America stopped caring how poor kids do in school | Hacker News Reader

America stopped caring how poor kids do in school

slowboring.com

> The basic story is that during the aughts, we had a bipartisan education reform consensus that was focused on improving school quality as an attainable and important driver of social and economic progress.

No Child Left Behind? It created tremendous incentives to teach to the test, and in some cases where that wasn't enough, to cheat to the test.

No Child Left Behind incentivised teaching to the level of the lowest denominator.

That's a not just a problem in education. Lowest denominator thinking is endemic throughout America.

Don’t be surprised if countries that seek excellence, like China, eventually have economic growth that outpaces America for this reason alone.

Seeking excellence and demanding ideological conformity at the risk of prison don't seem compatible to me.

Are you talking about china or the US?

That doesn't stand up to scrutiny, the US is famously politically and ideologically divided. I understand the impulse to say "no, you" but we can do better than that here.

Point taken about the snark, but ideological conformity is a growing pressure everywhere, and the fact that it has two poles in the US doesn't lessen the negative effects on education.

I think the other side is equally likely (if not already happening) in that countries seeking 'excellence' succumb to the manager's fallacy of using metrics to reward and punish, at which point Goodhart's law kicks in like it did for no child left behind. Are chinese students cheating on their exams because its only the score that matters, for example?

The lowest denominator, lowering of standards, and grade inflation I believe are all symptoms of 'education' not being about learning and skill building, but about credentialization. If only the certificate matters anymore, then rest is just theatre.

This is missing the forest for the trees.

The cost of almost everything government related is going up because the amount of money going to pensions is reaching its peak (the rate of increase was quite high for the last 15 years, that rate is starting to taper off significantly, and will pretty much flat line in 15 more years).

When a huge portion of your education spending is going to pay people that aren't working - you either need to funnel more money into it or cut.

When the economy isn't great (for the ordinary person), the ordinary person is going to choose cuts - and then they'll align their thinking to justify their choice.

Education is largely funded at the local level through property taxes which are rarely (never?) progressive.

If given the choice, I'm sure a lot more people would vote to make the Bill Gateses of the world pay more for education. It's not an option, so they're choosing cuts instead.

If it was an option, I'm sure you'd see a lot more ordinary people suddenly caring about the education of the poor.

Do we need to change laws to allow pensions to be reduced? It seems like a pyramid scheme

The ordinary old person is unlikely to be in favor of that.

And the world is getting older by the second.

Australia’s superannuation system is how retirement funding in the US should work.

Sadly NIHS is a severe problem in the US.

*NIHS = Not Invented Here Syndrome

The US stopped caring about truth, justice, and basic humanity. Caring about people is not in the cards at all.

I was blessedly slow to learn this, but a significant chunk of the population is motivated by hate.

It outwardly manifests as hate, but most people don't think of themselves like that. People generally view themselves as the star of the story. We have subcultures that make people drift towards certain beliefs and outcomes, all the while with those people largely being unaware of their course. You are noticing that there is a dominant subculture that indoctrinates with hateful beliefs.

>motivated by hate.

motivated by the love of money, the root of all evil.

A consequence of the end of the cold war and a belief among many that a few, exceptional individuals are responsible for the bulk of the ingenuity that powers economic growth.

I mean, that belief is clearly true.

Look how much Musk has given to society. PayPal / Tesla / SpaceX / OpenAI / Neuralink.

So why educate poor kids? The exceptional will rise to the top regardless or emigrate to the US as long as we make it attractive to anyway. If all that matters is GDP and relative geopolitical strength of course.

So that they can become contributors to society.

Economically, they still won’t be net contributors, only the top few percent are, but you still want them to contribute to the best of their ability.

"I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein's brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops." - Stephen Jay Gould

Developing talent is necessary, and many don't have the circumstances for their talent to be visible.

Maybe 100 years ago, or in remote villages in developing countries.

In America there's such an abundance of opportunity that talented people generally aren't going to be constrained by anything other than ambition. Certainly not by education.

Many of histories famous scholars had no formal education whatsoever, they were autodidactics.

That's an illustration of the worldview where you only care about the exceptional in action. There has to be an interest in having a healthy and enjoyable society among all ranks, and care about more than just cutting edge science and engineering.

I agree, but I was under the impression we were discussing the finding of exceptional talent.

Maybe put even a few minutes of cursory research into any of those claims

> I don’t want to blame everything bad that’s happened in American education on the little-noted 2015 Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA).

Before that was No Child Left Behind, which due to perverse incentives resulted in us being taught at the speed of the slowest student. Wouldn't surprise me if this is their theory here too but most of the article is behind a paywall.

Has anyone figured out where the mandate to eliminate academic 'tracking' came from?

https://archive.is/3SkYb

(sadly, I also tried this, but this snapshot seems to also include the paywall)

It's so obviously the phones. How is a child who grew up watching YouTube shorts supposed to sit through an entire novel without getting bored? They're used to quick and easy dopamine hits.

If you want literacy to come back, stop giving children YouTube shorts, TikTok, or Cocomelon.

At a certain age they will make that decision for themselves - you can't micromanage or monitor your kids' activities all the time. It's the same in every generation, it was TV at one point, then games, then youtube, then tiktok, and I'm sure the next generation in 10 years or so will scoff at whatever the younger generation does to get their distraction / dopamine hits.

That said, in the Netherlands there's been a ton of schools that have banned phones on the premises for various reasons. It's IMO ineffective as long as they also get laptops or tablets from the school, but it's a step in the right direction. There was just too much distraction and abuse; in a local example, there were anonymous "gossip" accounts on the various social media that would record and publish loads of random shit happening at school, often leading to cyberbullying and whatnot.

> I think it’s pretty obviously a combination of smartphones, social media, and short-form video. If you give people more stuff to do, they read less.

Bingo. I and many other adults I know struggle with this. Taking a book with me on the way to work today let's see if it helps

Brutal for attention spans and satiety

Is it about wealth or about innate talent or their family’s culture? I’m genuinely asking. I’ve seen poor kids do well in schools when their family cares about grades or when they’re just plain smart. The amount of money they had I don’t think held them back.

Do you think the amount a parent can care and show interest in their children's education could be correlated to financial freedom?

Maybe depends on how poor? My experience was even poor parents were able to care. But I think more extreme cases could be different - like if they’re both rarely at home and they don’t have others to help raise the kids, then I think the family culture doesn’t really exist.

Ahhh that's very interesting. I'm glad you've experienced that! I asked because I had mostly seen the latter, and in the few cases there were parents who had the capacity, they had been so soured by their own experiences in schools they didn't see the value in it for their children.

I hope one day we can solve the problems for both cases.

> all 2019 scores were at least a little bit lower than they were in 2013.

Do we know the degree to which test scores were high around that time due to schools doing a generally good job vs. gaming the system? NCLB created incentives to do the latter.

And I fear destroying the DOE will be the nail in the coffee

I'd like to read this, but it seems to be behind a paywall?

(There is a reasonable amount of the article before the paywall, and since the other comments here don't mention it, I am wondering whether they just thought the article was very short and then ended abruptly, lol)

America stopped caring about poor kids' education long before smartphones.

It goes back to at least the passage of Proposition 13 in California which gutted school funding from property taxes.

Even growing up in a middle class Midwestern suburb in the 90s, the increasingly elderly population who had no children in the public school system voted to lower their taxes rather than continue programs that they took for granted when their children were school age.

And this is nothing compared to what the poverty afflicted inner city and rural students have faced on top of the struggles in their community.

Smartphones have definitely made it worse, but we'd be deluding ourselves to think that much of the damage wasn't already done.

Prop 13 was passed on the back of California choosing to redistribute school funding away from local communities where the taxes were paid.

The result was predictable. Nobody wants to pay higher taxes that don't go to their kids or communities. They would rather opt. This is why most affluent school districts have complex parallel funding streams that don't go through the government.

More to the point, school costs are also out of control. Average tax spend on k-12 education in California is ~25k per student, or 750k for a 30 student class.

> Prop 13 was passed on the back of California choosing to redistribute school funding away from local communities where the taxes were paid.

> The result was predictable. Nobody wants to pay higher taxes that don't go to their kids or communities.

So the solution to school inequality should have been to enshrine both income inequality and real estate segregation in education funding policy?

> More to the point, school costs are also out of control. Average tax spend on k-12 education in California is ~25k per student, or 750k for a 30 student class.

It's closer to $20k (18th highest among US states)

https://www.ppic.org/publication/financing-californias-publi...

Also, FTA:

"When differences in labor costs across states are accounted for, California drops to 34th."

So California has very high labor costs, driven up by the insane housing costs, which are yet again enshrined by the provisions of Proposition 13 (and its accompanying phenomenon of NIMBYism).

>So the solution to school inequality should have been to enshrine both income inequality and real estate segregation in education funding policy?

Enshrine is a strong word, but yes, I think it basically broke the incentive structure for supporting the system. Regarding housing costs, I think they have far more to do with NIMBY and construction hostile policy.

High property tax doesn't really help housing affordability. High tax means sale prices are somewhat lower, but Mortgages would stabilize at the same value (just with a higher proportion being tax) unless you actually add more units.

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