People are talking about Covid, smartphones/screens, social media, and AI. No one has mentioned defunding public education yet.
In Alaska, where I lived most of the last 20 years, education has been largely flat funded for about a decade now. Imagine running an organization in 2026 on that organization's 2016 budget. Schools have a bunch of obligations they have to spend on. Every time health care costs for staff go up, and funding is flat, something gets cut. You can't cut education for a decade straight without impacting student learning.
I don't think Alaska is that much of an outlier in this regard.
There are highly politicized blogs which can discuss this further and offer opinions as to the correlation.
When DJT talked about cancelling the Dept of Edu, I got ahold of all the teachers I knew and asked them what impact it would have, and their response was mostly that they would lose their school lunch benefits.
> Funding per student is on the rise, or level on inflation-adjusted $
That's at the state level. But that doesn't account for the explosion in admin salaries and positions. The actual money a district spends on each student has been going down every year. Those funds are going more towards admin activities.
> I got ahold of all the teachers I knew and asked them what impact it would have, and their response was mostly that they would lose their school lunch benefits.
Teachers have a very poor understanding of where their funding comes from. Most just assume "property taxes", but it's far more complicated than that. The department of Ed provides a lot of funding to states that is passed through to the schools. They also enforce the education titles.
Cutting the department of Ed may not have a direct, immediate impact on classroom teachers, but it will have a large downstream effect in a few years.
Student/teacher ratios have gone down, not up over the last few decades. This isn't a lack of funding.
Teachers are put in an impossible position with students who come from homes where the parents don't do their proper jobs. It's never been easier to be a neglectful parent. Your child will be entertained non-stop by an iPad and a video game system. They won't get bored and bother you. You can send them to their room and do whatever you want if you don't care if they are sleeping or not, as long as they are quiet.
The "iPad babies" are an epidemic in schools.
Source:
My sister is a K-12 educator in a poor, rural public school system in southeastern Virginia.
In recent years, she's seen a surge in students who are sorted, improperly, into special education classes. These are students that exhibit symptoms of various learning disabilities, but these symptoms heavily overlap with the symptoms of children who are sleep deprived and over stimulated by dopamine activating content on the devices they are addicted to.
The single variable that actually matters when it comes to school - and nothing else matters until this one is fulfilled: The quality of the peers who make up the student body.
Or put another way: The quality and involvement of the average parent.
A school can absorb an extremely small minority of "problematic" students if the rest of the student body is stellar, but that's about it.
There is not a single thing any public education system can do to counteract that simple fact. If the average student in the classroom is uninterested at best and troublemaking at worst, it doesn't matter how good the teachers are or what the ratios are, or if the classrooms are old and busted or brand new.
Until society becomes serious again, this problem will only get worse as education continues to be a political and culture war football. The best realistic thing I can think of is take a look at nearly all other western social democracies who have much better outcomes and immediately implement student academic tracking. But that would be politically impossible to do in the current state of the US.
I fear that things are going to get far worse before they get better. You could 10x the primary school education budget and likely continue to see worsening results.
When I went from private (poor) primary and middle school, to a rich suburban high school, to a poor inner city high school back in the 90's this was self evident. I didn't think it could get much worse than that, but the administrative and political classes figured out how to wildly beat even my exceedingly low expectations.
If you ask boomers they'll be far more likely to tell you dad was out working 16 hours in the oil field / carpenter for the housing boom or something like that. Mom has no time for you either, she is busy with the 4th baby. Kid gets a nice belting for bad behavior and other than that, be back before the street lights come on for a dinner conversation and then left to your own devices before bed.
I think if anything parents are more involved now than they used to be.
The most obvious difference to me other than ipads/social media is we don't beat kids anymore and we give them way less autonomy.
Yes to this! So many people turn a blind eye to the critical role parents play in supporting teachers holding kids accountable. And I get it, holding kids accountable is very, very challenging, but that's the gig people sign up for when they decide to have a family.
And I'm a former high school teacher and my wife is a current high school teacher so I've experienced all of this first-hand.
It's also becoming increasingly more likely to enter into college with lower relative and absolute high school performance.
Perhaps some wonder why they should try so hard in HS, when most anyone that graduates can get into college, and no employer is asking a college grad what their high school grades and scores were.
There was a time back in the 60s or 70s or earlier when anyone that graduated HS could get a decent job. And a time now where most anyone who wants a decent job, must complete college or trade school. The latter are increasingly becoming less correlated with HS performance. The importance of HS performance needed to succeed is regressing back towards what was needed back in the 70s or before, so long as you actually graduate so you can go on to further schooling. In the 80s -00's was a time where you where the ladder was shut off if you didn't go to college, but going to college was far more correlated with having the highest marks.
In an era of declining birth rates and thus fewer students graduating from high school, of course the third-tier private colleges are going to lower their admission standards in order to survive. In the long run this won't work because employers will eventually figure out that degrees from those colleges are worthless. But they'll keep up their grifting for a while, and leave a lot of mediocre students stuck with huge debts they can't pay off.
It's crazy to pay income taxes to the federal government and then have the Department of Education turn around and grant that money back to the several states so they can use it to fund public school districts. A lot of those tax dollars get wasted along the way. Better to cut out the middlemen and send property and/or income taxes directly to local governments, with some state level aid for poor areas with low tax revenue.
> That's at the state level. But that doesn't account for the explosion in admin salaries and positions. The actual money a district spends on each student has been going down every year. Those funds are going more towards admin activities.
Ok? Seems like that's more of a problem than the funding. Or whatever is causing that is more of a problem, but it does a disservice to the general argument of "kids aren't receiving the same level of care" argument to blame a drop in funding--especially when it was so easily falsified.
> At the same time, school scores started to sag after 2014
That's around the time a bunch of districts in a state I lived in at the time had multi-year teacher pay scale freezes due to budget crunches. Not saying it's necessarily connected to the scores dropping, but still.
Total spending across the country may be high, but it's very much state-by-state and local how much is spent and where it goes. Some states pay teachers pretty well. Some states, the pay really is pretty awful. Some states are OK on staffing levels. Others are in an ongoing staffing catastrophe that's forcing them to cut school days to try to get by.
Meanwhile, school performance is heavily tied to home life and broader community support for students' families. That's why all this effort to improve schools hasn't been as effective as one might hope: the attention needs to go toward much harder problems that have little to do with schools and are really hard to get any progress on in the US. Worker protections, better and less-stressful "safety nets", better policing and a better justice system. That kind of thing. I'd look at least as much at what's been going on with those, and with security and home life for those in the lowest three quintiles of household income, as at schools themselves, to try to find reasons for trends like this.
That explosion plot is pretty bad. No y axis. Unclear if it includes tuition and loans (which are paid or owed by students). Loans are ~50% of "ED appropriations", and only ~$21 million was distributed to students in 2021. But in the plot is looks like spending was around 150 billion (hard to say with no y axis) but ~50% was loans? And the source is just a vague Dept of Ed, with a link at the very bottom of the page to every single table published by the Dept of Ed, so have fun checking the source.
I'm not criticizing your take, although I suspect teachers might lose more than their lunch, just pointing out how terrible the plot is.
You should not adjust for inflation or even for wages, but for cost of employment. The way health insurance works in the US makes public sector jobs with average wages and good benefits expensive to the employer.
I met a forensic accountant recently who mentioned a corruption investigation she participated in involving a school district nearby, several high-ranking board members and admins were on the take. She pointed out the futility of the project, it was a large sum of money for a school district, but nothing like your headline-grabbing Medicare scams. She wound up leaving the investigation due to threats to her safety and took another job. It felt like one of those unresolved endings to "The Wire".
I have had enough insight into enough school districts that I'm confident lots of them are hotbeds of corruption. Mostly at the upper admin level (superintendents and such). Kickbacks for contracts, hiring absurd numbers of assistants and secretaries to the point that one wonders what work remains for the top dogs, creating do-nothing decently-paid positions for people they're having affairs with. That kind of thing.
It doesn't even have to be outright corruption or fraud. It can just be "fraud lite" as I have come to call it. Won't actually qualified as fraud in any "academic study by the experts" but anyone who stuck their nose in and witnessed the ongoings would immediately call it for what it is.
Could simply be doing the bullshit "spend down the year's IT budget on stuff likely to sit in shipping crates at district HQs until it gets e-wasted". The latter being one of the few I directly witnessed - millions of dollars of Cisco gear sitting there for 5 years before it was trashed. Never needed in the first place. I have no reason to believe anyone was on the "take" for it - just general incompetence and grifting to keep one's Very Important job going for internal politics.
This was for a district where a few million could easily have paid to fund a district-wide music program that was recently cut, among myriad of other in-the-classroom things.
The older I get and the more I witness things like this, the more I understand why a large and growing segment of society has completely tuned out the "experts" trotting out studies and reports. Those have largely been weaponized, and the erosion in trust of both institutions and expert knowledge may now be terminal due to it. You can only be told the sky isn't blue by so many experts until you tune them out entirely.
There hasn't been enough said about the corruption of public life in the US. (And elsewhere.)
It used to be this kind of thing was - maybe not exceptional, but certainly not expected.
Now it's common but underreported.
So there's a kind of dream world where "education" and "health" are still considered official public goals. But the reality is that government procurement is mostly grift and corruption. There's been an epic collapse of almost any kind of public service ethic in favour of opportunism and profiteering, sometimes covered over with religious/moral pretexts.
I've just been assuming it's all gotten way, way worse over the last 20 years or so, too. One of the main things keeping it even slightly in check was local newspapers and TV stations with actual reporters.
Those are all gone, either shuttered or snapped up by huge companies that fired most of the staff and are milking them for the last money they can provide, or using them to distribute propaganda (e.g. Sinclair), and nobody's ever going to (be able to) do a proper accounting of how much the resulting waste and corrosion of public trust has cut into the actual overall cost/benefit of this whole "Internet" thing.
I remember hearing David Simon, creator of The Wire, predicting this (fall of local news enabling unchecked corruption). Here's an article on it from nearly 20 years ago:
> "Oh, to be a state or local official in America over the next 10 to 15 years, before somebody figures out the business model," says Simon, a former crime reporter for the Baltimore Sun. "To gambol freely across the wastelands of an American city, as a local politician! It's got to be one of the great dreams in the history of American corruption."
One of the seasons of The Wire is largely about a major newsroom (the Baltimore Sun, unsurprisingly) taking its first hard punch from the collapse of the news market and unchecked M&A activity, so I'm not surprised he commented on it elsewhere too. God, what a great show.
I'm not sure there is a viable business model for local investigative reporting waiting to be discovered, any more. At least not in the US, not in mid-sized or smaller markets. It's semi-functional in rich, dense cities. Might remain so for a while longer. It's just everywhere else that now has no watchdogs aside from the occasional, lazy, probably partisan look-see from state regulatory agencies, and maybe resource- and access-starved hobbyists if they're lucky. The pros are gone. A few still watching big national-scale stuff (bigger audience!) but all the smaller parts of the system have gone dark.
Corruption is not new- in fact looking at US history it appeared to be the norm. Tammany Hall, railroad barons, the Prohibition, Standard Oil. There were just a brief few decades after WW2 when it slipped into the background.
There’s probably a feedback loop: as people have become convinced that the government is only useful for corruption, that becomes an expected perk of the job.
Unfortunately, I don’t see a way out of that loop. Move to a state that still has some civic pride I guess.
> When DJT talked about cancelling the Dept of Edu, I got ahold of all the teachers I knew and asked them what impact it would have, and their response was mostly that they would lose their school lunch benefits.
>Averaged across the general student population, there was no statistically significant correlation between a school’s spending levels and its students’ academic performance in 27 of the 28 academic indicators used in the model. In the only category that did show a statistically significant correlation — seventh-grade math — the impact of spending more was very small.
I'm not sure how to square that with the very well-studied result that areas with higher income tend to have better schools. Students from lower income brackets also do better than their income peers at schools in less affluent areas. And because local property taxes are a major funding source for schools, those are also the schools I'd expect to spend more because they have more.
Michigan notably does not fund schools through homeowner property taxes. I suspect that's probably the difference here and a reason we shouldn't use it as a representative example.
Could it be that people with higher incomes are a lot more likely to actually care about their kids getting a good education, and to put pressure on the school to that effect?
> And because local property taxes are a major funding source for schools, those are also the schools I'd expect to spend more because they have more.
It depends on the state. In Texas, property taxes from wealthier districts are redirected to poorer districts to ensure more equitable funding (search for "texas robin hood").
The result is that most public schools are funded about the same regardless of where they're located.
We still need to find a cause for declining results. If it isn't funding, what is making our children stupider?
Regardless, I'd think that a study trying to find a correlation among practice, funding, and measurement would need at least a generation (~thirty years yea?) of results to show meaning
This analysis is rather weak, just a linear regression with 2 variables it seems. I'm not saying there's a direct link of school spending and academic performance but this is barely trying. Your average undergrad could've made a better study.
> No one has mentioned defunding public education yet.
Public education has vast amounts of funding in the U.S. compared to other developed countries. If it does badly despite that, it's very likely that "more funding" is not the answer.
It's worth pointing out that wages in the US are vast compared to other developed countries, though, too. We outspend OECD by 35-40%, but our average national wage is also higher than OECD by 35-40%.
Labor compensation in the U.S. is also extremely unequal, which pulls the average up in a way that isn't very informative as to this particular issue. The average starving PhD would be a much better and more knowledgeable teacher to high school students in the subject she took her PhD in, than the typical high school teacher with nothing more than an Education credential. Are you sure that you need to pay such high wages to existing teachers?
>The average starving PhD would be a much better and more knowledgeable teacher to high school students in the subject she took her PhD in
i dont think this is true.
there is an art to educating (especially the ~10-15 year old range) that does not just manifest itself because you are smart: how to engage students, how to keep them engaged, how to adjust the message to the audience's level and communicate it effectively (which changes kid to kid), how to earn a kids respect without becoming over-bearing (or too friendly), and dozens of other things that your PhD in compsci or whatever does not teach you.
some of the smartest PhD holders i know would be very shitty elementary/high school teachers.
(context: i teach at the college level. its a lot easier than teaching at the high school level.)
Yeah there's some truth to this - I find that my Ed students don't always have sophisticated understandings of their content area (though honestly I find that ENGR and BIOL students don't, either). But they do get more content area teaching than in ED.
ED as a field is 100% all-in on AI, too, so there's a lot of discussion amongst them about what skills in the field need to be automated and what has to stay artisanal. But I'm sympathetic to zozbot's claims too - I do think the reading scores would be higher if there were more comp/rhet specialists in sec. ed.
Yes to this! What makes a great teacher is the willingness to hold kids accountable for their behavior and their work. Sure, it helps to be a subject expert, but that won't matter if you can't manage your classroom.
And parents play an equally important role. One of the best things you can do for your child's education/life is support the teacher when they call you up and say, "Your child is making poor decisions..."
> Sure, it helps to be a subject expert, but that won't matter if you can't manage your classroom.
I've known plenty of highly credentialed teachers that were very poor communicators and/or could not manage their classroom. I think the idea that this can be, or is, effectively taught as part of the "education major" is very suspect.
Indeed, the worst-performing school districts are precisely those where "classroom management" is a serious problem, versus better districts where the children come to school ready to be managed. It seems older styles of classroom management now out of vogue and untaught by universities were more effective.
~10-13 mostly comprises the junior high range. By the time the kids are 14, they're plenty old enough to benefit from a "college-prep" educational approach. Sure, some PhDs will be better, others will be worse. But you solve that by throwing out terrible teachers and rewarding the best ones. There's no guarantee that an Education-credentialed teacher with negligible education in the actual subject they're supposed to teach would be any better.
I'm retired from engineering. I did startups / exited / joined difficult technical domains for the funsies / etc.
I have taught 5 years at a private school. I do not have a teaching credential.
Knowing the stuff you're teaching is the easiest part. And I say that despite teaching in an environment with far better behavior, student buy-in, family support, and academic accomplishment than most places.
I thought that when I launched a student team doing spacecraft design (selected for orbital flight on the basis of the quality of their mission, btw, not their age) that the hard part would be teaching kids about power budgets, radiation aging, and the thermal environment.
Turns out the hard part is helping them figure out how to navigate the social dynamics of talking to each other, organizing their work, realizing what other people know, and coping emotionally with setbacks. Kids will teach themselves the stuff if you have buy-in and the culture in the room is right.
Here in my state teachers in good districts start at $60,000 per year and see minimal increases due to length of service; after 20 years they might be making $75,000 per year. You ever done the math on living on $60k per year? Hard to do a lot besides support youself on that income. I note that surrounding states (even higher cost states) have lower salaries.
In states with lower teacher pay, most teachers without a much-higher-paid spouse take summer jobs or teach summer school. Also, none of them get as much time off in the summer as the kids do. Plus, you can't pay your mortgage with vacation days.
Given the (often ongoing) educational requirements, if you pro-rate it you still come out much below most positions with similar requirements. We absolutely under-pay teachers in virtually every public school.
My mother retired after working her entire career as a teacher, and I earned close to double her final salary my first year working in tech. She has her masters degree and I did not graduate college. And if you count the stocks I got at the end of that first year, it was over triple.
She was a special ed. teacher teaching emotionally disabled grade schoolers (including a first grader that tried to kill his grandmother with a tv power cord). There is no way that I worked harder than she did.
You sure they're not on 20 pay contracts? Everybody tells me "it must be so nice, getting summers off" and I'm like "actually I look for summer courses because I don't get paid."
It depends a lot on the state. Some actually do pay alright. Some pay terribly (and may have serious issues finding enough staff, as a result).
Unions are similar. People cry about them being a huge problem, but they have effectively no power (as in: don't even collectively bargain for contracts) in lots of states, including many of the ones with poor school performance. In other states, they really do have quite a bit of power.
PhD holders are, on average, not starving. Some of them could make good primary/secondary school teachers, but knowing how to teach children effectively is a skill by itself. It's quite different from working as a college instructor. That's why earning an teaching credential is important (although the quality of some teacher training programs is terrible).
Boston Public Schools had a 50 Million dollar budget shortfall for next year. We are rapidly closing schools and eating the disruption that comes with that. Teachers do not do their best work when they don't have confidence on long-term outcomes.
To some extent, this shift is inevitable due to demographics changes - but I don't think that there has been realistic planning on how to manage a future with dramatically fewer children.
Nearly nation wide enrollment at schools is down, and the funding methods for schools mostly are done on a per-student basis. So school budgets are getting smaller in absolute terms, so they have to get rid of a lot of the fixed spending (mainly schools).
Unfortunately, people hate it when you close their local school, and fight tooth-and-nail against it, but almost never fight for the funding needed to keep those schools open.
In the SF Bay Area almost all of the school districts are facing this. Oakland and San Francisco both had school closures canceled by parent revolts, but are still stuck with the budget shortfalls (and are handing out pick slips). One of the school districts in San Jose looks like they are going to make it through closing 5 elementary schools this year, but it has been a close fight all the way.
The same pattern will also play out with Universities and colleges. 2025 was the year of peak US high school graduation, with the next ~30-50 years of graduation rate declines baked in. We're still a few years away from this trend percolating into the work force.
I agree with you to an extent, but many states and school districts also engaged in fiscal malpractice by using defined-benefit employee pension plans to shift costs into the future. Those plans are financial weapons of mass destruction: far too risky for employers, retirees, and taxpayers. We need to eliminate them and shift all public school employees to 403(b) defined-contribution plans. This is especially critical as school enrollment declines.
But filling a leaky bucket does have an impact. You just have to fill it faster than it empties. Which is probably your point.
My point is different. Study after study shows that below a specific floor spending has almost no impact on educational outcomes. The correlation is such that you can both determine that there is likely no leak and also that it has no effect.
The stuff that does have an impact is much harder to move the needle on though so everyone just scapegoats funding instead. Stuff like building up the nuclear family in an area, increasing income mobility, and holding parents accountable for child outcomes do have a measurable effect but are politically intractable today.
Unfortunately there is much more to the story than a number on a line. Just because you increase spending doesn't mean that the spending isn't earmarked for items like digital projectors and virtual textbooks that have minimal impact on learning outcomes.
Covid, smartphones/screens, social media, AI have an enormous impact on the students. A slight school defunding (if it really exists, which I doubt) cannot compare.
ai summary: "According to that piece, K-12 education has been losing $407 million each year since 2017 due to inflation, even as Gov. Lamont called current funding levels the "largest ever commitment." The author also noted that $2.4 billion in urgent legislative funding requests were denied in one spring session alone, with needs for fully funding education among the shortfalls."
"Inflation-adjusted public school funding per student in the United States has increased significantly over the long term, with a roughly 34% increase in inflation-adjusted revenue per student over the last two decades alone. Looking at a broader historical view, inflation-adjusted spending per student has risen by over 200% since the 1960s."
This is always a common rebuttal but I used to work in education and believe me there was not a bunch of new money coming in. Quite the opposite. Maybe the data shows funding going up but that money is not making it to the students.
The amount of school administrators and non-teachers have increased at 10x the rate of teachers relative to students since 2000. I have no doubt funding keeps going up but virtually all of it is diverted away into bureaucracy.
So if you agree that administrators in public ed are doing a poor job managing the resources allocated to them, do you support school choice efforts that will allow more competition from charter/private schools that have incentives to spend more wisely?
Why would private schools be incentivized to spend more wisely? Why would paying a CEO obscene amounts of money to lobby for public funds be better than fixing public schools?
This is the bias that keeps us from actually making improvements to the education system. I guess it's easy to repeat and blame money. Kind of like a brilliantly colored red herring.
No one has discussed that lack of rigour in public education anymore. In my neighborhood the kids don't have homework until grade 7. Literally not a piece of homework came home from grade 1-6.
While I am not saying give kids more homework for the sake of work -- you do need to have some rigour. There was a movement about 10 years ago to let kids be kids and have lots of free time for exploration etc, remove competition at schools. These are all great things worth pursuing but not at a complete lack of work.
Also add in all the other things including funding - though funding doesn't solve all woes.
Much of the homework assigned at my local public high school is repetitive busy work. I'm not surprised that students don't care. And some of it is a completely worthless waste of time, like literally making little arts and crafts projects that would be more suitable for elementary school. I know that teaching is a tough job but it seems like a significant fraction of them are putting in the least possible effort.
Math, reading and writing are all accomplished by repetition and building muscle memory.
The adults in the room saying you don't need that in order to learn are doing a disservice to the next generation.
There is also a lot of busy work but again work and being able to do work, sustain focus requires the development of that skill and muscle. Especially in this day and age where everyone is vying for your attention.
My wife is on a school board in a large district that is trying to cut spending. The problem is not really how much money they have and giving them more money doesn't help. The problem at least in our state is:
Public schools are subsidizing charter schools
Public schools have many legal requirements to provide services that charter schools don't have to deal with. Charter schools also have a lot of freedom to refuse problematic kids, that public schools have to take.
Parents who don't need those services keep taking their kids out of public schools and putting them into charter schools, charter schools kick out problem kids. Public schools end up having a higher cost per student because of that.
Schools have to finance an entire security apparatus because assholes keep doing mass shootings.
Public school systems _also_ are terrible at spending money on bullshit that has absolutely nothing to do with schools. The amount of money spent on administration is way way out of line. There are so many layers between the top and teachers and so many people with their hands out. Big school systems could probably fire half of their administration and literally nobody would notice. They would probably run better. When they do internal reports on how to save money, it always comes back to the most trivial shit or even worse, pulling it out of _education_ and is _never_ 'you need to fire a bunch of people collecting a paycheck for doing nothing'.
I genuinely think most big school systems would be vastly improved by firing half of the administration at random and doubling teacher salaries.
Public schools are not subsidizing charter schools. Rather per-student money travels with those kids to the school they are actually attending. So since the kids don't go to those schools, neither does the money.
I don't know what state you are in, and there are a number of them where the charter systems are absolute messes and have become fraud paradises (looking at you Florida), but other states things are much better.
Fo instance my kids are in charter schools in California. All charter schools here are required to have tiered lotteries to get in, and after siblings and teachers' kids, the first tier is always kids with an IEP (the problematic/expensive ones). And at my kids school we know one of the kids with a severe problems that the school has bent over backwards to provide the best environment for that little girl.
And every 4 years they have to re-apply for their charter, and one of the front-and-center numbers required for that is how many kids they kick out. And they got grilled on that (which our school passed with flying colors). The charters absolutely had to prove that they are doing things better than the local schools, and our school worked very hard to prove that (and had the numbers to do so). If they didn't, then their charter would have been cut (we heard about other schools that failed this grade).
So I am experiencing a well run charter school, inside a well policed system (California). If you are not, then make that one of the things you cast your vote on: regulations on where your school dollars flow to.
I will note that there is one important advantage that charter schools have: you have to make a choice to get into them. That means that the parents tend to be more involved in their kids' education (if only minority so), and so you get kids that are a bit more motivated to do well. This one area is unfair to the public schools.
I don't understand your comment. Charter schools are public schools. Are you confusing charter schools with private schools? Charter schools generally can't pick and choose students the way private schools do.
I'm not hearing a whole lot of talk about No Child Left Behind or the near-total elimination of analysis and synthesis from modern curricula either, but having watched a 14 year old navigate what passes for elementary and middle school currently I'm unsurprised that test scores continue to slip.
Parents watching what their kids were learning (or not learning) was probably the largest acceleration into home and alternate school in history. That's what happened to nearly every family in our home school co-op.
Funny you should mention that, we're currently looking for a home school co-op in our area. It has become apparent that my child has learned basically no analytical skills whatsoever so I'm planning on homeschooling for a year to see what improvements that makes before making a final decision about what to do for high school.
And what are those budgets spent on? For the majority of subjects you only need pen, paper, blackboard and chalk. Couple of textbooks with expired copyright. Throw some chemicals for chemistry. Couple of frogs for dissection in biology. One teacher per 30 students. Two janitors, one fat lady with a goatee in the cafeteria to dispense slop.
If this style of education helped Feynman to get Nobel prize should be enough for current gen of pupils. And it is not expensive.
Much ink has been spilled in the comments already, but as a child of the 80s, computers were a class, and not a lifestyle. If I had gone through school with what's available today, I doubt I would have done as well as I did. Most things were handwritten, I learned cursive, and computer class was Oregon Trail and basic programming essentially.
Looking back, I don't think Chromebooks, iPads and the like would have been beneficial to my elementary/middle/high school education at all.
Our primary instrument of learning was the teacher and really thick textbooks that were passed down student to student, and you could see that journey inside the in front cover where you signed it out for the year.
As someone who would protest at learning long division when a calculator was around, in retrospect, the teacher was right.
Isn't the available learning material better than it has ever been?
As a 30-something, basic AI uses completely blow my mind. It has never been this easy to be curious, because there is a machine in my pocket that reduces the cost of finding answers to nearly zero. I can point my phone at a painting and dig as deep as I want into its subject, artist, movement and so on. It's a real world Pokédex.
Then there are countless well-made tutorials for every imaginable topic on YouTube, and more high-quality old-fashioned websites that Google cares to index.
Claude is really cool too. If you care to look at its output, you can see a fairly good translation of your thoughts into code. You can translate your projects from one language or framework to another. We used to read textbooks cover to cover. Now we get custom examples for any imaginable idea.
So why are these technologies failing our kids? Why are they so powerful in the hands of a curious person, yet making everyone dumber?
My hypothesis is that for us, now post studying in the "old ways", are able to use these tools to increase learning.
The fundamental problem seems to be that screens as a basis for learning how to learn, study, and retain information in kids appears to be detrimental to developing that core skill we have already developed.
> The fundamental problem seems to be that screens as a basis for learning how to learn, study, and retain information in kids appears to be detrimental to developing that core skill we have already developed.
As I like to say, AI is great for those of us who "learned it the hard way", be it coding and learning, but I suspect I would not have bothered learning it the hard way if I had it available when I was younger.
> Why are they so powerful in the hands of a curious person, yet making everyone dumber?
Curiosity level varies per individual. I find certain things fascinating that many others don't. AI has been a boon for me and others who may be limitlessly curious, and it may be a negative for the uncurious.
I don't know why I was so surprised when my kids told me there was nothing called a "computer lab" at their school... why would there be when each kid has their own device?
And parents are equally distracted from their job of parenting by those same devices. Want to help your child with their education? Support their teachers when/if your child is making poor decisions at school.
It's amazing how bad these things can be. My kids will sometimes get computerized homework which gets graded automatically, and if you don't format the answer the way it likes, zero points. They spend as much effort fighting with the formatting as they do understanding the material. And this is in one of the wealthiest, best run public school districts in the country.
"Technology" has been an education buzzword since I was in school and it needs to be taken out and shot.
This gave me flashbacks to LonCapa in college when I was in calculus classes circa 2011. A correct answer was marked incorrect automatically because of floating point issues.
Oh how I hated having to learn cursive when I was in school. What an utter waste of limited instructional time that could have been better spent on mathematics or science or touch typing or creative writing or literally any other subject. If some students really want to learn calligraphy then make it an art elective but don't torture the rest of us.
touch typing is about as useful as … (whatever is the most useless thing). science? I spent years in science classes from elem all the way through uni, physics, chemistry, thermodynamics, you name it, about as useful to me (and 99.6% of my classmates) as russian I learned along the way too. cursive is art and everyone needs a little art. my kid goes to private school and non-cursive is practically forbidden (you are allowed to print of course but not a single student does, it is beautiful getting to read what my kid writes when I get my friday folder :) )
My wife taught first through fifth grade from ~2004 until 2017.
One thing that was evident to me from the sidelines was how much admin work was continually added to her workload without any consideration for the amount of class time she had. The focus on data derived from continuous testing of the students resulted in her and her peers sticking ever more closely to a continuously disrupted and rotated collection of commercially sourced curriculum and materials. This constant flux disincentivized teachers augmenting with their own content (although they still often do) because it could fall out of line with next years 'innovative new approach' to teaching basic arithmetic.
Her role as educator started to take a back seat to facilitator, focused on classroom management and data collection. Add in differentiated instruction, where she was held accountable to develop personalized lesson plans for individual students and asked to track all of that and you end up with way too much workload to stay engaged and engaging year after year.
She was in a pretty good school district. A friend of mine had a similar role in a city district for a regional metro area and her students were horrific. She felt physically unsafe and ultimately quit.
It's a complex problem with many contributing factors. It's also difficult to experiment or strike out on your own as an educator when the future of the students in front of you could be negatively impacted by any mistakes made (not to mention job/test scores/etc) so most just ride the rail all the way down.
(Also, at least in the US, you can get stuck to a district b/c the value-add of a seasoned teacher doesn't really move the metrics in the current system enough to offset the fact that you can hire two junior/fresh grads for the same money.)
I worked for a couple of years in education and I think this sentiment is so harmful:
> It's also difficult to experiment or strike out on your own as an educator when the future of the students in front of you could be negatively impacted by any mistakes made (not to mention job/test scores/etc) so most just ride the rail all the way down.
It's pervasive and makes things move so slowly. The biggest issue I have with it is that the system is so protective of doing no harm, but doing no harm to a system that is failing students is a poor decision imo. We should be more experimental if things are generally bad. Be protective of the mechanisms when we have good results, not when we have bad ones.
- media/tech shortened content: shorter tv shows, short video content, etc.
(Tiktok is the "state of the art" of those 2 trends pushed to the max)
Specifically, we're getting more & more addicted to things that increase the dopamine spikes frequency, making it increasingly difficult to go in deep focus work.
Absolutely, we are feeding kids so much attention-span killing things. Even as an adult I'm having hard time with YouTube shorts, and i cannot imagine a kids brain having the ways to deal with all that.
I am _fighting_ with elderly relatives to adjust their YouTube habits. They didn't even know it comes on autopilot by default. They don't even check sources, they just let the garbage in.
That doesn't line up though. See if you're 13 and meeting the level in 2012 your scores don't decline. So the levels would lag a few years. The 8 year-olds show up and miss the mark in 2017 that indicate the infinite scroll problem was having a toll on them.
Additionally this would start to show in class specific measurements (those kids with access to home internet, personal devices, etc. would have worse scores). I think the argument about social media has merit in discussion of children, but it seems more of a social distinction rather than an objective indicator for academic performance.
I wonder if there's research on short form but educational content or if that's fundamentally impossible.
For example I remember reading a lot of science magazines / articles growing up (granted popsci but for a kid it still teaches some things) and as I grew up things like the Economist.
Similarly I also played games like math blaster as a kid and have realized I need to intentionally provide games like this to my kids that ideally teach something (the bar being greater than zero learning) rather than playing one of those infinite running games or whatever.
I think we're probably talking about the exact same thing but am curious where content vs. short form media is.
We don't have any NAEP long-term test results for years between 2012 and 2020, because they were canceled due to budget cuts[1], so we can't use the linked data to determine whether the decline started before or during COVID.
We do have the NAEP main series test results[2]. At a first glance at the math results[3][4], it appears they peaked in 2013, then fluctuated through 2019, then dropped significantly in 2022 and somewhat rebounded in 2024, which really does suggest COVID.
Could we look at average SAT scores by year as a proxy? It's not a great metric because not all students take the SAT but I think there's some correlation.
The change was in fact designed to make the scores jump. The purpose is compressing the top scores to allow universities to be more subjective and still have high averages
Score changes look about the same across performance percentiles and ethnicities. That suggests it's a systemic issue unrelated to population makeup. While I'd be interested to see regional and economic breakdowns, it's certainly far from obvious it's a result of demographic change, especially after such a short period of time.
I wouldn’t be so sure. Anecdotally all the kids these days seem equally messed up. It could be that the Chinese and Indian kids are propping up the locals.
I do well now , but as a teenager I didn't give a shit about high school. If anything I wanted to graduate early, and get a job to ward off the next eviction.
We really need to go back to occupational training in high school. I should be able to graduate and earn enough to get an apartment. It's not like you can't get a degree in Midwestern Poetry later in life.
A recent Atlantic article [1] by someone involved in the Mississippi reforms gives a good outline of what they did/are doing. It includes science-based reading curriculum and holding kids back (as you mentioned). It also includes other forms of accountability, including parental notification and empowering the state to force recalcitrant districts to improve. One notable quote:
"The law allowed the state to abolish these districts’ local school board and remove the local superintendent in favor of a state appointee who would report directly to the state board of education. A later amendment provided that removed local-school-board members would be barred from serving in that capacity again."
Politically unpopular in some cases (which local jurisdiction wants the state coming in and replacing your local school board?), but seems to be pretty effective.
School was like that back in Brazil in the 80s. Don’t get the grade, try again. And again. And again. Until you do. That is the real “not left behind”.
Yes. That's the whole idea of adaptive/personalized learning.
There are some interesting ethical questions about disparity of outcomes, but we should aim to have a system that educates each individual as best we can (without leaving kids behind). The current system of bludgeoning every individual student to be the same is not working well.
The National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) administered the NAEP long-term trend (LTT) reading and mathematics assessments to 13-year-old students from October to December of the 2022–23 school year. The average scores for 13-year-olds declined 4 points in reading and 9 points in mathematics compared to the previous assessment administered during the 2019–20 school year. Compared to a decade ago, the average scores declined 7 points in reading and 14 points in mathematics.
Note the results are compiled from the 2022–23 school year, compared to the 2019–20 school year. So yeah, the big thing there is the lockdown for (depending on local policies) the year or two in between.
Who is blaming the students? If 13 year olds were smoking and we blamed poor sports performance in that age group on the smoking, we wouldn't be "blaming" them. We don't model 13 year olds as little islands of free will.
Chronic absence is up and truancy is down according to this report. Not really what I’d expect for phone use—both should trend flat or up.
I wonder if there’s a way to validate the hypothesis that post-shutdown, some of the cohort that would have missed a day here and there now see school as optional and miss more days.
Overall, the reported effect is sad and should be addressed. These are people’s lives.
Youth participation in travel club sports is up so they miss more school days due to tournaments. These tend to be the more affluent and motivated students who still achieve good grades and high standardized test scores. I receive warning letters from the school district every year over high absences but it doesn't mean anything and I just throw them in the trash.
Chronic absence numbers are misleading. We all know that they are just placeholder stats for other factors and we should focus on those.
My 3rd grade daughter was unlucky with various illnesses and missed about 12 days this year (so far). I got a letter from her principal attempting to guilt trip me for her "Chronic absence".
I wrote an angry response (in retrospect it was too angry since he had no choice about the letter) where I asked if he would prefer my sending sick children to school.
Her grades (for whatever value grades have in 3rd grade) are fine. I'll take the chance on her reading her "Diary of a wimpy kid" book when sick, or when a sane system would have given a snow day.
> in retrospect it was too angry since he had no choice
Imho you did the right thing. Everyone has a choice.
I did the same (but instead of an email it was an angry speech, face to face), with the exact same question (if they would prefer my sending sick children to school). My child's grades were fine, too. Haven't received any letters after that.
The most common reply to this is: “people said the same about Books/TV/Comics/Games/Facebook stop being such a Luddite”
My answer to this is approximately: “yes they’re all relatively bad compared to the thing that came before so they were all right!”
Even books. If the option were between my child reading about blacksmithing/compsci and DOING blacksmithing/compsci I’d choose the latter every time. It gives you real experience and opinions.
The difference with each successive new wave is that it becomes increasingly addictive. It’s possible to read one book and stop for a while. Shorts can hook you for hours and then draw you back the next day with no natural stopping point.
It's also not possible to carry around enough books with you to allow you to jump from one to another whenever you get bored, while it is possible to effectively carry around a device that lets you watch YouTube/TikTok at all times. I think this is an important factor.
Or look at corporations + elites constantly attacking children for the last 40 years (pushing school vouchers, school choices, attacking teacher unions, politicizing school boards).
Who do you think suffers when elites attack public education? It's always the children.
Fun fact: Silicon Valley elites are big proponents of school vouchers because, like their hatred of American labor, they also hate public schools and don't want to pay for that either.
Plenty of children suffer in public schools as they are currently constituted. School vouchers, school choice, and attacking teachers unions are attempts to create more schooling options than just whatever the local public school is, which should benefit children who are currently having a bad time in that system.
School boards are inherently poltical because as long as a publicly-run school system exists, how it is run and what things it will attempt to teach are political questions. There's no apolitical school board that existed 40 years ago that has been altered since then, they have always been poltical.
Internet commenters try to get me to hate lots of people for lots of reasons, but "Parents trying to send their kid to a school that fits their kid's needs" seems like such a hard sell.
Like, I get the desire in a hypothetical, that you hope that people in power would use their power to make public schools better if their kids were forced to go there.
But in reality, the actually powerful can just pay for private schools out of pocket and the vouchers help a lot of middle-income families send their kid to a school that can provide a better environment for whatever definition of better is relevant to that individual.
It just seems like such misplaced anger and energy. You could just advocate for improving public schools, without attacking regular families trying to do their best while trapped inside a system they have very little influence on.
The voucher system is seen as an attack on IEP / special ed children, since public schools rely on distributing money away from the general population of students and into special ed and IEP students who, by various measures, can consume 3x the amount of money per student. They need lots of non-special-ed students to subsidize the special ed ones at the current levels.
If enough people use the voucher system it basically forces the per student spending to get closer to a purely egalitarian spending per student, with the result that public schools have to spend about the same amount on special ed kids as the voucher kids get (in the extreme, that's all the students they're left with). While this is objectively fairer in my opinion, it's viewed as an entitlement that the special ed kids can take more money at the expense of everyone else.
Obviously though this has to be carefully framed to sell it properly. Very few are going to knowingly sign up to lose funding for their own student to help some other student who is already getting 3x the money as them, so instead it's framed as some sort of evil capitalist agenda against public schools.
And yet, the SF school district decided that math is too racist, and advanced classes in particular should be banned as doubleplusungood.
Seattle's Public Schools district is among the leading in the nation on per-student spending, yet the test scores are cratering. Its previous superintendant had an official platform of not disciplining students.
Let's see Common Core was released in 2010 and by 2014-2015 most states had implemented it. Lets do the math, 2026 - 13 = 2013. Hmmm... You can say funding all you want but in the same 13 years of Common Core funding per student has increased by 50%.
It leads to K-shaped education where parents who recognize the deficiency of public education simply teach their kids math themselves or hire private tutors. Public education used to be a force for equality of knowledge in the country. Now it perversely does the opposite, all in the name of education!
At least in elementary school I don't see the deficiency in common core math compared to what I had 30 years ago. My kid has been exposed to a wide variety of topics sooner than I was, and she's way stronger in word problems on top of that. Do people have a specific complaint with elementary school common core math that we should be teaching but aren't, or vice versa? Or is it more problematic later?
One thing I notice is there seem to be far more students who finish elementary school unable to comfortably do basic math in their head (stuff like 17+36 or 144 or even basic multiplication tables like 38).
Except these are results for 2022, and they are significantly down from the levels in 2019. All kids in either cohort would have spent their entire school years with common core education.
If you have kids you will need to intervene to give them a good math science education.
Fortunately there are some great resources, far better than the average colorful school textbooks :
- aops.com and their BeastAcademy cartoon series
- an old book "Algebra" by Gelfand
- W W Sawyers old books on how math should be taught
- Geogebra and Desmos web tools
- 3Blue1Brown
- KhanAcademy
I try and introduce math in a more visual way, with multipication as rectangles and the distributive rule being central concepts that lead into all other areas of math :
It still shows a problem. If math and reading levels were largely improving for decades then we saw a sudden decline, it signals that something changed, especially since covid.
I’m curious how does it track with class sizes and tracks (remedial, regular, honors, “gifted”).
The level is so low in my local elementary school that the single track math class is still doing addition within 20 for first grade.
The funny thing is that the state standard actually measure 2 and 3 digit addition for K and 1st graders, and proficiency at that level would be p75 for a 1st grader.
So why is the actual class teaching level at p<50?
My child took the “CASTL” test as part of IEP assessment. According to the result percentiles, a 6 year old who can do 2 digit vertical addition is at the 70th percentile of 6 year olds.
How come in kindergarten the curriculum is counting to 100 and addition within 10, while the assessment test shows double digit addition is well within the norm?
BTW my child didn’t learn any arithmetic from school.
EDIT: In case I wasn’t clear: there is a huge discrepancy between the standardized tests and the actual curriculum “standards”.
The decrease from 2012 to 2020 was much less and generally not statistically significant. Further 2012 was the all time high, you'd expect some regression to the mean.
The NAEP has two types of tests - a long-term trend assessment, and the main assessment[1]. The long-term trend is given less often (and rather sporadically recently), and 2023 is the most recent one available.
The main assessment has been performed every two years recently, so 2024 data is most recent. They can all be seen here[2].
[1] is a summary of the impact on the brain of Covid-19 infections including IQ reduction but many others besides. Its best understood that there is no such thing as a consequence free Covid infection, it always damages something and the early british experiment where they intentionally infected young men resulted in all of them loosing IQ and none of them being aware of the loss. This finding has been built on substantially in the past 6 years and we have a much large list of issues now, none of it treatable.
Screen time and social media definitely have an impact on attention spans, but it's worth pointing out for Mathematics, 2023's average is higher than pre-1990, and reading averages seem to have always been in the 255-265 range.
Everyone is going to name their pet bugaboo, but if you look at the full charts, the scores were pretty stable in the 70s, 80s, and 90s, and are regressing back down to what they were historically. The real question is why they went up temporarily until 2012.
Few people know this, but it turns out a major bipartisan education reform bill was passed in the early 2000’s.
Constituencies of both parties found reasons to hate it, so its foundational accountability requirements were watered down by succeeding administrations.
I’m perfectly willing to be convinced NCLB had nothing to do with the evolution of test scores over the last 25 years, but the circumstantial evidence is not easy to dismiss.
I wonder if having the Soviet Union as an ever looming adversary could have something to do with it, and after their fall everyone just got complacent.
As a parent of 2 older kids (post college) and 2 young ones (primary/middle) I think one big problem is the academic expectations for the kids have dropped, and unless they are highly motivated they won’t rise above classroom expectations (even if the parents are pushing them at home). The second problem is what happens outside school: non-stop distractions: phones, iPads, social media, it’s always there. Yes we try to restrict it but it’s like forcing your kids to use a horse and buggy while all their friends are driving cars ; maybe we need to convert to Amish. It’s maddening, really.
Just eyeballing those graphs, the striking thing is the difference from the beginning (early 70s) to the peak in 2012. During that period, reading scores only increased by 8 points while math increased by 19 points.
I'm definitely in the camp that thinks cell phones have something to do with what's happened since 2012. If we start from the iPhone in 2007, it seems plausible to me that a 5-ish year lag is consistent with the time it took for smartphones to rise in popularity and their effects to filter into society. (I got my first smartphone around 2012, by which time pretty much everyone else I knew already had one.) That's at least a gesture toward explaining why there was a peak around 2012. What it doesn't explain is why the ascent to that peak was so much steeper in math than in reading.
The right wingers are going to have a heyday with this one just like they’ve been doing with the “Swedes are getting dumber and nobody knows why” articles.
They want to say that non-whites are naturally dumber than whites. There will be varying degrees of subtlety but that's what the dog whistlers are on about.
You can take a look at the charts in the linked article and see that the scores for Asians are consistently higher than the scores for whites which are consistently higher than the scores for blacks and Hispanics. This was true in 2012 and it's true today.
If these numbers are at all meaningful for determining how much a student has learned as a result of going through schooling, then thye show that white people are consistently better than blacks and Hispanics at school and are consistently worse than Asians.
I'm so relieved I left social media. Sadly, via democracy, even if you leave social media you are still impacted by those who use it and believe what they read.
I cannot wait for one of my uncles to post this about how kids these days can't do anything so I can point out that the scores were even lower in his age bracket.
Haha, I wouldn't actually say anything (sarcasm never transfers on the internet). More of it's interesting that many baby boomers I know in real life think the sky is falling based on metrics that are better than they were when they were kids, and they didn't even have COVID as an excuse.
I opened this thread expecting a bunch of "kids these days..." posts, kind of surprised not to see any. People have been raising themselves up by putting down other generations since the very first I assume, the temptation towards the fallacy of composition is too irresistible.
There's definitely loads of money in "education". But the actual teachers arent seeing it. No, its in "special interest programs", state/federal compliance, loads of tests, and ordained material from "preferred creators" (cough, pearson etm.)
We can pay teachers better, sure. But there's lots of areas to "pay better". Small classes. 12-17 students. Budget for class resources. No, teachers should NOT be responsible for work materials. Larger classes get aides as well.
Ive also seen what modern teaching is about. The teachers are handed absolutely shit material and required to teach that, with low/no deviation. Like, "New Math" https://www.understood.org/en/articles/9-new-math-problems-a... . None of these methods show WHY, only a rote procedure.
I thought about becoming a teacher. I already teach people (wide array of adults and under 18) in extracurricular groups. Ive seen what works well, and what doesnt. I can tell the 'energy' of a group, especially if theyre confused and angry about something, and how to solve it. But the pay is definitely laughable compared to IT, and the administration demands exacting rubrics put forth by companies who kicked back the state educators.
The responsibility is not worth their salaries or the anti-benefits and other costs.
And, no, this isn't mainly overtime pay. So they're getting paid this much even though they work only 80% as many days as people with normal jobs. If you multiply the compensation numbers by 100/80 to make them comparable with people working full time, the numbers look really large.
I'm confused by your comment here. Literally the entire point of teaching those various methods is to show WHY the math works. If anything you should be arguing for rote methods. Some are better than others, but ultimately they're all trying give tools to depict the way any math literate adult thinks about arithmetic.
We might be entering an era when literacy and math are no longer required by most of the populace. Have you seen these kids do google searches? They just use the voice recognition feature on their phone (yes, they have phones at twelve years old, for some reason) and ask google for what they want. Handwriting is already out the window, what if reading and writing are next? If they can have AIs explain everything to them verbally what do they need to read for?
I don't want to envision a future where most people besides a few elite have stopped reading and writing but maybe I'm just an old millennial and behind the times.
Without documenting the Change in demographics it’s meaningless. If there are more dumber people from populations with lower Iq - then this is inevitable. It’s an IQ test not a test of teaching skill.
Being a parent, I ask myself this question: is it worth it to struggle to get my child to try for better grades? And I don't have a definitive answer.
The reasons to doubt are perfectly known: meritocracy is on a decline in the Western world, there's an ever improving safety net for losers, there's a price to pay for forcing my child to study vs the child spending time with their friends who were left to roam free as their social life will suffer.
I probably met more people whose degrees played little to no role in their professional career than the other way around. I've met lots of people who could never realize their degree because of the hollowed down European industry. Engineers seem to suffer the most. It seems like the few ways where a degree can open the door to a better life must be in a field that provides very localized services s.a. medicine. All else is outsourced. Trades do better in this respect as a lot of them need to be local, but they too are being populated by foreign workers and competition is fierce.
I don't think that COVID or any other "force of nature" is to blame for the outcomes. When there's will, there's a way. It's just that fewer parents see academic achievements as worth pursuing for their children.
Why do you want to force your kid to study? Kids are naturally curious, it's likely that your kid will be curious about something. Introduce them to study and scholarship as a means of figuring these things out, so that it becomes natural to them.
Because _real_ study is boring. Watching videos on Youtube or playing "educational games" is not studying.
You need to repeatedly solve multiple practical problems to internalize the knowledge. And you'll eventually need to do stuff that you don't really like at all.
The proper response to that is still not to force your kid to study though. Instead, she should be made aware that in order to consistently do well, she is ultimately expected to gain the ability to force herself and defer the immediate gratification of watching a YouTube video (unless that YouTube video is a boring recorded college lecture that's relevant to her studies, I suppose).
There's a lot going on here. Most of it boils down to a concerted, decades-long project by half the country to defund, dismantle and destroy public education. This has infected every layer of education including what goes into textbooks. The Texas Board of Education has typically had outsized power here as they've mostly been the largest single purchaser of textbooks. But also we have the likes of Robert Maxwell who basically owned textbook printing [1], before "falling off" his yacht.
But the part I want to concentrate on is the education part and the role of tech. Anyone who sells to large bureaucracies like state and federal Education Departments will tell you the skill is in managing the procurement process. It's getting your claws in more than it is in delivering results. Any results tend to be more manufactured than not.
So contracts get signed with states and school districts that will require them to use a particular product, even if it doesn't work. We know how this goes too. Whoever was in charge of that decision will then tend to leave their job and go work for the seller. Shocking.
But we know what works in teaching and it's direct instruction [2] but you don't sell tech platforms or iPads or laptops that way. As a result we now have a disturbing number of people who have never read a book and really can't read a book, going so far as the students of elite colleges [3].
Likewise, we see Education PhDs who won't make a name for themselves pushing ideas from the 1800s. They have to come up with new methods and this was kind of a disaster for literacy [4], which people are finally waking up to as we go back to the 1800s method of phonics eg [5].
But it's hard to succeed when half the country wants the entire system to fail.
I don’t think there’s any great mystery here. Every few years, you guys elect a bunch of people for whom active sabotage of public education is a sine qua non to political gerrymandering strategies driven by the self-preservation instincts of lobbyists.
People are talking about Covid, smartphones/screens, social media, and AI. No one has mentioned defunding public education yet.
In Alaska, where I lived most of the last 20 years, education has been largely flat funded for about a decade now. Imagine running an organization in 2026 on that organization's 2016 budget. Schools have a bunch of obligations they have to spend on. Every time health care costs for staff go up, and funding is flat, something gets cut. You can't cut education for a decade straight without impacting student learning.
I don't think Alaska is that much of an outlier in this regard.
Funding per student is on the rise, or level on inflation-adjusted $
https://educationdata.org/public-education-spending-statisti...
The funding for dept of ed has _exploded_ after 2000
https://educationdata.org/public-education-spending-statisti...
At the same time, school scores started to sag after 2014
https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/ushistory/results/scores/
There are highly politicized blogs which can discuss this further and offer opinions as to the correlation.
When DJT talked about cancelling the Dept of Edu, I got ahold of all the teachers I knew and asked them what impact it would have, and their response was mostly that they would lose their school lunch benefits.
> Funding per student is on the rise, or level on inflation-adjusted $
That's at the state level. But that doesn't account for the explosion in admin salaries and positions. The actual money a district spends on each student has been going down every year. Those funds are going more towards admin activities.
> I got ahold of all the teachers I knew and asked them what impact it would have, and their response was mostly that they would lose their school lunch benefits.
Teachers have a very poor understanding of where their funding comes from. Most just assume "property taxes", but it's far more complicated than that. The department of Ed provides a lot of funding to states that is passed through to the schools. They also enforce the education titles.
Cutting the department of Ed may not have a direct, immediate impact on classroom teachers, but it will have a large downstream effect in a few years.
Student/teacher ratios have gone down, not up over the last few decades. This isn't a lack of funding.
Teachers are put in an impossible position with students who come from homes where the parents don't do their proper jobs. It's never been easier to be a neglectful parent. Your child will be entertained non-stop by an iPad and a video game system. They won't get bored and bother you. You can send them to their room and do whatever you want if you don't care if they are sleeping or not, as long as they are quiet.
The "iPad babies" are an epidemic in schools.
Source:
My sister is a K-12 educator in a poor, rural public school system in southeastern Virginia.
In recent years, she's seen a surge in students who are sorted, improperly, into special education classes. These are students that exhibit symptoms of various learning disabilities, but these symptoms heavily overlap with the symptoms of children who are sleep deprived and over stimulated by dopamine activating content on the devices they are addicted to.
The single variable that actually matters when it comes to school - and nothing else matters until this one is fulfilled: The quality of the peers who make up the student body.
Or put another way: The quality and involvement of the average parent.
A school can absorb an extremely small minority of "problematic" students if the rest of the student body is stellar, but that's about it.
There is not a single thing any public education system can do to counteract that simple fact. If the average student in the classroom is uninterested at best and troublemaking at worst, it doesn't matter how good the teachers are or what the ratios are, or if the classrooms are old and busted or brand new.
Until society becomes serious again, this problem will only get worse as education continues to be a political and culture war football. The best realistic thing I can think of is take a look at nearly all other western social democracies who have much better outcomes and immediately implement student academic tracking. But that would be politically impossible to do in the current state of the US.
I fear that things are going to get far worse before they get better. You could 10x the primary school education budget and likely continue to see worsening results.
When I went from private (poor) primary and middle school, to a rich suburban high school, to a poor inner city high school back in the 90's this was self evident. I didn't think it could get much worse than that, but the administrative and political classes figured out how to wildly beat even my exceedingly low expectations.
If you ask boomers they'll be far more likely to tell you dad was out working 16 hours in the oil field / carpenter for the housing boom or something like that. Mom has no time for you either, she is busy with the 4th baby. Kid gets a nice belting for bad behavior and other than that, be back before the street lights come on for a dinner conversation and then left to your own devices before bed.
I think if anything parents are more involved now than they used to be.
The most obvious difference to me other than ipads/social media is we don't beat kids anymore and we give them way less autonomy.
Another big difference is the amount of interaction between kids of different ages.
Yes to this! So many people turn a blind eye to the critical role parents play in supporting teachers holding kids accountable. And I get it, holding kids accountable is very, very challenging, but that's the gig people sign up for when they decide to have a family.
And I'm a former high school teacher and my wife is a current high school teacher so I've experienced all of this first-hand.
It's also becoming increasingly more likely to enter into college with lower relative and absolute high school performance.
Perhaps some wonder why they should try so hard in HS, when most anyone that graduates can get into college, and no employer is asking a college grad what their high school grades and scores were.
There was a time back in the 60s or 70s or earlier when anyone that graduated HS could get a decent job. And a time now where most anyone who wants a decent job, must complete college or trade school. The latter are increasingly becoming less correlated with HS performance. The importance of HS performance needed to succeed is regressing back towards what was needed back in the 70s or before, so long as you actually graduate so you can go on to further schooling. In the 80s -00's was a time where you where the ladder was shut off if you didn't go to college, but going to college was far more correlated with having the highest marks.
In an era of declining birth rates and thus fewer students graduating from high school, of course the third-tier private colleges are going to lower their admission standards in order to survive. In the long run this won't work because employers will eventually figure out that degrees from those colleges are worthless. But they'll keep up their grifting for a while, and leave a lot of mediocre students stuck with huge debts they can't pay off.
It's crazy to pay income taxes to the federal government and then have the Department of Education turn around and grant that money back to the several states so they can use it to fund public school districts. A lot of those tax dollars get wasted along the way. Better to cut out the middlemen and send property and/or income taxes directly to local governments, with some state level aid for poor areas with low tax revenue.
> That's at the state level. But that doesn't account for the explosion in admin salaries and positions. The actual money a district spends on each student has been going down every year. Those funds are going more towards admin activities.
Ok? Seems like that's more of a problem than the funding. Or whatever is causing that is more of a problem, but it does a disservice to the general argument of "kids aren't receiving the same level of care" argument to blame a drop in funding--especially when it was so easily falsified.
> At the same time, school scores started to sag after 2014
That's around the time a bunch of districts in a state I lived in at the time had multi-year teacher pay scale freezes due to budget crunches. Not saying it's necessarily connected to the scores dropping, but still.
Total spending across the country may be high, but it's very much state-by-state and local how much is spent and where it goes. Some states pay teachers pretty well. Some states, the pay really is pretty awful. Some states are OK on staffing levels. Others are in an ongoing staffing catastrophe that's forcing them to cut school days to try to get by.
Meanwhile, school performance is heavily tied to home life and broader community support for students' families. That's why all this effort to improve schools hasn't been as effective as one might hope: the attention needs to go toward much harder problems that have little to do with schools and are really hard to get any progress on in the US. Worker protections, better and less-stressful "safety nets", better policing and a better justice system. That kind of thing. I'd look at least as much at what's been going on with those, and with security and home life for those in the lowest three quintiles of household income, as at schools themselves, to try to find reasons for trends like this.
Are Mississippi and Louisiana at the top of the pay scale?
Then why are their reading scores improving so dramatically compared to wealthier states? Especially for under-privileged populations?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mississippi_Miracle
> This embrace of phonics education and the near-complete rejection of whole language theory was a key component of the program's success.
I only saw modest improvement in reading scores.
That explosion plot is pretty bad. No y axis. Unclear if it includes tuition and loans (which are paid or owed by students). Loans are ~50% of "ED appropriations", and only ~$21 million was distributed to students in 2021. But in the plot is looks like spending was around 150 billion (hard to say with no y axis) but ~50% was loans? And the source is just a vague Dept of Ed, with a link at the very bottom of the page to every single table published by the Dept of Ed, so have fun checking the source.
I'm not criticizing your take, although I suspect teachers might lose more than their lunch, just pointing out how terrible the plot is.
You should not adjust for inflation or even for wages, but for cost of employment. The way health insurance works in the US makes public sector jobs with average wages and good benefits expensive to the employer.
I met a forensic accountant recently who mentioned a corruption investigation she participated in involving a school district nearby, several high-ranking board members and admins were on the take. She pointed out the futility of the project, it was a large sum of money for a school district, but nothing like your headline-grabbing Medicare scams. She wound up leaving the investigation due to threats to her safety and took another job. It felt like one of those unresolved endings to "The Wire".
I have had enough insight into enough school districts that I'm confident lots of them are hotbeds of corruption. Mostly at the upper admin level (superintendents and such). Kickbacks for contracts, hiring absurd numbers of assistants and secretaries to the point that one wonders what work remains for the top dogs, creating do-nothing decently-paid positions for people they're having affairs with. That kind of thing.
It doesn't even have to be outright corruption or fraud. It can just be "fraud lite" as I have come to call it. Won't actually qualified as fraud in any "academic study by the experts" but anyone who stuck their nose in and witnessed the ongoings would immediately call it for what it is.
Could simply be doing the bullshit "spend down the year's IT budget on stuff likely to sit in shipping crates at district HQs until it gets e-wasted". The latter being one of the few I directly witnessed - millions of dollars of Cisco gear sitting there for 5 years before it was trashed. Never needed in the first place. I have no reason to believe anyone was on the "take" for it - just general incompetence and grifting to keep one's Very Important job going for internal politics.
This was for a district where a few million could easily have paid to fund a district-wide music program that was recently cut, among myriad of other in-the-classroom things.
The older I get and the more I witness things like this, the more I understand why a large and growing segment of society has completely tuned out the "experts" trotting out studies and reports. Those have largely been weaponized, and the erosion in trust of both institutions and expert knowledge may now be terminal due to it. You can only be told the sky isn't blue by so many experts until you tune them out entirely.
There hasn't been enough said about the corruption of public life in the US. (And elsewhere.)
It used to be this kind of thing was - maybe not exceptional, but certainly not expected.
Now it's common but underreported.
So there's a kind of dream world where "education" and "health" are still considered official public goals. But the reality is that government procurement is mostly grift and corruption. There's been an epic collapse of almost any kind of public service ethic in favour of opportunism and profiteering, sometimes covered over with religious/moral pretexts.
I've just been assuming it's all gotten way, way worse over the last 20 years or so, too. One of the main things keeping it even slightly in check was local newspapers and TV stations with actual reporters.
Those are all gone, either shuttered or snapped up by huge companies that fired most of the staff and are milking them for the last money they can provide, or using them to distribute propaganda (e.g. Sinclair), and nobody's ever going to (be able to) do a proper accounting of how much the resulting waste and corrosion of public trust has cut into the actual overall cost/benefit of this whole "Internet" thing.
I remember hearing David Simon, creator of The Wire, predicting this (fall of local news enabling unchecked corruption). Here's an article on it from nearly 20 years ago:
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2009/mar/27/david-simon-wi...
> "Oh, to be a state or local official in America over the next 10 to 15 years, before somebody figures out the business model," says Simon, a former crime reporter for the Baltimore Sun. "To gambol freely across the wastelands of an American city, as a local politician! It's got to be one of the great dreams in the history of American corruption."
One of the seasons of The Wire is largely about a major newsroom (the Baltimore Sun, unsurprisingly) taking its first hard punch from the collapse of the news market and unchecked M&A activity, so I'm not surprised he commented on it elsewhere too. God, what a great show.
I'm not sure there is a viable business model for local investigative reporting waiting to be discovered, any more. At least not in the US, not in mid-sized or smaller markets. It's semi-functional in rich, dense cities. Might remain so for a while longer. It's just everywhere else that now has no watchdogs aside from the occasional, lazy, probably partisan look-see from state regulatory agencies, and maybe resource- and access-starved hobbyists if they're lucky. The pros are gone. A few still watching big national-scale stuff (bigger audience!) but all the smaller parts of the system have gone dark.
Corruption is not new- in fact looking at US history it appeared to be the norm. Tammany Hall, railroad barons, the Prohibition, Standard Oil. There were just a brief few decades after WW2 when it slipped into the background.
There’s probably a feedback loop: as people have become convinced that the government is only useful for corruption, that becomes an expected perk of the job.
Unfortunately, I don’t see a way out of that loop. Move to a state that still has some civic pride I guess.
> It used to be this kind of thing was - maybe not exceptional, but certainly not expected.
What shocks me is how open they’ve become about it.
The people are too fat and impotent to care. Plus the average retard will convince themselves that it’s something only the other guy will do.
Meanwhile, once upon a time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Athens_(1946)
These men didn’t let a little threats and intimidation stop them, though tbf they just returned from a war.
To make your point even further, the US is near the global top in educational spending per student: https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/cmd/education-exp...
> When DJT talked about cancelling the Dept of Edu, I got ahold of all the teachers I knew and asked them what impact it would have, and their response was mostly that they would lose their school lunch benefits.
Not the most convincing sample size.
>Averaged across the general student population, there was no statistically significant correlation between a school’s spending levels and its students’ academic performance in 27 of the 28 academic indicators used in the model. In the only category that did show a statistically significant correlation — seventh-grade math — the impact of spending more was very small.
https://www.mackinac.org/S2016-02#results
I'm not sure how to square that with the very well-studied result that areas with higher income tend to have better schools. Students from lower income brackets also do better than their income peers at schools in less affluent areas. And because local property taxes are a major funding source for schools, those are also the schools I'd expect to spend more because they have more.
Michigan notably does not fund schools through homeowner property taxes. I suspect that's probably the difference here and a reason we shouldn't use it as a representative example.
Could it be that people with higher incomes are a lot more likely to actually care about their kids getting a good education, and to put pressure on the school to that effect?
There'd still be a correlation between spending and academic scores regardless of the actual causative mechanism.
> And because local property taxes are a major funding source for schools, those are also the schools I'd expect to spend more because they have more.
It depends on the state. In Texas, property taxes from wealthier districts are redirected to poorer districts to ensure more equitable funding (search for "texas robin hood").
The result is that most public schools are funded about the same regardless of where they're located.
Since 2007? That was long after we chose to leave kids behind
That study had a major update in April 2016. If the results confirmed the original premise would it actually change your mind about education funding?
We still need to find a cause for declining results. If it isn't funding, what is making our children stupider?
Regardless, I'd think that a study trying to find a correlation among practice, funding, and measurement would need at least a generation (~thirty years yea?) of results to show meaning
This analysis is rather weak, just a linear regression with 2 variables it seems. I'm not saying there's a direct link of school spending and academic performance but this is barely trying. Your average undergrad could've made a better study.
Could you link an alternative study?
> No one has mentioned defunding public education yet.
Public education has vast amounts of funding in the U.S. compared to other developed countries. If it does badly despite that, it's very likely that "more funding" is not the answer.
It's worth pointing out that wages in the US are vast compared to other developed countries, though, too. We outspend OECD by 35-40%, but our average national wage is also higher than OECD by 35-40%.
Labor compensation in the U.S. is also extremely unequal, which pulls the average up in a way that isn't very informative as to this particular issue. The average starving PhD would be a much better and more knowledgeable teacher to high school students in the subject she took her PhD in, than the typical high school teacher with nothing more than an Education credential. Are you sure that you need to pay such high wages to existing teachers?
>The average starving PhD would be a much better and more knowledgeable teacher to high school students in the subject she took her PhD in
i dont think this is true.
there is an art to educating (especially the ~10-15 year old range) that does not just manifest itself because you are smart: how to engage students, how to keep them engaged, how to adjust the message to the audience's level and communicate it effectively (which changes kid to kid), how to earn a kids respect without becoming over-bearing (or too friendly), and dozens of other things that your PhD in compsci or whatever does not teach you.
some of the smartest PhD holders i know would be very shitty elementary/high school teachers.
(context: i teach at the college level. its a lot easier than teaching at the high school level.)
Yeah there's some truth to this - I find that my Ed students don't always have sophisticated understandings of their content area (though honestly I find that ENGR and BIOL students don't, either). But they do get more content area teaching than in ED.
ED as a field is 100% all-in on AI, too, so there's a lot of discussion amongst them about what skills in the field need to be automated and what has to stay artisanal. But I'm sympathetic to zozbot's claims too - I do think the reading scores would be higher if there were more comp/rhet specialists in sec. ed.
Yes to this! What makes a great teacher is the willingness to hold kids accountable for their behavior and their work. Sure, it helps to be a subject expert, but that won't matter if you can't manage your classroom.
And parents play an equally important role. One of the best things you can do for your child's education/life is support the teacher when they call you up and say, "Your child is making poor decisions..."
> Sure, it helps to be a subject expert, but that won't matter if you can't manage your classroom.
I've known plenty of highly credentialed teachers that were very poor communicators and/or could not manage their classroom. I think the idea that this can be, or is, effectively taught as part of the "education major" is very suspect.
Indeed, the worst-performing school districts are precisely those where "classroom management" is a serious problem, versus better districts where the children come to school ready to be managed. It seems older styles of classroom management now out of vogue and untaught by universities were more effective.
~10-13 mostly comprises the junior high range. By the time the kids are 14, they're plenty old enough to benefit from a "college-prep" educational approach. Sure, some PhDs will be better, others will be worse. But you solve that by throwing out terrible teachers and rewarding the best ones. There's no guarantee that an Education-credentialed teacher with negligible education in the actual subject they're supposed to teach would be any better.
I'm retired from engineering. I did startups / exited / joined difficult technical domains for the funsies / etc.
I have taught 5 years at a private school. I do not have a teaching credential.
Knowing the stuff you're teaching is the easiest part. And I say that despite teaching in an environment with far better behavior, student buy-in, family support, and academic accomplishment than most places.
I thought that when I launched a student team doing spacecraft design (selected for orbital flight on the basis of the quality of their mission, btw, not their age) that the hard part would be teaching kids about power budgets, radiation aging, and the thermal environment.
Turns out the hard part is helping them figure out how to navigate the social dynamics of talking to each other, organizing their work, realizing what other people know, and coping emotionally with setbacks. Kids will teach themselves the stuff if you have buy-in and the culture in the room is right.
Here in my state teachers in good districts start at $60,000 per year and see minimal increases due to length of service; after 20 years they might be making $75,000 per year. You ever done the math on living on $60k per year? Hard to do a lot besides support youself on that income. I note that surrounding states (even higher cost states) have lower salaries.
Teachers get paid peanuts.
That's not so low when you account for the fact that school is not in session during summer, and teachers get these months off.
In states with lower teacher pay, most teachers without a much-higher-paid spouse take summer jobs or teach summer school. Also, none of them get as much time off in the summer as the kids do. Plus, you can't pay your mortgage with vacation days.
Given the (often ongoing) educational requirements, if you pro-rate it you still come out much below most positions with similar requirements. We absolutely under-pay teachers in virtually every public school.
My mother retired after working her entire career as a teacher, and I earned close to double her final salary my first year working in tech. She has her masters degree and I did not graduate college. And if you count the stocks I got at the end of that first year, it was over triple.
She was a special ed. teacher teaching emotionally disabled grade schoolers (including a first grader that tried to kill his grandmother with a tv power cord). There is no way that I worked harder than she did.
Teachers often end up working weeks that are more than 40 hours, though with grading, lesson planning, tutoring, etc.
You sure they're not on 20 pay contracts? Everybody tells me "it must be so nice, getting summers off" and I'm like "actually I look for summer courses because I don't get paid."
US teacher pay is near the top for OECD countries: https://www.oecd.org/en/data/indicators/teachers-salaries.ht...
US overall pay and cost of living is even closer to the top for OECD countries, as shown upthread :P
It depends a lot on the state. Some actually do pay alright. Some pay terribly (and may have serious issues finding enough staff, as a result).
Unions are similar. People cry about them being a huge problem, but they have effectively no power (as in: don't even collectively bargain for contracts) in lots of states, including many of the ones with poor school performance. In other states, they really do have quite a bit of power.
PhD holders are, on average, not starving. Some of them could make good primary/secondary school teachers, but knowing how to teach children effectively is a skill by itself. It's quite different from working as a college instructor. That's why earning an teaching credential is important (although the quality of some teacher training programs is terrible).
Boston Public Schools had a 50 Million dollar budget shortfall for next year. We are rapidly closing schools and eating the disruption that comes with that. Teachers do not do their best work when they don't have confidence on long-term outcomes.
To some extent, this shift is inevitable due to demographics changes - but I don't think that there has been realistic planning on how to manage a future with dramatically fewer children.
How much of the school closures are because of declining enrollment? https://www.bostonindicators.org/article-pages/2024/june/emp... https://www.bu.edu/articles/2025/public-school-enrollment-do...
Nearly nation wide enrollment at schools is down, and the funding methods for schools mostly are done on a per-student basis. So school budgets are getting smaller in absolute terms, so they have to get rid of a lot of the fixed spending (mainly schools).
Unfortunately, people hate it when you close their local school, and fight tooth-and-nail against it, but almost never fight for the funding needed to keep those schools open.
In the SF Bay Area almost all of the school districts are facing this. Oakland and San Francisco both had school closures canceled by parent revolts, but are still stuck with the budget shortfalls (and are handing out pick slips). One of the school districts in San Jose looks like they are going to make it through closing 5 elementary schools this year, but it has been a close fight all the way.
The same pattern will also play out with Universities and colleges. 2025 was the year of peak US high school graduation, with the next ~30-50 years of graduation rate declines baked in. We're still a few years away from this trend percolating into the work force.
I agree with you to an extent, but many states and school districts also engaged in fiscal malpractice by using defined-benefit employee pension plans to shift costs into the future. Those plans are financial weapons of mass destruction: far too risky for employers, retirees, and taxpayers. We need to eliminate them and shift all public school employees to 403(b) defined-contribution plans. This is especially critical as school enrollment declines.
If increasing spending had almost no impact over time why would cutting spending have an impact?
If filling a leaky bucket had almost no impact over time, why would stopping filling the bucket have an impact?
But filling a leaky bucket does have an impact. You just have to fill it faster than it empties. Which is probably your point.
My point is different. Study after study shows that below a specific floor spending has almost no impact on educational outcomes. The correlation is such that you can both determine that there is likely no leak and also that it has no effect.
The stuff that does have an impact is much harder to move the needle on though so everyone just scapegoats funding instead. Stuff like building up the nuclear family in an area, increasing income mobility, and holding parents accountable for child outcomes do have a measurable effect but are politically intractable today.
Unfortunately there is much more to the story than a number on a line. Just because you increase spending doesn't mean that the spending isn't earmarked for items like digital projectors and virtual textbooks that have minimal impact on learning outcomes.
>If increasing spending had almost no impact over time why would cutting spending have an impact?
big if true. we should probably cut 100% of spending in that case.
edit: not sure if people are missing the /s, or if people legitimately believe that cutting spending has no impact.
Covid, smartphones/screens, social media, AI have an enormous impact on the students. A slight school defunding (if it really exists, which I doubt) cannot compare.
An example from my neighbor state Connecticut
https://ctmirror.org/2024/01/28/ct-budget-fiscal-guardrails-...
ai summary: "According to that piece, K-12 education has been losing $407 million each year since 2017 due to inflation, even as Gov. Lamont called current funding levels the "largest ever commitment." The author also noted that $2.4 billion in urgent legislative funding requests were denied in one spring session alone, with needs for fully funding education among the shortfalls."
In the 5 years to 2024, per-pupil K-12 spending in Alaska grew by 8% per year.
https://educationdata.org/public-education-spending-statisti...
The US has been continuously defunding and deprioritizing education for decades. This is the result of a culture that doesn’t value education.
google sez:
"Inflation-adjusted public school funding per student in the United States has increased significantly over the long term, with a roughly 34% increase in inflation-adjusted revenue per student over the last two decades alone. Looking at a broader historical view, inflation-adjusted spending per student has risen by over 200% since the 1960s."
This is always a common rebuttal but I used to work in education and believe me there was not a bunch of new money coming in. Quite the opposite. Maybe the data shows funding going up but that money is not making it to the students.
The amount of school administrators and non-teachers have increased at 10x the rate of teachers relative to students since 2000. I have no doubt funding keeps going up but virtually all of it is diverted away into bureaucracy.
So if you agree that administrators in public ed are doing a poor job managing the resources allocated to them, do you support school choice efforts that will allow more competition from charter/private schools that have incentives to spend more wisely?
Why would private schools be incentivized to spend more wisely? Why would paying a CEO obscene amounts of money to lobby for public funds be better than fixing public schools?
This is the bias that keeps us from actually making improvements to the education system. I guess it's easy to repeat and blame money. Kind of like a brilliantly colored red herring.
For what it’s worth. I think the rise of anti-intellectualism in our culture has far more impact than funding.
It's weird you're using Alaska as an example of this because that state has the highest funding per student in the entire country:
https://www.learner.com/blog/states-that-spend-the-most-on-e...
>It's weird you're using Alaska as an example
its weird that they used the state that they live in and have lived in for the last 20 years as an example?
Raises even more questions.
No one has discussed that lack of rigour in public education anymore. In my neighborhood the kids don't have homework until grade 7. Literally not a piece of homework came home from grade 1-6.
While I am not saying give kids more homework for the sake of work -- you do need to have some rigour. There was a movement about 10 years ago to let kids be kids and have lots of free time for exploration etc, remove competition at schools. These are all great things worth pursuing but not at a complete lack of work.
Also add in all the other things including funding - though funding doesn't solve all woes.
Much of the homework assigned at my local public high school is repetitive busy work. I'm not surprised that students don't care. And some of it is a completely worthless waste of time, like literally making little arts and crafts projects that would be more suitable for elementary school. I know that teaching is a tough job but it seems like a significant fraction of them are putting in the least possible effort.
Math, reading and writing are all accomplished by repetition and building muscle memory.
The adults in the room saying you don't need that in order to learn are doing a disservice to the next generation.
There is also a lot of busy work but again work and being able to do work, sustain focus requires the development of that skill and muscle. Especially in this day and age where everyone is vying for your attention.
My wife is on a school board in a large district that is trying to cut spending. The problem is not really how much money they have and giving them more money doesn't help. The problem at least in our state is:
Public schools are subsidizing charter schools
Public schools have many legal requirements to provide services that charter schools don't have to deal with. Charter schools also have a lot of freedom to refuse problematic kids, that public schools have to take.
Parents who don't need those services keep taking their kids out of public schools and putting them into charter schools, charter schools kick out problem kids. Public schools end up having a higher cost per student because of that.
Schools have to finance an entire security apparatus because assholes keep doing mass shootings.
Public school systems _also_ are terrible at spending money on bullshit that has absolutely nothing to do with schools. The amount of money spent on administration is way way out of line. There are so many layers between the top and teachers and so many people with their hands out. Big school systems could probably fire half of their administration and literally nobody would notice. They would probably run better. When they do internal reports on how to save money, it always comes back to the most trivial shit or even worse, pulling it out of _education_ and is _never_ 'you need to fire a bunch of people collecting a paycheck for doing nothing'.
I genuinely think most big school systems would be vastly improved by firing half of the administration at random and doubling teacher salaries.
Public schools are not subsidizing charter schools. Rather per-student money travels with those kids to the school they are actually attending. So since the kids don't go to those schools, neither does the money.
I don't know what state you are in, and there are a number of them where the charter systems are absolute messes and have become fraud paradises (looking at you Florida), but other states things are much better.
Fo instance my kids are in charter schools in California. All charter schools here are required to have tiered lotteries to get in, and after siblings and teachers' kids, the first tier is always kids with an IEP (the problematic/expensive ones). And at my kids school we know one of the kids with a severe problems that the school has bent over backwards to provide the best environment for that little girl.
And every 4 years they have to re-apply for their charter, and one of the front-and-center numbers required for that is how many kids they kick out. And they got grilled on that (which our school passed with flying colors). The charters absolutely had to prove that they are doing things better than the local schools, and our school worked very hard to prove that (and had the numbers to do so). If they didn't, then their charter would have been cut (we heard about other schools that failed this grade).
So I am experiencing a well run charter school, inside a well policed system (California). If you are not, then make that one of the things you cast your vote on: regulations on where your school dollars flow to.
I will note that there is one important advantage that charter schools have: you have to make a choice to get into them. That means that the parents tend to be more involved in their kids' education (if only minority so), and so you get kids that are a bit more motivated to do well. This one area is unfair to the public schools.
I don't understand your comment. Charter schools are public schools. Are you confusing charter schools with private schools? Charter schools generally can't pick and choose students the way private schools do.
I'm not hearing a whole lot of talk about No Child Left Behind or the near-total elimination of analysis and synthesis from modern curricula either, but having watched a 14 year old navigate what passes for elementary and middle school currently I'm unsurprised that test scores continue to slip.
Parents watching what their kids were learning (or not learning) was probably the largest acceleration into home and alternate school in history. That's what happened to nearly every family in our home school co-op.
Funny you should mention that, we're currently looking for a home school co-op in our area. It has become apparent that my child has learned basically no analytical skills whatsoever so I'm planning on homeschooling for a year to see what improvements that makes before making a final decision about what to do for high school.
On the other hand, Seattle school funding has been going up and up. Yet the scores have been trending downwards.
As GP noted, there are multiple factors here. They're not arguing funding is the only factor.
Another Alaskan on HackerNews! I thought I was the only one.
> No one has mentioned defunding public education yet.
Some data.
https://edunomicslab.org/roi-over-time/
And what are those budgets spent on? For the majority of subjects you only need pen, paper, blackboard and chalk. Couple of textbooks with expired copyright. Throw some chemicals for chemistry. Couple of frogs for dissection in biology. One teacher per 30 students. Two janitors, one fat lady with a goatee in the cafeteria to dispense slop.
If this style of education helped Feynman to get Nobel prize should be enough for current gen of pupils. And it is not expensive.
AI and defunding public education are both faces of the same coin
AI is what shitty-capitalism wants to do to get money for themselves and try to push the society to defund public education
Much ink has been spilled in the comments already, but as a child of the 80s, computers were a class, and not a lifestyle. If I had gone through school with what's available today, I doubt I would have done as well as I did. Most things were handwritten, I learned cursive, and computer class was Oregon Trail and basic programming essentially.
Looking back, I don't think Chromebooks, iPads and the like would have been beneficial to my elementary/middle/high school education at all.
Our primary instrument of learning was the teacher and really thick textbooks that were passed down student to student, and you could see that journey inside the in front cover where you signed it out for the year.
As someone who would protest at learning long division when a calculator was around, in retrospect, the teacher was right.
Isn't the available learning material better than it has ever been?
As a 30-something, basic AI uses completely blow my mind. It has never been this easy to be curious, because there is a machine in my pocket that reduces the cost of finding answers to nearly zero. I can point my phone at a painting and dig as deep as I want into its subject, artist, movement and so on. It's a real world Pokédex.
Then there are countless well-made tutorials for every imaginable topic on YouTube, and more high-quality old-fashioned websites that Google cares to index.
Claude is really cool too. If you care to look at its output, you can see a fairly good translation of your thoughts into code. You can translate your projects from one language or framework to another. We used to read textbooks cover to cover. Now we get custom examples for any imaginable idea.
So why are these technologies failing our kids? Why are they so powerful in the hands of a curious person, yet making everyone dumber?
> Isn't the available learning material better than it has ever been?
Yes, and so’s the available distractions and entertainment.
My hypothesis is that for us, now post studying in the "old ways", are able to use these tools to increase learning.
The fundamental problem seems to be that screens as a basis for learning how to learn, study, and retain information in kids appears to be detrimental to developing that core skill we have already developed.
> The fundamental problem seems to be that screens as a basis for learning how to learn, study, and retain information in kids appears to be detrimental to developing that core skill we have already developed.
As I like to say, AI is great for those of us who "learned it the hard way", be it coding and learning, but I suspect I would not have bothered learning it the hard way if I had it available when I was younger.
> Why are they so powerful in the hands of a curious person, yet making everyone dumber?
Curiosity level varies per individual. I find certain things fascinating that many others don't. AI has been a boon for me and others who may be limitlessly curious, and it may be a negative for the uncurious.
I don't know why I was so surprised when my kids told me there was nothing called a "computer lab" at their school... why would there be when each kid has their own device?
> Much ink has been spilled
Ironically...
And parents are equally distracted from their job of parenting by those same devices. Want to help your child with their education? Support their teachers when/if your child is making poor decisions at school.
It's amazing how bad these things can be. My kids will sometimes get computerized homework which gets graded automatically, and if you don't format the answer the way it likes, zero points. They spend as much effort fighting with the formatting as they do understanding the material. And this is in one of the wealthiest, best run public school districts in the country.
"Technology" has been an education buzzword since I was in school and it needs to be taken out and shot.
This gave me flashbacks to LonCapa in college when I was in calculus classes circa 2011. A correct answer was marked incorrect automatically because of floating point issues.
Oh how I hated having to learn cursive when I was in school. What an utter waste of limited instructional time that could have been better spent on mathematics or science or touch typing or creative writing or literally any other subject. If some students really want to learn calligraphy then make it an art elective but don't torture the rest of us.
Learning cursive serves a dual purpose which is to develop fine motor skills.
https://macleans.ca/society/life/why-your-teenager-cant-use-...
Let's act like private school would make you less of a retard, eh? You can only purchase so much before people realize who you are
touch typing is about as useful as … (whatever is the most useless thing). science? I spent years in science classes from elem all the way through uni, physics, chemistry, thermodynamics, you name it, about as useful to me (and 99.6% of my classmates) as russian I learned along the way too. cursive is art and everyone needs a little art. my kid goes to private school and non-cursive is practically forbidden (you are allowed to print of course but not a single student does, it is beautiful getting to read what my kid writes when I get my friday folder :) )
My wife taught first through fifth grade from ~2004 until 2017.
One thing that was evident to me from the sidelines was how much admin work was continually added to her workload without any consideration for the amount of class time she had. The focus on data derived from continuous testing of the students resulted in her and her peers sticking ever more closely to a continuously disrupted and rotated collection of commercially sourced curriculum and materials. This constant flux disincentivized teachers augmenting with their own content (although they still often do) because it could fall out of line with next years 'innovative new approach' to teaching basic arithmetic.
Her role as educator started to take a back seat to facilitator, focused on classroom management and data collection. Add in differentiated instruction, where she was held accountable to develop personalized lesson plans for individual students and asked to track all of that and you end up with way too much workload to stay engaged and engaging year after year.
She was in a pretty good school district. A friend of mine had a similar role in a city district for a regional metro area and her students were horrific. She felt physically unsafe and ultimately quit.
It's a complex problem with many contributing factors. It's also difficult to experiment or strike out on your own as an educator when the future of the students in front of you could be negatively impacted by any mistakes made (not to mention job/test scores/etc) so most just ride the rail all the way down.
(Also, at least in the US, you can get stuck to a district b/c the value-add of a seasoned teacher doesn't really move the metrics in the current system enough to offset the fact that you can hire two junior/fresh grads for the same money.)
I worked for a couple of years in education and I think this sentiment is so harmful:
> It's also difficult to experiment or strike out on your own as an educator when the future of the students in front of you could be negatively impacted by any mistakes made (not to mention job/test scores/etc) so most just ride the rail all the way down.
It's pervasive and makes things move so slowly. The biggest issue I have with it is that the system is so protective of doing no harm, but doing no harm to a system that is failing students is a poor decision imo. We should be more experimental if things are generally bad. Be protective of the mechanisms when we have good results, not when we have bad ones.
I agree with you 100%. It's a system that punishes and stifles innovation.
The peak was in 2012
So people are looking at Covid and that's probably not enough. The scores are closer to those of the 80's than those in the 90's and 00'sMy non-controversial theory: It's all the attention-span-shortening stuff.
- tech apps starting with infinite scroll (facebook, 9gag, Instagram, etc.)
- media/tech shortened content: shorter tv shows, short video content, etc.
(Tiktok is the "state of the art" of those 2 trends pushed to the max)
Specifically, we're getting more & more addicted to things that increase the dopamine spikes frequency, making it increasingly difficult to go in deep focus work.
Absolutely, we are feeding kids so much attention-span killing things. Even as an adult I'm having hard time with YouTube shorts, and i cannot imagine a kids brain having the ways to deal with all that.
I am _fighting_ with elderly relatives to adjust their YouTube habits. They didn't even know it comes on autopilot by default. They don't even check sources, they just let the garbage in.
Also the parents using too many attention-span killing things which is hurting the attention they give their children.
That doesn't line up though. See if you're 13 and meeting the level in 2012 your scores don't decline. So the levels would lag a few years. The 8 year-olds show up and miss the mark in 2017 that indicate the infinite scroll problem was having a toll on them. Additionally this would start to show in class specific measurements (those kids with access to home internet, personal devices, etc. would have worse scores). I think the argument about social media has merit in discussion of children, but it seems more of a social distinction rather than an objective indicator for academic performance.
I wonder if there's research on short form but educational content or if that's fundamentally impossible.
For example I remember reading a lot of science magazines / articles growing up (granted popsci but for a kid it still teaches some things) and as I grew up things like the Economist.
Similarly I also played games like math blaster as a kid and have realized I need to intentionally provide games like this to my kids that ideally teach something (the bar being greater than zero learning) rather than playing one of those infinite running games or whatever.
I think we're probably talking about the exact same thing but am curious where content vs. short form media is.
Thanks for sharing :)
Last time I dove into its research, I found that Math Blaster had no impact on student learning.
I certainly feel several degrees dumber than I did as a teenager without that stuff
We don't have any NAEP long-term test results for years between 2012 and 2020, because they were canceled due to budget cuts[1], so we can't use the linked data to determine whether the decline started before or during COVID.
We do have the NAEP main series test results[2]. At a first glance at the math results[3][4], it appears they peaked in 2013, then fluctuated through 2019, then dropped significantly in 2022 and somewhat rebounded in 2024, which really does suggest COVID.
[1]https://www.edweek.org/teaching-learning/debate-flares-anew-...
[2]https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/report_archive.aspx
[3]https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/highlights/mathematics/202...
[4]https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/reports/mathematics/2024/g...
Could we look at average SAT scores by year as a proxy? It's not a great metric because not all students take the SAT but I think there's some correlation.
https://blog.prepscholar.com/average-sat-scores-over-time
There was a major change to the SAT design right around the start of the period of interest which seems to have caused scores to jump.
The change was in fact designed to make the scores jump. The purpose is compressing the top scores to allow universities to be more subjective and still have high averages
Demographic change is the obvious explanation.
Score changes look about the same across performance percentiles and ethnicities. That suggests it's a systemic issue unrelated to population makeup. While I'd be interested to see regional and economic breakdowns, it's certainly far from obvious it's a result of demographic change, especially after such a short period of time.
Mississippi is one of the recent education success stories though.
I wouldn’t be so sure. Anecdotally all the kids these days seem equally messed up. It could be that the Chinese and Indian kids are propping up the locals.
This is probably a macro economic sign.
It's really really difficult to worry about school when your in a homeless shelter or living in a motel.
https://www.wtxl.com/thomasville/school-bus-dropoff-reveals-...
I do well now , but as a teenager I didn't give a shit about high school. If anything I wanted to graduate early, and get a job to ward off the next eviction.
We really need to go back to occupational training in high school. I should be able to graduate and earn enough to get an apartment. It's not like you can't get a degree in Midwestern Poetry later in life.
Just gotta do the Mississippi thing and hold kids back unless they meet standards. Don't leave them behind by pretending to leave no one behind.
A recent Atlantic article [1] by someone involved in the Mississippi reforms gives a good outline of what they did/are doing. It includes science-based reading curriculum and holding kids back (as you mentioned). It also includes other forms of accountability, including parental notification and empowering the state to force recalcitrant districts to improve. One notable quote:
"The law allowed the state to abolish these districts’ local school board and remove the local superintendent in favor of a state appointee who would report directly to the state board of education. A later amendment provided that removed local-school-board members would be barred from serving in that capacity again."
Politically unpopular in some cases (which local jurisdiction wants the state coming in and replacing your local school board?), but seems to be pretty effective.
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/04/mississippi-educat... (gift link)
School was like that back in Brazil in the 80s. Don’t get the grade, try again. And again. And again. Until you do. That is the real “not left behind”.
If kids are held back when they fail standards, shouldn't they also be allowed to race ahead when they exceed them?
Off the top of my head I don't have problem with this, but the topic is about declining scores so I'm not sure how relevant this is.
Yes. That's the whole idea of adaptive/personalized learning.
There are some interesting ethical questions about disparity of outcomes, but we should aim to have a system that educates each individual as best we can (without leaving kids behind). The current system of bludgeoning every individual student to be the same is not working well.
Always used to be the case, is that no longer an option?
Not an option in San Francisco.
Back in 2022 I spoke with the principal of a nearby government-run school. She told me:
- under no circumstances would a kindergarten teacher teach any first grade content, and
- grade skip is so rare that she'd seen it only once in her entire career
teachers not being able to teach 'higher level' content seems like a huge issue.
No, because you’ll end up really dysfunctional if you’re a child in a class with 18 year olds.
Absolutely
The National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) administered the NAEP long-term trend (LTT) reading and mathematics assessments to 13-year-old students from October to December of the 2022–23 school year. The average scores for 13-year-olds declined 4 points in reading and 9 points in mathematics compared to the previous assessment administered during the 2019–20 school year. Compared to a decade ago, the average scores declined 7 points in reading and 14 points in mathematics.
I grepped for "covid" and "COVID-19" on all presented text. 1 result found.
". . . did you ever attend school from home or somewhere else outside of school because of the COVID-19 outbreak?"
Can someone else confirm?
Not enough investigation there. Of course, the trend was already going down, but the new slope is obvious.
Prediction in next three years will be same or greater - technology, ai, screentime.
Note the results are compiled from the 2022–23 school year, compared to the 2019–20 school year. So yeah, the big thing there is the lockdown for (depending on local policies) the year or two in between.
> technology, ai, screentime
Significant parts of our society and government are actively hostile to education. Blaming the students is convenient, but probably not accurate.
Who is blaming the students? If 13 year olds were smoking and we blamed poor sports performance in that age group on the smoking, we wouldn't be "blaming" them. We don't model 13 year olds as little islands of free will.
I know the talking heads have been saying that as well, but my bet is on social media and phone use being the majority stakeholder in this failure.
Chronic absence is up and truancy is down according to this report. Not really what I’d expect for phone use—both should trend flat or up.
I wonder if there’s a way to validate the hypothesis that post-shutdown, some of the cohort that would have missed a day here and there now see school as optional and miss more days.
Overall, the reported effect is sad and should be addressed. These are people’s lives.
Youth participation in travel club sports is up so they miss more school days due to tournaments. These tend to be the more affluent and motivated students who still achieve good grades and high standardized test scores. I receive warning letters from the school district every year over high absences but it doesn't mean anything and I just throw them in the trash.
Chronic absence numbers are misleading. We all know that they are just placeholder stats for other factors and we should focus on those.
My 3rd grade daughter was unlucky with various illnesses and missed about 12 days this year (so far). I got a letter from her principal attempting to guilt trip me for her "Chronic absence".
I wrote an angry response (in retrospect it was too angry since he had no choice about the letter) where I asked if he would prefer my sending sick children to school.
Her grades (for whatever value grades have in 3rd grade) are fine. I'll take the chance on her reading her "Diary of a wimpy kid" book when sick, or when a sane system would have given a snow day.
> in retrospect it was too angry since he had no choice
Imho you did the right thing. Everyone has a choice.
I did the same (but instead of an email it was an angry speech, face to face), with the exact same question (if they would prefer my sending sick children to school). My child's grades were fine, too. Haven't received any letters after that.
I would bet on a culture of lowered expectations.
Look at Youtube Shorts in an incognito window to see the mindless crap that's popular among median users.
The most common reply to this is: “people said the same about Books/TV/Comics/Games/Facebook stop being such a Luddite”
My answer to this is approximately: “yes they’re all relatively bad compared to the thing that came before so they were all right!”
Even books. If the option were between my child reading about blacksmithing/compsci and DOING blacksmithing/compsci I’d choose the latter every time. It gives you real experience and opinions.
The difference with each successive new wave is that it becomes increasingly addictive. It’s possible to read one book and stop for a while. Shorts can hook you for hours and then draw you back the next day with no natural stopping point.
It's also not possible to carry around enough books with you to allow you to jump from one to another whenever you get bored, while it is possible to effectively carry around a device that lets you watch YouTube/TikTok at all times. I think this is an important factor.
> It's also not possible to carry around enough books with you to allow you to jump from one to another whenever you get bored
It most certainly is.
What really is the point of this comment?
Or look at corporations + elites constantly attacking children for the last 40 years (pushing school vouchers, school choices, attacking teacher unions, politicizing school boards).
Who do you think suffers when elites attack public education? It's always the children.
Fun fact: Silicon Valley elites are big proponents of school vouchers because, like their hatred of American labor, they also hate public schools and don't want to pay for that either.
Plenty of children suffer in public schools as they are currently constituted. School vouchers, school choice, and attacking teachers unions are attempts to create more schooling options than just whatever the local public school is, which should benefit children who are currently having a bad time in that system.
School boards are inherently poltical because as long as a publicly-run school system exists, how it is run and what things it will attempt to teach are political questions. There's no apolitical school board that existed 40 years ago that has been altered since then, they have always been poltical.
Internet commenters try to get me to hate lots of people for lots of reasons, but "Parents trying to send their kid to a school that fits their kid's needs" seems like such a hard sell.
Like, I get the desire in a hypothetical, that you hope that people in power would use their power to make public schools better if their kids were forced to go there.
But in reality, the actually powerful can just pay for private schools out of pocket and the vouchers help a lot of middle-income families send their kid to a school that can provide a better environment for whatever definition of better is relevant to that individual.
It just seems like such misplaced anger and energy. You could just advocate for improving public schools, without attacking regular families trying to do their best while trapped inside a system they have very little influence on.
The voucher system is seen as an attack on IEP / special ed children, since public schools rely on distributing money away from the general population of students and into special ed and IEP students who, by various measures, can consume 3x the amount of money per student. They need lots of non-special-ed students to subsidize the special ed ones at the current levels.
If enough people use the voucher system it basically forces the per student spending to get closer to a purely egalitarian spending per student, with the result that public schools have to spend about the same amount on special ed kids as the voucher kids get (in the extreme, that's all the students they're left with). While this is objectively fairer in my opinion, it's viewed as an entitlement that the special ed kids can take more money at the expense of everyone else.
Obviously though this has to be carefully framed to sell it properly. Very few are going to knowingly sign up to lose funding for their own student to help some other student who is already getting 3x the money as them, so instead it's framed as some sort of evil capitalist agenda against public schools.
And yet, the SF school district decided that math is too racist, and advanced classes in particular should be banned as doubleplusungood.
Seattle's Public Schools district is among the leading in the nation on per-student spending, yet the test scores are cratering. Its previous superintendant had an official platform of not disciplining students.
Vouchers would _improve_ the situation.
> Who do you think suffers when elites attack public education? It's always the children.
Exactly. And who benefits from a less educated, less aware populace? The answer is pretty clear: look at who is benefiting right now!
Let's see Common Core was released in 2010 and by 2014-2015 most states had implemented it. Lets do the math, 2026 - 13 = 2013. Hmmm... You can say funding all you want but in the same 13 years of Common Core funding per student has increased by 50%.
It leads to K-shaped education where parents who recognize the deficiency of public education simply teach their kids math themselves or hire private tutors. Public education used to be a force for equality of knowledge in the country. Now it perversely does the opposite, all in the name of education!
At least in elementary school I don't see the deficiency in common core math compared to what I had 30 years ago. My kid has been exposed to a wide variety of topics sooner than I was, and she's way stronger in word problems on top of that. Do people have a specific complaint with elementary school common core math that we should be teaching but aren't, or vice versa? Or is it more problematic later?
One thing I notice is there seem to be far more students who finish elementary school unable to comfortably do basic math in their head (stuff like 17+36 or 144 or even basic multiplication tables like 38).
Except that's not what the data shows. The decrease is similar across performance levels.
Except these are results for 2022, and they are significantly down from the levels in 2019. All kids in either cohort would have spent their entire school years with common core education.
If you have kids you will need to intervene to give them a good math science education.
Fortunately there are some great resources, far better than the average colorful school textbooks :
- aops.com and their BeastAcademy cartoon series
- an old book "Algebra" by Gelfand
- W W Sawyers old books on how math should be taught
- Geogebra and Desmos web tools
- 3Blue1Brown
- KhanAcademy
I try and introduce math in a more visual way, with multipication as rectangles and the distributive rule being central concepts that lead into all other areas of math :
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tu8hxgQdvRo&list=PLEInJ-Z4qB...
I know the knee-jerk reaction is social media, but from the graph in the article, it seems to just get back to the same level as 90s.
It still shows a problem. If math and reading levels were largely improving for decades then we saw a sudden decline, it signals that something changed, especially since covid.
Shows a lot of people haven't read the article and just made assumptions based on the headline.
I’m curious how does it track with class sizes and tracks (remedial, regular, honors, “gifted”).
The level is so low in my local elementary school that the single track math class is still doing addition within 20 for first grade.
The funny thing is that the state standard actually measure 2 and 3 digit addition for K and 1st graders, and proficiency at that level would be p75 for a 1st grader. So why is the actual class teaching level at p<50?
The standards in New York for first grade are adding and subtracting within 20. Which state are you thinking of with higher standards?
https://www.nysed.gov/sites/default/files/programs/curriculu...
It’s in California.
My child took the “CASTL” test as part of IEP assessment. According to the result percentiles, a 6 year old who can do 2 digit vertical addition is at the 70th percentile of 6 year olds.
How come in kindergarten the curriculum is counting to 100 and addition within 10, while the assessment test shows double digit addition is well within the norm?
BTW my child didn’t learn any arithmetic from school.
EDIT: In case I wasn’t clear: there is a huge discrepancy between the standardized tests and the actual curriculum “standards”.
> tracks (remedial, regular, honors, “gifted”)
The decrease is consistent across performance levels which should be a pretty decent proxy for tracks.
(2023)
comparing Fall 2019 to Fall 2022
+ (USA)
It doesn't seem to be about 13-year-old students in general
instead of gpt did it, ill lazily say covid did it
Covid doesn't explain the drop from 2012 to 2020 though, as the tests were administered Fall of 2019 and therefore pre-Covid.
The decrease from 2012 to 2020 was much less and generally not statistically significant. Further 2012 was the all time high, you'd expect some regression to the mean.
> Further 2012 was the all time high
It's an all time high because it started declining after that. You'd expect some regression, but you don't expect it to fall back to 1980s levels.
Tiktok was launched by ByteDance in 2018. Reels was unleashed 2020 and YouTube shorts in 2021.
States should pay more attention to Mississippi on how they were able to revamp education in under a decade.
https://oxfordeagle.com/2025/01/30/mississippi-4th-graders-n...
I know it's a difficult word but if you spell Mississippi correctly your comment well be taken more seriously.
So sorry, I'm from Califurnia
Please don’t do this.
Full Senate Hearing on the Impact of Technology on America's Youth https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oawBfCAnbdc
Dr's Deposition on How Screen Time Hurts Kids' Cognitive Development https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fd-_VDYit3U
Note that these are 2023 numbers, not 2025.
The NAEP has two types of tests - a long-term trend assessment, and the main assessment[1]. The long-term trend is given less often (and rather sporadically recently), and 2023 is the most recent one available.
The main assessment has been performed every two years recently, so 2024 data is most recent. They can all be seen here[2].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Assessment_of_Educati...
[2] https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/report_archive.aspx
Are there newer numbers?
It looks like it's trending back up post-COVID (this link has California data but not sure how you link to this without selecting a state)? https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/profiles/stateprofile/over...
Children spend an insane amount of time in school yet it has little results.
One overlooked problem is imo that you can't just waste their time with nonsense and get good results.
A lot of people in the education system are so full of shit that they believe it's good for children to sit there the whole day.
Improving exercises and lectures should be a priority.
"Children spend an insane amount of time in school yet it has little results."
What do you mean by "little results" and what data supports it?
I wonder if this has anything to do with the fact that it took over two years for this data to be released after it was collected.
[1] is a summary of the impact on the brain of Covid-19 infections including IQ reduction but many others besides. Its best understood that there is no such thing as a consequence free Covid infection, it always damages something and the early british experiment where they intentionally infected young men resulted in all of them loosing IQ and none of them being aware of the loss. This finding has been built on substantially in the past 6 years and we have a much large list of issues now, none of it treatable.
[1] https://theconversation.com/mounting-research-shows-that-cov...
the trend started before covid...
Demographics is destiny. Import the third-world, get third-world results.
screen time and social media
Screen time and social media definitely have an impact on attention spans, but it's worth pointing out for Mathematics, 2023's average is higher than pre-1990, and reading averages seem to have always been in the 255-265 range.
Seriously. I'm surprised you got downvoted. The internet is so much more hostile to minds than it was when I was a kid.
Everyone is going to name their pet bugaboo, but if you look at the full charts, the scores were pretty stable in the 70s, 80s, and 90s, and are regressing back down to what they were historically. The real question is why they went up temporarily until 2012.
Few people know this, but it turns out a major bipartisan education reform bill was passed in the early 2000’s.
Constituencies of both parties found reasons to hate it, so its foundational accountability requirements were watered down by succeeding administrations.
I’m perfectly willing to be convinced NCLB had nothing to do with the evolution of test scores over the last 25 years, but the circumstantial evidence is not easy to dismiss.
I wonder if having the Soviet Union as an ever looming adversary could have something to do with it, and after their fall everyone just got complacent.
As a parent of 2 older kids (post college) and 2 young ones (primary/middle) I think one big problem is the academic expectations for the kids have dropped, and unless they are highly motivated they won’t rise above classroom expectations (even if the parents are pushing them at home). The second problem is what happens outside school: non-stop distractions: phones, iPads, social media, it’s always there. Yes we try to restrict it but it’s like forcing your kids to use a horse and buggy while all their friends are driving cars ; maybe we need to convert to Amish. It’s maddening, really.
Just eyeballing those graphs, the striking thing is the difference from the beginning (early 70s) to the peak in 2012. During that period, reading scores only increased by 8 points while math increased by 19 points.
I'm definitely in the camp that thinks cell phones have something to do with what's happened since 2012. If we start from the iPhone in 2007, it seems plausible to me that a 5-ish year lag is consistent with the time it took for smartphones to rise in popularity and their effects to filter into society. (I got my first smartphone around 2012, by which time pretty much everyone else I knew already had one.) That's at least a gesture toward explaining why there was a peak around 2012. What it doesn't explain is why the ascent to that peak was so much steeper in math than in reading.
The right wingers are going to have a heyday with this one just like they’ve been doing with the “Swedes are getting dumber and nobody knows why” articles.
Can you explain for the non-terminally online?
They want to say that non-whites are naturally dumber than whites. There will be varying degrees of subtlety but that's what the dog whistlers are on about.
You can take a look at the charts in the linked article and see that the scores for Asians are consistently higher than the scores for whites which are consistently higher than the scores for blacks and Hispanics. This was true in 2012 and it's true today.
If these numbers are at all meaningful for determining how much a student has learned as a result of going through schooling, then thye show that white people are consistently better than blacks and Hispanics at school and are consistently worse than Asians.
Depending on what variety of racist you get, they'll either just ignore that sort of data, or they openly state they prefer Asian immigrants.
Alternatively, maybe they became [more] racist after looking at the data.
Here's another way to say it: when you import the third world, you become the third world.
Oh. Racism.
I'm so relieved I left social media. Sadly, via democracy, even if you leave social media you are still impacted by those who use it and believe what they read.
Youth today are ungrateful; they contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble their food, and tyrannise their teachers.
Oh yeah, we never did ANY of that when we were kids...
Does anybody else find it super suspicious that all the percentiles declined by similar amounts?
I cannot wait for one of my uncles to post this about how kids these days can't do anything so I can point out that the scores were even lower in his age bracket.
oh, you'll get him with that one!
Haha, I wouldn't actually say anything (sarcasm never transfers on the internet). More of it's interesting that many baby boomers I know in real life think the sky is falling based on metrics that are better than they were when they were kids, and they didn't even have COVID as an excuse.
I opened this thread expecting a bunch of "kids these days..." posts, kind of surprised not to see any. People have been raising themselves up by putting down other generations since the very first I assume, the temptation towards the fallacy of composition is too irresistible.
where are the measurements between 2012 and 2020
I'll throw in my own $1.50 , inflation and all.
There's definitely loads of money in "education". But the actual teachers arent seeing it. No, its in "special interest programs", state/federal compliance, loads of tests, and ordained material from "preferred creators" (cough, pearson etm.)
We can pay teachers better, sure. But there's lots of areas to "pay better". Small classes. 12-17 students. Budget for class resources. No, teachers should NOT be responsible for work materials. Larger classes get aides as well.
Ive also seen what modern teaching is about. The teachers are handed absolutely shit material and required to teach that, with low/no deviation. Like, "New Math" https://www.understood.org/en/articles/9-new-math-problems-a... . None of these methods show WHY, only a rote procedure.
I thought about becoming a teacher. I already teach people (wide array of adults and under 18) in extracurricular groups. Ive seen what works well, and what doesnt. I can tell the 'energy' of a group, especially if theyre confused and angry about something, and how to solve it. But the pay is definitely laughable compared to IT, and the administration demands exacting rubrics put forth by companies who kicked back the state educators.
The responsibility is not worth their salaries or the anti-benefits and other costs.
"But the actual teachers arent seeing it."
There are multiple teachers in my local school district whose total compensation is well over $200k: https://transparentcalifornia.com/salaries/search/?a=school-...
And, no, this isn't mainly overtime pay. So they're getting paid this much even though they work only 80% as many days as people with normal jobs. If you multiply the compensation numbers by 100/80 to make them comparable with people working full time, the numbers look really large.
> Like, "New Math" https://www.understood.org/en/articles/9-new-math-problems-a... . None of these methods show WHY, only a rote procedure.
I'm confused by your comment here. Literally the entire point of teaching those various methods is to show WHY the math works. If anything you should be arguing for rote methods. Some are better than others, but ultimately they're all trying give tools to depict the way any math literate adult thinks about arithmetic.
We might be entering an era when literacy and math are no longer required by most of the populace. Have you seen these kids do google searches? They just use the voice recognition feature on their phone (yes, they have phones at twelve years old, for some reason) and ask google for what they want. Handwriting is already out the window, what if reading and writing are next? If they can have AIs explain everything to them verbally what do they need to read for?
I don't want to envision a future where most people besides a few elite have stopped reading and writing but maybe I'm just an old millennial and behind the times.
Without documenting the Change in demographics it’s meaningless. If there are more dumber people from populations with lower Iq - then this is inevitable. It’s an IQ test not a test of teaching skill.
Being a parent, I ask myself this question: is it worth it to struggle to get my child to try for better grades? And I don't have a definitive answer.
The reasons to doubt are perfectly known: meritocracy is on a decline in the Western world, there's an ever improving safety net for losers, there's a price to pay for forcing my child to study vs the child spending time with their friends who were left to roam free as their social life will suffer.
I probably met more people whose degrees played little to no role in their professional career than the other way around. I've met lots of people who could never realize their degree because of the hollowed down European industry. Engineers seem to suffer the most. It seems like the few ways where a degree can open the door to a better life must be in a field that provides very localized services s.a. medicine. All else is outsourced. Trades do better in this respect as a lot of them need to be local, but they too are being populated by foreign workers and competition is fierce.
I don't think that COVID or any other "force of nature" is to blame for the outcomes. When there's will, there's a way. It's just that fewer parents see academic achievements as worth pursuing for their children.
Why do you want to force your kid to study? Kids are naturally curious, it's likely that your kid will be curious about something. Introduce them to study and scholarship as a means of figuring these things out, so that it becomes natural to them.
Because _real_ study is boring. Watching videos on Youtube or playing "educational games" is not studying.
You need to repeatedly solve multiple practical problems to internalize the knowledge. And you'll eventually need to do stuff that you don't really like at all.
The proper response to that is still not to force your kid to study though. Instead, she should be made aware that in order to consistently do well, she is ultimately expected to gain the ability to force herself and defer the immediate gratification of watching a YouTube video (unless that YouTube video is a boring recorded college lecture that's relevant to her studies, I suppose).
Well, and how are you going to do that?
That's right. Real learning is difficult - even for activities we enjoy.
There's a lot going on here. Most of it boils down to a concerted, decades-long project by half the country to defund, dismantle and destroy public education. This has infected every layer of education including what goes into textbooks. The Texas Board of Education has typically had outsized power here as they've mostly been the largest single purchaser of textbooks. But also we have the likes of Robert Maxwell who basically owned textbook printing [1], before "falling off" his yacht.
But the part I want to concentrate on is the education part and the role of tech. Anyone who sells to large bureaucracies like state and federal Education Departments will tell you the skill is in managing the procurement process. It's getting your claws in more than it is in delivering results. Any results tend to be more manufactured than not.
So contracts get signed with states and school districts that will require them to use a particular product, even if it doesn't work. We know how this goes too. Whoever was in charge of that decision will then tend to leave their job and go work for the seller. Shocking.
But we know what works in teaching and it's direct instruction [2] but you don't sell tech platforms or iPads or laptops that way. As a result we now have a disturbing number of people who have never read a book and really can't read a book, going so far as the students of elite colleges [3].
Likewise, we see Education PhDs who won't make a name for themselves pushing ideas from the 1800s. They have to come up with new methods and this was kind of a disaster for literacy [4], which people are finally waking up to as we go back to the 1800s method of phonics eg [5].
But it's hard to succeed when half the country wants the entire system to fail.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZM05gRIROqQ
[2]: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8476697/
[3]: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2024/11/the-eli...
[4]: https://www.apmreports.org/episode/2019/08/22/whats-wrong-ho...
[5]: https://news.stanford.edu/stories/2026/02/science-of-reading...
… in mice.
Sorry - that was reflexive: “… in the US”.
I don’t think there’s any great mystery here. Every few years, you guys elect a bunch of people for whom active sabotage of public education is a sine qua non to political gerrymandering strategies driven by the self-preservation instincts of lobbyists.
The quality has gone down substantially in my EU member country. The kids can barely read and do simple arithmetic.