The kids may become dumber but they aren't stupid.
And if their children are underperforming in schools it would be important to know.
Not saying the US has bad genetics but certainly there’s a new pool we are competing with that wasn’t as large pre 2000s
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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 point is that students are doing worse, even though ^ is likely true today just like it was true 5, 10, and 20 years ago.
imports.
Intelligence is NOT evenly distributed geographically or racially.
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.
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%+.
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.
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.
Plus, these activities aren't causing missed education. I'm not teaching my kids math while they go on slides.
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.
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.
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.
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!
When great controversy surrounds the curriculum, the safest thing to teach is nothing at all.
Is it possible your niece was joking?
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".
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.
Same with the constant drumbeat of "Americans are getting shorter".
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.
It is more statistically realistic for them to want to be a successful influencer than it is for them to be a professional athlete.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
- 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.
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.
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.
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.
jjice•5h ago
- 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)
bee_rider•4h ago
pixl97•4h ago
weweersdfsd•4h ago
username332211•3h ago
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?
Der_Einzige•4h ago
bee_rider•4h ago
SoftTalker•4h ago
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•4h ago
Der_Einzige•4h ago
Texting is unironically a better use of time than reading infinite jest, or gravities rainbow, etc.
fiforpg•4h ago
realo•4h ago
... “How do you feel, Jake?” “Fine, it doesn’t hurt much.” “Are you all right?” ...
(Hemmingway)
BeetleB•1h ago
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.
vel0city•4h ago
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•4h ago
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.
barrenko•4h ago
iteria•4h ago
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•4h ago
agentcoops•4h ago
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•4h ago
username332211•3h ago
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.)
Fade_Dance•4h ago
Night_Thastus•4h ago
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•4h ago
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•4h ago
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)
Night_Thastus•4h ago
2OEH8eoCRo0•4h ago
Kapura•4h ago
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.
username332211•4h ago
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?
m00x•4h ago
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•4h ago
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•3h ago
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.
brightball•4h ago
agentcoops•4h ago
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.”
yoyohello13•4h ago
That and the culture of anti-intellectualism in the US. I’m completely unsurprised we are falling behind.
m00x•4h ago
It's definitely not just funding.
jandrewrogers•4h ago
treis•4h ago
bpt3•3h ago
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.