My wife taught first through fifth grade from ~2004 until 2017.
One thing that was evident to me from the sidelines was how much admin work was continually added to her workload without any consideration for the amount of class time she had. The focus on data derived from continuous testing of the students resulted in her and her peers sticking ever more closely to a continuously disrupted and rotated collection of commercially sourced curriculum and materials.
Her role as educator started to take a back see to classroom management and data collection. Add in differentiated instruction, where she was held accountable to develop personalized lesson plans for individual students and asked to track all of that and you end up with way too much workload to stay engaged and engaging year after year.
She was in a pretty good school district. A friend of mine had a similar role in a city district for a regional metro area and her students were horrific. She felt physically unsafe and ultimately quit.
It's a complex problem with many contributing factors. It's difficult to experiment when the future of the students in front of you could be negatively impacted by any mistakes made (not to mention job/test scores/etc) so everyone just rides the rail all the way down.
People are talking about Covid, smartphones/screens, social media, and AI. No one has mentioned defunding public education yet.
In Alaska, where I lived most of the last 20 years, education has been largely flat funded for about a decade now. Imagine running an organization in 2026 on that organization's 2016 budget. Schools have a bunch of obligations they have to spend on. Every time health care costs for staff go up, and funding is flat, something gets cut. You can't cut education for a decade straight without impacting student learning.
I don't think Alaska is that much of an outlier in this regard.
There are highly politicized blogs which can discuss this further and offer opinions as to the correlation.
When DJT talked about cancelling the Dept of Edu, I got ahold of all the teachers I knew and asked them what impact it would have, and their response was mostly that they would lose their school lunch benefits.
> Funding per student is on the rise, or level on inflation-adjusted $
That's at the state level. But that doesn't account for the explosion in admin salaries and positions. The actual money a district spends on each student has been going down every year. Those funds are going more towards admin activities.
> I got ahold of all the teachers I knew and asked them what impact it would have, and their response was mostly that they would lose their school lunch benefits.
Teachers have a very poor understanding of where their funding comes from. Most just assume "property taxes", but it's far more complicated than that. The department of Ed provides a lot of funding to states that is passed through to the schools. They also enforce the education titles.
Cutting the department of Ed may not have a direct, immediate impact on classroom teachers, but it will have a large downstream effect in a few years.
Student/teacher ratios have gone down, not up over the last few decades. This isn't a lack of funding.
Teachers are put in an impossible position with students who come from homes where the parents don't do their proper jobs. It's never been easier to be a neglectful parent. Your child will be entertained non-stop by an iPad and a video game system. They won't get bored and bother you. You can send them to their room and do whatever you want if you don't care if they are sleeping or not, as long as they are quiet.
The "iPad babies" are an epidemic in schools.
Source:
My sister is a K-12 educator in a poor, rural public school system in southeastern Virginia.
In recent years, she's seen a surge in students who are sorted, improperly, into special education classes. These are students that exhibit symptoms of various learning disabilities, but these symptoms heavily overlap with the symptoms of children who are sleep deprived and over stimulated by dopamine activating content on the devices they are addicted to.
Yes to this! So many people turn a blind eye to the critical role parents play in supporting teachers holding kids accountable. And I get it, holding kids accountable is very, very challenging, but that's the gig people sign up for when they decide to have a family.
And I'm a former high school teacher and my wife is a current high school teacher so I've experienced all of this first-hand.
> That's at the state level. But that doesn't account for the explosion in admin salaries and positions. The actual money a district spends on each student has been going down every year. Those funds are going more towards admin activities.
Ok? Seems like that's more of a problem than the funding. Or whatever is causing that is more of a problem, but it does a disservice to the general argument of "kids aren't receiving the same level of care" argument to blame a drop in funding--especially when it was so easily falsified.
> At the same time, school scores started to sag after 2014
That's around the time a bunch of districts in a state I lived in at the time had multi-year teacher pay scale freezes due to budget crunches. Not saying it's necessarily connected to the scores dropping, but still.
Total spending across the country may be high, but it's very much state-by-state and local how much is spent and where it goes. Some states pay teachers pretty well. Some states, the pay really is pretty awful. Some states are OK on staffing levels. Others are in an ongoing staffing catastrophe that's forcing them to cut school days to try to get by.
Meanwhile, school performance is heavily tied to home life and broader community support for students' families. That's why all this effort to improve schools hasn't been as effective as one might hope: the attention needs to go toward much harder problems that have little to do with schools and are really hard to get any progress on in the US. Worker protections, better and less-stressful "safety nets", better policing and a better justice system. That kind of thing. I'd look at least as much at what's been going on with those, and with security and home life for those in the lowest three quintiles of household income, as at schools themselves, to try to find reasons for trends like this.
I met a forensic accountant recently who mentioned a corruption investigation she participated in involving a school district nearby, several high-ranking board members and admins were on the take. She pointed out the futility of the project, it was a large sum of money for a school district, but nothing like your headline-grabbing Medicare scams. She wound up leaving the investigation due to threats to her safety and took another job. It felt like one of those unresolved endings to "The Wire".
I have had enough insight into enough school districts that I'm confident lots of them are hotbeds of corruption. Mostly at the upper admin level (superintendents and such). Kickbacks for contracts, hiring absurd numbers of assistants and secretaries to the point that one wonders what work remains for the top dogs, creating do-nothing decently-paid positions for people they're having affairs with. That kind of thing.
There hasn't been enough said about the corruption of public life in the US. (And elsewhere.)
It used to be this kind of thing was - maybe not exceptional, but certainly not expected.
Now it's common but underreported.
So there's a kind of dream world where "education" and "health" are still considered official public goals. But the reality is that government procurement is mostly grift and corruption. There's been an epic collapse of almost any kind of public service ethic in favour of opportunism and profiteering, sometimes covered over with religious/moral pretexts.
I've just been assuming it's all gotten way, way worse over the last 20 years or so, too. One of the main things keeping it even slightly in check was local newspapers and TV stations with actual reporters.
Those are all gone, either shuttered or snapped up by huge companies that fired most of the staff and are milking them for the last money they can provide, or using them to distribute propaganda (e.g. Sinclair), and nobody's ever going to (be able to) do a proper accounting of how much the resulting waste and corrosion of public trust has cut into the actual overall cost/benefit of this whole "Internet" thing.
You should not adjust for inflation or even for wages, but for cost of employment. The way health insurance works in the US makes public sector jobs with average wages and good benefits expensive to the employer.
>Averaged across the general student population, there was no statistically significant correlation between a school’s spending levels and its students’ academic performance in 27 of the 28 academic indicators used in the model. In the only category that did show a statistically significant correlation — seventh-grade math — the impact of spending more was very small.
I'm not sure how to square that with the very well-studied result that areas with higher income tend to have better schools. Students from lower income brackets also do better than their income peers at schools in less affluent areas. And because local property taxes are a major funding source for schools, those are also the schools I'd expect to spend more because they have more.
Michigan notably does not fund schools through homeowner property taxes. I suspect that's probably the difference here and a reason we shouldn't use it as a representative example.
Could it be that people with higher incomes are a lot more likely to actually care about their kids getting a good education, and to put pressure on the school to that effect?
We still need to find a cause for declining results. If it isn't funding, what is making our children stupider?
Regardless, I'd think that a study trying to find a correlation among practice, funding, and measurement would need at least a generation (~thirty years yea?) of results to show meaning
This analysis is rather weak, just a linear regression with 2 variables it seems. I'm not saying there's a direct link of school spending and academic performance but this is barely trying. Your average undergrad could've made a better study.
> No one has mentioned defunding public education yet.
Public education has vast amounts of funding in the U.S. compared to other developed countries. If it does badly despite that, it's very likely that "more funding" is not the answer.
It's worth pointing out that wages in the US are vast compared to other developed countries, though, too. We outspend OECD by 35-40%, but our average national wage is also higher than OECD by 35-40%.
Labor compensation in the U.S. is also extremely unequal, which pulls the average up in a way that isn't very informative as to this particular issue. The average starving PhD would be a much better and more knowledgeable teacher to high school students in the subject she took her PhD in, than the typical high school teacher with nothing more than an Education credential. Are you sure that you need to pay such high wages to existing teachers?
>The average starving PhD would be a much better and more knowledgeable teacher to high school students in the subject she took her PhD in
i dont think this is true.
there is an art to educating (especially the ~10-15 year old range) that does not just manifest itself because you are smart: how to engage students, how to keep them engaged, how to adjust the message to the audience's level and communicate it effectively, how to earn a kids respect without becoming over-bearing (or too friendly), and dozens of other things that your PhD in compsci or whatever does not teach you.
some of the smartest PhD holders i know would be very shitty elementary/high school teachers.
(context: i teach at the college level. its a lot easier than teaching at the high school level.)
Yes to this! What makes a great teacher is the willingness to hold kids accountable for their behavior and their work. Sure, it helps to be a subject expert, but that won't matter if you can't manage your classroom.
And parents play an equally important role. One of the best things you can do for your child's education/life is support the teacher when they call you up and say, "Your child is making poor decisions..."
~10-13 mostly comprises the junior high range. By the time the kids are 14, they're plenty old enough to benefit from a "college-prep" educational approach. Sure, some PhDs will be better, others will be worse. But you solve that by throwing out terrible teachers and rewarding the best ones. There's no guarantee that an Education-credentialed teacher with negligible education in the actual subject they're supposed to teach would be any better.
I'm retired from engineering/doing startups/exited etc. I have taught 5 years at a private school. I do not have a teaching credential.
Knowing the stuff you're teaching is the easiest part. And I say that despite teaching in an environment with far better behavior, student buy-in, family support, and academic accomplishment than most places.
at the same time, it’s simply not true that the “average starving phd student” would be “much better” at teaching than a typical teacher. teaching is more than just being smart.
Here in my state teachers in good districts start at $60,000 per year and see minimal increases due to length of service; after 20 years they might be making $75,000 per year. You ever done the math on living on $60k per year? Hard to do a lot besides support youself on that income. I note that surrounding states (even higher cost states) have lower salaries.
It depends a lot on the state. Some actually do pay alright. Some pay terribly (and may have serious issues finding enough staff, as a result).
Unions are similar. People cry about them being a huge problem, but they have effectively no power (as in: don't even collectively bargain for contracts) in lots of states, including many of the ones with poor school performance. In other states, they really do have quite a bit of power.
In states with lower teacher pay, most teachers without a much-higher-paid spouse take summer jobs or teach summer school. Also, none of them get as much time off in the summer as the kids do. Plus, you can't pay your mortgage with vacation days.
PhD holders are, on average, not starving. Some of them could make good primary/secondary school teachers, but knowing how to teach children effectively is a skill by itself. It's quite different from working as a college instructor. That's why earning an teaching credential is important (although the quality of some teacher training programs is terrible).
Boston Public Schools had a 50 Million dollar budget shortfall for next year. We are rapidly closing schools and eating the disruption that comes with that. Teachers do not do their best work when they don't have confidence on long-term outcomes.
To some extent, this shift is inevitable due to demographics changes - but I don't think that there has been realistic planning on how to manage a future with dramatically fewer children.
But filling a leaky bucket does have an impact. You just have to fill it faster than it empties. Which is probably your point.
My point is different. Study after study shows that below a specific floor spending has almost no impact on educational outcomes. The correlation is such that you can both determine that there is likely no leak and also that it has no effect.
The stuff that does have an impact is much harder to move the needle on though so everyone just scapegoats funding instead. Stuff like building up the nuclear family in an area, increasing income mobility, and holding parents accountable for child outcomes do have a measurable effect but are politically intractable today.
Unfortunately there is much more to the story than a number on a line. Just because you increase spending doesn't mean that the spending isn't earmarked for items like digital projectors and virtual textbooks that have minimal impact on learning outcomes.
I agree with you to an extent, but many states and school districts also engaged in fiscal malpractice by using defined-benefit employee pension plans to shift costs into the future. Those plans are financial weapons of mass destruction: far too risky for employers, retirees, and taxpayers. We need to eliminate them and shift all public school employees to 403(b) defined-contribution plans. This is especially critical as school enrollment declines.
So shifting this malpractice to private schooling will yield better results? Cmon we'll get bilked ten times worse. Or we'll end up with christian-taught homeschooled kids that make Georgia look like a premier educational state. And they still won't speak georgian
Edit: actually, this is an insult to Georgia. I apologize, brothers and sisters. You have much to teach us.
Well surely corruption would be orders of magnitude worse under private management yea? Or are we pretending that schools trade on a competitive market, and that the US is a place that distributes money rationally? Cuz all evidence points towards privatization as a graft vector
Buddy you've really lost the plot here. Privatization or lack thereof has nothing to do with mismanagement of employee retirement benefits. Both public and private employers can set up defined-benefit or defined-contribution retirement plans. Defined benefit pension plans create a huge risk for both private and public schools because current operating funds intended for educating students might have to be diverted to meet financial obligations to retirees.
"Inflation-adjusted public school funding per student in the United States has increased significantly over the long term, with a roughly 34% increase in inflation-adjusted revenue per student over the last two decades alone. Looking at a broader historical view, inflation-adjusted spending per student has risen by over 200% since the 1960s."
This is always a common rebuttal but I used to work in education and believe me there was not a bunch of new money coming in. Quite the opposite. Maybe the data shows funding going up but that money is not making it to the students.
So if you agree that administrators in public ed are doing a poor job managing the resources allocated to them, do you support school choice efforts that will allow more competition from charter/private schools that have incentives to spend more wisely?
The amount of school administrators and non-teachers have increased at 10x the rate of teachers relative to students since 2000. I have no doubt funding keeps going up but virtually all of it is diverted away into bureaucracy.
This is the bias that keeps us from actually making improvements to the education system. I guess it's easy to repeat and blame money. Kind of like a brilliantly colored red herring.
Covid, smartphones/screens, social media, AI have an enormous impact on the students. A slight school defunding (if it really exists, which I doubt) cannot compare.
ai summary: "According to that piece, K-12 education has been losing $407 million each year since 2017 due to inflation, even as Gov. Lamont called current funding levels the "largest ever commitment." The author also noted that $2.4 billion in urgent legislative funding requests were denied in one spring session alone, with needs for fully funding education among the shortfalls."
My wife is on a school board in a large district that is trying to cut spending. The problem is not really how much money they have and giving them more money doesn't help. The problem at least in our state is:
Public schools are subsidizing charter schools
Public schools have many legal requirements to provide services that charter schools don't have to deal with. Charter schools also have a lot of freedom to refuse problematic kids, that public schools have to take.
Parents who don't need those services keep taking their kids out of public schools and putting them into charter schools, charter schools kick out problem kids. Public schools end up having a higher cost per student because of that.
Schools have to finance an entire security apparatus because assholes keep doing mass shootings.
Public school systems _also_ are terrible at spending money on bullshit that has absolutely nothing to do with schools. The amount of money spent on administration is way way out of line. There are so many layers between the top and teachers and so many people with their hands out. Big school systems could probably fire half of their administration and literally nobody would notice. They would probably run better. When they do internal reports on how to save money, it always comes back to the most trivial shit or even worse, pulling it out of _education_ and is _never_ 'you need to fire a bunch of people collecting a paycheck for doing nothing'.
I genuinely think most big school systems would be vastly improved by firing half of the administration at random and doubling teacher salaries.
I'm not hearing a whole lot of talk about No Child Left Behind or the near-total elimination of analysis and synthesis from modern curricula either, but having watched a 14 year old navigate what passes for elementary and middle school currently I'm unsurprised that test scores continue to slip.
Parents watching what their kids were learning (or not learning) was probably the largest acceleration into home and alternate school in history. That's what happened to nearly every family in our home school co-op.
Funny you should mention that, we're currently looking for a home school co-op in our area. It has become apparent that my child has learned basically no analytical skills whatsoever so I'm planning on homeschooling for a year to see what improvements that makes before making a final decision about what to do for high school.
Much ink has been spilled in the comments already, but as a child of the 80s, computers were a class, and not a lifestyle. If I had gone through school with what's available today, I doubt I would have done as well as I did. Most things were handwritten, I learned cursive, and computer class was Oregon Trail and basic programming essentially.
Looking back, I don't think Chromebooks, iPads and the like would have been beneficial to my elementary/middle/high school education at all.
Our primary instrument of learning was the teacher and really thick textbooks that were passed down student to student, and you could see that journey inside the in front cover where you signed it out for the year.
As someone who would protest at learning long division when a calculator was around, in retrospect, the teacher was right.
And parents are equally distracted from their job of parenting by those same devices. Want to help your child with their education? Support their teachers when/if your child is making poor decisions at school.
I don't know why I was so surprised when my kids told me there was nothing called a "computer lab" at their school... why would there be when each kid has their own device?
It's amazing how bad these things can be. My kids will sometimes get computerized homework which gets graded automatically, and if you don't format the answer the way it likes, zero points. They spend as much effort fighting with the formatting as they do understanding the material. And this is in one of the wealthiest, best run public school districts in the country.
"Technology" has been an education buzzword since I was in school and it needs to be taken out and shot.
This gave me flashbacks to LonCapa in college when I was in calculus classes circa 2011. A correct answer was marked incorrect automatically because of floating point issues.
- media/tech shortened content: shorter tv shows, short video content, etc.
(Tiktok is the "state of the art" of those 2 trends pushed to the max)
Specifically, we're getting more & more addicted to things that increase the dopamine spikes frequency, making it increasingly difficult to go in deep focus work.
Absolutely, we are feeding kids so much attention-span killing things. Even as an adult I'm having hard time with YouTube shorts, and i cannot imagine a kids brain having the ways to deal with all that.
I am _fighting_ with elderly relatives to adjust their YouTube habits. They didn't even know it comes on autopilot by default. They don't even check sources, they just let the garbage in.
That doesn't line up though. See if you're 13 and meeting the level in 2012 your scores don't decline. So the levels would lag a few years. The 8 year-olds show up and miss the mark in 2017 that indicate the infinite scroll problem was having a toll on them.
Additionally this would start to show in class specific measurements (those kids with access to home internet, personal devices, etc. would have worse scores). I think the argument about social media has merit in discussion of children, but it seems more of a social distinction rather than an objective indicator for academic performance.
I wonder if there's research on short form but educational content or if that's fundamentally impossible.
For example I remember reading a lot of science magazines / articles growing up (granted popsci but for a kid it still teaches some things) and as I grew up things like the Economist.
Similarly I also played games like math blaster as a kid and have realized I need to intentionally provide games like this to my kids that ideally teach something (the bar being greater than zero learning) rather than playing one of those infinite running games or whatever.
I think we're probably talking about the exact same thing but am curious where content vs. short form media is.
We don't have any NAEP long-term test results for years between 2012 and 2020, because they were canceled due to budget cuts[1], so we can't use the linked data to determine whether the decline started before or during COVID.
We do have the NAEP main series test results[2]. At a first glance at the math results[3][4], it appears they peaked in 2013, then fluctuated through 2019, then dropped significantly in 2022 and somewhat rebounded in 2024, which really does suggest COVID.
Could we look at average SAT scores by year as a proxy? It's not a great metric because not all students take the SAT but I think there's some correlation.
Score changes look about the same across performance percentiles and ethnicities. That suggests it's a systemic issue unrelated to population makeup. While I'd be interested to see regional and economic breakdowns, it's certainly far from obvious it's a result of demographic change, especially after such a short period of time.
I wouldn’t be so sure. Anecdotally all the kids these days seem equally messed up. It could be that the Chinese and Indian kids are propping up the locals.
The National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) administered the NAEP long-term trend (LTT) reading and mathematics assessments to 13-year-old students from October to December of the 2022–23 school year. The average scores for 13-year-olds declined 4 points in reading and 9 points in mathematics compared to the previous assessment administered during the 2019–20 school year. Compared to a decade ago, the average scores declined 7 points in reading and 14 points in mathematics.
Note the results are compiled from the 2022–23 school year, compared to the 2019–20 school year. So yeah, the big thing there is the lockdown for (depending on local policies) the year or two in between.
Who is blaming the students? If 13 year olds were smoking and we blamed poor sports performance in that age group on the smoking, we wouldn't be "blaming" them. We don't model 13 year olds as little islands of free will.
Chronic absence is up and truancy is down according to this report. Not really what I’d expect for phone use—both should trend flat or up.
I wonder if there’s a way to validate the hypothesis that post-shutdown, some of the cohort that would have missed a day here and there now see school as optional and miss more days.
Overall, the reported effect is sad and should be addressed. These are people’s lives.
Chronic absence numbers are misleading. We all know that they are just placeholder stats for other factors and we should focus on those.
My 3rd grade daughter was unlucky with various illnesses and missed about 12 days this year (so far). I got a letter from her principal attempting to guilt trip me for her "Chronic absence".
I wrote an angry response (in retrospect it was too angry since he had no choice about the letter) where I asked if he would prefer my sending sick children to school.
Her grades (for whatever value grades have in 3rd grade) are fine. I'll take the chance on her reading her "Diary of a wimpy kid" book when sick, or when a sane system would have given a snow day.
Youth participation in travel club sports is up so they miss more school days due to tournaments. These tend to be the more affluent and motivated students who still achieve good grades and high standardized test scores. I receive warning letters from the school district every year over high absences but it doesn't mean anything and I just throw them in the trash.
Let's see Common Core was released in 2010 and by 2014-2015 most states had implemented it. Lets do the math, 2026 - 13 = 2013. Hmmm... You can say funding all you want but in the same 13 years of Common Core funding per student has increased by 50%.
It leads to K-shaped education where parents who recognize the deficiency of public education simply teach their kids math themselves or hire private tutors. Public education used to be a force for equality of knowledge in the country. Now it perversely does the opposite, all in the name of education!
At least in elementary school I don't see the deficiency in common core math compared to what I had 30 years ago. My kid has been exposed to a wide variety of topics sooner than I was, and she's way stronger in word problems on top of that. Do people have a specific complaint with elementary school common core math that we should be teaching but aren't, or vice versa? Or is it more problematic later?
I’m curious how does it track with class sizes and tracks (remedial, regular, honors, “gifted”).
The level is so low in my local elementary school that the single track math class is still doing addition within 20 for first grade.
The funny thing is that the state standard actually measure 2 and 3 digit addition for K and 1st graders, and proficiency at that level would be p75 for a 1st grader.
So why is the actual class teaching level at p<50?
The most common reply to this is: “people said the same about Books/TV/Comics/Games/Facebook stop being such a Luddite”
My answer to this is approximately: “yes they’re all relatively bad compared to the thing that came before so they were all right!”
Even books. If the option were between my child reading about blacksmithing/compsci and DOING blacksmithing/compsci I’d choose the latter every time. It gives you real experience and opinions.
The difference with each successive new wave is that it becomes increasingly addictive. It’s possible to read one book and stop for a while. Shorts can hook you for hours and then draw you back the next day with no natural stopping point.
It's also not possible to carry around enough books with you to allow you to jump from one to another whenever you get bored, while it is possible to effectively carry around a device that lets you watch YouTube/TikTok at all times. I think this is an important factor.
Or look at corporations + elites constantly attacking children for the last 40 years (pushing school vouchers, school choices, attacking teacher unions, politicizing school boards).
Who do you think suffers when elites attack public education? It's always the children.
Fun fact: Silicon Valley elites are big proponents of school vouchers because, like their hatred of American labor, they also hate public schools and don't want to pay for that either.
Plenty of children suffer in public schools as they are currently constituted. School vouchers, school choice, and attacking teachers unions are attempts to create more schooling options than just whatever the local public school is, which should benefit children who are currently having a bad time in that system.
School boards are inherently poltical because as long as a publicly-run school system exists, how it is run and what things it will attempt to teach are political questions. There's no apolitical school board that existed 40 years ago that has been altered since then, they have always been poltical.
Internet commenters try to get me to hate lots of people for lots of reasons, but "Parents trying to send their kid to a school that fits their kid's needs" seems like such a hard sell.
Like, I get the desire in a hypothetical, that you hope that people in power would use their power to make public schools better if their kids were forced to go there.
But in reality, the actually powerful can just pay for private schools out of pocket and the vouchers help a lot of middle-income families send their kid to a school that can provide a better environment for whatever definition of better is relevant to that individual.
It just seems like such misplaced anger and energy. You could just advocate for improving public schools, without attacking regular families trying to do their best while trapped inside a system they have very little influence on.
The voucher system is seen as an attack on IEP / special ed children, since public schools rely on distributing money away from the general population of students and into special ed and IEP students who, by various measures, can consume 3x the amount of money per student. They need lots of non-special-ed students to subsidize the special ed ones at the current levels.
If enough people use the voucher system it basically forces the per student spending to get closer to a purely egalitarian spending per student, with the result that public schools have to spend about the same amount on special ed kids as the voucher kids get (in the extreme, that's all the students they're left with). While this is objectively fairer in my opinion, it's viewed as an entitlement that the special ed kids can take more money at the expense of everyone else.
Obviously though this has to be carefully framed to sell it properly. Very few are going to knowingly sign up to lose funding for their own student to help some other student who is already getting 3x the money as them, so instead it's framed as some sort of evil capitalist agenda against public schools.
And yet, the SF school district decided that math is too racist, and advanced classes in particular should be banned as doubleplusungood.
Seattle's Public Schools district is among the leading in the nation on per-student spending, yet the test scores are cratering. Its previous superintendant had an official platform of not disciplining students.
[1] is a summary of the impact on the brain of Covid-19 infections including IQ reduction but many others besides. Its best understood that there is no such thing as a consequence free Covid infection, it always damages something and the early british experiment where they intentionally infected young men resulted in all of them loosing IQ and none of them being aware of the loss. This finding has been built on substantially in the past 6 years and we have a much large list of issues now, none of it treatable.
There's a lot going on here. Most of it boils down to a concerted, decades-long project by half the country to defund, dismantle and destroy public education. This has infected every layer of education including what goes into textbooks. The Texas Board of Education has typically had outsized power here as they've mostly been the largest single purchaser of textbooks. But also we have the likes of Robert Maxwell who basically owned textbook printing [1], before "falling off" his yacht.
But the part I want to concentrate on is the education part and the role of tech. Anyone who sells to large bureaucracies like state and federal Education Departments will tell you the skill is in managing the procurement process. It's getting your claws in more than it is in delivering results. Any results tend to be more manufactured than not.
So contracts get signed with states and school districts that will require them to use a particular product, even if it doesn't work. We know how this goes too. Whoever was in charge of that decision will then tend to leave their job and go work for the seller. Shocking.
But we know what works in teaching and it's direct instruction [2] but you don't sell tech platforms or iPads or laptops that way. As a result we now have a disturbing number of people who have never read a book and really can't read a book, going so far as the students of elite colleges [3].
Likewise, we see Education PhDs who won't make a name for themselves pushing ideas from the 1800s. They have to come up with new methods and this was kind of a disaster for literacy [4], which people are finally waking up to as we go back to the 1800s method of phonics eg [5].
But it's hard to succeed when half the country wants the entire system to fail.
The NAEP has two types of tests - a long-term trend assessment, and the main assessment[1]. The long-term trend is given less often (and rather sporadically recently), and 2023 is the most recent one available.
The main assessment has been performed every two years recently, so 2024 data is most recent. They can all be seen here[2].
Screen time and social media definitely have an impact on attention spans, but it's worth pointing out for Mathematics, 2023's average is higher than pre-1990, and reading averages seem to have always been in the 255-265 range.
Everyone is going to name their pet bugaboo, but if you look at the full charts, the scores were pretty stable in the 70s, 80s, and 90s, and are regressing back down to what they were historically. The real question is why they went up temporarily until 2012.
I wonder if having the Soviet Union as an ever looming adversary could have something to do with it, and after their fall everyone just got complacent.
Few people know this, but it turns out a major bipartisan education reform bill was passed in the early 2000’s.
Constituencies of both parties found reasons to hate it, so its foundational accountability requirements were watered down by succeeding administrations.
I’m perfectly willing to be convinced NCLB had nothing to do with the evolution of test scores over the last 25 years, but the circumstantial evidence is not easy to dismiss.
As a parent of 2 older kids (post college) and 2 young ones (primary/middle) I think one big problem is the academic expectations for the kids have dropped, and unless they are highly motivated they won’t rise above classroom expectations (even if the parents are pushing them at home). The second problem is what happens outside school: non-stop distractions: phones, iPads, social media, it’s always there. Yes we try to restrict it but it’s like forcing your kids to use a horse and buggy while all their friends are driving cars ; maybe we need to convert to Amish. It’s maddening, really.
The right wingers are going to have a heyday with this one just like they’ve been doing with the “Swedes are getting dumber and nobody knows why” articles.
They want to say that non-whites are naturally dumber than whites. There will be varying degrees of subtlety but that's what the dog whistlers are on about.
You can take a look at the charts in the linked article and see that the scores for Asians are consistently higher than the scores for whites which are consistently higher than the scores for blacks and Hispanics. This was true in 2012 and it's true today.
If these numbers are at all meaningful for determining how much a student has learned as a result of going through schooling, then thye show that white people are consistently better than blacks and Hispanics at school and are consistently worse than Asians.
I'm so relieved I left social media. Sadly, via democracy, even if you leave social media you are still impacted by those who use it and believe what they read.
I cannot wait for one of my uncles to post this about how kids these days can't do anything so I can point out that the scores were even lower in his age bracket.
Haha, I wouldn't actually say anything (sarcasm never transfers on the internet). More of it's interesting that many baby boomers I know in real life think the sky is falling based on metrics that are better than they were when they were kids, and they didn't even have COVID as an excuse.
I opened this thread expecting a bunch of "kids these days..." posts, kind of surprised not to see any. People have been raising themselves up by putting down other generations since the very first I assume, the temptation towards the fallacy of composition is too irresistible.
There's definitely loads of money in "education". But the actual teachers arent seeing it. No, its in "special interest programs", state/federal compliance, loads of tests, and ordained material from "preferred creators" (cough, pearson etm.)
We can pay teachers better, sure. But there's lots of areas to "pay better". Small classes. 12-17 students. Budget for class resources. No, teachers should NOT be responsible for work materials. Larger classes get aides as well.
Ive also seen what modern teaching is about. The teachers are handed absolutely shit material and required to teach that, with low/no deviation. Like, "New Math" https://www.understood.org/en/articles/9-new-math-problems-a... . None of these methods show WHY, only a rote procedure.
I thought about becoming a teacher. I already teach people (wide array of adults and under 18) in extracurricular groups. Ive seen what works well, and what doesnt. I can tell the 'energy' of a group, especially if theyre confused and angry about something, and how to solve it. But the pay is definitely laughable compared to IT, and the administration demands exacting rubrics put forth by companies who kicked back the state educators.
The responsibility is not worth their salaries or the anti-benefits and other costs.
We might be entering an era when literacy and math are no longer required by most of the populace. Have you seen these kids do google searches? They just use the voice recognition feature on their phone (yes, they have phones at twelve years old, for some reason) and ask google for what they want. Handwriting is already out the window, what if reading and writing are next? If they can have AIs explain everything to them verbally what do they need to read for?
I don't want to envision a future where most people besides a few elite have stopped reading and writing but maybe I'm just an old millennial and behind the times.
Being a parent, I ask myself this question: is it worth it to struggle to get my child to try for better grades? And I don't have a definitive answer.
The reasons to doubt are perfectly known: meritocracy is on a decline in the Western world, there's an ever improving safety net for losers, there's a price to pay for forcing my child to study vs the child spending time with their friends who were left to roam free as their social life will suffer.
I probably met more people whose degrees played little to no role in their professional career than the other way around. I've met lots of people who could never realize their degree because of the hollowed down European industry. Engineers seem to suffer the most. It seems like the few ways where a degree can open the door to a better life must be in a field that provides very localized services s.a. medicine. All else is outsourced. Trades do better in this respect as a lot of them need to be local, but they too are being populated by foreign workers and competition is fierce.
I don't think that COVID or any other "force of nature" is to blame for the outcomes. When there's will, there's a way. It's just that fewer parents see academic achievements as worth pursuing for their children.
Why do you want to force your kid to study? Kids are naturally curious, it's likely that your kid will be curious about something. Introduce them to study and scholarship as a means of figuring these things out, so that it becomes natural to them.
Because _real_ study is boring. Watching videos on Youtube or playing "educational games" is not studying.
You need to repeatedly solve multiple practical problems to internalize the knowledge. And you'll eventually need to do stuff that you don't really like at all.
The proper response to that is still not to force your kid to study though. Instead, she should be made aware that in order to consistently do well, she is ultimately expected to gain the ability to force herself and defer the immediate gratification of watching a YouTube video (unless that YouTube video is a boring recorded college lecture that's relevant to her studies, I suppose).
Without documenting the Change in demographics it’s meaningless. If there are more dumber people from populations with lower Iq - then this is inevitable. It’s an IQ test not a test of teaching skill.
I don’t think there’s any great mystery here. Every few years, you guys elect a bunch of people for whom active sabotage of public education is a sine qua non to political gerrymandering strategies driven by the self-preservation instincts of lobbyists.
One thing that was evident to me from the sidelines was how much admin work was continually added to her workload without any consideration for the amount of class time she had. The focus on data derived from continuous testing of the students resulted in her and her peers sticking ever more closely to a continuously disrupted and rotated collection of commercially sourced curriculum and materials.
Her role as educator started to take a back see to classroom management and data collection. Add in differentiated instruction, where she was held accountable to develop personalized lesson plans for individual students and asked to track all of that and you end up with way too much workload to stay engaged and engaging year after year.
She was in a pretty good school district. A friend of mine had a similar role in a city district for a regional metro area and her students were horrific. She felt physically unsafe and ultimately quit.
It's a complex problem with many contributing factors. It's difficult to experiment when the future of the students in front of you could be negatively impacted by any mistakes made (not to mention job/test scores/etc) so everyone just rides the rail all the way down.
In Alaska, where I lived most of the last 20 years, education has been largely flat funded for about a decade now. Imagine running an organization in 2026 on that organization's 2016 budget. Schools have a bunch of obligations they have to spend on. Every time health care costs for staff go up, and funding is flat, something gets cut. You can't cut education for a decade straight without impacting student learning.
I don't think Alaska is that much of an outlier in this regard.
https://educationdata.org/public-education-spending-statisti...
The funding for dept of ed has _exploded_ after 2000
https://educationdata.org/public-education-spending-statisti...
At the same time, school scores started to sag after 2014
https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/ushistory/results/scores/
There are highly politicized blogs which can discuss this further and offer opinions as to the correlation.
When DJT talked about cancelling the Dept of Edu, I got ahold of all the teachers I knew and asked them what impact it would have, and their response was mostly that they would lose their school lunch benefits.
That's at the state level. But that doesn't account for the explosion in admin salaries and positions. The actual money a district spends on each student has been going down every year. Those funds are going more towards admin activities.
> I got ahold of all the teachers I knew and asked them what impact it would have, and their response was mostly that they would lose their school lunch benefits.
Teachers have a very poor understanding of where their funding comes from. Most just assume "property taxes", but it's far more complicated than that. The department of Ed provides a lot of funding to states that is passed through to the schools. They also enforce the education titles.
Cutting the department of Ed may not have a direct, immediate impact on classroom teachers, but it will have a large downstream effect in a few years.
Teachers are put in an impossible position with students who come from homes where the parents don't do their proper jobs. It's never been easier to be a neglectful parent. Your child will be entertained non-stop by an iPad and a video game system. They won't get bored and bother you. You can send them to their room and do whatever you want if you don't care if they are sleeping or not, as long as they are quiet.
The "iPad babies" are an epidemic in schools.
Source:
My sister is a K-12 educator in a poor, rural public school system in southeastern Virginia.
In recent years, she's seen a surge in students who are sorted, improperly, into special education classes. These are students that exhibit symptoms of various learning disabilities, but these symptoms heavily overlap with the symptoms of children who are sleep deprived and over stimulated by dopamine activating content on the devices they are addicted to.
And I'm a former high school teacher and my wife is a current high school teacher so I've experienced all of this first-hand.
Ok? Seems like that's more of a problem than the funding. Or whatever is causing that is more of a problem, but it does a disservice to the general argument of "kids aren't receiving the same level of care" argument to blame a drop in funding--especially when it was so easily falsified.
That's around the time a bunch of districts in a state I lived in at the time had multi-year teacher pay scale freezes due to budget crunches. Not saying it's necessarily connected to the scores dropping, but still.
Total spending across the country may be high, but it's very much state-by-state and local how much is spent and where it goes. Some states pay teachers pretty well. Some states, the pay really is pretty awful. Some states are OK on staffing levels. Others are in an ongoing staffing catastrophe that's forcing them to cut school days to try to get by.
Meanwhile, school performance is heavily tied to home life and broader community support for students' families. That's why all this effort to improve schools hasn't been as effective as one might hope: the attention needs to go toward much harder problems that have little to do with schools and are really hard to get any progress on in the US. Worker protections, better and less-stressful "safety nets", better policing and a better justice system. That kind of thing. I'd look at least as much at what's been going on with those, and with security and home life for those in the lowest three quintiles of household income, as at schools themselves, to try to find reasons for trends like this.
Then why are their reading scores improving so dramatically compared to wealthier states? Especially for under-privileged populations?
It used to be this kind of thing was - maybe not exceptional, but certainly not expected.
Now it's common but underreported.
So there's a kind of dream world where "education" and "health" are still considered official public goals. But the reality is that government procurement is mostly grift and corruption. There's been an epic collapse of almost any kind of public service ethic in favour of opportunism and profiteering, sometimes covered over with religious/moral pretexts.
Those are all gone, either shuttered or snapped up by huge companies that fired most of the staff and are milking them for the last money they can provide, or using them to distribute propaganda (e.g. Sinclair), and nobody's ever going to (be able to) do a proper accounting of how much the resulting waste and corrosion of public trust has cut into the actual overall cost/benefit of this whole "Internet" thing.
What shocks me is how open they’ve become about it.
The people are too fat and impotent to care. Plus the average retard will convince themselves that it’s something only the other guy will do.
Meanwhile, once upon a time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Athens_(1946)
These men didn’t let a little threats and intimidation stop them, though tbf they just returned from a war.
https://www.mackinac.org/S2016-02#results
Michigan notably does not fund schools through homeowner property taxes. I suspect that's probably the difference here and a reason we shouldn't use it as a representative example.
Regardless, I'd think that a study trying to find a correlation among practice, funding, and measurement would need at least a generation (~thirty years yea?) of results to show meaning
Public education has vast amounts of funding in the U.S. compared to other developed countries. If it does badly despite that, it's very likely that "more funding" is not the answer.
i dont think this is true.
there is an art to educating (especially the ~10-15 year old range) that does not just manifest itself because you are smart: how to engage students, how to keep them engaged, how to adjust the message to the audience's level and communicate it effectively, how to earn a kids respect without becoming over-bearing (or too friendly), and dozens of other things that your PhD in compsci or whatever does not teach you.
some of the smartest PhD holders i know would be very shitty elementary/high school teachers.
(context: i teach at the college level. its a lot easier than teaching at the high school level.)
And parents play an equally important role. One of the best things you can do for your child's education/life is support the teacher when they call you up and say, "Your child is making poor decisions..."
Knowing the stuff you're teaching is the easiest part. And I say that despite teaching in an environment with far better behavior, student buy-in, family support, and academic accomplishment than most places.
of course it’s not guaranteed.
at the same time, it’s simply not true that the “average starving phd student” would be “much better” at teaching than a typical teacher. teaching is more than just being smart.
Teachers get paid peanuts.
Unions are similar. People cry about them being a huge problem, but they have effectively no power (as in: don't even collectively bargain for contracts) in lots of states, including many of the ones with poor school performance. In other states, they really do have quite a bit of power.
To some extent, this shift is inevitable due to demographics changes - but I don't think that there has been realistic planning on how to manage a future with dramatically fewer children.
My point is different. Study after study shows that below a specific floor spending has almost no impact on educational outcomes. The correlation is such that you can both determine that there is likely no leak and also that it has no effect.
The stuff that does have an impact is much harder to move the needle on though so everyone just scapegoats funding instead. Stuff like building up the nuclear family in an area, increasing income mobility, and holding parents accountable for child outcomes do have a measurable effect but are politically intractable today.
big if true. we should probably cut 100% of spending in that case.
edit: not sure if people are missing the /s, or if people legitimately believe that cutting spending has no impact.
Edit: actually, this is an insult to Georgia. I apologize, brothers and sisters. You have much to teach us.
"Inflation-adjusted public school funding per student in the United States has increased significantly over the long term, with a roughly 34% increase in inflation-adjusted revenue per student over the last two decades alone. Looking at a broader historical view, inflation-adjusted spending per student has risen by over 200% since the 1960s."
https://ctmirror.org/2024/01/28/ct-budget-fiscal-guardrails-...
ai summary: "According to that piece, K-12 education has been losing $407 million each year since 2017 due to inflation, even as Gov. Lamont called current funding levels the "largest ever commitment." The author also noted that $2.4 billion in urgent legislative funding requests were denied in one spring session alone, with needs for fully funding education among the shortfalls."
https://www.learner.com/blog/states-that-spend-the-most-on-e...
its weird that they used the state that they live in and have lived in for the last 20 years as an example?
Public schools are subsidizing charter schools
Public schools have many legal requirements to provide services that charter schools don't have to deal with. Charter schools also have a lot of freedom to refuse problematic kids, that public schools have to take.
Parents who don't need those services keep taking their kids out of public schools and putting them into charter schools, charter schools kick out problem kids. Public schools end up having a higher cost per student because of that.
Schools have to finance an entire security apparatus because assholes keep doing mass shootings.
Public school systems _also_ are terrible at spending money on bullshit that has absolutely nothing to do with schools. The amount of money spent on administration is way way out of line. There are so many layers between the top and teachers and so many people with their hands out. Big school systems could probably fire half of their administration and literally nobody would notice. They would probably run better. When they do internal reports on how to save money, it always comes back to the most trivial shit or even worse, pulling it out of _education_ and is _never_ 'you need to fire a bunch of people collecting a paycheck for doing nothing'.
I genuinely think most big school systems would be vastly improved by firing half of the administration at random and doubling teacher salaries.
Some data.
https://edunomicslab.org/roi-over-time/
AI is what shitty-capitalism wants to do to get money for themselves and try to push the society to defund public education
Looking back, I don't think Chromebooks, iPads and the like would have been beneficial to my elementary/middle/high school education at all.
Our primary instrument of learning was the teacher and really thick textbooks that were passed down student to student, and you could see that journey inside the in front cover where you signed it out for the year.
As someone who would protest at learning long division when a calculator was around, in retrospect, the teacher was right.
Ironically...
"Technology" has been an education buzzword since I was in school and it needs to be taken out and shot.
Dr's Deposition on How Screen Time Hurts Kids' Cognitive Development https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fd-_VDYit3U
- tech apps starting with infinite scroll (facebook, 9gag, Instagram, etc.)
- media/tech shortened content: shorter tv shows, short video content, etc.
(Tiktok is the "state of the art" of those 2 trends pushed to the max)
Specifically, we're getting more & more addicted to things that increase the dopamine spikes frequency, making it increasingly difficult to go in deep focus work.
For example I remember reading a lot of science magazines / articles growing up (granted popsci but for a kid it still teaches some things) and as I grew up things like the Economist.
Similarly I also played games like math blaster as a kid and have realized I need to intentionally provide games like this to my kids that ideally teach something (the bar being greater than zero learning) rather than playing one of those infinite running games or whatever.
I think we're probably talking about the exact same thing but am curious where content vs. short form media is.
Thanks for sharing :)
We do have the NAEP main series test results[2]. At a first glance at the math results[3][4], it appears they peaked in 2013, then fluctuated through 2019, then dropped significantly in 2022 and somewhat rebounded in 2024, which really does suggest COVID.
[1]https://www.edweek.org/teaching-learning/debate-flares-anew-...
[2]https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/report_archive.aspx
[3]https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/highlights/mathematics/202...
[4]https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/reports/mathematics/2024/g...
https://blog.prepscholar.com/average-sat-scores-over-time
". . . did you ever attend school from home or somewhere else outside of school because of the COVID-19 outbreak?"
Can someone else confirm?
Not enough investigation there. Of course, the trend was already going down, but the new slope is obvious.
Prediction in next three years will be same or greater - technology, ai, screentime.
Significant parts of our society and government are actively hostile to education. Blaming the students is convenient, but probably not accurate.
I wonder if there’s a way to validate the hypothesis that post-shutdown, some of the cohort that would have missed a day here and there now see school as optional and miss more days.
Overall, the reported effect is sad and should be addressed. These are people’s lives.
My 3rd grade daughter was unlucky with various illnesses and missed about 12 days this year (so far). I got a letter from her principal attempting to guilt trip me for her "Chronic absence".
I wrote an angry response (in retrospect it was too angry since he had no choice about the letter) where I asked if he would prefer my sending sick children to school.
Her grades (for whatever value grades have in 3rd grade) are fine. I'll take the chance on her reading her "Diary of a wimpy kid" book when sick, or when a sane system would have given a snow day.
The level is so low in my local elementary school that the single track math class is still doing addition within 20 for first grade.
The funny thing is that the state standard actually measure 2 and 3 digit addition for K and 1st graders, and proficiency at that level would be p75 for a 1st grader. So why is the actual class teaching level at p<50?
My answer to this is approximately: “yes they’re all relatively bad compared to the thing that came before so they were all right!”
Even books. If the option were between my child reading about blacksmithing/compsci and DOING blacksmithing/compsci I’d choose the latter every time. It gives you real experience and opinions.
The difference with each successive new wave is that it becomes increasingly addictive. It’s possible to read one book and stop for a while. Shorts can hook you for hours and then draw you back the next day with no natural stopping point.
Who do you think suffers when elites attack public education? It's always the children.
Fun fact: Silicon Valley elites are big proponents of school vouchers because, like their hatred of American labor, they also hate public schools and don't want to pay for that either.
School boards are inherently poltical because as long as a publicly-run school system exists, how it is run and what things it will attempt to teach are political questions. There's no apolitical school board that existed 40 years ago that has been altered since then, they have always been poltical.
Like, I get the desire in a hypothetical, that you hope that people in power would use their power to make public schools better if their kids were forced to go there.
But in reality, the actually powerful can just pay for private schools out of pocket and the vouchers help a lot of middle-income families send their kid to a school that can provide a better environment for whatever definition of better is relevant to that individual.
It just seems like such misplaced anger and energy. You could just advocate for improving public schools, without attacking regular families trying to do their best while trapped inside a system they have very little influence on.
If enough people use the voucher system it basically forces the per student spending to get closer to a purely egalitarian spending per student, with the result that public schools have to spend about the same amount on special ed kids as the voucher kids get (in the extreme, that's all the students they're left with). While this is objectively fairer in my opinion, it's viewed as an entitlement that the special ed kids can take more money at the expense of everyone else.
Obviously though this has to be carefully framed to sell it properly. Very few are going to knowingly sign up to lose funding for their own student to help some other student who is already getting 3x the money as them, so instead it's framed as some sort of evil capitalist agenda against public schools.
Exactly. And who benefits from a less educated, less aware populace? The answer is pretty clear: look at who is benefiting right now!
Seattle's Public Schools district is among the leading in the nation on per-student spending, yet the test scores are cratering. Its previous superintendant had an official platform of not disciplining students.
Vouchers would _improve_ the situation.
https://oxfordeagle.com/2025/01/30/mississippi-4th-graders-n...
[1] https://theconversation.com/mounting-research-shows-that-cov...
But the part I want to concentrate on is the education part and the role of tech. Anyone who sells to large bureaucracies like state and federal Education Departments will tell you the skill is in managing the procurement process. It's getting your claws in more than it is in delivering results. Any results tend to be more manufactured than not.
So contracts get signed with states and school districts that will require them to use a particular product, even if it doesn't work. We know how this goes too. Whoever was in charge of that decision will then tend to leave their job and go work for the seller. Shocking.
But we know what works in teaching and it's direct instruction [2] but you don't sell tech platforms or iPads or laptops that way. As a result we now have a disturbing number of people who have never read a book and really can't read a book, going so far as the students of elite colleges [3].
Likewise, we see Education PhDs who won't make a name for themselves pushing ideas from the 1800s. They have to come up with new methods and this was kind of a disaster for literacy [4], which people are finally waking up to as we go back to the 1800s method of phonics eg [5].
But it's hard to succeed when half the country wants the entire system to fail.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZM05gRIROqQ
[2]: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8476697/
[3]: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2024/11/the-eli...
[4]: https://www.apmreports.org/episode/2019/08/22/whats-wrong-ho...
[5]: https://news.stanford.edu/stories/2026/02/science-of-reading...
comparing Fall 2019 to Fall 2022
It doesn't seem to be about 13-year-old students in general
The main assessment has been performed every two years recently, so 2024 data is most recent. They can all be seen here[2].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Assessment_of_Educati...
[2] https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/report_archive.aspx
One overlooked problem is imo that you can't just waste their time with nonsense and get good results.
A lot of people in the education system are so full of shit that they believe it's good for children to sit there the whole day.
Improving exercises and lectures should be a priority.
What do you mean by "little results" and what data supports it?
Constituencies of both parties found reasons to hate it, so its foundational accountability requirements were watered down by succeeding administrations.
I’m perfectly willing to be convinced NCLB had nothing to do with the evolution of test scores over the last 25 years, but the circumstantial evidence is not easy to dismiss.
If these numbers are at all meaningful for determining how much a student has learned as a result of going through schooling, then thye show that white people are consistently better than blacks and Hispanics at school and are consistently worse than Asians.
I'm so relieved I left social media. Sadly, via democracy, even if you leave social media you are still impacted by those who use it and believe what they read.
There's definitely loads of money in "education". But the actual teachers arent seeing it. No, its in "special interest programs", state/federal compliance, loads of tests, and ordained material from "preferred creators" (cough, pearson etm.)
We can pay teachers better, sure. But there's lots of areas to "pay better". Small classes. 12-17 students. Budget for class resources. No, teachers should NOT be responsible for work materials. Larger classes get aides as well.
Ive also seen what modern teaching is about. The teachers are handed absolutely shit material and required to teach that, with low/no deviation. Like, "New Math" https://www.understood.org/en/articles/9-new-math-problems-a... . None of these methods show WHY, only a rote procedure.
I thought about becoming a teacher. I already teach people (wide array of adults and under 18) in extracurricular groups. Ive seen what works well, and what doesnt. I can tell the 'energy' of a group, especially if theyre confused and angry about something, and how to solve it. But the pay is definitely laughable compared to IT, and the administration demands exacting rubrics put forth by companies who kicked back the state educators.
The responsibility is not worth their salaries or the anti-benefits and other costs.
I don't want to envision a future where most people besides a few elite have stopped reading and writing but maybe I'm just an old millennial and behind the times.
The reasons to doubt are perfectly known: meritocracy is on a decline in the Western world, there's an ever improving safety net for losers, there's a price to pay for forcing my child to study vs the child spending time with their friends who were left to roam free as their social life will suffer.
I probably met more people whose degrees played little to no role in their professional career than the other way around. I've met lots of people who could never realize their degree because of the hollowed down European industry. Engineers seem to suffer the most. It seems like the few ways where a degree can open the door to a better life must be in a field that provides very localized services s.a. medicine. All else is outsourced. Trades do better in this respect as a lot of them need to be local, but they too are being populated by foreign workers and competition is fierce.
I don't think that COVID or any other "force of nature" is to blame for the outcomes. When there's will, there's a way. It's just that fewer parents see academic achievements as worth pursuing for their children.
You need to repeatedly solve multiple practical problems to internalize the knowledge. And you'll eventually need to do stuff that you don't really like at all.
Sorry - that was reflexive: “… in the US”.
I don’t think there’s any great mystery here. Every few years, you guys elect a bunch of people for whom active sabotage of public education is a sine qua non to political gerrymandering strategies driven by the self-preservation instincts of lobbyists.