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Comment by sharmanaetor | Hacker News Reader

The article says “Scores have been falling for six consecutive years, but the trend accelerated during the COVID-19 pandemic.” So it’s not just because of Covid

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It is basically just Covid, you can see the graph in this article:

https://www.axios.com/2023/10/11/act-test-scores-lowest-2023

Before Covid it was normal noise, it goes a bit up and down, it started to go outside the normal range when Covid started 2020.

And it wasn't covid, it was our response to it.

Well, my uncle had a heart attack during the covid pandemic but couldn't get a bed in the ICU as it was full of covid patients. Was he a covid death? I'd say yes (he lived in an region of low vaccination).

Hospital saturation is lightly correlated with vaccination rates. In fact, it’s probably reverse correlated. Rural areas which have a high degree of social isolation due to low population density didn’t run out if capacity to the same extent hospitals in large urban areas did. I’m very, very sorry for your loss, but maybe you are holding on to anger that is misplaced. Population density (lack of social isolation) was what drive hospital saturation. I was in a very low vaccination rate area, and we never get to even quarter capacity in the local hospitals.

This was in phoenix arizona. No anger on my part, just a dispassionate description.

People made fun of how Sweden addressed it --known vulnerable populations and the rest were deprioritized for isolation/lockdowns and vaccines.

The jury is still out if their response was better, worse, or just different.

They had lower excess deaths from 2020-2022, which is good. But they also had significantly higher COVID deaths in vulnerable populations in 2020, mostly the elderly, which could have lead to the lower excess deaths in 2021-2022, because those elderly people were expected to die in those years anyway, leaving headroom for other excess deaths that wouldn't show up.

Economically and educationally they seemed to fare about the same as their neighboring nordic countries with stricter policies.

So right now it looks like they had about the same results as their neigbors, but sacrificed some of their elderly a few years earlier than they would have died anyway.

This is kind of like saying the bullet didn't kill you, the loss of blood did. It's a distinction without a difference.

It’s more like if a bullet goes past you, and you calmly decide the best approach is to run full speed off the nearest cliff.

If there was some other major thing that came online in 2018, I think it would be easy to rationalize this chart as confirmatory evidence of that too, though I mostly agree.

TikTok?

maybe electronic classrooms --I don't think today's kids get many actual textbooks to consult and read. It's either MSFT or GOOG classroom content delivery solutions. It can't be helping.

Every school should have a library for the interested students! Otherwise I bristle a bit at being anti-computers in public school, especially in the coming age where LLMs can be doing a lot of the more rote 1:1 work of teaching.

This is coming from someone whose "Google classroom content" was chromebooks connected to our teacher's Drive; if there's some cursed Google Blackboard-competitor then maybe a return to physical books could be justified!

It's a combination of a lot of different factors. I've had multiple friends I've known for over a decade speak about how bad their teaching experience has become. COVID just further accelerated things.

* A lot of parents treat schools as daycare rather than a place to learn. They're more disengaged than ever when it comes to helping out their kid, for fairly guessable reasons.

* There's been a lot of political attacks on our schooling systems which results in discouraging or outright convincing teachers to leave. Teachers are retiring and we're not replacing them with similarly passionate teachers

* The usual pay issues

* School admins hide a lot of trouble boiling underneath the surface because they're afraid of lawsuits. One example is that more and more kids are bringing guns to school [1].

* Private schools are growing in popularity which pulls funding from public schools due to school voucer programs despite a lot of private schools not having the same level of oversight or level of teaching

As a result we're seeing literacy rates decline [2] and in general students are simply just not graduating as capable as they were before. We're failing the next generation and the fix requires radically improving and funding our public school systems.

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2023/10/10/guns-sch...

[2] https://www.npr.org/2023/06/22/1183653578/u-s-reading-and-ma...

In most schools, bringing a gun is one of the few offenses that will actually be punished with real severity. Prior to the Columbine High School massacre it was actually fairly common for rural high school students to bring rifles or shotguns to school so that they could go hunting on the way home. It was totally normal, and violence in those schools beyond minor fistfights was unknown. Many schools also had competitive shooting teams. But the change in attitudes, increased paranoia, and break down in social norms has made that situation untenable.

Most public school teachers are great people and do their best to educate every student. But a small minority of teachers, and a larger number of the administrators and union leaders whom they answer to, increasingly see schools as a channel to indoctrinate students on controversial social and political issues. It only takes one encounter with a situation like that to turn a parent off of public schooling entirely and move their child to a private school that better aligns with their values.

California has also banned suspending students for willful defiance. While those suspensions were over used in some schools, they did at least serve to get disruptive students out of the way so that others could learn. So, the situation here is likely to deteriorate further.

https://www.cbsnews.com/sanfrancisco/news/california-law-wil...

That bill let's teachers remove students from the classroom still. They just cant be suspended from school. It would be up to the schools to figure out an in-school punishment or improvement program.

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