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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
Nay, not "seems", but has indeed subverted education. Hofstadter's Pulitzer-winning book was published 62 years ago [0] and now, in 2025, even the highest office is unrecognisable.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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…
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.
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.
> 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.
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!
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.
> 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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
>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.
> 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.
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.
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.
Almost all of the comments have someone’s pet theory about the cause of the decline in achievement. The truth is we don’t actually know why there is a decline or how to stop it.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
- 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.
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.
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.
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?
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
> 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.
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)
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.
> 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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
My parents didn’t care about the details of my education yet I did well. I don’t think most parents ever cared so it doesn’t explain the decline. I had discipline instilled in me however, and I am guessing that’s what is lacking nowadays.
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?
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?
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.
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.
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%.
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)
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Lol. Any parent immediately knows. iPhone. Just passive entertainment and sweet sweet dopamine hits. Nothing else for 12 hours a day + both days on the weekend. This also decreases the kids ability to ask questions, go outside, meet people.
The problem is obvious. I don't think people will admit the problem - so this is the new normal.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
> seems to have a culture averse to education
Nay, not "seems", but has indeed subverted education. Hofstadter's Pulitzer-winning book was published 62 years ago [0] and now, in 2025, even the highest office is unrecognisable.
[0] _ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-intellectualism_in_Americ...
The decline in the last 20 years was more noticeable, and the last 10 far more noticeable.
> 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.
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.
not surprised you lose what you don't use, does modern world even require people using those reading and math skills anymore?
"Culture" is downstream of incentives.
Not just education but overall intellectualism. It’s a purely cultural issue that can be observed by looking at demographics.
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.
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.
[1] - https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5250447
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.
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.
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…
Personal responsibility was on the rise until 2013, after which it started to decline?
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.
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.
> 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.
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!
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.
> 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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
>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.
> 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.
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.
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.
Almost all of the comments have someone’s pet theory about the cause of the decline in achievement. The truth is we don’t actually know why there is a decline or how to stop it.
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.
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.
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.
https://www.goodmorningamerica.com/family/story/author-sugge...
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
- 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.
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.
If public school is essentially daycare, why did the pandemic set a generation of kids back?
This was trending long before the pandemic.
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.
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?
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
> 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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
>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.
The article mentions the chronic absenteeism which is mind blowing: https://apnews.com/article/school-attendance-sick-day-chroni...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I was happily lurking until I saw this astounding response.
"Every relationship with {men|women} I've been in has been bad, so romance is obviously worthless."
"My neighbors dog always barks at me, I didn't get why anyone likes dogs."
"I've had a bad experience with ${race} so I really wish we could get rid of them."
"I caught the flu, and it didn't kill me. I don't get why people are always worried about it."
"I've never worn a seatbelt, and I'm still alive. They're a waste of time."
"School was a bad experience for me personally, so best to get rid of it"
Are you serious right now?
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.
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.
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).
"America is bad and should be destroyed without regard to the people living there"
The worst leftists (handshake) the worst right wingers
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.
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.
Just looking at the picture triggered me. Why are the students sitting in groups and cutting paper with scissors?
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.
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.
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?
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.
> 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?
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)
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.
What else would you have them cut paper with?
I'm not smart enough to understand what are the conclusions of the patterns observed in the video.
> 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.
[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.
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?
I'm missing something. What change in demographics are we talking about, and why would that influence math results?
Yup, more article slop without accounting for demographic data.
Same with the constant drumbeat of "Americans are getting shorter".
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.
The answer NYC schools have come to is to relax /TEACHER/ basic knowledge requirements: https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-education/the-teach...
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.
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.
Report: https://www.oecd.org/content/dam/oecd/en/publications/report...
They should add more A1 to the classrooms.
Their steaks are obviously inadequetly sauced.
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.
My parents didn’t care about the details of my education yet I did well. I don’t think most parents ever cared so it doesn’t explain the decline. I had discipline instilled in me however, and I am guessing that’s what is lacking nowadays.
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?
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.
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?
Cal Newport talked on his podcast this week about declining IQs, too - a reversal of a decades-long trend:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_zzkQJq_V0w
He cites and directionally agrees with the decline of reading as the cause.
Maybe 6 hours of tiktok a day is not giving the brain the rest it needs to process and store any learned skills?
It's because they don't allow GPT in exams. Students are accustomed to using it.
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.
The Average College Student Is Illiterate. Students are not what they used to be. The crisis is worse than you think: https://www.persuasion.community/p/the-average-college-stude...
Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43522966 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43537808
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.
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??
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%.
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)
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.
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.
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.”
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.
It started in 2013. If we have to blame technology, social media seems more likely than AI, I guess.
This trend of decline significantly predates either COVID or GenAI.
The US has been on a steady decline in global education rankings since the 70s IIRC. Can’t remember where I saw the stat.
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.
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.
How about the quality of the education and curriculum itself?
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.
You need to look at who the kids look up to. What attributes do their role models have?
A head singing through a toilet seat
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.
Lol. Any parent immediately knows. iPhone. Just passive entertainment and sweet sweet dopamine hits. Nothing else for 12 hours a day + both days on the weekend. This also decreases the kids ability to ask questions, go outside, meet people.
The problem is obvious. I don't think people will admit the problem - so this is the new normal.
The biggest irony is that spending more money is not going to help things.
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
It's fine. The required and qualified people for the upcoming jobs will be imported from the bountiful overseas.
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.
I think too much is done on computers and not pencil and paper.
Watch the movie Idiocracy for the entertaining answer
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.
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.
I have thought that The "Mississippi Miracle" was a successful model for what could be done in other areas in other states. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mississippi_Miracle
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.
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?
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.
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.
OpenAI Study Mode will fix it. https://openai.com/index/chatgpt-study-mode/.
Oops, it won't: https://tech.co/news/another-study-ai-making-us-dumb
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.
You think they are better at detecting the know-nothings than the adults?
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.
it's about to get worse, maybe every year
https://www1.racgp.org.au/newsgp/clinical/how-covid-19-leave...
note even infections with no symptoms
Good source of factory labor.
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.
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.
We have a powerful right-wing political party that is aggressively anti-academic.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discipline_and_Punish
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/School-to-prison_pipeline