It’s declining because media is shifting. It’s declining because tools are replacing that need. Smartphones yes but more advanced computers as well. Communication has increased in speed and people have never had more access to speech platforms to spread whatever diatribe they wish. Test scores that test one’s general knowledge are going to show gaps as we specialize.

“Can you read? And by that I don’t just mean interpreting Logotype…” “No one uses that any more,” said Quin. “You’re talking about the symbols on your underwear that tell you not to use bleach. That sort of thing.”

Sure, that’s what republicans want and it serves them well. Dismantling, arms twisting, and attacks on universities - is all from their playbook. They’ve started saying universities are indoctrinating kids. If you don’t speak against these evil creatures now, there isn’t going to be another chance. They are just taliban in a suit!!

Is this average spending per student? If so, then that is just a cover for inequality. Spending a vast amount on educating elite students, and spending hardly enough on the majority.

Other countries with much better education than the US spend less than $16,000 per student, but I imagine they are spending much more equitably. They don’t have one school that is incredible and then another school so broke that teachers and parents have to foot the bill for supplies.

Writes and Writes not (October 2024) https://www.paulgraham.com/writes.html

>I'm usually reluctant to make predictions about technology, but I feel fairly confident about this one: in a couple decades there won't be many people who can write.

>One of the strangest things you learn if you're a writer is how many people have trouble writing. Doctors know how many people have a mole they're worried about; people who are good at setting up computers know how many people aren't; writers know how many people need help writing.

>The reason so many people have trouble writing is that it's fundamentally difficult. To write well you have to think clearly, and thinking clearly is hard. ...

It has examples of states which are seeing some improvements. Those states seem to be addressing one of the main problems this article highlights: they hold students to expectations and prevent them from advancing grades if they don’t meet the bar.

There's really not much else to it. Laura Bush's push for literacy was well intentioned but she did not anticipate the anti phonics backlash that would ensue due to her husband's politics.

The is not some kook take, yet no one talks about it in general discourse, despite plenty of reporting on it. Teachers unions and public schools in general, which typically lean left, have been fighting a war on phonics for several decades. My mother, who was a teacher herself, noted this. She was not born in the US, so didn't understand why it was seen as political to teach children sounding out words.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/nataliewexler/2022/04/12/lets-n...

We have this idea in America that conservatives are dumb and want lower standards for education. Of course, figures like Trump totally substantiate this idea, but in reality, both sides are invested in making America stupider. Yes, Democrats attract more educated voters, but often times these voters are exceptional and their kids wouldn't suffer the same fate as a typical child. Until at least one party takes education seriously, nothing will change

Easy. Parents of young children are on their phones more than ever before. That means less reading and more screen time.

One of the single largest determiners of schooling success is the number of books at home. Kids who are exposed to books and reading at home overwhelmingly out-achieve kids who are not. It starts earlier than people think and the effects are longer lived than people think. School standards have almost nothing to do with it.

Isn't there a video or a podcast of this?

/s

Schools and parents are also banning cell phones and cutting down on computer use, which should help with the distraction angle.

The socioeconomic divide mentioned in the article is still worrisome, though. I doubt that kids in the bottom 30% of America have the same experience. And simultaneously, the middle class has largely stopped having kids, which means there's a top 20% and a bottom 30% and pretty much nothing in between. If this continues for another couple generations, we're potentially faced with an America of an educated nobility and illiterate peasantry, and the future may look very Medieval indeed.

That has stopped existing over the last decades. Parents do not read and so neither do their children.

Reading is now a niche hobby. If you visit a book store you will also find out that most "readers" are a very niche group, who mostly read genre fiction or crime slop.

The amount of people actually reading intellectually challenging literature is miniscule. Is it any surprise to have an illiteracy problem in a country where nobody reads?

America is Sliding Towards Autocracy - FTFY

> High-achieving kids are doing roughly as well as they always have, while those at the bottom are seeing rapid losses

in the article, when they're actually doing much worse as well, which can be seen from the median (or top) scores in STEM competitions. All the financial incentives are for schools and teachers to focus on their bottom 20% of students, and even if they cared about their top students (culturally, most education departments do not), it's not even feasible to collect that data, short of signing everyone up for the AMC 12. So, naturally, the percent of elementary schools offering gifted programs has declined by fifteen (twenty?) percent in the last twenty years, and the general standards and curricula have been lowered to teach to the 20th percentile. This also creates a cultural issue where many students recognize they're bored, and that schools are not trying to teach them, so they become disaffected and stop caring. My friends in high school joked that school was for socializing, and frankly, what other purpose does it serve anymore for most kids?

> States were given latitude to spend their funds as they saw fit, which, it seems, was a mistake. Instead of funding high-quality tutoring programs or other programs that benefited students, districts spent money for professional development or on capital expenditures such as replacing HVAC systems and obtaining electric buses.

And then later, discussing Mississippi:

> it began screening kids for reading deficiencies, training instructors in how to teach reading better (by, among other things, emphasizing phonics), and hiring literacy coaches to work in the lowest-performing schools.

Leaving aside the idea that capital expenditures on aging school buildings and busses is a mistake instead of an absolute requirement, the author criticizes states that spent money on professional development, and then later praised Mississippi for (among other things) training instructors—that's what professional development is.

The NEAP follows cohorts which are four years apart in age - where (and how, and why) did The Atlantic rasterize this to "the decline"?

...and yes, the NEAP shows that all three of these cohorts suffered terribly from the school closures in parts of the USA, just as every serious expert predicted. The differences in the NEAP math unit are particularly obvious.

It feels very strange to cast this aside with a single sentence and no further analysis.

There's a convincing body of evidence that the way you get kids to read books is pretty simple: read them books that interest them and then give them access to more interesting books as well as time to read to self. Unfortunately, the lethal combo of Common Core and No Child Left Behind has left teachers at best too time-strapped (or, at worst, uninterested) in doing so because of mandatory curriculum and testing.

I read to my kids, make sure they see me reading, and talk to them about both what I'm reading and what they're reading. They've done fine despite awful reading instruction at school.

https://www.apmreports.org/episode/2019/08/22/whats-wrong-ho...

It's largely discredited, yet it still persists.

The problem is that kids are stupid, because their parents are teaching them (and demanding they repeat) a number of bizarre views of the world, and all of the media they consume is propagandistic and dumb. That's what's showing up on reading comprehension tests. Not that they don't understand the words, but that they lack the ability to put together a complex thought because they have been encouraged not to have them; that complex thoughts are suspicious, weird, and try-hard and make them feel like they're about to look stupid; and that having a thought by yourself is the surest way to be ostracized and to deserve to be.

They're scared to think, they've been crippled. They just want you to tell them what to say, so they can get back to their video game, or to TikTok.

The dumbing down of America is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance.”

- Carl Sagan, 1995

As a video editor, I’ve encountered multiple moments where an older person is incapable of even noticing that we’ve cut from one angle to another, and the amount of times I’ve had to convince them that “yes the audience will absolutely notice that incredibly obvious mistake and we need to fix it” is astronomical.

I’ve seen video after video of old people seemingly incapable of identifying even the most basic CGI or AI videos. And all you techies know how clearly this issue extends into the basic usage of a computer interface. How many times do I need to remind my dad how to turn on the subtitles?

We can sit here and lambast the younger generations all we want, but I refuse to do it without accurately comparing them to the previous generations, which IMO were clearly less capable than we previously thought.

Number of books Americans read per year is "a smaller number than Gallup has measured in any prior survey dating back to 1990"

per https://news.gallup.com/poll/388541/americans-reading-fewer-...

If you walk into a cafe it would be odd to see someone reading a book. And its almost impossible to buy physical newspapers even the Sunday edition for the NY Times as most grocery stores or convenience stores don't carry them.

Personally I'm also guilty of listening to more podcasts and background play -- but I only watch YT visual content when its interesting there is just too much stuff out there. I consume most of my news online -- so my reading comes from mostly articles. Its just more convenient and practical now -- though requires much less effort than say reading longer form content of a book or long essay.

Lately I've been going on TikTok just out of curiosity for entertainmentto watch amusing or funny videos. Its basically like digital crack -- before you know it you spent an hour just watching mindless content and its designed to get you hooked. It really is low-effort instant gratification at its worst (probably worse than porn -- because you stop after a while once satisfied.)

And you see kids as old as 1-2 years old with personal devices watching videos -- so it seems to be a disturbing trend And I heard that professors don't even assign books since they know their students won't read them and will just ChatGPT for summaries.

From the Atlantic article:

> An explanation that deserves equal consideration is what one might call the low-expectations theory. In short, schools have demanded less and less from students—who have responded, predictably, by giving less and less.

The APM Reports article I linked above, in this context, would likely suggest that "low-expectations theory" might actually be an effect of a specific and well-intentioned methodology change: one that replaces phonics-based approaches with an effort to get pupils through books rather than being able to read every word. From APM Reports:

> For decades, reading instruction in American schools has been rooted in a flawed theory about how reading works, a theory that was debunked decades ago by cognitive scientists, yet remains deeply embedded in teaching practices and curriculum materials. As a result, the strategies that struggling readers use to get by — memorizing words, using context to guess words, skipping words they don't know — are the strategies that many beginning readers are taught in school. This makes it harder for many kids to learn how to read, and children who don't get off to a good start in reading find it difficult to ever master the process.

It goes on to describe the origins of the different methodologies, historical reactions, plenty of context on adoption, visual examples. There's an ongoing debate here, but it provides real food for thought.

The Atlantic article could have done something similar, focusing on the methodologies at hand. Instead, it tries to conclude by assigning blame based on political affiliation:

> But for Democrats, who pride themselves on belonging to the party of education, these results may be awkward to process. Not only are the southern states that are registering the greatest improvements in learning run by Republicans, but also their teachers are among the least unionized in the country. And these red states are leaning into phonics-based, “science of reading” approaches to teaching literacy, while Democratic-run states such as New York, New Jersey, and Illinois have been painfully slow to adopt them, in some cases hanging on to other pedagogical approaches with little evidentiary basis.

The article provides no quantitative backing for these statements, much less evidence of causality. (The research they do cite has Massachusetts in 4th place, and New York in 10th place, for adjusted reading scores: https://www.urban.org/research/publication/states-demographi...)

It's a good reminder to read articles critically, and seek external sources, when blame is being ascribed.

"One in four students today is chronically absent, meaning that they miss more than a tenth of instructional days, a substantial increase from pre-pandemic averages. ... Roughly 40 percent of middle-school teachers work in schools where there are no late penalties for coursework, no zeroes for missing coursework, and unlimited redos of tests."

That alone may explain the declines in at the bottom. "80% of success is showing up", as Woody Allen once said.

The experience of a few outlier states gives reason for optimism. Matthew Chingos and Kristin Blagg, two scholars at the Urban Institute, computed “demographically adjusted NAEP scores,” examining how effective states are at educating kids after accounting for significant differences in socioeconomic status. Their analysis of the 2024 NAEP results found that Mississippi was best at educating kids in fourth-grade math, fourth-grade reading, and eighth-grade math. (In 2013, Mississippi was at the bottom of the unadjusted league table.) When I computed the correlation between these demographically adjusted scores and state spending, I found that there was none. If you’re an underprivileged kid in America, you will, on average, get the best education not in rich Massachusetts but in poor Mississippi, where per-pupil spending is half as high.

A simple example. We recently blocked chatgpt in our org. A large number of people sent in tickets with justifications like, "I use it to write reports", "I use it to write email" and more.

My partner teaches at a major university (top 200 in the US). You know how they spend about 30 mins on test days? Making sure the students mark their scantrons correctly, so it matches the version of the test they took! The test are color coded, so if you took the "blue" test, then it's pretty obvious you need to mark the answer card with the Blue Test, not the yellow test, you've never took.

Bridge too far.

I won't go into how many have their fucking parents call the teacher to beg for grades, extensions, etc.

Talk about disheartening.

The Last Question book seems more prescient every single day.

> Some have called it the “Mississippi miracle” ...

> A clear policy story is behind these improvements: imposing high standards while also giving schools the resources they needed to meet them. In 2013, Mississippi enacted a law requiring that third graders pass a literacy exam to be promoted to the next grade. It didn’t just issue a mandate, though; it began screening kids for reading deficiencies, training instructors in how to teach reading better (by, among other things, emphasizing phonics), and hiring literacy coaches to work in the lowest-performing schools. Louisiana’s improvements came about after a similar policy cocktail was administered, starting in 2021.

I would be interested to know more about the approach with literacy coaches. I donate to a charity that does 1 on 1 reading tutoring: https://readingpowerinc.org/

If we cannot as a society teach our children how to read, something is very wrong and we need to invest heavily in fixing it.

There is actually no change in reading scores before covid if you adjust for demographic change in the student population: https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/ltt/reading/student-group-.... Scores for white, black, and hispanic students went up consistently from 2000-2012 then stayed flat until 2020. The drop came only after covid.

Somehow I ended up with a really high end education system, and went to public school my last few years. As I get on in age, I realize that school systems vary so wildly it is shocking.

I thought that English was taught in a specific way letters -> phonics -> words -> sentences, but it appears that was abandoned for "Whole Language" approach which upon reading sounds insane to me!

Some of my younger friends (young millennial, early Z) have real issues "sounding out words", and I guess that is the effect of no phonics.

As much as it is socioeconomic divide, a nice part of DoDD schools is that the corporal's kids and the general's kids all go to the same school. To be fair, they are usually well funded and have career teachers, along with what is shaped like a national curriculum. The reason for this is if you move, and you will in the military, you can continue grades easily without having to interrupt your path.

Ex: in DoDD school, 9th grade had "world history", which didn't coincide with my 10th grade move to public school which required "American history" in 9th grade, so I was held back(!) in history to take American with 9th graders when I was in 10th grade.

Education, for the basics, in my mind should not deviate too hard from what we have learned over the years. It is fun and exciting to experiment with "new methods" but pretty much everyone I know that had common core or new math or xyz new 21st century teaching method is abysmally behind both in speed and skill from people that were taught in more traditional methods.

It's very bad in the ~20yo segment from HS no college. My mom works at a deli shop and people don't understand fractions. Let alone fraction<->decimal conversions on the scales. She is in complete disbelief this is real. (She is 68, retired, and still works because she wants to be useful!)

Now it's getting praised in retrospect.

I'd wager this article is written if not necessarily by the same people, but most definitely by the same kind of people writing those previous critiques.