my district, it's about 10% of the budget on average.
There is no shortage of young naive newly minted teachers who are eager to go into those low performing urban schools and help turn things around. But very few of them last more than a few years in those schools, they get badly burned by reality. The ones who last almost inevitably become callused and bitter, having lost all of the hope they had at the start. The biggest problem with those schools is the students themselves, and the families of those students. They're incredibly dysfunction and stymie all well intentioned efforts to help them.
Insofar as charter schools can help, it's because giving enough of a shit to apply for and go to one weeds out enough of the lost causes that would only disrupt everybody else. In fact, I think the best ways to improve those public schools is even simpler; make attendance optional. Families who give a shit will still attend, while all the trash will voluntarily stay home.
Hell no. Making attendance optional sacrifices way too much.
It's like reducing incarceration rates by never jailing people for anything short of murder. Sure, it improves on that one metric. Obviously. But the adverse effects elsewhere make it a nonstarter.
If you could trust self-selection to only ever stop the "lost causes" from attending? The absolute worst, most disruptive, least likely to ever benefit from education students? Then maybe.
But in practice, for every student like this there would be ten more who would benefit from school education if they attended, but wouldn't attend if it was optional.
And for those missing students, the difference between getting the classes and being left to their own devices might be the difference between becoming functioning adults, low in income but stable, and being locked in a vicious cycle of poverty, substance abuse, violence and crime.
Which is bad for the students in question, and even worse for the society.
> Insofar as the US had a “culture averse to education,” surely that affects white americans as much as it affects anyone else. But, on average, they are not the ones who are behind their peers internationally.
Education outcome massively depends on economic status of the parents. And that, no matter the country by the way, is very closely tied to immigration history and ethnicity.
When parents struggle to afford basic school supplies (to the tune that many teachers have to pay for their students' needs out of their own measly paychecks [1]), that's not exactly conductive to good learning outcomes. When parents don't have the time to sit down with their children and help them with learning because they have to work two jobs to make rent (remember, even two minimum wage jobs is not enough [2]), the kids are put further behind. And they certainly can't afford private after-school tutoring.
The last part is the environment itself - aka the quality of housing (mold, cockroaches and other health impacts) or when gangs lure in kids with the promise of striking it rich by dealing drugs or whatnot...
[1] https://edition.cnn.com/2023/09/02/business/teachers-back-to...
[2] https://www.housingfinance.com/news/rent-remains-unaffordabl...
Only if the US is a monoculture but we're a diverse multi-cultural society. Different cultural groups have different values and priorities.
And different individuals within those cultural groups also have different values and priorities. A good education system supports everyone equally in achieving their goals.
Take that to its logical conclusion and we'd have individual, personalized tutors for each student. We don't have the resources for that, so some groups are going to get shafted. The question is which.
And when those goals are orthogonal to educational achievement, then what?
The greatest predictor of academic success is the education level of a student's parents.
That's not what the article is discussing (decline over time). We (all?) know white American have over average performance due to whatever reasons. The question is: Are they declining alongside the overall group. That might suggests that the reason(s) for this decline is cross-culture/ethnic/race.
> We (all?) know white American have over average performance due to whatever reasons.
[citation needed]
(I'm not american) so I don't have a horse in this race.
These reports are becoming to find because measuring racial differences is considered racist, so you'd be asking for something that would not be acceptable in modern studies.
If you compare a country where most people are one ethnicity or where wealth and race are not as correlated as in the US, then it's a bit of an unfair comparison.
Does the comparison hold if you segment the white Americans, Chinese, Singaporeans, Japanese, etc. by economic class?
I think it’s the opposite—it is a fairer comparison. White Americans are a relatively homogenized population that reflect the entire spectrum of economic class, where immigration effects have been attenuated by time. Is it unfair to compare the median white american to the median Japanese, just because the U.S. also has a large Hispanic population that mostly descends from low-education post-1970 immigrants from impoverished Latin American countries?
Agreed, "culture" is a symptom, not a cause.
All humans are the same species, and in a vacuum, have no ideas or inherent behaviors beyond base instinct.
Culture is simply a byproduct of the environment around a segment of humans.
Hence, filtering by white kids in the US simply measures the result of higher average economic status (same as filtering by Asian kids).
American outcomes would look better if the populations they economically disenfranchised historically stayed in other countries like Europeans did with the colonial system (vs importing populations as slave labor domestically in the US). The economic class stratification that still lingers as a result of this in the US is such a unique factor as to make comparisons that don't take this into account worthless.
My kids don't get textbooks in public school, are comingled with highly disruptive kids (except in the limited gifted classes) and the curriculum is accelerated way past where it was when I was younger.
So my anecdotal theory is that the (public) education system is optimized to the edges, abandoning the middle entirely, resulting in majority decline.
They do get computers with TONS of dumb-ass apps and zero reference materials.
My daughter had no textbook for Freshman physics, which is obviously the hardest class she is going to have in high school (or top 2). It was ridiculous. We wound up supplementing learning materials and paying a tutor, but it all felt like making up for piss-poor course structure. Her (very intelligent but distracted) teacher barely knew where to send me for supplemental materials. And this is in the "advanced" high school that is very hard to get into.
How do they not know?! The parents at my school would gladly purchase materials for the classes if anyone bothered to ask for them.
Your average teacher is about as intelligent, motivated, and skilled as your average American.
How much initiative do you think a random office or retail worker would put into solving a problem they were presented with that they couldn't answer immediately and had no impact on their lives?
> So my anecdotal theory is that the (public) education system is optimized to the edges, abandoning the middle entirely...
Yep. Those edges are pushed by very vocal parents, usually backed by large communities and interest groups.
And the modern-day politics of American public schools (which generally have very low voter engagement) dictate that only the squeaky wheels get the grease.
My kids' schools are optimized for the lower edge, while providing some (but significantly less than the lower edge) additional support for the upper edge who almost exclusively come from upper income families who are assumed to be able to fend for themselves.
I want all people to live fulfilling lives and reach their potential, but we are pouring limited resources into a bottomless pit while intentionally de-emphasizing the fundamentals of education that worked well for decades (or longer), and any question of those methods receives an extremely hostile response.
It's no wonder that people are choosing to opt out in some form or another, or that the results are suboptimal.
That's kind of what I think but feel free to poke holes. It seems like there are three tiers. There's a closed off top tier of kids who get into top ranked universities. They go to highly ranked schools like selective high schools with high Ivy placement ranks. Those schools have different materials and more opportunities than most. These high schools are geographically mostly on the coasts. It's a totally different culture too where there's this years long effort.
Then there's a middle tier, the majority of people, where they might end up at a university but it's not top rated. Increasingly it's not worth the money and simultaneously it seems like our country has become more credentialist about prestigious jobs. But a degree probably isn't necessary for most careers that don't have gatekeepers so for these people the education doesn't really have a big payoff and their education might get de-emphasized.
Then there's the bottom tier which is self explanatory.
In my experience, the "top tier of kids" is more cultural than school-specific. Even in schools like TJHST there's usually 10–30 students in the school that really care about achieving, while the other 90% don't put in much effort (beyond your typical public schooler). There are a few feeder (public) schools on the coasts, but most of the private schools differentiate by extracurriculars (fencing, rowing, horseback riding) rather than academic excellence.
Accelerated tracks would produce the top tier, which begin in elementary school - so it's a matter of how much your parents invested in your education before school. Any child can technically enter the accelerated track at any grade. The later they join, the more untaught expectations there are. The other students went over these things already in previous accelerated classes. There's no on-ramp.
In the normal track, you don't eventually take calculus in math, learn much about labwork in science, or even learn how to write a research paper until the last year of classes at 18. (Source: class of 2005, USA)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pUKaB4P5Qns
At least introduce the video with a blurb if you're just going to drop a link.
So my anecdotal theory is that the (public) education system is optimized to the edges, abandoning the middle entirely, resulting in majority decline.
Based on my anecdotal experience, this is the explanation that makes the most sense to me. I've been hearing constantly for at least a decade how atrocious American public education is, which I can't reconcile at all with my experience as a 2010 graduate of McLean High School. Either my experience was so far outside the national norm that I have no useful perspective on this issue, or the national discourse has been totally corrupted by vocal minorities and political agendas.
Personally, my teachers were consistently amazing and brilliant (RIP Mr. Bigger), curricula were rigorous, and I learned a ton that prepared me well for my life and career after high school. Every time I hear about some factoid or perspective that American schools supposedly don't teach because they're propaganda farms designed to churn out uncurious low-skill workers, I roll my eyes as I vividly recall how it was explicitly covered in my classes. It's possible my experience may have been more the exception than the rule, given that most of my classes were advanced/AP/post-AP, but I also had some of my favorite teachers in regular and honors classes and never felt like I was receiving insufficient value for my time. Maybe I just got incredibly lucky, but I really have nothing but good things to say, and can't relate at all to the picture of American public education that's been painted in the media and social media. Granted, a lot can change in 15 years, and my perspective is already going to be skewed by having attended a top-ranked school in a wealthy district.
On the flip side, my public elementary school experience was the polar opposite. In kindergarten I was tutoring third graders who needed help learning to read, but by second grade I'd been kicked out more or less for being bored with the level and pace of the course material. (Effectively. Specifically, the principal was going to move me to special ed unless my mom agreed to find a doctor willing to put me on Ritalin for my nonexistent ADHD. The 90s were wild.) So there's that. Luckily there are some great private schools in the area which my mom was able to make sacrifices to afford, but I can't help but wonder how many other kids weren't as lucky and had their whole life trajectories sabotaged from an early age. Granted, that particular principal was fired a few months after my de facto expulsion (for many very good reasons), so maybe this was all genuinely just an anomaly and very far outside the norm for completely different reasons than my high school experience.
I think it’s so weird that your level of education in the US (and most of the world really) seems to depend on which specific school you went to.
The Netherlands has settled on three levels of schooling and within that level (according to capacity, and desire to learn) most of the schools show relatively little variation.
The same thing continues into university, with pretty much 99% of all the universities in the Netherlands being public.
You don’t select a university based on level of theoretical educational attainment, you select one by virtue of proximity, or which of them teaches the specific courses you are interested in.
Dutch PISA scores have fallen badly, though. We moved here from Ireland and the basisschools seem kinda mediocre compared to what we had in Ireland. My eldest certainly learned to read much better.
Schoelenopdekaart shows pretty wide variation in how many students go on to vwo etc.
Fair, my experience is pretty much 25 years out of date. At the time it was pretty good.
https://www.usnews.com/education/best-high-schools/virginia/...
#261 in National Rankings #8 in Virginia High Schools #11 in Washington, DC Metro Area High Schools #5 in Fairfax County Public Schools High Schools #302 in STEM High Schools
Are you seriously saying you can't reconcile how America has bad public schools after having gone to to a school ranked #261 in the country?
Can you, just for a moment, consider the situation here and try to reconcile this? It is important for me that you be able to do this.
You should spend some time considering how that school got such a ranking in the first place.
No, I'm not saying that. I already addressed my high school's ranking, so I'm not sure what point you think you're making by harping on that.
My point is that US public education isn't universally bad, not that it's universally good.
> I've been hearing constantly for at least a decade how atrocious American public education is, which I can't reconcile at all with my experience as a 2010 graduate of [top 10 HS in state].
> Either my experience was so far outside the national norm that I have no useful perspective on this issue, or the national discourse has been totally corrupted by vocal minorities and political agendas
> Every time I hear about some factoid or perspective that American schools supposedly don't teach because they're propaganda farms designed to churn out uncurious low-skill workers, I roll my eyes
> It's possible my experience may have been more the exception than the rule
> Maybe I just got incredibly lucky, but I really have nothing but good things to say, and can't relate at all to the picture of American public education that's been painted in the media and social media
Can you just clarify for me once more: what exactly can you not reconcile? Be very, very specific, please.
I'm not really sure what your problem is, but okay. My experience is a counterexample to the claim that American public education is bad. Maybe some public schools are bad, but not all. I chose to share a positive anecdote to balance out the negativity.
No, you chose to share the experience of a top 10 high school in a state and then proceed to say you don't understand how other people can say any of the other 25,000 public high schools in the country are bad.
I don't have a problem. I went to a well ranked public high school and am grateful for that privilege. It isn't lost on me that many, many, others are less fortunate than I am. But to say you can't reconcile these things is, at worst, tone-deaf, and at best, incredibly ignorant.
No, I didn't proceed to say anything of the sort. You're attacking a straw man.
Even if you choose to believe there's some interpretation of my original phrasing that could mean what you're suggesting, I've now clarified several times that the idea you're making a fuss over does not reflect my sentiments.
> No, you chose to share the experience of a top 10 high school in a state and then proceed to say you don't understand how other people can say any of the other 25,000 public high schools in the country are bad.
While that might be your cultural understanding of, or personal reaction to, what he said - he actually did not say that.
If this subject is sensitive for you, or useful communication just isn't happening, then it might be better to drop it and move on.
To expand on that a bit, based on my observations, I'd suggest the following conclusions:
1. Any reform effort needs to ensure that early education isn't overlooked. Elementary schools need capacity, processes, and expertise to appropriately deal with kids of all different knowledge/intelligence levels and backgrounds/skillsets in a personalized way, and they need oversight to ensure that lazy/incompetent/malicious teachers and administrators aren't making poor/abusive decisions that could have lifelong negative impacts on students.
2. AI will be a critical element of future reform. It's too incredibly useful of a learning and scaling tool to sleep on. Of course it's easy to misuse, but that's exactly why responsible use needs to be taught as part of research and fact-checking lessons. If they haven't already, schools need to start running small-scale experiments with incorporation of AI tools into curricula asap.
Imagine how much more you could have learned with a virtual TA in your pocket on call 24/7 for those 13 years, with human teachers in the loop to help guide any self-directed learning you might have chosen to undertake. That bright-eyed kid who never stops asking "why?" will finally have a conversational partner who never tires of answering. All the panic about hallucinations sounds like the same sensationalist takes I grew up hearing from adults about the internet and Wikipedia — a perfectly valid concern, but not sufficient to negate the value of the resource in competent hands.
I'd learn zero just like every other boy who would be 100000% distracted by technology and currently uses up tons of willpower every day to avoid playing games on their mandatory-issue-device.
So, basically the general distribution strikes again? I guess the floor fell out, but what evidence do we have that the ceiling also went up? Could just be the same or lower when we normalize for grade inflation and requirement destruction.
I don't know about this. In my community at least most kids want to do the best they can in school and feel more pressure than ever for admission to top schools - who are more selective than ever. Particularly since competition for knowledge economy jobs is tighter than ever.
> However,the United States, particularly in the last 50 years, seems to have fostered a culture averse to education.
I always find it interesting that the anti-schooling mentality is so prevalent here on HN, too. It’s most obvious in threads about cheating, where a popular topic of discussion is to defend cheating as a rational reaction because school doesn’t matter, a degree is “just a piece of paper”, and you’ll learn everything on the job anyway.
It also shows up in the tired argument that college is only really about networking, not learning.
I’ve had some on and off experience mentoring college students in the past. Those who adopt these mentalities often hit a wall partway through college or even at their first job when their baseline intelligence runs out and they realize they don’t have the necessary foundation because they’ve been blowing off coursework or even cheating their way through college for years.
I’m afraid that LLMs are only going to enable more of this behavior. It’s now easier to cheat and students are emboldened by the idea that they don’t need to learn things because they can always just ask ChatGPT.
The difference is that you can, quite successfully, keep "cheating" with an LLM while at a job. And people do, not just in lower-importance roles, but at law offices, etc.
I work in tech and I see this more and more every day. By "cheating", I mean deciding that you don't want to do the thinking or even spot-check the result; you just ask an LLM to vibe-write a design doc, send it out, and have others point out issues if they care.
Your very last point though is where it all falls apart. If you have people who know what they're doing, co-mingled with "LLM cheaters", its very obvious they're cheating. Before long, they're found out and fired. It's not sustainable.
I noticed a weird disdain for education too.
I once posted in support of general education and it didn’t go so well.
I suppose the people on HN are a certain demographic.
I don't think it's a disdain for education, but a disdain for the educational system that currently exists in the US.
If you have kids and experience it first hand, it's extremely underwhelming. If you were an outlier in any way as a student (and I bet a majority of people here are), it's extremely underwhelming.
My wife and I have advanced degrees and place a very high value on education, and I have very little that's positive to say about the state of education in our very highly ranked public schools. They've completely lost the plot. But any criticism is presumed to be hostility to teachers (and their union) or flat out racism by a vocal and increasingly large segment of the population.
> There is more and cheaper education available than ever before.
The real issue isn’t the availability of learning materials, but the healthy pressure and right push from experienced teachers. People tend to overestimate how self-driven most students are. The truth is, most students aren’t naturally motivated to learn. They need society to give them a sense of purpose, and they need teachers to challenge them with problems that keep them just outside their comfort zone. Sadly, the U.S. school system provides neither. Take my kid as an example: even though he’s in a decent public school, he thinks his schoolwork is tough and the SAT is challenging. Yet the SAT wouldn't even measure up to the high-school graduation exam in my country, let alone the college entrance exam. In the end, it’s the broad middle of students who suffer from low standards. With the right motivation and push, they could learn so much more, but instead they end up wasting precious time in high school.
> The real issue isn’t the availability of learning materials
Well, some people claim in these comments that their children don't get textbooks. Not saying that you're wrong, but it's gonna take a lot of 'healthy pressure and right pushes' to account for the fact that they don't have educational material.
In my kids' schools, the textbooks haven't been removed due to cost, they have been replaced with even more expensive online material that no one properly consumes.
Educators have been brainwashed into believing "computers are the future!" and don't seem to be able to even contemplate that reading something on a screen is a poor substitute for physically interacting with something (a pen and paper, a book, or the actual thing being described in a video).
I regularly have to tell my kids to stop doing math and science problems on their computer and get out a pencil and paper to do the work so they can organize it and understand it. They argue at first because their teachers tell them not to (so they say), but stop when they actually see it working.
It’s culture led by phones and other screens. Most teens are addicted to the screens. The need them for school and for socialization with friends and they end up on TikTok or another network and zombie there for most of their best brain years. They lack the ability to focus necessary to learn because the brain is used to constant screen simulation. Letting your child be babysat by a screen is absolutely the worst thing you can do to ever raise an adult.
I hear what you are saying, but I feel like this is related more to both parents working or single parent households. The more time parents work, the harder it is to get ahead, the more screen time kids will get.
From my conversations with 20-year-ago school students, American schools are culture led by sports, and football most of all. No surprise many parents don't see a reason for their kids to excel in STEM.
For this theory to hold up you would need to explain what changed as high schools in the US have loved sports since at least the 40s
I doubt much changed. American STEM education has always been pretty mediocre. I've been hearing about my whole life.
Mediocre by what metric? American STEM education seems to objectively be doing pretty well in terms of Nobel prizes, scholarly journal articles, patents, technology product revenue, etc. Of course there's always room for improvement.
Unfortunately, those metrics are very focused on the 0.1%, if not the 0.01%.
Like a sorting algorithm which is O(n) on nearly-sorted input - the utility is limited.
About a half of Nobel Prizes in the US were awarded to immigrants or children of immigrants.
> American STEM education seems to objectively be doing pretty well in terms of Nobel prizes, scholarly journal articles, patents, technology product revenue, etc.
I hate to break it to you, but a lot of our most valuable research is produced by people who did their primary education outside the US. Just go to a STEM research lab at any US university connected to a Nobel prize or Fields medal in the last 10-20 years, and it will be almost completely made up of internationally educated students / professors / etc.
If someone is curious about this data, I made a little analysis a while ago - Nobel Prize in numbers: https://blog.royalsloth.eu/posts/nobel-prize-in-numbers/#sec...
Yes, they are getting visas via academia employment.
Something that isn’t obvious to non-Americans or non-parents is just how diverse the US education system is. Even within a medium size city you’ll find multiple schools that might have completely different cultures.
Some schools are sports centric. Others have to work hard to get students interested in sports.
I think the implication that sports are bad is also misleading. Sports programs, when run well, can do a good job of getting kids into routines, out of trouble, and keeping them accountable to their peers for something. The TV and movie style sports culture where the football players aren’t expected to even attempt to pass their classes doesn’t actually exist in most schools.
This is true (and they do take a large amount of things like money and resources), but these cultural influences are also very loud. You will find that the majority of the kids in the cafeteria really don't give a crap about any of that, and that goes for the parents as well.
It really depends on the town, the school, and the social circle of the parents. If you live in a wealthy Boston suburb, academics are emphasized much more than sports, and expectations for students are very high. If you live in rural Appalachia, then football is king.
I'm pretty sure the same argument was made for television, movies, radio and fiction books.
That’s certainly true but at the same time, when I was a kid in the early 90s, we watched TV but cartoons ended (we did not have cable or a computer). I came home from school, ate a snack, watched TV for about an hour with a friend, cartoons were over and we went outside. With the internet and YouTube etc. you’re never “done”
I remember racing home from school to catch Gundam Wing and Dragonball Z. And then they were over until the next day.
yeah but you get home at 4, watch an hour of anime, it's 5pm, you do homework for half an hour, then you have dinner with family until about 7, then you have about an hour of getting ready for bed/chores and that gets you to 8pm. At most you have one more hour of studying. So 90 minutes of education-related stuff at home a day in your ideal past where kids "only" spent an hour on TV.
Much like extending the workday past 10 hours there must be a point of diminishing/negative returns to expecting multiple hours of study per night. Also, those times you list seem indicative of elementary school kids. Most high schoolers are going to be up way past 9pm. Of course, they also probably aren't getting home before 6pm and don't have the luxury of an hour long family dinner every night either.
That's true, the arguments were also made for television, movies, radio, and fiction books. However, during the times of movies, television, radio, and written books being introduced, the trend line of student performance seemed to be going upward. It now seems to be trending downward. It's harder to convincingly make the argument that cell phones are no worse than TVs when student performance was increasing during the TV era and is decreasing during the smartphone era. Even if the correlation is totally spurious, it's an uphill climb to ignore it.
Yeah, but were those coupled with an enormous, precipitous reversion in literacy rates?
So why are the drops happening in the US, but not Asia, which is equally smartphone addicted?
And? Maybe those things had an impact also? And maybe this is the last straw our backs can bear?
Like if you take a bunch of steps running from a road to the edge of a cliff, only after the last one over the edge do you experience all the problems
Don't expect much when (from what I see) most adults are properly addicted to their screens. If parents are already not up to the bar kids will seldom be, leading by example and all that.
Now show me parents, hell even here on HN, who openly admit that they are addicted to the screens and various 'social' cancers and consider it something profoundly bad and damaging, and that they as parents should really do better and actually try. A rare sight, mostly its brushed off and some even brag how 'digital' and modern their kids are.
But its fine, we all know how these things really are. This is one area where even otherwise disadvantaged parents (ie due to their poor upbringing or ie coming from undeveloped places) can raise their kids to be well above sea of future desperate population with severe social anxieties and addictions (lets not forget addictions ball up since they change personality for the worse).
Think how much lack / minimization of those will give them various advantages in their adult lives, be it professional (focus on work, ability to better socialize and communicate in person) or personal (all kinds of relationships, and finding one's purpose and drive in life). I just mentioned basically whole core of adult existence, no small things by any means.
And its not that hard, we do it with our kids and often see it around us in their peers, just need to put a bit more effort and spend more time with them instead of doom scrolling or binge watching TV. Which are anyway good parenting advices, but one needs to start like that from beginning and lead by example.
> seems to have a culture averse to education
Nay, not "seems", but has indeed subverted education. Hofstadter's Pulitzer-winning book was published 62 years ago [0] and now, in 2025, even the highest office is unrecognisable.
[0] _ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-intellectualism_in_Americ...
The decline in the last 20 years was more noticeable, and the last 10 far more noticeable.
> However,the United States, particularly in the last 50 years, seems to have fostered a culture averse to education.
!!
The rate of college graduates has increased nearby 50% over that timeframe.
A rather unexpected result for a cultural aversion to education.
Do you believe the average degree awarded today requires as much rigor as the average degree awarded half a century ago?
Not sure in the US but where I am from thats very much the case; they went to the paid per graduated student vs just student and students having loans vs state money (to study forever) and it turned the focus on churning out graduates from providing academic rigor. I saw the shift sharply studying and then teaching from late 90s to early 00s and as I see my nephews doing cs degrees now: it's really easy I would say, not the rigorous (not very practical outside academics) learnings I started with. Not sure if its good or bad, just an observation. We already had technical schools for exactly this purpose, but I guess the unis were running steep losses for the gov while not enough prominent research and related companies came out of them.
Academia is now vocational training but done badly. You get the pretend of academia and a very expensive loan as a bonus.
If you read his whole comment it was about how education is "just a piece of paper you need to get a job". That mentality could totally lead to worse proficiency and more degrees awarded.
If you punish teachers solely on passing percentage you get the same result. It might be the teacher is bad but if you teach a difficult course it might be the students.
The cultural shift is secondary to the demographic shift. Young Americans have been squeezed at one end by mass immigration from countries with lower educational performance and literacy rates, higher crime rates, higher gang participation rates, etc., which accelerated to such an extreme that native English speakers are now a minority in our local school district. And they’re squeezed at the other end, forced to compete for college admissions, jobs, and housing against a hungry and ambitious global population vying for H-1Bs and student visas. We sold out the younger generation, our own children and grandchildren, and it wasn’t at all driven by political and corporate machinations. No, it was for some greater good, and if you dare question that you’re a fascist.
not surprised you lose what you don't use, does modern world even require people using those reading and math skills anymore?
Looking at the amount of contracts I have to read to even start software it should. Looking at how many people buy lottery tickets I guess the same for math.
"Culture" is downstream of incentives.
Particularly, the biggest incentives are test scores and passing rates, which incentivize attention only to the bottom 50% and 20% of students (respectively). This means:
- You do not diversify classrooms by academic ability---the high-performing students can be free tutors to the low-performing students.
- You inflate the GPAs and implement no-zero policies.
- You teach to the standardized tests, and don't worry about the material.
- You make lessons "fun and engaging" because you need the attention of the students least likely to give you their attention.
- You eliminate gifted or honors programs, because that's wasted money not improving your bottom line (bottom students).
Needless to say, these are not effective ways of teaching remedial and underperforming students.
Those pupils will generally need very structured lessons that directly provide clear information (often in a form that can easily stick in memory and be repeated, even word for word), and straightforward instructions that can immediately inform their practice no matter what their level. I.e. the exact opposite of a so-called "fun and engaging" approach. (Which of course ignores the fact that such students tend to derive the most fun and engagement from being taught in a clear and effective way!)
The underlying issue is that the "progressive" educational strategy taught in Ed Schools is very explicitly a "sink or swim" approach where the student is supposed to be teaching themselves and the teacher isn't doing any real work. The hidden attitude here, coming directly from the "Progressive" era of the late 19th and early 20th century, is that many students will indeed fail but this is not an issue because clearly they were not worthy of entering the educated class with the very best.
(Special Ed is the one remaining niche that still teaches more effective educational methods, but obviously not every remedial student is a Special Ed student, and we should not expect them to be.)
And constraints. To call this a cultural issue is insane. I have firsthand seen the structural problems with institutional education. My scholastic experience was hell and anti-intellectual from day one, and it was all institutional issues.
And the institutions reflect culture.
The fact that these institutions can exist at the low-performing state they do is a direct reflection of the culture of the people who run them, send their kids to them, pay taxes to support them, etc.
The schools can only do what they do to the degree that people aren't willing to put up with it.
What could people unwilling do?
Institutions are supposed to protect culture, but they have failed due to the actions of a small elite class. It's like blaming a child for not having parents.
No, institutions reflect the culture of the broad population. It’s like blaming a community for having streets filled with litter.
It's a litter filled community with limited trash service and no public receptacles.
Have they failed?
Or are they dutifully resisting cultural shift that threatens the "don't think critically, just go to work, pay your taxes, don't question the system, don't do drugs, go to college, get a job, lease a new car, buy a condo, cross your fingers that stonks go up enough for you to retire" late 20th early 21st century status quo "ideal citizen" and "ideal culture" that they were built to foster (and who are the kind of people who fill out the majority of the system)?
The way I see it peddling blue state bullshit and red state bullshit (depending on a given school district's location) is simply a common sense adaptation districts are making to garner support from local populations who were willing to support the system so long as it provided useful education at a non-insane cost but are more critical now that the deal is worse.
People choose based on grades, success stories, safety, and exclusivity, not political alignment. But public schools aren't competitive, so they don't have any incentive to offer any of those things. That makes them a useful and susceptible hot bed for the least desirable part of an education; politics.
As a member of several of the {{{small, elite class[es]}}} you might be describing, which of us do you mean? Certainly those of us with a PhD don't want the schools to be shitty for our kids.
I mean our politicians and the idiots they manufacture with idpol in order to maintain power at the cost of degrading our communities. So, probably not you.
For example, in my state, it is an annual tradition to slash the budget of schools and/or libraries and funnel the money toward political goals and police retirement funds.
I attended the best public school in the state at one point and literally watched the Governor text someone for 10 minutes and then fall asleep in the middle of a budget presentation specifically put together in order to convince him not to cut more funding the next year, as it would mean the school would have to begin taking federal money and compromising on its values.
I also attended the worst public school in my state, a harrowing and illuminating experience which I've spoken about here a few times before. [0]
I also had my collegiate education robbed from me by a vindictive teacher who illegally falsified my grade out of spite, and an administration who protected her. I was homeless since 16 was and attending high school on my own in a rural community with no economic opportunity.
Due to my circumstances, her falsified grade meant I had to rescind a full-ride scholarship which had been offered to me including boarding and a job, but on condition that my credits included that core class. I had no adults in my life to fight for me, and even though I met with my guidance counselor, the principal, several teachers and the school board, I was not helped and fell through the cracks, despite high standardized test scores and a high GPA.
Instead, I continued to be homeless from 18 to 21 and struggled very badly, starving and sick. I am now employed in my field of choice despite these circumstances, but I overall had a very traumatic experience with the public school system. The institution ultimately failed me, despite my intellect and perseverance.
So I share your concerns deeply! I want nothing of the sort to happen to my kids or anyone else's.
Your work looks very interesting, by the way, leafing through one of your papers.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44823657
Not just education but overall intellectualism. It’s a purely cultural issue that can be observed by looking at demographics.
> 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.
A Republican promoted and implemented No Child Left Behind though? Maybe I’m misunderstanding your point.
That republican had stated during his campaign that he wanted to end the department of education…
Which I agree we should do, carefully. The federal government has no constitutional authorization to create educational standards for the country. Therefore, let those standards be set by the states.
What country with enviable educational results operates this way? Genuinely curious
Not sure where the UK stands on enviable results, but education is a devolved matter where the constituent countries can make independent decisions as opposed to there being a central government department that makes all decisions nationally.
Ok but which side supports it. Do you agree it’s a bad policy?
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).
What you're describing is a fad that has subsided a bit over the last few years. Cambridge MA stopped teaching 8th grade algebra because they didn't like the racial disparity between students in advanced vs non-advanced math. There was a significant backlash from parents, and now they're bringing back 8th grade algebra. The debate now seems to be much more about how to offer more advanced math than whether to offer it at all. A similar dynamic seems to be playing out in other towns as well.
I don’t understand why this became about politics, but I will bite.
Republicans want to dismantle department of education, have cut funding for education, food stamps, free meals, etc. they are by definition against education for the outgroup and “the poors”. So I think that label is apt.
On the other hand, Dem leadership is quite racist and has a saviour complex. They identified the right issue — children from impoverished areas that don’t see a future for themselves through education are underperforming — but instead of treating the problem they push stuff like no child left behind. In their defence though, republicans simply don’t allow any legislation that would improve education to go forward, mainly because they benefit from it.
> Democrats that will dumb down classes to make sure even the worst performing student will pass
News to me.
Unfortunately it’s a real thing among leftists (not necessarily Democrats in general).
The belief is that any advanced classes increase the achievement gap. People who subscribe to this also believe that advanced placement testing is discrimination and must be eliminated. They want equity of outcome, so reducing the curriculum to a single class at a single level that everyone the same age takes is their preference.
It has been implemented in several places with predictable backlash.
See San Francisco's failed de-tracking experiment as Exhibit A.
Tell us more about the cultural issue that can be observed by looking at demographics. What specifically stands out to you?
One is the observation that first- and second-generation black immigrants have much higher share of college admissions than their share of the black population, despite similar socio-economic status to African Americans with longer family history in the US.
https://www.insidehighered.com/admissions/article/2017/10/09...
Isn’t it obvious? Children of immigrants do way better. Children of Asian households do way better than other ethnicities, and children in impoverished areas do a lot worse.
All of this is cultural and anyone who thought I implied race — which looks like you did — is a moron and a racist.
IMHO this whole thing is environmental.
Just look at HN. Nominally an educated crowd, but talk about physics, and you immediately see terms like "ivory towers" or "return on investment", despite the fact that most on HN doesn't understand in fundamental science works.
A lot of the complaints here about physics have to do with focusing so heavily for decades on string theory (or M-theory) which hasn't produced much in the way of practical results. At some point we have to quit throwing good money after bad and redirect funding towards other lines of inquiry.
Yes, but this is cartoon shit. String theory was a major research program in theoretical physics for a few decades but theoretical physics involves quite a lot more than string theory and physics involves quite a lot more than theoretical physics and if you stacked up all the budgets you'd find that string theory is a minor footnote. And also, its been a few decades since people took it very seriously as a strong candidate for a TOE.
I really don't get it. As a total amount of any budget from any perspective, string theory has always been a blip whose cultural impact is much wider than its actual budgetary one. Like this critique about string theory is just a thing that people who are physics "enthusiasts" say and even to the extent that it is true, its really been more than a decade since it was a problem.
Is the purpose of life purely to seek a monetary return on investment?
Is the purpose of theoretical physics purely to seek mathematical innovations with no connection to objective reality?
There are _plenty_ of areas in physics where investment is paying off. Condensed matter physics, optics, material research and so on.
We mostly question the fundamental subatomic particle physics that is not producing any returns on the investment. E.g. the galvanic effect was discovered in 1780, and there were long-distance telegraph lines by 1845 - so 65 years.
The last major theoretical advance in particle physics was around 1965 (Higgs mechanism). That's already 60 years ago.
There's at least one actual physicist who will provide you with appropriate counterpoint. Here they are. And you're welcome.
a physicist responds: physics has done very little for like 70 years[0]
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d_o4k0eLoMI
She is speaking about physics in a very narrow sense.
>She is speaking about physics in a very narrow sense.
In what respect? Did you bother to actually watch the video or read a transcript or did you just watch the first minute and a half and assume that was the point? It wasn't. the ensuing thirty-two minutes serve to debunk the idea that there hasn't been progress in physics over the past seventy years.
Which GP claimed was the case. GP is wrong.
And she covers a wide array of physics areas -- she even mentions that she could have gone year by year starting in 1953 and cover at least one advancement per year, but she limited it to just her top ten which was pretty wide ranging.
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.)
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
Personal responsibility, or lack thereof always seemed to me like one of these memes that are used to explain phenomena in a handwavy fashion.
Does anyone have any data points that could help me update my world model here?
I certainly feel personally responsible for things and so do many people that I know.
Additionally, it feels like people like to blame systemic issues on lack of personal responsibility in the general public, while ideally, elected officials should take personal responsibility for fixing the system.
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.
I grew up being told by my peers in school that memorising things was a waste of time and critical thinking was all that mattered. Now I use Anki to literally memorize programming language syntax and ideas and facts that are relevant to my job (like data structures and algorithms). I wish I'd valued memorization when I was in school, because it's such a foundational thing to have knowledge upon which to build everything else.
I find that very interesting and also thought of using Anki for that but decided it wouldn't be useful for me now.
Could you give me an example and how it helped you? Thank you :)
- memorising names and birthdates of relevant people - private life and work life - anything I’m looking up more than ~5 times can go in Anki - spelling of words I often misspell (eg bureaucracy) - when reading anything technical I need for my work or study I have Anki open and type in what I learn in QnA format, and I will never forget it but have it easy within reach for an investment of only a few minutes per QnA over its (and my) life time - just for fun, the cantons of Switzerland, landskap of Sweden, provinces of Canada, and states and capitals of the USA - NATO phonetic alphabet which comes in useful more often that you’d think
Life-changingly useful program for every aspect of my life, when I can finish it every day
My top tips:
- put all decks in a master “daily” deck using the :: syntax in the deck names. Otherwise you feel “done” when having finished one deck, and feel like not starting the next. Have only one goal - finishing today’s Anki - for that master deck (and every other deck) go Study Options > Display Order > New/review order > Show after reviews. Otherwise it’s hard to ever catch up when slipping behind. With this setting, the system becomes somewhat self correcting
My only regret is not being able to pay more than $25 to the developers
And creativity is often putting seemingly unrelated things together. If you don't have the required things floating around in your mind at the same time, it is not possible.
The way of getting those facts and ideas into your head can be very different, though.
You can either mechanically memorize them, which is a boring and mindless activity, or you can be challenged, participate in discussions, projects, and activities that engage the parts of your brain involved with critical thinking.
Both will technically get you to pass a test, but the latter will be better for retaining information, while developing skills and neural pathways that make future learning easier.
The problem is that most academia is based on the memorization approach. Here are a bunch of ideas and facts we think are important; get them into your head, and regurgitate them back at us later. This is not a system that creates knowledgeable people. It doesn't inspire or reward curiosity, creativity, or critical thinking. It's an on-rails pipeline that can get you a piece of paper that says you've been through it, which is enough to make you a tax-paying citizen employed by companies who expect the bare minimum as well.
I get that the alternative approach is more difficult to scale, and requires a more nuanced, qualitative, and personal process. But that's how learning works. It's unique for everyone, and can't be specified as a fixed set of steps.
After all, what is the point of teaching people to be idea and fact storing machines, if machines can do a far better job at that than us? Everyone today can tell you a random fact about the world in an instant by looking it up in a computer. That's great, but we should be training and rewarding people for things computers can't do.
Your first point is a favorite of a lot of people, but doesn’t make a lot of sense to me: how is your generation with the ostensibly correct culture producing a generation with the wrong culture?
Parents are apparently raising their children wrong en masse, so was the parents’ generation rotten too? Which raises questions about the character of the generation that raised the parents…
I think social norms in child rearing have changed drastically, though I think, at least in my neighborhood, they are swinging back.
Growing up in the 80s, I remember having a lot of free time and autonomy. I had soccer or baseballaybe twice a week and guitar lessons once a week, but the other days, I was doing what I wanted, I was expected to get my homework done, but once that was done,I was free to roam the neighborhood or my backyard.
This parenting mindset changed, by the late 80s early 90s and kids started getting more and more scheduled activities and less free time.
Even personally, 6 years ago my wife was very apprehensive about letting our oldest who was then 8, walk to his friend's house who was a 1/4 mile away in the neighborhood. Our youngest, who is 7, walks or bikes to his friend's house the same distance away. And we have other neighborhood kids that also go between people houses. That is the childhood I remember.
I don't think HW I got in elementary school necessarily helped me learn more, but the act of being given work with expectation that I would complete it on my own was a growth activity for me, and that is something that is starting to come back in elementary school, homework for the sake of learning how to do homework.
I think this just kinda sounds like a retroactive rationalization if I’m honest. Imagine if the order was reversed: if you had filled your childhood with mandatory activities and todays kids were mostly left to do what they want.
Wouldn’t you just say “When I was young we were forced to adhere to a tight schedule which taught us to be dependable. Todays kids are allowed to do what they want, which means they never learn any responsibility.”
Personal responsibility was on the rise until 2013, after which it started to decline?
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.
Similarly there's a bunch of talk of "source criticism" in Swedish schools, but when you look closer at what is actually taught it sounds more like conspiracy theory or dogma and never anything actually useful.
Imo source criticism is only a thing if you have a well grounded model of the universe. And if you DO have that, then source criticism just falls out naturally and you don't need to discuss that at all anyway.
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.
> Most parents just watch TV, stare at their phones and don't want to be bothered by anything that requires effort.
No?
Most of the parents around me are busy each working a full time job and doing their best to raise their kids.
They now spend some of their free time reading on the phones instead of a newspaper, magazine, or book. Some listen to books while they mow the lawn, clean the house, or do other chores like laundry. They also hang out a mix of kids and parents nearby, both inside and out, in front of bonfires and kitchen tables. RN I'm commenting on HN while my kids and neighbor kids turn dinner into an imaginary cooking show at the table.
Parents around here are also often tending to elderly parents or physically/mentally challenged relatives.
Too few can afford to have one parent stay home fulltime.
Of course there have always been parents neglecting their kids to do anything else: bowling, drinking, partying, traveling, tinkering, obsessively reading, etc. The fact that more activities are behind screens isn't the catch all explanation it's often promoted to be.
People always want to blame the new thing in culture. Some collective sin if only we had better self control. Every generation has one.
Usually it’s just institutional failure at multiple levels and a whole bunch of people who don’t care about the institution’s output sufficiently.
Every time I read about new education stories they’re busy trying to solve wider social issues instead of being the best place to get an education. Just like how libraries turned into homeless shelters instead of being a place for the community to learn and read.
I agree, but it’s tough to see the studies showing average daily screen time of different age groups and not see that as a pretty obvious contributor.
Wait, you’re literally on your phone while your kids entertain you…?
Yes? You mention it too - parents glued to their phones, part of the problem. Kids seeing their parents reading a book vs being glued to their phones really isn't the same thing, far from it. They can come and see pages of printed text in a book, vs some endless tiktok/instagram feeds of shallow video entertainment. Guess which they will stay around and stare endlessly without even blinking.
Screens and especially active content are incredibly addictive and small kids have no way of being rational and throttle their use. If they see the same behavior in their parents that's it.
Its not about having stay-at-home parent, but about spending the time with kids to be 100% physically there for them and them only, no running screen of any type anywhere in sight. Lets be honest, this is a rather rare sight.
People like that guy like to jerk off to their thoughts and think they alone know the issue, and that it’s because people are lazy!!
Reality check, income inequality makes it so that parents have to slave away to earn the bar minimum to survive, participate in the gig economy, and then deal with tax cuts that give the richest of the rich even more money, while suffocating social services in their neighborhoods.
This is end stage capitalism, squeeze the rubes for every cent they have and damn their kids
Maybe. I've definitely seen that anecdotally in some cases. But the school system is also problematic for the families that do value education and the kids that could excel in the classroom.
Our district has eliminated programs for the kids at the top end in the name of equity. They've also eliminated separate spaces for kids with learning and behavioral issues for the same reason. So everyone is in the same classroom and most of the teacher's time is spent on a handful of kids causing trouble and the rest of the class learns nothing.
We can't afford private school, so we're doing a bunch of extra lessons at home to keep them on pace, engaged, and challenged. But really, there are only so many hours in the day and I want them to be outside playing too!
At a certain level “homeschool” is going to be more effective. Ive seen parents get together with 3-6 similar aged students, and then do a combination of hiring a teacher/tutor for them and splitting duting to making it tenable.
This is an empirical claim and there's statistics already available. Almost every study of student performance dramatically favors homeschool over American public school. I'm not saying this in support of homeschool, but as an indictment of public school. It's wild that schools spend many millions of dollars on hundreds of professionals, materials, and centuries of institutional knowledge, and yet are trivially outcompeted by just a mom who puts in the hours with a curriculum from the internet.
To be fair: that mom gets to pick and choose which kids to teach. She probably wouldn’t get the same result if she had to apply the same techniques to inner-city Detroit kids six hours a day and five days a week.
>She probably wouldn’t get the same result if she had to apply the same techniques to inner-city Detroit kids six hours a day and five days a week.
I think you're thinking of it backwards. Inner city Detroit kids probably struggle in school precisely because there maybe isn't a mom at home who's passionate and available to educate them (among plenty of other reasons, to be sure).
Inner city Detroit kids (not gonna lie, feels like a euphemism) aren't just inherently hard to teach for no reason
Obviously that's the case, which is why it's not fair to claim homeschooling parents "trivially outcompete" the public school system. That was my point.
> (not gonna lie, feels like a euphemism)
Are we still doing not-so-subtle claims of "I think you're a racist?"
Pick any demographic group that gets overwhelmingly bad results and depends on the public school system. Look at the statistics. We aren't going to fix problems we can't acknowledge. Urban public school districts are among the most impacted by bad public schools.
As a homeschooler raised ~20 years ago, the key insight is that outcomes are bimodally distributed based on an overlayed function of parental socioeconomic status and student talent.
> yet are trivially outcompeted by just a mom who puts in the hours with a curriculum from the internet.
Oh come on. A quick read on Wikipedia will even tell you the research on outcomes is fraught with biases and lacking evidence. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeschooling
Check the private schools a few more times - some offer quite competitive financial aid packages that even people who feel they’re “high wage” can take advantage of.
Are your kids old enough to run amok at home instead of going to school? Would the police arrest you if you left them home alone instead of sending them to school?
do you live in Canada or is this happening elsewhere?
> Seattle Public Schools cancels gifted program 'cohorts' for equity reasons
https://www.fox13seattle.com/news/sps-highly-capable-cohort-...
Chicago for example. Look up recent action on magnet schools.
I live in the US in New Jersey, and here a big problem was the State flooded school districts with money during Covid with no material oversight of its spending.
The end result was huge increases in spending. But not on education. The money was spent on more MacBooks, more iPads, more buildings, more smart TVs, more consultants, more School Bullshit System as a Service, more scoreboards, more $50,000 signs in front of schools.
Meanwhile the good teachers are fleeing the system and test scores are plummeting as schools focus more on day care and “social justice”, and a declining emphasis on teaching core subjects and learning in general, coupled with social promotion where everybody gets a C or higher, and 80% of the school gets on the honor roll (spoiler alert: our district is not some outlier where 80% of the kids are geniuses).
Schools have very little to do with teaching, and really are just about baby sitting and trying to correct social issues.
Oh, and endless buckets of tax payer money with meaningless oversight.
> Schools have very little to do with teaching, and really are just about baby sitting and trying to correct social issues.
Is that wrong? The government takes away your kid for 12 years, every weekday all day, they might as well solve social issues in the country even if that means, say, kids are 1 year behind Asian kids, or their parents 30 years ago. If they figure out how to solve personal issues, that's even better.
I think there is a logical fallacy here. People assume that the only purpose of school is education. The more the education the better, even if that means deepening social issues, or making kids unhappy (BTW being a kid is like ~20% of someones life, not insignificant in itself). I think they assume it just because 'school' is called 'school', but I don't think the name of an object should determine its purpose.
- - -
When I look at the social issues in my country, I think the school system would be a very natural place to start to solve them (and arguably the current school system just worsens them). Even at the cost of "fall in reading and math scores".
They do a pretty poor job at babysitting too. They do very little to create a calm and disciplined environment.
> more School Bullshit System as a Service
I fully hear you on this. I miss the days where a simple phone call or email communication would occur when needed. Now it's a deluge of daily updates via 2 separate 'apps' for 2 different schools, and a requirement to login to 'app' or website to read the 'email' that they've sent out. Nevermind contacting someone that isn't directly associated with your child at the school -- Guess that's all need to know basis.
I hate it.
Hard to conclude much from this, given New Jersey is consistently rated one of the top 2 states in the nation for K-12 education.
The lesson may even be the opposite: "If your school's biggest problem is 'too much money', outcomes will be pretty good."
New Jersey is probably the most socioeconomically segregated state in the country, mostly based on its school districts. It has crazy real estate prices precisely so parents can get their children into specific, high-performing school districts. These districts bring the state average up very high, but best of luck if your district is in the bottom 50%.
The conclusion I drew is that even schools in the "top 2 states for K-12 education" are piss poor at education.
Where are you comparing to that has better outcomes?
Homeschool or China.
Homeschooling (in particular) has a bimodal distribution of outcomes depending on the reasons the parents do it.
Which county in New Jersey?
> The majority of the public school system has devolved into day-care, not education.
I resisted that narrative for years, thinking it was just a media-hyped scare tactic to get clicks. However, my niece started high school a few weeks ago (in mid-August, which is weird to me); her experience blew my mind.
Her new high school is considered one of the better public high schools in the area. When I asked her how it was going, did she like being a high-schooler, I was expecting her to complain about the course load or something like that. However, she told me that after 2 weeks, they haven't spent one minute on actual education. She said they've been going over rules and policies for 2 weeks. Things like no bullying, inclusiveness, fire safety, bring your own water bottle, how to pray (they have a room dedicated to prayer), etc. Best/worst of all, they did an entire day on active shooter drills - the windows are now bullet-proof!
So yeah, unfortunately, I'm fully onboard with this narrative now. While kids in Taiwan and Japan are learning calc, kids in the US are doing active shooter drills and staring at the Ten Commandments. USA! USA! USA!
In what state are public high schools allowed to "how to pray"? It sounds like her new high school isn't that good. I have a daughter at a good public high school in California in a quite liberal area. There was none of what you mentioned. One day of reviewing the syllabi and rules and quizzes in most subjects starting less than a week later.
The law is extremely specific about this one, and this is constitutional law that overrules all other laws.
A government institution cannot promote any one religion. It's fine to have a multi-denominational non-secular common worship area. You can also promote religion as a general concept, but not a specific religion.
Whether this rule is followed or enforced properly is an entirely separate problem that we are apparently still grappling with.
Well our insane Supreme Court ruled a few years ago on a case involving a football coach praying at games that schools are forced to allow religious employees to do their weird religious ceremony at school events.
Why shouldnt the football coach be able to pray on the field, alone, without forcing their belief on others? That seems extremely reasonable. Making students also pray would be bad,but he didnt do that.
Because he’s a football coach and there is almost always an implication that you toe the line or face reprisal.
It’s also in poor taste. Jesus himself commented on performative piety:
“Whenever you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, who love to stand and pray in the synagogues and on street corners so that others may observe them doing so. Amen, I say to you, they have already received their reward. 6 But when you pray, go into your room, close the door, and pray to your Father in secret. And your Father who sees everything that is done in secret will reward you“
Fortunately for the coach, the gospels are not binding precedent.
> Because he’s a football coach and there is almost always an implication that you toe the line or face reprisal.
This sounds like nobody in a position of power should be allowed to openly do anything that people around them have the right to not do. Which would be kinda bs.
Very much not an accurate description of what was actually happening, despite what the court’s majority claimed (egregious and surely, at least often, willful factual errors in majority opinions are a hallmark of the Roberts court)
Luckily there are both witness accounts and photos in this case, so it’s pretty clear what was really going on.
> Why shouldnt the football coach be able to pray on the field, alone, without forcing their belief on others?
Because they're an authority figure in that context.
Same reason I can flirt with you, but your boss can't.
Who says you can’t find true love on Hacker News!
I strongly encourage you to glance at the dissents for that case. That is very much not the case. The Supreme Court willingly ignored very important evidence that was the case.
Because he's an employee being paid to do what he's told and the school told him not to because it was causing a disturbance. Why does he have to practice his religion on his employer's time? Let's say he was cussing during school hours, would it violate his 1st amendment rights if the school told him to stop?
I don't know if "how to pray" is covered, but Texas passed legislation requiring the display of the Ten Commandments in public schools.
>I don't know if "how to pray" is covered, but Texas passed legislation requiring the display of the Ten Commandments in public schools.
Yes. Apparently that's SB10. SB11 covers praying in school.
cf. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45194376
>Things like no bullying, inclusiveness, fire safety, bring your own water bottle, how to pray
When great controversy surrounds the curriculum, the safest thing to teach is nothing at all.
A lot of controversy is fabricated willfully by ideologues who believe absolutely batshit insane things.
True enough, but that has always been true. Something has changed on the institutional side such that it is no longer willing and/or able to simply reject batshit insanity and continue teaching children such that they are as well informed or better informed and capable as the last generation. What results is a positive feedback loop where a poorly educated public puts increasing pressure on an institution who's members are themselves poorly educated. The result is paralysis, and eventually, societal death.
>When great controversy surrounds the curriculum, the safest way to keep the gravy train rolling to teach is nothing at all.
I fixed your verbiage to be more descriptive. They are teaching nothing specifically because they don't want to kill the golden goose. If there wasn't so much money at stake we wouldn't be having this discussion.
Either this is a bizarre backwards school, or your niece is exaggerating for effect.
> kids in the US are doing active shooter drills and staring at the Ten Commandments. USA! USA! USA!
Not a thing at public schools (despite some attempts to force it)
Between this and the prayer comment, I suspect this comment is either exaggerated or mixed with internet anecdotes rather than actual experience.
>> kids in the US are doing active shooter drills and staring at the Ten Commandments. USA! USA! USA!
>Not a thing at public schools (despite some attempts to force it)
>Between this and the prayer comment, I suspect this comment is either exaggerated or mixed with internet anecdotes rather than actual experience.
Actually, it is a thing in Texas. And unfortunately, it's not exaggerated at all.
From Wikipedia[0]:
"S.B. 10 requires public schools to display the Ten Commandments anywhere clearly visible. The law requires the display to be framed or a poster, and include the exact text of the Ten Commandments provided in the law without alternatives. It must also be at least 16 inches (41 cm) wide and 20 inches (51 cm) tall.[13]"
From the office of the Texas Attorney General:
“In Texas classrooms, we want the Word of God opened, the Ten Commandments displayed, and prayers lifted up,” said Attorney General Paxton. “Twisted, radical liberals want to erase Truth, dismantle the solid foundation that America’s success and strength were built upon, and erode the moral fabric of our society. Our nation was founded on the rock of Biblical Truth, and I will not stand by while the far-left attempts to push our country into the sinking sand.”
Senate Bill 11, passed by the Texas Legislature this past regular session, allows school boards to adopt policies setting aside time for voluntary prayer and the reading of the Bible or other religious texts. The law requires that the board of trustees for each ISD in Texas take a record vote on whether to adopt a policy to implement these periods no later than six months after September 1, 2025. Student participation in these periods requires parental consent."
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_Senate_Bill_10
[1] https://www.texasattorneygeneral.gov/news/releases/attorney-...
Edit: Fixed typo (nor --> not).
dismantle the solid foundation on which America’s success and strength were built
>dismantle the solid foundation on which America’s success and strength were built
More songs about Ken Paxton[0]
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cUqTNDJjdLw
Texas seems pretty medieval : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cRIfsFefatg
I went to public high school in the 70s. The honors chemistry class spent an entire semester on what a molar mass was.
Among other things an entire day on active shooter drills?
Is it possible your niece was joking?
Unfortunately, no. My niece's mom, my sister, called her school to ask wtf was going on. They gave her a lame, lawyer-approved response about their responsibility to protect children and the drills are mandated by the state, blah blah blah. So yeah, my niece said they practice how to respond (call 911, not your parents?), what to do if the teacher is shot (they don't use the word "shot", though), and they talked about tactical gear, like bullet-proof backpacks, which my niece wants now.
> they don't use the word "shot", though
Can I guess.. "bulleted"? Similar to how the creators of brainrot content say "unalive" or "seggs" because they want to make sure their content can go viral, and there's the belief words like "kill", "died" or "sex" will trigger Zuck and Co.'s censorship?
2025, what a year to be alive...
That's wild. My daughter just started public high school last week and they haven't had any meaningful talk about safety, no active shooter drills, nothing like that. They did waste several days on orientation and how class will be organized, stuff like that, but since she's a freshman I guess maybe that makes sense. This week she's been assigned homework.
But this is a boring suburban town on the edge of a midsize metro in the PNW, which is not exactly the most exciting place in the country.
>call 911, not your parents?
What else do you expect government run schools to teach if not "engage the government at any/every opportunity"?
Looking back on my own education what a disservice some of those behavior patterns (not specifically that one) they tried to teach us would be in adult life.
I don’t think advising kids to make their first and possibly only call to an emergency number where someone’s all but guaranteed to pick up quickly and dispatch help instead of to a parent who might not pick up for any number of reasons and can’t personally dispatch emergency responders (but will surely just themselves turn around and call 911) is, like, a Big Government propaganda conspiracy. Seems more like plain old good advice.
While probably appropriate for a shooting, "when shit's going down, call the government first" is generally not a terrible way to handle things as an adult as it tends to reliably turn N-figure problems into much more complicated N+1 or N+2 figure problems. Running your situation by a cooler head not immediately involved is almost always better and the government is always slow enough to show up that you don't lose anything if you do go that route.
Likewise, I think it is very ill-advised to cram kid's heads full of "dial 911" at the young vulnerable age where repeated messaging goes into the kind of memory that's all but impossible to overwrite.
Given the recent school shooting where police waited around outside as the shooting was happening and parents were the only ones to intervene, it doesn't seem like such good advice.
Yeah, I wouldn't mind seeing the LE leadership at that particular, ah, event, plus maybe many of the other law enforcement folks present, subjected to some... consequences. Whatever the victims' parents want, really, I'd be pretty open to anything. I have ideas but I'd not suggest my preferences matter here, and would rather leave it to them, even if they settled on "nothing".
And ACAB, yeah, sure. Basically true, I agree.
That's still your best first move if there's a mass shooting. Anyone you call's just going to call 911 anyway (god, I hope). You do want hospitals on alert and calling in trauma surgeons, and ambulances on the way. And usually the police aren't that astoundingly useless in these cases, even if their outcomes are mixed.
I do think more often than not police are, in general, a net-benefit and force for "good", if you will, when called in for a mass shooting, and I don't think it's a particularly close call. Though yeah sometimes they are pretty bad even for that purpose (and they're often bad for other purposes, sure), and in the case of Uvalde they were disgustingly bad, and I here employ "disgustingly" with its full force and not flippantly.
Still, like... probably call 911 first if someone's shooting up a school?
lol, our legal system helping to destroy education via risk mitigation.
Would you be open to identifying the state where this school is?
It's Texas.
"My niece is a high school pupil so I know how it REALLY is." Surely, you must realize how dumb this argument is?
I don't like the comparisons to other schools or cultures where memorization is the priority.
What kids do with what they learn in school matter more than whether or not they memorized a calc function.
Besides, who cares if you know cal functions in a post-phone, post-AI world. You look that shit up now.
At the early stages memorization is essential for some subjects. I still benefit greatly - like many - from very early having to memorize the complete lower multiplication table (12x14, 15x15 and all that, the 20-square). I actually need that in daily life all the time (and I'm old and skeptical about teaching too much stuff that just drowns kids and prevents deeper understanding because they are always chasing the next subject with little time to let anything sink in deeper). What is sine, tangent, cosine. At least a few digits of pi. Language and grammar too.
Lots and lots of stuff that just has to be memorized. It becomes easier the more experiences one gets over time using those, merely memorizing the words alone ofc. is useless and also very inefficient, without other knowledge to create a network the brain will throw pure sentence-memorization out. So you still start the lessons with some memorization, then deepen it by using it in class. But in the end you will still remember those many little "facts".
I didn't say all memorization was bad, just that we should understand we are comparing cultures that treat rote memorization differently.
I wish this narrative that memorization is bad would die. Yes, understanding concepts is also important, but memorization is incredibly useful for learning and applying knowledge. The faster you can recall "trivia" the better you are able to make connections.
I say this as someone you drank the "no memorization" koolaid. Now I always start new things with memorization first and I learn so much faster.
Yep, the most obvious example (besides language) would be of math. Despite what kids (and unfortunately, some adults) say, it's worth memorizing the tables from 1->10 despite the ubiquity of calculators because the process of memorizing them helps with seeing the patterns that provide a deeper understanding, and it's much faster than pulling out a calculator and plugging the numbers in.
There are some subjects where the emphasis on memorization that some places have is detrimental, but that doesn't make memorization bad in general.
Doing math without memorizing some basic arithmetic facts is like reading without knowing what the hundred most common words in the English language mean, and having to look them up every time you encounter one. Sure I guess you can do that, but… you definitely shouldn’t.
This contradicts my own experience.
As a kid, and probably still now, I was very reluctant to memorise things, for some reason I never understood but that may be connected with distrust of authority. I still remember how long and hard I fought my parents and grandparents who tried to make sure I would eventually memorise multiplication tables. Instead, I had to develop many tricks to be able to retrieve the proper results without memorisation, effectively discovering patterns to retrieve quickly all the tables from very few memorised numbers. Years later, I remember having done a similar thing in history classes, refusing to learn any dates, so instead finding tricks to tell which events must have occurred before or after another, thus again getting more engaged with the material as a result.
Sure, some material do require pure memorisation, like language learning (that I still hate with a passion), but overall I believe memorisation gets the bad rep it deserves.
Why think when your phone or the AI can do it for you? I imagine there are a few people in this forum who might have some thoughts about that.
That's a great question! Let me go ask Claude and get back to you..
Recalling math trivia is not thinking... that's why it's called memorization...
I find this attitude to be really frustrating. Based on my experiences teaching math a student is not going to learn how to do the impressive things that you might call thinking if they don't have a solid foundation in how to do the basics. Imagine saying that learning the alphabet or spelling rules is just rote memorization and therefore not worth doing. If a person needs to spend all of their brain power thinking through elementary operations then they will have very little left over for the things that we might call thinking. I have seen too many kids who struggle with Algebra not because they can't understand the concepts but because they cannot do basic things like multiply 3x4 without needing to add 3 to 3 to 3 to 3.
The core problem is actually twofold:
1. We pay teachers like shit and treat them even worse. Even if you wanted to do a good job as a teacher, it's fundamentally impossible because:
2. Our schools are structured and run by busybodies that have absolutely no business being within 100 yards of a school. Curricula is set by politics and ideology, not established science. We have book bans and helicopter parents suing teachers for talking about dinosaurs or evolution or even for simply existing as a queer person in any capacity.
Teachers have been fleeing in droves for years, and many states and locales are further reducing the qualifications required to teach, leading to a downwards sprial.
There's also the intentional and systematic disassembling of our education system by the federal government, as a means of voter suppression. This whole situation was created on purpose to keep Americans dumb and complacent.
America is fucked six ways from Sunday and it's hard to even think about a way out of this mess. It's going to take several generations for our society and government to recover, if it ever does.
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 we had actual signifiers of success.
Where my wife works the average salary is over 100K per year, so not bad for 9 months of work. This is in California where the test scores are some of the worst in the nation. I would not lean too hard at political party affiliation, California politics is heavily influenced by Teachers Unions, and yet we score near the bottom of the entire US.
> This is in California where the test scores are some of the worst in the nation
I read your post and thought it was BS, so I did a little research. According to this, California public school test scores are better than Texas and closing in on New York and Florida.
> California politics is heavily influenced by Teachers Unions, and yet we score near the bottom of the entire US.
California scores better than Texas, a completely Republican-run state where the teacher's unions have almost no influence. How do you account for that?
https://www.ppic.org/publication/californias-k-12-test-score...
Maybe California just has more rich people. When you control for demographics/SES, Texas schools seem far superior:
https://www.chadaldeman.com/p/which-states-actually-have-the...
https://www.urban.org/sites/default/files/2024-12/States_Dem...
Texas, Mississippi, and others partially achieve this by holding students back.
Mississippi, for example, has a third grade reading gate. Texas holds black kids back at a nearly twice the rate of white kids. These kids are older and have repeated the grade so they do better in the 4th grade NAEP assessment.
This is possibly working as intended. However, you can achieve the same results by redshirting your kid or having them repeat a grade.
So the claim from the blog post that
> but Texas has a slight edge for Hispanic students and a huge advantage for Black students.
says that the Texas results are driven by a demographic that's aggressively held back.
Isn’t that a good thing? Should students be promoted to a higher grade if the aren’t doing well. It’s really difficult to do this in California. My wife has dealt with high school seniors who are functionally illiterate. Maybe if they were held back they might catch up.
I'm not making a judgment about whether it's a good or bad thing for the kid. I don't know the literature to have a position. I'm just contextualizing the data.
In practical terms, the states kind of have different definitions of what it means to be in 4th grade. And that's one way of increasing your score on this particular measurement.
I think the right thing to do is intervene before students are held back. But that costs money and might make your NAEP scores worse if the student just squeaks by this year rather than staying behind a year. But I don't have the data on how much they're attempting to intervene in cases where students look like they're going to be held back.
Adjusted for income its really bad. Income is the strongest causes of academic performance, so if you adjust for them California is doing way worse than other states.
CA also scores middle of the pack on nominal poverty rate (OPM), but last in the country on cost of living adjusted poverty rate (SPM). If anything though, that means backwards from what I would expect for income controlled education scores... ?
This is false. Adjusted for income CA students outperform most other states because CA has one of the largest populations of low income students.
Huge ESOL population, too (but to be fair, Texas and several other states also face that challenge)
Yes they have large ESL populations but CAs is much larger and those other states fare worse by any breakdown.
> This is in California where the test scores are some of the worst in the nation.
This is an easily disprovable statement that calls into question your credibility.
California schools generally score right at or just below the median for the entire US.
That doesn't make them good, but they sure aren't the worst.
> I would not lean too hard at political party affiliation
In the US, it's not hard to look at a map of political party affiliation and a ranking of the worst schools and not notice the correlation.
It's not hard to be in the median yet one of the worst states, if NY/CA/FL/TX all have shit scores (I have no idea if that's the case). You could conceivably be at the median while being one of the worst 5 or 10 states.
Median means that half the states are worse than you. Unless there are ties, it's impossible to be the median and the 10th percentile.
Unless I missed something?
I was thinking median meant enough population of below states to reach half of populace, are doing worse.
>It's not hard to be in the median yet one of the worst states, if NY/CA/FL/TX all have shit scores (I have no idea if that's the case). You could conceivably be at the median while being one of the worst 5 or 10 states.
I wonder where you went to school. Median means that half of the sample is above and half the sample is below.
To explain (and I'll use small words so you'll be sure to understand), the median of the fifty states is that 25 are above the median and 25 are below it. See how that works?
Here's a simpler example in case you're still confused:
Steve makes $5/hour
Bob makes $8/hour
Reggie makes $11/hour
Sylvana makes $14/hour
Benoit makes $17/hour
The median wage is then $11.00/hour. Get it now?
Check out this very complex page[0] (let me know if you need help with the bigger words) that discusses this idea. Good luck. I suspect you're gonna need it.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_tendency
> Curricula is set by politics and ideology, not established science.
This is part of it. A friend is a teacher and is now in an admin position where he manages teachers. His big gripe is the higher ups have no formal system - every time a new person comes in they bring with them their system and politics, burning down the previous efforts while doing little to nothing for students. Then they leave for greener pastures and the next ideologue comes along with their matches.
> There's also the intentional and systematic disassembling of our education system by the federal government
Where is your evidence of this? Schools are one of the most locally controlled institutions of our government.
Parents need to take responsibility for outcomes. Education happens as much at home as it does in school. You need engaged teachers AND parents.
Teacher salaries need to keep up. The problem is teacher salaries aren’t a state or a national setup. They depend on the school district you’re in. If you’re in a high income district where higher taxes are afforded. Teacher salaries are good. But then these places also have VERY engaged parents - which makes the scores much better.
If you want rural and inner city scores to improve it will need real funding - 1. For teachers to want to move to small town USA and teach there, 2. Or for them to risk life and limb going to inner cities and 3. Having an extremely high teacher to student ratio - probably 5-10 per teacher to compensate for lack of engagement at home.
It's a pipe dream. I live in a fairly high income district. The school's attitude is my way or the highway. Neighboring municipalities do not fare any better in this department. From my experience, schools will fight tooth and nail to defend the status quo. I gave up.
> systematic disassembling of our education system by the federal government
So you support shutting down the federal Dept. of Education? Or is the answer more centralized control of education?
Chicago public school teachers salaries will reach over $110,000 by 2029 or earlier. Just going by the track record, this will not result in a better quality of education.
You are hilarious.
Schools are dominated by leftwing CRT ideology. It's the rare exception when there is real pushback against dinosaurs or evolution. I very much doubt that you are as angry about Islamic pushback against sex topics in school.
The reward structures, the dumbing down of courses, removing accelerated courses, passing everyone, the move against merit, the removal of structure, discipline, and punishment for bad behavior all come from liberal ideas on teaching.
Anyone who demands standards, values merit, values hard work with high expectations is labeled a fascist, colonizer, or some other pejorative. "Ways of knowing" is an idea that permeates modern teaching where we can't judge or grade anyone for what they know or don't know because different people just "know" differently. Grades are racist. Expectations are racist. Math is racist.
Parent here with school-aged kids. I think this sub-thread blaming the parents is particularly depressing and not founded in reality. Here is the way I see it. The social media companies with quasi infinite resources have won. They hired the best and the brightest engineers to hack our minds and steal our attention and they have succeeded beyond expectations. As evidence look that the market capitalization of Meta, etc. The data showing that children are reading way less compared to when I was growing up is consistent with what I see, but I did not an infinite ocean of distractions available via device that has become indispensable for modern living (i.e., the smart phone). By the time I was thirteen, I had read the Lord of the Rings to completion, but if I had grown up in present times I doubt that would be the case.
My friend has kids, 8 and 10, who run around outside and play with neighborhood kids as well as read books. They are very active in their kids lives and constantly bring them to events and other social gatherings. This keeps them active physically and socially making things like screen time seem boring.
The shitty parents are the ones who let meta and the like hack them to the point where their children are just following by example - if you stare at the screen all day, so will they.
If the system is such that you have to be an exceptional parent not to fuck up your kids, the system is the problem. Like I applaud your friend with kids, but I think its worth considering that their might be an issue if you need to be working very hard to give your kids a stimulating, healthy, childhood.
Of course kids are reading less. When I was growing, there was frequently not much else to do. Reading was replaced by movies and shows on demand and wont come back no matter what educators or parents do.
It is cheaper, easily available and more fun.
Sure kids also use social networks. But the role reading had was mostly taken over by Netflix, youtube, disney and such.
>Reading was replaced by movies and shows on demand and wont come back no matter what educators or parents do.
... huh?
I'm a parent and this just isn't true. My wife and I have phones, our young children do not. We do not own a tablet. Our children have never known what it's like to have the option of resorting to a screen to keep them busy when we're out of the house. TV time is limited on the weekends, extra limited on the weeknights.
My oldest absolutely loves reading, and I watched her sit in the corner for 90 minutes on Sunday with a pile of books and a massive grin on her face the whole time. My youngest is still too young to read, but I'm hoping for results within the same realm.
Your comment about there frequently not being much else to do? It's up to parents to, for lack of a better phrase, teach kids how to be bored.
Edit:
>It's cheaper, easily available and more fun.
What's super fun, easily available and free for us is going to a park on the weekend to play and have lunch, and then driving around to a bunch of Little Free Libraries in the area. Drop off books we don't want, see if the kids or parents find anything that strikes our fancy. Our kiddos love it and so do we, it's great family time.
I wish people would understand that their personal experience doesn't automatically generalise to collective trends.
It's great that your kids are reading, but clearly a lot of kids, and even more adults, aren't.
It's not just "up to parents" because the media, in all its forms, sets collective values.
And the strategic problem in the US is that reading - and culture in general - is caught between a number of competing ideologies, most of which are destructive to what's usually understood as education both in and out of school.
What individual parents do is downstream of all of those cultural influences. It's heavily dependent on socioeconomics, opportunity, and status, with error bars that depend on a random range of individual values.
The US is a competing patchwork of wildly incompatible cultures and traditions, some of which are directly opposed to each other, and all of which - in practice - are suspicious of traditional educational goals.
Put simply, no one is driving the bus. So it's stuck in a ditch, with its wheels spinning. And it's about to burst into flames.
There's only so much individual parents can do to fix that. The problems are strategic and political, not individual, and they're much harder to fix than they seem.
>I wish people would understand that their personal experience doesn't automatically generalise to collective trends.
And I wish people wouldn't make assumptions and then respond based on those assumptions.
>Fewer than 1 in 5 (18.7%) 8- to 18-year-olds told us that they read something daily in their free time in 2025, again, the lowest levels we've recorded, with daily reading levels decreasing by nearly 20 percentage points since 2005.
[1] https://literacytrust.org.uk/research-services/research-repo...
Seems like the kids just don't read anymore, yours being exception of course
Alas, the evolution of societies is dictated by rules that no individual cases, however inspirational, can radically influence.
You can teach your kids how to fly a plane, yet gravity is not up to parents.
Your kids are small. They wont have other kids in school to talk about books with and to show them different books. The discovery of books and social aspect of it ends with you. It is completely different social environment compared to what I had. There used to be cheap junk book stories, journals about books, things like that. These do not really exist anymore, but similar structures exist for movies.
Assuming they will social, they will have friends to talk with them about anime shows and they will go visit them to watch those shows in their house. The kids in school will talk about anime, about netflix shows, but not about books.
> It's up to parents to, for lack of a better phrase, teach kids how to be bored.
You have full control while they are small. That goes away quickly and obviously even should go away.
But even more importantly, my parents and parents of my peers did not had to put that much work into us reading. They did not had to make the one big family project, they could have spend their weekends working in garden or going to play golf ... and generally speaking kids ended up reading a lot more anyway. They would read, because it was easily available and only fun thing to do.
> What's super fun, easily available and free for us is going to a park on the weekend to play and have lunch, and then driving around to a bunch of Little Free Libraries in the area.
It is not fun except for small kids. All these stats are about kids with agency which yours do not have yet.
Add a couple thoughts to that general idea:
- There's also a reward issue, in that reading, especially long form is "soft punished." It's not directly punished, yet there's very little reward, mostly a lot of struggle, not much of the candy feedback of TV, movies, and video games. It requires personal imagination and visualization of often difficult concepts rather than simply taking what someone else has "imagined correctly" for you. If you've never seen the Lord of the Rings movies, imaging what Frodo, Aragorn, and the rest are actually doing, where they're going, and the struggling through Tolkien's complicated prose is quite challenging. And socially, there's also significant peer pressure issues involved, that evoke “epidemic” or “contagion” comparisons. Once large numbers of peers discount reading, then the population on average starts receiving negative feedback. Notably, if peers are high achievers, then students who interact with these peers may also adopt those habits. [1]
[1] https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/jameskim/files/jep-peer_in...
- Part that's less nefarious, like a teen highlights about the difficulties of reading in this paper [2] (pg 34.) "You can’t ask a book to explain what it means right now. I go to people because of their interactive nature."
[2] https://alair.ala.org/server/api/core/bitstreams/0051cf84-91...
- The social media companies and the world wide web culture in general have also implemented a form of reading detriment. There's little reward to blogging, writing, or reading long form writing. Incendiary writing and rage-farming was long ago found to be an extremely effective tactic compared to informative discussion. And a lot of the time, almost all you can look forward to with your informative post is your contribution being aggressively scraped, while being compensated nothing, and then churned out to make someone else money.
- There's actually a few positive though, apparently teen and juvenile literature is actually increasing in sales somewhat from [2] compared with adult literature sales. Young adult books have been the fastest-growing category over the last 5 years, with print unit sales jumping by 48.2% since 2018. 35.03 million print copies of young adult (YA) books are sold each year as of 2022. [3]
[3] https://wordsrated.com/young-adult-book-sales/#:~:text=Compa...
- You may be slightly down biasing how much people read Lord of the Rings. The Hobbit edition from 2007 has 76,000 ratings and 12,000 reviews on Amazon. [4]
[4] https://www.amazon.com/Hobbit-J-R-R-Tolkien/dp/0618968636/re...
I wonder how much of the YA uptick is driven by adults who prefer less-challenging reading. If that's the case it just makes the picture appear even more bleak.
It’s mostly that. Basically the only genres that still sell meaningful numbers are YA (with lots of adult readers, and if we want to count that as its own genre) and romance (99.9% of which isn’t more challenging than average YA, and usually has even less going on as far as ideas and theme—not to knock it, I mean hell, it’s no worse a use of time than tons of other things).
Adult genre fic, even, is dying, and lit-fic has long been in decline and has pretty much just been for a few nerds since roughly the turn of the millennium.
I think the decline of reading is exactly what’s pushed publishers and agents to favor easier and easier books: you have to pursue as much of the market as possible to make money now because the whole market’s not that big, so you can’t afford to exclude readers. That means favoring ever-easier books as readership declines.
The only other route to make a living is aiming straight at film/TV adaptation, which is very hard to break into but a handful of authors have successfully specialized in that. Their books do OK but they’re watched, as it were, way, way more than they’re read.
The level of tolerance for phone use in the classroom in the last decade blows my mind. It would be like letting kids pull out a GameBoy back in the 2000s, which where I was would have it promptly confiscated.
I was thinking about that recently. I don’t anyone ever pulling out a Game Boy in elementary or middle school in the 90s, even though many of us had them at home.
It’s not that we all got a lecture about no video games in school. It just very self-evidently wasn’t a place you would play video games. It would be like getting a pizza delivered to you at the doctor’s office. Just absurd.
I remember a kid with a Game Gear on the elementary school bus and even that being, well, unusual enough I remember it. Kind of similar to how kids will always remember seeing someone’s family pet run on the bus, because it blows their minds that it can even happen.
by the time i was in elementary school, it was common enough for geeky kids to have game boys at school. this was the height of the pokemon craze, after all.
not in class, of course, but at lunch and on the bus, it was fair game.
Yes, and it's quadratically worse for the people that are on the lowest end.
If I was born recently, I'd be just one of the kids that get stuck with a screen from day 0. There's no recovering from that.
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.
> Most parents just watch TV, stare at their phones and don't want to be bothered by anything that requires effort.
What universe do you live in
> 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.
The generation raised by iPads are in HS now and American IQ tests scores are in decline, especially in the last 10-15 years.
Is there any study or evidence supports that MOST parents "watch TV, stare at their phones and don't want to be bothered by anything that requires effort?"
This is a common trope but I've never seen any evidence.
Go to any park/playground sometime and observe the benches.
Go to any sports field/venue and observe the bleachers.
What you find may astound you, even if the percentage isn't literally 50%+.
If I'm in those situations and staring at my phone, it's because I forgot to bring a book. Staring into the middle distance while my kid sits on the bench for fifteen minutes and a bunch of kids I don't know ineptly play soccer, or closely watching my 500th hour of kids playing "tag", is a last resort. Hell sometimes I'll just start trying to find weird bugs or something.
I do also play with them, but I'm not one of the parents who's always playing with them any time they're playing, they also need space to figure their own stuff out. Adults can do other things a lot of the time, it's fine.
Parents aren’t supposed to be engaged when kids are engaging in free play at the playground or under the supervision of a coach. That’s the definition of a helicopter parent.
Taking your kid to a playground is a parents chance to get a break! Everyone judges parents constantly and blames them for everything, parents in general are doing their best.
It's legit kind-of great, because you can't be doing much productive, so the dozen things you should be doing (most of them due to kids...) if you were at home are out the window. You can just chill for a long stretch of time, without concern. Taking your kids to the park or whatever is awesome, it's one of the best breaks a parent gets during daylight hours.
Or you can knock out some schedule stuff or teacher-emailing or bill-paying or whatever that you'd otherwise have to cram in some other time, that's nice too.
I'm at those things. I don't see even 10% of people on their phones. Yeah people check in but I see involved parents.
Plus, these activities aren't causing missed education. I'm not teaching my kids math while they go on slides.
I find restaurants more eye-opening. Amount of toddlers being fed while their mind is zombified with a screen are astonishing. Parents don't want to put effort in engaging the child and screen is an easy legal drug.
Gen x’er. My parents didn’t help me with homework. I was expected to be independent. There was a culture shift in 2000s and we are involved daily with our kids and their homework. This is all anecdotal and I can’t find any studies on the subject.
Like yeah, waiting in the park while kids plays is the most boring thing in the word. You have to do it, so that kid is not licked inside whole day.
What exactly do you expect people to do there while doing nothing and while being interrupted every 6 minutes over yet another interesting rock?
I graduated from high school less than ten years ago. I'm sure screens have become a big issue in many (or most) schools, but that was not the case at my high school. It still was mostly daycare, not education, so banning screens will not be enough.
> Most parents just watch TV, stare at their phones and don't want to be bothered by anything that requires effort.
You must live in a very sad place. This does not describe the average parent of any of the kids around me. I know these people exist, but it’s not the norm at least in my state.
The most common complaint among my teacher friends is about helicopter parents who are too involved.
I generally agree. However, I don't think most parents are neglectful for using a screen. The ones that can't be bothered would just be drinking, reading gossip magazines, going to bars, or whatever else they felt like if screens simply stopped existing.
Admittedly my kids get more screen time than I'd like, but we try to make it educational. An observation that I made that is on topic for this thread, is that there are very few modern US shows that seem to fit our criteria of being educational and not over-stimularing. It seemes there are many more international shows that are better.
It’s a function of time. For far too many people, the existence of modern life consumes more time than it did a generation ago. We work more hours, we work harder hours, we consume entertainment for more hours.
The costs of this societal shift fall on those who can’t compete for time. Student’s go unparented and unmentioned.
>Most parents just watch TV, stare at their phones and don't want to be bothered by anything that requires effort
This lazy "answer" to every parenting problem makes me roll my eyes nowadays. It's the equivalent of an umbrella hypothesis, a convenient excuse for not having to consider things in-depth, further justified by seeing parents when they are taking a break and assuming they're always like that.
Not only that, but it's a dead end for societal policy. Even if a person actually believed parents deserve the most blame for kids' educational outcomes, that person should recognize there's no real way to influence this (short of dystopic levels of forcing kids into foster care). They would then find the second most blame-worthy cause to fix.
> Most parents just watch TV, stare at their phones and don't want to be bothered by anything that requires effort
Citation? I've routinely seen statistics suggesting the opposite, that parents are moreI involved with their children in the modern time and more likely to play and engage with children.
I think it’s more a matter of both extremes.
I’ve seen stay at home parents who put their kids in daycare so they can spend the day shopping and effectively have someone else raise their kids. Their kids end up largely just being status symbols. I’ve also seen parents that go everywhere with their kids, schedule every moment of their day and won’t even let them stand at the school bus stop by themselves. The parents build their entire lives around their kids and live vicariously through them.
IMO, kids need a proper balance and I don’t think a lot of them are getting that.
what you are suggesting means that economic activity will decrease. we are a consumerism driven society, we want people looking at screens and watching ads. that's how we grow the economy.
I think the root of the problem is that education is no longer seen as a fundamental foundation to a better life. Kids aren't doing well because kids don't care. They don't care because their parents don't care.
Why don't they care? I think for many, they have given up any hope that a better life is possible. So education isn't the key, because nothing is the key, because the door doesn't even exist.
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.
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.
I followed a different approach with my son. We gave him a phone pretty early, and didn't even have a lot of rules around it (no family controls, etc).
The agreement I had with him: "Scroll all day, play video games, etc. That is my side of the agreement. And you also do your school work, learn, practice for exams, homework, etc. That is your side of the agreement. I'll trust you. If your grades get worse, i.e. you need help managing device time, we'll review/change this agreement."
We also sat down many times looking at content together, in attempt to teach him what's trust-worthy and what isn't, what's "healthy" and what isn't, etc. And of course we do other things together as well.
So far (knock on wood) my son has managed well - he is 16 now. He organizes his own time, and has learned when to play and when to work. And crucially he has learned when to disconnect from his devices to do what's necessary.
No kid is the same. I am not saying my approach is best or even right, I just offer it as another data point.
We did something similar with our now 12yo. She self-regulates and tries to stay off the worst doom scrolling garbage sites, and tries to explore different sites and such like Pinterest cards and so on. She knows intellectually that the apps and services are designed to suck away attention. This kinda broke my heart but the other day she made a "bored jar" probably based on a Pinterest card which is a jar filled with little scraps of paper with ideas for what to do when you're bored. It felt like I was watching a drowning person trying their best to stay afloat if that makes sense.
Why is that a bad thing? Choosing to be bored instead of mindlessly scrolling is great. Boredom was an important part of growing up for me.
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-sugge...
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.
In Japan and China, high-stakes entrance exams come earlier and play a stronger role than in the U.S. In China, the zhongkao (high school entrance exam, around age 15) and gaokao (college entrance exam, age 18) largely determine access to selective schools and universities. In Japan, competitive entrance exams for high schools (age 15) and universities (age 18).
That's really underselling it. Gaokao determines where you can live, where you can work, who your friends are, occasionally how much your family values you. They shut down airspace and conduct military/police patrols during examinations to sniff out cheaters. It's only the very wealthy who can just uproot their lives and send their kids to an Ivy/Stanford/Oxbridge/MIT and just skip the whole thing.
Responding to the OC, this is a downright awful solution to the current education problem in the U.S.
https://www.hup.harvard.edu/file/feeds/PDF/9780674295391_sam...
I grew up a white kid in a very (90+%) Asian community. IMO, the biggest difference I observed comparing my white friends from other communities to my Asian friends in my community was the expectation of excellence. For the Asian kids, either they were succeeding, above and beyond, or they were a failure. "B is for 'Better not come home tonight', A is for 'Adequate'", as the jokes went.
And some of those kids still struggled. But the response was to push harder. Didn't get adequate grades that school year? You're not doing anything fun this summer, you're studying. Needless to say it was a culture shock going to college and meeting people who were shockingly cavalier about potentially failing classes.
https://youtu.be/q9ijfnlF_24
Steven He demonstrates what happens when an Asian kid tells their parents about getting a B.
Cultural pressure towards education, and phone bans left and right. Also, people are still addicted to their phones, including kids. But more controlled, I guess.
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.
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.
I get it especially with younger ages, but on the other hand if the student is persistently disruptive they should be removed for the sake of the other students. It's also unfair that 1 student hinders the education of 20+ others.
Segregating overachievers and underachieves essentially means we should have separate schools for boys and girls. Let the boys crash and have the girls excel. However, people tend to get upset when you tell them that the strongest predictor for academic success is gender so they quickly abandon that idea. :P
I do agree there's a disparity between educational outcomes in men and women - but I don't think you can immediately draw your conclusion:
Baked into it is the assumption that current education models fit both genders equally. Boys respond better to active learning and competitive techniques than the more passive techniques used currently. (Could we just as easily draw the opposite conclusion if our current educational culture was geared towards boys?)
Another thing to consider is the various programs that incentivise/enable girls to get into various subjects (in my n=1 experience I had much fewer programs (programming, robotics, maths, etc.) to join despite being already very interested and strong in those subjects).
By comparing age groups directly we are also not controlling for the fact girls mature faster making them better students earlier in life. We are also not considering tail effects of a normal distribution: e.g. top 5% of all students are male, but majority of students in the top 50% are female.
Maybe the solution is to segregate schools on gender, but that doesn't immediately equate to boys crashing and girls excelling.
I agree and I don't think gender-segregated schooling is a wise idea. But the argument is Kryptonite to those who favor school segregation because they realize that they more likely than not would end up in the loser group. Works wonders on race baiters too, who has to come up with "reasons" why girls beating boys is the result of "unfairness" while whites beating blacks is "natural".
That's trivially not true. Girls do better overall, but it's a long, long way from being bimodal.
Do you have another reason for being against streaming?
If it's trivially untrue find me a Western country where boys generally do better than girls. I'll wait!
We did something similar. My daughter got her first phone last month, just in time to start high school. And I'm happy to say that the school district adjusted their mobile phone policy this year from being pretty restrictive, to an outright ban. I completely support that.
We've got one locked-down shared phone for our kids, for scheduling stuff with friends and calling & texting relatives or whatever. We almost have a teen so we'll see how long we can keep that up, but we only relented that much within the last year and a half, zero phones before that (which seems like it should be normal, but there are a lot of e.g. 4th grade classrooms out there where most of the kids have phones, seems super popular especially among the Fussellian middle class, I think in part for status reasons, like, "well if my kid doesn't have a phone people will think it's because we can't afford it!" which of course Fussell's upper-middle and higher don't give a shit about, so there's less child phone-ownership among them)
> e.g. 4th grade classrooms out there where most of the kids have phones, seems super popular especially among the Fussellian middle class, I think in part for status reasons, like, "well if my kid doesn't have a phone people will think it's because we can't afford it!" which of course Fussell's upper-middle and higher don't give a shit about, so there's less child phone-ownership among them)
Great onservation and great Fussell reference.
Some/much of the content in Class is a bit dated now, but imho it is still very directionally correct.
Having learned a bit about adult developmental psychology, many of his observations are found in and predictable by modern cognitive psychology.
Fussell was such a fun read, and so useful in little (also fun) ways.
I distinctly remember seeing, several years ago, a photo of one of (I swear this is going to be basically apolitical) Trump's kids with their family, including one or more kids with toys, sitting in some kind of living-space with this perfectly spotless mirrored-on-all-sides table, and I was like "FUSSELL!!!!". Or all the gold in photos of that family in their home environments (a signal aimed squarely at Fussell's "Middle", which thinks "gold shit everywhere" is an "upper" signal, which it is not—unlike the mirrored table, which is Upper, because nobody who ever does their own cleaning would willingly deal with a fingerprint-magnet like that)
I guess one could quibble about the effectiveness of testing, but the longer trend was… upwards. Eyeballing the math graph, we’re at 55% basic competence. The peak was 65%. But doing a totally informal eyeball projection, we ought to be above 70% by now.
We're seeing more districts ban cell phones in the classroom. It makes sense; in my day, the most you could do is text and play Tetris. We didn't have apps that were weaponized to capture our attention and memory like the kids do now.
People keep talking about how catastrophic it was to close schools during COVID. We keep having catastrophes and no one does anything about it. If the kids missed school, make them go back longer. Large chunks of the country still have 2-3 months where the kids don't do anything; send them back then. If they are already doing year-round schooling, cancel after-school athletics and make them learn with that time instead.
It's weird to me that cell phones in the classroom is even controversial. When I was in school, some kids had Walkmans, CD players, and game boys. You could bring them to school but they weren't allowed in the classroom without prior approval. In class, you were expected to pay attention to the teacher, even if you didn't want to. If you got caught with a device instead of listening, the teacher simply took it away until after class. If you kept bringing it in, you'd lose it until the end of the week, semester, or school year.
This doesn't seem to be a thing anymore, and there probably multiple sad reasons why.
To be very blunt: trashy parents with too much time on their hands will become enraged and raise a huge stink if their kid can't text them or answer their calls(!) while in class. So many will do this that schools just gave up.
That's why it's nice when states just make it a law. That shuts those people up (or at least forces them to go complain somewhere else, where they're more easily ignored and it takes more effort so they'll probably just give up).
(That's the middle-class schools—in really rough schools, teachers have to pick their battles because actual violence is on the table as a response, even among lower elementary kids, and admin's too busy dealing with things way more serious than some kid texting in class to back teachers up on small stuff like that)
I think as a general societal change, we need to stop catering to people simply because they "become enraged."
To be fair, there’s also a set who think their kid needs a phone on them at all times so they can make a call if there’s a school shooting. This doesn’t make any statistical sense as a justification (it might if more “school shootings” were indiscriminate mass shootings, but only a very tiny fraction are—not to downplay them, at all, but there are a couple statistical sieves here filtering for “a personal cell phone a student had saved a life” and the very first one is already filtering it down to almost nothing) but it’s a little easier to sympathize with the basic impulse, at least.
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.
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.
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?
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.
- 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.
My oldest has done both common core math(kinder and 1st grade) and Singapore math(2nd through 5th). Both emphasize understanding over procedure and repetition. I do think in the long run it's more valuable since she has an understanding of concepts instead of just having things memorized. She never really her learned her multiplication tables as it was never required, her homework is real world word problems that challenge even me. I think it's much more valuable than rote memorization that traditional math education focused on. It's just a lot of work from both the teacher and the student. That's the challenge teaching these types of math educations over traditional math.
If public school is essentially daycare, why did the pandemic set a generation of kids back?
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.
This was trending long before the pandemic.
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.
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?
It does. I went down a rabbit hole for this once and yes children of immigrants underperform for math and reading testing v immigrant groups. Can go dig up the .gov links assuming they didnt go away
That’s a strange one. The highest performing public schools are generally where Chinese and Indian origin kids are a significant minority - I.e. around 20-30%.
Every immigrant I've known that's around my age has told me basically the same story. When they came to the US as a child, and got put into public school, they struggled with reading (they could barely speak English, much less read it), but they excelled at math. I've heard this from people born in China, Taiwan, Mexico, Iraq, Iran, Japan, etc.
Is every immigrant you've known about your age someone you met through work / school and do you work in tech / on a STEM degree? If so then your sample is obviously biased.
Is that signal, or is it just mean-reversion, because first-generation immigrant groups tend to have strong academic performance?
> not supposed to think about this
Not supposed to think about it according to whom? Who's telling you that? Why are you listening to him?
The US has some of the best public schools in the world. The US also tops the world on spending per student, especially in poorly performing areas. The education crisis disappears when you control for demographics.
It's right to notice that and remains right no matter how much pushback you get from people who've been pushing the same broken solutions for 50 years.
Congratulations for adopting an independent perspective here. We need more of you.
Sounds like we need to spend even more on those “demographics” to get their performance up!
Are you serious? Because I've heard it argued that this is one of the fundamental differences in the approach between left and right. The left thinks money can solve all problems if we just spend more of it in the right place. The right thinks there is a cultural problem to be solved.
I'm generally quite progressive but I am beginning to appreciate that the right may have a good argument.
What do you think you mean with "cultural problem to be solved" that doesn't involve "putting money in the right place"?
> The right thinks there is a cultural problem to be solved.
That's also the left. The right holds the differences are genetic, not likely to change, and the only problem to solve is how to keep them out of the country.
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!
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.
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.
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.
Regardless of the colorability of your argument, you're responsible for how it hits and shapes the thread, and whether you intended to or not, you led off with a a clause that comes across "tee-hee aren't I edgy", which makes it difficult to read good faith into the rest of the comment. If you're writing something that could be misread as a step into a racewar thread, longstanding HN norms (let me know if you need admin cites) put the onus on you to write carefully so you won't be misread, and, in some cases, there's no way to effectively prevent those misreadings and you simply should not write the comment.
Or you could just not imply that people are racist when they want to discuss the truth.
I don’t see where race comes in, necessarily.
We just need to compare with country of origin performance. If a family relocates from a place with low scores to a place with high scores, can you explain why you think we would expect their scores to rapidly increase to match the new place? I can think of many factors that would work against this that have nothing to do with race or genetics.
If the study is not controlled for this, then the education system at large may not have the kind of problem we would think about if we ignored this aspect. That seems pretty important to the discussion, I think?
I don't think it necessarily does come in! I just think you have to be careful about this stuff, and the comment you wrote wasn't careful. I wouldn't care, except it spawned a gnarly thread --- that thread is what I noticed first, not anything you wrote.
For future reference, and as an example, how would you recommend I rephrase my comment to preclude gnarlification?
I think if you literally just struck the first clause, you'd have a fine comment. I'm not the boss of you, though!
This is just a long-winded way of calling them racist and threatening them with a ban.
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.
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.
>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.
"Their class sizes are also 12:1 students:teacher ratio, and 6:1 in Pre-K/Kindergarten. So that's also probably important."
Absolutely.
The article mentions the chronic absenteeism which is mind blowing: 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I was happily lurking until I saw this astounding response.
"Every relationship with {men|women} I've been in has been bad, so romance is obviously worthless."
"My neighbors dog always barks at me, I didn't get why anyone likes dogs."
"I've had a bad experience with ${race} so I really wish we could get rid of them."
"I caught the flu, and it didn't kill me. I don't get why people are always worried about it."
"I've never worn a seatbelt, and I'm still alive. They're a waste of time."
"School was a bad experience for me personally, so best to get rid of it"
Are you serious right now?
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.
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.
I guess your teachers failed you, since that's a hasty generalization (your experience isn't universal) and a non sequitur (defunding public schools wouldn't address the problem of poor schooling).
It's hard to talk about public education on HN because so many people posting here live in exclusive and expensive Bay Area communities with some of the best public schools in the world.
It’s hard to argue a point when the people you are arguing with have lived experience that contradicts your point yeah
"America is bad and should be destroyed without regard to the people living there"
The worst leftists (handshake) the worst right wingers
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.
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.
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://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.
What is the video supposed to suggest? I think it's extremely hard to conclude anything from a plot of the teacher's position over time throughout the classroom.
Is staying at the front a sign that the teacher is lazy and not helping students? Or is it that the students are competent enough without aid? That could be good if it indicates your students have been taught well enough to master the material. But it could also be bad, indicating your school does not offer enough incremental challenge, and students who are beyond their current level, but not high enough for the next level (honors or whatever), never reach their full potential.
There's far too many uncontrolled variables here. Also, it seems the wikipedia-on-ipfs page for Stigler is down.
Ignoring your huge generalisations based on one silly picture and a bunch of Asian clichés, I think you have a point when it comes to the group thing.
When I was in school, most work & learning happened on the individual level. Sometimes in pairs, where we would have to check each other's answers. But from what I see among my younger relatives and friends with children, there's a lot of group learning going on these days. Groups of five doing all kinds of projects in pretty much any class on any subject. Maybe it's fun to collectively build a diorama of ancient rome for history class, but I doubt you'll improve your maths skills much in this way.
Is this a consequence of a teacher shortage? Are kids in these groups supposed to help other kids? Are they supposed to learn cooperating with (or leeching off) others, at the cost of learning useful skills for themselves?
If it's not clear, arts and crafts sessions are occasionally included in classroom material, especially at younger ages. A single picture is not indicative of how most classrooms operate, or even how this particular classroom operates most of the time. It looks like a quick group project for a basic presentation on some subject matter.
> Why are the students sitting in groups and cutting paper with scissors?
Because paper cutters are too easy to disassemble as re-use as a shiv machete? And anyway, it's pretty hard to make cloudy curves with a paper cutter.
> 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.
Three or four students is a large group?
When someone links to a video I assuming that the video was heavily edited and cherry picked to show whatever point they want. I'm not wrong often enough to bother clicking on yours.
I find it interesting that James W Stigler doesn't even have a wikipedia page. I'm not sure what that means, but he somehow isn't very notable despite having written popular books and being a university professor. (or he is so controversial that they can't agree on one - which is a sign to not take him too seriously)
Well, someone has to write the page. They don't self-manifest. The draft is currently here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Draft:James_W._Stigler but was rejected for mainspace because it was written too promotionally. It will take some work, but he looks to be notable enough to deserve the article.
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.
> 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.
It's easy to blame the teachers unions, but if their goal was to only raise their own salaries and benefits, they are doing a very poor job at it. Teachers do not get paid well. They also tend to get paid more at the elite private schools. So if you want to compare, then you would be advocating for public schools to match private school salaries.
While not always the case, "measuring progress" makes things worse because they tried this and what you get is standardized tests and teachers teaching to the test (Goodhart's law). Most (not all, there are crap teachers out there) are doing their best despite the rules imposed on them by local schoolboards (which are often a shitshow), and by curriculum mandates which they have no say in. And when given too large classes and next to no resources or support, they are then blamed when the kids don't prosper in that environment. There's grade inflation also, this happens at private schools too. Which teacher is more likely to get fired/disciplined; one who fails a lot of students and hardly ever gives and A, or one that hands out A's like candy and the worst non-performing students get a maybe C- (brought up to a C or C+, once the parents come in to complain to administration).
> It's easy to blame the teachers unions, but if their goal was to only raise their own salaries and benefits, they are doing a very poor job at it.
They do a pretty good job at it when you factor in long term pensions and health care.
> Teachers do not get paid well.
Teachers get paid too much. They create artificial barriers like requiring multiple years of certifications to purposefully limit the pool of competition. Most teachers unions are closed shops that mandate membership.
> They also tend to get paid more at the elite private schools. So if you want to compare, then you would be advocating for public schools to match private school salaries.
If I could waive a wand to immediately increase public teacher’s salaries by 25% in exchange for the elimination of all tenure (which does not exist at K-12 private schools), I would do it immediately.
> While not always the case, "measuring progress" makes things worse because they tried this and what you get is standardized tests and teachers teaching to the test (Goodhart's law).
There’s plenty of objective things to measure in math and science. If little Johnny can’t do basic arithmetic or solve 3x+2=11, you can’t fake that during an exam.
At least with teaching to the test, the kids learned the material on the test.
If you don’t measure things, you will not improve it. And teachers unions are adamantly against measuring things. Because they know it can and will be used against them. It’s an inherent conflict of interest.
> They do a pretty good job at it when you factor in long term pensions and health care.
They only get good pensions and health care because school districts refuse to give them better salaries instead. And good health care (really, health insurance) is crucial because health care costs can obviously bankrupt you in America.
> They create artificial barriers like requiring multiple years of certifications to purposefully limit the pool of competition
How is requiring the equivalent of a master's degree an "artificial barrier"? Surely, new teachers should have some experience and theoretical background before standing in front of 30-100+ students and being responsible for their education?
Florida passed a law making it possible for veterans to teach without even having a bachelor's degree. Does that sound like a good idea to you? Would requiring even a bachelor's degree be an "artificial barrier" in your opinion?
https://www.fldoe.org/teaching/certification/military/
I'm not as familiar with the US, but Australia moved from requiring teachers to complete a 1-year graduate diploma, to a 2-year master of education. This is effectively doubling the commitment for someone to transfer into teaching from another field.
Requiring anything at all is by definition an artificial barrier. Some are justified and some are not. In this case, I question whether a longer education necessarily benefits students.
An average teacher salary in Chicago projected in their new contract is $110,000, plus pensions and heathcare on top of that. What better salary do you have in mind? An average individual salary in Chicago is about 45k.
They are still wining about this number and go on strikes pretty much every other year.
Compare teacher salaries to the overall population's. They're paid very well.
> Teacher’s unions, which predominantly exist in the public school system, are not in the business of educating children
I'm always surprised and disappointed to see such lazy thinking on HN. If teachers' unions were responsible for poor educational outcomes, you would see an inverse relationship between strong teachers' unions and K-12 rankings.
But New Jersey and Massachusetts consistently rank in the top 2 K-12 rankings in the US. And they have ~100% union density among K-12 public school teachers!
Let's test the rest of your little theory. If you believe that pesky teachers' unions are responsible for poor outcomes, then surely states with less teacher's union density and union power will be the epitome of strong K-12 outcomes.
But who ranks at the bottom? New Mexico at #50, Alaska at #49, Oklahoma at #48...
You might, at this point, sensibly say that's due to residents having less money and other disadvantages. But at that point you have to admit that teachers' unions have no correlation to K-12 outcomes.
https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/rankings/education
What else would you have them cut paper with?
Guns. /s
I'm not smart enough to understand what are the conclusions of the patterns observed in the video.
> Just looking at the picture triggered me. Why are the students sitting in groups and cutting paper with scissors?
So, I'm going to flag this as a perfect example of legibility vs. legitimacy[0]. You, probably AP's writers, and much of the public perceive learning as ocurring in a certain way. That isn't the way that 'the best' learning occurs, its the way that most closely resembles where we think learning occurs. Going further, it is much easier to interpret a lecture hall as a learning activity because it is easy to perceive what is being 'learned'. You sort of say it yourself. you are asking a why question about what is being learned - it is less legibile - and that is leveraged into an inference that less is being learned - i.e., it is less legitimate.
The problem is that the comparison you are making is false - but deeply embedded in our minds. Students *feel* like they learn more in lectures than in 'active learning' classes.However, when their actual knowledge is tested the oppostie is actually true. The students perception and actual learning are at odds and mediated by the environment[1]. It is, again, easy to sit in a lecture and overstate (i.e., feel like) you're learning because you are watching someone who is an expert talk about something. No metacognitive monitoring is required on the student's part. In contrast, it is really easy to perceive yourself as struggling in a class where your learning process and your failures in that process become visible. Students are taught to view failures/wrong answers as bad - so they view their process of learning as evidence of not learning.
Pedantically, no one in the picture you reference is cutting paper with scissors. There are scissors on the table, no one is cutting. You made an inference - inferences are important but difficult to test. They are working in groups to learn with peers (a science based best practice). I don't know exactly but I can infer it is related to math, possible learning to calculate area and estimate. Making that tangible, creating and measuring simple then more complex shapes helps them learn - its not arts and crafts. It leads to better conceptual understanding than an abstract explanation.
It may look different, but my hobby horse problem with US education is that everyone's vibes are treated as equivalent to actual scientific evidence. We regularly crator efforts to fix these problems simply because they don't look like the school that the parents went to. We had one parent try and ban school provided laptops (which are used for 20minutes / week) from my daughter's preK class because her kids are zero screen time. I can't imagine a parent in Japan or China even trying that.
[0] https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2010/07/26/a-big-little-idea-call...
[1] https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1821936116
As a CODA - measuring learning is shockingly hard. As an analogy, it is not deterministic it is quantum. Data tells us that if I ask demographic questions before a test, certain groups score lower than if I ask them at the end. If I ask a math question using a realistic scenario, students show higher conceptual understanding than if I ask them a fully abstracted question. If a student is hungry or tired that day, they will score lower. None of those are measuring the latent construct (e.g., math ability) that we need to estimate, even if it is a high variability measure.
They are cutting paper. You can see scraps of paper on the desk.
Of course “active” learning is better than passively sitting in a lecture. But these kids are not learning. They’re sitting in a group with scissors and markers making a X-y coordinate graph.
Your long diatribe fails to recognize the obvious: that middle school math class has turned into an art and hand labor class / day care.
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?
I'm missing something. What change in demographics are we talking about, and why would that influence math results?
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.
Intuitively, I can understand that English Second Language students would struggle in classes other than English, but are the demographics really shifting enough to explain the drop in attainment shown in the article?
The best demographic data I can find is here: https://datacenter.aecf.org/data/tables/103-child-population...
The best data I can find on language spoken at home is here: https://datacenter.aecf.org/data/tables/81-children-who-spea...
The above shows the share of "Non-Hispanic White alone" children (who I'll assume speak English as a first language) going from 52% to 48% from 2015-2024, and the percentage of "Children who speak a language other than English at home" staying flat at 22% from 2013-2023. From 2015-2024, math attainment goes from 62% to 55%.
At a glance, it would seem that the shift in math attainment cannot be explained by demographics/language alone.
The NAEP site has performance by student group sections. It includes breakdowns for Hispanic and English/non-English learners and includes a section on demographic changes (ctrl+f Group Population Percentages).
Reading: https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/reports/reading/2024/g12/p...
Math: https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/reports/mathematics/2024/g...
Hispanic population has shifted (+3-4%/report) and English learners have shifted (1-3%/report). [Note that reports have variable number (~2-5) of years between them]
English learner scores went up (or stayed the same) and non-English learner scores went down.
The big caveat of course that the English learner average score is still much lower than the non-English learner so if that population increased enough it still drags down the average. (Click the English learners to see their scores or see the National Student Group Score Distributions section for graphs that make this apparent).
But it has to be more complicated than "the English-learning Hispanic population increased" because if you look within racial groups: all groups except Asian are down within their own group.
Or, for example, girls' scores are down more than boys' scores even though girls' scores are still better than boys' on average in Reading (but worse in Math).
I think it's probably multiple factors all adding together. For example, % of public charters has increased but public charter schools have worse scores than public non-charter. % of economically disadvantaged has increased and economically disadvantaged students have worse scores than those not. % of students with disabilities has increased and students with disabilities have worse scores than those without.
The weirdest thing to me is how the population statistics are different between reading and math. From 2019->2024 the reported Hispanic 12th Grade population shifted 3% for Reading but only 1% for Math?
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.
> It's cultural
How do you know?
Florida has a huge hispanic population but is ranked #2 in K12 education rankings. Kids are actually remarkably fast at picking up on English even if they were born and raised in Spanish speaking homes or in Spanish speaking countries.
Curious what percentage of school districts fall into this purported category. And is that number continually increasing? Share some data on this please.
Using a metric like SAT math scores, the demographic breakdown is: Asian > White > Hispanic > Black. The youth population is becoming less White and more Hispanic, therefore we should expect lower math scores.
Yup, more article slop without accounting for demographic data.
Same with the constant drumbeat of "Americans are getting shorter".
They should add more A1 to the classrooms.
Their steaks are obviously inadequetly sauced.
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.
The answer NYC schools have come to is to relax /TEACHER/ basic knowledge requirements: 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.
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/report...
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.
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.
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?
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
He cites and directionally agrees with the decline of reading as the cause.
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-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?
Maybe 6 hours of tiktok a day is not giving the brain the rest it needs to process and store any learned skills?
It's because they don't allow GPT in exams. Students are accustomed to using it.
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.
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.
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??
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%.
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-stude...
Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43522966 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43537808
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)
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.
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.
> The best all-income schools are catholic schools, averaging at 1 grade level higher. Then private schools do even better
These are not equal comparisons. People who send their kids to a private school are choosing that, and thus care about the education their kids get. While Catholics are all income and choosing for religion reasons, generally catholic implies cultural care for education. Public schools take everyone including those who don't care about education.
In general public schools in the US are very good. However a small number in every school are kids that would be kicked out of private (including catholic) schools. There are also significant variation between schools with richer areas of a city doing better - despite often spending less on education.
> Charter schools have been the best bang for the buck.
That is a lot easier when you can require a transcript from the prospective student, review it, and say, "Uh, no thank you".
There's a private technical college near here that offers EMT and paramedic training. They "guarantee" "100% success in certification and registration" for their students.
How do they get there? They boot students out after they fail (<80%) their second test in the class.
I'm not necessarily opposed to such a policy. It is, however, intellectually dishonest of them to try to tout it as a better school for that reason. Charter schools are free to reject students who will bring their grade averages down.
Yeah, that's very selective. Catholic schools on the other hand just require you to be Catholic and be somewhat involved in the Parish and score much higher.
I believe this is not only restricted to Catholic schools though they are the most common. Most religious schools have higher scoring students.
If nothing else, parental involvement correlates with higher test scores and being enrolled in a non-default school correlates with parent involvement. So it's no surprise that being enrolled in a non-default school correlates with higher test scores.
IMHO, we always hear about such and such school (system) has X% kids proficient with $Y/year per pupil. But what I would really want to know about a school is how does a year change at the school change the proficiency of the class. If the class of 3rd graders starts the year at 20% proficient at 2nd grade level, and ends at 22% proficient at 3rd grade level, that might be a good school, even though a single point in time check says 22% proficient. But the numbers we get aren't really useful for that; a cohort analysis would be better; there's real privacy implications, but that doesn't make the numbers we get useful. :P
Catholic schools in Australia don't required you to be Catholic. Although, I'm sure most kids are. And enrolling there will expose you to Catholic teaching.
I wonder if USA schools are similar. It's next to impossible to require belief.
The vast majority to all Catholic schools in the US have no requirement of you being Catholic.
Correct. Your chances of getting in are just much better if you are, then even better if you're in the Parish.
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?
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.
I'm sorry but some F rated schools getting closed down needed to happen. There are institutions either so toxic at the administrative level or so heavily populated with kids with behavioral issues that it's impossible to fix without divvying up the student population into other schools that can better handle the load.
NCLB had some flaws but that wasn't one of them. Before NCLB you were stuck in the poor school district your likely single parent could afford to live in, inevitably doomed to poor education.
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.
Sure, but you could do the same in pretty much any country.
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.
from 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.
That's by design. France has a cabinet with full control over education in the entire nation. In the United States, education is in the hands of locally elected school boards and the role of the federal and state secretaries of education seems to be mostly limited to dumping money on those people. (And attaching conditions to that money in general seems to be fairly controversial, as the present discussion shows.)
There's no way such a system can produce uniform results.
(The wisdom in forcing voters to elect all sorts of local commissions is another matter entirely. I struggle to see how anyone can make an informed choice, in ballots with 10 or more elected positions, but they seem normal in America.)
The US has always had a state-run or private education system, since even before it was founded as a country. And the U.S. is among the top 10 most educated countries in the world, with over 50% of population having at least a bachelor's degree.
It's pretty simple to vote on local offices: are you happy with the current state of education in your district? Good, keep the incumbents around. Otherwise change out school board members until you achieve the desired results.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/232951/university-degree...
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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)
Disturbing % of people just consume tiktok style video and that's it.
There is also quite a difference between being able to type out and read short messages to friends like "who wants to go to the park today" or read a menu and know if a sandwich has mustard on it or not and being able to have deeper inferential and evaluative understandings of written thoughts and ideas.
I think back to some college peers who even in some more basic classes could clearly read the words of the assigned writings, they couldn't then parse out the deeper meanings behind the assignments. They weren't illiterate, you could ask them to read a passage, and they'd be able to say all the words. You could ask them face value questions about the text, and they'd probably be able to answer most questions right. But any deeper analysis was just beyond them. So, when the professor would ask deeper questions, they'd say "I don't know where he's getting this, the book didn't talk about that at all".
Agree, but I'm not sure how much worse this is today?
I avoided English Lit in college but thinking back to High School I recognize the "I don't know where he's getting this" reaction. I just rarely engaged with the so-called "classic" stuff we had to read, and like you say I had no trouble reading the words but struggled with deeper meanings or even just getting past the archaic language. And this was in the early 1980s, no chance it was influenced by social media or mobile phones or AI. My parents probably blamed television.
At least we now have AI, where a student could (if motivated) ask questions about the meaning of a passage and get back a synthesis of what other people have written about it. Back then I used Cliffs Notes to do that.
It started in 2013. If we have to blame technology, social media seems more likely than AI, I guess.
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.
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?
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.
Pfft, it started in 2007. Kids couldn’t deal with the orange box, cod4, halo3, all coming out at once.
Actually, it is a good point that this is a lagging indicator.
This trend of decline significantly predates either COVID or GenAI.
The US has been on a steady decline in global education rankings since the 70s IIRC. Can’t remember where I saw the stat.
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.
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.
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.
How can it be "defunding" while the US spends far more per student than just about any other country in the world?
Except for a brief blip around the housing crash inflation adjusted per pupil spending has steadily increased for decades.
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.
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.
How about the quality of the education and curriculum itself?
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.
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.
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)
But that's just punting the original question. Obviously parents aren't getting better, they are getting worse. Why is the question.
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.
You need to look at who the kids look up to. What attributes do their role models have?
A head singing through a toilet seat
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.
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.
The biggest irony is that spending more money is not going to help things.
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
It's fine. The required and qualified people for the upcoming jobs will be imported from the bountiful overseas.
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.
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.
I think too much is done on computers and not pencil and paper.
Watch the movie Idiocracy for the entertaining answer
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.
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.
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
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
You think they are better at detecting the know-nothings than the adults?
Who said "the king has no clothes" in the classic tale?
OpenAI Study Mode will fix it. https://openai.com/index/chatgpt-study-mode/.
Oops, it won't: https://tech.co/news/another-study-ai-making-us-dumb
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.
it's about to get worse, maybe every year
https://www1.racgp.org.au/newsgp/clinical/how-covid-19-leave...
note even infections with no symptoms
Good source of factory labor.
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.
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.
We have a powerful right-wing political party that is aggressively anti-academic.
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.
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.
Yeah, if kids could do math they’d probably be asking questions like “why are we subsidizing Israel with billions and billions of dollars while my friends are on food stamps and free school lunches and still go hungry” Or “why can’t my parent afford their health treatment while we give Israel billions of billions of dollars and they still want more”
If they could read, they’d probably read the Talmud & study the Torah, and realize that letting some small group schizophrenics inbreed for thousands of years was probably a bad idea.
I wonder who’s in charge of setting these standards in education for our children.
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.
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.
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.
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/School-to-prison_pipeline