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Comment by binlog | Hacker News Reader

Hmm, did anything happen in 2020 to disrupt the entire education system?

But if the drop between 2018 and 2022 was AS LARGE as the drop between 2022 and 2026, this implies that something happened that was as large as a global pandemic for students' education happened in the last four years. I believe the OP is implying this could have been AI. However, something else could be happening, such as use of phones and other devices or another fundamental problem in the education system.

- Students who entered the education system in the COVID years are still taking tests today. They didn’t automatically relearn everything.

- Schools have not gone back to pre-COVID practices. Online courses, use of digital tools, fewer tests, dropping SAT/ACT requirements, and most of all budget cuts in school districts – all are still happening today.

You mentioned budget cuts and yet if I remember the data there is almost no correlation between school budget and results.

On the other hand, you have the Mississippi miracle, achieved at a budget increase of $35 per student, and a total budget of around $12k per student-- a far cry from the more recent example of education failure in New York City at $26k/student (elementary) and $32k/student (middle school)

you are correct, but budget cuts are happening nevertheless and it's being used to justify laying off teachers (while admin staff stay employed... strange?)

If you normalize those numbers for the cost of operating in Mississippi vs New York City, the gap is way smaller.

The chief costs for schools are salaries and premises, both of which are highly location dependent.

One can try to tease out effects by looking at per-country or per-state breakdowns. It seems to me that:

- there are lots of different long term trends that vary by country

- some seem to have started too long ago to be tick tock or similar

- some countries see a pandemic drop and recovery

- this implies to me that:

(I) the pandemic had a strong temporary effect on average educational attainment (though I have strong priors here), and

(II) other things like long-term trends in teaching approaches, new distractions for students, or availability of AI for ‘cheating’ also have an impact

See coverage of the recent test results in the FT here: https://www.ft.com/content/724f8ecb-1e2b-4c7f-bbb6-14239abd5...

Yeah, I am genuinely confused how the grandparent comment just glossed over it.

I believe that both COVID and LLMs are disrupting educational metrics. But in terms of which one did more short-term scale damage (i.e, within 4 years), I would wager it was COVID.

Wouldn’t there be recovery? Especially for the cohort that started school after the end of restrictions.

A continuous decline across both COVID and llms points towards a different causal relationship to me. I would be more likely to believe algorithmic social media or computerized teaching tools are to blame, but that is pure conjecture.

The cohort that started school after the end of restrictions is not 15 yet, so no recovery can be expected until the 2029 PISA test or so.

No, but you would still expect to see some recovery 5 years on from students who were much younger when in-person was implemented.

By what mechanism is that recovery supposed to happen? AFAIK students who studied less during the pandemic weren't made to study more later to compensate, so by default they'll permanently have done less studying than other cohorts at the same age.

If I missed a year of fifth grade in 2020, I have had 5 years to recover any lost progress and should do better in 10th grade than the kids that just missed a year. Especially when you consider that many of the topics being tested against are not even introduced until after 5th grade. Sure you might miss out on some arithmetic, but you have had half a decade to correct and your trigonometry scores should be better than students that missed out on trigonometry the same year.

I think the pandemic had some effect on the current cohort of 15 year olds, but it should not be as large of an effect as the students who were 15 in 2020.

If I missed a week of math class at age ten would it have the same effect on a test given when I was 15 as if I had missed a week of math class just before the test? Your position seems to be that missing math class at any point in your schooling is a permanent unrecoverable setback

No, my position is that a recoverable setback will nonetheless remain unrecovered if there is no restorative force driving the recovery.

A student who is bad at arithmetic will tend to struggle to learn trigonometry. A good teacher can realize this and allocate time to arithmetic practice instead. But this time has to come somewhere. As long as the number of teaching hours remains the same, they have to sacrifice something else. So if the students are all caught up in arithmetic, they will be behind in trigonometry by the same amount.

To fully catch up without sacrifices, students who studied less would need to study correspondingly more to compensate, but there was no concerted effort to make that happen, although the opportunity certainly existed.

I think its probable that those who were younger were less able to cope and worse affected by it.

the event in 2020 would've only been the last straw in a series of bad policy in education. It might've brought forward this same outcome a few years in advance, but it isn't a root cause.

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