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Comment by swed420 | Hacker News Reader

None of the comments so far are engaging with the OP, whose written testimony was included in the article:

https://www.commerce.senate.gov/wp-content/uploads/media/doc...

It points to poorly designed and unproven "educational technology," or EdTech as the potential culprit. Rather than suggesting a luddite regression, it merely calls for proving the efficacy of EdTech prior to large rollouts.

Given the "reading wars" dragged on for over a century, I'm not optimistic this will be resolved anytime soon.

https://www.lexialearning.com/blog/the-science-of-reading-vs...

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I actually took it out of my reply below, but agree that “curriculum format” is much to blame. Thankfully our school district largely did away with screens this year (last year there was a huge parent outcry regarding the policy). They used to do everything on screens, to the point where they had to log into portals at home to play garbage “learning” games. Mind you, I’m talking about grades k-3. It was abhorrent. A lot of that was driven by the curriculum program they adopted from what I understand.

Thankfully they only get 30 min/day on the laptops now. I’m sure the teachers still use their smart screens (considering the chalkboards are covered in static material now), but somehow that seems less bad.

Wow that’s a lot worse than I expected. I’m very fortunate enough to have been able to put my children in a Waldorf school, which is very low tech and embraces the chalkboards heavily.

> proving the efficacy of EdTech prior to large rollouts.

Pretty much everything in education is fad-based, not evidence-based. And what's even more depressing is that the same failed fads, things like open-plan classrooms, keep coming back when the generation that saw them fail the first time retires and a new generation cottons onto the fad.

Outside of non-evidence-based health I can't think of any other field that's so strongly governed by fads.

> None of the comments so far are engaging with the OP, whose written testimony was included in the article:

Because of the extremely inflammatory title, perhaps? Replace "Gen Z" with a skin color or a religion and you'd get instantly banned from hacker news.

Also, from the article, it seems to directly contradict your comment:

> This conversation feels uncomfortable because it doesn’t offer villains or easy fixes. Horvath summed it up bluntly during his testimony. “A sad fact our generation has to face is this: Our kids are less cognitively capable than we were at their age.” His recommendation focused on restraint, dialing back screens in schools, and restoring depth before the next generation is doomed.

> it seems to directly contradict your comment

No it doesn't. My comment was based on his findings.

Indeed - all the graphs in that link show lower test scores for longer "in school cpu use". But the longitudinal comparison (2012-2018) show almost no change (except for zero CPU use, which they didn't really explain.)

This link shows the longitudinal drop in 2022 for the US - almost assuredly pandemic related https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=38. Otherwise the scores are higher than ever.

> almost assuredly pandemic related

But even in your link, you can see the plateau and subsequent decline prior to COVID.

The pandemic just exacerbated an already existing problem.

I don't know how much stock should be put in these numbers. Here in Atlanta there was widespread cheating organized by teachers and principals to game the results.

With NCLB test scores became very important. With Every Child Succeeds they became less so. The difference could simply be how much incentive is there to game the scores.

Gaming the scores is indeed a problem, but it too existed as a problem before the pandemic.

So once again, the pandemic was only an amplifier of problems that already existed.

The reading wars are a great example of founder effects distorting fields. Early educators supported whole word so it just “stuck” in spite of science and abundant real world evidence.

Evidence based policies are something we need more of in general.

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