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Comment by ajross | Hacker News Reader

Embarassing Occam's failure in the lede:

> For the past several years, America has been using its young people as lab rats in a sweeping, if not exactly thought-out, education experiment.

Good grief. No, it's just the pandemic. The kids whose middle school years got disrupted are behind on skills taught in middle school.

Can you squint and blame other things? Sure. But experimental education policies are hardly new ideas, and none of the nonsense from previous decades has shown an effect like this. If you want to show up to the game with a claim that it's some other effect, I want to see a big exposition of why it's not the obvious hypothesis at work.

It's covid, folks. And over the next 3-4 years the scores will bounce back (to much crowing in the media from whichever faction wants to claim credit). Write it down.

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It’s a shame other commenters are so busy waging culture war that this explanation is being minimized and dismissed. I’m married to a high school teacher, and not only is there a super obvious cohort that spent 8th-9th grade playing Fortnite instead of learning algebra, their successors are doing a lot better. Sure, the current cohort of college students needs remedial math. Let’s acknowledge the cause, offer them remedial math, and move forward. It’s not a sign that the sky is falling. The sky fell five years ago and we borrowed against the future to fix it. It’s the future now and the bill is due.

Grade inflation seems to be the main long-term culprit. Lowered standards mean that any student that isn't incentivized for some other reason to learn math simply won't learn. I'm less enamored with the other explanations, such as technology distractions or relying on AI, but they probably play a small part too. You and GP seem very sure that, if the pandemic didn't happen, the decline in math skills wouldn't be happening to a significant degree, but the pandemic was a fast-forward.

> Grade inflation seems to be the main long-term culprit

Is it though, or is that just what your ideological sense tells you? Like I'm trying to point out, if you take the pandemic shock out of the data set, there really isn't much to argue about here. US aggregate education results have never been great internationally, but haven't ever been moving particularly fast either and seem not to have been before the pandemic either.

There really is a woke-derangement-syndrome at work among the reactionary geek set these days. Teachers have always had funny ideas, and haven't broken kids yet. People need to relax.

I can't honestly call myself "anti-woke", nor can I honestly call myself "woke". What a pain. Harping on about either one makes for a dull comment. If anything, I'd probably be considered "woke" by ideological proximity.

> Is it though, or is that just what your ideological sense tells you?

What aside from grade inflation explains why those students in the UCSD report had high grades but had to take remedial math class? The schools I went to had some grade inflation, though perhaps it's not that bad. Heck, Harvard loves grade inflation.

Also, what even is the ideological angle here? I'm the only one talking about grade inflation here (well, one other person mentioned it, but surely not to be "anti-woke").

> but haven't ever been moving particularly fast either

Would it be false that education quality is declining even if it is doing so slowly?

> Teachers have always had funny ideas, and haven't broken kids yet

That "yet" is doing a lot of work, and ignoring the present article. A slow-moving train wreck is still a train wreck.

> A slow-moving train wreck is still a train wreck.

It's. Not. A. Train. Wreck.

There is a high signal NOW, due (very obviously) to a well-understood and well-characterized effect visible up and down social metrics in all societies where they have been measured.

What I'm saying is that pretending to ignore this very obvious hypothesis in order to push a personal theory about "grade inflation" or whatever and demanding the rest of us freak out about the implied "train wreck" is just bad logic.

Usually that kind of argument is the result of ideological bent, not considered thought.

When I brought up grade inflation, I meant it as a factor of a different kind than { COVID, phones, generative AI, ... }. Grade inflation is the reason why the decline is deceptive.

> > What aside from grade inflation explains why those students in the UCSD report had high grades but had to take remedial math class?

> > Also, what even is the ideological angle here? I'm the only one talking about grade inflation here (well, one other person mentioned it, but surely not to be "anti-woke").

What I’m saying is that the decline in math skills isn’t as obvious as you’re making out. The post COVID cohorts currently in high school are doing a lot better than the ones who are currently sophomores in college did. Anecdotally anyway, sample size one high school.

Decline in math skills in an international test before COVID: https://www.edutopia.org/article/pisa-math-scores-fall-globa....

> U.S. students remained relatively steady in science and reading in 2015 compared with 2012, when the exam was last administered, but dropped below the global average in math.

> Of the 35 OECD member countries, the U.S. was among the lowest-performing in math—finishing 31st—continuing a downward trend that started in 2009.

> Outspending all but two countries on education, the U.S. joins countries like Norway and Switzerland that provide significant funding to their school systems yet aren’t seeing the same high performance from their students as other countries that spend less.

It is even more an indictment of the education system if, this long after COVID, so many students are doing so poorly.

COVID was a problem, but other systemic problems allowed the lack of math skill to go unnoticed until the kids showed up to college. This article[1] discusses how high school teachers were subject to political pressure, forcing them to give A's to students in a Calculus class who barely knew fractions. Combine that with UCSD dropping SAT requirements, and you've got a horrible mess.

If the rest of the system was functioning properly, the COVID-related problems would have been caught early when those kids started failing their high school math classes-- which would have left them with plenty of time to go back and learn what they missed. And if UCSD still required the SAT, it would have been painfully obvious that they were admitting students who don't know basic math.

[1] https://www.theargumentmag.com/p/when-grades-stop-meaning-an...

Did you just read 5 words into the article and come to this conclusion? The article that the authors researched and told us it's been going on since before the pandemic?

Ah, their next article should be about the confidence of fools...

I did! Here's the quote:

> But the national trend is very clear: America’s students are getting much worse at math. The decline started about a decade ago and sharply accelerated during the coronavirus pandemic.

So I, a "fool", read that and think: Hm... well if the article isn't giving numbers I'm going to take the "sharp acceleration" as a statement about magnitude and clearly infer that the pandemic is at fault.

Again, is the subject complicated? Sure. But education policy doesn't produce effects like this. It never has, probably never will, and the article even doesn't claim it does.

You know what does produce effects like this? Keeping 13-year-olds out of class for two years.

I mean, come on. I repeat: write it down, in 4 years we'll all be reading about the miracle of American education policy. And that will be wrong too.

Our response to Covid was just the accelerant. We're lucky, in a way, as we can see the outcomes of many current policies a lot quicker.

You're hand wavy "it's the pandemic" neglects the other evidence provided in the article that happens to coincide with the pandemic such as the elimination of test scores as admissions criteria to many universities. And the article certainly doesn't blame it wholly on the pandemic, for example here are two theories it presents:

> How did this happen? One theory is that the attention-shredding influence of phones and social media is to blame. The dip in math scores coincides with the widespread adoption of smartphones; by 2015, nearly three-quarters of high-school-aged kids had access to one. A related possibility is that technology is making students complacent. Emelianenko told me that students “are just not engaged in math classes anymore”; they seem to believe that they don’t need to learn math, because they can use AI instead.

> Or maybe students have stopped achieving in math because schools have stopped demanding it of them. During the George W. Bush administration, federal policy emphasized accountability for public schools. Schools that saw poor performance on standardized tests received increased funding at first, but if scores still didn’t improve, they had their funding pulled. Research suggests that this helped improve math outcomes, particularly for poor Black students. After 2015, however, the federal government backed off from its accountability measures, which had faced bipartisan criticism. (Some teachers’ unions and progressive parents wanted less emphasis on standardized tests, and some conservative politicians wanted the federal government to remove itself from education policy.) Many schools across the country have shifted toward making math engaging for students at the expense of evidence-based teaching practices. And due to funding shortages or misguided efforts to improve equity, many students are held back from taking the hardest math courses.

> You're hand wavy "it's the pandemic" neglects the other evidence provided

There was no significant other evidence. And "hand wavy" is missing the point. There is a bleedingly obvious hypothesis for this effect with huge signal in all sorts of other areas of social policy. I mean, really? The pandemic is visible in every measurable segment of society but somehow not a major factor in education results?

In some sense, yes, Occam's Razor is a principle that embraces "hand wavy" understanding by demanding extraordinary evidence for extraordinary claims. And I think it's going to work very well here. Again, for the third time: write it down. In four years this will all bounce back.

What's happening here is actually a different logical fallacy entirely. HN commenters have a distinct ideological bent against new ("woke") ideas in education. And they're willing to ignore things like giant global pandemics to chase their preferred explanations.

When the education policy is less about "how do we teach math" and moreso grade inflation, I don't think it's strange.

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