I wonder if there’s a way to validate the hypothesis that post-shutdown, some of the cohort that would have missed a day here and there now see school as optional and miss more days.

Overall, the reported effect is sad and should be addressed. These are people’s lives.

For example I remember reading a lot of science magazines / articles growing up (granted popsci but for a kid it still teaches some things) and as I grew up things like the Economist.

Similarly I also played games like math blaster as a kid and have realized I need to intentionally provide games like this to my kids that ideally teach something (the bar being greater than zero learning) rather than playing one of those infinite running games or whatever.

I think we're probably talking about the exact same thing but am curious where content vs. short form media is.

Thanks for sharing :)

Exactly. And who benefits from a less educated, less aware populace? The answer is pretty clear: look at who is benefiting right now!

Seattle's Public Schools district is among the leading in the nation on per-student spending, yet the test scores are cratering. Its previous superintendant had an official platform of not disciplining students.

Vouchers would _improve_ the situation.

School boards are inherently poltical because as long as a publicly-run school system exists, how it is run and what things it will attempt to teach are political questions. There's no apolitical school board that existed 40 years ago that has been altered since then, they have always been poltical.

big if true. we should probably cut 100% of spending in that case.

"Inflation-adjusted public school funding per student in the United States has increased significantly over the long term, with a roughly 34% increase in inflation-adjusted revenue per student over the last two decades alone. Looking at a broader historical view, inflation-adjusted spending per student has risen by over 200% since the 1960s."

Edit: actually, this is an insult to Georgia. I apologize, brothers and sisters. You have much to teach us.

That's around the time a bunch of districts in a state I lived in at the time had multi-year teacher pay scale freezes due to budget crunches. Not saying it's necessarily connected to the scores dropping, but still.

Total spending across the country may be high, but it's very much state-by-state and local how much is spent and where it goes. Some states pay teachers pretty well. Some states, the pay really is pretty awful. Some states are OK on staffing levels. Others are in an ongoing staffing catastrophe that's forcing them to cut school days to try to get by.

Meanwhile, school performance is heavily tied to home life and broader community support for students' families. That's why all this effort to improve schools hasn't been as effective as one might hope: the attention needs to go toward much harder problems that have little to do with schools and are really hard to get any progress on in the US. Worker protections, better and less-stressful "safety nets", better policing and a better justice system. That kind of thing. I'd look at least as much at what's been going on with those, and with security and home life for those in the lowest three quintiles of household income, as at schools themselves, to try to find reasons for trends like this.

its weird that they used the state that they live in and have lived in for the last 20 years as an example?

You need to repeatedly solve multiple practical problems to internalize the knowledge. And you'll eventually need to do stuff that you don't really like at all.