Most of the comments are focused on the supply of education. But I don't think the supply side is the problem, irrespective of teachers and high schools. There is more and cheaper education available than ever before. Nearly every highschooler has more access to learning that kings and emperors would have fought wars for less than 200 years ago. However,the United States, particularly in the last 50 years, seems to have fostered a culture averse to education. I believe the years long decline in test scores is a symptom of that cultural shift.
rayiner 9 hours ago [-]
The problem with that “culture” explanation is that white kids in America do fine in international educational comparisons. In the 2018 PISA assessment, 15 year old white american students were near the top in reading (behind only Singapore and some Chinese SEZs) and in the top echelon in science (comparable to Japan). Their weakest performance was math, where they’re around the middle, behind the top asian countries but only modestly behind Finland: https://nces.ed.gov/surveys/pisa/pisa2018/pdf/PISA2018_compi....
Insofar as the US had a “culture averse to education,” surely that affects white americans as much as it affects anyone else. But, on average, they are not the ones who are behind their peers internationally.
zdragnar 6 hours ago [-]
Skin color isn't it, actually.
I knew (second hand) a teacher in a rural area of a low population state. All white kids, she'd have kindergartners cussing her out. Very little hope for any academic future for the other grades as things didn't get better with the older kids.
I knew a white kid who lived in a trailer park whose mom was upset he was getting tutoring after school for his dyslexia because she told him he'd never amount to anything.
My mixed race friend mentioned he was accused of "acting white" in school because he actually tried to get good grades.
What do all of those things have in common? Poverty, yes, but blended with hopelessness. The kids were surrounded by people who didn't have much, didn't think they'd get anywhere, and didn't believe the kids would ever have a chance at a better life.
That last part is what separates them from kids in third world countries who still manage to achieve academic success. Hope and optimism aren't guarantees; they aren't a replacement for social support. They are, however, a necessary ingredient for the intrinsic motivation necessary for personal growth.
poemxo 1 hours ago [-]
I don't appreciate reading anecdata in response to cited findings. It cheapens the discussion. Now everyone is going to spend time writing knee-jerk responses to you.
At least the parent commenter had the grace to reply with another source instead of falling for it.
ThunderSizzle 2 minutes ago [-]
Whose to say "cited findings" have any more value than "anecdata".
The institutions that build these national and international statistics do so with bias and goals, or without complete data. For example, how can a bureau make a national statistics on crime accurate when cities intentional report crime incorrectly to look better in statistics.
To think "cited findings" is gospel truth is naive. I know it's highly desired here, but I stand by what I'm saying. Data is lovely, but garbage in, garbage out, and most national-level data is complete garbage with an agenda or bias or naivety.
JohnMakin 24 minutes ago [-]
The parent commenter’s “source” makes no claims about race related performance whatsoever - it measures by just about everything but that, and then sorts by country. So maybe this is one of those darned reflexive knee jerk responses.
Meekro 6 hours ago [-]
"Poverty blended with hopelessness" sounds about right. I'd like to emphasize that it's not just poverty, since there are plenty of recent immigrant families who live in poverty but the kids are at the top of their class. Unfortunately, though, there's a certain kind of degeneracy some families live in: the parents have largely failed in their every endeavor, and they'll become absolutely furious if they see the kids starting to rise above that, get their lives together, and accomplish things. If you live in communities like that, it's part of the deal: no one is allowed to escape, lest they make the rest of them look bad.
6 hours ago [-]
bell-cot 2 hours ago [-]
Sadly, there are a variety of such family, community, and social and peer group motivations and behaviors -
That's an understatement. Sort that by at or above basic and the top 5 states in the US are: North Dakota, South Dakota, Minnesota, Utah, Wisconsin.
bootsmann 4 hours ago [-]
Even in those states you mention, the number of students managing basic proficiency in maths fell by over 10 percentage points in the past 10 years. You can use the year selection on the site to see the picture change over the years. Texas dropped by over 20 points.
somenameforme 3 hours ago [-]
Interesting! Yeah, this is a significant decline across the board. I'm curious what it is in the US in particular that's driving such sharp declines. Because many places in the world did things like shut down schools during COVID, have internet/social media, ongoing obesity epidemics, major immigration from low education sources, demographic/fertility issues, and so on. Yet somehow looking at the latest PISA (2022) [1], the US now sits between Malta and Slovakia in math. And if these scores are any indicator, we're probably looking at a further decline in the next PISA results, which should be released this year.
Honestly this is one of the biggest bullshit I've ever heard. Assuming that this mentality is quite widespread(not necessarily universal) among non White, then any attempt to introduce affirmative action or other equalizer practice would be futile.
That kind of mentality must be purged hard from yesterday.
pavlov 2 hours ago [-]
Teenage boys everywhere have a widespread bias against putting in the effort to get good grades.
They might call it "gay" or "sissy" or "acting white" or whatever, but the root cause is usually their perception of what masculinity should look like.
The men they look up to are anti-intellectual. This exists in all communities, race is not the main problem here.
58 minutes ago [-]
eunos 2 hours ago [-]
That must be dealt with full spectrum crackdown on national level.
0xEF 2 hours ago [-]
I'd like to see what a "full-spectrum crackdown" on anti-intellectualism in the US would look like, given that most of its population struggles to discern fact from fiction in the news cycle, healthcare and legal proceedings. The introduction of generative AI has only made that worse, pushing more distrust of any information that didn't come from a source counted among "one of us." Our problem stems from an intentionally poorly educated populace that still heavily relies on idolatry, allowing whatever demagogue with the means to rise and essentially manipulate the masses.
I'm pretty sure, at this point, this was intentional, individuals and orgs with the resources to create finely tuned systemic problems having been at it since the country's inception.
kotaKat 59 minutes ago [-]
Banning TikTok could have been a great first step, but too may people were cooked by the algorithm to stop it.
zdragnar 8 minutes ago [-]
FWIW, my friend was accused of acting white probably around the year 2000 or so, well before anything algorithmic.
Not to say that tiktok is innocent, but it certainly isn't the root cause.
eunos 2 hours ago [-]
Media from mainstream to alternative march in tune with pro intellectualism messages. Any works of art that espouse anti intellectualism would be swiftly and immediately canceled (including its authors) without hesitation. Do this for a generation or two minimum.
boppo1 1 hours ago [-]
Get sydney sweeny to date alec radford, make sure there's lots of PDA.
aredox 1 hours ago [-]
More delusion you are a part of.
Building things requires a sustained effort and understanding. You and your fellow Amaricans are drifting further and further from it.
lozenge 2 hours ago [-]
How do you propose to do that?
inglor_cz 36 minutes ago [-]
I cannot think of any single ethnocultural group in the West that highly values education and, at the same time, has bad outcomes doing so. We have invested a lot of money and effort into our educational systems.
Even traditionally oppressed groups like the Jews or the Chinese (Chinese Exclusion Act anyone?) or descendants of Russian muzhiks or Indian untouchable castes do have good outcomes if they actually motivate their kids to learn.
The groups that are systematically out (in Czechia, the part of the Roma that lives in ghettos - contrary what people tend to think, a lot of the Roma marry into the wider society, mix with it and live quite comfortable self-sufficient lives) tend to be the ones that despise schooling, and it will take a century or so of concerted efforts to change the attitudes.
hopelite 2 hours ago [-]
I do not buy this poverty argument for the simple and clear argument that not only were much of humanity’s knowledge developed by “poor” people by that standard, but also equally poor different racial groups perform very differently, your anecdotal stories notwithstanding.
And yes, skin color itself is irrelevant, it is simply a convenient identifier for underlying significant biological differences. There is absolutely zero reason one would rationally conclude that biological differences would somehow magically stop at the brain. And that goes without saying that it’s not even “just skin color”, since even the most naive child can identify the race of any person where the skin color has been changed with photoshop. Have you seen those images where whites/asians have been made black and vice versa, etc?
We really need to move past these infantile ideologies like that we are all the same. The smart people can clearly see that has always been a gaslighting lie.
DiogenesKynikos 1 hours ago [-]
> it is simply a convenient identifier for underlying significant biological differences
It's actually not. Skin color does not correlate well with the genetic diversity among humans at all. It's just one particular trait that is very easy to identify by eye.
> There is absolutely zero reason one would rationally conclude that biological differences would somehow magically stop at the brain.
There is absolutely zero reason to rationally conclude that a random physical trait that happens to be easy to distinguish by eye correlates with brain function at all.
On the other hand, there are massive socioeconomic disparities that arise from the history of slavery, which easily explain both the disparities and the reasons why racists such as yourself want to boil things down to skin color.
safety1st 2 hours ago [-]
I don't think that disproves the culture argument. American culture is segmented. (Modern marketing and politics have leaned heavily into this segmentation by the way.) For example, if you grow up exposed to ghetto culture you will probably not value education. The PISA assessment doesn't tell us that white kids who grew up in the ghetto are magically competing with Singapore's best. And we know that the ghetto is less white than the rest of America. Ergo in aggregate, US whites outperform. There are of course a million exceptions to this i.e. grow up in a certain type of Asian immigrant household and you will probably do great on these tests and maybe learn piano, violin etc. as well.
Now whether ghetto culture or ghetto economics is the main contributor to poor academic performance... I will leave that finer point up for debate, but my point here is the US has big differences in educational outcomes based on NEIGHBORHOOD, if your neighborhood is high crime and the schools are broke, your educational outcomes tend to be bad.
If there is a culture related problem, I think it's that the people pushing this trashy culture, for example music that glorifies rape, drugs and gangs, code it as black culture and use that as a way to deflect criticism. You're a racist if you don't like hip hop! It would be an understatement to say that many black Americans want nothing to do with that lifestyle or image and have evolved well beyond it, yet it still gets called black culture. It is a cultural weakness that we don't see rape, drugs and gangs as bad stuff to promote and reward, full stop, and not a thing we should be educating the next generation with, regardless of the skin color of the performer, or its roots.
BTW for whatever it's worth I'm white and I grew up in the ghetto. My parents forced me to take a public bus for an hour each morning to a magnet school in the rich part of town. Years later I met up with my white childhood friend from down the road who had gone to our local high school. I had a bunch of academic achievements and a college scholarship, he had a gunshot wound in his stomach. He was a smart guy when I knew him but the ghetto had its own plans for him.
eunos 2 hours ago [-]
>culture averse to education
Remind me when Vivek told his followers that American education need ti be more rigorous to compete with China and other Asian nations he got owned so hard, practically quiting from DOGE before it started.
erosenbe0 8 hours ago [-]
Culture argument can be argued effectively as follows:
If a cohort in Japan has a median score of X at median household income Y, the American cohort with same median score X has income closer to 1.25Y or 1.5Y.
Whether you want to define your American cohort based on geography or ethnicity doesn't really matter-the result will be preserved up to a point.
rayiner 7 hours ago [-]
That’s just because Americans are richer across the Board than Japanese. But would we expect PISA scores to track absolute income across different developed countries? I don’t think that follows. For example, Sweden’s median household income (PPP) is 2.6x higher than Poland’s. But the two countries had very similar scores on the 2018 PISA: http://hechingerreport.org/what-2018-pisa-international-rank...
diogenescynic 7 hours ago [-]
I think one of the biggest factors comes down to single parent vs intact families.
chongli 2 hours ago [-]
Sweden has the highest proportion of single-parent households at 34% whereas Poland is near the bottom at 9% [1].
I'm interested; do you have any good stats for that?
MacsHeadroom 6 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
kenjackson 4 hours ago [-]
Id ask you for a citation, but I know it doesn’t exist.
5 hours ago [-]
mschuster91 4 hours ago [-]
> Insofar as the US had a “culture averse to education,” surely that affects white americans as much as it affects anyone else. But, on average, they are not the ones who are behind their peers internationally.
Education outcome massively depends on economic status of the parents. And that, no matter the country by the way, is very closely tied to immigration history and ethnicity.
When parents struggle to afford basic school supplies (to the tune that many teachers have to pay for their students' needs out of their own measly paychecks [1]), that's not exactly conductive to good learning outcomes. When parents don't have the time to sit down with their children and help them with learning because they have to work two jobs to make rent (remember, even two minimum wage jobs is not enough [2]), the kids are put further behind. And they certainly can't afford private after-school tutoring.
The last part is the environment itself - aka the quality of housing (mold, cockroaches and other health impacts) or when gangs lure in kids with the promise of striking it rich by dealing drugs or whatnot...
The racial achievement gap is probably one of the most significant problems educators in the US think about. I think one of the biggest obstacles to improving it (not causing the problem, but making solutions difficult or ineffective) is that low-performing urban school districts tend to correlate strongly with strong teachers' unions and big, mismanaged school administrations where things are too bureaucratic and incompetent for anybody to be able to really effect significant change.
I'm not sure I support charter schools as a universal good, but they've actually proven to be pretty consistently effective at improving the educational attainment of low-income black/hispanic students [0-1]. When the local school system is a political quagmire and objectively failing in its mission to educate students, it's probably the only way out.
The meta-problem is that the people most actively involved in improving the racial educational achievement gap are precisely the type of people to reflexively dislike charter schools (because it's "right wing", although I see it more aligned with the centralization vs decentralization axis) and maybe even feel overtly threatened by them (because of their union job). Also, charter schools have to actually figure out how to get buy-in from low-income black and hispanic parents, figure out how to serve this community better, and can't hide behind the excuse of cyclical poverty + orwellian bureaucracy anymore.
I think a lot of educators really would rather work in a system where bad outcomes are guaranteed and thus not their fault, than one in which they actually have the ability to make more than just performative progress in serving the needs of their underprivileged student body.
Why do you assume racial achievement gaps indicate problems with schools? For example, Asian students perform much better than white students. We don’t say that indicates a problem with how schools educate white kids. Instead, most people see it as a predictable consequence of asian immigrants being filtered for higher education. By that same token, why would we treat Hispanic students having lower scores as indicative of a problem with the schools? The U.S. Hispanic population is subject to the same immigrant filtering effect, but in the opposite direction. Both immigrant groups largely arrived in the last 50 years. Why would we assume the effects of the initial filtering would disappear so quickly?
Here’s a modest proposal: American schools are actually quite good across the board.
sapphicsnail 5 hours ago [-]
I wouldn't trust any data about charter schools that came from the Hoover Institute. Plenty of red states with weak labor laws have awful educational systems.
lupusreal 38 minutes ago [-]
There is no shortage of young naive newly minted teachers who are eager to go into those low performing urban schools and help turn things around. But very few of them last more than a few years in those schools, they get badly burned by reality. The ones who last almost inevitably become callused and bitter, having lost all of the hope they had at the start. The biggest problem with those schools is the students themselves, and the families of those students. They're incredibly dysfunction and stymie all well intentioned efforts to help them.
Insofar as charter schools can help, it's because giving enough of a shit to apply for and go to one weeds out enough of the lost causes that would only disrupt everybody else. In fact, I think the best ways to improve those public schools is even simpler; make attendance optional. Families who give a shit will still attend, while all the trash will voluntarily stay home.
brewdad 7 hours ago [-]
At least near me the biggest problems facing the "urban" district compared to suburban ones is declining student populations as long time homeowners age in place and the maintenance costs of 100 year old buildings compared to 10-20 year old ones in the suburbs. Teachers tend to get paid the same or less in the city district and administration counts are higher but fairly close on a per student basis compared to the burbs.
This is before you get into the socioeconomic factors that make one student population more susceptible to starting and falling behind.
bandofthehawk 7 hours ago [-]
Wouldn't a declining student population mean more money per student? And it seems like it would often (but not always) be cheaper to maintain existing buildings vs building new ones?
I'm also wondering how much of the new suburban buildings are financed with debt, and the costs just haven't really caught up to them yet.
_fs 6 hours ago [-]
A school's budget is tied directly to attendance. Less students = less budget.
cyberax 6 hours ago [-]
> At least near me the biggest problems facing the "urban" district compared to suburban ones is declining student populations as long time homeowners age in place and the maintenance costs of 100 year old buildings compared to 10-20 year old ones in the suburbs
The building maintenance is a red herring. I believe in my district, it's about 10% of the budget on average.
KPGv2 7 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
phil21 6 hours ago [-]
The only reason I became anything today is because my parents who were poor but cared very much were able to "opt out" of the shit-tier local public school that pandered to the kids who would rather not learn before it was too late for me.
Just a couple disruptive kids per class can ruin an entire generation of students for a grade level. And there were far more than just a couple. Not to mention kids who had no business being in those classes - when the class is half full of low-performers they drag the rest of the kids down with them as the environment completely changes.
The focus these public school districts have put on the low performing and low achievers at the expense of those there to learn is astounding and perhaps civilization-ending if it continues. More resources should be spent on those there to help themselves vs. trying to shovel ever-more resources at people that will never provide a return on that investment.
At this point the local district here spends magnitudes more on special education and catering to IEP students than they do any AP level classes or other high performer programs. In fact they continue to destroy any advanced track segmentation in the favor of equity, and the teachers union nearly killed public magnet schools off entirely recently. They will try again until they are successful.
It's an obviously bad strategy, and apparently results don't matter. Dragging everyone down is not a plan for success.
This is the single political hill I will die on. Removing the ability for poor but high functioning families to give their kids a chance to get out of their circumstances because it raises uncomfortable questions is downright evil.
Other western countries everyone loves to champion so much have this figured out. Student tracks are a good thing. Put high achievers on an advanced track earlier than later and get them out of the general population of students before it's too late for them.
And yes, it's obvious to anyone who's ever been to a decent number of different types of schools that the only thing that truly matters is the other students (read: parents) that go there. Anything else is a rounding error.
As bad as it was 30 years ago when I was going to school, it's infinitely worse now from watching nieces and nephews attending their local public schools. Until they were able to transfer out to magnets at least.
Meekro 6 hours ago [-]
There's one slow-motion conservative victory happening that's getting relatively little news coverage (and that's a good thing, lest there be more pushback): allowing more alternatives to public schools, funded by taxpayer dollars. Charter schools are the most obvious example, but I expect this to eventually be expanded further. If 10 homeschooler families want to get together and hire a professional teacher, there's no reason why the state shouldn't pay for it (provided the kids pass grade-level standardized tests).
Like you said, 99% of what makes a "good" school good is the quality of the other kids who go there. Since there's absolutely no political will for expelling the troublemakers (even in most conservative districts), the only remaining option is to build more lifeboats.
lelanthran 4 hours ago [-]
> the schools are able to kick out any underperforming students
Being able to kick out disruptive students has a pretty big influence on the remaining students.
How do you distinguish between underperforming-non-disruptive students and under-performing-disruptive students, especially as the almost all the disruptive students are going to be underperforming anyway.
3 hours ago [-]
lupusreal 26 minutes ago [-]
You make it sound difficult. It's not. Schools are filled with security cameras. When a student attacks another, expell him. And none of that "the victim tried to defend himself so we have to expelled him too, we don't care who started it" horse shit. The schools have cameras, use them.
weitendorf 7 hours ago [-]
I don't consider myself right wing, but I guess in this case I wouldn't care even if it were nominally right-wing, because it's more important to give students good educations than it is to perpetuate institutions (eg giant school systems with awful performance) that might ideologically better align with my beliefs but are clearly not working.
Also, while I don't think students should be pushed out of charter schools purely for bad performance (if they are putting in the effort), I do think that poor minority parents should have the right to send their kids to schools that don't force students to share classrooms with disruptive or way-behind-grade-level students. When educational outcomes under the local public school system are really bad I think school-choice just makes a lot of sense as a way of figuring out what policies are popular/effective/unpopular/harmful.
cwillu 7 hours ago [-]
The implication seems to be that charter schools are superior, but does that jive with other countries' successes? A commonly given alternative explanation is that the public options in the US are deliberately sabotaged via budget restrictions, and then the resulting poor performance is used to justify further cuts—a similar dynamic has been fairly recently executed in Alberta with public health care.
nradov 7 hours ago [-]
There is very little correlation between per-capita student spending and student outcomes. We should fund our public schools adequately but no amount of funding can overcome a bad environment in a student's home or neighborhood.
enjo 6 hours ago [-]
And to be clear: we fund our schools at a higher rate than basically any other country in the world. We are fifth in the world in per-pupil student funding behind only Luxembourg, Norway, Austria, and South Korea.
I thought charter schools and public schools received the same $/student.
rahimnathwani 6 hours ago [-]
Charter schools generally receive less.
ab5tract 6 hours ago [-]
Source please.
rahimnathwani 4 hours ago [-]
Here's just one:
Heape-Johnson, A., McGee, J. B., Wolf, P. J., May, J. F., & Maloney, L. D. (August 2023). Charter School Funding: Little Progress Towards Equity in the City. School Choice Demonstration Project.
In some states and cities the difference is more extreme than in others.
cyberax 5 hours ago [-]
Budgets are NOT a problem. Magnet schools in the US get the same or _less_ funding per capita than the average for the area.
E.g. Lowell Heights in SF gets less than the average funding, and Stuyvesant in NYC gets the average amount.
weitendorf 7 hours ago [-]
I think the specific form of "charter schools" we have are mainly a US invention, but a lot of countries (like the Netherlands, where it's more common than not) actually just let students use public funds to go to private schools, which would melt the heads of most people who oppose charter schools because it's "right wing".
Charter schools are I think a direct response to figuring out how to fix low performing, big school districts in the US. So while I have no idea if private or public schools do better in the Netherlands, I think we'd need to find something more like the Baltimore public school system in another country to make the right comparison.
> A commonly given alternative explanation is that the public options in the US are deliberately sabotaged via budget restrictions, and then the resulting poor performance is used to justify further cuts
I find this hard to address because it's not really a matter of policy but of ulterior motives or conspiracy. I personally have no secret plan to make public education even worse by posting about charter schools on hacker news. To me it's just about giving students the option to get educated by an independent institution rather than be forced to attend some of the worst public school systems in the country.
TimorousBestie 7 hours ago [-]
Perhaps you believe the “nominally right-wing” thing is merely academic. It is not.
Nazis drink water and post on internet communities too. And that's a homeschool network, not a charter school.
Honestly, this might be a good opportunity for you to think about why you find charter schools such a nonstarter JUST because they tend to have more support among those on the right (which I'm not) than those on the left. That's actually one of the big problems I was trying to point out: people have extremely strong opinions on educational policy because of these ideological left vs right things rather than on what students actually need!
davorak 3 hours ago [-]
> why you find charter schools such a nonstarter JUST because they tend to have more support among those on the right
So my general impression is that the republican party, nationally, note I am distinguishing the republican party form political right in the USA, has not been supportive of education in terms of financing or in promoting the necessary environment to ensure high quality and consistent education.
My general impression is that the republican party is for charter schools.
An argument that says trust/invest in the system promoted by the party that has been undermining/unsupportive of the current system does not invoke my trust/sympathy.
This is not a topic I have done rigorous investigations on, but what little I have done normally shows a lack of hard evidence and apples to apples between charter schools and traditional public schools.
elktown 5 hours ago [-]
People should study charter schools here in Sweden where it’s common. It’s such a corrupt profit motivated segregation mess, it should be avoided at all costs. It’s taken a very well functioning public school system that had a high lowest standard across the board and segregated them by cherry picking cheap to maintain students.
Then we also have the pure frauds, no education to the students until the finally gets shut down 5-10 years later when all inspections are done. etc etc.
Why on earth willingly let in the profit motive into this? It was introduced right wingers in Sweden too ofc, boat loads of profit to their supporters.
Now it’s also very hard to get rid of when state capacity has been reduced over the years.
TimorousBestie 6 hours ago [-]
> And that's a homeschool network, not a charter school.
They were registered as an online charter school, which is why the Ohio DOE got involved at all. They wouldn’t have investigated an individual homeschooler. (Many “homeschool networks” or the like do this because it makes it easier for their clientele to prove they’ve met the meager legal requirements of homeschooling. Justifies the price tag, yknow?)
> Honestly, this might be a good opportunity for you to think about why you find charter schools such a nonstarter JUST because they tend to have more support among those on the right (which I'm not) than those on the left
You’ve imagined a whole backstory and character arc for me, which is sadly more interesting than the truth. I think charter schools are repugnant because they operate under little to no oversight and, around these parts, have a reputation for abusing students (see reason one).
You seemed to imply earlier that the right wing connection was irrelevant or unimportant to the concept of a charter school. It isn’t, really. It’s an essential feature of the system, and why they’ve become so popular as of late after decades of failed leftist attempts at the same thing.
monero-xmr 7 hours ago [-]
Why wouldn’t I want a school to be able to kick out bad kids? Violent and disruptive kids need to be warehoused away from actual future productive members of society, rather than forcing 90% of kids to have their education ruined by 10% of bad kids
brewdad 7 hours ago [-]
Prepare to build a fuckton more prisons then. Most kids can get turned around from a bad path if they get the right support early on. I don't want to live in a world where we write off 7 year olds forever.
somenameforme 6 hours ago [-]
There was a famous study that tried to test this - the Perry Preschool Study. [1] Basically they enlisted a number of high risk children - black, low iq, low income children. Half were placed into a high quality specialized preschool program (that lasted two years for 2.5 hours a day) with small class sizes, half were not, and they followed what happened over the next 40 years. The results were definitely impactful, but not the sort of major turn around one might hope for.
So for instance 55% of the control group ended up being arrested 5+ times by age 40, while 'only' 36% of the experiment group did. I think the thing this demonstrates is that intervention can help, but is also insufficient alone. Students who are in a sufficiently high risk scenario need ongoing support and treatment that they're not going to receive at a normal public institution. And not only that but they will remain disproportionately disruptive to other student's educations at normal institutions, even with years of ongoing care.
I'm surprised that 2.5 hours a day for 2 years was enough to make that big a difference on outcomes through age 40. Like... damn, that's a big effect!
imtringued 4 hours ago [-]
In Germany children only spend between 5.5 to 6 hours at school per day. You‘ve raised that amount to 8 hours now and the outcomes are not that much better since the number represents being arrested at least five times. If you get arrested four times, you would be considered a model student.
5 hours ago [-]
Biganon 5 hours ago [-]
Imagine the moral dilemma of having to choose which kid goes in which group
5 hours ago [-]
monero-xmr 7 hours ago [-]
If anything we need to double the amount of money paid to build high-intensity “schools” for those kids, and then reduce the amount of money needed for the good kids, because honestly all of that money is wasted now on the bad ones. We should also imprison criminals but that goes without saying. If we don’t have enough prisons to house violent criminals then we simply need more prisons, or release them only into communities that vote for such a thing (maybe rich liberal communities only etc.)
Nevermark 4 hours ago [-]
> We should also imprison criminals but that goes without saying.
Obviously we need effective justice.
But since we are on the topic of ineffective schooling, there is an argument to be made that US prisons are more effective at punishment than rehabilitation. Which seems to please some people, but just adds another undertow to society.
A loss for criminal inmates, and everyone they impact, family or stranger, after they are released.
Education is worth looking at with respect to an entire culture, with many important contexts beyond/outside school. From before school age (huge), onward.
ZeroGravitas 4 hours ago [-]
There's a great early TED talk from a Lawyer trying to stop death row inmates being executed.
He realises that the simplest and easiest intervention is to stop the violent crime happening in the first place, and the cheapest and easiest way to do that is to intervene in the future murderers childhood. The specific example he gives is a client with a schizophrenic mother who needed more support.
lupusreal 22 minutes ago [-]
Instead of imprisoning all criminals we should be streamlining the process to execute murderers, drug dealers, etc.
nradov 7 hours ago [-]
Please stop spreading misinformation. Public charter schools aren't allowed to kick out underperforming students.
brewdad 7 hours ago [-]
They are allowed to screen prospective students up front. They also won't kick out under-performers for getting Ds. They will find a disciplinary reason to do so.
Every one of us could have been kicked out of school at one time or another if we had fallen under the microscope looking for an excuse.
nradov 7 hours ago [-]
No, that's also misinformation. Public charter schools in most states aren't allowed to screen prospective students up front. Any parents can enroll their children, and when a charter school is oversubscribed they use admission lotteries. And they follow the same disciplinary procedures as other public schools.
Please don’t spread misinformation. Charter school law varies by state and you should not make blanket statements about what they are allowed to do.
1123581321 5 hours ago [-]
They appear to be essentially correct. There is little variance by state in how they accept students from the public. Were you thinking of a particular state? Here's information on the admission laws for each state from Wested. https://wested2024.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/wp-content/upl...
lazyasciiart 3 hours ago [-]
In zero states can you show up at a charter school and say “I live next door, I want to enrol” and be enrolled. That is an enormous difference from public schools that immediately eliminates the most disadvantaged students from the applicant pool.
Moreover, some charter schools require things like parental time volunteering, which eliminates more kids, or introductory essays - they don’t score the essays! They just require it to be done! By horrible coincidence this eliminates more cough lower performing children, who simply never submit a completed application for the lottery, so sad. This definitely happens in multiple states but here’s one specific example:
If you want to be exceedingly pedantic, a student at a typical charter school in the United States has much weaker due process guarantees than a student at a public school. The school administration at a charter school has much less government oversight by design, and in some states there is effectively none.
cyberax 5 hours ago [-]
OK, here's a question. Should every sportball team in the US be prohibited from being selective? Everyone, regardless of their capability, should be able to play on the same field. Including paraplegics because it's not their fault.
It's a lofty ideal, don't you think?
abenga 4 hours ago [-]
If playing sports was essential to living to everyone across the board, yeah, they would be prohibited from being selective.
csomar 3 hours ago [-]
That's not what the article is discussing (decline over time). We (all?) know white American have over average performance due to whatever reasons. The question is: Are they declining alongside the overall group. That might suggests that the reason(s) for this decline is cross-culture/ethnic/race.
fragmede 2 hours ago [-]
> We (all?) know white American have over average performance due to whatever reasons.
[citation needed]
worthless-trash 1 hours ago [-]
(I'm not american) so I don't have a horse in this race.
These reports are becoming to find because measuring racial differences is considered racist, so you'd be asking for something that would not be acceptable in modern studies.
Mountain_Skies 8 hours ago [-]
Only if the US is a monoculture but we're a diverse multi-cultural society. Different cultural groups have different values and priorities.
6LLvveMx2koXfwn 2 hours ago [-]
And different individuals within those cultural groups also have different values and priorities. A good education system supports everyone equally in achieving their goals.
bpt3 49 minutes ago [-]
And when those goals are orthogonal to educational achievement, then what?
The greatest predictor of academic success is the education level of a student's parents.
aprilthird2021 7 hours ago [-]
If you compare a country where most people are one ethnicity or where wealth and race are not as correlated as in the US, then it's a bit of an unfair comparison.
Does the comparison hold if you segment the white Americans, Chinese, Singaporeans, Japanese, etc. by economic class?
rayiner 6 hours ago [-]
I think it’s the opposite—it is a fairer comparison. White Americans are a relatively homogenized population that reflect the entire spectrum of economic class, where immigration effects have been attenuated by time. Is it unfair to compare the median white american to the median Japanese, just because the U.S. also has a large Hispanic population that mostly descends from low-education post-1970 immigrants from impoverished Latin American countries?
pembrook 3 hours ago [-]
Agreed, "culture" is a symptom, not a cause.
All humans are the same species, and in a vacuum, have no ideas or inherent behaviors beyond base instinct.
Culture is simply a byproduct of the environment around a segment of humans.
Hence, filtering by white kids in the US simply measures the result of higher average economic status (same as filtering by Asian kids).
American outcomes would look better if the populations they economically disenfranchised historically stayed in other countries like Europeans did with the colonial system (vs importing populations as slave labor domestically in the US). The economic class stratification that still lingers as a result of this in the US is such a unique factor as to make comparisons that don't take this into account worthless.
liveoneggs 9 hours ago [-]
My kids don't get textbooks in public school, are comingled with highly disruptive kids (except in the limited gifted classes) and the curriculum is accelerated way past where it was when I was younger.
So my anecdotal theory is that the (public) education system is optimized to the edges, abandoning the middle entirely, resulting in majority decline.
They do get computers with TONS of dumb-ass apps and zero reference materials.
sgc 8 hours ago [-]
My daughter had no textbook for Freshman physics, which is obviously the hardest class she is going to have in high school (or top 2). It was ridiculous. We wound up supplementing learning materials and paying a tutor, but it all felt like making up for piss-poor course structure. Her (very intelligent but distracted) teacher barely knew where to send me for supplemental materials. And this is in the "advanced" high school that is very hard to get into.
liveoneggs 8 hours ago [-]
How do they not know?! The parents at my school would gladly purchase materials for the classes if anyone bothered to ask for them.
mercutio2 8 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
sgc 8 hours ago [-]
Most schools do biology > chemistry > physics, which is from funnest and easiest to most technical and hardest (plus digging in to the building blocks of the previous class). Physics first is very much throwing them in at the deep end of the pool when they have never taken a high school class at all. Frankly, I never got the details of the curriculum due to lack of printed materials. Parenting is not easy, and it's an art not a science. I got her a tutor instead of risking giving her the impression her grades were more important than her to me because I was pushing her too hard. Her tutor helped a lot and had plenty of materials to help out. So no, my kid's not dumb ;)
legacynl 2 hours ago [-]
In the NL we start with a combined chemistry/physics class that's mostly physics, after the 2nd year you get physics, chemistry and biology as separate classes.
I don't think physics is hardest. On the contrary, physics is probably the best subject to start with, because everyone (even people who don't know about physics) have experienced physics. People intuitively understand that you go faster down a steep hill, than a gently sloped one.
shagie 8 hours ago [-]
Physics also tends to expect some understanding of calculus... which tends to be a junior or senior level class. Having someone take a physics class when they're still struggling with single variable substitution in equations would be torturous to student and teacher alike.
inemesitaffia 4 hours ago [-]
There are calculus free science programs
SamBam 7 hours ago [-]
Science teacher here. Physics First is absolutely not throwing them into the deep end, and should not be the hardest class. Physics First generally means physics taught without calculus, and most of it is stuff that could have been taught to most eighth graders.
Not saying it won't be hard, but I don't want you to think it's some crazy torture. It should be no harder than doing Bio or Chem first, and for many kids it's easier. (Bio and Chem have way more memorization and vocabulary.)
sgc 7 hours ago [-]
I am sure you are right, my physics class was my hardest class in HS, but I took it my senior year. Regardless, her school is science and tech focused, and it was a hard class without materials to study for tests, and with minimal guidance.
I'm only aware of schools providing these three courses as independent of each other. Which makes sense, since they are independent.
I took Chem as a sophomore, Physics as a freshman, AP Chem as a senior, and AP Physics as a senior. I didn't take a single bio course after 7th grade.
For what it's worth, both Calculus courses were harder IMO than any of the aforementioned.
Jensson 8 hours ago [-]
> Most schools do biology > chemistry > physics, which is from funnest and easiest to most technical and hardest
More like from what women prefer to what men prefer, they probably do it since most teachers are women and prioritize what girls want. Physics is "hard" as in not soft, not "hard" as in not easy.
The reasonable order is the opposite, physics underpins chemistry and chemistry underpins biology.
sgc 7 hours ago [-]
There is a thing called pedagogy, and biology > chemistry > physics is a perfectly healthy order of discovery. I am not sure why there needs to be a battle of the sexes in the middle of this.
16 minutes ago [-]
onetimeusename 8 hours ago [-]
That's kind of what I think but feel free to poke holes. It seems like there are three tiers. There's a closed off top tier of kids who get into top ranked universities. They go to highly ranked schools like selective high schools with high Ivy placement ranks. Those schools have different materials and more opportunities than most. These high schools are geographically mostly on the coasts. It's a totally different culture too where there's this years long effort.
Then there's a middle tier, the majority of people, where they might end up at a university but it's not top rated. Increasingly it's not worth the money and simultaneously it seems like our country has become more credentialist about prestigious jobs. But a degree probably isn't necessary for most careers that don't have gatekeepers so for these people the education doesn't really have a big payoff and their education might get de-emphasized.
Then there's the bottom tier which is self explanatory.
programjames 2 hours ago [-]
In my experience, the "top tier of kids" is more cultural than school-specific. Even in schools like TJHST there's usually 10–30 students in the school that really care about achieving, while the other 90% don't put in much effort (beyond your typical public schooler). There are a few feeder (public) schools on the coasts, but most of the private schools differentiate by extracurriculars (fencing, rowing, horseback riding) rather than academic excellence.
At least introduce the video with a blurb if you're just going to drop a link.
buu700 5 hours ago [-]
So my anecdotal theory is that the (public) education system is optimized to the edges, abandoning the middle entirely, resulting in majority decline.
Based on my anecdotal experience, this is the explanation that makes the most sense to me. I've been hearing constantly for at least a decade how atrocious American public education is, which I can't reconcile at all with my experience as a 2010 graduate of McLean High School. Either my experience was so far outside the national norm that I have no useful perspective on this issue, or the national discourse has been totally corrupted by vocal minorities and political agendas.
Personally, my teachers were consistently amazing and brilliant (RIP Mr. Bigger), curricula were rigorous, and I learned a ton that prepared me well for my life and career after high school. Every time I hear about some factoid or perspective that American schools supposedly don't teach because they're propaganda farms designed to churn out uncurious low-skill workers, I roll my eyes as I vividly recall how it was explicitly covered in my classes. It's possible my experience may have been more the exception than the rule, given that most of my classes were advanced/AP/post-AP, but I also had some of my favorite teachers in regular and honors classes and never felt like I was receiving insufficient value for my time. Maybe I just got incredibly lucky, but I really have nothing but good things to say, and can't relate at all to the picture of American public education that's been painted in the media and social media. Granted, a lot can change in 15 years, and my perspective is already going to be skewed by having attended a top-ranked school in a wealthy district.
On the flip side, my public elementary school experience was the polar opposite. In kindergarten I was tutoring third graders who needed help learning to read, but by second grade I'd been kicked out more or less for being bored with the level and pace of the course material. (Effectively. Specifically, the principal was going to move me to special ed unless my mom agreed to find a doctor willing to put me on Ritalin for my nonexistent ADHD. The 90s were wild.) So there's that. Luckily there are some great private schools in the area which my mom was able to make sacrifices to afford, but I can't help but wonder how many other kids weren't as lucky and had their whole life trajectories sabotaged from an early age. Granted, that particular principal was fired a few months after my de facto expulsion (for many very good reasons), so maybe this was all genuinely just an anomaly and very far outside the norm for completely different reasons than my high school experience.
Aeolun 28 minutes ago [-]
I think it’s so weird that your level of education in the US (and most of the world really) seems to depend on which specific school you went to.
The Netherlands has settled on three levels of schooling and within that level (according to capacity, and desire to learn) most of the schools show relatively little variation.
The same thing continues into university, with pretty much 99% of all the universities in the Netherlands being public.
You don’t select a university based on level of theoretical educational attainment, you select one by virtue of proximity, or which of them teaches the specific courses you are interested in.
CalRobert 7 minutes ago [-]
Dutch PISA scores have fallen badly, though. We moved here from Ireland and the basisschools seem kinda mediocre compared to what we had in Ireland. My eldest certainly learned to read much better.
Schoelenopdekaart shows pretty wide variation in how many students go on to vwo etc.
#261 in National Rankings
#8 in Virginia High Schools
#11 in Washington, DC Metro Area High Schools
#5 in Fairfax County Public Schools High Schools
#302 in STEM High Schools
Are you seriously saying you can't reconcile how America has bad public schools after having gone to to a school ranked #261 in the country?
Can you, just for a moment, consider the situation here and try to reconcile this? It is important for me that you be able to do this.
buu700 4 hours ago [-]
No, I'm not saying that. I already addressed my high school's ranking, so I'm not sure what point you think you're making by harping on that.
My point is that US public education isn't universally bad, not that it's universally good.
brettgriffin 4 hours ago [-]
> I've been hearing constantly for at least a decade how atrocious American public education is, which I can't reconcile at all with my experience as a 2010 graduate of [top 10 HS in state].
> Either my experience was so far outside the national norm that I have no useful perspective on this issue, or the national discourse has been totally corrupted by vocal minorities and political agendas
> Every time I hear about some factoid or perspective that American schools supposedly don't teach because they're propaganda farms designed to churn out uncurious low-skill workers, I roll my eyes
> It's possible my experience may have been more the exception than the rule
> Maybe I just got incredibly lucky, but I really have nothing but good things to say, and can't relate at all to the picture of American public education that's been painted in the media and social media
Can you just clarify for me once more: what exactly can you not reconcile? Be very, very specific, please.
buu700 4 hours ago [-]
I'm not really sure what your problem is, but okay. My experience is a counterexample to the claim that American public education is bad. Maybe some public schools are bad, but not all. I chose to share a positive anecdote to balance out the negativity.
brettgriffin 3 hours ago [-]
No, you chose to share the experience of a top 10 high school in a state and then proceed to say you don't understand how other people can say any of the other 25,000 public high schools in the country are bad.
I don't have a problem. I went to a well ranked public high school and am grateful for that privilege. It isn't lost on me that many, many, others are less fortunate than I am. But to say you can't reconcile these things is, at worst, tone-deaf, and at best, incredibly ignorant.
buu700 3 hours ago [-]
No, I didn't proceed to say anything of the sort. You're attacking a straw man.
Even if you choose to believe there's some interpretation of my original phrasing that could mean what you're suggesting, I've now clarified several times that the idea you're making a fuss over does not reflect my sentiments.
bell-cot 2 hours ago [-]
> No, you chose to share the experience of a top 10 high school in a state and then proceed to say you don't understand how other people can say any of the other 25,000 public high schools in the country are bad.
While that might be your cultural understanding of, or personal reaction to, what he said - he actually did not say that.
If this subject is sensitive for you, or useful communication just isn't happening, then it might be better to drop it and move on.
buu700 5 hours ago [-]
To expand on that a bit, based on my observations, I'd suggest the following conclusions:
1. Any reform effort needs to ensure that early education isn't overlooked. Elementary schools need capacity, processes, and expertise to appropriately deal with kids of all different knowledge/intelligence levels and backgrounds/skillsets in a personalized way, and they need oversight to ensure that lazy/incompetent/malicious teachers and administrators aren't making poor/abusive decisions that could have lifelong negative impacts on students.
2. AI will be a critical element of future reform. It's too incredibly useful of a learning and scaling tool to sleep on. Of course it's easy to misuse, but that's exactly why responsible use needs to be taught as part of research and fact-checking lessons. If they haven't already, schools need to start running small-scale experiments with incorporation of AI tools into curricula asap.
Imagine how much more you could have learned with a virtual TA in your pocket on call 24/7 for those 13 years, with human teachers in the loop to help guide any self-directed learning you might have chosen to undertake. That bright-eyed kid who never stops asking "why?" will finally have a conversational partner who never tires of answering. All the panic about hallucinations sounds like the same sensationalist takes I grew up hearing from adults about the internet and Wikipedia — a perfectly valid concern, but not sufficient to negate the value of the resource in competent hands.
ivape 9 hours ago [-]
So, basically the general distribution strikes again? I guess the floor fell out, but what evidence do we have that the ceiling also went up? Could just be the same or lower when we normalize for grade inflation and requirement destruction.
Aurornis 7 hours ago [-]
> However,the United States, particularly in the last 50 years, seems to have fostered a culture averse to education.
I always find it interesting that the anti-schooling mentality is so prevalent here on HN, too. It’s most obvious in threads about cheating, where a popular topic of discussion is to defend cheating as a rational reaction because school doesn’t matter, a degree is “just a piece of paper”, and you’ll learn everything on the job anyway.
It also shows up in the tired argument that college is only really about networking, not learning.
I’ve had some on and off experience mentoring college students in the past. Those who adopt these mentalities often hit a wall partway through college or even at their first job when their baseline intelligence runs out and they realize they don’t have the necessary foundation because they’ve been blowing off coursework or even cheating their way through college for years.
I’m afraid that LLMs are only going to enable more of this behavior. It’s now easier to cheat and students are emboldened by the idea that they don’t need to learn things because they can always just ask ChatGPT.
non_aligned 5 hours ago [-]
The difference is that you can, quite successfully, keep "cheating" with an LLM while at a job. And people do, not just in lower-importance roles, but at law offices, etc.
I work in tech and I see this more and more every day. By "cheating", I mean deciding that you don't want to do the thinking or even spot-check the result; you just ask an LLM to vibe-write a design doc, send it out, and have others point out issues if they care.
halfmatthalfcat 1 hours ago [-]
Your very last point though is where it all falls apart. If you have people who know what they're doing, co-mingled with "LLM cheaters", its very obvious they're cheating. Before long, they're found out and fired. It's not sustainable.
harrall 6 hours ago [-]
I noticed a weird disdain for education too.
I once posted in support of general education and it didn’t go so well.
I suppose the people on HN are a certain demographic.
bpt3 37 minutes ago [-]
I don't think it's a disdain for education, but a disdain for the educational system that currently exists in the US.
If you have kids and experience it first hand, it's extremely underwhelming. If you were an outlier in any way as a student (and I bet a majority of people here are), it's extremely underwhelming.
My wife and I have advanced degrees and place a very high value on education, and I have very little that's positive to say about the state of education in our very highly ranked public schools. They've completely lost the plot. But any criticism is presumed to be hostility to teachers (and their union) or flat out racism by a vocal and increasingly large segment of the population.
5 hours ago [-]
dzink 10 hours ago [-]
It’s culture led by phones and other screens. Most teens are addicted to the screens. The need them for school and for socialization with friends and they end up on TikTok or another network and zombie there for most of their best brain years. They lack the ability to focus necessary to learn because the brain is used to constant screen simulation. Letting your child be babysat by a screen is absolutely the worst thing you can do to ever raise an adult.
pylua 9 hours ago [-]
I hear what you are saying, but I feel like this is related more to both parents working or single parent households. The more time parents work, the harder it is to get ahead, the more screen time kids will get.
emptyfile 2 hours ago [-]
[dead]
deepsun 9 hours ago [-]
From my conversations with 20-year-ago school students, American schools are culture led by sports, and football most of all. No surprise many parents don't see a reason for their kids to excel in STEM.
monkeyelite 9 hours ago [-]
For this theory to hold up you would need to explain what changed as high schools in the US have loved sports since at least the 40s
eli_gottlieb 7 hours ago [-]
I doubt much changed. American STEM education has always been pretty mediocre. I've been hearing about my whole life.
nradov 7 hours ago [-]
Mediocre by what metric? American STEM education seems to objectively be doing pretty well in terms of Nobel prizes, scholarly journal articles, patents, technology product revenue, etc. Of course there's always room for improvement.
bell-cot 28 minutes ago [-]
Unfortunately, those metrics are very focused on the 0.1%, if not the 0.01%.
Like a sorting algorithm which is O(n) on nearly-sorted input - the utility is limited.
cyberax 5 hours ago [-]
About a half of Nobel Prizes in the US were awarded to immigrants or children of immigrants.
aprilthird2021 6 hours ago [-]
> American STEM education seems to objectively be doing pretty well in terms of Nobel prizes, scholarly journal articles, patents, technology product revenue, etc.
I hate to break it to you, but a lot of our most valuable research is produced by people who did their primary education outside the US. Just go to a STEM research lab at any US university connected to a Nobel prize or Fields medal in the last 10-20 years, and it will be almost completely made up of internationally educated students / professors / etc.
Yes, they are getting visas via academia employment.
Aurornis 7 hours ago [-]
Something that isn’t obvious to non-Americans or non-parents is just how diverse the US education system is. Even within a medium size city you’ll find multiple schools that might have completely different cultures.
Some schools are sports centric. Others have to work hard to get students interested in sports.
I think the implication that sports are bad is also misleading. Sports programs, when run well, can do a good job of getting kids into routines, out of trouble, and keeping them accountable to their peers for something. The TV and movie style sports culture where the football players aren’t expected to even attempt to pass their classes doesn’t actually exist in most schools.
Fade_Dance 8 hours ago [-]
This is true (and they do take a large amount of things like money and resources), but these cultural influences are also very loud. You will find that the majority of the kids in the cafeteria really don't give a crap about any of that, and that goes for the parents as well.
apical_dendrite 7 hours ago [-]
It really depends on the town, the school, and the social circle of the parents. If you live in a wealthy Boston suburb, academics are emphasized much more than sports, and expectations for students are very high. If you live in rural Appalachia, then football is king.
jajko 2 hours ago [-]
Don't expect much when (from what I see) most adults are properly addicted to their screens. If parents are already not up to the bar kids will seldom be, leading by example and all that.
Now show me parents, hell even here on HN, who openly admit that they are addicted to the screens and various 'social' cancers and consider it something profoundly bad and damaging, and that they as parents should really do better and actually try. A rare sight, mostly its brushed off and some even brag how 'digital' and modern their kids are.
But its fine, we all know how these things really are. This is one area where even otherwise disadvantaged parents (ie due to their poor upbringing or ie coming from undeveloped places) can raise their kids to be well above sea of future desperate population with severe social anxieties and addictions (lets not forget addictions ball up since they change personality for the worse).
Think how much lack / minimization of those will give them various advantages in their adult lives, be it professional (focus on work, ability to better socialize and communicate in person) or personal (all kinds of relationships, and finding one's purpose and drive in life). I just mentioned basically whole core of adult existence, no small things by any means.
And its not that hard, we do it with our kids and often see it around us in their peers, just need to put a bit more effort and spend more time with them instead of doom scrolling or binge watching TV. Which are anyway good parenting advices, but one needs to start like that from beginning and lead by example.
decimalenough 9 hours ago [-]
I'm pretty sure the same argument was made for television, movies, radio and fiction books.
throwaway31131 9 hours ago [-]
That’s certainly true but at the same time, when I was a kid in the early 90s, we watched TV but cartoons ended (we did not have cable or a computer). I came home from school, ate a snack, watched TV for about an hour with a friend, cartoons were over and we went outside. With the internet and YouTube etc. you’re never “done”
hombre_fatal 8 hours ago [-]
I remember racing home from school to catch Gundam Wing and Dragonball Z. And then they were over until the next day.
KPGv2 7 hours ago [-]
yeah but you get home at 4, watch an hour of anime, it's 5pm, you do homework for half an hour, then you have dinner with family until about 7, then you have about an hour of getting ready for bed/chores and that gets you to 8pm. At most you have one more hour of studying. So 90 minutes of education-related stuff at home a day in your ideal past where kids "only" spent an hour on TV.
brewdad 7 hours ago [-]
Much like extending the workday past 10 hours there must be a point of diminishing/negative returns to expecting multiple hours of study per night. Also, those times you list seem indicative of elementary school kids. Most high schoolers are going to be up way past 9pm. Of course, they also probably aren't getting home before 6pm and don't have the luxury of an hour long family dinner every night either.
Edman274 9 hours ago [-]
That's true, the arguments were also made for television, movies, radio, and fiction books. However, during the times of movies, television, radio, and written books being introduced, the trend line of student performance seemed to be going upward. It now seems to be trending downward. It's harder to convincingly make the argument that cell phones are no worse than TVs when student performance was increasing during the TV era and is decreasing during the smartphone era. Even if the correlation is totally spurious, it's an uphill climb to ignore it.
BobaFloutist 8 hours ago [-]
Yeah, but were those coupled with an enormous, precipitous reversion in literacy rates?
decimalenough 3 hours ago [-]
So why are the drops happening in the US, but not Asia, which is equally smartphone addicted?
aprilthird2021 6 hours ago [-]
And? Maybe those things had an impact also? And maybe this is the last straw our backs can bear?
Like if you take a bunch of steps running from a road to the edge of a cliff, only after the last one over the edge do you experience all the problems
hintymad 4 hours ago [-]
> There is more and cheaper education available than ever before.
The real issue isn’t the availability of learning materials, but the healthy pressure and right push from experienced teachers. People tend to overestimate how self-driven most students are. The truth is, most students aren’t naturally motivated to learn. They need society to give them a sense of purpose, and they need teachers to challenge them with problems that keep them just outside their comfort zone. Sadly, the U.S. school system provides neither. Take my kid as an example: even though he’s in a decent public school, he thinks his schoolwork is tough and the SAT is challenging. Yet the SAT wouldn't even measure up to the high-school graduation exam in my country, let alone the college entrance exam. In the end, it’s the broad middle of students who suffer from low standards. With the right motivation and push, they could learn so much more, but instead they end up wasting precious time in high school.
legacynl 2 hours ago [-]
> The real issue isn’t the availability of learning materials
Well, some people claim in these comments that their children don't get textbooks. Not saying that you're wrong, but it's gonna take a lot of 'healthy pressure and right pushes' to account for the fact that they don't have educational material.
userbinator 9 hours ago [-]
The decline in the last 20 years was more noticeable, and the last 10 far more noticeable.
9 hours ago [-]
paulddraper 10 hours ago [-]
> However,the United States, particularly in the last 50 years, seems to have fostered a culture averse to education.
!!
The rate of college graduates has increased nearby 50% over that timeframe.
A rather unexpected result for a cultural aversion to education.
Mountain_Skies 8 hours ago [-]
Do you believe the average degree awarded today requires as much rigor as the average degree awarded half a century ago?
anonzzzies 7 hours ago [-]
Not sure in the US but where I am from thats very much the case; they went to the paid per graduated student vs just student and students having loans vs state money (to study forever) and it turned the focus on churning out graduates from providing academic rigor. I saw the shift sharply studying and then teaching from late 90s to early 00s and as I see my nephews doing cs degrees now: it's really easy I would say, not the rigorous (not very practical outside academics) learnings I started with. Not sure if its good or bad, just an observation. We already had technical schools for exactly this purpose, but I guess the unis were running steep losses for the gov while not enough prominent research and related companies came out of them.
consp 5 hours ago [-]
Academia is now vocational training but done badly. You get the pretend of academia and a very expensive loan as a bonus.
aprilthird2021 6 hours ago [-]
If you read his whole comment it was about how education is "just a piece of paper you need to get a job". That mentality could totally lead to worse proficiency and more degrees awarded.
consp 5 hours ago [-]
If you punish teachers solely on passing percentage you get the same result. It might be the teacher is bad but if you teach a difficult course it might be the students.
bigcat12345678 9 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
faangguyindia 8 hours ago [-]
not surprised you lose what you don't use, does modern world even require people using those reading and math skills anymore?
consp 5 hours ago [-]
Looking at the amount of contracts I have to read to even start software it should. Looking at how many people buy lottery tickets I guess the same for math.
eli_gottlieb 12 hours ago [-]
"Culture" is downstream of incentives.
programjames 10 hours ago [-]
Particularly, the biggest incentives are test scores and passing rates, which incentivize attention only to the bottom 50% and 20% of students (respectively). This means:
- You do not diversify classrooms by academic ability---the high-performing students can be free tutors to the low-performing students.
- You inflate the GPAs and implement no-zero policies.
- You teach to the standardized tests, and don't worry about the material.
- You make lessons "fun and engaging" because you need the attention of the students least likely to give you their attention.
- You eliminate gifted or honors programs, because that's wasted money not improving your bottom line (bottom students).
zozbot234 8 hours ago [-]
Needless to say, these are not effective ways of teaching remedial and underperforming students.
Those pupils will generally need very structured lessons that directly provide clear information (often in a form that can easily stick in memory and be repeated, even word for word), and straightforward instructions that can immediately inform their practice no matter what their level. I.e. the exact opposite of a so-called "fun and engaging" approach. (Which of course ignores the fact that such students tend to derive the most fun and engagement from being taught in a clear and effective way!)
The underlying issue is that the "progressive" educational strategy taught in Ed Schools is very explicitly a "sink or swim" approach where the student is supposed to be teaching themselves and the teacher isn't doing any real work. The hidden attitude here, coming directly from the "Progressive" era of the late 19th and early 20th century, is that many students will indeed fail but this is not an issue because clearly they were not worthy of entering the educated class with the very best.
(Special Ed is the one remaining niche that still teaches more effective educational methods, but obviously not every remedial student is a Special Ed student, and we should not expect them to be.)
soulofmischief 11 hours ago [-]
And constraints. To call this a cultural issue is insane. I have firsthand seen the structural problems with institutional education. My scholastic experience was hell and anti-intellectual from day one, and it was all institutional issues.
potato3732842 11 hours ago [-]
And the institutions reflect culture.
The fact that these institutions can exist at the low-performing state they do is a direct reflection of the culture of the people who run them, send their kids to them, pay taxes to support them, etc.
The schools can only do what they do to the degree that people aren't willing to put up with it.
trimethylpurine 10 hours ago [-]
What could people unwilling do?
onetokeoverthe 9 hours ago [-]
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soulofmischief 11 hours ago [-]
Institutions are supposed to protect culture, but they have failed due to the actions of a small elite class. It's like blaming a child for not having parents.
rayiner 10 hours ago [-]
No, institutions reflect the culture of the broad population. It’s like blaming a community for having streets filled with litter.
brewdad 7 hours ago [-]
It's a litter filled community with limited trash service and no public receptacles.
potato3732842 10 hours ago [-]
Have they failed?
Or are they dutifully resisting cultural shift that threatens the "don't think critically, just go to work, pay your taxes, don't question the system, don't do drugs, go to college, get a job, lease a new car, buy a condo, cross your fingers that stonks go up enough for you to retire" late 20th early 21st century status quo "ideal citizen" and "ideal culture" that they were built to foster (and who are the kind of people who fill out the majority of the system)?
The way I see it peddling blue state bullshit and red state bullshit (depending on a given school district's location) is simply a common sense adaptation districts are making to garner support from local populations who were willing to support the system so long as it provided useful education at a non-insane cost but are more critical now that the deal is worse.
trimethylpurine 10 hours ago [-]
People choose based on grades, success stories, safety, and exclusivity, not political alignment. But public schools aren't competitive, so they don't have any incentive to offer any of those things. That makes them a useful and susceptible hot bed for the least desirable part of an education; politics.
eli_gottlieb 8 hours ago [-]
As a member of several of the {{{small, elite class[es]}}} you might be describing, which of us do you mean? Certainly those of us with a PhD don't want the schools to be shitty for our kids.
soulofmischief 4 hours ago [-]
I mean our politicians and the idiots they manufacture with idpol in order to maintain power at the cost of degrading our communities. So, probably not you.
For example, in my state, it is an annual tradition to slash the budget of schools and/or libraries and funnel the money toward political goals and police retirement funds.
I attended the best public school in the state at one point and literally watched the Governor text someone for 10 minutes and then fall asleep in the middle of a budget presentation specifically put together in order to convince him not to cut more funding the next year, as it would mean the school would have to begin taking federal money and compromising on its values.
I also attended the worst public school in my state, a harrowing and illuminating experience which I've spoken about here a few times before. [0]
I also had my collegiate education robbed from me by a vindictive teacher who illegally falsified my grade out of spite, and an administration who protected her. I was homeless since 16 was and attending high school on my own in a rural community with no economic opportunity.
Due to my circumstances, her falsified grade meant I had to rescind a full-ride scholarship which had been offered to me including boarding and a job, but on condition that my credits included that core class. I had no adults in my life to fight for me, and even though I met with my guidance counselor, the principal, several teachers and the school board, I was not helped and fell through the cracks, despite high standardized test scores and a high GPA.
Instead, I continued to be homeless from 18 to 21 and struggled very badly, starving and sick. I am now employed in my field of choice despite these circumstances, but I overall had a very traumatic experience with the public school system. The institution ultimately failed me, despite my intellect and perseverance.
So I share your concerns deeply! I want nothing of the sort to happen to my kids or anyone else's.
Your work looks very interesting, by the way, leafing through one of your papers.
The cultural shift is secondary to the demographic shift. Young Americans have been squeezed at one end by mass immigration from countries with lower educational performance and literacy rates, higher crime rates, higher gang participation rates, etc., which accelerated to such an extreme that native English speakers are now a minority in our local school district. And they’re squeezed at the other end, forced to compete for college admissions, jobs, and housing against a hungry and ambitious global population vying for H-1Bs and student visas. We sold out the younger generation, our own children and grandchildren, and it wasn’t at all driven by political and corporate machinations. No, it was for some greater good, and if you dare question that you’re a fascist.
PartiallyTyped 12 hours ago [-]
Not just education but overall intellectualism. It’s a purely cultural issue that can be observed by looking at demographics.
ars 10 hours ago [-]
> intellectualism
It's interesting to blame anti-intellectualism because Republicans are usually labeled with that.
But simultaneously it's Democrats that will dumb down classes to make sure even the worst performing student will pass. And this is also anti-intellectualism, but of a different sort.
The combination is failing our students, doesn't matter the political orientation.
I'm involved in education, I see this every day - I spoke with someone taking a class on how to reach students, and due to no-child-left-behind, this is actually a class on how racism holds back black students and what to do about it (answer: Make simpler, easier classes). It's completely silent on any other type of student.
doritosfan84 10 hours ago [-]
A Republican promoted and implemented No Child Left Behind though? Maybe I’m misunderstanding your point.
BirAdam 9 hours ago [-]
That republican had stated during his campaign that he wanted to end the department of education…
bigstrat2003 7 hours ago [-]
Which I agree we should do, carefully. The federal government has no constitutional authorization to create educational standards for the country. Therefore, let those standards be set by the states.
aprilthird2021 6 hours ago [-]
What country with enviable educational results operates this way? Genuinely curious
monkeyelite 9 hours ago [-]
Ok but which side supports it. Do you agree it’s a bad policy?
ars 9 hours ago [-]
My point is that Democrats are implementing it by making classes worse for everyone.
Republican states aren't doing that. It's not the concept of No Child Left Behind that is bad, it's the implementation (and it's used as a reason to worsen classes).
apical_dendrite 7 hours ago [-]
What you're describing is a fad that has subsided a bit over the last few years. Cambridge MA stopped teaching 8th grade algebra because they didn't like the racial disparity between students in advanced vs non-advanced math. There was a significant backlash from parents, and now they're bringing back 8th grade algebra. The debate now seems to be much more about how to offer more advanced math than whether to offer it at all. A similar dynamic seems to be playing out in other towns as well.
PartiallyTyped 5 hours ago [-]
I don’t understand why this became about politics, but I will bite.
Republicans want to dismantle department of education, have cut funding for education, food stamps, free meals, etc. they are by definition against education for the outgroup and “the poors”. So I think that label is apt.
On the other hand, Dem leadership is quite racist and has a saviour complex. They identified the right issue — children from impoverished areas that don’t see a future for themselves through education are underperforming — but instead of treating the problem they push stuff like no child left behind. In their defence though, republicans simply don’t allow any legislation that would improve education to go forward, mainly because they benefit from it.
JKCalhoun 8 hours ago [-]
> Democrats that will dumb down classes to make sure even the worst performing student will pass
News to me.
Aurornis 7 hours ago [-]
Unfortunately it’s a real thing among leftists (not necessarily Democrats in general).
The belief is that any advanced classes increase the achievement gap. People who subscribe to this also believe that advanced placement testing is discrimination and must be eliminated. They want equity of outcome, so reducing the curriculum to a single class at a single level that everyone the same age takes is their preference.
It has been implemented in several places with predictable backlash.
dlivingston 7 hours ago [-]
See San Francisco's failed de-tracking experiment as Exhibit A.
paulcole 10 hours ago [-]
Tell us more about the cultural issue that can be observed by looking at demographics. What specifically stands out to you?
chithanh 8 minutes ago [-]
One is the observation that first- and second-generation black immigrants have much higher share of college admissions than their share of the black population, despite similar socio-economic status to African Americans with longer family history in the US.
Isn’t it obvious? Children of immigrants do way better. Children of Asian households do way better than other ethnicities, and children in impoverished areas do a lot worse.
All of this is cultural and anyone who thought I implied race — which looks like you did — is a moron and a racist.
IMHO this whole thing is environmental.
bxsioshc 11 hours ago [-]
Just look at HN. Nominally an educated crowd, but talk about physics, and you immediately see terms like "ivory towers" or "return on investment", despite the fact that most on HN doesn't understand in fundamental science works.
nradov 7 hours ago [-]
A lot of the complaints here about physics have to do with focusing so heavily for decades on string theory (or M-theory) which hasn't produced much in the way of practical results. At some point we have to quit throwing good money after bad and redirect funding towards other lines of inquiry.
nathan_compton 49 minutes ago [-]
Yes, but this is cartoon shit. String theory was a major research program in theoretical physics for a few decades but theoretical physics involves quite a lot more than string theory and physics involves quite a lot more than theoretical physics and if you stacked up all the budgets you'd find that string theory is a minor footnote. And also, its been a few decades since people took it very seriously as a strong candidate for a TOE.
I really don't get it. As a total amount of any budget from any perspective, string theory has always been a blip whose cultural impact is much wider than its actual budgetary one. Like this critique about string theory is just a thing that people who are physics "enthusiasts" say and even to the extent that it is true, its really been more than a decade since it was a problem.
OccamsMirror 7 hours ago [-]
Is the purpose of life purely to seek a monetary return on investment?
nradov 7 hours ago [-]
Is the purpose of theoretical physics purely to seek mathematical innovations with no connection to objective reality?
bxsioshc 4 hours ago [-]
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cyberax 5 hours ago [-]
There are _plenty_ of areas in physics where investment is paying off. Condensed matter physics, optics, material research and so on.
We mostly question the fundamental subatomic particle physics that is not producing any returns on the investment. E.g. the galvanic effect was discovered in 1780, and there were long-distance telegraph lines by 1845 - so 65 years.
The last major theoretical advance in particle physics was around 1965 (Higgs mechanism). That's already 60 years ago.
nobody9999 4 hours ago [-]
There's at least one actual physicist who will provide you with appropriate counterpoint. Here they are. And you're welcome.
a physicist responds: physics has done very little for like 70 years[0]
She is speaking about physics in a very narrow sense.
bxsioshc 4 hours ago [-]
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blitzar 2 minutes ago [-]
They should add more A1 to the classrooms.
Their steasks are obviously inadequetly sauced.
obscurette 3 hours ago [-]
As someone old (60+) who was a teacher in school and thinking a lot about it:
- It's mostly a cultural shift in the western world – we don't value personal responsibility any more. When I was in school in seventies, it was my responsibility to study no matter what since grade 1. It didn't matter whether I liked a teacher, topic or whatever. It's not the case any more.
- Since nineties there has been a shift in educational sciences and practices from "old school" memorizing as "rote learning" and explicit instruction toward "critical thinking skills". Sounds nice for many, but in practice it doesn't work. Barb Oakley has a wonderful paper about it "The Memory Paradox: Why Our Brains Need Knowledge in an Age of AI"[1].
- Smartphones, social media etc certainly contribute and the rise of LLMs will make it even worse.
Personal responsibility, or lack thereof always seemed to me like one of these memes that are used to explain phenomena in a handwavy fashion.
Does anyone have any data points that could help me update my world model here?
I certainly feel personally responsible for things and so do many people that I know.
Additionally, it feels like people like to blame systemic issues on lack of personal responsibility in the general public, while ideally, elected officials should take personal responsibility for fixing the system.
noobermin 3 hours ago [-]
I've related this story here before. I was a first year in physics grad school, and my professor told me he heard rumours of students telling each other memorising formulae was a waste of time, and that as a physicist one should just be good at deriving results. The professor scoffed at that and sardonically surmised that may be the person who said that was intentionally trying to stiffle their competition in the class. Memorisation while limited in some ways is a part of the whole in addition to creative and critical thinking. Without facts and ideas in your mind, you have nothing to think criticall about.
Yokolos 3 hours ago [-]
I grew up being told by my peers in school that memorising things was a waste of time and critical thinking was all that mattered. Now I use Anki to literally memorize programming language syntax and ideas and facts that are relevant to my job (like data structures and algorithms). I wish I'd valued memorization when I was in school, because it's such a foundational thing to have knowledge upon which to build everything else.
theF00l 2 hours ago [-]
I find that very interesting and also thought of using Anki for that but decided it wouldn't be useful for me now.
Could you give me an example and how it helped you?
Thank you :)
jeofken 32 minutes ago [-]
- memorising names and birthdates of relevant people - private life and work life
- anything I’m looking up more than ~5 times can go in Anki
- spelling of words I often misspell (eg bureaucracy)
- when reading anything technical I need for my work or study I have Anki open and type in what I learn in QnA format, and I will never forget it but have it easy within reach for an investment of only a few minutes per QnA over its (and my) life time
- just for fun, the cantons of Switzerland, landskap of Sweden, provinces of Canada, and states and capitals of the USA
- NATO phonetic alphabet which comes in useful more often that you’d think
Life-changingly useful program for every aspect of my life, when I can finish it every day
My top tips:
- put all decks in a master “daily” deck using the :: syntax in the deck names. Otherwise you feel “done” when having finished one deck, and feel like not starting the next. Have only one goal - finishing today’s Anki
- for that master deck (and every other deck) go Study Options > Display Order > New/review order > Show after reviews. Otherwise it’s hard to ever catch up when slipping behind. With this setting, the system becomes somewhat self correcting
My only regret is not being able to pay more than $25 to the developers
ahartmetz 3 hours ago [-]
And creativity is often putting seemingly unrelated things together. If you don't have the required things floating around in your mind at the same time, it is not possible.
imiric 25 minutes ago [-]
The way of getting those facts and ideas into your head can be very different, though.
You can either mechanically memorize them, which is a boring and mindless activity, or you can be challenged, participate in discussions, projects, and activities that engage the parts of your brain involved with critical thinking.
Both will technically get you to pass a test, but the latter will be better for retaining information, while developing skills and neural pathways that make future learning easier.
The problem is that most academia is based on the memorization approach. Here are a bunch of ideas and facts we think are important; get them into your head, and regurgitate them back at us later. This is not a system that creates knowledgeable people. It doesn't inspire or reward curiosity, creativity, or critical thinking. It's an on-rails pipeline that can get you a piece of paper that says you've been through it, which is enough to make you a tax-paying citizen employed by companies who expect the bare minimum as well.
I get that the alternative approach is more difficult to scale, and requires a more nuanced, qualitative, and personal process. But that's how learning works. It's unique for everyone, and can't be specified as a fixed set of steps.
After all, what is the point of teaching people to be idea and fact storing machines, if machines can do a far better job at that than us? Everyone today can tell you a random fact about the world in an instant by looking it up in a computer. That's great, but we should be training and rewarding people for things computers can't do.
Fraterkes 52 minutes ago [-]
Your first point is a favorite of a lot of people, but doesn’t make a lot of sense to me: how is your generation with the ostensibly correct culture producing a generation with the wrong culture?
Parents are apparently raising their children wrong en masse, so was the parents’ generation rotten too? Which raises questions about the character of the generation that raised the parents…
scherlock 5 minutes ago [-]
I think social norms in child rearing have changed drastically, though I think, at least in my neighborhood, they are swinging back.
Growing up in the 80s, I remember having a lot of free time and autonomy. I had soccer or baseballaybe twice a week and guitar lessons once a week, but the other days, I was doing what I wanted, I was expected to get my homework done, but once that was done,I was free to roam the neighborhood or my backyard.
This parenting mindset changed, by the late 80s early 90s and kids started getting more and more scheduled activities and less free time.
Even personally, 6 years ago my wife was very apprehensive about letting our oldest who was then 8, walk to his friend's house who was a 1/4 mile away in the neighborhood. Our youngest, who is 7, walks or bikes to his friend's house the same distance away. And we have other neighborhood kids that also go between people houses. That is the childhood I remember.
I don't think HW I got in elementary school necessarily helped me learn more, but the act of being given work with expectation that I would complete it on my own was a growth activity for me, and that is something that is starting to come back in elementary school, homework for the sake of learning how to do homework.
jampekka 3 hours ago [-]
Personal responsibility was on the rise until 2013, after which it started to decline?
obscurette 3 hours ago [-]
Every cultural/policy/etc change in society has huge delays. Especially in education - changes you implement have an impact 10+ years later. Culture, even if it's dying, dies slowly. Here in Estonia where I live at the moment educational systems is falling completely apart – overworked and bullied teachers escape from schools in unprecedented rate, there is 20% less teachers than there is a need etc. But Estonia is still in top of the PISA. Why? Because this culture of personal responsibility and valuing education is still alive in the generation of todays parents. But it's certainly dying here as well.
boxed 3 hours ago [-]
Similarly there's a bunch of talk of "source criticism" in Swedish schools, but when you look closer at what is actually taught it sounds more like conspiracy theory or dogma and never anything actually useful.
Imo source criticism is only a thing if you have a well grounded model of the universe. And if you DO have that, then source criticism just falls out naturally and you don't need to discuss that at all anyway.
lucideng 19 hours ago [-]
The majority of the public school system has devolved into day-care, not education. Most parents just watch TV, stare at their phones and don't want to be bothered by anything that requires effort. A major societal shift needs to happen for this to be reversed. It's many factors... the parents, the food system, various inequalities, social media, technology, healthcare... the solution is multi-pronged. But if I had to choose id start with social media, smart phones, tablets, etc. Technoloy needs to be seen as a tool and a resource, not primarily as the brainwashing entertainment that it is, and brainwashing them with entertainment is how most people introduce tech to their kids.
paulryanrogers 12 hours ago [-]
> Most parents just watch TV, stare at their phones and don't want to be bothered by anything that requires effort.
No?
Most of the parents around me are busy each working a full time job and doing their best to raise their kids.
They now spend some of their free time reading on the phones instead of a newspaper, magazine, or book. Some listen to books while they mow the lawn, clean the house, or do other chores like laundry. They also hang out a mix of kids and parents nearby, both inside and out, in front of bonfires and kitchen tables. RN I'm commenting on HN while my kids and neighbor kids turn dinner into an imaginary cooking show at the table.
Parents around here are also often tending to elderly parents or physically/mentally challenged relatives.
Too few can afford to have one parent stay home fulltime.
Of course there have always been parents neglecting their kids to do anything else: bowling, drinking, partying, traveling, tinkering, obsessively reading, etc. The fact that more activities are behind screens isn't the catch all explanation it's often promoted to be.
dmix 10 hours ago [-]
People always want to blame the new thing in culture. Some collective sin if only we had better self control. Every generation has one.
Usually it’s just institutional failure at multiple levels and a whole bunch of people who don’t care about the institution’s output sufficiently.
Every time I read about new education stories they’re busy trying to solve wider social issues instead of being the best place to get an education. Just like how libraries turned into homeless shelters instead of being a place for the community to learn and read.
moduspol 9 hours ago [-]
I agree, but it’s tough to see the studies showing average daily screen time of different age groups and not see that as a pretty obvious contributor.
thehappypm 9 hours ago [-]
Wait, you’re literally on your phone while your kids entertain you…?
jajko 1 hours ago [-]
Yes? You mention it too - parents glued to their phones, part of the problem. Kids seeing their parents reading a book vs being glued to their phones really isn't the same thing, far from it. They can come and see pages of printed text in a book, vs some endless tiktok/instagram feeds of shallow video entertainment. Guess which they will stay around and stare endlessly without even blinking.
Screens and especially active content are incredibly addictive and small kids have no way of being rational and throttle their use. If they see the same behavior in their parents that's it.
Its not about having stay-at-home parent, but about spending the time with kids to be 100% physically there for them and them only, no running screen of any type anywhere in sight. Lets be honest, this is a rather rare sight.
throwawaybob420 9 hours ago [-]
People like that guy like to jerk off to their thoughts and think they alone know the issue, and that it’s because people are lazy!!
Reality check, income inequality makes it so that parents have to slave away to earn the bar minimum to survive, participate in the gig economy, and then deal with tax cuts that give the richest of the rich even more money, while suffocating social services in their neighborhoods.
This is end stage capitalism, squeeze the rubes for every cent they have and damn their kids
k2enemy 11 hours ago [-]
Maybe. I've definitely seen that anecdotally in some cases. But the school system is also problematic for the families that do value education and the kids that could excel in the classroom.
Our district has eliminated programs for the kids at the top end in the name of equity. They've also eliminated separate spaces for kids with learning and behavioral issues for the same reason. So everyone is in the same classroom and most of the teacher's time is spent on a handful of kids causing trouble and the rest of the class learns nothing.
We can't afford private school, so we're doing a bunch of extra lessons at home to keep them on pace, engaged, and challenged. But really, there are only so many hours in the day and I want them to be outside playing too!
ecshafer 11 hours ago [-]
At a certain level “homeschool” is going to be more effective. Ive seen parents get together with 3-6 similar aged students, and then do a combination of hiring a teacher/tutor for them and splitting duting to making it tenable.
sdsd 9 hours ago [-]
This is an empirical claim and there's statistics already available. Almost every study of student performance dramatically favors homeschool over American public school. I'm not saying this in support of homeschool, but as an indictment of public school. It's wild that schools spend many millions of dollars on hundreds of professionals, materials, and centuries of institutional knowledge, and yet are trivially outcompeted by just a mom who puts in the hours with a curriculum from the internet.
moduspol 9 hours ago [-]
To be fair: that mom gets to pick and choose which kids to teach. She probably wouldn’t get the same result if she had to apply the same techniques to inner-city Detroit kids six hours a day and five days a week.
sdsd 7 hours ago [-]
>She probably wouldn’t get the same result if she had to apply the same techniques to inner-city Detroit kids six hours a day and five days a week.
I think you're thinking of it backwards. Inner city Detroit kids probably struggle in school precisely because there maybe isn't a mom at home who's passionate and available to educate them (among plenty of other reasons, to be sure).
Inner city Detroit kids (not gonna lie, feels like a euphemism) aren't just inherently hard to teach for no reason
gnz11 15 minutes ago [-]
> yet are trivially outcompeted by just a mom who puts in the hours with a curriculum from the internet.
As a homeschooler raised ~20 years ago, the key insight is that outcomes are bimodally distributed based on an overlayed function of parental socioeconomic status and student talent.
bombcar 10 hours ago [-]
Check the private schools a few more times - some offer quite competitive financial aid packages that even people who feel they’re “high wage” can take advantage of.
programjames 10 hours ago [-]
Are your kids old enough to run amok at home instead of going to school? Would the police arrest you if you left them home alone instead of sending them to school?
ghostpepper 11 hours ago [-]
do you live in Canada or is this happening elsewhere?
itake 8 hours ago [-]
> Seattle Public Schools cancels gifted program 'cohorts' for equity reasons
Chicago for example. Look up recent action on magnet schools.
Scubabear68 19 hours ago [-]
I live in the US in New Jersey, and here a big problem was the State flooded school districts with money during Covid with no material oversight of its spending.
The end result was huge increases in spending. But not on education. The money was spent on more MacBooks, more iPads, more buildings, more smart TVs, more consultants, more School Bullshit System as a Service, more scoreboards, more $50,000 signs in front of schools.
Meanwhile the good teachers are fleeing the system and test scores are plummeting as schools focus more on day care and “social justice”, and a declining emphasis on teaching core subjects and learning in general, coupled with social promotion where everybody gets a C or higher, and 80% of the school gets on the honor roll (spoiler alert: our district is not some outlier where 80% of the kids are geniuses).
Schools have very little to do with teaching, and really are just about baby sitting and trying to correct social issues.
Oh, and endless buckets of tax payer money with meaningless oversight.
bmacho 1 hours ago [-]
> Schools have very little to do with teaching, and really are just about baby sitting and trying to correct social issues.
Is that wrong? The government takes away your kid for 12 years, every weekday all day, they might as well solve social issues in the country even if that means, say, kids are 1 year behind Asian kids, or their parents 30 years ago. If they figure out how to solve personal issues, that's even better.
I think there is a logical fallacy here. People assume that the only purpose of school is education. The more the education the better, even if that means deepening social issues, or making kids unhappy (BTW being a kid is like ~20% of someones life, not insignificant in itself). I think they assume it just because 'school' is called 'school', but I don't think the name of an object should determine its purpose.
- - -
When I look at the social issues in my country, I think the school system would be a very natural place to start to solve them (and arguably the current school system just worsens them). Even at the cost of "fall in reading and math scores".
giantg2 12 hours ago [-]
They do a pretty poor job at babysitting too. They do very little to create a calm and disciplined environment.
brewtide 11 hours ago [-]
> more School Bullshit System as a Service
I fully hear you on this. I miss the days where a simple phone call or email communication would occur when needed. Now it's a deluge of daily updates via 2 separate 'apps' for 2 different schools, and a requirement to login to 'app' or website to read the 'email' that they've sent out. Nevermind contacting someone that isn't directly associated with your child at the school -- Guess that's all need to know basis.
I hate it.
verteu 11 hours ago [-]
Hard to conclude much from this, given New Jersey is consistently rated one of the top 2 states in the nation for K-12 education.
The lesson may even be the opposite: "If your school's biggest problem is 'too much money', outcomes will be pretty good."
speakfreely 7 hours ago [-]
New Jersey is probably the most socioeconomically segregated state in the country, mostly based on its school districts. It has crazy real estate prices precisely so parents can get their children into specific, high-performing school districts. These districts bring the state average up very high, but best of luck if your district is in the bottom 50%.
programjames 10 hours ago [-]
The conclusion I drew is that even schools in the "top 2 states for K-12 education" are piss poor at education.
jen20 10 hours ago [-]
Where are you comparing to that has better outcomes?
programjames 9 hours ago [-]
Homeschool or China.
jen20 9 hours ago [-]
Homeschooling (in particular) has a bimodal distribution of outcomes depending on the reasons the parents do it.
thehappypm 9 hours ago [-]
Which county in New Jersey?
jimt1234 18 hours ago [-]
> The majority of the public school system has devolved into day-care, not education.
I resisted that narrative for years, thinking it was just a media-hyped scare tactic to get clicks. However, my niece started high school a few weeks ago (in mid-August, which is weird to me); her experience blew my mind.
Her new high school is considered one of the better public high schools in the area. When I asked her how it was going, did she like being a high-schooler, I was expecting her to complain about the course load or something like that. However, she told me that after 2 weeks, they haven't spent one minute on actual education. She said they've been going over rules and policies for 2 weeks. Things like no bullying, inclusiveness, fire safety, bring your own water bottle, how to pray (they have a room dedicated to prayer), etc. Best/worst of all, they did an entire day on active shooter drills - the windows are now bullet-proof!
So yeah, unfortunately, I'm fully onboard with this narrative now. While kids in Taiwan and Japan are learning calc, kids in the US are doing active shooter drills and staring at the Ten Commandments. USA! USA! USA!
el_memorioso 17 hours ago [-]
In what state are public high schools allowed to "how to pray"? It sounds like her new high school isn't that good. I have a daughter at a good public high school in California in a quite liberal area. There was none of what you mentioned. One day of reviewing the syllabi and rules and quizzes in most subjects starting less than a week later.
estimator7292 13 hours ago [-]
The law is extremely specific about this one, and this is constitutional law that overrules all other laws.
A government institution cannot promote any one religion. It's fine to have a multi-denominational non-secular common worship area. You can also promote religion as a general concept, but not a specific religion.
Whether this rule is followed or enforced properly is an entirely separate problem that we are apparently still grappling with.
guelo 12 hours ago [-]
Well our insane Supreme Court ruled a few years ago on a case involving a football coach praying at games that schools are forced to allow religious employees to do their weird religious ceremony at school events.
ecshafer 11 hours ago [-]
Why shouldnt the football coach be able to pray on the field, alone, without forcing their belief on others? That seems extremely reasonable. Making students also pray would be bad,but he didnt do that.
Spooky23 10 hours ago [-]
Because he’s a football coach and there is almost always an implication that you toe the line or face reprisal.
It’s also in poor taste. Jesus himself commented on performative piety:
“Whenever you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, who love to stand and pray in the synagogues and on street corners so that others may observe them doing so. Amen, I say to you, they have already received their reward. 6 But when you pray, go into your room, close the door, and pray to your Father in secret. And your Father who sees everything that is done in secret will reward you“
twoodfin 8 hours ago [-]
Fortunately for the coach, the gospels are not binding precedent.
tbrownaw 6 hours ago [-]
> Because he’s a football coach and there is almost always an implication that you toe the line or face reprisal.
This sounds like nobody in a position of power should be allowed to openly do anything that people around them have the right to not do. Which would be kinda bs.
yepitwas 10 hours ago [-]
Very much not an accurate description of what was actually happening, despite what the court’s majority claimed (egregious and surely, at least often, willful factual errors in majority opinions are a hallmark of the Roberts court)
Luckily there are both witness accounts and photos in this case, so it’s pretty clear what was really going on.
ixwt 10 hours ago [-]
I strongly encourage you to glance at the dissents for that case. That is very much not the case. The Supreme Court willingly ignored very important evidence that was the case.
ceejayoz 10 hours ago [-]
> Why shouldnt the football coach be able to pray on the field, alone, without forcing their belief on others?
Because they're an authority figure in that context.
Same reason I can flirt with you, but your boss can't.
TimorousBestie 6 hours ago [-]
Who says you can’t find true love on Hacker News!
9 hours ago [-]
guelo 10 hours ago [-]
Because he's an employee being paid to do what he's told and the school told him not to because it was causing a disturbance. Why does he have to practice his religion on his employer's time? Let's say he was cussing during school hours, would it violate his 1st amendment rights if the school told him to stop?
jen20 10 hours ago [-]
I don't know if "how to pray" is covered, but Texas passed legislation requiring the display of the Ten Commandments in public schools.
nobody9999 3 hours ago [-]
>I don't know if "how to pray" is covered, but Texas passed legislation requiring the display of the Ten Commandments in public schools.
Yes. Apparently that's SB10. SB11 covers praying in school.
Either this is a bizarre backwards school, or your niece is exaggerating for effect.
> kids in the US are doing active shooter drills and staring at the Ten Commandments. USA! USA! USA!
Not a thing at public schools (despite some attempts to force it)
Between this and the prayer comment, I suspect this comment is either exaggerated or mixed with internet anecdotes rather than actual experience.
nobody9999 3 hours ago [-]
>> kids in the US are doing active shooter drills and staring at the Ten Commandments. USA! USA! USA!
>Not a thing at public schools (despite some attempts to force it)
>Between this and the prayer comment, I suspect this comment is either exaggerated or mixed with internet anecdotes rather than actual experience.
Actually, it is a thing in Texas. And unfortunately, it's not exaggerated at all.
From Wikipedia[0]:
"S.B. 10 requires public schools to display the Ten Commandments anywhere clearly visible. The law requires the display to be framed or a poster, and include the exact text of the Ten Commandments provided in the law without alternatives. It must also be at least 16 inches (41 cm) wide and 20 inches (51 cm) tall.[13]"
From the office of the Texas Attorney General:
“In Texas classrooms, we want the Word of God opened, the Ten Commandments displayed, and prayers lifted up,” said Attorney General Paxton. “Twisted, radical liberals want to erase Truth, dismantle the solid foundation that America’s success and strength were built upon, and erode the moral fabric of our society. Our nation was founded on the rock of Biblical Truth, and I will not stand by while the far-left attempts to push our country into the sinking sand.”
Senate Bill 11, passed by the Texas Legislature this past regular session, allows school boards to adopt policies setting aside time for voluntary prayer and the reading of the Bible or other religious texts. The law requires that the board of trustees for each ISD in Texas take a record vote on whether to adopt a policy to implement these periods no later than six months after September 1, 2025. Student participation in these periods requires parental consent."
>Things like no bullying, inclusiveness, fire safety, bring your own water bottle, how to pray
When great controversy surrounds the curriculum, the safest thing to teach is nothing at all.
titzer 18 hours ago [-]
A lot of controversy is fabricated willfully by ideologues who believe absolutely batshit insane things.
simpaticoder 18 hours ago [-]
True enough, but that has always been true. Something has changed on the institutional side such that it is no longer willing and/or able to simply reject batshit insanity and continue teaching children such that they are as well informed or better informed and capable as the last generation. What results is a positive feedback loop where a poorly educated public puts increasing pressure on an institution who's members are themselves poorly educated. The result is paralysis, and eventually, societal death.
linuxftw 18 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
potato3732842 11 hours ago [-]
>When great controversy surrounds the curriculum, the safest way to keep the gravy train rolling to teach is nothing at all.
I fixed your verbiage to be more descriptive. They are teaching nothing specifically because they don't want to kill the golden goose. If there wasn't so much money at stake we wouldn't be having this discussion.
WalterBright 11 hours ago [-]
I went to public high school in the 70s. The honors chemistry class spent an entire semester on what a molar mass was.
staticman2 18 hours ago [-]
Among other things an entire day on active shooter drills?
Is it possible your niece was joking?
jimt1234 17 hours ago [-]
Unfortunately, no. My niece's mom, my sister, called her school to ask wtf was going on. They gave her a lame, lawyer-approved response about their responsibility to protect children and the drills are mandated by the state, blah blah blah. So yeah, my niece said they practice how to respond (call 911, not your parents?), what to do if the teacher is shot (they don't use the word "shot", though), and they talked about tactical gear, like bullet-proof backpacks, which my niece wants now.
netsharc 11 hours ago [-]
> they don't use the word "shot", though
Can I guess.. "bulleted"? Similar to how the creators of brainrot content say "unalive" or "seggs" because they want to make sure their content can go viral, and there's the belief words like "kill", "died" or "sex" will trigger Zuck and Co.'s censorship?
2025, what a year to be alive...
rootusrootus 11 hours ago [-]
That's wild. My daughter just started public high school last week and they haven't had any meaningful talk about safety, no active shooter drills, nothing like that. They did waste several days on orientation and how class will be organized, stuff like that, but since she's a freshman I guess maybe that makes sense. This week she's been assigned homework.
But this is a boring suburban town on the edge of a midsize metro in the PNW, which is not exactly the most exciting place in the country.
potato3732842 11 hours ago [-]
>call 911, not your parents?
What else do you expect government run schools to teach if not "engage the government at any/every opportunity"?
Looking back on my own education what a disservice some of those behavior patterns (not specifically that one) they tried to teach us would be in adult life.
yepitwas 10 hours ago [-]
I don’t think advising kids to make their first and possibly only call to an emergency number where someone’s all but guaranteed to pick up quickly and dispatch help instead of to a parent who might not pick up for any number of reasons and can’t personally dispatch emergency responders (but will surely just themselves turn around and call 911) is, like, a Big Government propaganda conspiracy. Seems more like plain old good advice.
potato3732842 10 hours ago [-]
While probably appropriate for a shooting, "when shit's going down, call the government first" is generally not a terrible way to handle things as an adult as it tends to reliably turn N-figure problems into much more complicated N+1 or N+2 figure problems. Running your situation by a cooler head not immediately involved is almost always better and the government is always slow enough to show up that you don't lose anything if you do go that route.
Likewise, I think it is very ill-advised to cram kid's heads full of "dial 911" at the young vulnerable age where repeated messaging goes into the kind of memory that's all but impossible to overwrite.
lmm 6 hours ago [-]
Given the recent school shooting where police waited around outside as the shooting was happening and parents were the only ones to intervene, it doesn't seem like such good advice.
yepitwas 6 hours ago [-]
Yeah, I wouldn't mind seeing the LE leadership at that particular, ah, event, plus maybe many of the other law enforcement folks present, subjected to some... consequences. Whatever the victims' parents want, really, I'd be pretty open to anything. I have ideas but I'd not suggest my preferences matter here, and would rather leave it to them, even if they settled on "nothing".
And ACAB, yeah, sure. Basically true, I agree.
That's still your best first move if there's a mass shooting. Anyone you call's just going to call 911 anyway (god, I hope). You do want hospitals on alert and calling in trauma surgeons, and ambulances on the way. And usually the police aren't that astoundingly useless in these cases, even if their outcomes are mixed.
I do think more often than not police are, in general, a net-benefit and force for "good", if you will, when called in for a mass shooting, and I don't think it's a particularly close call. Though yeah sometimes they are pretty bad even for that purpose (and they're often bad for other purposes, sure), and in the case of Uvalde they were disgustingly bad, and I here employ "disgustingly" with its full force and not flippantly.
Still, like... probably call 911 first if someone's shooting up a school?
mensetmanusman 11 hours ago [-]
lol, our legal system helping to destroy education via risk mitigation.
yumraj 16 hours ago [-]
Would you be open to identifying the state where this school is?
nobody9999 3 hours ago [-]
It's Texas.
bjourne 12 hours ago [-]
"My niece is a high school pupil so I know how it REALLY is." Surely, you must realize how dumb this argument is?
jf22 17 hours ago [-]
I don't like the comparisons to other schools or cultures where memorization is the priority.
What kids do with what they learn in school matter more than whether or not they memorized a calc function.
Besides, who cares if you know cal functions in a post-phone, post-AI world. You look that shit up now.
nosianu 17 hours ago [-]
At the early stages memorization is essential for some subjects. I still benefit greatly - like many - from very early having to memorize the complete lower multiplication table (12x14, 15x15 and all that, the 20-square). I actually need that in daily life all the time (and I'm old and skeptical about teaching too much stuff that just drowns kids and prevents deeper understanding because they are always chasing the next subject with little time to let anything sink in deeper). What is sine, tangent, cosine. At least a few digits of pi. Language and grammar too.
Lots and lots of stuff that just has to be memorized. It becomes easier the more experiences one gets over time using those, merely memorizing the words alone ofc. is useless and also very inefficient, without other knowledge to create a network the brain will throw pure sentence-memorization out. So you still start the lessons with some memorization, then deepen it by using it in class. But in the end you will still remember those many little "facts".
jf22 13 hours ago [-]
I didn't say all memorization was bad, just that we should understand we are comparing cultures that treat rote memorization differently.
yoyohello13 12 hours ago [-]
I wish this narrative that memorization is bad would die. Yes, understanding concepts is also important, but memorization is incredibly useful for learning and applying knowledge. The faster you can recall "trivia" the better you are able to make connections.
I say this as someone you drank the "no memorization" koolaid. Now I always start new things with memorization first and I learn so much faster.
dotnet00 12 hours ago [-]
Yep, the most obvious example (besides language) would be of math. Despite what kids (and unfortunately, some adults) say, it's worth memorizing the tables from 1->10 despite the ubiquity of calculators because the process of memorizing them helps with seeing the patterns that provide a deeper understanding, and it's much faster than pulling out a calculator and plugging the numbers in.
There are some subjects where the emphasis on memorization that some places have is detrimental, but that doesn't make memorization bad in general.
yepitwas 10 hours ago [-]
Doing math without memorizing some basic arithmetic facts is like reading without knowing what the hundred most common words in the English language mean, and having to look them up every time you encounter one. Sure I guess you can do that, but… you definitely shouldn’t.
rixed 7 hours ago [-]
This contradicts my own experience.
As a kid, and probably still now, I was very reluctant to memorise things, for some reason I never understood but that may be connected with distrust of authority. I still remember how long and hard I fought my parents and grandparents who tried to make sure I would eventually memorise multiplication tables. Instead, I had to develop many tricks to be able to retrieve the proper results without memorisation, effectively discovering patterns to retrieve quickly all the tables from very few memorised numbers. Years later, I remember having done a similar thing in history classes, refusing to learn any dates, so instead finding tricks to tell which events must have occurred before or after another, thus again getting more engaged with the material as a result.
Sure, some material do require pure memorisation, like language learning (that I still hate with a passion), but overall I believe memorisation gets the bad rep it deserves.
desolate_muffin 17 hours ago [-]
Why think when your phone or the AI can do it for you? I imagine there are a few people in this forum who might have some thoughts about that.
ThrowMeAway1618 2 hours ago [-]
That's a great question! Let me go ask Claude and get back to you..
jf22 13 hours ago [-]
Recalling math trivia is not thinking... that's why it's called memorization...
blululu 10 hours ago [-]
I find this attitude to be really frustrating. Based on my experiences teaching math a student is not going to learn how to do the impressive things that you might call thinking if they don't have a solid foundation in how to do the basics. Imagine saying that learning the alphabet or spelling rules is just rote memorization and therefore not worth doing. If a person needs to spend all of their brain power thinking through elementary operations then they will have very little left over for the things that we might call thinking. I have seen too many kids who struggle with Algebra not because they can't understand the concepts but because they cannot do basic things like multiply 3x4 without needing to add 3 to 3 to 3 to 3.
estimator7292 13 hours ago [-]
The core problem is actually twofold:
1. We pay teachers like shit and treat them even worse. Even if you wanted to do a good job as a teacher, it's fundamentally impossible because:
2. Our schools are structured and run by busybodies that have absolutely no business being within 100 yards of a school. Curricula is set by politics and ideology, not established science. We have book bans and helicopter parents suing teachers for talking about dinosaurs or evolution or even for simply existing as a queer person in any capacity.
Teachers have been fleeing in droves for years, and many states and locales are further reducing the qualifications required to teach, leading to a downwards sprial.
There's also the intentional and systematic disassembling of our education system by the federal government, as a means of voter suppression. This whole situation was created on purpose to keep Americans dumb and complacent.
America is fucked six ways from Sunday and it's hard to even think about a way out of this mess. It's going to take several generations for our society and government to recover, if it ever does.
programjames 10 hours ago [-]
The core problem is actually very simple. Education studies do not measure what they claim to measure. When they say, "education outcomes improve when..." they usually mean the pass rate, i.e. they only measured a signal among the bottom 20% of students. When they say, "test scores improve when..." they are, at best, measuring up to the 90th percentile. When they say, "the white/black attainment gap," or "socioeconomic disadvantages," they're usually just fishing for funding money, and their study will not actually attempt to measure either of those things. From a review of the literature on No Child Left Behind (NCLB) in 2015:
> Only one study specifically examined the achievement gap for students from low socioeconomic backgrounds (Hampton & Gruenert, 2008) despite NCLB’s stated commitment to improving education for children from low-income families. African American students were often mentioned in studies of general student achievement but none of the reviewed studies focused specifically on the effects of NCLB for this subgroup. Again, this is a curious gap in the research considering the law’s emphasis on narrowing the Black-White achievement gap. Other groups of students underrepresented in the research on NCLB include gifted students, students with vision impairments, and English proficient minority students.
("A Review of the Empirical Literature on No Child Left Behind From 2001 to 2010", Husband & Hunt, 2015)
Everything you see going wrong is downstream of this. Yes, harmful ideologies have done a lot of damage to the education system, but it could easily survive this we had actual signifiers of success.
vondur 13 hours ago [-]
Where my wife works the average salary is over 100K per year, so not bad for 9 months of work. This is in California where the test scores are some of the worst in the nation. I would not lean too hard at political party affiliation, California politics is heavily influenced by Teachers Unions, and yet we score near the bottom of the entire US.
teachrdan 12 hours ago [-]
> This is in California where the test scores are some of the worst in the nation
I read your post and thought it was BS, so I did a little research. According to this, California public school test scores are better than Texas and closing in on New York and Florida.
> California politics is heavily influenced by Teachers Unions, and yet we score near the bottom of the entire US.
California scores better than Texas, a completely Republican-run state where the teacher's unions have almost no influence. How do you account for that?
Texas, Mississippi, and others partially achieve this by holding students back.
Mississippi, for example, has a third grade reading gate. Texas holds black kids back at a nearly twice the rate of white kids. These kids are older and have repeated the grade so they do better in the 4th grade NAEP assessment.
This is possibly working as intended. However, you can achieve the same results by redshirting your kid or having them repeat a grade.
So the claim from the blog post that
> but Texas has a slight edge for Hispanic students and a huge advantage for Black students.
says that the Texas results are driven by a demographic that's aggressively held back.
vondur 8 hours ago [-]
Isn’t that a good thing? Should students be promoted to a higher grade if the aren’t doing well. It’s really difficult to do this in California. My wife has dealt with high school seniors who are functionally illiterate. Maybe if they were held back they might catch up.
ants_everywhere 8 hours ago [-]
I'm not making a judgment about whether it's a good or bad thing for the kid. I don't know the literature to have a position. I'm just contextualizing the data.
In practical terms, the states kind of have different definitions of what it means to be in 4th grade. And that's one way of increasing your score on this particular measurement.
I think the right thing to do is intervene before students are held back. But that costs money and might make your NAEP scores worse if the student just squeaks by this year rather than staying behind a year. But I don't have the data on how much they're attempting to intervene in cases where students look like they're going to be held back.
daedrdev 11 hours ago [-]
Adjusted for income its really bad. Income is the strongest causes of academic performance, so if you adjust for them California is doing way worse than other states.
dmoy 10 hours ago [-]
CA also scores middle of the pack on nominal poverty rate (OPM), but last in the country on cost of living adjusted poverty rate (SPM). If anything though, that means backwards from what I would expect for income controlled education scores... ?
gamblor956 10 hours ago [-]
This is false. Adjusted for income CA students outperform most other states because CA has one of the largest populations of low income students.
yepitwas 10 hours ago [-]
Huge ESOL population, too (but to be fair, Texas and several other states also face that challenge)
gamblor956 6 hours ago [-]
Yes they have large ESL populations but CAs is much larger and those other states fare worse by any breakdown.
bsder 12 hours ago [-]
> This is in California where the test scores are some of the worst in the nation.
This is an easily disprovable statement that calls into question your credibility.
California schools generally score right at or just below the median for the entire US.
That doesn't make them good, but they sure aren't the worst.
> I would not lean too hard at political party affiliation
In the US, it's not hard to look at a map of political party affiliation and a ranking of the worst schools and not notice the correlation.
mothballed 11 hours ago [-]
It's not hard to be in the median yet one of the worst states, if NY/CA/FL/TX all have shit scores (I have no idea if that's the case). You could conceivably be at the median while being one of the worst 5 or 10 states.
Tyr42 10 hours ago [-]
Median means that half the states are worse than you.
Unless there are ties, it's impossible to be the median and the 10th percentile.
Unless I missed something?
mothballed 8 hours ago [-]
I was thinking median meant enough population of below states to reach half of populace, are doing worse.
ThrowMeAway1618 3 hours ago [-]
>It's not hard to be in the median yet one of the worst states, if NY/CA/FL/TX all have shit scores (I have no idea if that's the case). You could conceivably be at the median while being one of the worst 5 or 10 states.
I wonder where you went to school. Median means that half of the sample is above and half the sample is below.
To explain (and I'll use small words so you'll be sure to understand), the median of the fifty states is that 25 are above the median and 25 are below it. See how that works?
Here's a simpler example in case you're still confused:
Steve makes $5/hour
Bob makes $8/hour
Reggie makes $11/hour
Sylvana makes $14/hour
Benoit makes $17/hour
The median wage is then $11.00/hour. Get it now?
Check out this very complex page[0] (let me know if you need help with the bigger words) that discusses this idea. Good luck. I suspect you're gonna need it.
> Curricula is set by politics and ideology, not established science.
This is part of it. A friend is a teacher and is now in an admin position where he manages teachers. His big gripe is the higher ups have no formal system - every time a new person comes in they bring with them their system and politics, burning down the previous efforts while doing little to nothing for students. Then they leave for greener pastures and the next ideologue comes along with their matches.
terminalshort 13 hours ago [-]
> There's also the intentional and systematic disassembling of our education system by the federal government
Where is your evidence of this? Schools are one of the most locally controlled institutions of our government.
orochimaaru 12 hours ago [-]
Parents need to take responsibility for outcomes. Education happens as much at home as it does in school. You need engaged teachers AND parents.
Teacher salaries need to keep up. The problem is teacher salaries aren’t a state or a national setup. They depend on the school district you’re in. If you’re in a high income district where higher taxes are afforded. Teacher salaries are good. But then these places also have VERY engaged parents - which makes the scores much better.
If you want rural and inner city scores to improve it will need real funding - 1. For teachers to want to move to small town USA and teach there, 2. Or for them to risk life and limb going to inner cities and 3. Having an extremely high teacher to student ratio - probably 5-10 per teacher to compensate for lack of engagement at home.
braincat31415 8 hours ago [-]
It's a pipe dream.
I live in a fairly high income district.
The school's attitude is my way or the highway. Neighboring municipalities do not fare any better in this department. From my experience, schools will fight tooth and nail to defend the status quo.
I gave up.
aeternum 12 hours ago [-]
> systematic disassembling of our education system by the federal government
So you support shutting down the federal Dept. of Education? Or is the answer more centralized control of education?
braincat31415 9 hours ago [-]
Chicago public school teachers salaries will reach over $110,000 by 2029 or earlier. Just going by the track record, this will not result in a better quality of education.
skellington 10 hours ago [-]
You are hilarious.
Schools are dominated by leftwing CRT ideology. It's the rare exception when there is real pushback against dinosaurs or evolution. I very much doubt that you are as angry about Islamic pushback against sex topics in school.
The reward structures, the dumbing down of courses, removing accelerated courses, passing everyone, the move against merit, the removal of structure, discipline, and punishment for bad behavior all come from liberal ideas on teaching.
Anyone who demands standards, values merit, values hard work with high expectations is labeled a fascist, colonizer, or some other pejorative. "Ways of knowing" is an idea that permeates modern teaching where we can't judge or grade anyone for what they know or don't know because different people just "know" differently. Grades are racist. Expectations are racist. Math is racist.
julienchastang 18 hours ago [-]
Parent here with school-aged kids. I think this sub-thread blaming the parents is particularly depressing and not founded in reality. Here is the way I see it. The social media companies with quasi infinite resources have won. They hired the best and the brightest engineers to hack our minds and steal our attention and they have succeeded beyond expectations. As evidence look that the market capitalization of Meta, etc. The data showing that children are reading way less compared to when I was growing up is consistent with what I see, but I did not an infinite ocean of distractions available via device that has become indispensable for modern living (i.e., the smart phone). By the time I was thirteen, I had read the Lord of the Rings to completion, but if I had grown up in present times I doubt that would be the case.
MisterTea 12 hours ago [-]
My friend has kids, 8 and 10, who run around outside and play with neighborhood kids as well as read books. They are very active in their kids lives and constantly bring them to events and other social gatherings. This keeps them active physically and socially making things like screen time seem boring.
The shitty parents are the ones who let meta and the like hack them to the point where their children are just following by example - if you stare at the screen all day, so will they.
nathan_compton 45 minutes ago [-]
If the system is such that you have to be an exceptional parent not to fuck up your kids, the system is the problem. Like I applaud your friend with kids, but I think its worth considering that their might be an issue if you need to be working very hard to give your kids a stimulating, healthy, childhood.
watwut 12 hours ago [-]
Of course kids are reading less. When I was growing, there was frequently not much else to do. Reading was replaced by movies and shows on demand and wont come back no matter what educators or parents do.
It is cheaper, easily available and more fun.
Sure kids also use social networks. But the role reading had was mostly taken over by Netflix, youtube, disney and such.
jjulius 12 hours ago [-]
>Reading was replaced by movies and shows on demand and wont come back no matter what educators or parents do.
... huh?
I'm a parent and this just isn't true. My wife and I have phones, our young children do not. We do not own a tablet. Our children have never known what it's like to have the option of resorting to a screen to keep them busy when we're out of the house. TV time is limited on the weekends, extra limited on the weeknights.
My oldest absolutely loves reading, and I watched her sit in the corner for 90 minutes on Sunday with a pile of books and a massive grin on her face the whole time. My youngest is still too young to read, but I'm hoping for results within the same realm.
Your comment about there frequently not being much else to do? It's up to parents to, for lack of a better phrase, teach kids how to be bored.
Edit:
>It's cheaper, easily available and more fun.
What's super fun, easily available and free for us is going to a park on the weekend to play and have lunch, and then driving around to a bunch of Little Free Libraries in the area. Drop off books we don't want, see if the kids or parents find anything that strikes our fancy. Our kiddos love it and so do we, it's great family time.
TheOtherHobbes 9 hours ago [-]
I wish people would understand that their personal experience doesn't automatically generalise to collective trends.
It's great that your kids are reading, but clearly a lot of kids, and even more adults, aren't.
It's not just "up to parents" because the media, in all its forms, sets collective values.
And the strategic problem in the US is that reading - and culture in general - is caught between a number of competing ideologies, most of which are destructive to what's usually understood as education both in and out of school.
What individual parents do is downstream of all of those cultural influences. It's heavily dependent on socioeconomics, opportunity, and status, with error bars that depend on a random range of individual values.
The US is a competing patchwork of wildly incompatible cultures and traditions, some of which are directly opposed to each other, and all of which - in practice - are suspicious of traditional educational goals.
Put simply, no one is driving the bus. So it's stuck in a ditch, with its wheels spinning. And it's about to burst into flames.
There's only so much individual parents can do to fix that. The problems are strategic and political, not individual, and they're much harder to fix than they seem.
9 hours ago [-]
jjulius 8 hours ago [-]
>I wish people would understand that their personal experience doesn't automatically generalise to collective trends.
And I wish people wouldn't make assumptions and then respond based on those assumptions.
GeoAtreides 4 hours ago [-]
>Fewer than 1 in 5 (18.7%) 8- to 18-year-olds told us that they read something daily in their free time in 2025, again, the lowest levels we've recorded, with daily reading levels decreasing by nearly 20 percentage points since 2005.
Seems like the kids just don't read anymore, yours being exception of course
rixed 7 hours ago [-]
Alas, the evolution of societies is dictated by rules that no individual cases, however inspirational, can radically influence.
You can teach your kids how to fly a plane, yet gravity is not up to parents.
watwut 4 hours ago [-]
Your kids are small. They wont have other kids in school to talk about books with and to show them different books. The discovery of books and social aspect of it ends with you. It is completely different social environment compared to what I had. There used to be cheap junk book stories, journals about books, things like that. These do not really exist anymore, but similar structures exist for movies.
Assuming they will social, they will have friends to talk with them about anime shows and they will go visit them to watch those shows in their house. The kids in school will talk about anime, about netflix shows, but not about books.
> It's up to parents to, for lack of a better phrase, teach kids how to be bored.
You have full control while they are small. That goes away quickly and obviously even should go away.
But even more importantly, my parents and parents of my peers did not had to put that much work into us reading. They did not had to make the one big family project, they could have spend their weekends working in garden or going to play golf ... and generally speaking kids ended up reading a lot more anyway. They would read, because it was easily available and only fun thing to do.
> What's super fun, easily available and free for us is going to a park on the weekend to play and have lunch, and then driving around to a bunch of Little Free Libraries in the area.
It is not fun except for small kids. All these stats are about kids with agency which yours do not have yet.
araes 10 hours ago [-]
Add a couple thoughts to that general idea:
- There's also a reward issue, in that reading, especially long form is "soft punished." It's not directly punished, yet there's very little reward, mostly a lot of struggle, not much of the candy feedback of TV, movies, and video games. It requires personal imagination and visualization of often difficult concepts rather than simply taking what someone else has "imagined correctly" for you. If you've never seen the Lord of the Rings movies, imaging what Frodo, Aragorn, and the rest are actually doing, where they're going, and the struggling through Tolkien's complicated prose is quite challenging. And socially, there's also significant peer pressure issues involved, that evoke “epidemic” or “contagion” comparisons. Once large numbers of peers discount reading, then the population on average starts receiving negative feedback. Notably, if peers are high achievers, then students who interact with these peers may also adopt those habits. [1]
- Part that's less nefarious, like a teen highlights about the difficulties of reading in this paper [2] (pg 34.) "You can’t ask a book to explain what it means right now. I go to people because of their interactive nature."
- The social media companies and the world wide web culture in general have also implemented a form of reading detriment. There's little reward to blogging, writing, or reading long form writing. Incendiary writing and rage-farming was long ago found to be an extremely effective tactic compared to informative discussion. And a lot of the time, almost all you can look forward to with your informative post is your contribution being aggressively scraped, while being compensated nothing, and then churned out to make someone else money.
- There's actually a few positive though, apparently teen and juvenile literature is actually increasing in sales somewhat from [2] compared with adult literature sales. Young adult books have been the fastest-growing category over the last 5 years, with print unit sales jumping by 48.2% since 2018. 35.03 million print copies of young adult (YA) books are sold each year as of 2022. [3]
- You may be slightly down biasing how much people read Lord of the Rings. The Hobbit edition from 2007 has 76,000 ratings and 12,000 reviews on Amazon. [4]
I wonder how much of the YA uptick is driven by adults who prefer less-challenging reading. If that's the case it just makes the picture appear even more bleak.
yepitwas 10 hours ago [-]
It’s mostly that. Basically the only genres that still sell meaningful numbers are YA (with lots of adult readers, and if we want to count that as its own genre) and romance (99.9% of which isn’t more challenging than average YA, and usually has even less going on as far as ideas and theme—not to knock it, I mean hell, it’s no worse a use of time than tons of other things).
Adult genre fic, even, is dying, and lit-fic has long been in decline and has pretty much just been for a few nerds since roughly the turn of the millennium.
I think the decline of reading is exactly what’s pushed publishers and agents to favor easier and easier books: you have to pursue as much of the market as possible to make money now because the whole market’s not that big, so you can’t afford to exclude readers. That means favoring ever-easier books as readership declines.
The only other route to make a living is aiming straight at film/TV adaptation, which is very hard to break into but a handful of authors have successfully specialized in that. Their books do OK but they’re watched, as it were, way, way more than they’re read.
bananalychee 16 hours ago [-]
The level of tolerance for phone use in the classroom in the last decade blows my mind. It would be like letting kids pull out a GameBoy back in the 2000s, which where I was would have it promptly confiscated.
smelendez 13 hours ago [-]
I was thinking about that recently. I don’t anyone ever pulling out a Game Boy in elementary or middle school in the 90s, even though many of us had them at home.
It’s not that we all got a lecture about no video games in school. It just very self-evidently wasn’t a place you would play video games. It would be like getting a pizza delivered to you at the doctor’s office. Just absurd.
I remember a kid with a Game Gear on the elementary school bus and even that being, well, unusual enough I remember it. Kind of similar to how kids will always remember seeing someone’s family pet run on the bus, because it blows their minds that it can even happen.
GuinansEyebrows 13 hours ago [-]
by the time i was in elementary school, it was common enough for geeky kids to have game boys at school. this was the height of the pokemon craze, after all.
not in class, of course, but at lunch and on the bus, it was fair game.
barrenko 19 hours ago [-]
Yes, and it's quadratically worse for the people that are on the lowest end.
If I was born recently, I'd be just one of the kids that get stuck with a screen from day 0. There's no recovering from that.
captainkrtek 19 hours ago [-]
Not to be too pessimistic, but it feels like this is impossible given how hyper-optimized our devices are to retain our attention. They’re beyond “tools” now and profits of countless companies are tied to our fixation on our phones.
straydusk 12 hours ago [-]
> Most parents just watch TV, stare at their phones and don't want to be bothered by anything that requires effort.
What universe do you live in
Taylor_OD 19 hours ago [-]
> Most parents just watch TV, stare at their phones and don't want to be bothered by anything that requires effort
The point is that students are doing worse, even though ^ is likely true today just like it was true 5, 10, and 20 years ago.
hungmung 19 hours ago [-]
The generation raised by iPads are in HS now and American IQ tests scores are in decline, especially in the last 10-15 years.
peterfirefly 18 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
Belopolye 18 hours ago [-]
You mean to tell me the dirt ISN'T magic?
gdulli 18 hours ago [-]
Moe: Immigants! I knew it was them! Even when it was the bears, I knew it was them!
jf22 19 hours ago [-]
Is there any study or evidence supports that MOST parents "watch TV, stare at their phones and don't want to be bothered by anything that requires effort?"
This is a common trope but I've never seen any evidence.
jihadjihad 19 hours ago [-]
Go to any park/playground sometime and observe the benches.
Go to any sports field/venue and observe the bleachers.
What you find may astound you, even if the percentage isn't literally 50%+.
yepitwas 18 hours ago [-]
If I'm in those situations and staring at my phone, it's because I forgot to bring a book. Staring into the middle distance while my kid sits on the bench for fifteen minutes and a bunch of kids I don't know ineptly play soccer, or closely watching my 500th hour of kids playing "tag", is a last resort. Hell sometimes I'll just start trying to find weird bugs or something.
I do also play with them, but I'm not one of the parents who's always playing with them any time they're playing, they also need space to figure their own stuff out. Adults can do other things a lot of the time, it's fine.
orochimaaru 12 hours ago [-]
Parents aren’t supposed to be engaged when kids are engaging in free play at the playground or under the supervision of a coach. That’s the definition of a helicopter parent.
bad_haircut72 19 hours ago [-]
Taking your kid to a playground is a parents chance to get a break! Everyone judges parents constantly and blames them for everything, parents in general are doing their best.
yepitwas 18 hours ago [-]
It's legit kind-of great, because you can't be doing much productive, so the dozen things you should be doing (most of them due to kids...) if you were at home are out the window. You can just chill for a long stretch of time, without concern. Taking your kids to the park or whatever is awesome, it's one of the best breaks a parent gets during daylight hours.
Or you can knock out some schedule stuff or teacher-emailing or bill-paying or whatever that you'd otherwise have to cram in some other time, that's nice too.
jf22 18 hours ago [-]
I'm at those things. I don't see even 10% of people on their phones. Yeah people check in but I see involved parents.
Plus, these activities aren't causing missed education. I'm not teaching my kids math while they go on slides.
blackoil 8 hours ago [-]
I find restaurants more eye-opening. Amount of toddlers being fed while their mind is zombified with a screen are astonishing. Parents don't want to put effort in engaging the child and screen is an easy legal drug.
7 hours ago [-]
adrr 7 hours ago [-]
Gen x’er. My parents didn’t help me with homework. I was expected to be independent. There was a culture shift in 2000s and we are involved daily with our kids and their homework. This is all anecdotal and I can’t find any studies on the subject.
watwut 12 hours ago [-]
Like yeah, waiting in the park while kids plays is the most boring thing in the word. You have to do it, so that kid is not licked inside whole day.
What exactly do you expect people to do there while doing nothing and while being interrupted every 6 minutes over yet another interesting rock?
programjames 10 hours ago [-]
I graduated from high school less than ten years ago. I'm sure screens have become a big issue in many (or most) schools, but that was not the case at my high school. It still was mostly daycare, not education, so banning screens will not be enough.
Aurornis 7 hours ago [-]
> Most parents just watch TV, stare at their phones and don't want to be bothered by anything that requires effort.
You must live in a very sad place. This does not describe the average parent of any of the kids around me. I know these people exist, but it’s not the norm at least in my state.
The most common complaint among my teacher friends is about helicopter parents who are too involved.
giantg2 12 hours ago [-]
I generally agree. However, I don't think most parents are neglectful for using a screen. The ones that can't be bothered would just be drinking, reading gossip magazines, going to bars, or whatever else they felt like if screens simply stopped existing.
Admittedly my kids get more screen time than I'd like, but we try to make it educational. An observation that I made that is on topic for this thread, is that there are very few modern US shows that seem to fit our criteria of being educational and not over-stimularing. It seemes there are many more international shows that are better.
lumost 10 hours ago [-]
It’s a function of time. For far too many people, the existence of modern life consumes more time than it did a generation ago. We work more hours, we work harder hours, we consume entertainment for more hours.
The costs of this societal shift fall on those who can’t compete for time. Student’s go unparented and unmentioned.
dotnet00 18 hours ago [-]
>Most parents just watch TV, stare at their phones and don't want to be bothered by anything that requires effort
This lazy "answer" to every parenting problem makes me roll my eyes nowadays. It's the equivalent of an umbrella hypothesis, a convenient excuse for not having to consider things in-depth, further justified by seeing parents when they are taking a break and assuming they're always like that.
vharuck 16 hours ago [-]
Not only that, but it's a dead end for societal policy. Even if a person actually believed parents deserve the most blame for kids' educational outcomes, that person should recognize there's no real way to influence this (short of dystopic levels of forcing kids into foster care). They would then find the second most blame-worthy cause to fix.
VirusNewbie 18 hours ago [-]
> Most parents just watch TV, stare at their phones and don't want to be bothered by anything that requires effort
Citation? I've routinely seen statistics suggesting the opposite, that parents are moreI involved with their children in the modern time and more likely to play and engage with children.
thepryz 18 hours ago [-]
I think it’s more a matter of both extremes.
I’ve seen stay at home parents who put their kids in daycare so they can spend the day shopping and effectively have someone else raise their kids. Their kids end up largely just being status symbols. I’ve also seen parents that go everywhere with their kids, schedule every moment of their day and won’t even let them stand at the school bus stop by themselves. The parents build their entire lives around their kids and live vicariously through them.
IMO, kids need a proper balance and I don’t think a lot of them are getting that.
charlie90 14 hours ago [-]
what you are suggesting means that economic activity will decrease. we are a consumerism driven society, we want people looking at screens and watching ads. that's how we grow the economy.
AnimalMuppet 19 hours ago [-]
I think the root of the problem is that education is no longer seen as a fundamental foundation to a better life. Kids aren't doing well because kids don't care. They don't care because their parents don't care.
Why don't they care? I think for many, they have given up any hope that a better life is possible. So education isn't the key, because nothing is the key, because the door doesn't even exist.
13 hours ago [-]
odwyerrich 26 minutes ago [-]
Not sure how you all missed it. Here's what happened:
Step 1: Import millions of low-IQ migrants
Step 2: Scores drop on average
mrandish 19 hours ago [-]
There's a longer trend but also a clear inflection point around the rise of mobile phones and social media. N=1 but we delayed getting a phone for our kid until a few months after she turned 13, which was a good choice because now we wish we'd gone longer. We can see how social media and app snacking clearly have negative effects on attention span, attitude, etc.
Also choosing to close schools during COVID was as catastrophic as many predicted. Our kid was in 7th grade during COVID and teachers each year report the effects are still being felt across many students. Of course, naturally great students recovered quickly and innately poor students remained poor but the biggest loss was in the large middle of B/C students.
linuxhansl 10 hours ago [-]
I followed a different approach with my son. We gave him a phone pretty early, and didn't even have a lot of rules around it (no family controls, etc).
The agreement I had with him: "Scroll all day, play video games, etc. That is my side of the agreement. And you also do your school work, learn, practice for exams, homework, etc. That is your side of the agreement. I'll trust you. If your grades get worse, i.e. you need help managing device time, we'll review/change this agreement."
We also sat down many times looking at content together, in attempt to teach him what's trust-worthy and what isn't, what's "healthy" and what isn't, etc. And of course we do other things together as well.
So far (knock on wood) my son has managed well - he is 16 now. He organizes his own time, and has learned when to play and when to work. And crucially he has learned when to disconnect from his devices to do what's necessary.
No kid is the same. I am not saying my approach is best or even right, I just offer it as another data point.
foobarian 9 hours ago [-]
We did something similar with our now 12yo. She self-regulates and tries to stay off the worst doom scrolling garbage sites, and tries to explore different sites and such like Pinterest cards and so on. She knows intellectually that the apps and services are designed to suck away attention. This kinda broke my heart but the other day she made a "bored jar" probably based on a Pinterest card which is a jar filled with little scraps of paper with ideas for what to do when you're bored. It felt like I was watching a drowning person trying their best to stay afloat if that makes sense.
stephendause 19 hours ago [-]
Jonathan Haidt has a lot of good material on this. He is leading the charge in encouraging parents to delay giving their child a phone until high school and not allowing them to have social media accounts until age 16.
How do Asian countries and top-performing countries deal with this?
We should do whatever they do.
On that note, we should also segregate kids by academic desire and achievement like Japan and China. The bullies and underachievers hold back those who are academically excellent. We do this in limited instances, but not enough to really count.
rawgabbit 12 hours ago [-]
In Japan and China, high-stakes entrance exams come earlier and play a stronger role than in the U.S. In China, the zhongkao (high school entrance exam, around age 15) and gaokao (college entrance exam, age 18) largely determine access to selective schools and universities. In Japan, competitive entrance exams for high schools (age 15) and universities (age 18).
waterTanuki 10 hours ago [-]
That's really underselling it. Gaokao determines where you can live, where you can work, who your friends are, occasionally how much your family values you. They shut down airspace and conduct military/police patrols during examinations to sniff out cheaters. It's only the very wealthy who can just uproot their lives and send their kids to an Ivy/Stanford/Oxbridge/MIT and just skip the whole thing.
Responding to the OC, this is a downright awful solution to the current education problem in the U.S.
I grew up a white kid in a very (90+%) Asian community. IMO, the biggest difference I observed comparing my white friends from other communities to my Asian friends in my community was the expectation of excellence. For the Asian kids, either they were succeeding, above and beyond, or they were a failure. "B is for 'Better not come home tonight', A is for 'Adequate'", as the jokes went.
And some of those kids still struggled. But the response was to push harder. Didn't get adequate grades that school year? You're not doing anything fun this summer, you're studying. Needless to say it was a culture shock going to college and meeting people who were shockingly cavalier about potentially failing classes.
Steven He demonstrates what happens when an Asian kid tells their parents about getting a B.
tokioyoyo 13 hours ago [-]
Cultural pressure towards education, and phone bans left and right. Also, people are still addicted to their phones, including kids. But more controlled, I guess.
kridsdale1 19 hours ago [-]
I only know through cultural osmosis and not real data but it sure seems like the expectation is for the kids to be up till midnight grinding away on homework.
barbazoo 18 hours ago [-]
As someone with difficulties early on in life and thus showing behavioral issues (what you describe as bullies and underachievers), I went through a system like this and I despised it. N=1 but segregating children at early age based on the behavior they're showing, i.e. the difficulties they're having, felt kinda cruel. It worked academically I guess, I ended up ok, but for many it just meant they just simmered in an environment of mediocrity and rarely made it out.
miningape 13 hours ago [-]
I get it especially with younger ages, but on the other hand if the student is persistently disruptive they should be removed for the sake of the other students. It's also unfair that 1 student hinders the education of 20+ others.
bjourne 12 hours ago [-]
Segregating overachievers and underachieves essentially means we should have separate schools for boys and girls. Let the boys crash and have the girls excel. However, people tend to get upset when you tell them that the strongest predictor for academic success is gender so they quickly abandon that idea. :P
miningape 1 hours ago [-]
I do agree there's a disparity between educational outcomes in men and women - but I don't think you can immediately draw your conclusion:
Baked into it is the assumption that current education models fit both genders equally. Boys respond better to active learning and competitive techniques than the more passive techniques used currently. (Could we just as easily draw the opposite conclusion if our current educational culture was geared towards boys?)
Another thing to consider is the various programs that incentivise/enable girls to get into various subjects (in my n=1 experience I had much fewer programs (programming, robotics, maths, etc.) to join despite being already very interested and strong in those subjects).
By comparing age groups directly we are also not controlling for the fact girls mature faster making them better students earlier in life. We are also not considering tail effects of a normal distribution: e.g. top 5% of all students are male, but majority of students in the top 50% are female.
Maybe the solution is to segregate schools on gender, but that doesn't immediately equate to boys crashing and girls excelling.
jadamson 10 hours ago [-]
That's trivially not true. Girls do better overall, but it's a long, long way from being bimodal.
Do you have another reason for being against streaming?
bjourne 4 hours ago [-]
If it's trivially untrue find me a Western country where boys generally do better than girls. I'll wait!
rootusrootus 11 hours ago [-]
We did something similar. My daughter got her first phone last month, just in time to start high school. And I'm happy to say that the school district adjusted their mobile phone policy this year from being pretty restrictive, to an outright ban. I completely support that.
yepitwas 18 hours ago [-]
We've got one locked-down shared phone for our kids, for scheduling stuff with friends and calling & texting relatives or whatever. We almost have a teen so we'll see how long we can keep that up, but we only relented that much within the last year and a half, zero phones before that (which seems like it should be normal, but there are a lot of e.g. 4th grade classrooms out there where most of the kids have phones, seems super popular especially among the Fussellian middle class, I think in part for status reasons, like, "well if my kid doesn't have a phone people will think it's because we can't afford it!" which of course Fussell's upper-middle and higher don't give a shit about, so there's less child phone-ownership among them)
csa 15 hours ago [-]
> e.g. 4th grade classrooms out there where most of the kids have phones, seems super popular especially among the Fussellian middle class, I think in part for status reasons, like, "well if my kid doesn't have a phone people will think it's because we can't afford it!" which of course Fussell's upper-middle and higher don't give a shit about, so there's less child phone-ownership among them)
Great onservation and great Fussell reference.
Some/much of the content in Class is a bit dated now, but imho it is still very directionally correct.
Having learned a bit about adult developmental psychology, many of his observations are found in and predictable by modern cognitive psychology.
yepitwas 6 hours ago [-]
Fussell was such a fun read, and so useful in little (also fun) ways.
I distinctly remember seeing, several years ago, a photo of one of (I swear this is going to be basically apolitical) Trump's kids with their family, including one or more kids with toys, sitting in some kind of living-space with this perfectly spotless mirrored-on-all-sides table, and I was like "FUSSELL!!!!". Or all the gold in photos of that family in their home environments (a signal aimed squarely at Fussell's "Middle", which thinks "gold shit everywhere" is an "upper" signal, which it is not—unlike the mirrored table, which is Upper, because nobody who ever does their own cleaning would willingly deal with a fingerprint-magnet like that)
bee_rider 19 hours ago [-]
I guess one could quibble about the effectiveness of testing, but the longer trend was… upwards. Eyeballing the math graph, we’re at 55% basic competence. The peak was 65%. But doing a totally informal eyeball projection, we ought to be above 70% by now.
lenerdenator 19 hours ago [-]
We're seeing more districts ban cell phones in the classroom. It makes sense; in my day, the most you could do is text and play Tetris. We didn't have apps that were weaponized to capture our attention and memory like the kids do now.
People keep talking about how catastrophic it was to close schools during COVID. We keep having catastrophes and no one does anything about it. If the kids missed school, make them go back longer. Large chunks of the country still have 2-3 months where the kids don't do anything; send them back then. If they are already doing year-round schooling, cancel after-school athletics and make them learn with that time instead.
bityard 19 hours ago [-]
It's weird to me that cell phones in the classroom is even controversial. When I was in school, some kids had Walkmans, CD players, and game boys. You could bring them to school but they weren't allowed in the classroom without prior approval. In class, you were expected to pay attention to the teacher, even if you didn't want to. If you got caught with a device instead of listening, the teacher simply took it away until after class. If you kept bringing it in, you'd lose it until the end of the week, semester, or school year.
This doesn't seem to be a thing anymore, and there probably multiple sad reasons why.
yepitwas 18 hours ago [-]
To be very blunt: trashy parents with too much time on their hands will become enraged and raise a huge stink if their kid can't text them or answer their calls(!) while in class. So many will do this that schools just gave up.
That's why it's nice when states just make it a law. That shuts those people up (or at least forces them to go complain somewhere else, where they're more easily ignored and it takes more effort so they'll probably just give up).
(That's the middle-class schools—in really rough schools, teachers have to pick their battles because actual violence is on the table as a response, even among lower elementary kids, and admin's too busy dealing with things way more serious than some kid texting in class to back teachers up on small stuff like that)
ryandrake 12 hours ago [-]
I think as a general societal change, we need to stop catering to people simply because they "become enraged."
yepitwas 9 hours ago [-]
To be fair, there’s also a set who think their kid needs a phone on them at all times so they can make a call if there’s a school shooting. This doesn’t make any statistical sense as a justification (it might if more “school shootings” were indiscriminate mass shootings, but only a very tiny fraction are—not to downplay them, at all, but there are a couple statistical sieves here filtering for “a personal cell phone a student had saved a life” and the very first one is already filtering it down to almost nothing) but it’s a little easier to sympathize with the basic impulse, at least.
lqstuart 10 hours ago [-]
The fact that there’s even a debate about banning smart phones in classrooms tells you all you need to know. Cell phones were de facto banned in school in like 2002, not sure when it became the norm but it seems like a no brainer.
elric 4 hours ago [-]
To some extent this is one of the recommendations of the PISA 2022 report, but it comes with a big caveat:
> 4. Limit the distractions caused by using digital devices in class
>Students who spent up to one hour per day on digital devices for learning activities in school scored 14 points higher on average in mathematics than students who spent no time. Enforced cell phone bans in class may help reduce distractions but can also hinder the ability of students to self-regulate their use of the devices.
I don't think a simple blanket ban on smartphones in schools is likely to solve much.
nonethewiser 10 hours ago [-]
This is what I thought of immediately as well. I remember being shocked to learn that phones were allowed. Of course thats not going to work out well.
There are so many factors to the negative education outcomes but this policy is just obvious. I guess its actually the parents who insist on being able to reach their kid at any moment?
programjames 10 hours ago [-]
The core problem is actually very simple. Education studies do not measure what they claim to measure. When they say, "education outcomes improve when..." they usually mean the pass rate, i.e. they only measured a signal among the bottom 20% of students. When they say, "test scores improve when..." they are, at best, measuring up to the 90th percentile. When they say, "the white/black attainment gap," or "socioeconomic disadvantages," they're usually just fishing for funding money, and their study will not actually attempt to measure either of those things. From a review of the literature on No Child Left Behind (NCLB) in 2015:
> Only one study specifically examined the achievement gap for students from low socioeconomic backgrounds (Hampton & Gruenert, 2008) despite NCLB’s stated commitment to improving education for children from low-income families. African American students were often mentioned in studies of general student achievement but none of the reviewed studies focused specifically on the effects of NCLB for this subgroup. Again, this is a curious gap in the research considering the law’s emphasis on narrowing the Black-White achievement gap. Other groups of students underrepresented in the research on NCLB include gifted students, students with vision impairments, and English proficient minority students.
("A Review of the Empirical Literature on No Child Left Behind From 2001 to 2010", Husband & Hunt, 2015)
Everything you see going wrong is downstream of this. Yes, harmful ideologies have done a lot of damage to the education system, but it could easily survive this if we had actual signifiers of success.
runjake 19 hours ago [-]
- The Pandemic really set that generation of kids back, particularly kids who were in elementary during that time.
- Public school is essentially daycare. They try to integrate special education students more into the regular classrooms, but the teachers end up spending disproportionate time dealing with them and their behavioral issues, which hurts learning for regular students.
- I don't have strong, set in stone opinions about Common Core, but it's approach is certainly hard for parents trying to catch their own children at home. Eg. there is no emphasis on memorizing multiplication tables, but rather it's on learning rather esoteric and hard to remember (albeit valid) math algorithms.
- The teachers are generally poorly trained, poorly motivated, poorly paid, poorly educated, and poorly adapted to teaching students.
- Learning high school math has been enjoyable. I only took up to geometry in high school, but they are doing much more advanced math. I don't know any of it, and they barely do. So it's been fun learning it and then having to teach it to them in the matter of a day or two. Being a programmer has been exceptionally useful in that regard.
adrr 5 hours ago [-]
My oldest has done both common core math(kinder and 1st grade) and Singapore math(2nd through 5th). Both emphasize understanding over procedure and repetition. I do think in the long run it's more valuable since she has an understanding of concepts instead of just having things memorized. She never really her learned her multiplication tables as it was never required, her homework is real world word problems that challenge even me. I think it's much more valuable than rote memorization that traditional math education focused on. It's just a lot of work from both the teacher and the student. That's the challenge teaching these types of math educations over traditional math.
clipsy 10 hours ago [-]
If public school is essentially daycare, why did the pandemic set a generation of kids back?
e-khadem 9 hours ago [-]
It's a cascading failure. I live in another part of the world, and we have been witnessing the actual toll of the pandemic unravel in the past couple of years.
programjames 10 hours ago [-]
This was trending long before the pandemic.
softwaredoug 19 hours ago [-]
We’re also trying to force the dropout rate lower. So naturally test scores will decline.
Gone are the days you are held back. It’s a classic Goodharts Law problem. We’ve focused on one metric and lost site of the bigger picture.
States improving performance (Mississippi of all places) now are holding you back at certain milestones. IE at 3rd grade if you can’t read, 8th grade for math deficits, etc.
pfannkuchen 20 hours ago [-]
I know we’re not supposed to think about this, but is this controlled for region of origin? That has been changing, and so if that impacts school performance (schools designed by westerners, mind you, in a societal model designed by the same), then we would expect this to change as well right?
Nicook 19 hours ago [-]
It does. I went down a rabbit hole for this once and yes children of immigrants underperform for math and reading testing v immigrant groups. Can go dig up the .gov links assuming they didnt go away
orochimaaru 12 hours ago [-]
That’s a strange one. The highest performing public schools are generally where Chinese and Indian origin kids are a significant minority - I.e. around 20-30%.
4 hours ago [-]
jimt1234 18 hours ago [-]
Every immigrant I've known that's around my age has told me basically the same story. When they came to the US as a child, and got put into public school, they struggled with reading (they could barely speak English, much less read it), but they excelled at math. I've heard this from people born in China, Taiwan, Mexico, Iraq, Iran, Japan, etc.
fullshark 18 hours ago [-]
Is every immigrant you've known about your age someone you met through work / school and do you work in tech / on a STEM degree? If so then your sample is obviously biased.
tptacek 19 hours ago [-]
Is that signal, or is it just mean-reversion, because first-generation immigrant groups tend to have strong academic performance?
quotemstr 19 hours ago [-]
> not supposed to think about this
Not supposed to think about it according to whom? Who's telling you that? Why are you listening to him?
The US has some of the best public schools in the world. The US also tops the world on spending per student, especially in poorly performing areas. The education crisis disappears when you control for demographics.
It's right to notice that and remains right no matter how much pushback you get from people who've been pushing the same broken solutions for 50 years.
Congratulations for adopting an independent perspective here. We need more of you.
senordevnyc 18 hours ago [-]
Sounds like we need to spend even more on those “demographics” to get their performance up!
rootusrootus 11 hours ago [-]
Are you serious? Because I've heard it argued that this is one of the fundamental differences in the approach between left and right. The left thinks money can solve all problems if we just spend more of it in the right place. The right thinks there is a cultural problem to be solved.
I'm generally quite progressive but I am beginning to appreciate that the right may have a good argument.
dmbche 8 hours ago [-]
What do you think you mean with "cultural problem to be solved" that doesn't involve "putting money in the right place"?
3cKU 10 hours ago [-]
> The right thinks there is a cultural problem to be solved.
That's also the left. The right holds the differences are genetic, not likely to change, and the only problem to solve is how to keep them out of the country.
add-sub-mul-div 19 hours ago [-]
Net immigration has been trending down for a decade, but I'm not cynical enough to think we're not churning out some pretty smart kids of our own!
trynumber9 19 hours ago [-]
Perhaps, but the percentage of Americans foreign-born is at a 100 year high. And the percentage of under 18s who have a foreign-born parent is at an all-time high (25.6% of students, the previous peak was 21.6% in 1920).
And if their children are underperforming in schools it would be important to know.
Simulacra 20 hours ago [-]
It depends, is this a federal problem, or a local problem? Because I don't see the federal department of education has really done anything to improve scores. So this may be a local issue, and of local resources.
bluGill 19 hours ago [-]
There are very large regional effects. We talk about Finland's scores being great, but I have no idea what France's scores are... We should compare US scores to all of the EU if we want to fair comparison.
How can you prove that empirically? What is your methodology for controlling for environmental factors in making that assertion, including factors associated with access to resources, tutors, having a full belly every morning, and not being constantly flooded with stress hormones as a result of grappling with the daily reality of living in poverty?
hx8 19 hours ago [-]
I don't want to come off as supporting the grandparent comment, but ultimately there is at least some degree of heritability of IQ [0]. US IQ also seemed to have peaked in the 1990s [1].
It's quite a leap to claim that immigration is the cause of the US IQ decline. The best explanations seem to be that it's environmental [2]. The general decline in IQ is impacting several countries.
IQ testing is flawed at its core, and engaging with it is akin to phrenology.
ninetyninenine 8 hours ago [-]
IQ is one of the most heavily studied constructs in psychology. Modern IQ tests have over a century of development behind them, starting with Binet and refined through versions like the WAIS-IV and Stanford–Binet. They have high test–retest reliability, meaning a person’s score tends to be stable unless there’s brain injury, illness, or some major change. Scores correlate strongly with academic performance, job performance in cognitively demanding roles, and even certain life outcomes like income, health behaviors, and longevity. There’s also a body of neuroscience work showing links between IQ and measures like processing speed, working memory, and brain connectivity.
The “IQ is BS” meme mostly comes from misunderstandings and misuse. People often assume IQ is meant to measure all kinds of intelligence when it really focuses on certain reasoning and problem-solving skills. Early tests had cultural biases, and while modern versions address this better, that history sticks. It’s also been used for discriminatory purposes, which has left a bad taste even when the measurement itself is valid. Critics are right that IQ doesn’t capture creativity, emotional intelligence, or practical skills—but psychologists never claimed it did.
In short, IQ is a valid and reliable measure for a specific set of cognitive abilities. It’s not the whole story of intelligence, but dismissing it outright ignores a large and consistent body of evidence.
dmbche 7 hours ago [-]
No, and your chatgpt written response is uninspired (edit: and contradicts itself multiple times!). Sadly, you are not as smart as you fantasize.
Also, that replication crisis, that was in psychology, was it?
ninetyninenine 6 hours ago [-]
It wasn't written by chatGPT — I myself like to use dashes. There are no contradictions and I never mentioned anything personal. Going to personal insults and remarks is a strategy for people who have no logical argument so they resort to alternatives.
The replication crisis doesn't apply. IQ is one of the most studied and replicated statistics in psychology. IQ IS in fact the exception to the replication crisis. Your beliefs are a myth.
tptacek 19 hours ago [-]
Heritability != DNA.
quotemstr 18 hours ago [-]
Do you expect embryo selection startups to fail? Come on. I know you're smart enough to have heard about GWAS.
I'll bet you 3:1 odds embryo selection works. If you're serious about your anti-hereditarian position, take me up on my offer.
tptacek 17 hours ago [-]
I think embryo selection companies, to the extent they don't actually result in people selecting for embryos with autism, are brilliant products. They're "magician's choice" setups: embryo selection promises single-to-low-double-digit improvements in metrics that aren't fully evaluable for over a decade after the product is paid for, on metrics with huge variability and low test-test reliability. The people paying for the products are generally upper-income and already predisposed to invest in educational achievement, which is the actual outcome the customers care about to begin with. It's a can't-lose proposition for the vendors.
So, no, of course I'm not going to take you up on that bet. It's like betting against Bitcoin. I think Bitcoin is a farce but I'm not dumb enough to short it.
I'm not an "anti-heriditarian". I think there's probably a lot of value, long term, in embryo selection for things like disease avoidance. I also believe there's natural variability in cognitive ability; I don't believe all people are "blank slates"; that's a caricature (or, if you like, a deliberate wrong-footing of people who reflexively reject psychometrics and genetics for ideological reasons) of the actual concern I have.
Finally, I don't know what anything you said has to do with what I said. I said, very simply, "heritability != DNA". That's an objective, positive claim. Was this bet your attempt at rebutting it?
quotemstr 17 hours ago [-]
It's interesting: to the extent the orthodox position acknowledges that genetically mediated trait inheritance exists, it cases it in terms of "disease" and "treatment". It's morally wrong to select an embryo for height, but acceptable, even imperative, to use genetics to screen for "shortism".
I'm sure you've read Gwern's essay on polygenic trait inheritance. I'm not sure repeating the literature would be productive here. We have every reason to believe that embryo selection and genetic engineering more generally won't just "cure disease" but make us taller, smarter, more beautiful, and longer lived -- and there's nothing wrong with that.
Of course there's a lot of variability. At some point technology will improve to the point that denying the effect exists will seem ridiculous, although I'm sure plenty will try.
I will say, though, that downplaying trait inheritance and the way genetics is the mechanism for this inheritance produces models that don't predict reality nearly as well as models that incorporate hereditary via genetics, and especially when it comes to education, we're throwing public money down the toilet as long as we make policy using inaccurate models.
tptacek 17 hours ago [-]
I have no idea what the first paragraph you wrote means. I don't have a moral issue with embryo selection. Select them for eye color for all I care.
I don't know what any of the rest of this has to do with what I said. I ask again: are you writing all this by way of declaring that "heritability == DNA"? That's a straightforward discussion we can have. Why avoid it?
kasey_junk 17 hours ago [-]
What is the success criteria of the bet?
tptacek 17 hours ago [-]
I'm just happy for an opportunity to rattle off my embryo-selection rant! :)
nyc_data_geek1 19 hours ago [-]
You know what else is heritable? Wealth, the possession of which tends to help with standardized test scores.
peterfirefly 18 hours ago [-]
That causality goes in the other direction.
Wealthier parents tend to be smarter (that's how they got wealthy or managed to keep inherited wealth) and tend to have smarter kids... who then tend to up on the wealthier side of the spectrum.
It's very unfair. It's also very real. Your fantasy is not real.
dmbche 8 hours ago [-]
Capital agregates. The ruch don't make smart kids - smarts are not genetic.
Your fantasy is not real.
medvezhenok 19 hours ago [-]
Whether its genetic or environmental doesn't matter here.
Existence of a correlation is enough reason to break down any analyses by demographic data to have a clearer picture of what's going on. That's just basic data science.
19 hours ago [-]
sp1nningaway 19 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
tptacek 19 hours ago [-]
The thing to do when this happens is to flag the comment, and, if you think it's really bad, mail hn@ycombinator.com. Writing about how the author is a "dumb asshole" is actually counterproductive; please don't do that!
sp1nningaway 19 hours ago [-]
I probably would have just flagged and moved on, but I don't have an enough karma and at the time of my reply I didn't see anyone pushing back against the parent effectively. The parent got flagged and is now dead so the point is moot, but thank you for your level-headed response to me and to others elsewhere in the thread!
ninetyninenine 8 hours ago [-]
No I'm just voted down. Not flagged. You were voted down as well because your response is against the rules and rude.
What I said got you angry. But I am stating a factual truth and opinion. You need to learn how to respect other peoples opinion, because your anger and disillusionment is what causes the same thing as censorship.
The truth hurts, but you can't restrict it just because it hurts.
lagniappe 19 hours ago [-]
Say it with your chest: the comment is implying USA has more immigrants, and the immigrants arriving have lower outcomes on IQ related tasks.
bluGill 19 hours ago [-]
Not just immigrants (though that is likely what was intended). It could also imply non-immigrants with lower IQ are having more babies.
tptacek 11 hours ago [-]
There is in fact not good evidence for IQ being "highly linked to genetics".
exoverito 9 hours ago [-]
It still amazes me that people believe that intelligence has no link to genetics. Down's syndrome is not simply a social construct, Trisomy 21 is a genetic disorder from a third copy of chromosome 21, distorting gene dosages and resulting developmental pathways. Nearly all phenotypes are a mixture of genetics and environment, yet some traits have a much higher degree of heritability. For example, height has a heritability of 60 to 80%, once you control for sufficient nutrition it's almost entirely due to genes.
The most elegant proof of IQ being linked to genetics:
The same person taking an IQ test twice has mean correlation of 0.85 or above in their scores.
Identical twins reared together: 0.86
Identical twins reared apart: 0.76
Biological parent and child: 0.42
Adoptive parent and child: 0.19
And of course, any two random people will have a correlation close to 0.
If you do not believe this, then I would have to hypothesize you are succumbing to motivated reasoning out of a deeper value system placing equality above all other values. This is a well known pattern of belief amongst leftists, where they think humans are infinitely malleable blank slates and all inequalities can be rectified given enough social engineering. They deny objective group differences because they want a utopia where everyone is equal. This is clearly unrealistic, but furthermore it contradicts their value of diversity, where if people are diverse, then you would expect variation in all traits, intelligence included.
legacynl 1 hours ago [-]
> The most elegant proof of IQ being linked to genetics:
>
> The same person taking an IQ test twice has mean correlation of 0.85 or above in their scores. Identical twins reared together: 0.86 Identical twins reared apart: 0.76 Biological parent and child: 0.42 Adoptive parent and child: 0.19 And of course, any two random people will have a correlation close to 0.
How is this proof of IQ being linked to genetics if adoptive parents can have 1/2 of the correlation that identical twins have? I think this proves that genetics only has a minor part, and upbringing/environment seems to be the most important factor.
tptacek 9 hours ago [-]
I'm not a blank-slateist or an anti-hereditarian, as someone else claimed earlier today. I understand that cognitive disabilities are often causally --- mechanistically understood --- genetic.
But leaving aside things like Trisomy 21, your evidence here is twin study heritability. Heritability is not genetic determinism; it's almost a category error to claim otherwise, since "heritability" is really just a way of framing the question of whether something is genetically determined --- you still have to answer the question! There's a whole big research field controversy about this, "missing heritability", exploring (in part) why molecular genetics results, especially when corrected for things like within-family bias, are returning such lower heritability estimates than classic twin studies.
I do not believe that any random child selected at birth has an equivalent potential to win a Fields Medal, given the optimal environment to do that in. But the "hard truth nobody wants to face", from the parent commenter, is subtextually about race --- and there the evidence is a wreck; extraordinarily unlikely to bear any fruit.
sksinx 9 hours ago [-]
> and there the evidence is a wreck; extraordinarily unlikely to bear any fruit
Is there any new reading here? I used to follow this stuff much more closely a decade ago, but came to the conclusion most scientists will go to great lengths to avoid saying some races (if they don’t barrage you with pedantry regarding what race is) are on average different in some axis than others. There were a few out there who were able to say the politically incorrect thing only because objective science was strongly in their favor, but they still had the full force of the consensus academia coming down on them.
I lost interest when, much like history, it became obvious the field was too political for any real truth to be found. Maybe in 100 years or so.
tptacek 8 hours ago [-]
This is very actively studied, and the idea that it's somehow suppressed in the academy is another pervasive Internet myth --- put it on the shelf alongside "every employer would use IQ tests to hire but they're illegal" (they most certainly are not).
I think what some people are noticing is that there aren't splashy results to confirm, like, The Bell Curve. Yeah, that's because The Bell Curve was really dumb; it's from the phlogiston era of this science.
sksinx 8 hours ago [-]
> it's from the phlogiston era of this science.
I’ll try again in 100 years :)
dmbche 8 hours ago [-]
Intelligence is not a defined measurable trait
But keep fantasizing you're born in the best race in the world, lucky you
skellington 9 hours ago [-]
You're right. It's the only human trait that has no genetic link. Convenient. That's why dogs and humans also have equal IQs.
mushroomba 19 hours ago [-]
Tabula Rasa remains the axiom upon which the entire post-war world is founded. Regardless of its truth, to question it is to question this world's fundamental belief. To speak against it is to speak against existence itself.
The emperor's robes are fine indeed.
dmbche 8 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
tptacek 19 hours ago [-]
Regardless of the colorability of your argument, you're responsible for how it hits and shapes the thread, and whether you intended to or not, you led off with a a clause that comes across "tee-hee aren't I edgy", which makes it difficult to read good faith into the rest of the comment. If you're writing something that could be misread as a step into a racewar thread, longstanding HN norms (let me know if you need admin cites) put the onus on you to write carefully so you won't be misread, and, in some cases, there's no way to effectively prevent those misreadings and you simply should not write the comment.
BJones12 18 hours ago [-]
Or you could just not imply that people are racist when they want to discuss the truth.
pfannkuchen 18 hours ago [-]
I don’t see where race comes in, necessarily.
We just need to compare with country of origin performance. If a family relocates from a place with low scores to a place with high scores, can you explain why you think we would expect their scores to rapidly increase to match the new place? I can think of many factors that would work against this that have nothing to do with race or genetics.
If the study is not controlled for this, then the education system at large may not have the kind of problem we would think about if we ignored this aspect. That seems pretty important to the discussion, I think?
tptacek 17 hours ago [-]
I don't think it necessarily does come in! I just think you have to be careful about this stuff, and the comment you wrote wasn't careful. I wouldn't care, except it spawned a gnarly thread --- that thread is what I noticed first, not anything you wrote.
pfannkuchen 17 hours ago [-]
For future reference, and as an example, how would you recommend I rephrase my comment to preclude gnarlification?
4 hours ago [-]
tptacek 17 hours ago [-]
I think if you literally just struck the first clause, you'd have a fine comment. I'm not the boss of you, though!
EnPissant 11 hours ago [-]
This is just a long-winded way of calling them racist and threatening them with a ban.
cosmic_cheese 19 hours ago [-]
Education in the US as a whole may be on the decline, but for math specifically I’m not sure that we ever figured out teaching methodologies that work for all children. Every math teacher I’ve ever had was very theory-minded and could barely understand students who weren’t — those who learn through practical example and hands-on activity for instance usually get left in the dust.
Reading teaching on the other hand was for the most part figured out a long time ago but trendy experimental methods keep getting cycled regardless.
hbosch 13 hours ago [-]
>I’m not sure that we ever figured out teaching methodologies that work for all children.
This is a fundamental problem with all learning: it's difficult to get entire group to do something the same way with equal effectiveness... that being said, teaching methods are evolving and it's really on the school system to embrace those changes. My kids are young, and their school teaches math with the Singapore Math system and literacy with the UFLI program. They have both been highly effective.
Their class sizes are also 12:1 students:teacher ratio, and 6:1 in Pre-K/Kindergarten. So that's also probably important.
lif 8 hours ago [-]
"Their class sizes are also 12:1 students:teacher ratio, and 6:1 in Pre-K/Kindergarten. So that's also probably important."
I don't see how somebody can learn when they're missing school so much. Math and reading require so much repetition and if you're not in school, you're not getting that time to sit down and do the exercises required to ingrain these topics. It doesn't even matter how a school teaches if the student isn't in class. They're just not going to retain things well.
Retric 7 hours ago [-]
I think you’re overestimating how much actual education takes place each day. Most kids can catch up fine on double the workload after some extended break even without in class lectures. Just abstractly the extreme example is someone skipping a full grade, but consider the huge middle ground between that and needing to be in class essentially every single day.
That said a significant fraction of kids really do need all the help they can get, but catering to them means leaving a lot of slack in the schedule.
tyoma 7 hours ago [-]
Chronic absenteeism is a huge misnomer. The statistic covers both excused and unexcused absences.
The reason it’s since covid up is because (more) parents stopped sending their kids to school when they are sick.
Last year I got a semi-threatening letter from the district for “chronic absenteeism” because I didn’t want to send a sick child to school. To their defense, they did say that the state (California) requires them to send the letter.
Glyptodon 10 hours ago [-]
Not limiting myself to just high schools:
Elephant in the room in my state is definitely chronic absence. Depending on source it's when student misses something like 15+ or 20+ school days a school year. More affluent areas have numbers 15% and lower. Less affluent ones it can be well above 50%. And nobody is doing anything.
Test scores substantially mirror this bifurcation.
It is substantially worsened by charter and voucher schools. Which interact with the whole mess in complex and negative ways.
benmw333 12 hours ago [-]
When I think of all my teachers I had throughout K-12 public school, not one of them stands out as having meaningfully impacted my life.
In fact I would argue many of them were a net negative to my learning achievements (or lack thereof).
So yeah, defund public schools as much as possible. That will get my vote.
chrisco255 11 hours ago [-]
That's unfortunate, I had at least 6 or 7 I could point to from that time that were outstanding teachers who instilled passion into their subject.
exoverito 9 hours ago [-]
I had a number of good teachers at the various public schools I attended, though the best ones were at a private school.
Instead of defunding, we should institute a voucher system where parents can choose between a local public school if it's good, charter schools, or towards a private school tuition and pay the difference.
mherkender 9 hours ago [-]
I guess your teachers failed you, since that's a hasty generalization (your experience isn't universal) and a non sequitur (defunding public schools wouldn't address the problem of poor schooling).
ipnon 7 hours ago [-]
It's hard to talk about public education on HN because so many people posting here live in exclusive and expensive Bay Area communities with some of the best public schools in the world.
01HNNWZ0MV43FF 12 hours ago [-]
"America is bad and should be destroyed without regard to the people living there"
The worst leftists (handshake) the worst right wingers
cindyllm 11 hours ago [-]
[dead]
lan321 2 hours ago [-]
Outside of the US but past the daycare, covid, etc issues that have been mentioned everywhere I see a focus on money making. Highschoolers are still kids but I feel the new generation is more aware of the fact that the end goal is making as much money as possible, so if they feel like learning something they lean more towards reading/watching about investing/hustling which doesn't translate well into academia.
drivebyhooting 19 hours ago [-]
Just looking at the picture triggered me. Why are the students sitting in groups and cutting paper with scissors?
Edit: since it may not have been clear from the video, this is my interpretation:
* in the Japanese math class the teacher teaches at the board and then walks around the class to look at the students. Students are not sitting in large groups.
* in the American class the teacher spends practically 0 time at the blackboard, the students sit in large groups, the teacher spends most of the time with one or two groups.
toshinoriyagi 19 hours ago [-]
What is the video supposed to suggest? I think it's extremely hard to conclude anything from a plot of the teacher's position over time throughout the classroom.
Is staying at the front a sign that the teacher is lazy and not helping students? Or is it that the students are competent enough without aid? That could be good if it indicates your students have been taught well enough to master the material. But it could also be bad, indicating your school does not offer enough incremental challenge, and students who are beyond their current level, but not high enough for the next level (honors or whatever), never reach their full potential.
There's far too many uncontrolled variables here. Also, it seems the wikipedia-on-ipfs page for Stigler is down.
elric 4 hours ago [-]
Ignoring your huge generalisations based on one silly picture and a bunch of Asian clichés, I think you have a point when it comes to the group thing.
When I was in school, most work & learning happened on the individual level. Sometimes in pairs, where we would have to check each other's answers. But from what I see among my younger relatives and friends with children, there's a lot of group learning going on these days. Groups of five doing all kinds of projects in pretty much any class on any subject. Maybe it's fun to collectively build a diorama of ancient rome for history class, but I doubt you'll improve your maths skills much in this way.
Is this a consequence of a teacher shortage? Are kids in these groups supposed to help other kids? Are they supposed to learn cooperating with (or leeching off) others, at the cost of learning useful skills for themselves?
chrisco255 11 hours ago [-]
If it's not clear, arts and crafts sessions are occasionally included in classroom material, especially at younger ages. A single picture is not indicative of how most classrooms operate, or even how this particular classroom operates most of the time. It looks like a quick group project for a basic presentation on some subject matter.
toast0 12 hours ago [-]
> Why are the students sitting in groups and cutting paper with scissors?
Because paper cutters are too easy to disassemble as re-use as a shiv machete? And anyway, it's pretty hard to make cloudy curves with a paper cutter.
> in the American class the teacher spends practically 0 time at the blackboard, the students sit in large groups, the teacher spends most of the time with one or two groups.
Three or four students is a large group?
bluGill 19 hours ago [-]
When someone links to a video I assuming that the video was heavily edited and cherry picked to show whatever point they want. I'm not wrong often enough to bother clicking on yours.
I find it interesting that James W Stigler doesn't even have a wikipedia page. I'm not sure what that means, but he somehow isn't very notable despite having written popular books and being a university professor. (or he is so controversial that they can't agree on one - which is a sign to not take him too seriously)
arjie 12 hours ago [-]
Well, someone has to write the page. They don't self-manifest. The draft is currently here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Draft:James_W._Stigler but was rejected for mainspace because it was written too promotionally. It will take some work, but he looks to be notable enough to deserve the article.
Eddy_Viscosity2 19 hours ago [-]
I think this is because Asian governments want their populations to more educated and American governments want their populations to be less educated.
For the former I'd guess its because they have very strong control on people's behaviors so they just want them more capable to innovate, grow economy, etc.
For the latter I'd guess its because they fear a more educated population will be harder to manipulate and hence erode government power.
koolba 19 hours ago [-]
> I think this is because Asian governments want their populations to more educated and American governments want their populations to be less educated.
On the American side it’s not that they want people to be less educated. It’s the adversarial system of education being run by people whose interests are not aligned with students excelling.
Teacher’s unions, which predominantly exist in the public school system, are not in the business of educating children. They’re in the business of raising costs (their salaries and benefits) and lowering requirements (the work they actually have to do). They’re against measuring progress. They’re against firing for lack of progress.
Compare that to a private system where you only stay employed if you’re actually doing a good job of educating kids. There’s also the advantage of private schools being able to fire their students, but that’s more of an anti-disruption thing.
Eddy_Viscosity2 18 hours ago [-]
It's easy to blame the teachers unions, but if their goal was to only raise their own salaries and benefits, they are doing a very poor job at it. Teachers do not get paid well. They also tend to get paid more at the elite private schools. So if you want to compare, then you would be advocating for public schools to match private school salaries.
While not always the case, "measuring progress" makes things worse because they tried this and what you get is standardized tests and teachers teaching to the test (Goodhart's law). Most (not all, there are crap teachers out there) are doing their best despite the rules imposed on them by local schoolboards (which are often a shitshow), and by curriculum mandates which they have no say in. And when given too large classes and next to no resources or support, they are then blamed when the kids don't prosper in that environment. There's grade inflation also, this happens at private schools too. Which teacher is more likely to get fired/disciplined; one who fails a lot of students and hardly ever gives and A, or one that hands out A's like candy and the worst non-performing students get a maybe C- (brought up to a C or C+, once the parents come in to complain to administration).
koolba 17 hours ago [-]
> It's easy to blame the teachers unions, but if their goal was to only raise their own salaries and benefits, they are doing a very poor job at it.
They do a pretty good job at it when you factor in long term pensions and health care.
> Teachers do not get paid well.
Teachers get paid too much. They create artificial barriers like requiring multiple years of certifications to purposefully limit the pool of competition. Most teachers unions are closed shops that mandate membership.
> They also tend to get paid more at the elite private schools. So if you want to compare, then you would be advocating for public schools to match private school salaries.
If I could waive a wand to immediately increase public teacher’s salaries by 25% in exchange for the elimination of all tenure (which does not exist at K-12 private schools), I would do it immediately.
> While not always the case, "measuring progress" makes things worse because they tried this and what you get is standardized tests and teachers teaching to the test (Goodhart's law).
There’s plenty of objective things to measure in math and science. If little Johnny can’t do basic arithmetic or solve 3x+2=11, you can’t fake that during an exam.
At least with teaching to the test, the kids learned the material on the test.
If you don’t measure things, you will not improve it. And teachers unions are adamantly against measuring things. Because they know it can and will be used against them. It’s an inherent conflict of interest.
teachrdan 11 hours ago [-]
> They do a pretty good job at it when you factor in long term pensions and health care.
They only get good pensions and health care because school districts refuse to give them better salaries instead. And good health care (really, health insurance) is crucial because health care costs can obviously bankrupt you in America.
> They create artificial barriers like requiring multiple years of certifications to purposefully limit the pool of competition
How is requiring the equivalent of a master's degree an "artificial barrier"? Surely, new teachers should have some experience and theoretical background before standing in front of 30-100+ students and being responsible for their education?
Florida passed a law making it possible for veterans to teach without even having a bachelor's degree. Does that sound like a good idea to you? Would requiring even a bachelor's degree be an "artificial barrier" in your opinion?
I'm not as familiar with the US, but Australia moved from requiring teachers to complete a 1-year graduate diploma, to a 2-year master of education. This is effectively doubling the commitment for someone to transfer into teaching from another field.
Requiring anything at all is by definition an artificial barrier. Some are justified and some are not. In this case, I question whether a longer education necessarily benefits students.
braincat31415 8 hours ago [-]
An average teacher salary in Chicago projected in their new contract is $110,000, plus pensions and heathcare on top of that. What better salary do you have in mind? An average individual salary in Chicago is about 45k.
They are still wining about this number and go on strikes pretty much every other year.
veqq 11 hours ago [-]
Compare teacher salaries to the overall population's. They're paid very well.
teachrdan 12 hours ago [-]
> Teacher’s unions, which predominantly exist in the public school system, are not in the business of educating children
I'm always surprised and disappointed to see such lazy thinking on HN. If teachers' unions were responsible for poor educational outcomes, you would see an inverse relationship between strong teachers' unions and K-12 rankings.
But New Jersey and Massachusetts consistently rank in the top 2 K-12 rankings in the US. And they have ~100% union density among K-12 public school teachers!
Let's test the rest of your little theory. If you believe that pesky teachers' unions are responsible for poor outcomes, then surely states with less teacher's union density and union power will be the epitome of strong K-12 outcomes.
But who ranks at the bottom? New Mexico at #50, Alaska at #49, Oklahoma at #48...
You might, at this point, sensibly say that's due to residents having less money and other disadvantages. But at that point you have to admit that teachers' unions have no correlation to K-12 outcomes.
I'm not smart enough to understand what are the conclusions of the patterns observed in the video.
avs733 18 hours ago [-]
> Just looking at the picture triggered me. Why are the students sitting in groups and cutting paper with scissors?
So, I'm going to flag this as a perfect example of legibility vs. legitimacy[0]. You, probably AP's writers, and much of the public perceive learning as ocurring in a certain way. That isn't the way that 'the best' learning occurs, its the way that most closely resembles where we think learning occurs. Going further, it is much easier to interpret a lecture hall as a learning activity because it is easy to perceive what is being 'learned'. You sort of say it yourself. you are asking a why question about what is being learned - it is less legibile - and that is leveraged into an inference that less is being learned - i.e., it is less legitimate.
The problem is that the comparison you are making is false - but deeply embedded in our minds. Students *feel* like they learn more in lectures than in 'active learning' classes.However, when their actual knowledge is tested the oppostie is actually true. The students perception and actual learning are at odds and mediated by the environment[1]. It is, again, easy to sit in a lecture and overstate (i.e., feel like) you're learning because you are watching someone who is an expert talk about something. No metacognitive monitoring is required on the student's part. In contrast, it is really easy to perceive yourself as struggling in a class where your learning process and your failures in that process become visible. Students are taught to view failures/wrong answers as bad - so they view their process of learning as evidence of not learning.
Pedantically, no one in the picture you reference is cutting paper with scissors. There are scissors on the table, no one is cutting. You made an inference - inferences are important but difficult to test. They are working in groups to learn with peers (a science based best practice). I don't know exactly but I can infer it is related to math, possible learning to calculate area and estimate. Making that tangible, creating and measuring simple then more complex shapes helps them learn - its not arts and crafts. It leads to better conceptual understanding than an abstract explanation.
It may look different, but my hobby horse problem with US education is that everyone's vibes are treated as equivalent to actual scientific evidence. We regularly crator efforts to fix these problems simply because they don't look like the school that the parents went to. We had one parent try and ban school provided laptops (which are used for 20minutes / week) from my daughter's preK class because her kids are zero screen time. I can't imagine a parent in Japan or China even trying that.
As a CODA - measuring learning is shockingly hard. As an analogy, it is not deterministic it is quantum. Data tells us that if I ask demographic questions before a test, certain groups score lower than if I ask them at the end. If I ask a math question using a realistic scenario, students show higher conceptual understanding than if I ask them a fully abstracted question. If a student is hungry or tired that day, they will score lower. None of those are measuring the latent construct (e.g., math ability) that we need to estimate, even if it is a high variability measure.
drivebyhooting 18 hours ago [-]
They are cutting paper. You can see scraps of paper on the desk.
Of course “active” learning is better than passively sitting in a lecture. But these kids are not learning. They’re sitting in a group with scissors and markers making a X-y coordinate graph.
Your long diatribe fails to recognize the obvious: that middle school math class has turned into an art and hand labor class / day care.
ashton314 11 hours ago [-]
Some amount of this has got to be due to Covid. I used to tutor a middle school boy, and he was probably two years behind where he should have been. Because of this, he was lacking the foundation that he needed to progress. It was so bad.
adrr 6 hours ago [-]
Tiktok also gained popularity the same time as covid. Someone needs to do a study on screen time over the last 5 years for school age children. We do know screen time is correlated to poor academic performance.
EcommerceFlow 19 hours ago [-]
Unless this accounts for the change in population demographics, it's a pointless study, or are we still pretending that doesn't exist at a macro level?
chabons 19 hours ago [-]
I'm missing something. What change in demographics are we talking about, and why would that influence math results?
throwway120385 19 hours ago [-]
I don't intend this as a dig against Spanish-speaking students. But many school systems in the US have tons of Spanish-speaking students who know very little English. But all of the homework, readings, and classroom instruction are given in English. If you don't know the language of instruction then it puts you at an immediate disadvantage. This might be what they're referring to.
chabons 18 hours ago [-]
Intuitively, I can understand that English Second Language students would struggle in classes other than English, but are the demographics really shifting enough to explain the drop in attainment shown in the article?
The above shows the share of "Non-Hispanic White alone" children (who I'll assume speak English as a first language) going from 52% to 48% from 2015-2024, and the percentage of "Children who speak a language other than English at home" staying flat at 22% from 2013-2023. From 2015-2024, math attainment goes from 62% to 55%.
At a glance, it would seem that the shift in math attainment cannot be explained by demographics/language alone.
Brybry 2 hours ago [-]
The NAEP site has performance by student group sections. It includes breakdowns for Hispanic and English/non-English learners and includes a section on demographic changes (ctrl+f Group Population Percentages).
Hispanic population has shifted (+3-4%/report) and English learners have shifted (1-3%/report). [Note that reports have variable number (~2-5) of years between them]
English learner scores went up (or stayed the same) and non-English learner scores went down.
The big caveat of course that the English learner average score is still much lower than the non-English learner so if that population increased enough it still drags down the average. (Click the English learners to see their scores or see the National Student Group Score Distributions section for graphs that make this apparent).
But it has to be more complicated than "the English-learning Hispanic population increased" because if you look within racial groups: all groups except Asian are down within their own group.
Or, for example, girls' scores are down more than boys' scores even though girls' scores are still better than boys' on average in Reading (but worse in Math).
I think it's probably multiple factors all adding together.
For example, % of public charters has increased but public charter schools have worse scores than public non-charter. % of economically disadvantaged has increased and economically disadvantaged students have worse scores than those not. % of students with disabilities has increased and students with disabilities have worse scores than those without.
The weirdest thing to me is how the population statistics are different between reading and math. From 2019->2024 the reported Hispanic 12th Grade population shifted 3% for Reading but only 1% for Math?
cpursley 18 hours ago [-]
Even second generation Latin American folks who speak English fine often perform poorly. It's cultural but we're not supposed to talk about it. Saw a lot of it first hand via the family business; it's truly bewildering and even disheartening.
saagarjha 11 hours ago [-]
> It's cultural
How do you know?
chrisco255 11 hours ago [-]
Florida has a huge hispanic population but is ranked #2 in K12 education rankings. Kids are actually remarkably fast at picking up on English even if they were born and raised in Spanish speaking homes or in Spanish speaking countries.
nielsbot 19 hours ago [-]
Curious what percentage of school districts fall into this purported category. And is that number continually increasing? Share some data on this please.
intalentive 19 hours ago [-]
Using a metric like SAT math scores, the demographic breakdown is: Asian > White > Hispanic > Black.
The youth population is becoming less White and more Hispanic, therefore we should expect lower math scores.
medvezhenok 19 hours ago [-]
Yup, more article slop without accounting for demographic data.
Same with the constant drumbeat of "Americans are getting shorter".
elric 4 hours ago [-]
Looking at the PISA 2022 results (2022 is the most recent report, PISA is the Programme for International Student Assessment), this is clearly a way bigger problem than just the US. Many Western countries have a downward trend in maths, reading, and science scores, including Canada, France, the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, ...
Scores for reading & science had actually been trending upwards in the US, while maths has been trending downwards for some 20 years.
Without bonus points, DEI-hires at the school would not survive; these racist school districts need a way to ensure these lousy teachers create entire generations of people hostile to learning! The whole system needs to have an emergency cut over to vouchers.. $27k/year/pupil in NYS to get a teacher that looks like me but is functionally illiterate.
These public teachers aren't heroes, they are actively keeping us behind with their pro-union/anti-student behaviors.
3 hours ago [-]
oxag3n 16 hours ago [-]
Most of my friends have no idea what math and reading curriculum is used in their kids public schools.
It's different with friends whose kids attend private schools - most knew it was Singapore Math.
You may like it or not - but it requires parent effort to make sure your child uses their most valuable time to learn something.
ropable 5 hours ago [-]
Accepting the premise, this outsider's view of the US is that there seems to be an increasing reluctance to fund "public" goods (e.g. infrastructure, population healthcare, etc) of which public education is one such service. Is this decreasing investment an actual thing, and could it (in aggregate) cause an overall drop in achievement?
btown 7 hours ago [-]
This 2019 article about how reading strategies have shifted in recent decades away from phonics to "three cueing" - which attempts to incentivize reading by encouraging students to interpolate words they don't understand from context, but may lead to bad practices that skip over the ability to recognize words in isolation - may be related to this trend.
> For Goodman, accurate word recognition was not necessarily the goal of reading. The goal was to comprehend text.8 If the sentences were making sense, the reader must be getting the words right, or right enough. These ideas soon became the foundation for how reading was taught in many schools.
> The whole language movement of the late 20th century was perhaps the zenith of the anti-phonics argument.26 Phonics instruction was seen as tedious, time-consuming and ultimately unnecessary. Why? Because — according to the three-cueing theory — readers can use other, more reliable cues to figure out what the words say.27
> "To our surprise, all of our research results pointed in the opposite direction," Stanovich wrote. "It was the poorer readers, not the more skilled readers, who were more reliant on context to facilitate word recognition."13
> The skilled readers could instantly recognize words without relying on context. Other researchers have confirmed these findings with similar experiments. It turns out that the ability to read words in isolation quickly and accurately is the hallmark of being a skilled reader. This is now one of the most consistent and well-replicated findings in all of reading research.14
It's interesting to wonder whether LLMs may struggle with similar issues - while they can intuit a distribution over held-out tokens from context, they famously can't count the number of r's in "strawberry" because they don't have a concept of letters.
Are we holding our LLMs back much the way we are holding back students - or are we holding back students much the same way we're holding back our LLMs?
teekert 5 hours ago [-]
Maybe 6 hours of tiktok a day is not giving the brain the rest it needs to process and store any learned skills?
philip1209 10 hours ago [-]
Cal Newport talked on his podcast this week about declining IQs, too - a reversal of a decades-long trend:
He cites and directionally agrees with the decline of reading as the cause.
10 hours ago [-]
visarga 4 hours ago [-]
It's because they don't allow GPT in exams. Students are accustomed to using it.
tarkin2 6 hours ago [-]
It's consuming rather than creating, it's products aimed at sating short attention spans, it's superficial social media rather than books, it's instant answers from LLM rather than thinking through. We created this, and its fallout throughout society and politics. Yet we refuse to fess up.
Nearly half of kids aren’t being raised with their parents in the home. This was rare 50 years ago, and all the research shows that home dynamics matters the most.
Education spending has shot up per student because people think it will solve cultural ills.
xyst 10 hours ago [-]
I wonder why parents are not in the home. Could it be a rising cost of living far outpacing the wage increases? Decades of wage stagnation? Decades of boomers ripping up our safety nets? Decades of Reaganomics that have eroded trust in our government?
We have decades of evidence yet these types of comments still pop up.
Why aReNt PaReNts HomE eNoUgH? Are they stupid??
ihsw 11 hours ago [-]
It's worse than that, the only authority figure in most kids' lives are women -- there are no male authority figures for over 80% of their upbringing between the ages of 0-18 years old, and most years it is 100%.
8 hours ago [-]
jjice 20 hours ago [-]
Curious what the causes are and how their weighted. Seems like it'd be too complex to actually figure out what's causing the most damage, but it's very interesting. There are so many factors I'd argue are probably negatives:
- Always online phone access (and everything that comes with it)
- Generative AI for doing assignments without thought
- The COVID year or two that they had to learn from home couldn't have helped develop good habits (I know it would've for me)
Kapura 19 hours ago [-]
early on in the bush (ii) administration, they passed a bill called "no child left behind" that would cut funding from schools that couldn't achieve desired standardized test scores.
while this may seem to align incentives, in reality a school that has struggling students needs MORE resources, not less.
the outcome, in reality, is an extreme desire to "teach to the test," where developing actual skills is secondary to learning the structure of test problems and how to answer them correctly enough to keep the school from being obliterated.
teachers are one of the most valuable, most undervalued positions in society. my mother taught elementary school for 20 years; when she retired, i was making 3 times her salary doing my computer job. this is the sad but inevitable outcome from the policies put in place by a class of people that can afford to educate their children outside of the systems forced upon the working class.
m00x 19 hours ago [-]
The Obama administration reversed this in the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) in 2015.
Many of the schools with the most funding per student, like Washington D.C. and NYC currently underperform.
NYC has a spending of $36-40k per student with only 56% ELA, ~47% Math.
Washington DC has $27k-31k of spending per student and only 22% proficient in reading and 16% in Math.
Charter schools have been the best bang for the buck. The best all-income schools are catholic schools, averaging at 1 grade level higher. Then private schools do even better, but aren't accessible to everyone, and then the top spot is left to selective high-performing schools, unsurprisingly.
bluGill 19 hours ago [-]
> The best all-income schools are catholic schools, averaging at 1 grade level higher. Then private schools do even better
These are not equal comparisons. People who send their kids to a private school are choosing that, and thus care about the education their kids get. While Catholics are all income and choosing for religion reasons, generally catholic implies cultural care for education. Public schools take everyone including those who don't care about education.
In general public schools in the US are very good. However a small number in every school are kids that would be kicked out of private (including catholic) schools. There are also significant variation between schools with richer areas of a city doing better - despite often spending less on education.
FireBeyond 18 hours ago [-]
> Charter schools have been the best bang for the buck.
That is a lot easier when you can require a transcript from the prospective student, review it, and say, "Uh, no thank you".
There's a private technical college near here that offers EMT and paramedic training. They "guarantee" "100% success in certification and registration" for their students.
How do they get there? They boot students out after they fail (<80%) their second test in the class.
I'm not necessarily opposed to such a policy. It is, however, intellectually dishonest of them to try to tout it as a better school for that reason. Charter schools are free to reject students who will bring their grade averages down.
m00x 13 hours ago [-]
Yeah, that's very selective. Catholic schools on the other hand just require you to be Catholic and be somewhat involved in the Parish and score much higher.
I believe this is not only restricted to Catholic schools though they are the most common. Most religious schools have higher scoring students.
toast0 12 hours ago [-]
If nothing else, parental involvement correlates with higher test scores and being enrolled in a non-default school correlates with parent involvement. So it's no surprise that being enrolled in a non-default school correlates with higher test scores.
IMHO, we always hear about such and such school (system) has X% kids proficient with $Y/year per pupil. But what I would really want to know about a school is how does a year change at the school change the proficiency of the class. If the class of 3rd graders starts the year at 20% proficient at 2nd grade level, and ends at 22% proficient at 3rd grade level, that might be a good school, even though a single point in time check says 22% proficient. But the numbers we get aren't really useful for that; a cohort analysis would be better; there's real privacy implications, but that doesn't make the numbers we get useful. :P
emmelaich 8 hours ago [-]
Catholic schools in Australia don't required you to be Catholic. Although, I'm sure most kids are. And enrolling there will expose you to Catholic teaching.
I wonder if USA schools are similar. It's next to impossible to require belief.
phil21 4 hours ago [-]
The vast majority to all Catholic schools in the US have no requirement of you being Catholic.
m00x 3 hours ago [-]
Correct. Your chances of getting in are just much better if you are, then even better if you're in the Parish.
username332211 19 hours ago [-]
The no child left behind act was enacted in 2001. If you check the article, it has a nice little chart, showing a decline that starts in 2015. Prior to 2013, the results show a clear trend of improvement (in regards to the percentage of students achieving a minimum level of proficiency).
How would you explain that temporal gap? If the No Child Left Behind Act is the problem, why was the trend positive for the first 12-14 years of the time it's been in force?
programjames 9 hours ago [-]
Gifted programs dropped from ~72% of elementary schools to ~65% by 2013, and probably have continued declining. Given it takes 10+ years to educate a child, the school culture to change, and so on, we should expect to see quite a lag between policy and outcomes.
chrisco255 11 hours ago [-]
I'm sorry but some F rated schools getting closed down needed to happen.
There are institutions either so toxic at the administrative level or so heavily populated with kids with behavioral issues that it's impossible to fix without divvying up the student population into other schools that can better handle the load.
NCLB had some flaws but that wasn't one of them. Before NCLB you were stuck in the poor school district your likely single parent could afford to live in, inevitably doomed to poor education.
iteria 20 hours ago [-]
As always with these things, I'm curious what are the results by state. I wish I could find it again, but I saw some results by state and some of our states scored the same as the top rank nations and some score with 3rd world nations.
I would be interested if this is a nationwide trend or the bad performers are performing even worse. Especially since from my memory, this is mostly a poverty issue. Not a school funding issue, but that per capita income was a good indicator of where that state would score.
ginko 20 hours ago [-]
Sure, but you could do the same in pretty much any country.
agentcoops 19 hours ago [-]
I’m originally from a US state that currently sits at a 40% literacy rate, but I’ve lived for the last decade in various European countries. I say this only because, even if still anecdotal, I feel like I have a decent basis for comparison. Certainly there are educational disparities from center to periphery and across income brackets everywhere, but I have never lived somewhere that the division was as stark as the US.
France — with all its problems — ensures the same incredibly high standard of curriculum across the country and perhaps most importantly it is actually expected that top university performers who will become researchers teach at high school in the periphery. It’s even a nation-wide competition by discipline (look up the “aggregation”) to obtain these highly sought positions. The idea is something like you teach high school outside Paris while preparing your doctorate and then either return triumphant to the big research institutes or continue teaching in the provinces. Something like this in the US would have immeasurable impact, since probably one of the biggest issues is just convincing well-educated people to teach in rural areas.
bluGill 19 hours ago [-]
from https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/us-literacy... "California’s 23.1% of adults lacking basic prose literacy skills make California have the lowest literacy rate of 76.9%". I don't know where you are from with a 40% literacy
rate, but it isn't any US state.
username332211 19 hours ago [-]
That's by design. France has a cabinet with full control over education in the entire nation. In the United States, education is in the hands of locally elected school boards and the role of the federal and state secretaries of education seems to be mostly limited to dumping money on those people. (And attaching conditions to that money in general seems to be fairly controversial, as the present discussion shows.)
There's no way such a system can produce uniform results.
(The wisdom in forcing voters to elect all sorts of local commissions is another matter entirely. I struggle to see how anyone can make an informed choice, in ballots with 10 or more elected positions, but they seem normal in America.)
chrisco255 11 hours ago [-]
The US has always had a state-run or private education system, since even before it was founded as a country. And the U.S. is among the top 10 most educated countries in the world, with over 50% of population having at least a bachelor's degree.
It's pretty simple to vote on local offices: are you happy with the current state of education in your district? Good, keep the incumbents around. Otherwise change out school board members until you achieve the desired results.
I’m from a US state with a 40% adult literacy rate (=above eighth grade reading level). At least there, none of those three things are even close to the root causes. The average school in the US outside of the big cities, especially the farther you get from the coasts, is just not fit for purpose — and funding only seems to ever go down (not that throwing money at the problem alone would solve it).
Honestly — and I’m not being at all utopian/overvaluing the present state of the technology — I think AI is one of the few prospects for even just marginal improvement, especially since it’s accessible by phone. Much as I wish it wasn’t the case, it’s hard to even imagine all the things that would have to change (from funding, to legislation, undoing all the embarrassing “teaching the controversy” curriculum, to say nothing of staffing) for a “non-technical solution.”
SoftTalker 20 hours ago [-]
Phones/screens is one I'm not sure about. On the one hand, to use a mobile phone, and social media, and messaging apps, you have to read and write. I certainly spent a lot less time reading and writing messages to my friends in the 1980s than the typical kid does today. We just talked, in person or on an old-fashioned phone call.
On the other hand, it's shallow. Messages are short, and filled with shorthand and emoticons. There's no deep reading or expression of complicated ideas in written form.
BeetleB 20 hours ago [-]
There's a difference between reading and writing, and reading and writing well. I would expect the tests to expect higher proficiency than what is expected in your usual text messages.
Der_Einzige 19 hours ago [-]
The quality of most text msgs is higher than what passes for “quality literature” in many lit classrooms.
Texting is unironically a better use of time than reading infinite jest, or gravities rainbow, etc.
fiforpg 19 hours ago [-]
While you can certainly argue that some texts have more substance to them than these literary works, you cannot deny that most texts have worse prose than the books.
BeetleB 16 hours ago [-]
> The quality of most text msgs is higher than what passes for “quality literature” in many lit classrooms.
First: Your HS kids hang out with a different crowd than my HS kids :-)
Second: This is about reading ability (comprehension, etc), not literature. Whether the quality of a text message is superior/inferior to whatever they use in literature classes is irrelevant.
realo 19 hours ago [-]
Hum... "R U OK" is sooo much better than
... “How do you feel, Jake?”
“Fine, it doesn’t hurt much.”
“Are you all right?” ...
(Hemmingway)
barrenko 19 hours ago [-]
Disturbing % of people just consume tiktok style video and that's it.
vel0city 20 hours ago [-]
There is also quite a difference between being able to type out and read short messages to friends like "who wants to go to the park today" or read a menu and know if a sandwich has mustard on it or not and being able to have deeper inferential and evaluative understandings of written thoughts and ideas.
I think back to some college peers who even in some more basic classes could clearly read the words of the assigned writings, they couldn't then parse out the deeper meanings behind the assignments. They weren't illiterate, you could ask them to read a passage, and they'd be able to say all the words. You could ask them face value questions about the text, and they'd probably be able to answer most questions right. But any deeper analysis was just beyond them. So, when the professor would ask deeper questions, they'd say "I don't know where he's getting this, the book didn't talk about that at all".
SoftTalker 19 hours ago [-]
Agree, but I'm not sure how much worse this is today?
I avoided English Lit in college but thinking back to High School I recognize the "I don't know where he's getting this" reaction. I just rarely engaged with the so-called "classic" stuff we had to read, and like you say I had no trouble reading the words but struggled with deeper meanings or even just getting past the archaic language. And this was in the early 1980s, no chance it was influenced by social media or mobile phones or AI. My parents probably blamed television.
At least we now have AI, where a student could (if motivated) ask questions about the meaning of a passage and get back a synthesis of what other people have written about it. Back then I used Cliffs Notes to do that.
bee_rider 20 hours ago [-]
It started in 2013. If we have to blame technology, social media seems more likely than AI, I guess.
weweersdfsd 19 hours ago [-]
Social media AND smartphones became popular around that time. I think it's the toxic combination that's the worst - easy, low effort dopamine hits that are available everywhere via your phone, whenever you are bored.
username332211 19 hours ago [-]
In 2013 social media was still a textual medium, right? There was Vine, but that died pretty quickly, from what I remember.
If social media and smartphones are the problem, I would have expected that results for English proficiency would be steady until the advent of TikTok, right?
pixl97 19 hours ago [-]
From 2011 to 2013 smartphone adoption in the US went from 35 to 55%, and by 2016 was 75%. While not proof of causation, the correlation is very strong.
Der_Einzige 19 hours ago [-]
Pfft, it started in 2007. Kids couldn’t deal with the orange box, cod4, halo3, all coming out at once.
bee_rider 19 hours ago [-]
Actually, it is a good point that this is a lagging indicator.
Night_Thastus 20 hours ago [-]
This trend of decline significantly predates either COVID or GenAI.
brightball 19 hours ago [-]
The US has been on a steady decline in global education rankings since the 70s IIRC. Can’t remember where I saw the stat.
yoyohello13 19 hours ago [-]
It’s decades of defunding schools. I used to work in education and I have never in my career experienced “more” money coming in. It’s always, cuts, cuts, cuts.
That and the culture of anti-intellectualism in the US. I’m completely unsurprised we are falling behind.
m00x 19 hours ago [-]
NYC, DC, and LA all have over $20k of funding per student, with NYC projecting to hit $42k/student this year and are scoring at 12-56% ELA and Math.
It's definitely not just funding.
phil21 4 hours ago [-]
Education spending by all metrics has only gone up - beating inflation nearly every single year since I've been alive.
It might not make it down to teacher salaries or more educators, but the money is absolutely being spent at massive levels.
The best schools where I grew up and around me today have the lowest per-pupil cost. There is basically no correlation between budget spent on education until you get to the extremes on both ends.
jandrewrogers 19 hours ago [-]
How can it be "defunding" while the US spends far more per student than just about any other country in the world?
treis 19 hours ago [-]
Except for a brief blip around the housing crash inflation adjusted per pupil spending has steadily increased for decades.
terminalshort 12 hours ago [-]
Do you have evidence of this? I have never seen a shred of it even though the claim is repeated endlessly. I think it's a conspiracy theory.
bpt3 19 hours ago [-]
To add to your list, in my kids' school district, they spent about 4 - 5 years trying to compensate for kids who didn't do well during COVID by basically slowing every class down to the pace of the kid who struggled the most.
Combine this with an emphasis on single-tracking students and a de-emphasis of grading in general, and it's not surprising to me that scores are declining.
Fade_Dance 20 hours ago [-]
How about the quality of the education and curriculum itself?
Night_Thastus 20 hours ago [-]
The curriculum can be amazing, but it doesn't matter if the students don't care. And frankly, a lot of them don't.
Some of that is cultural, some of that is due to parenting. A lot of parents aren't involved in their kids education. Frankly, a lot of them are barely involved in parenting in general.
pixl97 19 hours ago [-]
But I mean, I remember hearing this back in the 80s, so in itself is not a great indicator unless we can see something that would point at why parents stopped caring as much.
Now, if someone came with a headline that said "Parents not involved in childrens education because they've been ragebaited into spending all their time yelling on social media" my biases would tend to lend me to believe it's true, even without sufficient evidence. There are other correlations, like cellphone ownership in the population.
Just having social media itself doesn't seem to be an exact fit, but that tells us nothing about the algorithms that social media was using at the time.
bluGill 19 hours ago [-]
It is just as true today as the 1980s - parents have long been the largest indicator of how well kids do in school.
What isn't known is how to get parents to do better. Or lacking that, how to get kids to do better anyway. (there have been some successes, but nothing seems to be repeatable)
pixl97 11 hours ago [-]
But that's just punting the original question. Obviously parents aren't getting better, they are getting worse. Why is the question.
2OEH8eoCRo0 20 hours ago [-]
I think it's all of the above and probably more. It might be difficult to find a biggest culprit since they all feed each other. As an example: COVID forced people inside onto their screens and now that people are more screen addicted they use more gen ai or lost the skills to solve things themselves. Gen ai reliance leads to more gen ai use as skills wither.
beardyw 19 hours ago [-]
You need to look at who the kids look up to. What attributes do their role models have?
gre 19 hours ago [-]
A head singing through a toilet seat
avs733 18 hours ago [-]
They used to look up to professional athletes.
It is more statistically realistic for them to want to be a successful influencer than it is for them to be a professional athlete.
favflam 5 hours ago [-]
Rent is out of control. I am amazed that anyone can afford kids, much less afford to dedicate the time necessary for kids to succeed in school. Then you have the brain rot that has infected youth and efforts to defund public schools.
I have not seen a good track record of states privatizing education through the use of charter schools. In the South (US), I have come to view that as a backdoor segregation and religious indoctrination attempt on top of some old-school grifting.
narrator 10 hours ago [-]
The biggest irony is that spending more money is not going to help things.
matrix87 4 hours ago [-]
The US is just one giant corporate playground that companies force people to move to for the regulatory climate. It isn't meant for raising a family. People will either be transplants or neo-feudal serfs working in kitchens. The whole thing will turn into the Bay Area
People will get to choose between a vibes-based "equity" ideology where achievement is disregarded or the republican woodchipper of austerity. Either thing leads to the same outcome: everything becomes stupider and shittier. The whole system is moving of its own accord towards enshittification. People should just get the grieving over with and leave
csomar 58 minutes ago [-]
It's fine. The required and qualified people for the upcoming jobs will be imported from the bountiful overseas.
zkmon 5 hours ago [-]
I don't see what's new here. This trend is not unexpected with our goals as a society. The overall goals are in the other direction. We don't want to work hard or think hard. That's precisely what is driving tech, business and lifestyle here. We have outsourced all of our hard work and hard thinking to machines and cheaper workforce elsewhere. For some reason, it seems to work fine. With all the dumbness and weakness, we still seem to be doing well as a country. So, why the concern?
Oh, you say that, we are losing some human abilities. Well, Prosperity and easy food removes the need for abilities or hunting. It is all cyclic. Each cycle is a few generations long.
p1dda 4 hours ago [-]
Watch the movie Idiocracy for the entertaining answer
HumblyTossed 8 hours ago [-]
I think too much is done on computers and not pencil and paper.
Spent a lot of time in education, K through Ph.D and as a college professor. Net, it seemed that the keys to good or better quality K-12 public school education was simply the parents, their quality that also showed in careers, income, standard of living, socialization, etc. A lot of that quality gets inherited, and Darwin wins again.
But here is a surprise: In college my wife made both PBK and Summa Cum Laude, won both NSF and Woodrow Wilson graduate fellowships, and got her Ph.D.
Her high school? Her family lived in Indiana, in a house her father built from some plans in Good Housekeeping magazine, on a 33 acre farm, surrounded by farms raising mostly corn, soy beans, wheat, and chickens. The local town consisted of a church, a school, and a tavern. The school building was a good accomplishment by the community, big enough for the number of students, taught grades 1-12, but had fewer than 12 classrooms and fewer than 12 teachers! Net, the facilities were poor, but the parents made sure the schooling was good.
The school I went to was relatively large, the pride of the city with a quite good Principal for 1-6 and another for 7-12, no bad teachers, and some good ones. They taught Latin, Spanish, and French and had a good math program. The year before me three guys went to Princeton and two of them ran against each other for President of the Freshman Class. In my year, myself and two others did the best on the Math SATs, all went to college, one MIT.
In both of the schools, 100% of the students were well behaved, i.e., no disruption in classes; this was just expected and without any particular efforts.
I really liked math and physics and wanted much more than the classes offered. So, the classes were beneath me and mostly taught myself from the books. So the school put up with that independent approach and sent me to a Math Tournament and some summer enrichment programs, which was good education: The good parents wanted good education.
Later there were some race riots with that school a target. So, the city changed to teaching cosmotology, etc. and picked another school to be a good one.
Net, with good parents, a school can be plenty good with modest facilities.
simpaticoder 19 hours ago [-]
The final answer to the perennial question "What is algebra good for?" is found in the success or failure of society as a whole. The same can be said for many other oft-questioned values, like "What does it matter if I'm a hypocrite?" In truth no-one really knows what the future will bring - it's always possible to construct a scenario where ignorance and irrationality will save society from extermination. But in the "horses, not zebras" sense it pays, I think, to play the odds and consider the most likely scenarios that put a society at risk: invasion, revolution, natural catastrophe, and then ask those questions again. Much of history can be read as a set of experiments testing various social theories, and the failure modes of not knowing algebra (Cambodia), or not caring about logical consistency or truthfulness (Russia) are well-known. Education is an insurance policy against a threat that may occur a generation or two in the future, and so the feedback loop is very long. This says, to me, that any change to education policy or practice should be very slow, incremental, and based not in aesthetics or ideology, but on the need for society's continued existence. It would be optimal to have many parallel longitudinal incremental educational experiments going on all the time, and then adopt the changes that bear fruit. It would be optimal to require that ALL educational policy makers be experts in history.
t0lo 4 hours ago [-]
I think part of this is we don't know where progress will lead us right now- partly because the "ai" hype is choking natural social communication and organisation. What's the point in being educated in an uneducated society with no intellectual future?
BobbyTables2 7 hours ago [-]
I find it funny that schools took away textbooks and then wonder why scores went down.
Textbooks cohesively presented material. Random printouts and notes glued into a notebook do not.
Similarly, we read a whole lot more in Literature classes than kids do now.
Spooky23 10 hours ago [-]
Everyone wants to shit on teachers and schools. Both get alot of blame.
I’m fortunate to send my kid to an excellent private school that is excellent at what it does. They have problems too.
I blame technology. The pivot from books to the lowest common denominator Chromebook homework, reading and testing is a joke.
It is, and it shouldn't be surprising that introducing or increasing the amount of rigor in education improves outcomes. But that flies in the face of educational trends in the US overall, so adoption is slow.
aredox 20 hours ago [-]
Adults can't dismiss experts and expertise all the time on every topic (climate, health, economy) and worship know-nothings, and expect their children to invest time and effort to learn stuff.
The kids may become dumber but they aren't stupid.
apples_oranges 20 hours ago [-]
You think they are better at detecting the know-nothings than the adults?
aredox 15 hours ago [-]
Who said "the king has no clothes" in the classic tale?
dr-detroit 20 hours ago [-]
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tehjoker 12 hours ago [-]
The kids are not doing as well at home, the parents are struggling economically, the teachers are struggling, and the government doesn't care. Perfect storm.
Don't forget the brain eating virus we loosed on the population, that probably doesn't help.
I offer another explanation: we simply don't value educated people. Kids have few role models who are educated or value knowledge. Careers emphasize narrow expertise. Business leaders often show very little understanding of the world outside of squeezing money out of others. We live in an age where access to knowledge is prioritized over knowledge itself, and dogma is difficult for most to tease from contradictory observations. We no longer portray reading or discovery as pleasureful in itself. Why would we? There is no money in showing the complexity of the world.
Simply put, if you were a child now, why should you care about education when it doesn't appear to be the key to anything you want? Money has taken the place of knowledge. On further inspection, this should not be a surprise to anyone who has bought into the dogma of a transaction-oriented reality.
Children these days are raised just as much by a culture that never figured out how to resolve the contradiction between making money and having values.
Blame is futile, though. Hold your children close and raise them the best you can, for there is no reversing the tide.
xyst 10 hours ago [-]
We are in an kakistocracy. Nobody cares about merit anymore.
Just grift your way through life like the Pedophile of the United States. Become a jester/influencer. Smell your own farts on a live stream and pump your engagements. Be a clown. It clearly pays to do so.
nphardon 12 hours ago [-]
We have a powerful right-wing political party that is aggressively anti-academic.
bediger4000 18 hours ago [-]
My youngest is now 19, but all of my kids had "common core" math in Denver Public Schools. That was an utter travesty. I had the tail end of the "new math", and it was obvious even then that arithmetic drills were monumental wastes of times. Apparently, the common core folks had not heard of pocket calculators, or calculator apps on cell phones.
If "math" does not account for reality, of course people are going to treat it as a meaningless barrier to be overcome rather than learned. Also, math is more than arithmetic. Using picture of coins. For Chrissake.
naasking 19 hours ago [-]
If you can't fail students and hold them back, poor students will continue and pull down the average of later grades. News at 11.
wiredpancake 8 hours ago [-]
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s5300 19 hours ago [-]
Yeah, if kids could do math they’d probably be asking questions like “why are we subsidizing Israel with billions and billions of dollars while my friends are on food stamps and free school lunches and still go hungry”
Or “why can’t my parent afford their health treatment while we give Israel billions of billions of dollars and they still want more”
If they could read, they’d probably read the Talmud & study the Torah, and realize that letting some small group schizophrenics inbreed for thousands of years was probably a bad idea.
I wonder who’s in charge of setting these standards in education for our children.
mquander 6 hours ago [-]
If kids could do math they would be able to divide the yearly American military aid to Israel ($18b last year) by the American population (340m), so they probably wouldn't conclude that fifty bucks per year per person was the main reason why their classmates are poor or their parents can't afford healthcare.
shadowtree 7 hours ago [-]
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farceSpherule 18 hours ago [-]
I am not sure why this is news. Classic economic warfare.
Parents with higher education and stable incomes have the resources, time, and knowledge to supplement their children's education. This includes tutoring, enrichment programs, monitoring social media and phone use, and advocating within schools, as well as sending their children to smaller, private schools.
Most Joe Six Pack parents hand their children unrestricted iPhones and let the schools raise and baby sit them, while the parents sit back getting fat soaking up social media and TV.
teekert 5 hours ago [-]
Well, it's put in a bit of a disrespectful tone, but I think you are right. Unrestricted access to a smartphone will lead to 6 hours + a day screen time. And it's all addictive junk. That can't be good.
One also sees the "educational" difference. Here a study was published concluding that poorer areas have twice the number of snackbars compared to areas with "higher educated" people. Bad food is also very cheap. It's also very easy to never read about the effects of screens on childeren and I see people with kids of ~1 sitting on the back of a bike with a smartphone blaring... Why not let the kid enjoy and learn from the surroundings? My kids loved riding a bike with me.
AfterHIA 17 hours ago [-]
American high school is just preparation for prison: anyone that's been in the joint tell me that American public schools and prisons don't, "kind of smell the same."
Insofar as the US had a “culture averse to education,” surely that affects white americans as much as it affects anyone else. But, on average, they are not the ones who are behind their peers internationally.
I knew (second hand) a teacher in a rural area of a low population state. All white kids, she'd have kindergartners cussing her out. Very little hope for any academic future for the other grades as things didn't get better with the older kids.
I knew a white kid who lived in a trailer park whose mom was upset he was getting tutoring after school for his dyslexia because she told him he'd never amount to anything.
My mixed race friend mentioned he was accused of "acting white" in school because he actually tried to get good grades.
What do all of those things have in common? Poverty, yes, but blended with hopelessness. The kids were surrounded by people who didn't have much, didn't think they'd get anywhere, and didn't believe the kids would ever have a chance at a better life.
That last part is what separates them from kids in third world countries who still manage to achieve academic success. Hope and optimism aren't guarantees; they aren't a replacement for social support. They are, however, a necessary ingredient for the intrinsic motivation necessary for personal growth.
At least the parent commenter had the grace to reply with another source instead of falling for it.
The institutions that build these national and international statistics do so with bias and goals, or without complete data. For example, how can a bureau make a national statistics on crime accurate when cities intentional report crime incorrectly to look better in statistics.
To think "cited findings" is gospel truth is naive. I know it's highly desired here, but I stand by what I'm saying. Data is lovely, but garbage in, garbage out, and most national-level data is complete garbage with an agenda or bias or naivety.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crab_mentality
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crab_mentality#See_also
[1] - https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/pisa-scor...
Honestly this is one of the biggest bullshit I've ever heard. Assuming that this mentality is quite widespread(not necessarily universal) among non White, then any attempt to introduce affirmative action or other equalizer practice would be futile. That kind of mentality must be purged hard from yesterday.
They might call it "gay" or "sissy" or "acting white" or whatever, but the root cause is usually their perception of what masculinity should look like.
The men they look up to are anti-intellectual. This exists in all communities, race is not the main problem here.
I'm pretty sure, at this point, this was intentional, individuals and orgs with the resources to create finely tuned systemic problems having been at it since the country's inception.
Not to say that tiktok is innocent, but it certainly isn't the root cause.
Building things requires a sustained effort and understanding. You and your fellow Amaricans are drifting further and further from it.
Even traditionally oppressed groups like the Jews or the Chinese (Chinese Exclusion Act anyone?) or descendants of Russian muzhiks or Indian untouchable castes do have good outcomes if they actually motivate their kids to learn.
The groups that are systematically out (in Czechia, the part of the Roma that lives in ghettos - contrary what people tend to think, a lot of the Roma marry into the wider society, mix with it and live quite comfortable self-sufficient lives) tend to be the ones that despise schooling, and it will take a century or so of concerted efforts to change the attitudes.
And yes, skin color itself is irrelevant, it is simply a convenient identifier for underlying significant biological differences. There is absolutely zero reason one would rationally conclude that biological differences would somehow magically stop at the brain. And that goes without saying that it’s not even “just skin color”, since even the most naive child can identify the race of any person where the skin color has been changed with photoshop. Have you seen those images where whites/asians have been made black and vice versa, etc?
We really need to move past these infantile ideologies like that we are all the same. The smart people can clearly see that has always been a gaslighting lie.
It's actually not. Skin color does not correlate well with the genetic diversity among humans at all. It's just one particular trait that is very easy to identify by eye.
> There is absolutely zero reason one would rationally conclude that biological differences would somehow magically stop at the brain.
There is absolutely zero reason to rationally conclude that a random physical trait that happens to be easy to distinguish by eye correlates with brain function at all.
On the other hand, there are massive socioeconomic disparities that arise from the history of slavery, which easily explain both the disparities and the reasons why racists such as yourself want to boil things down to skin color.
Now whether ghetto culture or ghetto economics is the main contributor to poor academic performance... I will leave that finer point up for debate, but my point here is the US has big differences in educational outcomes based on NEIGHBORHOOD, if your neighborhood is high crime and the schools are broke, your educational outcomes tend to be bad.
If there is a culture related problem, I think it's that the people pushing this trashy culture, for example music that glorifies rape, drugs and gangs, code it as black culture and use that as a way to deflect criticism. You're a racist if you don't like hip hop! It would be an understatement to say that many black Americans want nothing to do with that lifestyle or image and have evolved well beyond it, yet it still gets called black culture. It is a cultural weakness that we don't see rape, drugs and gangs as bad stuff to promote and reward, full stop, and not a thing we should be educating the next generation with, regardless of the skin color of the performer, or its roots.
BTW for whatever it's worth I'm white and I grew up in the ghetto. My parents forced me to take a public bus for an hour each morning to a magnet school in the rich part of town. Years later I met up with my white childhood friend from down the road who had gone to our local high school. I had a bunch of academic achievements and a college scholarship, he had a gunshot wound in his stomach. He was a smart guy when I knew him but the ghetto had its own plans for him.
Remind me when Vivek told his followers that American education need ti be more rigorous to compete with China and other Asian nations he got owned so hard, practically quiting from DOGE before it started.
If a cohort in Japan has a median score of X at median household income Y, the American cohort with same median score X has income closer to 1.25Y or 1.5Y.
Whether you want to define your American cohort based on geography or ethnicity doesn't really matter-the result will be preserved up to a point.
[1] https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-eurostat-news/-/e...
Education outcome massively depends on economic status of the parents. And that, no matter the country by the way, is very closely tied to immigration history and ethnicity.
When parents struggle to afford basic school supplies (to the tune that many teachers have to pay for their students' needs out of their own measly paychecks [1]), that's not exactly conductive to good learning outcomes. When parents don't have the time to sit down with their children and help them with learning because they have to work two jobs to make rent (remember, even two minimum wage jobs is not enough [2]), the kids are put further behind. And they certainly can't afford private after-school tutoring.
The last part is the environment itself - aka the quality of housing (mold, cockroaches and other health impacts) or when gangs lure in kids with the promise of striking it rich by dealing drugs or whatnot...
[1] https://edition.cnn.com/2023/09/02/business/teachers-back-to...
[2] https://www.housingfinance.com/news/rent-remains-unaffordabl...
I'm not sure I support charter schools as a universal good, but they've actually proven to be pretty consistently effective at improving the educational attainment of low-income black/hispanic students [0-1]. When the local school system is a political quagmire and objectively failing in its mission to educate students, it's probably the only way out.
The meta-problem is that the people most actively involved in improving the racial educational achievement gap are precisely the type of people to reflexively dislike charter schools (because it's "right wing", although I see it more aligned with the centralization vs decentralization axis) and maybe even feel overtly threatened by them (because of their union job). Also, charter schools have to actually figure out how to get buy-in from low-income black and hispanic parents, figure out how to serve this community better, and can't hide behind the excuse of cyclical poverty + orwellian bureaucracy anymore.
I think a lot of educators really would rather work in a system where bad outcomes are guaranteed and thus not their fault, than one in which they actually have the ability to make more than just performative progress in serving the needs of their underprivileged student body.
[0] https://hechingerreport.org/proof-points-charter-schools-hav...
[1] https://www.kqed.org/news/11953408/charter-schools-show-gain...
Here’s a modest proposal: American schools are actually quite good across the board.
Insofar as charter schools can help, it's because giving enough of a shit to apply for and go to one weeds out enough of the lost causes that would only disrupt everybody else. In fact, I think the best ways to improve those public schools is even simpler; make attendance optional. Families who give a shit will still attend, while all the trash will voluntarily stay home.
This is before you get into the socioeconomic factors that make one student population more susceptible to starting and falling behind.
The building maintenance is a red herring. I believe in my district, it's about 10% of the budget on average.
Just a couple disruptive kids per class can ruin an entire generation of students for a grade level. And there were far more than just a couple. Not to mention kids who had no business being in those classes - when the class is half full of low-performers they drag the rest of the kids down with them as the environment completely changes.
The focus these public school districts have put on the low performing and low achievers at the expense of those there to learn is astounding and perhaps civilization-ending if it continues. More resources should be spent on those there to help themselves vs. trying to shovel ever-more resources at people that will never provide a return on that investment.
At this point the local district here spends magnitudes more on special education and catering to IEP students than they do any AP level classes or other high performer programs. In fact they continue to destroy any advanced track segmentation in the favor of equity, and the teachers union nearly killed public magnet schools off entirely recently. They will try again until they are successful.
It's an obviously bad strategy, and apparently results don't matter. Dragging everyone down is not a plan for success.
This is the single political hill I will die on. Removing the ability for poor but high functioning families to give their kids a chance to get out of their circumstances because it raises uncomfortable questions is downright evil.
Other western countries everyone loves to champion so much have this figured out. Student tracks are a good thing. Put high achievers on an advanced track earlier than later and get them out of the general population of students before it's too late for them.
And yes, it's obvious to anyone who's ever been to a decent number of different types of schools that the only thing that truly matters is the other students (read: parents) that go there. Anything else is a rounding error.
As bad as it was 30 years ago when I was going to school, it's infinitely worse now from watching nieces and nephews attending their local public schools. Until they were able to transfer out to magnets at least.
Like you said, 99% of what makes a "good" school good is the quality of the other kids who go there. Since there's absolutely no political will for expelling the troublemakers (even in most conservative districts), the only remaining option is to build more lifeboats.
Being able to kick out disruptive students has a pretty big influence on the remaining students.
How do you distinguish between underperforming-non-disruptive students and under-performing-disruptive students, especially as the almost all the disruptive students are going to be underperforming anyway.
Also, while I don't think students should be pushed out of charter schools purely for bad performance (if they are putting in the effort), I do think that poor minority parents should have the right to send their kids to schools that don't force students to share classrooms with disruptive or way-behind-grade-level students. When educational outcomes under the local public school system are really bad I think school-choice just makes a lot of sense as a way of figuring out what policies are popular/effective/unpopular/harmful.
https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/cmd/education-exp...
Heape-Johnson, A., McGee, J. B., Wolf, P. J., May, J. F., & Maloney, L. D. (August 2023). Charter School Funding: Little Progress Towards Equity in the City. School Choice Demonstration Project.
In some states and cities the difference is more extreme than in others.
E.g. Lowell Heights in SF gets less than the average funding, and Stuyvesant in NYC gets the average amount.
Charter schools are I think a direct response to figuring out how to fix low performing, big school districts in the US. So while I have no idea if private or public schools do better in the Netherlands, I think we'd need to find something more like the Baltimore public school system in another country to make the right comparison.
> A commonly given alternative explanation is that the public options in the US are deliberately sabotaged via budget restrictions, and then the resulting poor performance is used to justify further cuts
I find this hard to address because it's not really a matter of policy but of ulterior motives or conspiracy. I personally have no secret plan to make public education even worse by posting about charter schools on hacker news. To me it's just about giving students the option to get educated by an independent institution rather than be forced to attend some of the worst public school systems in the country.
https://freespeechproject.georgetown.edu/tracker-entries/neo...
Honestly, this might be a good opportunity for you to think about why you find charter schools such a nonstarter JUST because they tend to have more support among those on the right (which I'm not) than those on the left. That's actually one of the big problems I was trying to point out: people have extremely strong opinions on educational policy because of these ideological left vs right things rather than on what students actually need!
So my general impression is that the republican party, nationally, note I am distinguishing the republican party form political right in the USA, has not been supportive of education in terms of financing or in promoting the necessary environment to ensure high quality and consistent education.
My general impression is that the republican party is for charter schools.
An argument that says trust/invest in the system promoted by the party that has been undermining/unsupportive of the current system does not invoke my trust/sympathy.
This is not a topic I have done rigorous investigations on, but what little I have done normally shows a lack of hard evidence and apples to apples between charter schools and traditional public schools.
Then we also have the pure frauds, no education to the students until the finally gets shut down 5-10 years later when all inspections are done. etc etc.
Why on earth willingly let in the profit motive into this? It was introduced right wingers in Sweden too ofc, boat loads of profit to their supporters.
Now it’s also very hard to get rid of when state capacity has been reduced over the years.
They were registered as an online charter school, which is why the Ohio DOE got involved at all. They wouldn’t have investigated an individual homeschooler. (Many “homeschool networks” or the like do this because it makes it easier for their clientele to prove they’ve met the meager legal requirements of homeschooling. Justifies the price tag, yknow?)
> Honestly, this might be a good opportunity for you to think about why you find charter schools such a nonstarter JUST because they tend to have more support among those on the right (which I'm not) than those on the left
You’ve imagined a whole backstory and character arc for me, which is sadly more interesting than the truth. I think charter schools are repugnant because they operate under little to no oversight and, around these parts, have a reputation for abusing students (see reason one).
You seemed to imply earlier that the right wing connection was irrelevant or unimportant to the concept of a charter school. It isn’t, really. It’s an essential feature of the system, and why they’ve become so popular as of late after decades of failed leftist attempts at the same thing.
So for instance 55% of the control group ended up being arrested 5+ times by age 40, while 'only' 36% of the experiment group did. I think the thing this demonstrates is that intervention can help, but is also insufficient alone. Students who are in a sufficiently high risk scenario need ongoing support and treatment that they're not going to receive at a normal public institution. And not only that but they will remain disproportionately disruptive to other student's educations at normal institutions, even with years of ongoing care.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HighScope (overview)
[1] - https://highscope.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/perry-presc... (detailed paper)
Obviously we need effective justice.
But since we are on the topic of ineffective schooling, there is an argument to be made that US prisons are more effective at punishment than rehabilitation. Which seems to please some people, but just adds another undertow to society.
A loss for criminal inmates, and everyone they impact, family or stranger, after they are released.
Education is worth looking at with respect to an entire culture, with many important contexts beyond/outside school. From before school age (huge), onward.
He realises that the simplest and easiest intervention is to stop the violent crime happening in the first place, and the cheapest and easiest way to do that is to intervene in the future murderers childhood. The specific example he gives is a client with a schizophrenic mother who needed more support.
Every one of us could have been kicked out of school at one time or another if we had fallen under the microscope looking for an excuse.
https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2014/12/10/are-charter...
https://www.reuters.com/article/world/special-report-class-s...
https://www.edweek.org/leadership/charter-schools-more-likel...
Moreover, some charter schools require things like parental time volunteering, which eliminates more kids, or introductory essays - they don’t score the essays! They just require it to be done! By horrible coincidence this eliminates more cough lower performing children, who simply never submit a completed application for the lottery, so sad. This definitely happens in multiple states but here’s one specific example:
https://www.latimes.com/opinion/editorials/la-ed-charter-app...
It's a lofty ideal, don't you think?
[citation needed]
These reports are becoming to find because measuring racial differences is considered racist, so you'd be asking for something that would not be acceptable in modern studies.
The greatest predictor of academic success is the education level of a student's parents.
Does the comparison hold if you segment the white Americans, Chinese, Singaporeans, Japanese, etc. by economic class?
All humans are the same species, and in a vacuum, have no ideas or inherent behaviors beyond base instinct.
Culture is simply a byproduct of the environment around a segment of humans.
Hence, filtering by white kids in the US simply measures the result of higher average economic status (same as filtering by Asian kids).
American outcomes would look better if the populations they economically disenfranchised historically stayed in other countries like Europeans did with the colonial system (vs importing populations as slave labor domestically in the US). The economic class stratification that still lingers as a result of this in the US is such a unique factor as to make comparisons that don't take this into account worthless.
So my anecdotal theory is that the (public) education system is optimized to the edges, abandoning the middle entirely, resulting in majority decline.
They do get computers with TONS of dumb-ass apps and zero reference materials.
I don't think physics is hardest. On the contrary, physics is probably the best subject to start with, because everyone (even people who don't know about physics) have experienced physics. People intuitively understand that you go faster down a steep hill, than a gently sloped one.
Not saying it won't be hard, but I don't want you to think it's some crazy torture. It should be no harder than doing Bio or Chem first, and for many kids it's easier. (Bio and Chem have way more memorization and vocabulary.)
I'm only aware of schools providing these three courses as independent of each other. Which makes sense, since they are independent.
I took Chem as a sophomore, Physics as a freshman, AP Chem as a senior, and AP Physics as a senior. I didn't take a single bio course after 7th grade.
For what it's worth, both Calculus courses were harder IMO than any of the aforementioned.
More like from what women prefer to what men prefer, they probably do it since most teachers are women and prioritize what girls want. Physics is "hard" as in not soft, not "hard" as in not easy.
The reasonable order is the opposite, physics underpins chemistry and chemistry underpins biology.
Then there's a middle tier, the majority of people, where they might end up at a university but it's not top rated. Increasingly it's not worth the money and simultaneously it seems like our country has become more credentialist about prestigious jobs. But a degree probably isn't necessary for most careers that don't have gatekeepers so for these people the education doesn't really have a big payoff and their education might get de-emphasized.
Then there's the bottom tier which is self explanatory.
Based on my anecdotal experience, this is the explanation that makes the most sense to me. I've been hearing constantly for at least a decade how atrocious American public education is, which I can't reconcile at all with my experience as a 2010 graduate of McLean High School. Either my experience was so far outside the national norm that I have no useful perspective on this issue, or the national discourse has been totally corrupted by vocal minorities and political agendas.
Personally, my teachers were consistently amazing and brilliant (RIP Mr. Bigger), curricula were rigorous, and I learned a ton that prepared me well for my life and career after high school. Every time I hear about some factoid or perspective that American schools supposedly don't teach because they're propaganda farms designed to churn out uncurious low-skill workers, I roll my eyes as I vividly recall how it was explicitly covered in my classes. It's possible my experience may have been more the exception than the rule, given that most of my classes were advanced/AP/post-AP, but I also had some of my favorite teachers in regular and honors classes and never felt like I was receiving insufficient value for my time. Maybe I just got incredibly lucky, but I really have nothing but good things to say, and can't relate at all to the picture of American public education that's been painted in the media and social media. Granted, a lot can change in 15 years, and my perspective is already going to be skewed by having attended a top-ranked school in a wealthy district.
On the flip side, my public elementary school experience was the polar opposite. In kindergarten I was tutoring third graders who needed help learning to read, but by second grade I'd been kicked out more or less for being bored with the level and pace of the course material. (Effectively. Specifically, the principal was going to move me to special ed unless my mom agreed to find a doctor willing to put me on Ritalin for my nonexistent ADHD. The 90s were wild.) So there's that. Luckily there are some great private schools in the area which my mom was able to make sacrifices to afford, but I can't help but wonder how many other kids weren't as lucky and had their whole life trajectories sabotaged from an early age. Granted, that particular principal was fired a few months after my de facto expulsion (for many very good reasons), so maybe this was all genuinely just an anomaly and very far outside the norm for completely different reasons than my high school experience.
The Netherlands has settled on three levels of schooling and within that level (according to capacity, and desire to learn) most of the schools show relatively little variation.
The same thing continues into university, with pretty much 99% of all the universities in the Netherlands being public.
You don’t select a university based on level of theoretical educational attainment, you select one by virtue of proximity, or which of them teaches the specific courses you are interested in.
Schoelenopdekaart shows pretty wide variation in how many students go on to vwo etc.
#261 in National Rankings #8 in Virginia High Schools #11 in Washington, DC Metro Area High Schools #5 in Fairfax County Public Schools High Schools #302 in STEM High Schools
Are you seriously saying you can't reconcile how America has bad public schools after having gone to to a school ranked #261 in the country?
Can you, just for a moment, consider the situation here and try to reconcile this? It is important for me that you be able to do this.
My point is that US public education isn't universally bad, not that it's universally good.
> Either my experience was so far outside the national norm that I have no useful perspective on this issue, or the national discourse has been totally corrupted by vocal minorities and political agendas
> Every time I hear about some factoid or perspective that American schools supposedly don't teach because they're propaganda farms designed to churn out uncurious low-skill workers, I roll my eyes
> It's possible my experience may have been more the exception than the rule
> Maybe I just got incredibly lucky, but I really have nothing but good things to say, and can't relate at all to the picture of American public education that's been painted in the media and social media
Can you just clarify for me once more: what exactly can you not reconcile? Be very, very specific, please.
I don't have a problem. I went to a well ranked public high school and am grateful for that privilege. It isn't lost on me that many, many, others are less fortunate than I am. But to say you can't reconcile these things is, at worst, tone-deaf, and at best, incredibly ignorant.
Even if you choose to believe there's some interpretation of my original phrasing that could mean what you're suggesting, I've now clarified several times that the idea you're making a fuss over does not reflect my sentiments.
While that might be your cultural understanding of, or personal reaction to, what he said - he actually did not say that.
If this subject is sensitive for you, or useful communication just isn't happening, then it might be better to drop it and move on.
1. Any reform effort needs to ensure that early education isn't overlooked. Elementary schools need capacity, processes, and expertise to appropriately deal with kids of all different knowledge/intelligence levels and backgrounds/skillsets in a personalized way, and they need oversight to ensure that lazy/incompetent/malicious teachers and administrators aren't making poor/abusive decisions that could have lifelong negative impacts on students.
2. AI will be a critical element of future reform. It's too incredibly useful of a learning and scaling tool to sleep on. Of course it's easy to misuse, but that's exactly why responsible use needs to be taught as part of research and fact-checking lessons. If they haven't already, schools need to start running small-scale experiments with incorporation of AI tools into curricula asap.
Imagine how much more you could have learned with a virtual TA in your pocket on call 24/7 for those 13 years, with human teachers in the loop to help guide any self-directed learning you might have chosen to undertake. That bright-eyed kid who never stops asking "why?" will finally have a conversational partner who never tires of answering. All the panic about hallucinations sounds like the same sensationalist takes I grew up hearing from adults about the internet and Wikipedia — a perfectly valid concern, but not sufficient to negate the value of the resource in competent hands.
I always find it interesting that the anti-schooling mentality is so prevalent here on HN, too. It’s most obvious in threads about cheating, where a popular topic of discussion is to defend cheating as a rational reaction because school doesn’t matter, a degree is “just a piece of paper”, and you’ll learn everything on the job anyway.
It also shows up in the tired argument that college is only really about networking, not learning.
I’ve had some on and off experience mentoring college students in the past. Those who adopt these mentalities often hit a wall partway through college or even at their first job when their baseline intelligence runs out and they realize they don’t have the necessary foundation because they’ve been blowing off coursework or even cheating their way through college for years.
I’m afraid that LLMs are only going to enable more of this behavior. It’s now easier to cheat and students are emboldened by the idea that they don’t need to learn things because they can always just ask ChatGPT.
I work in tech and I see this more and more every day. By "cheating", I mean deciding that you don't want to do the thinking or even spot-check the result; you just ask an LLM to vibe-write a design doc, send it out, and have others point out issues if they care.
I once posted in support of general education and it didn’t go so well.
I suppose the people on HN are a certain demographic.
If you have kids and experience it first hand, it's extremely underwhelming. If you were an outlier in any way as a student (and I bet a majority of people here are), it's extremely underwhelming.
My wife and I have advanced degrees and place a very high value on education, and I have very little that's positive to say about the state of education in our very highly ranked public schools. They've completely lost the plot. But any criticism is presumed to be hostility to teachers (and their union) or flat out racism by a vocal and increasingly large segment of the population.
Like a sorting algorithm which is O(n) on nearly-sorted input - the utility is limited.
I hate to break it to you, but a lot of our most valuable research is produced by people who did their primary education outside the US. Just go to a STEM research lab at any US university connected to a Nobel prize or Fields medal in the last 10-20 years, and it will be almost completely made up of internationally educated students / professors / etc.
Some schools are sports centric. Others have to work hard to get students interested in sports.
I think the implication that sports are bad is also misleading. Sports programs, when run well, can do a good job of getting kids into routines, out of trouble, and keeping them accountable to their peers for something. The TV and movie style sports culture where the football players aren’t expected to even attempt to pass their classes doesn’t actually exist in most schools.
Now show me parents, hell even here on HN, who openly admit that they are addicted to the screens and various 'social' cancers and consider it something profoundly bad and damaging, and that they as parents should really do better and actually try. A rare sight, mostly its brushed off and some even brag how 'digital' and modern their kids are.
But its fine, we all know how these things really are. This is one area where even otherwise disadvantaged parents (ie due to their poor upbringing or ie coming from undeveloped places) can raise their kids to be well above sea of future desperate population with severe social anxieties and addictions (lets not forget addictions ball up since they change personality for the worse).
Think how much lack / minimization of those will give them various advantages in their adult lives, be it professional (focus on work, ability to better socialize and communicate in person) or personal (all kinds of relationships, and finding one's purpose and drive in life). I just mentioned basically whole core of adult existence, no small things by any means.
And its not that hard, we do it with our kids and often see it around us in their peers, just need to put a bit more effort and spend more time with them instead of doom scrolling or binge watching TV. Which are anyway good parenting advices, but one needs to start like that from beginning and lead by example.
Like if you take a bunch of steps running from a road to the edge of a cliff, only after the last one over the edge do you experience all the problems
The real issue isn’t the availability of learning materials, but the healthy pressure and right push from experienced teachers. People tend to overestimate how self-driven most students are. The truth is, most students aren’t naturally motivated to learn. They need society to give them a sense of purpose, and they need teachers to challenge them with problems that keep them just outside their comfort zone. Sadly, the U.S. school system provides neither. Take my kid as an example: even though he’s in a decent public school, he thinks his schoolwork is tough and the SAT is challenging. Yet the SAT wouldn't even measure up to the high-school graduation exam in my country, let alone the college entrance exam. In the end, it’s the broad middle of students who suffer from low standards. With the right motivation and push, they could learn so much more, but instead they end up wasting precious time in high school.
Well, some people claim in these comments that their children don't get textbooks. Not saying that you're wrong, but it's gonna take a lot of 'healthy pressure and right pushes' to account for the fact that they don't have educational material.
!!
The rate of college graduates has increased nearby 50% over that timeframe.
A rather unexpected result for a cultural aversion to education.
- You do not diversify classrooms by academic ability---the high-performing students can be free tutors to the low-performing students.
- You inflate the GPAs and implement no-zero policies.
- You teach to the standardized tests, and don't worry about the material.
- You make lessons "fun and engaging" because you need the attention of the students least likely to give you their attention.
- You eliminate gifted or honors programs, because that's wasted money not improving your bottom line (bottom students).
Those pupils will generally need very structured lessons that directly provide clear information (often in a form that can easily stick in memory and be repeated, even word for word), and straightforward instructions that can immediately inform their practice no matter what their level. I.e. the exact opposite of a so-called "fun and engaging" approach. (Which of course ignores the fact that such students tend to derive the most fun and engagement from being taught in a clear and effective way!)
The underlying issue is that the "progressive" educational strategy taught in Ed Schools is very explicitly a "sink or swim" approach where the student is supposed to be teaching themselves and the teacher isn't doing any real work. The hidden attitude here, coming directly from the "Progressive" era of the late 19th and early 20th century, is that many students will indeed fail but this is not an issue because clearly they were not worthy of entering the educated class with the very best.
(Special Ed is the one remaining niche that still teaches more effective educational methods, but obviously not every remedial student is a Special Ed student, and we should not expect them to be.)
The fact that these institutions can exist at the low-performing state they do is a direct reflection of the culture of the people who run them, send their kids to them, pay taxes to support them, etc.
The schools can only do what they do to the degree that people aren't willing to put up with it.
Or are they dutifully resisting cultural shift that threatens the "don't think critically, just go to work, pay your taxes, don't question the system, don't do drugs, go to college, get a job, lease a new car, buy a condo, cross your fingers that stonks go up enough for you to retire" late 20th early 21st century status quo "ideal citizen" and "ideal culture" that they were built to foster (and who are the kind of people who fill out the majority of the system)?
The way I see it peddling blue state bullshit and red state bullshit (depending on a given school district's location) is simply a common sense adaptation districts are making to garner support from local populations who were willing to support the system so long as it provided useful education at a non-insane cost but are more critical now that the deal is worse.
For example, in my state, it is an annual tradition to slash the budget of schools and/or libraries and funnel the money toward political goals and police retirement funds.
I attended the best public school in the state at one point and literally watched the Governor text someone for 10 minutes and then fall asleep in the middle of a budget presentation specifically put together in order to convince him not to cut more funding the next year, as it would mean the school would have to begin taking federal money and compromising on its values.
I also attended the worst public school in my state, a harrowing and illuminating experience which I've spoken about here a few times before. [0]
I also had my collegiate education robbed from me by a vindictive teacher who illegally falsified my grade out of spite, and an administration who protected her. I was homeless since 16 was and attending high school on my own in a rural community with no economic opportunity.
Due to my circumstances, her falsified grade meant I had to rescind a full-ride scholarship which had been offered to me including boarding and a job, but on condition that my credits included that core class. I had no adults in my life to fight for me, and even though I met with my guidance counselor, the principal, several teachers and the school board, I was not helped and fell through the cracks, despite high standardized test scores and a high GPA.
Instead, I continued to be homeless from 18 to 21 and struggled very badly, starving and sick. I am now employed in my field of choice despite these circumstances, but I overall had a very traumatic experience with the public school system. The institution ultimately failed me, despite my intellect and perseverance.
So I share your concerns deeply! I want nothing of the sort to happen to my kids or anyone else's.
Your work looks very interesting, by the way, leafing through one of your papers.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44823657
It's interesting to blame anti-intellectualism because Republicans are usually labeled with that.
But simultaneously it's Democrats that will dumb down classes to make sure even the worst performing student will pass. And this is also anti-intellectualism, but of a different sort.
The combination is failing our students, doesn't matter the political orientation.
I'm involved in education, I see this every day - I spoke with someone taking a class on how to reach students, and due to no-child-left-behind, this is actually a class on how racism holds back black students and what to do about it (answer: Make simpler, easier classes). It's completely silent on any other type of student.
Republican states aren't doing that. It's not the concept of No Child Left Behind that is bad, it's the implementation (and it's used as a reason to worsen classes).
Republicans want to dismantle department of education, have cut funding for education, food stamps, free meals, etc. they are by definition against education for the outgroup and “the poors”. So I think that label is apt.
On the other hand, Dem leadership is quite racist and has a saviour complex. They identified the right issue — children from impoverished areas that don’t see a future for themselves through education are underperforming — but instead of treating the problem they push stuff like no child left behind. In their defence though, republicans simply don’t allow any legislation that would improve education to go forward, mainly because they benefit from it.
News to me.
The belief is that any advanced classes increase the achievement gap. People who subscribe to this also believe that advanced placement testing is discrimination and must be eliminated. They want equity of outcome, so reducing the curriculum to a single class at a single level that everyone the same age takes is their preference.
It has been implemented in several places with predictable backlash.
https://www.insidehighered.com/admissions/article/2017/10/09...
All of this is cultural and anyone who thought I implied race — which looks like you did — is a moron and a racist.
IMHO this whole thing is environmental.
I really don't get it. As a total amount of any budget from any perspective, string theory has always been a blip whose cultural impact is much wider than its actual budgetary one. Like this critique about string theory is just a thing that people who are physics "enthusiasts" say and even to the extent that it is true, its really been more than a decade since it was a problem.
We mostly question the fundamental subatomic particle physics that is not producing any returns on the investment. E.g. the galvanic effect was discovered in 1780, and there were long-distance telegraph lines by 1845 - so 65 years.
The last major theoretical advance in particle physics was around 1965 (Higgs mechanism). That's already 60 years ago.
a physicist responds: physics has done very little for like 70 years[0]
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d_o4k0eLoMI
Their steasks are obviously inadequetly sauced.
- It's mostly a cultural shift in the western world – we don't value personal responsibility any more. When I was in school in seventies, it was my responsibility to study no matter what since grade 1. It didn't matter whether I liked a teacher, topic or whatever. It's not the case any more.
- Since nineties there has been a shift in educational sciences and practices from "old school" memorizing as "rote learning" and explicit instruction toward "critical thinking skills". Sounds nice for many, but in practice it doesn't work. Barb Oakley has a wonderful paper about it "The Memory Paradox: Why Our Brains Need Knowledge in an Age of AI"[1].
- Smartphones, social media etc certainly contribute and the rise of LLMs will make it even worse.
[1] - https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5250447
Does anyone have any data points that could help me update my world model here?
I certainly feel personally responsible for things and so do many people that I know.
Additionally, it feels like people like to blame systemic issues on lack of personal responsibility in the general public, while ideally, elected officials should take personal responsibility for fixing the system.
Could you give me an example and how it helped you? Thank you :)
Life-changingly useful program for every aspect of my life, when I can finish it every day
My top tips:
- put all decks in a master “daily” deck using the :: syntax in the deck names. Otherwise you feel “done” when having finished one deck, and feel like not starting the next. Have only one goal - finishing today’s Anki - for that master deck (and every other deck) go Study Options > Display Order > New/review order > Show after reviews. Otherwise it’s hard to ever catch up when slipping behind. With this setting, the system becomes somewhat self correcting
My only regret is not being able to pay more than $25 to the developers
You can either mechanically memorize them, which is a boring and mindless activity, or you can be challenged, participate in discussions, projects, and activities that engage the parts of your brain involved with critical thinking.
Both will technically get you to pass a test, but the latter will be better for retaining information, while developing skills and neural pathways that make future learning easier.
The problem is that most academia is based on the memorization approach. Here are a bunch of ideas and facts we think are important; get them into your head, and regurgitate them back at us later. This is not a system that creates knowledgeable people. It doesn't inspire or reward curiosity, creativity, or critical thinking. It's an on-rails pipeline that can get you a piece of paper that says you've been through it, which is enough to make you a tax-paying citizen employed by companies who expect the bare minimum as well.
I get that the alternative approach is more difficult to scale, and requires a more nuanced, qualitative, and personal process. But that's how learning works. It's unique for everyone, and can't be specified as a fixed set of steps.
After all, what is the point of teaching people to be idea and fact storing machines, if machines can do a far better job at that than us? Everyone today can tell you a random fact about the world in an instant by looking it up in a computer. That's great, but we should be training and rewarding people for things computers can't do.
Parents are apparently raising their children wrong en masse, so was the parents’ generation rotten too? Which raises questions about the character of the generation that raised the parents…
Growing up in the 80s, I remember having a lot of free time and autonomy. I had soccer or baseballaybe twice a week and guitar lessons once a week, but the other days, I was doing what I wanted, I was expected to get my homework done, but once that was done,I was free to roam the neighborhood or my backyard.
This parenting mindset changed, by the late 80s early 90s and kids started getting more and more scheduled activities and less free time.
Even personally, 6 years ago my wife was very apprehensive about letting our oldest who was then 8, walk to his friend's house who was a 1/4 mile away in the neighborhood. Our youngest, who is 7, walks or bikes to his friend's house the same distance away. And we have other neighborhood kids that also go between people houses. That is the childhood I remember.
I don't think HW I got in elementary school necessarily helped me learn more, but the act of being given work with expectation that I would complete it on my own was a growth activity for me, and that is something that is starting to come back in elementary school, homework for the sake of learning how to do homework.
Imo source criticism is only a thing if you have a well grounded model of the universe. And if you DO have that, then source criticism just falls out naturally and you don't need to discuss that at all anyway.
No?
Most of the parents around me are busy each working a full time job and doing their best to raise their kids.
They now spend some of their free time reading on the phones instead of a newspaper, magazine, or book. Some listen to books while they mow the lawn, clean the house, or do other chores like laundry. They also hang out a mix of kids and parents nearby, both inside and out, in front of bonfires and kitchen tables. RN I'm commenting on HN while my kids and neighbor kids turn dinner into an imaginary cooking show at the table.
Parents around here are also often tending to elderly parents or physically/mentally challenged relatives.
Too few can afford to have one parent stay home fulltime.
Of course there have always been parents neglecting their kids to do anything else: bowling, drinking, partying, traveling, tinkering, obsessively reading, etc. The fact that more activities are behind screens isn't the catch all explanation it's often promoted to be.
Usually it’s just institutional failure at multiple levels and a whole bunch of people who don’t care about the institution’s output sufficiently.
Every time I read about new education stories they’re busy trying to solve wider social issues instead of being the best place to get an education. Just like how libraries turned into homeless shelters instead of being a place for the community to learn and read.
Screens and especially active content are incredibly addictive and small kids have no way of being rational and throttle their use. If they see the same behavior in their parents that's it.
Its not about having stay-at-home parent, but about spending the time with kids to be 100% physically there for them and them only, no running screen of any type anywhere in sight. Lets be honest, this is a rather rare sight.
Reality check, income inequality makes it so that parents have to slave away to earn the bar minimum to survive, participate in the gig economy, and then deal with tax cuts that give the richest of the rich even more money, while suffocating social services in their neighborhoods.
This is end stage capitalism, squeeze the rubes for every cent they have and damn their kids
Our district has eliminated programs for the kids at the top end in the name of equity. They've also eliminated separate spaces for kids with learning and behavioral issues for the same reason. So everyone is in the same classroom and most of the teacher's time is spent on a handful of kids causing trouble and the rest of the class learns nothing.
We can't afford private school, so we're doing a bunch of extra lessons at home to keep them on pace, engaged, and challenged. But really, there are only so many hours in the day and I want them to be outside playing too!
I think you're thinking of it backwards. Inner city Detroit kids probably struggle in school precisely because there maybe isn't a mom at home who's passionate and available to educate them (among plenty of other reasons, to be sure).
Inner city Detroit kids (not gonna lie, feels like a euphemism) aren't just inherently hard to teach for no reason
Oh come on. A quick read on Wikipedia will even tell you the research on outcomes is fraught with biases and lacking evidence. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeschooling
https://www.fox13seattle.com/news/sps-highly-capable-cohort-...
The end result was huge increases in spending. But not on education. The money was spent on more MacBooks, more iPads, more buildings, more smart TVs, more consultants, more School Bullshit System as a Service, more scoreboards, more $50,000 signs in front of schools.
Meanwhile the good teachers are fleeing the system and test scores are plummeting as schools focus more on day care and “social justice”, and a declining emphasis on teaching core subjects and learning in general, coupled with social promotion where everybody gets a C or higher, and 80% of the school gets on the honor roll (spoiler alert: our district is not some outlier where 80% of the kids are geniuses).
Schools have very little to do with teaching, and really are just about baby sitting and trying to correct social issues.
Oh, and endless buckets of tax payer money with meaningless oversight.
Is that wrong? The government takes away your kid for 12 years, every weekday all day, they might as well solve social issues in the country even if that means, say, kids are 1 year behind Asian kids, or their parents 30 years ago. If they figure out how to solve personal issues, that's even better.
I think there is a logical fallacy here. People assume that the only purpose of school is education. The more the education the better, even if that means deepening social issues, or making kids unhappy (BTW being a kid is like ~20% of someones life, not insignificant in itself). I think they assume it just because 'school' is called 'school', but I don't think the name of an object should determine its purpose.
- - -
When I look at the social issues in my country, I think the school system would be a very natural place to start to solve them (and arguably the current school system just worsens them). Even at the cost of "fall in reading and math scores".
I fully hear you on this. I miss the days where a simple phone call or email communication would occur when needed. Now it's a deluge of daily updates via 2 separate 'apps' for 2 different schools, and a requirement to login to 'app' or website to read the 'email' that they've sent out. Nevermind contacting someone that isn't directly associated with your child at the school -- Guess that's all need to know basis.
I hate it.
The lesson may even be the opposite: "If your school's biggest problem is 'too much money', outcomes will be pretty good."
I resisted that narrative for years, thinking it was just a media-hyped scare tactic to get clicks. However, my niece started high school a few weeks ago (in mid-August, which is weird to me); her experience blew my mind.
Her new high school is considered one of the better public high schools in the area. When I asked her how it was going, did she like being a high-schooler, I was expecting her to complain about the course load or something like that. However, she told me that after 2 weeks, they haven't spent one minute on actual education. She said they've been going over rules and policies for 2 weeks. Things like no bullying, inclusiveness, fire safety, bring your own water bottle, how to pray (they have a room dedicated to prayer), etc. Best/worst of all, they did an entire day on active shooter drills - the windows are now bullet-proof!
So yeah, unfortunately, I'm fully onboard with this narrative now. While kids in Taiwan and Japan are learning calc, kids in the US are doing active shooter drills and staring at the Ten Commandments. USA! USA! USA!
A government institution cannot promote any one religion. It's fine to have a multi-denominational non-secular common worship area. You can also promote religion as a general concept, but not a specific religion.
Whether this rule is followed or enforced properly is an entirely separate problem that we are apparently still grappling with.
It’s also in poor taste. Jesus himself commented on performative piety:
“Whenever you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, who love to stand and pray in the synagogues and on street corners so that others may observe them doing so. Amen, I say to you, they have already received their reward. 6 But when you pray, go into your room, close the door, and pray to your Father in secret. And your Father who sees everything that is done in secret will reward you“
This sounds like nobody in a position of power should be allowed to openly do anything that people around them have the right to not do. Which would be kinda bs.
Luckily there are both witness accounts and photos in this case, so it’s pretty clear what was really going on.
Because they're an authority figure in that context.
Same reason I can flirt with you, but your boss can't.
Yes. Apparently that's SB10. SB11 covers praying in school.
cf. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45194376
> kids in the US are doing active shooter drills and staring at the Ten Commandments. USA! USA! USA!
Not a thing at public schools (despite some attempts to force it)
Between this and the prayer comment, I suspect this comment is either exaggerated or mixed with internet anecdotes rather than actual experience.
>Not a thing at public schools (despite some attempts to force it)
>Between this and the prayer comment, I suspect this comment is either exaggerated or mixed with internet anecdotes rather than actual experience.
Actually, it is a thing in Texas. And unfortunately, it's not exaggerated at all.
From Wikipedia[0]:
"S.B. 10 requires public schools to display the Ten Commandments anywhere clearly visible. The law requires the display to be framed or a poster, and include the exact text of the Ten Commandments provided in the law without alternatives. It must also be at least 16 inches (41 cm) wide and 20 inches (51 cm) tall.[13]"
From the office of the Texas Attorney General:
“In Texas classrooms, we want the Word of God opened, the Ten Commandments displayed, and prayers lifted up,” said Attorney General Paxton. “Twisted, radical liberals want to erase Truth, dismantle the solid foundation that America’s success and strength were built upon, and erode the moral fabric of our society. Our nation was founded on the rock of Biblical Truth, and I will not stand by while the far-left attempts to push our country into the sinking sand.”
Senate Bill 11, passed by the Texas Legislature this past regular session, allows school boards to adopt policies setting aside time for voluntary prayer and the reading of the Bible or other religious texts. The law requires that the board of trustees for each ISD in Texas take a record vote on whether to adopt a policy to implement these periods no later than six months after September 1, 2025. Student participation in these periods requires parental consent."
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_Senate_Bill_10
[1] https://www.texasattorneygeneral.gov/news/releases/attorney-...
Edit: Fixed typo (nor --> not).
More songs about Ken Paxton[0]
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cUqTNDJjdLw
When great controversy surrounds the curriculum, the safest thing to teach is nothing at all.
I fixed your verbiage to be more descriptive. They are teaching nothing specifically because they don't want to kill the golden goose. If there wasn't so much money at stake we wouldn't be having this discussion.
Is it possible your niece was joking?
Can I guess.. "bulleted"? Similar to how the creators of brainrot content say "unalive" or "seggs" because they want to make sure their content can go viral, and there's the belief words like "kill", "died" or "sex" will trigger Zuck and Co.'s censorship?
2025, what a year to be alive...
But this is a boring suburban town on the edge of a midsize metro in the PNW, which is not exactly the most exciting place in the country.
What else do you expect government run schools to teach if not "engage the government at any/every opportunity"?
Looking back on my own education what a disservice some of those behavior patterns (not specifically that one) they tried to teach us would be in adult life.
Likewise, I think it is very ill-advised to cram kid's heads full of "dial 911" at the young vulnerable age where repeated messaging goes into the kind of memory that's all but impossible to overwrite.
And ACAB, yeah, sure. Basically true, I agree.
That's still your best first move if there's a mass shooting. Anyone you call's just going to call 911 anyway (god, I hope). You do want hospitals on alert and calling in trauma surgeons, and ambulances on the way. And usually the police aren't that astoundingly useless in these cases, even if their outcomes are mixed.
I do think more often than not police are, in general, a net-benefit and force for "good", if you will, when called in for a mass shooting, and I don't think it's a particularly close call. Though yeah sometimes they are pretty bad even for that purpose (and they're often bad for other purposes, sure), and in the case of Uvalde they were disgustingly bad, and I here employ "disgustingly" with its full force and not flippantly.
Still, like... probably call 911 first if someone's shooting up a school?
What kids do with what they learn in school matter more than whether or not they memorized a calc function.
Besides, who cares if you know cal functions in a post-phone, post-AI world. You look that shit up now.
Lots and lots of stuff that just has to be memorized. It becomes easier the more experiences one gets over time using those, merely memorizing the words alone ofc. is useless and also very inefficient, without other knowledge to create a network the brain will throw pure sentence-memorization out. So you still start the lessons with some memorization, then deepen it by using it in class. But in the end you will still remember those many little "facts".
I say this as someone you drank the "no memorization" koolaid. Now I always start new things with memorization first and I learn so much faster.
There are some subjects where the emphasis on memorization that some places have is detrimental, but that doesn't make memorization bad in general.
As a kid, and probably still now, I was very reluctant to memorise things, for some reason I never understood but that may be connected with distrust of authority. I still remember how long and hard I fought my parents and grandparents who tried to make sure I would eventually memorise multiplication tables. Instead, I had to develop many tricks to be able to retrieve the proper results without memorisation, effectively discovering patterns to retrieve quickly all the tables from very few memorised numbers. Years later, I remember having done a similar thing in history classes, refusing to learn any dates, so instead finding tricks to tell which events must have occurred before or after another, thus again getting more engaged with the material as a result.
Sure, some material do require pure memorisation, like language learning (that I still hate with a passion), but overall I believe memorisation gets the bad rep it deserves.
1. We pay teachers like shit and treat them even worse. Even if you wanted to do a good job as a teacher, it's fundamentally impossible because:
2. Our schools are structured and run by busybodies that have absolutely no business being within 100 yards of a school. Curricula is set by politics and ideology, not established science. We have book bans and helicopter parents suing teachers for talking about dinosaurs or evolution or even for simply existing as a queer person in any capacity.
Teachers have been fleeing in droves for years, and many states and locales are further reducing the qualifications required to teach, leading to a downwards sprial.
There's also the intentional and systematic disassembling of our education system by the federal government, as a means of voter suppression. This whole situation was created on purpose to keep Americans dumb and complacent.
America is fucked six ways from Sunday and it's hard to even think about a way out of this mess. It's going to take several generations for our society and government to recover, if it ever does.
> Only one study specifically examined the achievement gap for students from low socioeconomic backgrounds (Hampton & Gruenert, 2008) despite NCLB’s stated commitment to improving education for children from low-income families. African American students were often mentioned in studies of general student achievement but none of the reviewed studies focused specifically on the effects of NCLB for this subgroup. Again, this is a curious gap in the research considering the law’s emphasis on narrowing the Black-White achievement gap. Other groups of students underrepresented in the research on NCLB include gifted students, students with vision impairments, and English proficient minority students.
("A Review of the Empirical Literature on No Child Left Behind From 2001 to 2010", Husband & Hunt, 2015)
Everything you see going wrong is downstream of this. Yes, harmful ideologies have done a lot of damage to the education system, but it could easily survive this we had actual signifiers of success.
I read your post and thought it was BS, so I did a little research. According to this, California public school test scores are better than Texas and closing in on New York and Florida.
> California politics is heavily influenced by Teachers Unions, and yet we score near the bottom of the entire US.
California scores better than Texas, a completely Republican-run state where the teacher's unions have almost no influence. How do you account for that?
https://www.ppic.org/publication/californias-k-12-test-score...
https://www.chadaldeman.com/p/which-states-actually-have-the...
https://www.urban.org/sites/default/files/2024-12/States_Dem...
Mississippi, for example, has a third grade reading gate. Texas holds black kids back at a nearly twice the rate of white kids. These kids are older and have repeated the grade so they do better in the 4th grade NAEP assessment.
This is possibly working as intended. However, you can achieve the same results by redshirting your kid or having them repeat a grade.
So the claim from the blog post that
> but Texas has a slight edge for Hispanic students and a huge advantage for Black students.
says that the Texas results are driven by a demographic that's aggressively held back.
In practical terms, the states kind of have different definitions of what it means to be in 4th grade. And that's one way of increasing your score on this particular measurement.
I think the right thing to do is intervene before students are held back. But that costs money and might make your NAEP scores worse if the student just squeaks by this year rather than staying behind a year. But I don't have the data on how much they're attempting to intervene in cases where students look like they're going to be held back.
This is an easily disprovable statement that calls into question your credibility.
California schools generally score right at or just below the median for the entire US.
That doesn't make them good, but they sure aren't the worst.
> I would not lean too hard at political party affiliation
In the US, it's not hard to look at a map of political party affiliation and a ranking of the worst schools and not notice the correlation.
Unless I missed something?
I wonder where you went to school. Median means that half of the sample is above and half the sample is below.
To explain (and I'll use small words so you'll be sure to understand), the median of the fifty states is that 25 are above the median and 25 are below it. See how that works?
Here's a simpler example in case you're still confused:
Steve makes $5/hour
Bob makes $8/hour
Reggie makes $11/hour
Sylvana makes $14/hour
Benoit makes $17/hour
The median wage is then $11.00/hour. Get it now?
Check out this very complex page[0] (let me know if you need help with the bigger words) that discusses this idea. Good luck. I suspect you're gonna need it.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_tendency
This is part of it. A friend is a teacher and is now in an admin position where he manages teachers. His big gripe is the higher ups have no formal system - every time a new person comes in they bring with them their system and politics, burning down the previous efforts while doing little to nothing for students. Then they leave for greener pastures and the next ideologue comes along with their matches.
Where is your evidence of this? Schools are one of the most locally controlled institutions of our government.
Teacher salaries need to keep up. The problem is teacher salaries aren’t a state or a national setup. They depend on the school district you’re in. If you’re in a high income district where higher taxes are afforded. Teacher salaries are good. But then these places also have VERY engaged parents - which makes the scores much better.
If you want rural and inner city scores to improve it will need real funding - 1. For teachers to want to move to small town USA and teach there, 2. Or for them to risk life and limb going to inner cities and 3. Having an extremely high teacher to student ratio - probably 5-10 per teacher to compensate for lack of engagement at home.
So you support shutting down the federal Dept. of Education? Or is the answer more centralized control of education?
Schools are dominated by leftwing CRT ideology. It's the rare exception when there is real pushback against dinosaurs or evolution. I very much doubt that you are as angry about Islamic pushback against sex topics in school.
The reward structures, the dumbing down of courses, removing accelerated courses, passing everyone, the move against merit, the removal of structure, discipline, and punishment for bad behavior all come from liberal ideas on teaching.
Anyone who demands standards, values merit, values hard work with high expectations is labeled a fascist, colonizer, or some other pejorative. "Ways of knowing" is an idea that permeates modern teaching where we can't judge or grade anyone for what they know or don't know because different people just "know" differently. Grades are racist. Expectations are racist. Math is racist.
The shitty parents are the ones who let meta and the like hack them to the point where their children are just following by example - if you stare at the screen all day, so will they.
It is cheaper, easily available and more fun.
Sure kids also use social networks. But the role reading had was mostly taken over by Netflix, youtube, disney and such.
... huh?
I'm a parent and this just isn't true. My wife and I have phones, our young children do not. We do not own a tablet. Our children have never known what it's like to have the option of resorting to a screen to keep them busy when we're out of the house. TV time is limited on the weekends, extra limited on the weeknights.
My oldest absolutely loves reading, and I watched her sit in the corner for 90 minutes on Sunday with a pile of books and a massive grin on her face the whole time. My youngest is still too young to read, but I'm hoping for results within the same realm.
Your comment about there frequently not being much else to do? It's up to parents to, for lack of a better phrase, teach kids how to be bored.
Edit:
>It's cheaper, easily available and more fun.
What's super fun, easily available and free for us is going to a park on the weekend to play and have lunch, and then driving around to a bunch of Little Free Libraries in the area. Drop off books we don't want, see if the kids or parents find anything that strikes our fancy. Our kiddos love it and so do we, it's great family time.
It's great that your kids are reading, but clearly a lot of kids, and even more adults, aren't.
It's not just "up to parents" because the media, in all its forms, sets collective values.
And the strategic problem in the US is that reading - and culture in general - is caught between a number of competing ideologies, most of which are destructive to what's usually understood as education both in and out of school.
What individual parents do is downstream of all of those cultural influences. It's heavily dependent on socioeconomics, opportunity, and status, with error bars that depend on a random range of individual values.
The US is a competing patchwork of wildly incompatible cultures and traditions, some of which are directly opposed to each other, and all of which - in practice - are suspicious of traditional educational goals.
Put simply, no one is driving the bus. So it's stuck in a ditch, with its wheels spinning. And it's about to burst into flames.
There's only so much individual parents can do to fix that. The problems are strategic and political, not individual, and they're much harder to fix than they seem.
And I wish people wouldn't make assumptions and then respond based on those assumptions.
[1] https://literacytrust.org.uk/research-services/research-repo...
Seems like the kids just don't read anymore, yours being exception of course
You can teach your kids how to fly a plane, yet gravity is not up to parents.
Assuming they will social, they will have friends to talk with them about anime shows and they will go visit them to watch those shows in their house. The kids in school will talk about anime, about netflix shows, but not about books.
> It's up to parents to, for lack of a better phrase, teach kids how to be bored.
You have full control while they are small. That goes away quickly and obviously even should go away.
But even more importantly, my parents and parents of my peers did not had to put that much work into us reading. They did not had to make the one big family project, they could have spend their weekends working in garden or going to play golf ... and generally speaking kids ended up reading a lot more anyway. They would read, because it was easily available and only fun thing to do.
> What's super fun, easily available and free for us is going to a park on the weekend to play and have lunch, and then driving around to a bunch of Little Free Libraries in the area.
It is not fun except for small kids. All these stats are about kids with agency which yours do not have yet.
- There's also a reward issue, in that reading, especially long form is "soft punished." It's not directly punished, yet there's very little reward, mostly a lot of struggle, not much of the candy feedback of TV, movies, and video games. It requires personal imagination and visualization of often difficult concepts rather than simply taking what someone else has "imagined correctly" for you. If you've never seen the Lord of the Rings movies, imaging what Frodo, Aragorn, and the rest are actually doing, where they're going, and the struggling through Tolkien's complicated prose is quite challenging. And socially, there's also significant peer pressure issues involved, that evoke “epidemic” or “contagion” comparisons. Once large numbers of peers discount reading, then the population on average starts receiving negative feedback. Notably, if peers are high achievers, then students who interact with these peers may also adopt those habits. [1]
[1] https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/jameskim/files/jep-peer_in...
- Part that's less nefarious, like a teen highlights about the difficulties of reading in this paper [2] (pg 34.) "You can’t ask a book to explain what it means right now. I go to people because of their interactive nature."
[2] https://alair.ala.org/server/api/core/bitstreams/0051cf84-91...
- The social media companies and the world wide web culture in general have also implemented a form of reading detriment. There's little reward to blogging, writing, or reading long form writing. Incendiary writing and rage-farming was long ago found to be an extremely effective tactic compared to informative discussion. And a lot of the time, almost all you can look forward to with your informative post is your contribution being aggressively scraped, while being compensated nothing, and then churned out to make someone else money.
- There's actually a few positive though, apparently teen and juvenile literature is actually increasing in sales somewhat from [2] compared with adult literature sales. Young adult books have been the fastest-growing category over the last 5 years, with print unit sales jumping by 48.2% since 2018. 35.03 million print copies of young adult (YA) books are sold each year as of 2022. [3]
[3] https://wordsrated.com/young-adult-book-sales/#:~:text=Compa...
- You may be slightly down biasing how much people read Lord of the Rings. The Hobbit edition from 2007 has 76,000 ratings and 12,000 reviews on Amazon. [4]
[4] https://www.amazon.com/Hobbit-J-R-R-Tolkien/dp/0618968636/re...
Adult genre fic, even, is dying, and lit-fic has long been in decline and has pretty much just been for a few nerds since roughly the turn of the millennium.
I think the decline of reading is exactly what’s pushed publishers and agents to favor easier and easier books: you have to pursue as much of the market as possible to make money now because the whole market’s not that big, so you can’t afford to exclude readers. That means favoring ever-easier books as readership declines.
The only other route to make a living is aiming straight at film/TV adaptation, which is very hard to break into but a handful of authors have successfully specialized in that. Their books do OK but they’re watched, as it were, way, way more than they’re read.
It’s not that we all got a lecture about no video games in school. It just very self-evidently wasn’t a place you would play video games. It would be like getting a pizza delivered to you at the doctor’s office. Just absurd.
I remember a kid with a Game Gear on the elementary school bus and even that being, well, unusual enough I remember it. Kind of similar to how kids will always remember seeing someone’s family pet run on the bus, because it blows their minds that it can even happen.
not in class, of course, but at lunch and on the bus, it was fair game.
If I was born recently, I'd be just one of the kids that get stuck with a screen from day 0. There's no recovering from that.
What universe do you live in
The point is that students are doing worse, even though ^ is likely true today just like it was true 5, 10, and 20 years ago.
This is a common trope but I've never seen any evidence.
Go to any sports field/venue and observe the bleachers.
What you find may astound you, even if the percentage isn't literally 50%+.
I do also play with them, but I'm not one of the parents who's always playing with them any time they're playing, they also need space to figure their own stuff out. Adults can do other things a lot of the time, it's fine.
Or you can knock out some schedule stuff or teacher-emailing or bill-paying or whatever that you'd otherwise have to cram in some other time, that's nice too.
Plus, these activities aren't causing missed education. I'm not teaching my kids math while they go on slides.
What exactly do you expect people to do there while doing nothing and while being interrupted every 6 minutes over yet another interesting rock?
You must live in a very sad place. This does not describe the average parent of any of the kids around me. I know these people exist, but it’s not the norm at least in my state.
The most common complaint among my teacher friends is about helicopter parents who are too involved.
Admittedly my kids get more screen time than I'd like, but we try to make it educational. An observation that I made that is on topic for this thread, is that there are very few modern US shows that seem to fit our criteria of being educational and not over-stimularing. It seemes there are many more international shows that are better.
The costs of this societal shift fall on those who can’t compete for time. Student’s go unparented and unmentioned.
This lazy "answer" to every parenting problem makes me roll my eyes nowadays. It's the equivalent of an umbrella hypothesis, a convenient excuse for not having to consider things in-depth, further justified by seeing parents when they are taking a break and assuming they're always like that.
Citation? I've routinely seen statistics suggesting the opposite, that parents are moreI involved with their children in the modern time and more likely to play and engage with children.
I’ve seen stay at home parents who put their kids in daycare so they can spend the day shopping and effectively have someone else raise their kids. Their kids end up largely just being status symbols. I’ve also seen parents that go everywhere with their kids, schedule every moment of their day and won’t even let them stand at the school bus stop by themselves. The parents build their entire lives around their kids and live vicariously through them.
IMO, kids need a proper balance and I don’t think a lot of them are getting that.
Why don't they care? I think for many, they have given up any hope that a better life is possible. So education isn't the key, because nothing is the key, because the door doesn't even exist.
Step 1: Import millions of low-IQ migrants Step 2: Scores drop on average
Also choosing to close schools during COVID was as catastrophic as many predicted. Our kid was in 7th grade during COVID and teachers each year report the effects are still being felt across many students. Of course, naturally great students recovered quickly and innately poor students remained poor but the biggest loss was in the large middle of B/C students.
The agreement I had with him: "Scroll all day, play video games, etc. That is my side of the agreement. And you also do your school work, learn, practice for exams, homework, etc. That is your side of the agreement. I'll trust you. If your grades get worse, i.e. you need help managing device time, we'll review/change this agreement."
We also sat down many times looking at content together, in attempt to teach him what's trust-worthy and what isn't, what's "healthy" and what isn't, etc. And of course we do other things together as well.
So far (knock on wood) my son has managed well - he is 16 now. He organizes his own time, and has learned when to play and when to work. And crucially he has learned when to disconnect from his devices to do what's necessary.
No kid is the same. I am not saying my approach is best or even right, I just offer it as another data point.
https://www.goodmorningamerica.com/family/story/author-sugge...
We should do whatever they do.
On that note, we should also segregate kids by academic desire and achievement like Japan and China. The bullies and underachievers hold back those who are academically excellent. We do this in limited instances, but not enough to really count.
Responding to the OC, this is a downright awful solution to the current education problem in the U.S.
https://www.hup.harvard.edu/file/feeds/PDF/9780674295391_sam...
And some of those kids still struggled. But the response was to push harder. Didn't get adequate grades that school year? You're not doing anything fun this summer, you're studying. Needless to say it was a culture shock going to college and meeting people who were shockingly cavalier about potentially failing classes.
Steven He demonstrates what happens when an Asian kid tells their parents about getting a B.
Baked into it is the assumption that current education models fit both genders equally. Boys respond better to active learning and competitive techniques than the more passive techniques used currently. (Could we just as easily draw the opposite conclusion if our current educational culture was geared towards boys?)
Another thing to consider is the various programs that incentivise/enable girls to get into various subjects (in my n=1 experience I had much fewer programs (programming, robotics, maths, etc.) to join despite being already very interested and strong in those subjects).
By comparing age groups directly we are also not controlling for the fact girls mature faster making them better students earlier in life. We are also not considering tail effects of a normal distribution: e.g. top 5% of all students are male, but majority of students in the top 50% are female.
Maybe the solution is to segregate schools on gender, but that doesn't immediately equate to boys crashing and girls excelling.
Do you have another reason for being against streaming?
Great onservation and great Fussell reference.
Some/much of the content in Class is a bit dated now, but imho it is still very directionally correct.
Having learned a bit about adult developmental psychology, many of his observations are found in and predictable by modern cognitive psychology.
I distinctly remember seeing, several years ago, a photo of one of (I swear this is going to be basically apolitical) Trump's kids with their family, including one or more kids with toys, sitting in some kind of living-space with this perfectly spotless mirrored-on-all-sides table, and I was like "FUSSELL!!!!". Or all the gold in photos of that family in their home environments (a signal aimed squarely at Fussell's "Middle", which thinks "gold shit everywhere" is an "upper" signal, which it is not—unlike the mirrored table, which is Upper, because nobody who ever does their own cleaning would willingly deal with a fingerprint-magnet like that)
People keep talking about how catastrophic it was to close schools during COVID. We keep having catastrophes and no one does anything about it. If the kids missed school, make them go back longer. Large chunks of the country still have 2-3 months where the kids don't do anything; send them back then. If they are already doing year-round schooling, cancel after-school athletics and make them learn with that time instead.
This doesn't seem to be a thing anymore, and there probably multiple sad reasons why.
That's why it's nice when states just make it a law. That shuts those people up (or at least forces them to go complain somewhere else, where they're more easily ignored and it takes more effort so they'll probably just give up).
(That's the middle-class schools—in really rough schools, teachers have to pick their battles because actual violence is on the table as a response, even among lower elementary kids, and admin's too busy dealing with things way more serious than some kid texting in class to back teachers up on small stuff like that)
> 4. Limit the distractions caused by using digital devices in class >Students who spent up to one hour per day on digital devices for learning activities in school scored 14 points higher on average in mathematics than students who spent no time. Enforced cell phone bans in class may help reduce distractions but can also hinder the ability of students to self-regulate their use of the devices.
I don't think a simple blanket ban on smartphones in schools is likely to solve much.
There are so many factors to the negative education outcomes but this policy is just obvious. I guess its actually the parents who insist on being able to reach their kid at any moment?
("A Review of the Empirical Literature on No Child Left Behind From 2001 to 2010", Husband & Hunt, 2015)
Everything you see going wrong is downstream of this. Yes, harmful ideologies have done a lot of damage to the education system, but it could easily survive this if we had actual signifiers of success.
- Public school is essentially daycare. They try to integrate special education students more into the regular classrooms, but the teachers end up spending disproportionate time dealing with them and their behavioral issues, which hurts learning for regular students.
- I don't have strong, set in stone opinions about Common Core, but it's approach is certainly hard for parents trying to catch their own children at home. Eg. there is no emphasis on memorizing multiplication tables, but rather it's on learning rather esoteric and hard to remember (albeit valid) math algorithms.
- The teachers are generally poorly trained, poorly motivated, poorly paid, poorly educated, and poorly adapted to teaching students.
- Learning high school math has been enjoyable. I only took up to geometry in high school, but they are doing much more advanced math. I don't know any of it, and they barely do. So it's been fun learning it and then having to teach it to them in the matter of a day or two. Being a programmer has been exceptionally useful in that regard.
Gone are the days you are held back. It’s a classic Goodharts Law problem. We’ve focused on one metric and lost site of the bigger picture.
States improving performance (Mississippi of all places) now are holding you back at certain milestones. IE at 3rd grade if you can’t read, 8th grade for math deficits, etc.
Not supposed to think about it according to whom? Who's telling you that? Why are you listening to him?
The US has some of the best public schools in the world. The US also tops the world on spending per student, especially in poorly performing areas. The education crisis disappears when you control for demographics.
It's right to notice that and remains right no matter how much pushback you get from people who've been pushing the same broken solutions for 50 years.
Congratulations for adopting an independent perspective here. We need more of you.
I'm generally quite progressive but I am beginning to appreciate that the right may have a good argument.
That's also the left. The right holds the differences are genetic, not likely to change, and the only problem to solve is how to keep them out of the country.
And if their children are underperforming in schools it would be important to know.
Citation desperately needed.
How can you prove that empirically? What is your methodology for controlling for environmental factors in making that assertion, including factors associated with access to resources, tutors, having a full belly every morning, and not being constantly flooded with stress hormones as a result of grappling with the daily reality of living in poverty?
It's quite a leap to claim that immigration is the cause of the US IQ decline. The best explanations seem to be that it's environmental [2]. The general decline in IQ is impacting several countries.
0 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heritability_of_IQ
1 https://nchstats.com/average-iq-by-state-in-us/
2 https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29891660/
The “IQ is BS” meme mostly comes from misunderstandings and misuse. People often assume IQ is meant to measure all kinds of intelligence when it really focuses on certain reasoning and problem-solving skills. Early tests had cultural biases, and while modern versions address this better, that history sticks. It’s also been used for discriminatory purposes, which has left a bad taste even when the measurement itself is valid. Critics are right that IQ doesn’t capture creativity, emotional intelligence, or practical skills—but psychologists never claimed it did.
In short, IQ is a valid and reliable measure for a specific set of cognitive abilities. It’s not the whole story of intelligence, but dismissing it outright ignores a large and consistent body of evidence.
Also, that replication crisis, that was in psychology, was it?
The replication crisis doesn't apply. IQ is one of the most studied and replicated statistics in psychology. IQ IS in fact the exception to the replication crisis. Your beliefs are a myth.
I'll bet you 3:1 odds embryo selection works. If you're serious about your anti-hereditarian position, take me up on my offer.
So, no, of course I'm not going to take you up on that bet. It's like betting against Bitcoin. I think Bitcoin is a farce but I'm not dumb enough to short it.
I'm not an "anti-heriditarian". I think there's probably a lot of value, long term, in embryo selection for things like disease avoidance. I also believe there's natural variability in cognitive ability; I don't believe all people are "blank slates"; that's a caricature (or, if you like, a deliberate wrong-footing of people who reflexively reject psychometrics and genetics for ideological reasons) of the actual concern I have.
Finally, I don't know what anything you said has to do with what I said. I said, very simply, "heritability != DNA". That's an objective, positive claim. Was this bet your attempt at rebutting it?
I'm sure you've read Gwern's essay on polygenic trait inheritance. I'm not sure repeating the literature would be productive here. We have every reason to believe that embryo selection and genetic engineering more generally won't just "cure disease" but make us taller, smarter, more beautiful, and longer lived -- and there's nothing wrong with that.
Of course there's a lot of variability. At some point technology will improve to the point that denying the effect exists will seem ridiculous, although I'm sure plenty will try.
I will say, though, that downplaying trait inheritance and the way genetics is the mechanism for this inheritance produces models that don't predict reality nearly as well as models that incorporate hereditary via genetics, and especially when it comes to education, we're throwing public money down the toilet as long as we make policy using inaccurate models.
I don't know what any of the rest of this has to do with what I said. I ask again: are you writing all this by way of declaring that "heritability == DNA"? That's a straightforward discussion we can have. Why avoid it?
Wealthier parents tend to be smarter (that's how they got wealthy or managed to keep inherited wealth) and tend to have smarter kids... who then tend to up on the wealthier side of the spectrum.
It's very unfair. It's also very real. Your fantasy is not real.
Your fantasy is not real.
Existence of a correlation is enough reason to break down any analyses by demographic data to have a clearer picture of what's going on. That's just basic data science.
What I said got you angry. But I am stating a factual truth and opinion. You need to learn how to respect other peoples opinion, because your anger and disillusionment is what causes the same thing as censorship.
The truth hurts, but you can't restrict it just because it hurts.
The most elegant proof of IQ being linked to genetics:
The same person taking an IQ test twice has mean correlation of 0.85 or above in their scores. Identical twins reared together: 0.86 Identical twins reared apart: 0.76 Biological parent and child: 0.42 Adoptive parent and child: 0.19 And of course, any two random people will have a correlation close to 0.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heritability_of_IQ#Correlation...
If you do not believe this, then I would have to hypothesize you are succumbing to motivated reasoning out of a deeper value system placing equality above all other values. This is a well known pattern of belief amongst leftists, where they think humans are infinitely malleable blank slates and all inequalities can be rectified given enough social engineering. They deny objective group differences because they want a utopia where everyone is equal. This is clearly unrealistic, but furthermore it contradicts their value of diversity, where if people are diverse, then you would expect variation in all traits, intelligence included.
How is this proof of IQ being linked to genetics if adoptive parents can have 1/2 of the correlation that identical twins have? I think this proves that genetics only has a minor part, and upbringing/environment seems to be the most important factor.
But leaving aside things like Trisomy 21, your evidence here is twin study heritability. Heritability is not genetic determinism; it's almost a category error to claim otherwise, since "heritability" is really just a way of framing the question of whether something is genetically determined --- you still have to answer the question! There's a whole big research field controversy about this, "missing heritability", exploring (in part) why molecular genetics results, especially when corrected for things like within-family bias, are returning such lower heritability estimates than classic twin studies.
I do not believe that any random child selected at birth has an equivalent potential to win a Fields Medal, given the optimal environment to do that in. But the "hard truth nobody wants to face", from the parent commenter, is subtextually about race --- and there the evidence is a wreck; extraordinarily unlikely to bear any fruit.
Is there any new reading here? I used to follow this stuff much more closely a decade ago, but came to the conclusion most scientists will go to great lengths to avoid saying some races (if they don’t barrage you with pedantry regarding what race is) are on average different in some axis than others. There were a few out there who were able to say the politically incorrect thing only because objective science was strongly in their favor, but they still had the full force of the consensus academia coming down on them.
I lost interest when, much like history, it became obvious the field was too political for any real truth to be found. Maybe in 100 years or so.
I think what some people are noticing is that there aren't splashy results to confirm, like, The Bell Curve. Yeah, that's because The Bell Curve was really dumb; it's from the phlogiston era of this science.
I’ll try again in 100 years :)
But keep fantasizing you're born in the best race in the world, lucky you
We just need to compare with country of origin performance. If a family relocates from a place with low scores to a place with high scores, can you explain why you think we would expect their scores to rapidly increase to match the new place? I can think of many factors that would work against this that have nothing to do with race or genetics.
If the study is not controlled for this, then the education system at large may not have the kind of problem we would think about if we ignored this aspect. That seems pretty important to the discussion, I think?
Reading teaching on the other hand was for the most part figured out a long time ago but trendy experimental methods keep getting cycled regardless.
This is a fundamental problem with all learning: it's difficult to get entire group to do something the same way with equal effectiveness... that being said, teaching methods are evolving and it's really on the school system to embrace those changes. My kids are young, and their school teaches math with the Singapore Math system and literacy with the UFLI program. They have both been highly effective.
Their class sizes are also 12:1 students:teacher ratio, and 6:1 in Pre-K/Kindergarten. So that's also probably important.
Absolutely.
I don't see how somebody can learn when they're missing school so much. Math and reading require so much repetition and if you're not in school, you're not getting that time to sit down and do the exercises required to ingrain these topics. It doesn't even matter how a school teaches if the student isn't in class. They're just not going to retain things well.
That said a significant fraction of kids really do need all the help they can get, but catering to them means leaving a lot of slack in the schedule.
The reason it’s since covid up is because (more) parents stopped sending their kids to school when they are sick.
Last year I got a semi-threatening letter from the district for “chronic absenteeism” because I didn’t want to send a sick child to school. To their defense, they did say that the state (California) requires them to send the letter.
Elephant in the room in my state is definitely chronic absence. Depending on source it's when student misses something like 15+ or 20+ school days a school year. More affluent areas have numbers 15% and lower. Less affluent ones it can be well above 50%. And nobody is doing anything.
Test scores substantially mirror this bifurcation.
It is substantially worsened by charter and voucher schools. Which interact with the whole mess in complex and negative ways.
In fact I would argue many of them were a net negative to my learning achievements (or lack thereof).
So yeah, defund public schools as much as possible. That will get my vote.
Instead of defunding, we should institute a voucher system where parents can choose between a local public school if it's good, charter schools, or towards a private school tuition and pay the difference.
The worst leftists (handshake) the worst right wingers
There’s a huge teaching gap between USA and Asia.
See for yourself:
https://youtu.be/wIyVYCuPxl0?si=f6wFv2G3Iru7QFTy
https://en.wikipedia-on-ipfs.org/wiki/James_W._Stigler
Edit: since it may not have been clear from the video, this is my interpretation:
* in the Japanese math class the teacher teaches at the board and then walks around the class to look at the students. Students are not sitting in large groups.
* in the American class the teacher spends practically 0 time at the blackboard, the students sit in large groups, the teacher spends most of the time with one or two groups.
Is staying at the front a sign that the teacher is lazy and not helping students? Or is it that the students are competent enough without aid? That could be good if it indicates your students have been taught well enough to master the material. But it could also be bad, indicating your school does not offer enough incremental challenge, and students who are beyond their current level, but not high enough for the next level (honors or whatever), never reach their full potential.
There's far too many uncontrolled variables here. Also, it seems the wikipedia-on-ipfs page for Stigler is down.
When I was in school, most work & learning happened on the individual level. Sometimes in pairs, where we would have to check each other's answers. But from what I see among my younger relatives and friends with children, there's a lot of group learning going on these days. Groups of five doing all kinds of projects in pretty much any class on any subject. Maybe it's fun to collectively build a diorama of ancient rome for history class, but I doubt you'll improve your maths skills much in this way.
Is this a consequence of a teacher shortage? Are kids in these groups supposed to help other kids? Are they supposed to learn cooperating with (or leeching off) others, at the cost of learning useful skills for themselves?
Because paper cutters are too easy to disassemble as re-use as a shiv machete? And anyway, it's pretty hard to make cloudy curves with a paper cutter.
> in the American class the teacher spends practically 0 time at the blackboard, the students sit in large groups, the teacher spends most of the time with one or two groups.
Three or four students is a large group?
I find it interesting that James W Stigler doesn't even have a wikipedia page. I'm not sure what that means, but he somehow isn't very notable despite having written popular books and being a university professor. (or he is so controversial that they can't agree on one - which is a sign to not take him too seriously)
For the former I'd guess its because they have very strong control on people's behaviors so they just want them more capable to innovate, grow economy, etc.
For the latter I'd guess its because they fear a more educated population will be harder to manipulate and hence erode government power.
On the American side it’s not that they want people to be less educated. It’s the adversarial system of education being run by people whose interests are not aligned with students excelling.
Teacher’s unions, which predominantly exist in the public school system, are not in the business of educating children. They’re in the business of raising costs (their salaries and benefits) and lowering requirements (the work they actually have to do). They’re against measuring progress. They’re against firing for lack of progress.
Compare that to a private system where you only stay employed if you’re actually doing a good job of educating kids. There’s also the advantage of private schools being able to fire their students, but that’s more of an anti-disruption thing.
While not always the case, "measuring progress" makes things worse because they tried this and what you get is standardized tests and teachers teaching to the test (Goodhart's law). Most (not all, there are crap teachers out there) are doing their best despite the rules imposed on them by local schoolboards (which are often a shitshow), and by curriculum mandates which they have no say in. And when given too large classes and next to no resources or support, they are then blamed when the kids don't prosper in that environment. There's grade inflation also, this happens at private schools too. Which teacher is more likely to get fired/disciplined; one who fails a lot of students and hardly ever gives and A, or one that hands out A's like candy and the worst non-performing students get a maybe C- (brought up to a C or C+, once the parents come in to complain to administration).
They do a pretty good job at it when you factor in long term pensions and health care.
> Teachers do not get paid well.
Teachers get paid too much. They create artificial barriers like requiring multiple years of certifications to purposefully limit the pool of competition. Most teachers unions are closed shops that mandate membership.
> They also tend to get paid more at the elite private schools. So if you want to compare, then you would be advocating for public schools to match private school salaries.
If I could waive a wand to immediately increase public teacher’s salaries by 25% in exchange for the elimination of all tenure (which does not exist at K-12 private schools), I would do it immediately.
> While not always the case, "measuring progress" makes things worse because they tried this and what you get is standardized tests and teachers teaching to the test (Goodhart's law).
There’s plenty of objective things to measure in math and science. If little Johnny can’t do basic arithmetic or solve 3x+2=11, you can’t fake that during an exam.
At least with teaching to the test, the kids learned the material on the test.
If you don’t measure things, you will not improve it. And teachers unions are adamantly against measuring things. Because they know it can and will be used against them. It’s an inherent conflict of interest.
They only get good pensions and health care because school districts refuse to give them better salaries instead. And good health care (really, health insurance) is crucial because health care costs can obviously bankrupt you in America.
> They create artificial barriers like requiring multiple years of certifications to purposefully limit the pool of competition
How is requiring the equivalent of a master's degree an "artificial barrier"? Surely, new teachers should have some experience and theoretical background before standing in front of 30-100+ students and being responsible for their education?
Florida passed a law making it possible for veterans to teach without even having a bachelor's degree. Does that sound like a good idea to you? Would requiring even a bachelor's degree be an "artificial barrier" in your opinion?
https://www.fldoe.org/teaching/certification/military/
Requiring anything at all is by definition an artificial barrier. Some are justified and some are not. In this case, I question whether a longer education necessarily benefits students.
They are still wining about this number and go on strikes pretty much every other year.
I'm always surprised and disappointed to see such lazy thinking on HN. If teachers' unions were responsible for poor educational outcomes, you would see an inverse relationship between strong teachers' unions and K-12 rankings.
But New Jersey and Massachusetts consistently rank in the top 2 K-12 rankings in the US. And they have ~100% union density among K-12 public school teachers!
Let's test the rest of your little theory. If you believe that pesky teachers' unions are responsible for poor outcomes, then surely states with less teacher's union density and union power will be the epitome of strong K-12 outcomes.
But who ranks at the bottom? New Mexico at #50, Alaska at #49, Oklahoma at #48...
You might, at this point, sensibly say that's due to residents having less money and other disadvantages. But at that point you have to admit that teachers' unions have no correlation to K-12 outcomes.
https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/rankings/education
So, I'm going to flag this as a perfect example of legibility vs. legitimacy[0]. You, probably AP's writers, and much of the public perceive learning as ocurring in a certain way. That isn't the way that 'the best' learning occurs, its the way that most closely resembles where we think learning occurs. Going further, it is much easier to interpret a lecture hall as a learning activity because it is easy to perceive what is being 'learned'. You sort of say it yourself. you are asking a why question about what is being learned - it is less legibile - and that is leveraged into an inference that less is being learned - i.e., it is less legitimate.
The problem is that the comparison you are making is false - but deeply embedded in our minds. Students *feel* like they learn more in lectures than in 'active learning' classes.However, when their actual knowledge is tested the oppostie is actually true. The students perception and actual learning are at odds and mediated by the environment[1]. It is, again, easy to sit in a lecture and overstate (i.e., feel like) you're learning because you are watching someone who is an expert talk about something. No metacognitive monitoring is required on the student's part. In contrast, it is really easy to perceive yourself as struggling in a class where your learning process and your failures in that process become visible. Students are taught to view failures/wrong answers as bad - so they view their process of learning as evidence of not learning.
Pedantically, no one in the picture you reference is cutting paper with scissors. There are scissors on the table, no one is cutting. You made an inference - inferences are important but difficult to test. They are working in groups to learn with peers (a science based best practice). I don't know exactly but I can infer it is related to math, possible learning to calculate area and estimate. Making that tangible, creating and measuring simple then more complex shapes helps them learn - its not arts and crafts. It leads to better conceptual understanding than an abstract explanation.
It may look different, but my hobby horse problem with US education is that everyone's vibes are treated as equivalent to actual scientific evidence. We regularly crator efforts to fix these problems simply because they don't look like the school that the parents went to. We had one parent try and ban school provided laptops (which are used for 20minutes / week) from my daughter's preK class because her kids are zero screen time. I can't imagine a parent in Japan or China even trying that.
[0] https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2010/07/26/a-big-little-idea-call...
[1] https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1821936116
As a CODA - measuring learning is shockingly hard. As an analogy, it is not deterministic it is quantum. Data tells us that if I ask demographic questions before a test, certain groups score lower than if I ask them at the end. If I ask a math question using a realistic scenario, students show higher conceptual understanding than if I ask them a fully abstracted question. If a student is hungry or tired that day, they will score lower. None of those are measuring the latent construct (e.g., math ability) that we need to estimate, even if it is a high variability measure.
Of course “active” learning is better than passively sitting in a lecture. But these kids are not learning. They’re sitting in a group with scissors and markers making a X-y coordinate graph.
Your long diatribe fails to recognize the obvious: that middle school math class has turned into an art and hand labor class / day care.
The best demographic data I can find is here: https://datacenter.aecf.org/data/tables/103-child-population...
The best data I can find on language spoken at home is here: https://datacenter.aecf.org/data/tables/81-children-who-spea...
The above shows the share of "Non-Hispanic White alone" children (who I'll assume speak English as a first language) going from 52% to 48% from 2015-2024, and the percentage of "Children who speak a language other than English at home" staying flat at 22% from 2013-2023. From 2015-2024, math attainment goes from 62% to 55%.
At a glance, it would seem that the shift in math attainment cannot be explained by demographics/language alone.
Reading: https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/reports/reading/2024/g12/p...
Math: https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/reports/mathematics/2024/g...
Hispanic population has shifted (+3-4%/report) and English learners have shifted (1-3%/report). [Note that reports have variable number (~2-5) of years between them]
English learner scores went up (or stayed the same) and non-English learner scores went down.
The big caveat of course that the English learner average score is still much lower than the non-English learner so if that population increased enough it still drags down the average. (Click the English learners to see their scores or see the National Student Group Score Distributions section for graphs that make this apparent).
But it has to be more complicated than "the English-learning Hispanic population increased" because if you look within racial groups: all groups except Asian are down within their own group.
Or, for example, girls' scores are down more than boys' scores even though girls' scores are still better than boys' on average in Reading (but worse in Math).
I think it's probably multiple factors all adding together. For example, % of public charters has increased but public charter schools have worse scores than public non-charter. % of economically disadvantaged has increased and economically disadvantaged students have worse scores than those not. % of students with disabilities has increased and students with disabilities have worse scores than those without.
The weirdest thing to me is how the population statistics are different between reading and math. From 2019->2024 the reported Hispanic 12th Grade population shifted 3% for Reading but only 1% for Math?
How do you know?
Same with the constant drumbeat of "Americans are getting shorter".
Scores for reading & science had actually been trending upwards in the US, while maths has been trending downwards for some 20 years.
Report: https://www.oecd.org/content/dam/oecd/en/publications/report...
Without bonus points, DEI-hires at the school would not survive; these racist school districts need a way to ensure these lousy teachers create entire generations of people hostile to learning! The whole system needs to have an emergency cut over to vouchers.. $27k/year/pupil in NYS to get a teacher that looks like me but is functionally illiterate.
These public teachers aren't heroes, they are actively keeping us behind with their pro-union/anti-student behaviors.
It's different with friends whose kids attend private schools - most knew it was Singapore Math.
You may like it or not - but it requires parent effort to make sure your child uses their most valuable time to learn something.
https://www.apmreports.org/episode/2019/08/22/whats-wrong-ho...
> For Goodman, accurate word recognition was not necessarily the goal of reading. The goal was to comprehend text.8 If the sentences were making sense, the reader must be getting the words right, or right enough. These ideas soon became the foundation for how reading was taught in many schools.
> The whole language movement of the late 20th century was perhaps the zenith of the anti-phonics argument.26 Phonics instruction was seen as tedious, time-consuming and ultimately unnecessary. Why? Because — according to the three-cueing theory — readers can use other, more reliable cues to figure out what the words say.27
> "To our surprise, all of our research results pointed in the opposite direction," Stanovich wrote. "It was the poorer readers, not the more skilled readers, who were more reliant on context to facilitate word recognition."13
> The skilled readers could instantly recognize words without relying on context. Other researchers have confirmed these findings with similar experiments. It turns out that the ability to read words in isolation quickly and accurately is the hallmark of being a skilled reader. This is now one of the most consistent and well-replicated findings in all of reading research.14
It's interesting to wonder whether LLMs may struggle with similar issues - while they can intuit a distribution over held-out tokens from context, they famously can't count the number of r's in "strawberry" because they don't have a concept of letters.
Are we holding our LLMs back much the way we are holding back students - or are we holding back students much the same way we're holding back our LLMs?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_zzkQJq_V0w
He cites and directionally agrees with the decline of reading as the cause.
Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43522966 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43537808
Education spending has shot up per student because people think it will solve cultural ills.
We have decades of evidence yet these types of comments still pop up.
Why aReNt PaReNts HomE eNoUgH? Are they stupid??
- Always online phone access (and everything that comes with it)
- Generative AI for doing assignments without thought
- The COVID year or two that they had to learn from home couldn't have helped develop good habits (I know it would've for me)
while this may seem to align incentives, in reality a school that has struggling students needs MORE resources, not less.
the outcome, in reality, is an extreme desire to "teach to the test," where developing actual skills is secondary to learning the structure of test problems and how to answer them correctly enough to keep the school from being obliterated.
teachers are one of the most valuable, most undervalued positions in society. my mother taught elementary school for 20 years; when she retired, i was making 3 times her salary doing my computer job. this is the sad but inevitable outcome from the policies put in place by a class of people that can afford to educate their children outside of the systems forced upon the working class.
Many of the schools with the most funding per student, like Washington D.C. and NYC currently underperform.
NYC has a spending of $36-40k per student with only 56% ELA, ~47% Math. Washington DC has $27k-31k of spending per student and only 22% proficient in reading and 16% in Math.
Charter schools have been the best bang for the buck. The best all-income schools are catholic schools, averaging at 1 grade level higher. Then private schools do even better, but aren't accessible to everyone, and then the top spot is left to selective high-performing schools, unsurprisingly.
These are not equal comparisons. People who send their kids to a private school are choosing that, and thus care about the education their kids get. While Catholics are all income and choosing for religion reasons, generally catholic implies cultural care for education. Public schools take everyone including those who don't care about education.
In general public schools in the US are very good. However a small number in every school are kids that would be kicked out of private (including catholic) schools. There are also significant variation between schools with richer areas of a city doing better - despite often spending less on education.
That is a lot easier when you can require a transcript from the prospective student, review it, and say, "Uh, no thank you".
There's a private technical college near here that offers EMT and paramedic training. They "guarantee" "100% success in certification and registration" for their students.
How do they get there? They boot students out after they fail (<80%) their second test in the class.
I'm not necessarily opposed to such a policy. It is, however, intellectually dishonest of them to try to tout it as a better school for that reason. Charter schools are free to reject students who will bring their grade averages down.
I believe this is not only restricted to Catholic schools though they are the most common. Most religious schools have higher scoring students.
IMHO, we always hear about such and such school (system) has X% kids proficient with $Y/year per pupil. But what I would really want to know about a school is how does a year change at the school change the proficiency of the class. If the class of 3rd graders starts the year at 20% proficient at 2nd grade level, and ends at 22% proficient at 3rd grade level, that might be a good school, even though a single point in time check says 22% proficient. But the numbers we get aren't really useful for that; a cohort analysis would be better; there's real privacy implications, but that doesn't make the numbers we get useful. :P
I wonder if USA schools are similar. It's next to impossible to require belief.
How would you explain that temporal gap? If the No Child Left Behind Act is the problem, why was the trend positive for the first 12-14 years of the time it's been in force?
NCLB had some flaws but that wasn't one of them. Before NCLB you were stuck in the poor school district your likely single parent could afford to live in, inevitably doomed to poor education.
I would be interested if this is a nationwide trend or the bad performers are performing even worse. Especially since from my memory, this is mostly a poverty issue. Not a school funding issue, but that per capita income was a good indicator of where that state would score.
France — with all its problems — ensures the same incredibly high standard of curriculum across the country and perhaps most importantly it is actually expected that top university performers who will become researchers teach at high school in the periphery. It’s even a nation-wide competition by discipline (look up the “aggregation”) to obtain these highly sought positions. The idea is something like you teach high school outside Paris while preparing your doctorate and then either return triumphant to the big research institutes or continue teaching in the provinces. Something like this in the US would have immeasurable impact, since probably one of the biggest issues is just convincing well-educated people to teach in rural areas.
There's no way such a system can produce uniform results.
(The wisdom in forcing voters to elect all sorts of local commissions is another matter entirely. I struggle to see how anyone can make an informed choice, in ballots with 10 or more elected positions, but they seem normal in America.)
It's pretty simple to vote on local offices: are you happy with the current state of education in your district? Good, keep the incumbents around. Otherwise change out school board members until you achieve the desired results.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/232951/university-degree...
Honestly — and I’m not being at all utopian/overvaluing the present state of the technology — I think AI is one of the few prospects for even just marginal improvement, especially since it’s accessible by phone. Much as I wish it wasn’t the case, it’s hard to even imagine all the things that would have to change (from funding, to legislation, undoing all the embarrassing “teaching the controversy” curriculum, to say nothing of staffing) for a “non-technical solution.”
On the other hand, it's shallow. Messages are short, and filled with shorthand and emoticons. There's no deep reading or expression of complicated ideas in written form.
Texting is unironically a better use of time than reading infinite jest, or gravities rainbow, etc.
First: Your HS kids hang out with a different crowd than my HS kids :-)
Second: This is about reading ability (comprehension, etc), not literature. Whether the quality of a text message is superior/inferior to whatever they use in literature classes is irrelevant.
... “How do you feel, Jake?” “Fine, it doesn’t hurt much.” “Are you all right?” ...
(Hemmingway)
I think back to some college peers who even in some more basic classes could clearly read the words of the assigned writings, they couldn't then parse out the deeper meanings behind the assignments. They weren't illiterate, you could ask them to read a passage, and they'd be able to say all the words. You could ask them face value questions about the text, and they'd probably be able to answer most questions right. But any deeper analysis was just beyond them. So, when the professor would ask deeper questions, they'd say "I don't know where he's getting this, the book didn't talk about that at all".
I avoided English Lit in college but thinking back to High School I recognize the "I don't know where he's getting this" reaction. I just rarely engaged with the so-called "classic" stuff we had to read, and like you say I had no trouble reading the words but struggled with deeper meanings or even just getting past the archaic language. And this was in the early 1980s, no chance it was influenced by social media or mobile phones or AI. My parents probably blamed television.
At least we now have AI, where a student could (if motivated) ask questions about the meaning of a passage and get back a synthesis of what other people have written about it. Back then I used Cliffs Notes to do that.
If social media and smartphones are the problem, I would have expected that results for English proficiency would be steady until the advent of TikTok, right?
That and the culture of anti-intellectualism in the US. I’m completely unsurprised we are falling behind.
It's definitely not just funding.
It might not make it down to teacher salaries or more educators, but the money is absolutely being spent at massive levels.
The best schools where I grew up and around me today have the lowest per-pupil cost. There is basically no correlation between budget spent on education until you get to the extremes on both ends.
Combine this with an emphasis on single-tracking students and a de-emphasis of grading in general, and it's not surprising to me that scores are declining.
Some of that is cultural, some of that is due to parenting. A lot of parents aren't involved in their kids education. Frankly, a lot of them are barely involved in parenting in general.
Now, if someone came with a headline that said "Parents not involved in childrens education because they've been ragebaited into spending all their time yelling on social media" my biases would tend to lend me to believe it's true, even without sufficient evidence. There are other correlations, like cellphone ownership in the population.
Just having social media itself doesn't seem to be an exact fit, but that tells us nothing about the algorithms that social media was using at the time.
What isn't known is how to get parents to do better. Or lacking that, how to get kids to do better anyway. (there have been some successes, but nothing seems to be repeatable)
It is more statistically realistic for them to want to be a successful influencer than it is for them to be a professional athlete.
I have not seen a good track record of states privatizing education through the use of charter schools. In the South (US), I have come to view that as a backdoor segregation and religious indoctrination attempt on top of some old-school grifting.
People will get to choose between a vibes-based "equity" ideology where achievement is disregarded or the republican woodchipper of austerity. Either thing leads to the same outcome: everything becomes stupider and shittier. The whole system is moving of its own accord towards enshittification. People should just get the grieving over with and leave
Oh, you say that, we are losing some human abilities. Well, Prosperity and easy food removes the need for abilities or hunting. It is all cyclic. Each cycle is a few generations long.
Oops, it won't: https://tech.co/news/another-study-ai-making-us-dumb
But here is a surprise: In college my wife made both PBK and Summa Cum Laude, won both NSF and Woodrow Wilson graduate fellowships, and got her Ph.D.
Her high school? Her family lived in Indiana, in a house her father built from some plans in Good Housekeeping magazine, on a 33 acre farm, surrounded by farms raising mostly corn, soy beans, wheat, and chickens. The local town consisted of a church, a school, and a tavern. The school building was a good accomplishment by the community, big enough for the number of students, taught grades 1-12, but had fewer than 12 classrooms and fewer than 12 teachers! Net, the facilities were poor, but the parents made sure the schooling was good.
The school I went to was relatively large, the pride of the city with a quite good Principal for 1-6 and another for 7-12, no bad teachers, and some good ones. They taught Latin, Spanish, and French and had a good math program. The year before me three guys went to Princeton and two of them ran against each other for President of the Freshman Class. In my year, myself and two others did the best on the Math SATs, all went to college, one MIT.
In both of the schools, 100% of the students were well behaved, i.e., no disruption in classes; this was just expected and without any particular efforts.
I really liked math and physics and wanted much more than the classes offered. So, the classes were beneath me and mostly taught myself from the books. So the school put up with that independent approach and sent me to a Math Tournament and some summer enrichment programs, which was good education: The good parents wanted good education.
Later there were some race riots with that school a target. So, the city changed to teaching cosmotology, etc. and picked another school to be a good one.
Net, with good parents, a school can be plenty good with modest facilities.
Textbooks cohesively presented material. Random printouts and notes glued into a notebook do not.
Similarly, we read a whole lot more in Literature classes than kids do now.
I’m fortunate to send my kid to an excellent private school that is excellent at what it does. They have problems too.
I blame technology. The pivot from books to the lowest common denominator Chromebook homework, reading and testing is a joke.
The kids may become dumber but they aren't stupid.
Don't forget the brain eating virus we loosed on the population, that probably doesn't help.
https://www1.racgp.org.au/newsgp/clinical/how-covid-19-leave...
note even infections with no symptoms
Simply put, if you were a child now, why should you care about education when it doesn't appear to be the key to anything you want? Money has taken the place of knowledge. On further inspection, this should not be a surprise to anyone who has bought into the dogma of a transaction-oriented reality.
Children these days are raised just as much by a culture that never figured out how to resolve the contradiction between making money and having values.
Blame is futile, though. Hold your children close and raise them the best you can, for there is no reversing the tide.
Just grift your way through life like the Pedophile of the United States. Become a jester/influencer. Smell your own farts on a live stream and pump your engagements. Be a clown. It clearly pays to do so.
If "math" does not account for reality, of course people are going to treat it as a meaningless barrier to be overcome rather than learned. Also, math is more than arithmetic. Using picture of coins. For Chrissake.
If they could read, they’d probably read the Talmud & study the Torah, and realize that letting some small group schizophrenics inbreed for thousands of years was probably a bad idea.
I wonder who’s in charge of setting these standards in education for our children.
Parents with higher education and stable incomes have the resources, time, and knowledge to supplement their children's education. This includes tutoring, enrichment programs, monitoring social media and phone use, and advocating within schools, as well as sending their children to smaller, private schools.
Most Joe Six Pack parents hand their children unrestricted iPhones and let the schools raise and baby sit them, while the parents sit back getting fat soaking up social media and TV.
One also sees the "educational" difference. Here a study was published concluding that poorer areas have twice the number of snackbars compared to areas with "higher educated" people. Bad food is also very cheap. It's also very easy to never read about the effects of screens on childeren and I see people with kids of ~1 sitting on the back of a bike with a smartphone blaring... Why not let the kid enjoy and learn from the surroundings? My kids loved riding a bike with me.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discipline_and_Punish
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/School-to-prison_pipeline