US High school students' scores fall in reading and math | Hacker News Reader

US High school students' scores fall in reading and math

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540 pointsbikenaga1,089 comments

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.

> 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...

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.

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.

>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.

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.

That’s crazy man! Hey, I don’t suppose it was controlled for income as well as race, was it?

> Insofar as the US had a “culture averse to education,” surely that affects white americans as much as it affects anyone else.

Its like you've never lived in America.

Obviously white people are extremely privileged and also have a different culture. Keep in mind that schools in predominantly black areas are typically significantly less funded than those in white areas.

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.

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?

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...

Hmmm I wonder if something happened after 2018, it's on the tip of my tongue I just can't quite remember ..

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.

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.

Wow it's almost like racism is systemic.

It's pretty wild how you can show lower achievement scores for any countries definition of "black" while changing who belongs in that group.

For instance, Italians were considered black in the early 1900s and wouldn't you know it, there was an achievement discrepancy for Italians so long as that definition held.

Or you can look at apartheid and post apartheid South Africa - when the political structure flipped, so did the academic scores of the groups.

The discrepancy follows the social category and power asymmetry and not the actual people. It's a social artifact, not some biologically inert trait.

Only if the US is a monoculture but we're a diverse multi-cultural society. Different cultural groups have different values and priorities.

> 15 year old white american students

Which barbarian idiot included a question about skin colour in an otherwise-respectable test?

In the US there are a few obvious things, but everyone acts as if we are powerless to solve them:

1. Cell phones in classrooms.

I don’t know how or why they were ever allowed. They should have to be in a backpack or in a locker and off during class.

2. Not removing students with bad behavior from classrooms and schools.

The current thinking on how to handle a student who is seriously misbehaving and potentially violent is to remove all of the other students from the classroom versus just removing the problematic student in question. This is because there have been instances where a child has been physically removed and has gotten seriously injured. The thinking on expulsion is that it should essentially never happen because kids who get expelled have bad outcomes later in life. But the net effect is that one bad student can hold an entire classroom hostage and there is nothing the teacher can do. This is obviously detrimental to all of the kids who are compliant and behaving. It also causes burnout which leads me to the next major issue facing public schools.

3. Good teachers are quitting

It isn’t worth it to teach in America. You need a lot of expensive education. You get paid very little. You have no power to remove a student who are major disruptions and make it impossible to teach. And, in many districts, teachers are being accused of trying to indoctrinate children because we live in a politicized world.

4. Too many parents aren’t parenting

The number of kids who are not potty trained by kindergarten continues to rise. This is an issue of parents not wanting to do something that is hard and takes patience.

5. Lowering Standards

When faced with kids failing the solution should never be to lower long held standards. The kids are the same, they are just as capable, it is all of the above that is different.

Bonus. We feed kids junk in schools

This has been going on for decades. Why is it so hard to make fresh food for kids? It could probably cost about the same if done properly. The answer is it takes some effort and people have to think about it.

> In the US there are a few obvious things, but everyone acts as if we are powerless to solve them

Yes but they aren’t the things you said:

1. Schools are filled with disruptive kids who use up time and resources and are not removed. 2. Teachers have no enforcement authority so they cannot do any of what you said, including removing phones. 3. Teachers and administrators are generally not smart or capable and continue to spend resources on everything except time spent reading, writing, and doing math. 4. Teachers are trapped in a web of legal red tape, bad incentives, and horrible metrics. 5. The US is segregated by by class and education.

Re point 2: In Germany, among other countries, you have social education workers (a college-educated job) in school for these situations. Such behavior has underlying causes, e.g. problems at home (fresh divorce, drugs, poverty-related stress) recent trauma (accidents, death of a loved one, abuse), mental illness (AHDS etc.). Treat the cause and the behavior changes.

I think a major issue is the lack of a feedback loop. Cheap money in america means that no matter what country you're currently in, it's financially beneficial to migrate to the US. One of the happy paths towards this end is migrating for college or higher education.

In other countries' colleges without this unlimited input second to local students, there is a feedback loop connecting the college back to the local schools. This ensures that schools keep up. In america this is not required, since no matter what standard say UW sets, the corresponding tutoring centres in India, China and Singapore will adapt to that within weeks. And they can send as many students as UW can possibly ever want.

It also doesn't help that international students bring in more money than local students.

Point 5 has been a thing for a very long time with respect to sports. The kid is marked-up a few points on tests if they're the reason the basketball team is winning.

From your list it's hard to explain why jurisdictions such as San Diego (reading 4th grade male) test score have risen continuously since the 2000s seems like, if the students are defecating themselves at ever-increasing rates test scores would go down there too.

Or is San Diego immune to these problems? I think the reality is that these test scores aren't majorly affected by literally any of the things you listed.

On 2, the US DOEd has decided for at least the last couple decades that it is inherently racist if a school's punishment metrics are misaligned with their demographics (e.g. white kids are 50% of the school population but receive only 40% of suspensions).

That environment makes it risky to punish anyone, and a lack of order causes or compounds almost every other item on your list (which I largely agree with).

> 2. Not removing students with bad behavior from classrooms and schools

This is basically _the_ reason people send their kids to private schools

States are starting to pass bans for phones in schools which is a wonderful thing so we are making progres there.

> 4. Too many parents aren’t parenting

You attribute this to increased laziness, and that might contribute, but there are other factors at play.

For one, it takes significantly more hours of work from both parents just to provide basic food & shelter than it did a few decades ago. Calling parents who work more hours than any previous generation in history "lazy" is itself lazy and misses the point.

1. Good luck. Have you ever tried to take an iPad kid's iPad? Be ready for the fight of your fucking life.

2 and 5 are handily down to No Child Left Behind which is frankly some of the worst legislation ever devised for education.

3 and 4: And these factors are only getting worse as worse and worse kids enter the school systems. Nobody wants to deal with them, including their parents.

Bonus: It's not hard, but we won't allocate the money. School lunch lady is a job considered a punch line because for some reason our culture thinks it's easy to serve food to several hundred people in 45 minutes when the people in question aren't old enough to buy cigarettes, but good fucking luck getting money and people allocated to actually do that.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

While HN users have various backgrounds, I suppose programmers make up quite a large proportion of this community.

Programmers are generally more anti-schooling, at least anti-college for a good reason. It's one of the high-paying jobs where a degree is optional in modern days. It's also one of the few fields where the best resources are not gatekept.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I'm pretty sure the same argument was made for television, movies, radio and fiction books.

> 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.

> However,the United States, particularly in the last 50 years, seems to have fostered a culture averse to education.

There's good reason for this. Not everyone enjoys learning for the sake of it. The pitch for forced education is that it will help you sustain yourself as an adult. If adults are finding their time in forced public education to be regretted, then they pass that information onto the younger generations. Maybe there are better ways to acquire useful skills.

I'm always a little surprised to see the HN crowd so in favor of education. The median commenter writes programs for a living, and probably acquired that skill mostly on their own. They might enjoy learning for its own sake, but surely they can look at their own situation objectively and realize their marketable skill came more from free time, computer access, and internet access, than an educational institution. If the strategy was to bet on what already worked for oneself, and hope it works for others too, then they would want to pull money out of schools and put it into libraries, computer labs, and internet cafes.

That's all true, but this crowd also leans heavily progressive. Progressives have a great faith in processes and systems. Get the right top-down systems in place, and everything will be good. Naturally that includes the school system, especially government schools.

It might be okay that I was self-taught, because I'm special; but we can't let regular people be doing that sort of thing.

That’s one hypothesis: American culture is degenerate.

I offer an alternative hypothesis: corporations influence policy.

Corporations would simply prefer to import skilled workers than to have to pay taxes to educate Americans. Evidence for my hypothesis can be found in Vivek et al’s endorsement of the lazy Americans hypothesis. It is a narrative the GOP gets from corporate donors and not from Joe Sixpack fox tv viewers who make up the base.

> 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?

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.

Wouldn't that be the expected result? The culture shifted precisely because colleges started promoting the idea that education outside of college doesn't count. Which, in the culture, has lead to rejecting any other source of education — and why you will hear strange things like high school graduates being called "uneducated".

most students are going to college because many jobs require it, or because they were “pushed” into it by teachers or parents. Not because they value education in the slightest.

I went to a state school and was one of the “weirdos” that didn’t party or join a fraternity. IMO some of us are there to learn and socialize on the side. Others are there to socialize and learn on the side.

In my community, it’s both. The referendum to continue funding the teachers who supported the advanced math and reading classes didn’t pass.

The referendum didn’t pass because a large swath of the community saw no value in having advanced math and reading classes. I have no doubt there was a lot of “I didn’t go to advanced classes and I turned out just fine, that’s a waste of money” thought process.

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.

> We sold out the younger generation [...] for some greater good, and if you dare question that you’re a fascist.

I think this is a very flawed argument. Immigration was tolerated/encouraged because it kept demographics stable, labor affordable and economic growth high.

Pretending now that the previous generations did this for some "greater good" or out of misguided kindness is disingenuous.

The decline in the last 20 years was more noticeable, and the last 10 far more noticeable.

"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).

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.

You're sort of not allowed to mention culture in the context of education. Otherwise people might realize that different cultural groups have very divergent education outcomes. For example, Asian students study 2x as much as white students and 3x as much as black students. It is likely not unrelated that Asian students have much better educational outcomes, regardless of class. For example, Asian students whose parents have no HS degree perform better on the SAT than black students whose parents have a doctoral degree.

It's easy to blame culture. It's kind of a thought terminating cliche. Once you've assigned blame to a general attitude among the public there nothing much to be done.

We could examine the common differences between US education and other high performing nations and try to reform towards something more effective, but really culture is the problem so let's all pack it up and find something else to worry about.

I think the one way that American culture does prevent progress is that Americans tend to be averse to evidence based reforms. They like to atomize responsibility for everything down to the individual. Homelessness, drug addiction, poor education outcomes, poor health outcomes, it's all just individuals making bad decisions or perpetuating bad culture.

If we did anything that actually helped it would somehow be condoning/encouraging the badness of these individuals. Regardless of how effective it would be it's somehow worse than allowing the problem to fester.

I don't know about this. In my community atleast, 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.

Also, high schoolers who see their advanced degree-holding parents out of work for months or years at a time may begin to wonder if the effort is worth it - education is a lot of work for comparatively little benefit.

but

it being available "on the internet" doesn't mean it' available to a child!

it also misses the important aspect that for children you need to nudge them into the right direction of learning

it also misses that children today often get bombarded with a non stop stream of skillfully engineered distractions and dopamine loops, that makes it much harder to nudge them in the direction of educating themself.

oh and all the fake news, fake education etc. isn't helping either,

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.

Tell us more about the cultural issue that can be observed by looking at demographics. What specifically stands out to you?

> 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...

not surprised you lose what you don't use, does modern world even require people using those reading and math skills anymore?

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.

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.

Ugh, I was born in 68 and I always advocate for doing some research in libraries. The important factor is the serendipity of finding random stuff as you walk around and the narrowed part when you get to your target's area on the shelves and seeing other volumes in the same subject area.

Wow, I spent 90% of my free time as a kid in the school library. Reading this hurts. At least they are protecting them from using their brain

Here in North Texas, school districts drop tens of millions on artificial turf for junior high and high school football fields. Some even run bond elections to build stadiums and training facilities that would make an NFL team jealous. Meanwhile, academics sit dead last on the priority list—kids are walking across the stage barely able to read or write. Honestly, if AI came in and torched the whole education system, it might be an upgrade. Hard to do worse than the geniuses running things now, who seem to think Friday night lights are more important than literacy.

People keep talking about education cost. By and large, this isn't a cost issue. The lowest performing schools get the most funding per student, and while school boards and teacher's unions always are going to advocate for more money spent on education, spending in the US isn't low objectively or based on per-pupil averages elsewhere.

The issue is who is ultimately in charge of students and who is responsible for raising them (which should be the same thing, but doesn't have to be), making this ultimately a control issue.

Certain people want to use the school system to raise children based on their own moral system because they could be learning the "wrong" thing at home, and other people want the schools to defer to parents' wishes. Most people want their kid to get a good education and otherwise be left alone by teachers and administrators, but that group gets very little attention.

At the end of the day, parents are legally responsible for their children, and unless that is changed, schools play an important but secondary role in caring for and raising them. Until that is widely accepted or changed, conflict will continue.

The ironic bit here is the local high school where I live in the Pacific North-West doesn't have a copy of Homo Ludens (either in print or as an e-book for lending) which is sort of the Sine Qua Non text on the philosophy of sport (which would explain why having a Football Team is important.)

Sounds like a reasonable decision to me: let the schools teach and let the city/county maintain the library separately.

But disassembling the library bookcases is hardly an appropriate woodworking project.

Sounds like a town named Southlake.

The future needs serfs, not readers.

This is probably an unpopular opinion, but is there still much purpose in a modern high school libraries except as a work/study space?

Elementary school libraries are important because kids can check out books at their reading level and you don't need a huge variety.

But in high school, when I wanted a book for research or recreational reading, 99% of the time my high school library wouldn't have it anyways. You had to go to the public library anyways for decent fiction, and the local college library for non-fiction you would need to cite.

I think it's important to preserve the high school library space for working and the computer access. But I'm just not sure how relevant the actual books are. Especially since public libraries now have e-books, so you don't even have to go there in person if it's inconvenient.

Should maintaining a collection of physical library books really still be the job of high schools, when public libraries will do it better and are open to everyone, not just high schoolers?

Wish I could say we were moving in the right direction, but it's going to be getting worse for the foreseeable future. What part of the country is this?

> 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

Would those parents really have support in your community if they were named and shamed?

I went to a high school with lots of kids that read and nobody ever checked out a book from the school library.

Their interests were specialized and they got their books online or from larger collections not offered at a school.

It’s fine - libraries aren’t sacred. If nobody uses them we don’t need them.

The joke about football is often made but they pay for it, because people use it.

> “Disassembling the library bookcases”

I am skeptical. This is not the subject of wood working. And why would the school entangle students with a task to be performed by professional vendors.

Good riddance. Libraries are totally pointless and a waste of money.

Almost every book that is available at all can be accessed within seconds on any modern digital device. You will learn how extremely valuable that is when you actually are doing research.

Students should be taught how to actually do research, not how to waste time looking things up in some small buildings which doesn't have the resources they need.

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

The football team makes money, why do people constantly ignore this. There's always money for ventures that have positive ROI. It has nothing to do with priorities.

At schools with top theater programs they're also always fully funded because they bring in outside revenue.

> which were being questioned by some parents

I doubt that: My experience is that people who complain about books don't read them, let alone understand them enough to "question" them.

> This society has priorities which aren’t education.

Forgive me, but it's your society: You live there. It's that way because of you.

I know that sucks to hear; it's not all your fault; it seems like there is a lot of inertia; and you definitely can't overcome it all by yourself, and it is was like that before you were born; and so on,

But I urge you to take responsibility to right the ship anyway, and at risk of mixing metaphors too much stop worrying so much about who started the fire and work on putting it out. Make friends with your neighbours, and get them to help you. Stop enabling bad behaviour by referring to those other parents "questions" in their couched weasel-words and call them out for their hate and the spread of hate and ignorance.

Because literally nobody else is going to do it, and we need you.

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.

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.

> 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!

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!

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.

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 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.

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

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 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.

> 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.

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.

> 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

Public school is a joke. My 5 year old started kindergarten recently. They're currently learning shapes, which she (and every other child I've encountered) knew when she was two years old.

Meanwhile at home, she's already reading. She's at the hard part, when reading is so slow that it's painfully boring. It's still too slow for the entertainment value to justify the work, so she's not hooked yet. We spend 5-10 minutes a day on it, and I suspect she'll be over the hump in 3-6 months. Public school would have taken another two years to get her there, even though they get her for 7 hours per day.

The one-size-fits-all model of education is a blight on our civilization.

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.

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.

> 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.

>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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

No jard data, but from talking to teachers there was a shift sometime in the last few decades were parents got really aggressive towards teachers when they should have been aggressive towards their children. This idea that their kids were no longer accountable and that poor performance or discipline had to be the fault of the teachers.

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.

If parents could perfectly pass their culture down to their children, no religious country would ever turn secular. Gay marriage would never have been legalized. Black people would have no right to cast vote today.

All these things are not true in the real world, so the conclusion is that a generation doesn't copy the previous generation's culture like a spit image.

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.

It became politicized because politicians latched onto it as a way to cutback entitlement spending which is unfortunate.

When you were younger a much larger portion of the student body dropped out to work construction or drive truck, that's less of an option now.

We still rely on rote memorization to a greater degree than Finland which is consistently far more successful in their education.

I think the biggest problem with current education is that too many people like you are looking back with rose colored glasses and resisting the kinds of changes we actually need.

We have a crappy mix of outdated 1970s style education with a bunch of enshittified technology layered on top. Google classroom, we also spend too much time and money on sports. Schools shouldn't even be in the football business. CTE is bad for kids.

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.

Gotta say it: School was easier back then, the US was less populated. There was way more opportunity. Kids these days are treated like slaves stuck in child-jail.

I don't need to go into the traditional whining, I'm sure you are aware of the changes of the structure of America.

It's not about personal responsibility. There is a reason rich kids do better than poor kids.

The thing nobody wants to say out loud: America's demographics are changing, they are aging. We are producing less wealth. Our country has less potential.

The wealthy members of the past generation have failed to invest in the American project so we are left with a weak, crumbling economy that doesn't have any industry or useful skills to export.

We, as a country, as WEAKER and POORER than EVER.

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.

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...

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'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.

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)

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.

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.

Reading a french book ''enfances de classes'' from bernard lahire, it explains exactly that. Children from low ''resource'' family have agressive behavior, they are left as animals because their parents are not teaching them.

In my state, to live in an excellent school district is very expensive. We've been trying to move but always get out-bid and out-priced. Mind you we earn well above median but unfortunately, we were not "born early enough." Many folks living in the districts have been there well before it was expensive and probably cannot afford their own home if they had to buy it again. Shit sucks.

How do you determine what is a good district or not?

In your discussion of "bad kids", it seems like there's a subtext you're not saying out loud.

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.

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?

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.

Agreed. The argument "I want to know if my child is safe in an emergency" is incredibly flawed. God forbid there is a shooting, kids should be listening to their teachers to be instructed to safety not distracted. And their phones should not make noise when they are hiding.

If the emergency is on the outside of school, parents still need to go through the main office to pull kids out of school, so contacting them is also unnecessary. These helicopter parents smh

- 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.

If public school is essentially daycare, why did the pandemic set a generation of kids back?

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.

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.

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.

Test scores do not measure directly what they purport to measure. They are a proxy, and when you have a system designed to optimize for a proxy of the thing you want to improve, then the system will always find ways to exploit the difference between the proxy and the underlying thing.

You can call it "juking the stats" or "overfitting", or whatever.

https://sohl-dickstein.github.io/2022/11/06/strong-Goodhart....

We can only ever have proxies. The issue (at least here) isn't Goodharting, it's that the proxy does not even measure what the researchers claim it measures. For example, pretty much the only study of its name, "High-Achieving Students in the Era of NCLB" (Lovelass, Parkas, Duffett) uses the NAEP, which only releases 10th, 20th, ..., 90th percentile scores. Gifted programs are ~95th percentile. Or, look at this lovely graph of 36 ACT scores:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Percent_ACT_Composite_S...

When it increases by 30x in 30 years, it becomes very apparent that standardized tests are simultaneously being gamed by the students and the testwriters. Students (and school districts and states) are choosing the "easier" tests that make them look proficient, so testwriters are making their tests easier to get a bigger market share. And all along, the tests that only care about separating out the top show declining scores every year...

- [AMC Historical Results](https://artofproblemsolving.com/wiki/index.php/AMC_historica...)

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?

> 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.

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

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.

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!

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.

>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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

FTA: "While the pandemic had an outsize impact on student achievement, experts said falling scores are part of a longer arc in education that cannot be attributed solely to COVID-19, school closures and related issues such as heightened absenteeism. Educators said potential underlying factors include children’s increased screen time, shortened attention spans and a decline in reading longer-form writing both in and out of school."

Maybe start with ousting the most anti-intellectual administration in existence? Whatever the solution is, they won't be the one to implement it.

We do know; it's just not in the popular conscience yet. Read a bit of Marshall McLuhan.

The truth is obvious, you just don't like the solution.

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?

Yup, more article slop without accounting for demographic data.

Same with the constant drumbeat of "Americans are getting shorter".

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.

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.

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?

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)

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.

> 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?

What else would you have them cut paper with?

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.

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.

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 went to a private school and then a public school. All of my private school teachers were worse than the public school teachers, without exception.

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).

"America is bad and should be destroyed without regard to the people living there"

The worst leftists (handshake) the worst right wingers

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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)

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.

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 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.”

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.

It started in 2013. If we have to blame technology, social media seems more likely than AI, I guess.

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.

This trend of decline significantly predates either COVID or GenAI.

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.

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.

How about the quality of the education and curriculum itself?

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

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.

You think they are better at detecting the know-nothings than the adults?

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?

US spend per student per year is $16,000. Fairly high investment on the international playing field, especially when adjusted for the poor results.

The view that the education institutions are bloated and inefficient is a fairly mainstream (because some things like low pay for the actual teachers in the classrooms is quite publicly apparent). I'd hazard to say that there's some truth to it, after taking in the first point into account.

Tl;Dr money is part of the problem on some levels, but it's not primarily a money problem.

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.)

This is not just an unfounded theory but a completely insane theory. Many (all?) of the countries ahead of the US in test scores also don’t “beat their kids” because that is absolutely fucking insane.

It’s such an American thing, to blame something on a lack of violence.

Teachers still beat kids:

https://www.economist.com/united-states/2023/01/19/it-is-sti...

and looking at state maps, beatings look negatively correlated with test scores:

https://reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/1krxcco/oc_ranking_of_...

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.

Bringing race into it will surely increase the coherence of the discussion.

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.

My daughter's math is all on tablet. I don't even know how to help.

I feel like it was better when we had a book. We would read a couple pages on the lesson and then move on to the problems. We could go back and reference earlier topics.

Now they just click through quizzes on some app or a website for extra help.

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.

> Nearly half of kids aren’t being raised with their parents in the home. This was rare 50 years ago, and all the research shows that home dynamics matters the most.

Every thread about something like this is full of people just blaming it on whatever social trend annoys them personally.

But also this statistic is absolute bullshit. 71% of kids in the US have two parents at home, and the number is going up.

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%.

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??

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

It's fine. The required and qualified people for the upcoming jobs will be imported from the bountiful overseas.

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.

For the first years of school, it is actually very beneficial to pretend that calculators don't exist.

Students must be accustomed to do simple arithmetic without the help of a calculator, or else their mathematical abilities will be negatively impacted. Same for learning multiplication tables, recognizing the associations between the numbers is important.

Only when they begin to calculate things which exceed the number of mental tokens that they can handle, then they can start using a calculator with no ill effects.

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.

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.

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