Scores decline again for 13-year-old students in reading and mathematics

Why are you still sending your kid there? Those are atrocious conditions. Complain, loudly, to your school board and vote with your feet.

Since those kids have IEPs the main recourse you have will be lawyering up because there are a bunch of backwards incentives if someone at the top thinks they can excessively mainstream self contained needing kids.

> they got rid of the special education (or whatever is the correct phrase) classrooms, laid off those teachers

How did they lay off special education teachers?

Special Education is funded via the Federal DoE because of a mix of requirements from the ADA and NCLB.

Unless you mean low severity student cases which might not be classified as SpED.

Edit: Now that I think about it, it might be dependent on your school district and state's fiscal condition too. There might have been a reclassification done by the school district as a personnel cutting measure

Source: Mom's a Special Education teacher.

Do ya mind me asking where you are in the country? I ask because I have a severely disabled nephew, and if I recall a few years before Covid our corner of California tried to get rid of special ed in elementary school. It went about as well as its going for your kid. My nephew literally couldn't integrate with the rest of the class, he's got severe epilepsy, even if he could understand the material, he couldn't actually write because his hands shake horribly! It was actually insane to put him in a normal class, the only thing he could do was disrupt it. It was bad for everyone involved.

Fortunately though, they had kept special ed programs at other schools nearby and he got transferred pretty quickly for being a severe case. It was my understanding that our school district backpedaled and reinstated special ed, but maybe that's not the case? I thought that it was just a crazy liberal California thing, but is this cancelling of special ed a more widespread phenomena? Why the hell is that happening?

One thing I notice that you do not take in account nor do the child comments is that you are comparing your daughter to your son.

Boys have more challenges with academics starting in late elementary school up to high school. https://www.apa.org/monitor/2023/04/boys-school-challenges-r...

This has been known for a while yet does not receive any real attention.

The saying, "Every idea contains the seeds of its own destruction" keeps popping into my head.

The notion that children shouldnt be excluded for their differences is laudable, and led to IEPs, mainstreaming, and lots of progress. And then calcified into dogma that no child should be excluded no matter how disruptive they were.

Anti-bullying and "empower yourself to solve your problems" became the dogma of zero-tolerance and non-intervention. Children and staff are attacked in school and the administration doesn't do a thing.

There is plenty of blame to go around, but as a left leaning kind of person it is obvious now how calcification of some progressive ideas into rigid dogma is sending people screaming into the arms of the authoritarian right. Religious schools, charter schools, andnthe right wing etc are going to win because the combination of entitled parents, frustrated teachers, weakened administration and a educational academic establishment that has had essentially no intellectual rigor while still being able to suggest pedagogical approaches that affect millions of children are busy policing one another's adherence to dogma.

> One is that the COVID quarantine, while necessary for public safety

No. It didn't help in the slightest. See Sweden. See the Armish

> A couple of kids in my family have also developed mental illnesses as a result of lockdowns – and I don't use this word lightly.

I've witnessed the same among several kids I know, they're really suffering and worse yet there's no supports for them. My province had some of, if not the strictest measures in Canada and honestly people just don't seem okay in general.

I myself got to experience my first psychotic break in 2022 after never having had any such issues in my life. It is the single scariest thing I've ever gone through and it's not an understatement to say the last few years have permentantly changed me.

If there is a more convincing indicator of a failing school system, it's that a 13 year old no longer wants to do schoolwork and instead play video games with his friends.

Seriously, puberty is a thing. Math in particular can go from clear to impenetrable surprisingly quickly.

I understand the addictive and short-term-reward nature of video games.

But for many, video games are also a gateway drug into technology!

I tend to think that video games (and tabletop games) are educational on their own. For example, I think RPGs, strategy games, and puzzle games are pretty good for thinking and planning, while shooters and action games are good for eye-hand coordination and reaction time. I also think it's educational to build, configure, benchmark, and optimize a gaming PC.

Also if gaming is something you do with friends (especially in-person), then it has social benefits as well.

If he's interested, I'd encourage him to get involved in game programming and mods. I think that programming in particular can synergize with algebra (e.g. variables and expressions) and geometry (since logical reasoning is used in algorithms as well as geometric proofs, and graphics often require geometry and trigonometry.)

Robotics and real-world computing and electronics can also be fun and game-like. For some (many?), hands-on activities can be more engaging than pure software. Maybe he might enjoy building robotics or electronics kits or projects, or building something at a local wood, metal, or machine shop or maker space. We live in such a virtual world of screens that it is often refreshing to work with our hands with physical things.

Also sports and physical activity are good for getting away from youtube and improving the delivery of oxygen to your brain (excepting possible head injuries that are common in certain sports.)

> How can you miss a quarter of the school days and keep up?

Not a problem, as public schools move at a glacial pace. In 8th grade, the teachers were still going over the times tables with them.

In high school "honors" class, the teacher spent an entire semester on the concept of "molar mass".

My experience going through the bowels of the public school system was it was fun place to be with your friends. Any learning was incidental.

Of course, the magnitude of this disaster made it very difficult for me to get my feet under me in college.

A lot of this is mandated by the school: you have a cough? Go home, it might be COVID!

It gets annoying as a parent: the kid wants to be in school, they aren't really sick (well, above the normal level of snifflies a kid has during much of the winter), but the system is ultra conservative right now.

> How can you miss a quarter of the school days and keep up?

In middle school I missed quite a bit of school, even more in high school (sometimes missed entire weeks at a time) . It's not really that difficult, most of the time was spent on fluff. I passed with nothing lower than a B if my memory serves me, got accepted to every school I applied to so I was definitely performing well enough.

As someone who graduated valedictorian but skipped more days than allowable to graduate (my parents had to fight with the district to let me graduate), there is no correlation between days attended and skill/aptitude.

In Poland it was a very common thing in high school for us to skip school and study for high school exam on our own, as that was more effective usage of time we felt.

> rely on a host of shitty online platforms and expect the kids to figure out how to navigate all of them.

This sounds like good real world preparation

> Ourselves and many parents didn’t know how bad it was until standard testing came up and our kids were scoring in the single digits in percentile.

Who was the comparator group here?

How do parents not know how bad the school is? Are you not, on a daily basis asking what they learned in school and challenging them on it?

I do it whenever I have a chance with my niece and nephew. They're learning about multiplication? We're doing times tables in the car trip. History of some Native American tribe? What happened, who were their leaders, etc.

With my son it's simpler stuff - what color is this? What letter is that? Does our house have a door? And it's mainly my wife and I teaching him, but still - evaluation is critical.

During the lockdown it took my sister one to two weeks to move her kids to private schools.

I can't imagine not understanding, first intuitively, and second empirically, that online education is a poor fit for young children.

Pretty much what I expect from a strong union. They're fighting for their members, not for their customers.

The fact is that the vast majority of people who go into "education" do it because it is the one of the least demanding career paths. Yes, there are some "true believers" who go into teaching because they truly seek to make a difference, but they are the tiny minority. Majoring in education is even less rigorous than majoring in liberal arts and is more akin to majoring in gender studies or basket weaving. This is even more true of the administrators who bloat the schools and drain crucial funding from actual teachers and classrooms while adding nothing in terms of educational value (and often detracting from it). But teachers certainly aren't entirely to blame for the mess we've gotten into to - there is more than enough blame to go around. The unfortunate truth is that our educational system is horribly broken, corrupt and inefficient. We hear far more from the leadership of the teacher's union and from school administrators about diversity nonsense than we do about the fact that they are churning out a generation of kids who are not literate and cannot do basic math. The "remote learning" nonsense was the final nail in the coffin as far as many public schools were concerned. They were already on life support before the pandemic when it came to academic achievement, and "remote learning" pulled the plug entirely. "Chronic school absenteeism", defined as missing at least 15 days of school per year (3 school weeks) is 16% nationally, and much higher in many large cities. Achievement is so bad that states like New York are lowering their standards across the board so that it appears that more students are proficient.

When a massive number of kids aren't even showing up at schools, teachers aren't very well educated, administrators are more interested in promoting their social and political agenda than they are in teaching children how to read and write and standards for achievement are being lowered and/or eliminated you end up with the situation we have today.

https://www.timesunion.com/news/article/new-york-lowers-bar-...

My kids go to a charter school. They went very hard on the online learning during Covid. Crazy amount of assignments. Lots of online time.

As parents the workload was totally overwhelming to stay on top of everything.

They ended up going back early because the test results were just atrocious even with how hard they were pushing.

My wife teaches kindergarten there. There have been massive problems with the kids that came in that missed preschool during Covid. No idea how to share or interact with others. Had to spend a lot of time with basic life skills.

Lots of students that had severe mental problems / disabilities that were completely missed since they missed preschool. Basically shutting down entire classes for months while various testing and placements were handled. Lots of “Jimmy is a genius” 4 months later. He has an IQ of 50.

The masks also destroyed many students. Many highly depressed kids became happy cheerful kids once the masks were removed.

I guess we have this kind of anti-union, anti-teacher propaganda to thank for anyone still choosing to major in education (such enrollment has been declining for some time, with good reason). An easy-street gravy train with no accountability and perfect job security? Sign me up!

In fact, the work sucks—and parents with this kind of perspective are part of why—and the pay's bad. Accountability-seeking regulation and admin overhead gets more onerous every year. Time actually productively teaching kids keeps dropping. It's a miserable career.

Get into ordinary state government then lateral-hop jobs until you land in some do-nothing office (they exist! Hop around, and you will find one!) where you can truly screw around most of the day and collect your paycheck as long as you know how to work the rules, if you want the secure, barely-working, low-paid-but-at-least-you-have-retirement "paradise" that certain folks believe teaching to be. If you go into teaching thinking these folks are right about it, you're gonna have a very bad time.

> Some teachers stayed remote (!), requiring assistants in the classroom.

Schools were facing the loss of a ton of their teachers, if they forced them back to the classroom, for a fairly long stretch of Covid. They kept trying, and teachers kept pushing back. Many teachers personally at high risk of serious illness if they caught Covid, or with close family members at high risk, were wiling to walk if forced back. In the earlier, less-certain phase of the whole thing when the threat wasn't as clearly defined, many were offended by the "die for the children" vibe they were getting from admin. Classrooms that opened back up before the vaccine was available faced their own challenges, due to high rates of absence and teachers often being out sick or quarantining after close exposure (you know, because of Covid spreading). There's an ongoing staffing crisis as a result of stress from dealing with the school environment during Covid, which was not a cakewalk and was far worse than usual (which is saying something), and other factors (pay stagnating for years in many districts, even as high inflation hit, would be a big one). If you think the way things went was a disaster, try losing 20+% of teachers in a district in a single year. They're not in the military, you can't just order them to do whatever.

> Teachers rely on a host of shitty online platforms and expect the kids to figure out how to navigate all of them.

They don't always get to pick them, and often hate those too :-/

They're also not tech or ed-tech experts and have little or no support from people who are. And they often had a few days or weeks to put this together, with minimal assistance with ongoing support. I assure you, none of them were happy about spending a quarter of their time doing tech support.

> The icing on the cake was the grading system that gave kids a B for showing up.

Schools had a choice during Covid of failing a shitload of kids, or doing this. Ultimately, they answer to parents, and were not prepared to deal with the fallout of 50%+ of their constituent families seeing F grades on report cards. This goes for in-person and remote, both. A similar effect is why grading has become more and more lax over the years—many teachers hate this and wouldn't choose to operate that way if it were up to them, but admin doesn't want to deal with a bunch of angry parents, in part because those parents can and will agitate enough to get them fired if they're upset enough, so they follow incentives. Failing kids isn't really a thing, anymore, period, even before Covid, and it's mostly not teachers making that call.

Covid was a disaster for education—that's true! It was really bad!—but if you think it's because teachers don't actually care about teaching kids, you're not going to find useful solutions to those or similar problems in the future. Most of them care about that a lot—again, the job's shit, so it's a minority, overall, who are willing to tolerate that without the positive-vibes experience of teaching children. That's what most of them are there for. Certainly not the work environment, the parents (the ones who make the most noise, anyway), or the pay.

> We have since moved to a private school for both. The first year was rough as they over came the Learning deficit and learned how to study again, but both are back as normal students with the kind of understanding in math, science, reading, etc they never would have gotten in public school.

Selection bias is a hell of a thing. Nb we've sent our kids to private school at times, too—it may not be fair, and much of the difference probably is, in fact, due to that ability to select for easy-to-teach students and parents who are on-board with your particular program, but that doesn't make the advantage less real, and ultimately we personally have to play the game the rest of the table's playing, no matter what we wish it were.

Incidentally, you know what enabled one private school we were involved with to open for in-person sooner and safer than area public schools? The parents. They had selected for a pool of parents who were highly likely to comply with Covid protocols and take them seriously. While a bunch of public schools were contending with a large body of parents who were evading rules and telling their kids they were bullshit and that they should chin-wear their masks, this private school could tell such parents to get fucked because they had a waiting list for admission, and, besides, had already cultivated a rather, I suppose, liberal-leaning set of parents, so it largely wasn't an issue. Fewer parents modeling poor adherence to masking and distancing for their kids, fewer parents sending their kids when they knew they were sick or had been exposed, fewer having ill-advised outings to restaurants and other high-risk places or holding family reunions or whatever during Covid infection peaks, and, go figure, they weren't dealing with as many teacher absences in the middle of a (very much related) substitute shortage, kids weren't sick or exposed as often, the families weren't sick or exposed as often, and so on. SES (socio-economic status) also helped, as many parents were well-off and had the kind of jobs where they could work from home, not performing jobs where they had to go in or else get fired, which meant fewer exposures. IOW the private school did better in part because they had Covid on easy mode, largely because the parents of the attending kids weren't giant assholes and also had the money and freedom to mitigate the risk of Covid. When they were remote, parents were better-able to help the kids learn, for similar reasons. They had tons of advantages that public schools didn't.

Before blaming unions, you might want to look at performance of students in districts that don't have them.

School choice so that people can vote with their feet seems reasonable.

You are not alone, looking at enrollment for most public schools they are falling across the board with many choosing homeschooling[1] or private school[2]. On the homeschooling article one thing that blew me away was 16.1% of black families now homeschool their kids(from 3.3%). Private school admittance went up 53% as well during the pandemic. With my daughter I am extremely disappointed in the quality and difficulty(way too easy) of her schoolwork(1st grade public school). The school iving out 2-3 homework assignments a week with mindless addition and subtraction really makes me feel like my Daughter is wasting her time and even she says she doesn't know why she is doing the same problems over and over. Overall we may look to pull her and move to a private school if the low quality of this education continues.

[1] - https://www.ksbw.com/article/homeschooling-surge-continues/3...

[2] - https://www.thewellnews.com/education/private-school-enrollm...

I think the true tragedy of public education in the US is the sentiment of the public itself. The thinking that it's a conveyer belt where we put our children "on-rails" for 6 hours a day and they'll come out the other side with a strong education and high test scores. This is bolstered by yet more poor reasoning that any failures to reach that metric must surely be the fault of the workers in the factory. Workers who don't even get paid a livable wage but yet have to front the cash for tools just to do the job.

Absent from your comment is the reality of just how much a shit job it is to be a teacher under normal circumstances, with the pandemic being unequivocally abnormal. Teachers are still stuck in this whirlwind trying to figure out how to teach in the post-pandemic ruins that's not just our education system, but our public sentiment that is bursting with shitty expectations.

Union teachers in Massachusetts were among the worst. They used COVID to lobby hard to end the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS) standardized tests.

https://www.masslive.com/news/2020/08/mass-educators-urge-pa...

Truly despicable.

>The icing on the cake was the grading system that gave kids a B for showing up.

This has happened worldwide. /u/k1next has made several Reddit posts on how German high-school graduates' grades jumped up during COVID-19. <https://www.reddit.com/user/k1next/submitted/>

Public schools are sort of a monopoly. Unless you are well off and can afford private school, you are stuck with them as your only option.

Home school for most people is not an option if you have to work to support your family.

Yeah. I’m all for paying teachers better to get the best and brightest. But to be honest, the thing the teachers union doesn’t seem to get is that getting the best and brightest strongly implies that most teachers would have to leave the profession to make way for the best and brightest.

Schools comprised of smarter teachers would look a lot more like charters. They would prioritize removing disruptive students because they recognize that it drives away the critical mass of kids that can behave well enough to learn. They would know that public school systems have an insurmountable reputation problem, and champion a solution that gradually sends kids who have a chance to make it to a different school over time. The fact that they don’t see it, and still think they can fix the public schools, tells me we don’t have the best and brightest in our education system.

I have no idea why you would bring COVID into this. The scores were going down before COVID. They continued going down during COVID.

> Some teachers stayed remote

Some teachers are still remote? Which country are you in, because that seems insane.

Is the random capitalized word some kind of AI artifact, or is this a new internet Affectation?

There was a fantastic Hacker News discussion about Sold a Story a few months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35599181

Apparently the same sort of analysis with math isn't quite as straightforward. There is some evidence that pure constructivism is not successful with struggling math students. But unlike reading instruction where skilled readers never use the strategies taught in things like three-cueing (for "decoding", anyway), skilled mathematicians do approach novel problems in an exploratory manner.

It's a nice argument. But it probably isn't a great way to explain a decline in performance that was larger in math than in reading!

>You shall know a word by the company it keeps.

As we went over in the last discussion, "Sold a Story" can be a grueling podcast because of the ratio of information to cliff hangers.

The short version, and maybe the entirety of the information in the 15+ hours of podcast is:

Phonics works. While some kids can learn to read English without phonics, many kids can't, and there are periodic trends to teach reading without phonics, which causes a lot of problems when a school district follows one of those trends.

Wait, so the idea that I've used for years, which is deriving meaning of a word based on context clues around how its used in a sentence, is a sham?

I have been doing this my whole life nearly, at this point. This hits me hard for some reason. And I tested in the top percentiles for reading too! (in 1997, 2004, and 2008)

EDIT: I may be completely misunderstanding this here. Are you saying using context for word pronunciation or for trying to derive meaning?

I also seem to recall that most concerns over "teaching to the test" were themselves misguided. Is like being worried that you are training to the sport, for kids that are getting into sports.

Not that there isn't systemic cheating that can be done by some places. There can also be neglect of topics. That said, for the most part, if you can do the test, you have learned more of the topic than if you can't.

I think teaching the test is common everywhere. I remember the same thing for my GCSEs and A levels (UK pre-university qualifications) growing up, and my Russian partner says it was the same for them in school.

For us, the teachers would almost tell us with 100% certainty what was going to be on the test, and what keywords/phrases to include to boost your marks. They also ran us through past papers from previous years, and lo and behold, we had the exact same questions, just worded slightly differently.

Social media and computer games in general.

And this darned, newfangled Internet thing. And don’t even get me started on printed, moveable type.

No doubt the electronics explain the majority of it. Giving the kids a gadget like the phone is the ultimate lazy parenting.

How do your kids use phones? What about it hurts the scores?

I’m in basically the first cohort to get fully fledged (web browsing, YouTube, social media, games, porn) unmonitored smartphone access at those ages and I think it did not mess me up much if at all. I was living in isolated suburbia so it’s not like playing outside was an option anyway.

If those are a problem, it’s more likely to be from getting access at a younger age IMO. I have a theory that it’s primarily the increasing use of video as a medium that is damaging. Not only does video prevent building literacy skills, it also tends to be used to deliver content that leads to parasocial relationships and celebrity worship which is frankly concerning IME.

it shows scores have been in decline for over 10 years before a sharp covid related decline. And worse is that scores are now back to where they were in the early 70s. So despite the massive increase in spending and in theory the fact that all the spending dedicating to researching how to improve education, results are the same.

Imagine how much easier it would be to answer that question if there was NAEP data from 2016, or if there was post-2012 data for the 17-year-old group.

One thing that helped me as a kid was that my dad made time for us both to sit down and write a free form "story" (really a big paragraph) as kids. It could be on any topic but sometimes we'd all agree to write on the same topic if we were having trouble starting.

My siblings, father, and I would all write one over half an hour, and then read them to each other and discuss them.

I did fight it plenty, but in the end it was fun and helped make reading and writing more of a natural thing for me.

May help to go on regular walks with her while reading or listening to an audio book to reignite the love of stories.

As a parent with a child in public grade school, the whole rote memorization of facts vs trying to help him understand and think isn't the real problem.

The thing that makes him an A/B student (and sometimes almost C) instead of a straight A student is that my ability to help him is virtually nil because all his tests, classwork and even homework are done electronically. I never get to see an actual graded copy of anything that would tell me exactly where he is struggling. Instead, I'm supposed to trust that he is getting adequate guidance from his teacher when they review classwork but given a classroom size of 20+ students I have serious doubts that that is actually happening.

I hate to say it - but I really am coming around to the idea that having computers in classrooms and digitization of tests, classwork and homework is actually a hindrance to learning because of the missing feedback loop. :-/

I have fond memories of my calculus teacher being confused when she realized everybody had been made to memorize basic trig identities in the previous grade but were never taught their very basic and intuitive relationship and derivation from the Pythagorean theorem.

A great shocked pikachu moment for the class to realize, collectively, that they were all being dumbasses in their empty understanding of things.

If the data is taken from a wide range of plentiful sources, then even a small variance can be very significant. What is the 95%, 99%, or 99.9% confidence intervals for this data?

It sounds like you have an opinion. Care to share it?

I'm not sure why you are getting downvoted.

How about letting kids earn screen time points through learning apps. The current time based blocking in iOS doesn’t mean the kids will do homework when device is locked.

> incentivizes schools to improve.

Doesn't school choice divert funds away from public schools, depriving them of the means to improve?

> (2) incentivizes schools to improve

The largest factor in good v bad schools is already selection bias. Turning up the temperature on that (if you will) is not gonna help a thing, except the people itching like a goddamn meth addict at the prospect of getting a piece of those sweet, sweet public dollars. They'll benefit.

CGP Grey talked about it. "Digital Aristotle"

If you were extremely rich and lucky in the time of Aristotle, you could have Aristotle as a tutor. Why can't everyone have their own personal digital 24/7 tutor?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7vsCAM17O-M

But instead we will train AIs to be constant in-the-person's-ear salesmen and propagandists.

Sounds a lot like the "Mrs Davis" TV Show.

Anyhow, this is not a good idea. We are having issues with their scores and performance declining. We have to find the root cause, not try to patch it with another band-aid by saying "Here, lets try this OTHER NEW THING", on top of the hundreds of other tools students already have.

Is there some principled reason to believe that an AI trained on 8th grades will emergently perform better than 8th graders?

Yes, I’m adamant. But schools are very slow to react and commercial initiatives are hardly a substitute for school curriculum at least where I’m from. School teach and then teach to test. So even a little bit different way of phrasing could throw a students ability to score the local test. In the long run you’d be learning but the signaling function of education is then missing. Plus what I notice in one of my kids: tests below his level get abysmal performance due to lack of interest. Again teaching to test in his class with him lacking the grit to just perform regardless of his feelings regarding the difficulty of the test. (He is nine so nothing lost yet.)

No. LLMs aren't capable of learning how a student best learns. Nor are they capable of really "teaching".

At best, using an LLM this way would get it to parrot out existing, common explanations for some math topics.

If you asked it something outside its existing knowledge base (or asked it a question from a different perspective), it would make up fake or logically inconsistent, but very reasonable-sounding explanations which would be horrific for a student trying to learn.

It cannot actually learn mathematics or logic itself, so it has no way to ensure that its explanations are logically or mathmatically sound.

This is the goal of Khanmigo.

https://www.khanacademy.org/khan-labs