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Comment by ren_engineer | Hacker News Reader

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.

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Salaries for educators isn't great, there were strikes right up until the pandemic started. Pay hasn't increased since then; whatever the money is being spent on it's not teachers. My first thought was maybe "mohr teachers" but I believe there's a shortage, they can't hire more math or science teachers here in western MA.

It has me wondering where this money is actually being spent!

https://thehill.com/changing-america/enrichment/education/36...

> I believe there's a shortage, they can't hire more math or science teachers here in western MA.

This is probably a symptom of, amongst other things, unsatisfactory salaries over generational time-periods; people might simply don't grow up wishing to be a teacher. I think this cultural phenomenon struck me when I watched Breaking Bad, where Walter being a high-school teacher is often presented as proof that he "failed", something undesirable and to be ashamed of.

I'm from outside the USA and over here being a teacher is considered a pretty good gig— if you're in a private school because you can earn good money. If you're in a public school because you get access to state benefits; better free health-care, retirement benefits, etc, with the largest (albeit a pretty controversial one too) union in Latin America [1] standing by you.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sindicato_Nacional_de_Trabajad...

My perspective as an American with school teachers in my family: Being a teacher is a coveted job in America, it offers a lot of flexibility and fulfillment. Salaries are low because there's a surplus of young people who want to teach. Getting a teaching position at a nice school is very competitive, but bad schools always need new teachers because the unruly kids chase new teachers away (the root cause of schools being bad is usually bad parenting.) It is common for newly minted teachers to take jobs at bad schools in the hopes of getting enough experience to later get a job at a good school, but most wash out before they get that far. Others try to get in "the back way" by working as substitute teachers for many years to accumulate experience and get a good teaching job; the poor and irregular pay for substitute teachers makes this possibly an even worse strategy, but a lot of people still try it because these jobs are desired.

The graphs don't show that: there's no data points at all between 2012 and 2020. The extrapolation doesn't imply a linear decline.

It's also worth noting that educational spending hasn't actually increased that much in real terms over the last decade[1].

[1]: https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=66

What are the numbers, adjusted for inflation and taking into account a rising population of students, in terms of spending on education? Where did that money go exactly, was it spent on teacher salaries or was it spent on administrative overhead and "services" unrelated to the business of actually teaching? How evenly is that spread?

Those all seem like important questions to ask and answer before we talk about an alleged "massive increase in spending" around education.

YouTube, Fortnite, cell phones. People worried about MTV rotting the brain back in the day but we really are frying attention spans with an arms race of color, editing, explosions, excitement, and fast movement. I’m willing to bet almost anything home reading is down.

School has not caught up to other more engaging temptations. A question is, should it.

> I’m willing to bet almost anything home reading is down.

Your implication is that children, famous for their love of texting rather than calling, are reading less than a generation of tv watching phone callers?

Don’t discount the idea that children are simply better at reading digital content and these tests are testing analogue reading skills.

Keep in mind we just invented the machine that takes complex abstract writing and makes it easy to digest (and takes simple thoughts and expands them into rich texts).

Nobody became a genius from only reading cartoons and text messages between adolescents is of much lower academic and literary quality.

I think it's pretty clear that the critical reading skills required to handle the information density in a tiktok caption or the average message between 15 year olds is a little different than what we're aiming for in an educational setting.

Language informs thought, in a very concrete way. If I can't write it, or read it, I can't think it (to some degree). We abandon formal reading and writing educational standards at the risk of handicapping a generation of young people with poor cognitive scaffolding.

When was the last time you read anything in Latin/Greek because people in 1750 would agree with you, except they would be talking about the classics.

I'm not sure that's an applicable data point.

I think "reading" is usually shorthand for reading material that is intellectually and/or grammatically/vocabularily challenging. In short, something that can expand your ability to understand and communicate ideas.

I don't think it hurts or kids should stop doing it but I don't think reading text messages from your peers is going to do that.

All the Covid explanation folks should try this: take away phones and computer for six months and have your kids read (old!) fiction books and good (challenging) non-fiction. Limit TV to a few approved shows/movies as a rare treat. I bet you ‘ll be surprised.

Which book should I use to read hacker news?

Texting with your peers (people at roughly the same reading level as you) won't teach you much compared to reading increasingly challenging books written by adults who actually know what they're doing with words.

I’m sorry, but is your implication that the point of books is to make information hard to digest for the sake of some vain appearance of intelligence?

Not efficiently communicating ideas?

It's not about the informational "nonfiction" content of the books, we're talking about teaching kids how to use language. Expanding people's vocabulary and awareness of all the language has to offer so that more cultural and informative works might become accessible to them. If you're not challenging yourself, you're not learning.

Sure, but keep in mind, we just invented the machine that takes hard-to-digest content and transforms it into something easy to understand.

It's challenging to read the original classics in Greek (and for a while, doing so was considered the epitome of linguistic education), but we have all agreed that it's not worth it given the realities of the modern world.

Take agape for example. Understanding the various ways in which that was used to express 'love' is a masterclass in the history of human emotional development, but I can also read Shakespeare (which is at least in English, sort of), or watch Her (which is a beautiful and compelling film) and arguable have a better understanding of how love is expressed in modernity.

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