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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.

My son is taking a woodworking class in high school. First week, he came home and I asked him what he was doing in his woodworking class… “Disassembling the library bookcases”. “Why???” “Because they’re getting rid of the library”.

Apparently the school board decided to save money by cutting the librarian, and then decided to just move the books out of the school library and into the “nearby” public library.

In reality, there were 95 books in the school library which were being questioned by some parents. Instead of removing just those books, and being accused of book banning, they just removed the entire library. For all intents and purposes, it was a book burning.

Yet the football team is fully funded, and the baseball diamond is kept up.

This society has priorities which aren’t education.

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.

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

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.

After moving my kids out of a bad elementary school and into a fantastic district with a highly ranked school, the differences are obvious. The good school has smarter kids with better parents. The bad school had dull kids with bad parents.

The kids at the new school do their homework, read, play outside. The kids at the old school skipped homework, played call of duty, and could hardly read.

The new school has fun exercises like the "word of the week" -- and they swear they will rarely assign homework. The old school had mandated trips to the library so kids could take home books and ignore them, alongside a minimum of 1hr of homework per night.

In the bad school, a class of 24 had 11 kids who would not behave themselves, ever (one of the kids would often pick up his chair and hit other students and his aide). In the good school, a class of 24 has 1 kid with limited behavioral issues.

Anyways, the people make the place -- and that includes kids.

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.

- 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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

Do we know how much of this decline is US-specific versus a global phenomenon? The article cites no data on that score.

This kind of thing is unfortunately pretty common in American publications, and it drives me up the wall. If you don't compare US statistics to global ones, it's hard to separate out political / local factors from global trends (and to be fair, this is exactly what some journalists want.)

In particular, I'd be interested in statistics from countries with different lockdown policies, as well as those that banned smartphones in school. Beyond US politics, lockdowns and Tiktok seem like the two most likely factors that may influence this.

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

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.

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

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.

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 US is practicing a mass production approach to education still. Drill students with excessive facts and expect them to remember it. 3 minute passing periods, 15 minutes for lunch, scolded for socializing. Etc. It's intensive and counter productive. Now there's an over reliance on tech that degrades rather than improves the experience. A link in Google classroom to an exercise that expires after a day, a PDF instead of a handout. Etc

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)

You need to look at who the kids look up to. What attributes do their role models have?

Isn’t contemporary education just a preview of the highly competitive white collar rat race? Constant grading, judgement and ranking? And for what? For some coveted yet mind-numbing tech job so can stay one step ahead of your peers and afford a decent place to live?

And that’s nearly the best realistic future. Why wouldn’t students internalize this and start mentally checking out?

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.

Maybe 6 hours of tiktok a day is not giving the brain the rest it needs to process and store any learned skills?

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...

I'm 24 and I've used internet heavily completely unsupervised since around 7-ish years old. As I've grown older I notice myself using my phone and be on the web less and less, it is a conscious decision. My access to youtube is blocked except on my laptop, though I have noticed not watching any videos for weeks now. My phone is B&W and has it's browser disabled. Being more mindful of technology use is definitely a positive trend within my generation.

But as I near parenthood, I feel conflicted. I'm still young enough to remember my state of mind in the early teen years. I remember being surprised at the amount of attention the level "No Russian" from MW2 got. I thought - "It's just a game, why would anyone be offended by this?". Now, having seen similar things happen in my lifetime, it seems very distasteful to me. Even seeing a kid with a realistic looking toy gun gives me mixed feelings. The idea of having my kid being on tiktok for 6 hours unsupervised with all the people feeding their agenda to young impressionable minds makes me uneasy. And I was the one who spent good portion of his day being on 4chan.

My question is to parents of HN - how does one find balance within their parenting? I don't want to be a helicopter parent who blasts their child for not falling in line with all their demands, torturing them with endless extracurricular activities for their own good. At the same time I want them to learn a little discipline and not hate me for forcing things on them. I had zero limits on my screen time, and I'd say I turned out perfectly fine, though I did poorly in school and was a troublemaker. I found my love for studying only after I turned 18 and had some time with my thoughts after I moved out and stopped hanging out with deadbeats. Frankly, I'd say my upbringing was a little too lax.

Younger me would feel betrayed by my changing attitude towards raising kids , and that's what worries me - the disconnect that leads to the repeating cycle of parent-kid conflict. I don't think a parent usually thinks that they'll try to be the world's shittiest parent, yet so many of them are.

There are 3 grade levels and 9 subjects giving 27 possible groups. It seems entirely inappropriate to pick out 3 and highlight the fact that (on a different test of students studying a different curricula) the results went down.

Especially when the NCES Data Usage Agreement clearly states "Use the data in any dataset for statistical purposes only."

As an example 4th grade reading has on a scale from 0 to 500 been between 213-223 for 20 years with of course this year (215) not being the lowest point. This is a test where many jurisdictions have 10+ point swings from test to test. There really isn't that much signal in the noise here.

Out of all the taxes I pay, the one I would put more money in is for public library funding. This funding is indiscriminate of races, wealth, and social status ear mark. Everyone would receive the benefits from a library.

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.

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?

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.

This is interesting data. For all the talk of bringing up the bottom and "No child left behind" this suggests we're still succeeding. And as anyone in California will tell you, schools are doing this at the expense of the top students.

I get that COVID is part of the cause. Forcing one instructor to teach to 30 kids of widely varied abilities makes it worse. In that model, nobody learns.

Watch the movie Idiocracy for the entertaining answer

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?

I wonder if red state forcing bible curriculum, alternative history, and erasing factual information will help improve scores…

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?

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

It's because they don't allow GPT in exams. Students are accustomed to using it.

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.

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.)

Milton Friedman was there, signed the guest book, and left.

Public Schools: Make Them Private - Milton Friedman

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45197646

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.

They should add more A1 to the classrooms.

Their steaks are obviously inadequetly sauced.

The biggest irony is that spending more money is not going to help things.

Regardless of the arguments, it's encouraging to see people interested enough in public education to take the time to comment (even if it's a comment I don't agree with.)

There cannot be a coherent discussion on this topic without also taking race-adjusted scores in account. America's demographics are changing and this must be understood by all.

I just made a new Math Education tool called https://fuzzygraph.com. Hope it will increase interest in math.

I think too much is done on computers and not pencil and paper.

Taking bets on how fast Marshall McLuhan re-enters the public conscience :)

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

I mean, is it any question it's about money? And I don't mean money spent on education.

People are too poor and harried to care anymore.

When I was growing up, you could strive for a white collar job and get one, and we assumed it would lead to a decent life.

Now, what are kids supposed to look forward to? Tech is in the toilet, everything is going overseas, everyone is broke.

So many of my friends are unemployed, LinkedIn is filled with people desperately posting looking for jobs. Of COURSE this is going to affect early education as well.

But at least we're not paying teachers as much as we used to (in real dollar terms): https://www.nea.org/resource-library/educator-pay-and-studen...

[If you note the slight whiff of sarcasm, that is intentional.]

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.

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.

> There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.

- Isaac Asimov

The cult of ignorance now rules the country, simple as that. To half the nation, teachers are now all insane satanists out to trans their kids. As a result, they're paid dirt poor and the state, controlled by that anti-science reactionary wave, is making their work harder and less rewarding everyday.

Vaccine mandates are ended on religious grounds, public research is destroyed to save pennies in tax cuts to the wealthy, and foreign researchers are arrested at the borders for no reason but to assert American dominance over them and satisfy the racist folk fueling the machine.

This is what it looks like, witnessing the end of an Empire from the inside.

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.

Good source of factory labor.

We have a powerful right-wing political party that is aggressively anti-academic.

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

Adding to the swath of anecdotes here so wiser policymakers and teachers than myself have more perspectives to draw from in addressing the ongoing learning crisis.

I was in High School for the first full class of the new millennium (2000-2004). Being gifted at the time (now we know I just had OCD and hyperfocus), I’m cruising through on Honor Roll and knocking even difficult content out of the park. It’s to the point that I’m sleeping through English with a perfect GPA and have been politely asked by my Social Studies teacher to stop answering questions (to give other students a chance to learn) and just work on my homework in his class while he teaches. Everyone is super chill, happy to teach, and has no compunction failing students who don’t grasp the material and fail to seek help.

January 8, 2002. Social studies is my last class of the day. The teacher storms in, angry, and flips his desk in rage.

Alright, you have our collective attention.

He points furtively at the class while facing the chalkboard before turning around. “Congratulations, you’re the last group of students to get a decent education. Starting next semester, No Child Left Behind means we’ll be teaching to tests and not covering the material, and every single class after you is going to be dumber as a result. You better pay attention, because this is the last good world history class you’ll likely ever have.”

I could not hope to appreciate his wisdom at that moment, but in the years since? Dude was 100% correct. I learned about context and nuance to discuss on essay exams; my siblings who came after me learned rote dates and events for a standardized test. The irony is that they have superior college credentials (MS and BA) than I do (AS), but all three of us are fairly even in footing in our overall intelligence, seeking of new knowledge and data, and ability to teach others. I can anecdotally credit my superior education pre-NCLB for preparing me to succeed in the real world compared to younger peers who have required far more (expensive) education to get to the same point. Introducing KPIs alone won’t fix the problem, it will require rekindling a passion for learning in the hearts of students, teachers, and parents alike to restore our basic comprehension scores.

And before people ask: yes, we too had the dreaded issues of defunding everything to fund the football team. My school closed auto, metal, and eventually wood shop classes to create three more weight training rooms for the sports teams, and cancelled HomeEc in lieu of letting bankers do an hour lecture on credit cards to Seniors.

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

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.