US High school students' scores fall in reading and math | Hacker News Reader

US High school students' scores fall in reading and math

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540 pointsbikenaga1,089 comments

Most of the comments are focused on the supply of education. But I don't think the supply side is the problem, irrespective of teachers and high schools. There is more and cheaper education available than ever before. Nearly every highschooler has more access to learning that kings and emperors would have fought wars for less than 200 years ago. However,the United States, particularly in the last 50 years, seems to have fostered a culture averse to education. I believe the years long decline in test scores is a symptom of that cultural shift.

Not just education but overall intellectualism. It’s a purely cultural issue that can be observed by looking at demographics.

> intellectualism

It's interesting to blame anti-intellectualism because Republicans are usually labeled with that.

But simultaneously it's Democrats that will dumb down classes to make sure even the worst performing student will pass. And this is also anti-intellectualism, but of a different sort.

The combination is failing our students, doesn't matter the political orientation.

I'm involved in education, I see this every day - I spoke with someone taking a class on how to reach students, and due to no-child-left-behind, this is actually a class on how racism holds back black students and what to do about it (answer: Make simpler, easier classes). It's completely silent on any other type of student.

A Republican promoted and implemented No Child Left Behind though? Maybe I’m misunderstanding your point.

My point is that Democrats are implementing it by making classes worse for everyone.

Republican states aren't doing that. It's not the concept of No Child Left Behind that is bad, it's the implementation (and it's used as a reason to worsen classes).

Those states are declining too

That republican had stated during his campaign that he wanted to end the department of education…

Which I agree we should do, carefully. The federal government has no constitutional authorization to create educational standards for the country. Therefore, let those standards be set by the states.

What country with enviable educational results operates this way? Genuinely curious

Not sure where the UK stands on enviable results, but education is a devolved matter where the constituent countries can make independent decisions as opposed to there being a central government department that makes all decisions nationally.

Ok but which side supports it. Do you agree it’s a bad policy?

> Democrats that will dumb down classes to make sure even the worst performing student will pass

News to me.

See San Francisco's failed de-tracking experiment as Exhibit A.

Unfortunately it’s a real thing among leftists (not necessarily Democrats in general).

The belief is that any advanced classes increase the achievement gap. People who subscribe to this also believe that advanced placement testing is discrimination and must be eliminated. They want equity of outcome, so reducing the curriculum to a single class at a single level that everyone the same age takes is their preference.

It has been implemented in several places with predictable backlash.

The funny, and somewhat ironic thing is from my own understanding of Communist nations is they don't even try to do this... USSR put in a fair amount of effort to promote excellence and achievement for students into more specialized programs earlier than later. With an overall increased divide between the best and worst performing. I find it hard to fathom that there are those in the US that work so hard to hold back advancement from those most capable.

What you're describing is a fad that has subsided a bit over the last few years. Cambridge MA stopped teaching 8th grade algebra because they didn't like the racial disparity between students in advanced vs non-advanced math. There was a significant backlash from parents, and now they're bringing back 8th grade algebra. The debate now seems to be much more about how to offer more advanced math than whether to offer it at all. A similar dynamic seems to be playing out in other towns as well.

A positive change for sure but what about the kids who were stunted developmentally during that time?

In a nearby elementary school they are now touting teaching kids “AI literacy”. At an age where they don’t even have enough of a world view to understand anything related to it. Such an asinine idea, and of course it will be at the expense of something non-trendy.

It seems like public education suffers from so much “idea cascade” now and jumps from one fad to the next. Educational paths are more and more left to chance than organized thought.

I don’t understand why this became about politics, but I will bite.

Republicans want to dismantle department of education, have cut funding for education, food stamps, free meals, etc. they are by definition against education for the outgroup and “the poors”. So I think that label is apt.

On the other hand, Dem leadership is quite racist and has a saviour complex. They identified the right issue — children from impoverished areas that don’t see a future for themselves through education are underperforming — but instead of treating the problem they push stuff like no child left behind. In their defence though, republicans simply don’t allow any legislation that would improve education to go forward, mainly because they benefit from it.

> Republicans want to dismantle department of education, have cut funding for education, food stamps, free meals, etc.

> they are by definition against education for the outgroup and “the poors”

The second does not follow from the first in anyway. You can be against federal education and strongly for education. Just because you think a federal department of education is needed for good education doesn't mean it everyone thinks like you or that people who think differently automatically do not value the things you think having a federal department of education would help.

Grand, let’s observe state-wide evidence.

Red states overwhelmingly occupy the bottom end of leaderboards by all accounts of education except the number of people believing in fairytales about angels.

The bottom end is also places where there are a lot more Hispanic people who for whatever reason tend do do bad in education. Which is to say there are so many confounders that your observation isn't helpful to the debate.

Tell us more about the cultural issue that can be observed by looking at demographics. What specifically stands out to you?

Isn’t it obvious? Children of immigrants do way better. Children of Asian households do way better than other ethnicities, and children in impoverished areas do a lot worse.

All of this is cultural and anyone who thought I implied race — which looks like you did — is a moron and a racist.

IMHO this whole thing is environmental.

This should be flagged for being a personal insult.

I asked a question for details you failed to provide in your first comment.

> All of this is cultural and anyone who thought I implied race — which looks like you did

There’s no way this can be true because I never think before I comment here.

One is the observation that first- and second-generation black immigrants have much higher share of college admissions than their share of the black population, despite similar socio-economic status to African Americans with longer family history in the US.

https://www.insidehighered.com/admissions/article/2017/10/09...

"Culture" is downstream of incentives.

And constraints. To call this a cultural issue is insane. I have firsthand seen the structural problems with institutional education. My scholastic experience was hell and anti-intellectual from day one, and it was all institutional issues.

And the institutions reflect culture.

The fact that these institutions can exist at the low-performing state they do is a direct reflection of the culture of the people who run them, send their kids to them, pay taxes to support them, etc.

The schools can only do what they do to the degree that people aren't willing to put up with it.

Institutions are supposed to protect culture, but they have failed due to the actions of a small elite class. It's like blaming a child for not having parents.

Have they failed?

Or are they dutifully resisting cultural shift that threatens the "don't think critically, just go to work, pay your taxes, don't question the system, don't do drugs, go to college, get a job, lease a new car, buy a condo, cross your fingers that stonks go up enough for you to retire" late 20th early 21st century status quo "ideal citizen" and "ideal culture" that they were built to foster (and who are the kind of people who fill out the majority of the system)?

The way I see it peddling blue state bullshit and red state bullshit (depending on a given school district's location) is simply a common sense adaptation districts are making to garner support from local populations who were willing to support the system so long as it provided useful education at a non-insane cost but are more critical now that the deal is worse.

People choose based on grades, success stories, safety, and exclusivity, not political alignment. But public schools aren't competitive, so they don't have any incentive to offer any of those things. That makes them a useful and susceptible hot bed for the least desirable part of an education; politics.

No, institutions reflect the culture of the broad population. It’s like blaming a community for having streets filled with litter.

It's a litter filled community with limited trash service and no public receptacles.

Japan has limited trash service and no public receptacles

As a member of several of the {{{small, elite class[es]}}} you might be describing, which of us do you mean? Certainly those of us with a PhD don't want the schools to be shitty for our kids.

I mean our politicians and the idiots they manufacture with idpol in order to maintain power at the cost of degrading our communities. So, probably not you.

For example, in my state, it is an annual tradition to slash the budget of schools and/or libraries and funnel the money toward political goals and police retirement funds.

I attended the best public school in the state at one point and literally watched the Governor text someone for 10 minutes and then fall asleep in the middle of a budget presentation specifically put together in order to convince him not to cut more funding the next year, as it would mean the school would have to begin taking federal money and compromising on its values.

I also attended the worst public school in my state, a harrowing and illuminating experience which I've spoken about here a few times before. [0]

I also had my collegiate education robbed from me by a vindictive teacher who illegally falsified my grade out of spite, and an administration who protected her. I was homeless since 16 was and attending high school on my own in a rural community with no economic opportunity.

Due to my circumstances, her falsified grade meant I had to rescind a full-ride scholarship which had been offered to me including boarding and a job, but on condition that my credits included that core class. I had no adults in my life to fight for me, and even though I met with my guidance counselor, the principal, several teachers and the school board, I was not helped and fell through the cracks, despite high standardized test scores and a high GPA.

Instead, I continued to be homeless from 18 to 21 and struggled very badly, starving and sick. I am now employed in my field of choice despite these circumstances, but I overall had a very traumatic experience with the public school system. The institution ultimately failed me, despite my intellect and perseverance.

So I share your concerns deeply! I want nothing of the sort to happen to my kids or anyone else's.

Your work looks very interesting, by the way, leafing through one of your papers.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44823657

Thanks for getting down to details where we can talk, as well as the look into my papers.

I gotta say: I had a pretty terrible public-school experience too, which I mostly don't talk about in adulthood. Policywise I'm more anti-anti-public schooling than in favor of the system as I went through it, because I've spent the past couple of years living in a state that allows quite a lot of local control, quite a lot of "school choice", and doesn't invest very much in taxes... and currently attempts to brag that slightly less than one third (yes, 1/3) of its kids score as proficient in reading and math[0]. The idea that basic literacy and numeracy qualify someone as belong to an "upper" or "elite" cohort drives me absolutely freaking nuts -- hence my not really supporting a "shut it all the fuck down for how bad it sucks" approach to public education.

[0] https://www.tn.gov/education/news/2025/1/29/nation-s-report-...

What could people unwilling do?

Particularly, the biggest incentives are test scores and passing rates, which incentivize attention only to the bottom 50% and 20% of students (respectively). This means:

- You do not diversify classrooms by academic ability---the high-performing students can be free tutors to the low-performing students.

- You inflate the GPAs and implement no-zero policies.

- You teach to the standardized tests, and don't worry about the material.

- You make lessons "fun and engaging" because you need the attention of the students least likely to give you their attention.

- You eliminate gifted or honors programs, because that's wasted money not improving your bottom line (bottom students).

Needless to say, these are not effective ways of teaching remedial and underperforming students.

Those pupils will generally need very structured lessons that directly provide clear information (often in a form that can easily stick in memory and be repeated, even word for word), and straightforward instructions that can immediately inform their practice no matter what their level. I.e. the exact opposite of a so-called "fun and engaging" approach. (Which of course ignores the fact that such students tend to derive the most fun and engagement from being taught in a clear and effective way!)

The underlying issue is that the "progressive" educational strategy taught in Ed Schools is very explicitly a "sink or swim" approach where the student is supposed to be teaching themselves and the teacher isn't doing any real work. The hidden attitude here, coming directly from the "Progressive" era of the late 19th and early 20th century, is that many students will indeed fail but this is not an issue because clearly they were not worthy of entering the educated class with the very best.

(Special Ed is the one remaining niche that still teaches more effective educational methods, but obviously not every remedial student is a Special Ed student, and we should not expect them to be.)

Just look at HN. Nominally an educated crowd, but talk about physics, and you immediately see terms like "ivory towers" or "return on investment", despite the fact that most on HN doesn't understand in fundamental science works.

A lot of the complaints here about physics have to do with focusing so heavily for decades on string theory (or M-theory) which hasn't produced much in the way of practical results. At some point we have to quit throwing good money after bad and redirect funding towards other lines of inquiry.

Is the purpose of life purely to seek a monetary return on investment?

Is the purpose of theoretical physics purely to seek mathematical innovations with no connection to objective reality?

Define objective

Yes, but this is cartoon shit. String theory was a major research program in theoretical physics for a few decades but theoretical physics involves quite a lot more than string theory and physics involves quite a lot more than theoretical physics and if you stacked up all the budgets you'd find that string theory is a minor footnote. And also, its been a few decades since people took it very seriously as a strong candidate for a TOE.

I really don't get it. As a total amount of any budget from any perspective, string theory has always been a blip whose cultural impact is much wider than its actual budgetary one. Like this critique about string theory is just a thing that people who are physics "enthusiasts" say and even to the extent that it is true, its really been more than a decade since it was a problem.

The problem is string theory was pushed by people who were really good at getting attention and so they appeared to be outsized. Eventually everyone realized they were never making good on their promises and it was time to quit given them money - but most people who are not physics insiders don't really understand the other parts and so the total budget was cut to punish string theory - but by more than just the string theory part.

There is a warning above about something, but I'm not sure exactly what.

I actually think that for the most part string theory and its detractors and its rise and fall have had little effect on total physics budgets in the last 30 years.

I will say that theoretical physics is in a hard spot, but the problem isn't string theory. It is that we are short experimental data because the domain of validity of our theories is currently somewhat larger (in most obvious ways, anyway) than the domains we can reach with experiment.

I don't think any amount of clever budget allocation is going to make progress in theoretical physics go faster, nor do I think we'd be in a different position if we had allocated the resources differently. Notably, LQG and similar approaches (of which there is hardly any shortage) have not made noticeable progress either.

My perspective is this: string theorists are cheap. We may as well have a few for some long shot research, and while we fund them they teach kids math and physics. Seems like a good trade.

> My perspective is this: string theorists are cheap. We may as well have a few for some long shot research, and while we fund them they teach kids math and physics. Seems like a good trade.

We need kids learning math because it is useful for engineering and other parts of life. However there are large parts of math that are useless in the real world and we don't need to each at all. (we need enough to teach rigorous logical thinking because that is useful in the real world - but there are lots of ways to get there)

Is there value in more theoretical physics - at what point do we know the constants to enough values? This is a reference to just before relativity was discovered when it was thought refining the constants was all that was left - it turned out that some major things were left, but is there anything more? This is an unanswerable question, but what if we redirected those working on string theory to a hobby if they want to and made their day job either teaching math (which they are already doing part time), or some engineering type job? If we distribute the workload that implies everyone could work half an hour less every day, is that a bad trade?

> However there are large parts of math that are useless in the real world and we don't need to each at all.

The way I see it is thus: life is objectively pointless. There is no god and time will erase everything anyone ever builds one way or another. Human life is predicated on doing work to survive, but that isn't the point of life. Instead of asking how we can only do what is useful, we should be asking how we can do more and more useless stuff while still providing for our bodily needs. Show me a mathematician working on pure math and I see a person at the absolute peak of human potential. I do not resent the mathematician. On the contrary, I aspire to their place. I guess you see one and you think they are useless and should be writing code for an ad company somewhere.

What a dogshit world.

> I do not resent the mathematician. On the contrary, I aspire to their place

Those two do not follow. I resent the mathematician because the world can only afford to pay a small number of them (we need to eat and that consumes far more people), not to mention shelter and such - I'm not one of those society has chosen to do math all day (for good reasons - I'm not that great at math - my math minor makes me a better choice than average, but still not anywhere near good enough). Even those who do math all day are mostly professors who do math between teaching classes and advising students. The time / taxes that are spent from my paycheck to pay someone to do math is time that I'm working for someone else to achieve a peak that I cannot and without them I could work less (we are talking a second per year or something, but still...)

Yes I'm admitting to jealousy here. I aspire to their place.

> . I guess you see one and you think they are useless and should be writing code for an ad company somewhere.

You picked a bad example. I'd call most ad work useless too - they are not informing me of something new that I need but trying to get me to buy something either I already know about or worse things that would make my life worse.

There are _plenty_ of areas in physics where investment is paying off. Condensed matter physics, optics, material research and so on.

We mostly question the fundamental subatomic particle physics that is not producing any returns on the investment. E.g. the galvanic effect was discovered in 1780, and there were long-distance telegraph lines by 1845 - so 65 years.

The last major theoretical advance in particle physics was around 1965 (Higgs mechanism). That's already 60 years ago.

There's at least one actual physicist who will provide you with appropriate counterpoint. Here they are. And you're welcome.

a physicist responds: physics has done very little for like 70 years[0]

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d_o4k0eLoMI

She is speaking about physics in a very narrow sense.

>She is speaking about physics in a very narrow sense.

In what respect? Did you bother to actually watch the video or read a transcript or did you just watch the first minute and a half and assume that was the point? It wasn't. the ensuing thirty-two minutes serve to debunk the idea that there hasn't been progress in physics over the past seventy years.

Which GP claimed was the case. GP is wrong.

And she covers a wide array of physics areas -- she even mentions that she could have gone year by year starting in 1953 and cover at least one advancement per year, but she limited it to just her top ten which was pretty wide ranging.

She's confirming my point. There are plenty of advances in physics outside of the foundational subatomic physics.

And literally nothing in subatomic physics. The theories from 1960-s made predictions that were later confirmed: Higgs boson, neutrino oscillations, etc.

> However,the United States, particularly in the last 50 years, seems to have fostered a culture averse to education.

The rate of college graduates has increased nearby 50% over that timeframe.

A rather unexpected result for a cultural aversion to education.

Do you believe the average degree awarded today requires as much rigor as the average degree awarded half a century ago?

Not sure in the US but where I am from thats very much the case; they went to the paid per graduated student vs just student and students having loans vs state money (to study forever) and it turned the focus on churning out graduates from providing academic rigor. I saw the shift sharply studying and then teaching from late 90s to early 00s and as I see my nephews doing cs degrees now: it's really easy I would say, not the rigorous (not very practical outside academics) learnings I started with. Not sure if its good or bad, just an observation. We already had technical schools for exactly this purpose, but I guess the unis were running steep losses for the gov while not enough prominent research and related companies came out of them.

Academia is now vocational training but done badly. You get the pretend of academia and a very expensive loan as a bonus.

No, and the article would -- if anything -- suggest the opposite.

My point is "culture averse to education" seems a strange assertion.

If you read his whole comment it was about how education is "just a piece of paper you need to get a job". That mentality could totally lead to worse proficiency and more degrees awarded.

If you punish teachers solely on passing percentage you get the same result. It might be the teacher is bad but if you teach a difficult course it might be the students.

Wouldn't that be the expected result? The culture shifted precisely because colleges started promoting the idea that education outside of college doesn't count. Which, in the culture, has lead to rejecting any other source of education — and why you will hear strange things like high school graduates being called "uneducated".

most students are going to college because many jobs require it, or because they were “pushed” into it by teachers or parents. Not because they value education in the slightest.

I went to a state school and was one of the “weirdos” that didn’t party or join a fraternity. IMO some of us are there to learn and socialize on the side. Others are there to socialize and learn on the side.

> or because they were “pushed” into it by

That's literally the definition of cultural influence

It’s culture led by phones and other screens. Most teens are addicted to the screens. The need them for school and for socialization with friends and they end up on TikTok or another network and zombie there for most of their best brain years. They lack the ability to focus necessary to learn because the brain is used to constant screen simulation. Letting your child be babysat by a screen is absolutely the worst thing you can do to ever raise an adult.

I'm pretty sure the same argument was made for television, movies, radio and fiction books.

That’s certainly true but at the same time, when I was a kid in the early 90s, we watched TV but cartoons ended (we did not have cable or a computer). I came home from school, ate a snack, watched TV for about an hour with a friend, cartoons were over and we went outside. With the internet and YouTube etc. you’re never “done”

I remember racing home from school to catch Gundam Wing and Dragonball Z. And then they were over until the next day.

yeah but you get home at 4, watch an hour of anime, it's 5pm, you do homework for half an hour, then you have dinner with family until about 7, then you have about an hour of getting ready for bed/chores and that gets you to 8pm. At most you have one more hour of studying. So 90 minutes of education-related stuff at home a day in your ideal past where kids "only" spent an hour on TV.

Much like extending the workday past 10 hours there must be a point of diminishing/negative returns to expecting multiple hours of study per night. Also, those times you list seem indicative of elementary school kids. Most high schoolers are going to be up way past 9pm. Of course, they also probably aren't getting home before 6pm and don't have the luxury of an hour long family dinner every night either.

I'm not sure what your point is.

My point is that the entertainment was finite, in this case because it was only available for a set duration.

That Dragonball Z came on for a single episode created a dead zone where it made sense to do homework and it wasn't pulling teeth when it came time to sit down for dinner with my family (something we both would be very privileged to have in our youth btw).

That's true, the arguments were also made for television, movies, radio, and fiction books. However, during the times of movies, television, radio, and written books being introduced, the trend line of student performance seemed to be going upward. It now seems to be trending downward. It's harder to convincingly make the argument that cell phones are no worse than TVs when student performance was increasing during the TV era and is decreasing during the smartphone era. Even if the correlation is totally spurious, it's an uphill climb to ignore it.

Yeah, but were those coupled with an enormous, precipitous reversion in literacy rates?

So why are the drops happening in the US, but not Asia, which is equally smartphone addicted?

> but not Asia

It's happening in many Asian countries too.

Korea: https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/pisa-2022-results-volum...

HK: https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/pisa-2022-results-volum...

And? Maybe those things had an impact also? And maybe this is the last straw our backs can bear?

Like if you take a bunch of steps running from a road to the edge of a cliff, only after the last one over the edge do you experience all the problems

yes, and none of those things are just available to you while you're also learning in the classroom. no school should allow phones in the classroom.

Yes and it was a fair argument then, too. It's likely only a matter of degree of distraction.

I hear what you are saying, but I feel like this is related more to both parents working or single parent households. The more time parents work, the harder it is to get ahead, the more screen time kids will get.

From my conversations with 20-year-ago school students, American schools are culture led by sports, and football most of all. No surprise many parents don't see a reason for their kids to excel in STEM.

For this theory to hold up you would need to explain what changed as high schools in the US have loved sports since at least the 40s

I doubt much changed. American STEM education has always been pretty mediocre. I've been hearing about my whole life.

Mediocre by what metric? American STEM education seems to objectively be doing pretty well in terms of Nobel prizes, scholarly journal articles, patents, technology product revenue, etc. Of course there's always room for improvement.

> American STEM education seems to objectively be doing pretty well in terms of Nobel prizes, scholarly journal articles, patents, technology product revenue, etc.

I hate to break it to you, but a lot of our most valuable research is produced by people who did their primary education outside the US. Just go to a STEM research lab at any US university connected to a Nobel prize or Fields medal in the last 10-20 years, and it will be almost completely made up of internationally educated students / professors / etc.

Yes, they are getting visas via academia employment.

If someone is curious about this data, I made a little analysis a while ago - Nobel Prize in numbers: https://blog.royalsloth.eu/posts/nobel-prize-in-numbers/#sec...

About a half of Nobel Prizes in the US were awarded to immigrants or children of immigrants.

Unfortunately, those metrics are very focused on the 0.1%, if not the 0.01%.

Like a sorting algorithm which is O(n) on nearly-sorted input - the utility is limited.

? That’s a common use case for sorting though.

Changed was the reduction of brain-drain from Germany/Hungary and later USSR to the US.

This is true (and they do take a large amount of things like money and resources), but these cultural influences are also very loud. You will find that the majority of the kids in the cafeteria really don't give a crap about any of that, and that goes for the parents as well.

It really depends on the town, the school, and the social circle of the parents. If you live in a wealthy Boston suburb, academics are emphasized much more than sports, and expectations for students are very high. If you live in rural Appalachia, then football is king.

Something that isn’t obvious to non-Americans or non-parents is just how diverse the US education system is. Even within a medium size city you’ll find multiple schools that might have completely different cultures.

Some schools are sports centric. Others have to work hard to get students interested in sports.

I think the implication that sports are bad is also misleading. Sports programs, when run well, can do a good job of getting kids into routines, out of trouble, and keeping them accountable to their peers for something. The TV and movie style sports culture where the football players aren’t expected to even attempt to pass their classes doesn’t actually exist in most schools.

Don't expect much when (from what I see) most adults are properly addicted to their screens. If parents are already not up to the bar kids will seldom be, leading by example and all that.

Now show me parents, hell even here on HN, who openly admit that they are addicted to the screens and various 'social' cancers and consider it something profoundly bad and damaging, and that they as parents should really do better and actually try. A rare sight, mostly its brushed off and some even brag how 'digital' and modern their kids are.

But its fine, we all know how these things really are. This is one area where even otherwise disadvantaged parents (ie due to their poor upbringing or ie coming from undeveloped places) can raise their kids to be well above sea of future desperate population with severe social anxieties and addictions (lets not forget addictions ball up since they change personality for the worse).

Think how much lack / minimization of those will give them various advantages in their adult lives, be it professional (focus on work, ability to better socialize and communicate in person) or personal (all kinds of relationships, and finding one's purpose and drive in life). I just mentioned basically whole core of adult existence, no small things by any means.

And its not that hard, we do it with our kids and often see it around us in their peers, just need to put a bit more effort and spend more time with them instead of doom scrolling or binge watching TV. Which are anyway good parenting advices, but one needs to start like that from beginning and lead by example.

The decline in the last 20 years was more noticeable, and the last 10 far more noticeable.

My kids don't get textbooks in public school, are comingled with highly disruptive kids (except in the limited gifted classes) and the curriculum is accelerated way past where it was when I was younger.

So my anecdotal theory is that the (public) education system is optimized to the edges, abandoning the middle entirely, resulting in majority decline.

They do get computers with TONS of dumb-ass apps and zero reference materials.

So, basically the general distribution strikes again? I guess the floor fell out, but what evidence do we have that the ceiling also went up? Could just be the same or lower when we normalize for grade inflation and requirement destruction.

My daughter had no textbook for Freshman physics, which is obviously the hardest class she is going to have in high school (or top 2). It was ridiculous. We wound up supplementing learning materials and paying a tutor, but it all felt like making up for piss-poor course structure. Her (very intelligent but distracted) teacher barely knew where to send me for supplemental materials. And this is in the "advanced" high school that is very hard to get into.

How do they not know?! The parents at my school would gladly purchase materials for the classes if anyone bothered to ask for them.

Your average teacher is about as intelligent, motivated, and skilled as your average American.

How much initiative do you think a random office or retail worker would put into solving a problem they were presented with that they couldn't answer immediately and had no impact on their lives?

I’ve never heard anyone say freshman physics is the hardest class in high school!

Memorize 6 equations, 15 terms of art, and be competent at super simple algebraic expressions and you’re done. Physics in US high schools is taught long before calculus and usually before trig, which is dumb, but they compensate by making the calculation requirements something 6th graders routinely do.

AP Calculus is even easier assuming you’ve taken trig and calculus, but I realize many Americans don’t. But freshman physics is… I generally say a waste of time it’s so easy.

What did your daughter find challenging?

Most schools do biology > chemistry > physics, which is from funnest and easiest to most technical and hardest (plus digging in to the building blocks of the previous class). Physics first is very much throwing them in at the deep end of the pool when they have never taken a high school class at all. Frankly, I never got the details of the curriculum due to lack of printed materials. Parenting is not easy, and it's an art not a science. I got her a tutor instead of risking giving her the impression her grades were more important than her to me because I was pushing her too hard. Her tutor helped a lot and had plenty of materials to help out. So no, my kid's not dumb ;)

> Most schools do biology > chemistry > physics, which is from funnest and easiest to most technical and hardest

More like from what women prefer to what men prefer, they probably do it since most teachers are women and prioritize what girls want. Physics is "hard" as in not soft, not "hard" as in not easy.

The reasonable order is the opposite, physics underpins chemistry and chemistry underpins biology.

There is a thing called pedagogy, and biology > chemistry > physics is a perfectly healthy order of discovery. I am not sure why there needs to be a battle of the sexes in the middle of this.

> I am not sure why there needs to be a battle of the sexes in the middle of this.

I am not sure either, but there is, and ignoring it means that school gets optimized for girls and seatbelts optimized for men. You have to bring that up to change it.

It sounds like something specific to US education, though. When I was in school, physics actually started first in 6th grade, while biology and chemistry both started in the 7th grade - but from there on the classes were all going concurrently.

Physics also tends to expect some understanding of calculus... which tends to be a junior or senior level class. Having someone take a physics class when they're still struggling with single variable substitution in equations would be torturous to student and teacher alike.

There are calculus free science programs

My high school back in the early 00s had an algebra-based physics track and a calculus-based. We were a smaller school so they alternated every year. Take it junior / senior year depending on what version you wanted to take.

Science teacher here. Physics First is absolutely not throwing them into the deep end, and should not be the hardest class. Physics First generally means physics taught without calculus, and most of it is stuff that could have been taught to most eighth graders.

Not saying it won't be hard, but I don't want you to think it's some crazy torture. It should be no harder than doing Bio or Chem first, and for many kids it's easier. (Bio and Chem have way more memorization and vocabulary.)

I am sure you are right, my physics class was my hardest class in HS, but I took it my senior year. Regardless, her school is science and tech focused, and it was a hard class without materials to study for tests, and with minimal guidance.

Mandatory xkcd: https://m.xkcd.com/435/

> Most schools do biology > chemistry > physics

I'm only aware of schools providing these three courses as independent of each other. Which makes sense, since they are independent.

I took Chem as a sophomore, Physics as a freshman, AP Chem as a senior, and AP Physics as a senior. I didn't take a single bio course after 7th grade.

For what it's worth, both Calculus courses were harder IMO than any of the aforementioned.

In the NL we start with a combined chemistry/physics class that's mostly physics, after the 2nd year you get physics, chemistry and biology as separate classes.

I don't think physics is hardest. On the contrary, physics is probably the best subject to start with, because everyone (even people who don't know about physics) have experienced physics. People intuitively understand that you go faster down a steep hill, than a gently sloped one.

At the high school level of presentation and rigor, Biology is hard and boring full of memorization without anything that reduces or compresses the data. Chemistry is very hard, lots of memorization and also lots of mathematical thinking. Physics is easy, very few basic laws that are quite intuitive and whose proofs you are not expected to learn and links in most directly to real life things you can feel and experience such as levers, moments etc.

That's kind of what I think but feel free to poke holes. It seems like there are three tiers. There's a closed off top tier of kids who get into top ranked universities. They go to highly ranked schools like selective high schools with high Ivy placement ranks. Those schools have different materials and more opportunities than most. These high schools are geographically mostly on the coasts. It's a totally different culture too where there's this years long effort.

Then there's a middle tier, the majority of people, where they might end up at a university but it's not top rated. Increasingly it's not worth the money and simultaneously it seems like our country has become more credentialist about prestigious jobs. But a degree probably isn't necessary for most careers that don't have gatekeepers so for these people the education doesn't really have a big payoff and their education might get de-emphasized.

Then there's the bottom tier which is self explanatory.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pUKaB4P5Qns

At least introduce the video with a blurb if you're just going to drop a link.

In my experience, the "top tier of kids" is more cultural than school-specific. Even in schools like TJHST there's usually 10–30 students in the school that really care about achieving, while the other 90% don't put in much effort (beyond your typical public schooler). There are a few feeder (public) schools on the coasts, but most of the private schools differentiate by extracurriculars (fencing, rowing, horseback riding) rather than academic excellence.

Accelerated tracks would produce the top tier, which begin in elementary school - so it's a matter of how much your parents invested in your education before school. Any child can technically enter the accelerated track at any grade. The later they join, the more untaught expectations there are. The other students went over these things already in previous accelerated classes. There's no on-ramp.

In the normal track, you don't eventually take calculus in math, learn much about labwork in science, or even learn how to write a research paper until the last year of classes at 18. (Source: class of 2005, USA)

So my anecdotal theory is that the (public) education system is optimized to the edges, abandoning the middle entirely, resulting in majority decline.

Based on my anecdotal experience, this is the explanation that makes the most sense to me. I've been hearing constantly for at least a decade how atrocious American public education is, which I can't reconcile at all with my experience as a 2010 graduate of McLean High School. Either my experience was so far outside the national norm that I have no useful perspective on this issue, or the national discourse has been totally corrupted by vocal minorities and political agendas.

Personally, my teachers were consistently amazing and brilliant (RIP Mr. Bigger), curricula were rigorous, and I learned a ton that prepared me well for my life and career after high school. Every time I hear about some factoid or perspective that American schools supposedly don't teach because they're propaganda farms designed to churn out uncurious low-skill workers, I roll my eyes as I vividly recall how it was explicitly covered in my classes. It's possible my experience may have been more the exception than the rule, given that most of my classes were advanced/AP/post-AP, but I also had some of my favorite teachers in regular and honors classes and never felt like I was receiving insufficient value for my time. Maybe I just got incredibly lucky, but I really have nothing but good things to say, and can't relate at all to the picture of American public education that's been painted in the media and social media. Granted, a lot can change in 15 years, and my perspective is already going to be skewed by having attended a top-ranked school in a wealthy district.

On the flip side, my public elementary school experience was the polar opposite. In kindergarten I was tutoring third graders who needed help learning to read, but by second grade I'd been kicked out more or less for being bored with the level and pace of the course material. (Effectively. Specifically, the principal was going to move me to special ed unless my mom agreed to find a doctor willing to put me on Ritalin for my nonexistent ADHD. The 90s were wild.) So there's that. Luckily there are some great private schools in the area which my mom was able to make sacrifices to afford, but I can't help but wonder how many other kids weren't as lucky and had their whole life trajectories sabotaged from an early age. Granted, that particular principal was fired a few months after my de facto expulsion (for many very good reasons), so maybe this was all genuinely just an anomaly and very far outside the norm for completely different reasons than my high school experience.

To expand on that a bit, based on my observations, I'd suggest the following conclusions:

1. Any reform effort needs to ensure that early education isn't overlooked. Elementary schools need capacity, processes, and expertise to appropriately deal with kids of all different knowledge/intelligence levels and backgrounds/skillsets in a personalized way, and they need oversight to ensure that lazy/incompetent/malicious teachers and administrators aren't making poor/abusive decisions that could have lifelong negative impacts on students.

2. AI will be a critical element of future reform. It's too incredibly useful of a learning and scaling tool to sleep on. Of course it's easy to misuse, but that's exactly why responsible use needs to be taught as part of research and fact-checking lessons. If they haven't already, schools need to start running small-scale experiments with incorporation of AI tools into curricula asap.

Imagine how much more you could have learned with a virtual TA in your pocket on call 24/7 for those 13 years, with human teachers in the loop to help guide any self-directed learning you might have chosen to undertake. That bright-eyed kid who never stops asking "why?" will finally have a conversational partner who never tires of answering. All the panic about hallucinations sounds like the same sensationalist takes I grew up hearing from adults about the internet and Wikipedia — a perfectly valid concern, but not sufficient to negate the value of the resource in competent hands.

I'd learn zero just like every other boy who would be 100000% distracted by technology and currently uses up tons of willpower every day to avoid playing games on their mandatory-issue-device.

That's a good point. Personally, I'm not in favor of unfettered personal device access in schools. Back in my day, you used school computers on the (filtered) school network and cellphones remained off and out of sight during school hours. It was a pretty good system that moderated distractions and goofing off reasonably well. I'm not sure when or why that changed, but I don't think it was a positive change.

To your point, I would expect any sanctioned in-school student-facing AI usage to be through a school-provided platform on locked down school-owned hardware, in line with how computer/internet access already works (or how it worked 15 years ago). School-issued mobile devices with AI access could be a nice addition if they were locked down enough to sufficiently minimize distractions, but maybe sticking to laptops and desktops would work better in practice.

I think it’s so weird that your level of education in the US (and most of the world really) seems to depend on which specific school you went to.

The Netherlands has settled on three levels of schooling and within that level (according to capacity, and desire to learn) most of the schools show relatively little variation.

The same thing continues into university, with pretty much 99% of all the universities in the Netherlands being public.

You don’t select a university based on level of theoretical educational attainment, you select one by virtue of proximity, or which of them teaches the specific courses you are interested in.

Dutch PISA scores have fallen badly, though. We moved here from Ireland and the basisschools seem kinda mediocre compared to what we had in Ireland. My eldest certainly learned to read much better.

Schoelenopdekaart shows pretty wide variation in how many students go on to vwo etc.

Fair, my experience is pretty much 25 years out of date. At the time it was pretty good.

I graduated from McLean High School in 1990. I had some fantastic teachers. McLean is absolutely an outlier.

McLean's formula for success is to be located in an upper-middle class district with parents who value education and are wealthy enough to provide a stable environment, but not so wealthy they must send their kids to a private school. This formula isn't something that can be easily replicated or scaled out nationwide.

The aspiration is to make excellent education available for all children, regardless of what school district their parents can afford to move into. This is a problem that looks easy on the surface, but it seems to be extremely difficult in practice. Education is a social benefit, and a lot of people seem to have rejected the notion that taxes should even pay for social benefits.

Agreed, I believe its success can potentially be replicated to some degree, but not its particular formula. I left a few thoughts on that in a follow-up comment below, but fundamentally my thinking is that comprehensive well-designed integration of AI throughout the system could allow schools to move toward leaner administrations with smaller numbers of higher-quality better-compensated teachers. Furthermore, technology like Waymo's could potentially make it viable to shuttle larger numbers of students to a smaller number of higher-quality schools.

I'm also optimistic that physical goods as a whole will become much more affordable over the next decade or two for various reasons, which would further enable the median public school to approach the level of 00s MHS without relying on local concentration of a disproportionate share of national wealth.

All that being said, my point wasn't "look how well-funded my high school was". Regardless of the reasons, it's a bright spot in a narrative of doom and gloom. Only the horror stories seem to get any attention, and if you listen to anyone with strong political views on the topic you'd think each state's governing party had turned its entire school system into a network of indoctrination camps. It's also clearly the case based on my disturbingly bad elementary school experience, and from what I've heard of some other local schools that should have comparable financing to MHS, that money isn't sufficient to provide a top-tier educational experience.

I think it's important to look at schools and counties that perform well and carefully evaluate which elements can be used as a model to help improve public education as a whole, rather than assuming that absolutely nothing is replicable without gobs of cash. For example, off the top of my head, what if the federal government provided an annual budget for a handful of top-ranking districts across the country to have their best teachers of different subjects at each grade level oversee production and maintenance of open source course materials, video lectures, and possibly LLM chatbots? What if teachers all had some equivalent of GitHub to share and collaborate on that stuff? It wouldn't fix problems like rundown facilities or availability of computers and textbooks, but it would allow the worst Latin teacher in the country to provide something a lot closer to the Mr. Bigger experience, and that's just one idea.

> So my anecdotal theory is that the (public) education system is optimized to the edges, abandoning the middle entirely...

Yep. Those edges are pushed by very vocal parents, usually backed by large communities and interest groups.

And the modern-day politics of American public schools (which generally have very low voter engagement) dictate that only the squeaky wheels get the grease.

My kids' schools are optimized for the lower edge, while providing some (but significantly less than the lower edge) additional support for the upper edge who almost exclusively come from upper income families who are assumed to be able to fend for themselves.

I want all people to live fulfilling lives and reach their potential, but we are pouring limited resources into a bottomless pit while intentionally de-emphasizing the fundamentals of education that worked well for decades (or longer), and any question of those methods receives an extremely hostile response.

It's no wonder that people are choosing to opt out in some form or another, or that the results are suboptimal.

The problem with that “culture” explanation is that white kids in America do fine in international educational comparisons. In the 2018 PISA assessment, 15 year old white american students were near the top in reading (behind only Singapore and some Chinese SEZs) and in the top echelon in science (comparable to Japan). Their weakest performance was math, where they’re around the middle, behind the top asian countries but only modestly behind Finland: https://nces.ed.gov/surveys/pisa/pisa2018/pdf/PISA2018_compi....

Insofar as the US had a “culture averse to education,” surely that affects white americans as much as it affects anyone else. But, on average, they are not the ones who are behind their peers internationally.

Only if the US is a monoculture but we're a diverse multi-cultural society. Different cultural groups have different values and priorities.

And different individuals within those cultural groups also have different values and priorities. A good education system supports everyone equally in achieving their goals.

And when those goals are orthogonal to educational achievement, then what?

The greatest predictor of academic success is the education level of a student's parents.

Take that to its logical conclusion and we'd have individual, personalized tutors for each student. We don't have the resources for that, so some groups are going to get shafted. The question is which.

eh no. a good education system educates the populous. if a student's goals are to play sports and never learn to read, that is irrelevant, they are measured on the education aspect. if their goals are to become a professional streamer, or they value "fame" over anything else, also irrelevant.

we have and should set clear and high education goals. you can adjust teaching strategies towards those goals based on the student and aim to drive those goals even higher, and things like advanced classes are clear ways to do so.

Culture argument can be argued effectively as follows:

If a cohort in Japan has a median score of X at median household income Y, the American cohort with same median score X has income closer to 1.25Y or 1.5Y.

Whether you want to define your American cohort based on geography or ethnicity doesn't really matter-the result will be preserved up to a point.

That’s just because Americans are richer across the Board than Japanese. But would we expect PISA scores to track absolute income across different developed countries? I don’t think that follows. For example, Sweden’s median household income (PPP) is 2.6x higher than Poland’s. But the two countries had very similar scores on the 2018 PISA: http://hechingerreport.org/what-2018-pisa-international-rank...

I think one of the biggest factors comes down to single parent vs intact families.

I'm interested; do you have any good stats for that?

I am on my phone but you can Google and find lots of data that shows dual parent/intact families correlate positively with a bunch of other factors like income, college graduation, etc. More parents=more resources. More resources is generally better than less. Having kids myself, I can barely imagine being able to do it by myself... and even if I could it would certainly be to a lesser quality.

Sweden has the highest proportion of single-parent households at 34% whereas Poland is near the bottom at 9% [1].

[1] https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-eurostat-news/-/e...

One possible synthesis is that the high incomes in Sweden make up for the high number of single-parent households.

I almost noted in my prior comment that income is the second biggest factor but left that out. Totally agree that income is a big part of the equation. I also bet because it's Sweden it also has to do with public services like childcare being available.

"Single-parent households" in Scandinavia doesn't mean the same thing as it does in most of the world. There is usually still a high degree of coparenting.

This isn't a culture argument or even a sound/good argument for anything. Americans are just wealthier and you can't compare like that.

When you compare groups of students within the same country and adjust for both household income and intelligence you find that (again, even within the same intelligence brackets and income levels) some ethnic groups simply study more while others spend more time on things like unprovoked violence.

Id ask you for a citation, but I know it doesn’t exist.

The racial achievement gap is probably one of the most significant problems educators in the US think about. I think one of the biggest obstacles to improving it (not causing the problem, but making solutions difficult or ineffective) is that low-performing urban school districts tend to correlate strongly with strong teachers' unions and big, mismanaged school administrations where things are too bureaucratic and incompetent for anybody to be able to really effect significant change.

I'm not sure I support charter schools as a universal good, but they've actually proven to be pretty consistently effective at improving the educational attainment of low-income black/hispanic students [0-1]. When the local school system is a political quagmire and objectively failing in its mission to educate students, it's probably the only way out.

The meta-problem is that the people most actively involved in improving the racial educational achievement gap are precisely the type of people to reflexively dislike charter schools (because it's "right wing", although I see it more aligned with the centralization vs decentralization axis) and maybe even feel overtly threatened by them (because of their union job). Also, charter schools have to actually figure out how to get buy-in from low-income black and hispanic parents, figure out how to serve this community better, and can't hide behind the excuse of cyclical poverty + orwellian bureaucracy anymore.

I think a lot of educators really would rather work in a system where bad outcomes are guaranteed and thus not their fault, than one in which they actually have the ability to make more than just performative progress in serving the needs of their underprivileged student body.

[0] https://hechingerreport.org/proof-points-charter-schools-hav...

[1] https://www.kqed.org/news/11953408/charter-schools-show-gain...

At least near me the biggest problems facing the "urban" district compared to suburban ones is declining student populations as long time homeowners age in place and the maintenance costs of 100 year old buildings compared to 10-20 year old ones in the suburbs. Teachers tend to get paid the same or less in the city district and administration counts are higher but fairly close on a per student basis compared to the burbs.

This is before you get into the socioeconomic factors that make one student population more susceptible to starting and falling behind.

Wouldn't a declining student population mean more money per student? And it seems like it would often (but not always) be cheaper to maintain existing buildings vs building new ones? I'm also wondering how much of the new suburban buildings are financed with debt, and the costs just haven't really caught up to them yet.

A school's budget is tied directly to attendance. Less students = less budget.

> At least near me the biggest problems facing the "urban" district compared to suburban ones is declining student populations as long time homeowners age in place and the maintenance costs of 100 year old buildings compared to 10-20 year old ones in the suburbs

The building maintenance is a red herring. I believe in my district, it's about 10% of the budget on average.

Every urban district I'm familiar with has higher per-pupil funding than ~90th percentile suburban areas. (Seattle versus suburbs, Detroit versus smaller towns)

Why do you assume racial achievement gaps indicate problems with schools? For example, Asian students perform much better than white students. We don’t say that indicates a problem with how schools educate white kids. Instead, most people see it as a predictable consequence of asian immigrants being filtered for higher education. By that same token, why would we treat Hispanic students having lower scores as indicative of a problem with the schools? The U.S. Hispanic population is subject to the same immigrant filtering effect, but in the opposite direction. Both immigrant groups largely arrived in the last 50 years. Why would we assume the effects of the initial filtering would disappear so quickly?

Here’s a modest proposal: American schools are actually quite good across the board.

Why do you assume racial achievement gaps indicate problems with schools?

GP didn't say that, but educators of course see schools as an important area to address the gap. The literature is pretty clear on this being a complex problems with schools being an important wedge to break the vicious circle.

Schools are the only tool we have at hand to reliably solve it.

I wouldn't trust any data about charter schools that came from the Hoover Institute. Plenty of red states with weak labor laws have awful educational systems.

There is no shortage of young naive newly minted teachers who are eager to go into those low performing urban schools and help turn things around. But very few of them last more than a few years in those schools, they get badly burned by reality. The ones who last almost inevitably become callused and bitter, having lost all of the hope they had at the start. The biggest problem with those schools is the students themselves, and the families of those students. They're incredibly dysfunction and stymie all well intentioned efforts to help them.

Insofar as charter schools can help, it's because giving enough of a shit to apply for and go to one weeds out enough of the lost causes that would only disrupt everybody else. In fact, I think the best ways to improve those public schools is even simpler; make attendance optional. Families who give a shit will still attend, while all the trash will voluntarily stay home.

Hell no. Making attendance optional sacrifices way too much.

It's like reducing incarceration rates by never jailing people for anything short of murder. Sure, it improves on that one metric. Obviously. But the adverse effects elsewhere make it a nonstarter.

If you could trust self-selection to only ever stop the "lost causes" from attending? The absolute worst, most disruptive, least likely to ever benefit from education students? Then maybe.

But in practice, for every student like this there would be ten more who would benefit from school education if they attended, but wouldn't attend if it was optional.

And for those missing students, the difference between getting the classes and being left to their own devices might be the difference between becoming functioning adults, low in income but stable, and being locked in a vicious cycle of poverty, substance abuse, violence and crime.

Which is bad for the students in question, and even worse for the society.

But going to jail and getting an education are completely different things...nobody wants to go to jail.

You'd be surprised. America is an incredibly fucked up society. Free meals, Healthcare. Hell, even cheaper tattoos. There is a certain segment of the population where "jail" does not have the same meaning as it does for you or I.

Some evidence that progress can be made within public school systems, though perhaps less bureaucratic than northern cities: https://www.the74million.org/article/the-last-reformer-houst...

If you compare a country where most people are one ethnicity or where wealth and race are not as correlated as in the US, then it's a bit of an unfair comparison.

Does the comparison hold if you segment the white Americans, Chinese, Singaporeans, Japanese, etc. by economic class?

I think it’s the opposite—it is a fairer comparison. White Americans are a relatively homogenized population that reflect the entire spectrum of economic class, where immigration effects have been attenuated by time. Is it unfair to compare the median white american to the median Japanese, just because the U.S. also has a large Hispanic population that mostly descends from low-education post-1970 immigrants from impoverished Latin American countries?

West Virginia is a nice datapoint here: Almost completely white, but also poor. And one of the worst scores of all.

> Is it unfair to compare the median white american to the median Japanese, just because the U.S. also has a large Hispanic population that mostly descends from low-education post-1970 immigrants from impoverished Latin American countries?

It's a bit unfair because the average white American is wealthier than the races you excluded from American. The average Japanese person includes everyone from all classes, it does not skew towards the wealthier. If it did, you might see a different result.

Like I asked, does the comparison hold if you segment the results by economic class?

Skin color isn't it, actually.

I knew (second hand) a teacher in a rural area of a low population state. All white kids, she'd have kindergartners cussing her out. Very little hope for any academic future for the other grades as things didn't get better with the older kids.

I knew a white kid who lived in a trailer park whose mom was upset he was getting tutoring after school for his dyslexia because she told him he'd never amount to anything.

My mixed race friend mentioned he was accused of "acting white" in school because he actually tried to get good grades.

What do all of those things have in common? Poverty, yes, but blended with hopelessness. The kids were surrounded by people who didn't have much, didn't think they'd get anywhere, and didn't believe the kids would ever have a chance at a better life.

That last part is what separates them from kids in third world countries who still manage to achieve academic success. Hope and optimism aren't guarantees; they aren't a replacement for social support. They are, however, a necessary ingredient for the intrinsic motivation necessary for personal growth.

Rural low population states actually have pretty good test scores: https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/profiles/stateprofile?sfj=...

That's an understatement. Sort that by at or above basic and the top 5 states in the US are: North Dakota, South Dakota, Minnesota, Utah, Wisconsin.

Even in those states you mention, the number of students managing basic proficiency in maths fell by over 10 percentage points in the past 10 years. You can use the year selection on the site to see the picture change over the years. Texas dropped by over 20 points.

Interesting! Yeah, this is a significant decline across the board. I'm curious what it is in the US in particular that's driving such sharp declines. Because many places in the world did things like shut down schools during COVID, have internet/social media, ongoing obesity epidemics, major immigration from low education sources, demographic/fertility issues, and so on. Yet somehow looking at the latest PISA (2022) [1], the US now sits between Malta and Slovakia in math. And if these scores are any indicator, we're probably looking at a further decline in the next PISA results, which should be released this year.

[1] - https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/pisa-scor...

> Because many places in the world did things like shut down schools during COVID

Most of the EU/lots of Europe focused on getting the kids back in school before the US did. I personally think that was the right trade-off, but obviously people differ.

Nationally, seems to be mostly demographic change plus covid. For white 13 year olds, NAEP reading and math scores dipped a point from 2012-2020. Then they dipped 5-6 points from 2020-2023: https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/highlights/ltt/2023/

Pupil teacher ratios in rural states are insanely low. That would impact the below basic group presumably.

Edit: to say pupil teacher ratios are low, not high.

You can almost guarantee test scores in Minnesota and Wisconsin are being carried by the cities and suburbs, not rural areas. They have some of the best (and most expensive) schools in the country, and the highest test scores.

"Poverty blended with hopelessness" sounds about right. I'd like to emphasize that it's not just poverty, since there are plenty of recent immigrant families who live in poverty but the kids are at the top of their class. Unfortunately, though, there's a certain kind of degeneracy some families live in: the parents have largely failed in their every endeavor, and they'll become absolutely furious if they see the kids starting to rise above that, get their lives together, and accomplish things. If you live in communities like that, it's part of the deal: no one is allowed to escape, lest they make the rest of them look bad.

Sadly, there are a variety of such family, community, and social and peer group motivations and behaviors -

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crab_mentality

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crab_mentality#See_also

It's not the poverty; it's the learned helplessness.

The causal direction from poverty to learned helplessness is pretty much established, though

Learned helplessness is poverty+some other things, though. Otherwise no one in poverty would ever leave it. Just talking about causal direction elides reality.

>"acting white"

Honestly this is one of the biggest bullshit I've ever heard. Assuming that this mentality is quite widespread(not necessarily universal) among non White, then any attempt to introduce affirmative action or other equalizer practice would be futile. That kind of mentality must be purged hard from yesterday.

Teenage boys everywhere have a widespread bias against putting in the effort to get good grades.

They might call it "gay" or "sissy" or "acting white" or whatever, but the root cause is usually their perception of what masculinity should look like.

The men they look up to are anti-intellectual. This exists in all communities, race is not the main problem here.

That must be dealt with full spectrum crackdown on national level.

I'd like to see what a "full-spectrum crackdown" on anti-intellectualism in the US would look like, given that most of its population struggles to discern fact from fiction in the news cycle, healthcare and legal proceedings. The introduction of generative AI has only made that worse, pushing more distrust of any information that didn't come from a source counted among "one of us." Our problem stems from an intentionally poorly educated populace that still heavily relies on idolatry, allowing whatever demagogue with the means to rise and essentially manipulate the masses.

I'm pretty sure, at this point, this was intentional, individuals and orgs with the resources to create finely tuned systemic problems having been at it since the country's inception.

Media from mainstream to alternative march in tune with pro intellectualism messages. Any works of art that espouse anti intellectualism would be swiftly and immediately canceled (including its authors) without hesitation. Do this for a generation or two minimum.

Get sydney sweeny to date alec radford, make sure there's lots of PDA.

Banning TikTok could have been a great first step, but too may people were cooked by the algorithm to stop it.

FWIW, my friend was accused of acting white probably around the year 2000 or so, well before anything algorithmic.

Not to say that tiktok is innocent, but it certainly isn't the root cause.

Burning books and censoring media has rarely been a path to fostering intellectualism.

You call it an app ban, but really it’s just press censorship.

The irony is that TikTok et al. could also be the very solution GP wants, depending on algorithm.

Imagine kids glued to an app that shows them engaging and intellectually-positive content. (Which at that scale could actually be inferred)

Fast social isn't intrinsically evil: recommendation algorithms that maximize engagement at the expense of other social goods are. (Or even that operate blind to them)

You're ignoring the effect of the medium itself.

Education requires sustained engagement. Books are conducive to that kind of deep engagement with the material. It requires perseverance, an ability to sit with a topic at the expense of indulging all the cheap distractions that may be available to them (the internet furnishes these gladly and easily). TikTok and bite-sized social media is certainly not conducive to that. The train never leaves the station. Social media's very form consists of feeding the impulsive indulgence of distraction. It only produces superficiality and trains the user's attention span to contract, or to never develop in the first place.

Gamifying learning is a fool's errand. Children are easily distracted, because they haven't yet learned discipline. They need something to counteract these urges, like removing the tempting distraction, an environment that is saturated with relationships and habits that enable good behavior and pursuits, or the threat of punishment for straying from good behavior.

Agreed in principle, but you're never going to substantially remove distractions from children, because school doesn't control them at home (nor should it) and most parents are too busy to be involved (DIWK).

They're going to be bathed in the omnipresent social environment radiation for a large portion of their time.

And they're going to form part of their self image and life goals from that.

Better to make it as positive as we can. Or at least prevent it from being explicitly anti-intellectual.

Lack of role models, right? What men do they look up to?

I guess primary school teachers in the US are predominantly women as they are in most countries? So boys without intellectually inclined men at home or in their social circles do not have role models for educated masculinity.

I’m not sure if the gender of teachers is so much a factor as class identity.

Young French author Édouard Louis has written about his experience growing up in an extremely anti-intellectual working class milieu in France. It’s a country where school teachers are traditionally men, and discipline is stricter than in America or the Northern European countries. But that seems to go together with a class separation where the working class boys don’t see the male teachers as role models but more as representatives of the distant authority.

Both will play a role, and it will differ between societies.

Boys from more intellectually inclined backgrounds will have the role models outside school and that correlates with class (as do attitudes to authority, of course).

The lack of US male teachers (as well as non-white teachers, especially at higher grade levels) is born out by the numbers: https://usafacts.org/articles/who-are-the-nations-teachers/

The share of male teachers has trended downward in the 80s and 90s (by ~ -1%/yr), then slowed in the 00s+ (to ~ -0.5%/yr), and now sits at 22.4%.

The share of white teachers sits at 80%+ for post-kindergarten grades.

So if teachers represent academic achievement, then there are certainly a lot of kids (especially male minorities) who don't see themselves in their teacher (ethnically and gender-wise).

> Teenage boys everywhere have a widespread bias against putting in the effort to get good grades.

"Everywhere" as in "across the world and across time", "because testosterone/teen boys will be boys"?

If so, then I can give you an emphatic no, this is not at all true. It is, as with 99% of things, a cultural phenomenon. The degree to which the "bias against putting in the effort to get good grades" exists varies enormously depending on subculture and time. You may have personally only experienced cultures where this is the dominant case, but that does not make it indicative of immutable nature.

If not, then where and when is your "everywhere"?

Mandatory HRT to improve academic performance time.

> This exists in all communities, race is not the main problem here.

Absolutely not, this is hilariously wrong. I invite you to find any male role models in China and India (or just outside the Western hemisphere in general, for that matter) pushing such anti-intellectualism.

The male influencers here may misguide on communal lines, but you won't find anyone looking down on studying or considering it "unmanly" in any context.

How do you propose to do that?

Not t true. I don’t have the reference, but I read 10 or more years ago about an affluent community in the midwest whose black students greatly underperformed their white counterparts. The parents hired a black researcher and his final report said exactly that, that many black students didn’t want to appear white and also there were negative consequences for trying to do well. The parents thought it had to be racism and wouldn’t accept the results. The guy was a sociology professor at a college in CA.

For more annectdata, this same thing was happening at Berkeley High School around the same time. First hand knowledge from parents of students.

I have seen the pattern with latino students in SoCal as well.

Anecdotally the pressure can be worse with people who have a white parent (either mixed-race or through adoption); I am unsure if the cause more is internal (insecurity about self-image) or external (teenagers can be ruthless when they see differences).

I don't appreciate reading anecdata in response to cited findings. It cheapens the discussion. Now everyone is going to spend time writing knee-jerk responses to you.

At least the parent commenter had the grace to reply with another source instead of falling for it.

The parent commenter’s “source” makes no claims about race related performance whatsoever - it measures by just about everything but that, and then sorts by country. So maybe this is one of those darned reflexive knee jerk responses.

Pages 16, 32, 50 and 62 have breakdowns of mean score by ethnicity actually.

Ethnicity is way too coarse-grained to answer questions about culture and family wealth/connections. That’s lumping together a kid from an old-money family in New Haven with a kid from a trailer park in Virginia.

I'd say it's an incomplete measure, but it's far from useless given the US' continued statistically-significant disparities between ethnicity outcomes. The first step of solving a problem, etc. etc.

I do agree with the general sentiment though and think that too much research/news over the last couple decades has been exclusively ethnically segmented, given the economic segmentation that should always also be involved.

They're perpendicular questions and best triangulate the American experience in tandem.

E.g. what are outcomes for wealthy members of disadvantaged ethnicities? What are outcomes for poor members of advantaged ethnicities?

Those are interesting socioeconomic questions!

> They're perpendicular questions and best triangulate the American experience in tandem.

They are not perpendicular, which is why it's difficult to separate them. You even seem to know this intuitively, that's why they're "interesting socioeconomic questions".

They are perpendicular, in that one does not determine the other.

They may influence each other, but it's obviously physically possible to be a wealthy minority in the US.

It shows correlation, not causation. In the vein of this thread, it's not more or less useful than other anecdotes.

I posited a causation based on how the anecdotes countered the general trends in the data. I welcome counter arguments better than "I'm ignoring you because you don't have numbers".

Were I being paid to research this more deeply, I would. I'm not, and if someone doesn't like my argument, they're free to find one of their own.

Test scores improve with income among all groups, but the gaps between groups remain relatively similar at each income level.

Whose to say "cited findings" have any more value than "anecdata".

The institutions that build these national and international statistics do so with bias and goals, or without complete data. For example, how can a bureau make a national statistics on crime accurate when cities intentional report crime incorrectly to look better in statistics.

To think "cited findings" is gospel truth is naive. I know it's highly desired here, but I stand by what I'm saying. Data is lovely, but garbage in, garbage out, and most national-level data is complete garbage with an agenda or bias or naivety.

Anecdotes are not a very useful tool in discussions about generalisations. They provide little evidence aside from saying that it's a category of event that can exist. No one at any point has said citations are gospel. Just that anecdotes aren't adding much to the discussion at hand. If you've got issues with the cited data, be precise instead of casting general aspersions on academia.

Given that this is just a discussion between random strangers on an internet forum, I personally find both statistics and clear anecdotes, which GP provided, valuable in creating the richest perspective.

This isn't Proceedings of Hacker News or parliament: we're writing ephemeral internet words and trying to enrich each other.

Cited data on broad human population shows correlation at best, not causation.

I posited a cause based on the lived experiences people shared with me.

You're free to disagree with my conclusion, or to suggest an alternative cause. None of the cited data has actually done either of those things.

Then argue the methodology and data; anecdotes are great tools for sharing narratives, but a narrative based on bad data doesn't help anyone achieve good outcomes.

> Whose to say "cited findings" have any more value than "anecdata".

The history of human civilization.

I disagree. Were this an academic symposium I would agree. But this is the internet where folks who know how to establish causality and understand research methods and proper citing are uncommon. Fortunately, I do appreciate the author's thought and contribtions to observation data, and, tongue in cheek, as a utility monster my appreciation more than negates your lack of appreciation.

There is nothing hn doesn’t understand. There are just a lot of juniors, which is important.

Was your comment meant for me or someone else? I don't follow.

Just responding to: “folks who know how to establish causality and understand research methods and proper citing are uncommon”

There may be more folks on hn with said skills than you presume.

This may well be true in terms of absolute rate, but still satisfy "uncommon."

Were this an academic symposium on lung cancer I would agree. But this is the internet where folks who know how to establish causality and understand research methods and proper citing are uncommon. As a utility monster my appreciation reading about the author's grandma who lived 'til 90 smoking a pack a day more than negates your obsession with medical data.

The irony of this being every discussion of education on HN.

Must consume more utility, rawr.

> I don't appreciate reading anecdata in response to cited findings. It cheapens the discussion.

So does the linked PDF address this proposed "hopelessness" factor, or is it that once someone cites something the discussion becomes restricted to only things that have published study results?

Also, if someone were to cite https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.k5094 on the effectiveness of parachutes, are other commenters then forbidden from citing anecdata that disagree with the findings?

The cited findings, don't refute the culture argument though, and maybe even reenforces it. In US culture being illiterate is bad, being bad at math is not looked down up on. The stats show good at reading and bad at math.

While there are STEM (Science Tech Engineering and Math) initiatives, I have yet to see one that actually includes math. You see results in science but not math.

The U.S. isn’t “bad” at math. I found some updated charts that break down the data for 2022 (the underlying data is all from OECD and NCES). White kids in the U.S. outperform non-immigrant kids from every European country except Switzerland, the Netherlands, and Estonia: https://x.com/cremieuxrecueil/status/1732244690408214720?s=4.... Though to be fair, the US and Europe are all notable behind the developed asian countries (Singapore, Japan, Korea) which may indicate a lesser cultural focus on STEM.

I cannot think of any single ethnocultural group in the West that highly values education and, at the same time, has bad outcomes doing so. We have invested a lot of money and effort into our educational systems.

Even traditionally oppressed groups like the Jews or the Chinese (Chinese Exclusion Act anyone?) or descendants of Russian muzhiks or Indian untouchable castes do have good outcomes if they actually motivate their kids to learn.

The groups that are systematically out (in Czechia, the part of the Roma that lives in ghettos - contrary what people tend to think, a lot of the Roma marry into the wider society, mix with it and live quite comfortable self-sufficient lives) tend to be the ones that despise schooling, and it will take a century or so of concerted efforts to change the attitudes.

Jews were motived to achieve because they were oppressed.

How do Indian low castes do compared to higher castes in the same country? They often continue to suffer from discrimination from higher castes in the west. I can believe they do better than some other groups, but how to they compare to higher caste Indians?

I don’t know about low caste indians, but a good data point might be vietnamese. They are generally looked down on by other east asians. Their poverty rate in 1980 was higher than among black people. Today (where 60% are still foreign born) their median income and poverty rate is right around the national average, about 10% behind white americans.

> Skin color isn't it, actually.

Is contradicted by this

> My mixed race friend mentioned he was accused of "acting white" in school because he actually tried to get good grades.

Unless you are taking skin colour very literally, which is obviously not it (someone's academic performance is not going to change if they get a heavy tan or use s kin whitening cream or take a drug that changes skin colour etc.).

I interpreted "white" to mean an ethnic identity, not a literal description.

How might we formalize these anecdotes and prove them out from a systemic issue?

> Insofar as the US had a “culture averse to education,” surely that affects white americans as much as it affects anyone else. But, on average, they are not the ones who are behind their peers internationally.

Education outcome massively depends on economic status of the parents. And that, no matter the country by the way, is very closely tied to immigration history and ethnicity.

When parents struggle to afford basic school supplies (to the tune that many teachers have to pay for their students' needs out of their own measly paychecks [1]), that's not exactly conductive to good learning outcomes. When parents don't have the time to sit down with their children and help them with learning because they have to work two jobs to make rent (remember, even two minimum wage jobs is not enough [2]), the kids are put further behind. And they certainly can't afford private after-school tutoring.

The last part is the environment itself - aka the quality of housing (mold, cockroaches and other health impacts) or when gangs lure in kids with the promise of striking it rich by dealing drugs or whatnot...

[1] https://edition.cnn.com/2023/09/02/business/teachers-back-to...

[2] https://www.housingfinance.com/news/rent-remains-unaffordabl...

Education outcome massively depends on economic status of the parents

And to bring this point home, because of systemic racism in the US, race is an indicator of economic status.

Anyone intentionally leaving out this context is contributing to the system.

https://home.treasury.gov/news/featured-stories/racial-inequ...

Agreed, "culture" is a symptom, not a cause.

All humans are the same species, and in a vacuum, have no ideas or inherent behaviors beyond base instinct.

Culture is simply a byproduct of the environment around a segment of humans.

Hence, filtering by white kids in the US simply measures the result of higher average economic status (same as filtering by Asian kids).

American outcomes would look better if the populations they economically disenfranchised historically stayed in other countries like Europeans did with the colonial system (vs importing populations as slave labor domestically in the US). The economic class stratification that still lingers as a result of this in the US is such a unique factor as to make comparisons that don't take this into account worthless.

That's not what the article is discussing (decline over time). We (all?) know white American have over average performance due to whatever reasons. The question is: Are they declining alongside the overall group. That might suggests that the reason(s) for this decline is cross-culture/ethnic/race.

> We (all?) know white American have over average performance due to whatever reasons.

[citation needed]

(I'm not american) so I don't have a horse in this race.

These reports are becoming to find because measuring racial differences is considered racist, so you'd be asking for something that would not be acceptable in modern studies.

>culture averse to education

Remind me when Vivek told his followers that American education need ti be more rigorous to compete with China and other Asian nations he got owned so hard, practically quiting from DOGE before it started.

I don't think that disproves the culture argument. American culture is segmented. (Modern marketing and politics have leaned heavily into this segmentation by the way.) For example, if you grow up exposed to ghetto culture you will probably not value education. The PISA assessment doesn't tell us that white kids who grew up in the ghetto are magically competing with Singapore's best. And we know that the ghetto is less white than the rest of America. Ergo in aggregate, US whites outperform. There are of course a million exceptions to this i.e. grow up in a certain type of Asian immigrant household and you will probably do great on these tests and maybe learn piano, violin etc. as well.

Now whether ghetto culture or ghetto economics is the main contributor to poor academic performance... I will leave that finer point up for debate, but my point here is the US has big differences in educational outcomes based on NEIGHBORHOOD, if your neighborhood is high crime and the schools are broke, your educational outcomes tend to be bad.

If there is a culture related problem, I think it's that the people pushing this trashy culture, for example music that glorifies rape, drugs and gangs, code it as black culture and use that as a way to deflect criticism. You're a racist if you don't like hip hop! It would be an understatement to say that many black Americans want nothing to do with that lifestyle or image and have evolved well beyond it, yet it still gets called black culture. It is a cultural weakness that we don't see rape, drugs and gangs as bad stuff to promote and reward, full stop, and not a thing we should be educating the next generation with, regardless of the skin color of the performer, or its roots.

BTW for whatever it's worth I'm white and I grew up in the ghetto. My parents forced me to take a public bus for an hour each morning to a magnet school in the rich part of town. Years later I met up with my white childhood friend from down the road who had gone to our local high school. I had a bunch of academic achievements and a college scholarship, he had a gunshot wound in his stomach. He was a smart guy when I knew him but the ghetto had its own plans for him.

All this demonstrates is that outcomes are not uniform, not that the culture explanation is necessarily wrong.

Schools in many urban districts where we see this same disparity control for teacher qualifications and per pupil student funding. In fact, various anti-poverty measures and intensive interventions on low performing schools even tip the scale in their favor on thr "supply" side.

Education isn't just something "delivered" like manufactured product; it is something that had to be properly received and used.

We have to start asking some better questions to uncover what's going on, and they will be a lot tougher to quantify.

That’s crazy man! Hey, I don’t suppose it was controlled for income as well as race, was it?

Wow it's almost like racism is systemic.

It's pretty wild how you can show lower achievement scores for any countries definition of "black" while changing who belongs in that group.

For instance, Italians were considered black in the early 1900s and wouldn't you know it, there was an achievement discrepancy for Italians so long as that definition held.

Or you can look at apartheid and post apartheid South Africa - when the political structure flipped, so did the academic scores of the groups.

The discrepancy follows the social category and power asymmetry and not the actual people. It's a social artifact, not some biologically inert trait.

> Or you can look at apartheid and post apartheid South Africa - when the political structure flipped, so did the academic scores of the groups

Do you have a source for this. As far as I can verify this is not true, the gap in achievement persisted and the cause is usually attributed to the legacy of apartheid.

I won't get into the larger point your comment is making about power structures + definitions as I don't know enough about those histories to get into your assertions, but wanted to point out that the parent comment didn't seem to suggest these discrepancies were "biologically inert" as you were refuting (I'm also assuming you meant "inherent"). They were commenting on the a racial difference in educational outcomes. From my understanding that's largely a systemic issue, and regardless of shifting definitions/categorization, not a conversation about biology anymore.

> 15 year old white american students

Which barbarian idiot included a question about skin colour in an otherwise-respectable test?

Hmmm I wonder if something happened after 2018, it's on the tip of my tongue I just can't quite remember ..

> Insofar as the US had a “culture averse to education,” surely that affects white americans as much as it affects anyone else.

Its like you've never lived in America.

Obviously white people are extremely privileged and also have a different culture. Keep in mind that schools in predominantly black areas are typically significantly less funded than those in white areas.

> Obviously white people are extremely privileged and also have a different culture.

Why is this obviously? It's like /you've/ never lived in America, not outside of some coastal city. Go to anywhere in the Midwest or Southeast and tell me that white people are privileged in some unique way. It's a poverty problem and a problem of cultural priorities, not about race.

It is a poverty problem, and black people are much more likely to be in poverty. That doesn't mean that white people can't also be in poverty.

A lot of people just don't understand what privilege is. Who has more upward mobility - an impoverished black person, or an impoverished white person? Who is more likely to face systemic factors that influence poverty and outcomes - black people or white people?

And before I hear "well not everything is about race!!1!" Uh, the US has a long history of systemic racism that does continue to this day.

Obviously if you just integrated a few decades ago you're not going to just magically have equal outcomes. People don't move like that, systems are sticky, and the US isn't evenly distributed.

And, of course, race is correlated tightly with culture and with average income and levels of poverty.

No, you can't just ignore race. Well you can, if that's easier for you, but it's dishonest and incomplete.

And, because I know it's coming: yes I'm white, no I don't have white guilt, I just think about the world we live in. Its easy not to think about things. I prefer thinking about things.

> Keep in mind that schools in predominantly black areas are typically significantly less funded than those in white areas.

Spending per student is not partially predictive of education outcomes in the USA.

Finnish people in Finland and Japanese people in Japan also have “white privilege” in the way you’re talking about—they don’t suffer from whatever disadvantages are associated with being black in America. White Americans have the ordinary range of privileges and disadvantages of people in any country (some are richer, some are poorer, etc). If you trying to evaluate American educational culture and schools in general, it makes sense to compare white people in the U.S. with Finnish people in Finland or Japanese people in Japan or non-immigrant French people in France. To the extent we have this data, Americans perform very well in such comparisons.

If what you say about racism, etc., is true, that is actually an argument against the cultural explanation. That would mean that educational underperformance compared to other countries is caused by internal racism in the U.S., not some anti-educational trend across American culture as a whole. If you somehow erased racism and brought everyone up to the scores of white Americans, then the U.S. would be right behind Japan in educational outcomes—even though the Americans care more about football than reading.

Also, only about 5 states have significantly more funding for white students once you consider federal funds. About twice as many have significantly more funding for black students: https://www.urban.org/sites/default/files/2022-10/Measuring%... (see page 22).

not surprised you lose what you don't use, does modern world even require people using those reading and math skills anymore?

Looking at the amount of contracts I have to read to even start software it should. Looking at how many people buy lottery tickets I guess the same for math.

yes, if you're in any job that interacts with a lot of people and is at least a little technical. writing for communication and math proficiency are both extremely important for being effective.

> However,the United States, particularly in the last 50 years, seems to have fostered a culture averse to education.

I always find it interesting that the anti-schooling mentality is so prevalent here on HN, too. It’s most obvious in threads about cheating, where a popular topic of discussion is to defend cheating as a rational reaction because school doesn’t matter, a degree is “just a piece of paper”, and you’ll learn everything on the job anyway.

It also shows up in the tired argument that college is only really about networking, not learning.

I’ve had some on and off experience mentoring college students in the past. Those who adopt these mentalities often hit a wall partway through college or even at their first job when their baseline intelligence runs out and they realize they don’t have the necessary foundation because they’ve been blowing off coursework or even cheating their way through college for years.

I’m afraid that LLMs are only going to enable more of this behavior. It’s now easier to cheat and students are emboldened by the idea that they don’t need to learn things because they can always just ask ChatGPT.

I noticed a weird disdain for education too.

I once posted in support of general education and it didn’t go so well.

I suppose the people on HN are a certain demographic.

I don't think it's a disdain for education, but a disdain for the educational system that currently exists in the US.

If you have kids and experience it first hand, it's extremely underwhelming. If you were an outlier in any way as a student (and I bet a majority of people here are), it's extremely underwhelming.

My wife and I have advanced degrees and place a very high value on education, and I have very little that's positive to say about the state of education in our very highly ranked public schools. They've completely lost the plot. But any criticism is presumed to be hostility to teachers (and their union) or flat out racism by a vocal and increasingly large segment of the population.

The difference is that you can, quite successfully, keep "cheating" with an LLM while at a job. And people do, not just in lower-importance roles, but at law offices, etc.

I work in tech and I see this more and more every day. By "cheating", I mean deciding that you don't want to do the thinking or even spot-check the result; you just ask an LLM to vibe-write a design doc, send it out, and have others point out issues if they care.

Your very last point though is where it all falls apart. If you have people who know what they're doing, co-mingled with "LLM cheaters", its very obvious they're cheating. Before long, they're found out and fired. It's not sustainable.

While HN users have various backgrounds, I suppose programmers make up quite a large proportion of this community.

Programmers are generally more anti-schooling, at least anti-college for a good reason. It's one of the high-paying jobs where a degree is optional in modern days. It's also one of the few fields where the best resources are not gatekept.

They're anti-college because of general education classes, which get in the way of the making money part or seem useless to their specialty.

Einstein had a few things to say about this. [1]

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/1952/10/05/archives/einstein-stresse...

The cultural shift is secondary to the demographic shift. Young Americans have been squeezed at one end by mass immigration from countries with lower educational performance and literacy rates, higher crime rates, higher gang participation rates, etc., which accelerated to such an extreme that native English speakers are now a minority in our local school district. And they’re squeezed at the other end, forced to compete for college admissions, jobs, and housing against a hungry and ambitious global population vying for H-1Bs and student visas. We sold out the younger generation, our own children and grandchildren, and it wasn’t at all driven by political and corporate machinations. No, it was for some greater good, and if you dare question that you’re a fascist.

> We sold out the younger generation [...] for some greater good, and if you dare question that you’re a fascist.

I think this is a very flawed argument. Immigration was tolerated/encouraged because it kept demographics stable, labor affordable and economic growth high.

Pretending now that the previous generations did this for some "greater good" or out of misguided kindness is disingenuous.

> There is more and cheaper education available than ever before.

The real issue isn’t the availability of learning materials, but the healthy pressure and right push from experienced teachers. People tend to overestimate how self-driven most students are. The truth is, most students aren’t naturally motivated to learn. They need society to give them a sense of purpose, and they need teachers to challenge them with problems that keep them just outside their comfort zone. Sadly, the U.S. school system provides neither. Take my kid as an example: even though he’s in a decent public school, he thinks his schoolwork is tough and the SAT is challenging. Yet the SAT wouldn't even measure up to the high-school graduation exam in my country, let alone the college entrance exam. In the end, it’s the broad middle of students who suffer from low standards. With the right motivation and push, they could learn so much more, but instead they end up wasting precious time in high school.

> The real issue isn’t the availability of learning materials

Well, some people claim in these comments that their children don't get textbooks. Not saying that you're wrong, but it's gonna take a lot of 'healthy pressure and right pushes' to account for the fact that they don't have educational material.

In my kids' schools, the textbooks haven't been removed due to cost, they have been replaced with even more expensive online material that no one properly consumes.

Educators have been brainwashed into believing "computers are the future!" and don't seem to be able to even contemplate that reading something on a screen is a poor substitute for physically interacting with something (a pen and paper, a book, or the actual thing being described in a video).

I regularly have to tell my kids to stop doing math and science problems on their computer and get out a pencil and paper to do the work so they can organize it and understand it. They argue at first because their teachers tell them not to (so they say), but stop when they actually see it working.

> seems to have a culture averse to education

Nay, not "seems", but has indeed subverted education. Hofstadter's Pulitzer-winning book was published 62 years ago [0] and now, in 2025, even the highest office is unrecognisable.

[0] _ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-intellectualism_in_Americ...

I don't know about this. In my community atleast, most kids want to do the best they can in school and feel more pressure than ever for admission to top schools - who are more selective than ever. Particularly since competition for knowledge economy jobs is tighter than ever.

In my community, it’s both. The referendum to continue funding the teachers who supported the advanced math and reading classes didn’t pass.

The referendum didn’t pass because a large swath of the community saw no value in having advanced math and reading classes. I have no doubt there was a lot of “I didn’t go to advanced classes and I turned out just fine, that’s a waste of money” thought process.

That’s one hypothesis: American culture is degenerate.

I offer an alternative hypothesis: corporations influence policy.

Corporations would simply prefer to import skilled workers than to have to pay taxes to educate Americans. Evidence for my hypothesis can be found in Vivek et al’s endorsement of the lazy Americans hypothesis. It is a narrative the GOP gets from corporate donors and not from Joe Sixpack fox tv viewers who make up the base.

In the US there are a few obvious things, but everyone acts as if we are powerless to solve them:

1. Cell phones in classrooms.

I don’t know how or why they were ever allowed. They should have to be in a backpack or in a locker and off during class.

2. Not removing students with bad behavior from classrooms and schools.

The current thinking on how to handle a student who is seriously misbehaving and potentially violent is to remove all of the other students from the classroom versus just removing the problematic student in question. This is because there have been instances where a child has been physically removed and has gotten seriously injured. The thinking on expulsion is that it should essentially never happen because kids who get expelled have bad outcomes later in life. But the net effect is that one bad student can hold an entire classroom hostage and there is nothing the teacher can do. This is obviously detrimental to all of the kids who are compliant and behaving. It also causes burnout which leads me to the next major issue facing public schools.

3. Good teachers are quitting

It isn’t worth it to teach in America. You need a lot of expensive education. You get paid very little. You have no power to remove a student who are major disruptions and make it impossible to teach. And, in many districts, teachers are being accused of trying to indoctrinate children because we live in a politicized world.

4. Too many parents aren’t parenting

The number of kids who are not potty trained by kindergarten continues to rise. This is an issue of parents not wanting to do something that is hard and takes patience.

5. Lowering Standards

When faced with kids failing the solution should never be to lower long held standards. The kids are the same, they are just as capable, it is all of the above that is different.

Bonus. We feed kids junk in schools

This has been going on for decades. Why is it so hard to make fresh food for kids? It could probably cost about the same if done properly. The answer is it takes some effort and people have to think about it.

Point 5 has been a thing for a very long time with respect to sports. The kid is marked-up a few points on tests if they're the reason the basketball team is winning.

Re point 2: In Germany, among other countries, you have social education workers (a college-educated job) in school for these situations. Such behavior has underlying causes, e.g. problems at home (fresh divorce, drugs, poverty-related stress) recent trauma (accidents, death of a loved one, abuse), mental illness (AHDS etc.). Treat the cause and the behavior changes.

Most schools here have those too. The problem is in the United States children are treated just a hair better than chattel slaves and their parents can basically do anything they want up to the line of actually killing them, and the state does very little.

And, even in the cases where the state should and could do something, the line for those services is incredibly long and the child will be properly fucked up by the time they get to the front.

So the state, which is incompetent/ineffective in your description above, should be given even more power in this situation?

Parents in the US don't have any more rights than those elsewhere.

I mean, it's ineffective because it's under-resourced. Child welfare offices and family services in general have been gutted by the politics of austerity in the name of tax cuts and balancing budgets after the aforementioned tax cuts. You can take the best damn engine in the world and if you run it on barely any fuel, you will get barely any power.

I've never understood this pervasive logic in our culture where a government service that's deemed ineffective has it's budgets and staffing cut. How is that supposed to help anything?

And, in regards to the state getting more power; yes but no? I don't think it's a matter of the state needing more power than it has, I think it's a matter of children needing more legal protections for themselves as people. Like it's wild how authoritarian the American system makes parents, whether they desire that power or not. Parents routinely keep their children from going to school because the schools values "don't align" with theirs, but that's not a choice a parent should be making, not really? If a parent is all about that Jesus life and is blessed in whichever way to not really need to function in society, bully for them. That's not necessarily true for their children and they aren't the ones who will suffer the consequences of that choice, their children are but the children largely have no say in the matter until it's FAR too late.

We're the only developed nation that has not signed onto the UN's charter for children to have rights as people themselves as opposed to simply the property of their parents, subject to the whims of people who supposedly have their best interests in mind, but with absolutely zero recourse for that child if that child disagrees with those whims. It's very strange to me that children effectively exist, in the "land of the free," within tiny totalitarian states until such time as they turn a completely arbitrary age, at which point they're expected to be plus or minus functioning adults, with whatever teaching their parents permitted and completed before then, with, in many places, NO oversight whatsoever.

> I mean, it's ineffective because it's under-resourced. Child welfare offices and family services in general have been gutted by the politics of austerity in the name of tax cuts and balancing budgets after the aforementioned tax cuts. You can take the best damn engine in the world and if you run it on barely any fuel, you will get barely any power.

Tax cuts at the state and local level, which is where these offices receive funding, are not happening on a widespread level to my knowledge. Increases in my personal state and local tax rates have outpaced inflation for approximately the last decade, and yet somehow every government agency feels they have a budget crisis.

> I've never understood this pervasive logic in our culture where a government service that's deemed ineffective has it's budgets and staffing cut. How is that supposed to help anything?

Because no matter how effective a government agency is, the solution is always to give it more money. No matter how wisely it uses any additional money it receives, any issues the agency has are blamed on a lack of funding by many and the only conceivable solution is to increase funding. And there are many places where these agencies are not being cut, but are still not effective.

There is rarely any serious assessment of whether every function currently performed by the government needs to continue to exist.

Take a look at the budget of any government. By and large, their budgets have increased substantially year over year, yet has the quality of service improved or even been maintained? Schools are the perfect example of my point. Throwing money at the problem isn't the answer.

> And, in regards to the state getting more power; yes but no? I don't think it's a matter of the state needing more power than it has, I think it's a matter of children needing more legal protections for themselves as people. Like it's wild how authoritarian the American system makes parents, whether they desire that power or not.

Children have legal protection from abuse and neglect, the standard of which has been continually raised in my lifetime (which is great to be clear).

> Parents routinely keep their children from going to school because the schools values "don't align" with theirs, but that's not a choice a parent should be making, not really? If a parent is all about that Jesus life and is blessed in whichever way to not really need to function in society, bully for them. That's not necessarily true for their children and they aren't the ones who will suffer the consequences of that choice, their children are but the children largely have no say in the matter until it's FAR too late.

This hits on the crux of the issue, and I don't have an answer to be clear. You are highly concerned about some kid slipping through the cracks because his parents are nutjobs. Other people (I fall more on this end of the spectrum, but certainly acknowledge your point) are more concerned about watching their kid's math/science/english teacher bumble their way through the material but being told that the school is doing a great job and they have no right to pull them out to ensure their time in school isn't wasted.

> We're the only developed nation that has not signed onto the UN's charter for children to have rights as people themselves as opposed to simply the property of their parents, subject to the whims of people who supposedly have their best interests in mind, but with absolutely zero recourse for that child if that child disagrees with those whims.

Who cares, the UN is meaningless, particularly around the concept of positive rights that liberals love to invent with no way of actually providing.

Minor children do have rights that increase as they approach the age of majority in their state.

> It's very strange to me that children effectively exist, in the "land of the free," within tiny totalitarian states until such time as they turn a completely arbitrary age, at which point they're expected to be plus or minus functioning adults, with whatever teaching their parents permitted and completed before then, with, in many places, NO oversight whatsoever.

That's not how things work now in the US. Do you live there?

And let's say we give kids more rights than they have now, are you willing to relieve parents from their legal and financial responsibilities and have the state take them on instead, because the kids can't do it themselves (which is the point of them having a legal guardian)? How will you fund and manage that exactly?

Yeah and it's not working at all

1. Good luck. Have you ever tried to take an iPad kid's iPad? Be ready for the fight of your fucking life.

2 and 5 are handily down to No Child Left Behind which is frankly some of the worst legislation ever devised for education.

3 and 4: And these factors are only getting worse as worse and worse kids enter the school systems. Nobody wants to deal with them, including their parents.

Bonus: It's not hard, but we won't allocate the money. School lunch lady is a job considered a punch line because for some reason our culture thinks it's easy to serve food to several hundred people in 45 minutes when the people in question aren't old enough to buy cigarettes, but good fucking luck getting money and people allocated to actually do that.

If you can't take a kid's iPad away the parents have made major mistakes and the only option is for the school to directly address this addiction head on.

I see it with a lot of parents that use iPads and other devices to pacify their kids. Yes, it is easy, but when they are so addicted to it that they can’t put it down it is a problem.

>1. Good luck. Have you ever tried to take an iPad kid's iPad? Be ready for the fight of your fucking life.

If a parent has a child that is addicted to an iPad or any other device, the blame is squarely on the parent having let the child use the addictive device so much in the first place. If there needs to be a "detox" period for the child's addiction, so be it, but throwing up one's hands and giving up is parental negligence.

Oh I completely agree. But it isn’t the parents problem, it’s the teachers, and the teacher is uniquely un-equipped and disempowered to deal with it. They have a room full of kids to attend to and one having a meltdown because they’ve lost their dopamine dispenser and have no emotional regulation capability ruins that entire class.

Fair enough, I misunderstood your point. It's so strange to me that teachers are having to deal with any of these behavioral issues. I seem to recall it being the domain of Assistant Principals and what we called "resource officers". Any disruption more than a childish comment meant a trip to the principals office escorted by an officer. That was it. Teaching could continue.

The issue is you can no longer physically remove a child. So getting them there is the problem if they are not going willingly and if they are a big enough problem they need to be removed it probably means they aren’t doing anything willingly.

> The issue is you can no longer physically remove a child

What change has made this impossible?

Any person who has such an "iPad kid" has completely failed as a parent. That they can't have everything their way is literally the first moral value children are taught in functioning societies; if this basic need is not being met then we are truly living in a dystopia.

Yes, it’s a fight sometimes. Do it anyway. When we give in to avoid a blow‑up, we teach “meltdown = win.” That’s not fair to the kid long‑term. Set the limit, prep the transition, follow through.

> In the US there are a few obvious things, but everyone acts as if we are powerless to solve them

Yes but they aren’t the things you said:

1. Schools are filled with disruptive kids who use up time and resources and are not removed. 2. Teachers have no enforcement authority so they cannot do any of what you said, including removing phones. 3. Teachers and administrators are generally not smart or capable and continue to spend resources on everything except time spent reading, writing, and doing math. 4. Teachers are trapped in a web of legal red tape, bad incentives, and horrible metrics. 5. The US is segregated by by class and education.

Districts need to make district-wide policies and have clear action steps that happens if a student is caught with the phone out.

What are some examples of consequences they would enforce?

First offense > phone goes in a lock box for the day Second offense > in school suspension Third offense > out of school suspension

Schools won’t suspend problem students

Is 1 even true? I can't say I have ever heard of a school that allows phones out in class. Taking them till the end of school, or making a parent come claim them is the standard punishment I have seen.

Taking them implies they have respect to give them to you or you are willing to use force to get them. Neither exist.

Sending them home implies there is a parent who cares and will come.

Anecdote: I have spoken to primary school teachers on the east coast of the United States who report that in recent years, there were not supported by parents and administrators when trying to separate kids from their phones ins school.

This was the case in schools 15+ years ago, but recently a lot have had more problems with parents complaining about teachers taking away their child's phone.

Part of it is that phones are more expensive, a $900 iPhone vs a $100 Nokia.

Another is (perhaps founded) anxiety about their child needing to have a way to communicate to the outside world in an emergency situation like a school shooting.

Also people get used to things, and modern parents have grown used to being able to text and check on their child any time of day at any location versus sending them off on their bike with no phone and telling them to be back by the time the street lights come on.

It's definitely a problem that needs to be addressed and it needs strong backing from higher levels of administration so it doesn't become an argument of each teacher versus angry parents.

> Another is (perhaps founded) anxiety about their child needing to have a way to communicate to the outside world in an emergency situation like a school shooting.

Yes, a situation less likely to happen than being struck by lightning. Very founded!

Not to mention you can just, I dunno, borrow anyone else's phone and have one or two phone numbers memorized? Assuming if they are in an emergency and alone they are not going to be saved by a phone.

It's rare, but scary, and humans are often bad at judging things that are rare but scary.

I'm not saying it's a good net reason to let kids keep their phones, it's just founded in some real things that have happened in this country, including a famous case where kids were calling/texting parents while police waited for over an hour before entering, while blocking parents who had arrived from entering the school.

Letting kids have their phones isn't an actual solution to that problem, but right now in a lot of places that's the argument each teacher has to have with each parent. It's better for the state, county, etc. to pass an explicit policy about phones in the classroom so teachers can just point to that policy instead of having to rehash the argument with every parent.

Yes. It is an issue because 1. Phones are incredibly expensive now so if something happens to it parents are pissed. 2. The high prevalence of school shootings creates a feasible reason why students and their parents want their phones on their person.

Some school districts are starting to create firmer rules around this.

Yes it's true but it's not limited to or even primarily phones. It's disruptive students who cannot sit still or listen to lessons regardless of whether they have a phone or not. Phones are an easy scapegoat for shit parents who won't do anything to set their kids on the right path. Anything wrong their kids do must be because of someone else. Ban the phones all you want. These parents will still be shit parents and their kids will still be disruptive in classes. We cannot tackle anti-social behaviors because it's largely a protected political and religious class.

Cellphones is true, but it's mostly just another symptom of the disruptive kids.

The ones trying to do their best, who are not rude and inconsiderate of others, are usually quietly paying attention regardless of whether or not they have a phone with them. The disruptive ones are going to cause other ways to play up even if they could not have their phones with them.

> 2. Teachers have no enforcement authority so they cannot do any of what you said, including removing phones.

If it's school policy, the teacher could say that offending students can get suspended or some similar measure.

> 4. Too many parents aren’t parenting

You attribute this to increased laziness, and that might contribute, but there are other factors at play.

For one, it takes significantly more hours of work from both parents just to provide basic food & shelter than it did a few decades ago. Calling parents who work more hours than any previous generation in history "lazy" is itself lazy and misses the point.

Did not say “lazy” as you misquote, just that it isn’t happening.

On 2, the US DOEd has decided for at least the last couple decades that it is inherently racist if a school's punishment metrics are misaligned with their demographics (e.g. white kids are 50% of the school population but receive only 40% of suspensions).

That environment makes it risky to punish anyone, and a lack of order causes or compounds almost every other item on your list (which I largely agree with).

I think a major issue is the lack of a feedback loop. Cheap money in america means that no matter what country you're currently in, it's financially beneficial to migrate to the US. One of the happy paths towards this end is migrating for college or higher education.

In other countries' colleges without this unlimited input second to local students, there is a feedback loop connecting the college back to the local schools. This ensures that schools keep up. In america this is not required, since no matter what standard say UW sets, the corresponding tutoring centres in India, China and Singapore will adapt to that within weeks. And they can send as many students as UW can possibly ever want.

It also doesn't help that international students bring in more money than local students.

States are starting to pass bans for phones in schools which is a wonderful thing so we are making progres there.

> 2. Not removing students with bad behavior from classrooms and schools

This is basically _the_ reason people send their kids to private schools

From your list it's hard to explain why jurisdictions such as San Diego (reading 4th grade male) test score have risen continuously since the 2000s seems like, if the students are defecating themselves at ever-increasing rates test scores would go down there too.

Or is San Diego immune to these problems? I think the reality is that these test scores aren't majorly affected by literally any of the things you listed.

> However,the United States, particularly in the last 50 years, seems to have fostered a culture averse to education.

There's good reason for this. Not everyone enjoys learning for the sake of it. The pitch for forced education is that it will help you sustain yourself as an adult. If adults are finding their time in forced public education to be regretted, then they pass that information onto the younger generations. Maybe there are better ways to acquire useful skills.

I'm always a little surprised to see the HN crowd so in favor of education. The median commenter writes programs for a living, and probably acquired that skill mostly on their own. They might enjoy learning for its own sake, but surely they can look at their own situation objectively and realize their marketable skill came more from free time, computer access, and internet access, than an educational institution. If the strategy was to bet on what already worked for oneself, and hope it works for others too, then they would want to pull money out of schools and put it into libraries, computer labs, and internet cafes.

That's all true, but this crowd also leans heavily progressive. Progressives have a great faith in processes and systems. Get the right top-down systems in place, and everything will be good. Naturally that includes the school system, especially government schools.

It might be okay that I was self-taught, because I'm special; but we can't let regular people be doing that sort of thing.

> It might be okay that I was self-taught, because I'm special; but we can't let regular people be doing that sort of thing.

That's an interesting theory. It definitely explains a lot of what we see. I don't know if anyone self-describing as progressive would sign off on it as their own thinking.

Phrased the way you put it, it also seems like a kind of cognitive bias almost like the gambler's fallacy. Assuming that the concrete data you have is not representative, and instead the opposite is more likely to occur. The correct reasoning would be "this definitely worked for me, assume I'm not special and try to make the same path easier for others".

The reason I think it might be a strawman is that the ideology your talking about does want to help others, and that thinking would make them less effective at that goal.

It's easy to blame culture. It's kind of a thought terminating cliche. Once you've assigned blame to a general attitude among the public there nothing much to be done.

We could examine the common differences between US education and other high performing nations and try to reform towards something more effective, but really culture is the problem so let's all pack it up and find something else to worry about.

I think the one way that American culture does prevent progress is that Americans tend to be averse to evidence based reforms. They like to atomize responsibility for everything down to the individual. Homelessness, drug addiction, poor education outcomes, poor health outcomes, it's all just individuals making bad decisions or perpetuating bad culture.

If we did anything that actually helped it would somehow be condoning/encouraging the badness of these individuals. Regardless of how effective it would be it's somehow worse than allowing the problem to fester.

Also, high schoolers who see their advanced degree-holding parents out of work for months or years at a time may begin to wonder if the effort is worth it - education is a lot of work for comparatively little benefit.

but

it being available "on the internet" doesn't mean it' available to a child!

it also misses the important aspect that for children you need to nudge them into the right direction of learning

it also misses that children today often get bombarded with a non stop stream of skillfully engineered distractions and dopamine loops, that makes it much harder to nudge them in the direction of educating themself.

oh and all the fake news, fake education etc. isn't helping either,

You're sort of not allowed to mention culture in the context of education. Otherwise people might realize that different cultural groups have very divergent education outcomes. For example, Asian students study 2x as much as white students and 3x as much as black students. It is likely not unrelated that Asian students have much better educational outcomes, regardless of class. For example, Asian students whose parents have no HS degree perform better on the SAT than black students whose parents have a doctoral degree.

My son is taking a woodworking class in high school. First week, he came home and I asked him what he was doing in his woodworking class… “Disassembling the library bookcases”. “Why???” “Because they’re getting rid of the library”.

Apparently the school board decided to save money by cutting the librarian, and then decided to just move the books out of the school library and into the “nearby” public library.

In reality, there were 95 books in the school library which were being questioned by some parents. Instead of removing just those books, and being accused of book banning, they just removed the entire library. For all intents and purposes, it was a book burning.

Yet the football team is fully funded, and the baseball diamond is kept up.

This society has priorities which aren’t education.

Wish I could say we were moving in the right direction, but it's going to be getting worse for the foreseeable future. What part of the country is this?

I went to a high school with lots of kids that read and nobody ever checked out a book from the school library.

Their interests were specialized and they got their books online or from larger collections not offered at a school.

It’s fine - libraries aren’t sacred. If nobody uses them we don’t need them.

The joke about football is often made but they pay for it, because people use it.

> “Disassembling the library bookcases”

I am skeptical. This is not the subject of wood working. And why would the school entangle students with a task to be performed by professional vendors.

> why would the school entangle students with a task to be performed by professional vendors.

Why pay a vendor to do it when you can get the students to do it for free?

Because of legal problems if the job is performed improperly or someone is injured. This is basic administration.

Also once again, this sounds like what someone would imagine they did in wood shop if they never took wood shop.

maybe they used the wood to make something else

At my HS in the 90s students were frequently used to do stuff like this. Ex: this ravine/brush area we want to clean it out and chop some stuff down to make it a "nature center".

Similar in woodshop and metal working - doing stuff to fix the schools infra/bldg.

It's actually the basis of community building. The students take some ownership of the area they work/live in by fixing/building for others.

Wonderful idea.

> Because of legal problems if the job is performed improperly or someone is injured. This is basic administration.

You do know what goes on in wood shop class right? Some light demolition is nothing compared to the power tools they'll be using soon.

Well, this is what they did in wood shop. Happy to send proof. My son documented the full process.

Yeah please share his documentation.

> The joke about football is often made but they pay for it, because people use it.

This is not a joke. At all. There are a LOT of high schools that actively prioritize football facilities over education. I grew up in one. It's very frustrating, and that's coming from someone who DID play football.

At my school the kids asked for donations to fund their equipment and they brought in money on the games for their budget.

But once again… students and community use football. They do not use high school libraries.

What is your point? One of education’s primary goals is / were to help learning to enjoy the “right” things. Football field or library are not “good” in themselves, people learn to enjoy reading books and playing football via guidance.

My point is you don’t need to spend money on high school libraries if nobody uses them. You can even just buy students books.

> students and community use football. They do not use high school libraries.

That's literally the problem being presented, the "joke" as you called it. This isn't something to be weirdly proud about. This is something to be extremely concerned about. Prioritizing football over education in a place dedicated to the latter is absurd. Like, Idiocracy-levels absurd.

How has it gone so far over your head?

So which is worse? - funding something people benefit from but is not part of your mission - funding something which is in your mission, but nobody uses?

The former is questionable. The latter is a just a waste.

Do you care about education outcomes? Or do you care about 90s symbols of education, like libraries.

Which is worse, buying Marlboros for the students, or buying books for the library?

You got me. Especially with the edit from heroin.

funding something ... but is not part of your mission

That is worse. It's education, not a startup in need of a pivot.

Most Americans disagree and see athletics as an integral part of a rounded education.

You're the one who drew the contrast in the first place!

You characterized it as outside the mission and now you're trying to say it's part of the mission. Come on.

I think the point is that the average person in a community cares more about football than education. There are place where they really do. You think that is idiotic and absurd -- I don't disagree. But we live in a democracy. You can't force people to care about what you think they should care about.

Let's do away with the blackboards, school books, pencils, pens, and edutech. Replace all of them with tablets loaded with TikTok, Youtube, Instagram, Minecraft, Roblox. I'm sure they'll see much more use than what they're replacing. Such efficiency!

Who said anything about replacing school time?

I agree - having an after school video game time would be a better use of resources than an unused library.

The the big ironies of North Texas school districts — taxpayers foot the bill for those multimillion-dollar stadiums, turf fields, courts, and gyms, but the second class is out, the gates get locked like it’s Fort Knox. Meanwhile, kids are dodging cars in the street because they can’t set foot on the pristine facilities their parents literally paid for.

It’s not even just a summer thing — a lot of districts have blanket “no public use” policies year-round. They’ll cite liability, vandalism, or “preservation of facilities” as the reason, but the result is the same: empty fields, fenced-off courts, and taxpayers staring at what they bought but can’t touch.

>This is not the subject of wood working

Sure it is, it's free wood for the woodshop. Unless the library is very new, those are probably solid planks. No shop teacher is going to say no to free wood.

The real mystery is how the woodshop survived longer than the library did. Usually woodshops are the first thing to go.

> Usually woodshops are the first thing to go.

Perhaps your experience is with states whose legislatures are dominated by trial lawyers, who can hope to retire on one really good, fat personal injury judgment?

Mine is, but I hope that's not the case everywhere.

Wood shops don’t have books in them that have naughty words or share ideas to children contrary to their parent’s conservative beliefs.

I doubt there’s a true budget crisis. It was manufactured to justify getting rid of the books for political reasons.

Libraries are more than checking out books, but your point is well made. I prefer printed books, but absolutely use e-books when they're more convenient. I still think it's useful to have a librarian AT THE SCHOOL to help students with all the things libraries do that aren't related to circulation or lending. Having the librarian at the point of use increases the chance that students, faculty and administration will make best use of the library's services.

The woodworking teacher had a source for free furniture grade lumber. Of course he’s going to jump on it. If you demand “proof” (not very HN like), I’m happy to send pics.

Wow, I spent 90% of my free time as a kid in the school library. Reading this hurts. At least they are protecting them from using their brain

+1. Libraries are about more than just lending out books.

I got shunted into remedial reading in the 1st grade because I had a visible disability. I was there for about a week before the teacher noticed I was bored to tears. Bless her, she had me tested. Turns out I was reading at a 4th grade level, so I immediately got taken out of that class and put into the 'gifted' class.

That class was the best kind of unstructured. We had a new teacher with little experience, but she just turned us lose on the school library and let us read whatever and then talk about it in class. I *ADORED* that class. It was getting an hour a day to basically do what I wanted to be doing anyway.

Here in North Texas, school districts drop tens of millions on artificial turf for junior high and high school football fields. Some even run bond elections to build stadiums and training facilities that would make an NFL team jealous. Meanwhile, academics sit dead last on the priority list—kids are walking across the stage barely able to read or write. Honestly, if AI came in and torched the whole education system, it might be an upgrade. Hard to do worse than the geniuses running things now, who seem to think Friday night lights are more important than literacy.

It's very sad... I went to schools in Arlington that were quite good when I attended in the 70s and 80s. Our high school routinely ranked high on the academic achievement ratings (% of students going to college, average SAT score, etc.) _AND_ we routinely sent our high school football team to district and state competitions. Our soccer team was undefeated for years.

I've often thought it would be a good idea to separate academics from athletics. Have a "school district" that runs the schools in a building next to the football field run by the "athletic district." I think both are important, but you're right, North Texas public schools have fallen quite far from the academic standards they used to hold.

> I've often thought it would be a good idea to separate academics from athletics. Have a "school district" that runs the schools in a building next to the football field run by the "athletic district." I think both are important, but you're right, North Texas public schools have fallen quite far from the academic standards they used to hold.

It’s my understanding this is what they do in much of Europe.

Are federal public schools a bad idea then? Wonder how much of this kind of thing would be unlocked without their interference. Presumably the bottom would also get a lot lower though

I presume if AI does come in, it won't be replacing those "geniuses running things now". They'll be fine; it's all the teachers who will be replaced. They're expensive, and all that money can go towards more sports!

If you think education is expensive, you should try ignorance.

The cost of ignorance won't be felt for at least a decade or two, and by then it will be somebody else problem. Or at least that is what the people making the decisions are hoping.

I really want to down-vote this for being overly snarky. But... I can't argue with the underlying logic, so +1.

Bread and circuses seem to be the most important things.

> Yet the football team is fully funded, and the baseball diamond is kept up

The football team makes money, why do people constantly ignore this. There's always money for ventures that have positive ROI. It has nothing to do with priorities.

At schools with top theater programs they're also always fully funded because they bring in outside revenue.

I seriously doubt that most highschool football teams make a profit. I would be surprised if ticket sales even cover the cost of the staff working the game.

Then you didn't go to a football school. We had a multi-million dollar stadium that could hold a thousand-ish fans and it was packed every game. Most of them were season ticket holders. We also raked in $$ from other schools who wanted to host their events using our stadium.

Also none of the people working the game are paid except for the ref (and the TV crew if you have one). It's all volunteers and students. Our principal was the announcer. The revenue from football paid for every other sport and then some.

Schools that weren't football schools had much more modest stadiums, usually just a field and a pre-fab bleacher.

The vast majority of high school sports teams aren't coming anywhere close to a profit. Your experience is unusual, which answers your question:

> why do people constantly ignore this.

Because people who talk about "the football team always is fully funded" are from schools that are turning a profit. We played teams from schools that weren't. They had ancient gear and a field. The public HS across the street from us didn't even have a field, they used ours.

The implication of the original posters mention of his district's "fully funded" team was definitely not that it was turning a profit... but that the school is instead still spending on it while cutting services like the library.

Why would he complain, in this context, about a football program that is generating income for the district?

Yes, that's exactly the implication I'm challenging. The amount of times I've heard the "they're cutting thing-i-think-is-important but keeping the football program" but who don't know that it's because the football program is self-sustaining is so frustrating. They're not choosing football over music or art or whatever. For sports which aren't local cash-cows the parents are having to buy the new equipment and uniforms. Sadly, no one stepped up for the music program like that.

People also ignore how these football stadiums are financed. Some with public bonds, others with private agreements with outside organizations. (Looking at you, Flower Mound.)

You're always beholden to the person who pays the bills. If your football stadium is paid for by public funds, you're beholden to the voter (by way of elected representatives.) If your football stadium was paid for by the local Ford dealership who asks for a cut of concessions, well... you give them a cut of the concessions.

People in North Texas seem to trust corporations more than they trust local governments. I think that's because they're familiar with whom they elect to office. The local corporations might be run by sociopathic dorks, but at least they're SUCCESSFUL sociopathic dorks. And while it might seem that I'm dissing North Texans... I'm really not. We may be on the road to neo-feudalism, but at least they know what side their bread is buttered on.

I’d like to see how much my school district spends on football. Unfortunately they don’t release the numbers anywhere for public scrutiny that I’ve found. How can I find the actual numbers? I don’t want to go to the school board accusing them of wasting money on football if it’s actually net profitable.

Yeah I know schools like that exist, I just doubt that they are anywhere near the majority.

The games I have been to recently have a medic of some kind, the coaches, band/drumline director, police officers for security, plus a bunch of teachers doing other things. They may not be getting paid extra to do it, but they're still employees and a portion of their time is being used for the game.

Can you prove the school made money from the football?

You're just saying football is popular and some revenue comes in, but nothing that proves football is money making for the district.

The take from concessions sales and tickets is actually very high.

At the school where I’m familiar with the finances, the concessions stands were run by student volunteers from other after school programs. They got a cut of the profit. It was an easy way for different programs to raise money with a much larger audience than they could get anywhere else.

This school wasn’t even a “football school”. The football events were just a big excuse for everyone to come out and do activities at the school.

And how much do they pay the coach and assistants? How much to maintain athletic fields?

They don't all make money. Why are you assuming that this one does?

> There's always money for ventures that have positive ROI.

If it can't help fund things like...checks notes...libraries then it's not really an effective ROI.

A high school varsity football team has how many players? 50? My son’s graduating class is almost 1000. So 5% of students get to play football, but 100% of them don’t get a library.

The future needs serfs, not readers.

Perhaps, but the past also needed more serfs than readers. I don't think that is good, but maybe it is too idealistic to think you can create a nation of 330m critical thinkers. Not because it isn't possible, but because not everyone wants to approach life that way.

The past needed more serfs than readers until the Industrial Revolution, but once we got those going, all that machinery required skilled people to operate.

Did making things without machinery require fewer skilled people?

Depends on what you're making. Pre-industrial society was mostly concerned with growing food to feed itself. Things like say blacksmithing or advanced weaving certainly did require skilled professionals, but they were proportionally a tiny minority of a society consisting mostly of farmers.

People keep talking about education cost. By and large, this isn't a cost issue. The lowest performing schools get the most funding per student, and while school boards and teacher's unions always are going to advocate for more money spent on education, spending in the US isn't low objectively or based on per-pupil averages elsewhere.

The issue is who is ultimately in charge of students and who is responsible for raising them (which should be the same thing, but doesn't have to be), making this ultimately a control issue.

Certain people want to use the school system to raise children based on their own moral system because they could be learning the "wrong" thing at home, and other people want the schools to defer to parents' wishes. Most people want their kid to get a good education and otherwise be left alone by teachers and administrators, but that group gets very little attention.

At the end of the day, parents are legally responsible for their children, and unless that is changed, schools play an important but secondary role in caring for and raising them. Until that is widely accepted or changed, conflict will continue.

I think it's mostly that too much is spent on administration and middle-management type roles both in public schools and higher education. They're IMO largely a less than useful drain on funding that could be better spent elsewhere. At least as far as budgeting is concerned.

I have completely separate views on how kids are being raised and educated and how things have changed just in my half century on this planet.

I taught in the Japanese school system for 2 years. Very low funding, but actually the opposite of your example. Teachers had a high level of respect and ability to act in the child's life.

Also almost every kid had club activities in and in class all day long. Primary goal is to drill in discipline and conformity over education to be honest.

The ironic bit here is the local high school where I live in the Pacific North-West doesn't have a copy of Homo Ludens (either in print or as an e-book for lending) which is sort of the Sine Qua Non text on the philosophy of sport (which would explain why having a Football Team is important.)

I tend to think sports is good for kids. Not football though. My kids in high school marching band so I'm at the games. It's stupid how many kids get hurt on any given Saturday and some will go on to have CTE

Yeah. I was the only kid in Texas who was vaguely interested in athletics but completely uninterested in football. I mean... I was never insulted for playing baseball or soccer, but yeah, we need a better game than football as the go-to for Texas sports.

>we need a better game than football as the go-to for Texas sports.

Freestyle[0] FTW! Let's Jam!

[0] https://www.freestyle-frisbee.com/index.html

Why the downvotes?

Just because it doesn't require a cup or serious risk of CTE/TBI doesn't make freestyle bad, does it?

This is probably an unpopular opinion, but is there still much purpose in a modern high school libraries except as a work/study space?

Elementary school libraries are important because kids can check out books at their reading level and you don't need a huge variety.

But in high school, when I wanted a book for research or recreational reading, 99% of the time my high school library wouldn't have it anyways. You had to go to the public library anyways for decent fiction, and the local college library for non-fiction you would need to cite.

I think it's important to preserve the high school library space for working and the computer access. But I'm just not sure how relevant the actual books are. Especially since public libraries now have e-books, so you don't even have to go there in person if it's inconvenient.

Should maintaining a collection of physical library books really still be the job of high schools, when public libraries will do it better and are open to everyone, not just high schoolers?

Convenient access is a huge deal. Students are at school every day whereas with public libraries they are limited to their parents' schedule. I know I was able to read nearly twice as much fiction as a teen because I could checkout a new book the same day I finished the previous one rather than waiting a week or so until we could go to the public library. Having the library is also useful for integrating into classes, for example my English classes would alternate between assigned books and reading a book of your choice, and we would make trips to the library during class time to be taught how to use libraries for research. Lastly, in rural areas the school libraries are often the only library.

Libraries are about more than lending books (or media). Start here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library

Your patronizing comment is unhelpful. My high school library certainly didn't do anything but lend books and store some AV equipment, and provide a computer/study space, and I already referred to keeping the space for those other purposes.

If we wanted information or recommendations on books to read, that was definitely what our English teachers were for. The library wasn't helping with that.

Okay. You don't have to read about libraries if you don't want to. But you'll likely sound a bit more informed if you do. Your comment makes it sound like the only thing you think ALL libraries do is lend out media. Maybe you just had a crap library.

Learning about a library's complete range of services is a decent idea and I encourage you to do so. If you don't want to read about it on the Wikipedia, I encourage you to engage your local librarian. Just ask them what they do. They will be delighted someone took an interest.

Here are a few examples... In the 70s, our high-school librarian was the go-to person to ask about where to find specific types of information. Before the internet, I think most people didn't know how to look up raw data in the reference stacks. My high school librarian showed me where to find state and federal data and departmental reports. I learned what "semiotics" was by asking my Jr. High School librarian about how the library was structured. When I worked for the government, we had a departmental library whose librarian was much more like a research assistant. The Seattle Public Library maintains 3-d printers they let the public use. I mean... I would not have guessed that was a thing the library would do. (Though I didn't see them the last time I was there, so maybe they're not doing that anymore.)

My previous comment wasn't intended to be patronizing, but I guess I can't control how you interpret comments from other people. Feel free to think I'm a jerk... but please ask your local librarian what services their library offers.

I know about reference libraries, government libraries, etc. -- believe me. I use them professionally.

It sounds like you had an exceptional high school library. On the other hand, my high school "librarians" knew how to check books out and shelve them when they were returned and that was pretty much it. And this was one of the best high schools in the area, one of only two that had AP classes.

So my original comment was questioning the utility of book lending in high school libraries specifically. And specifically asking if the focus shouldn't be on public libraries instead, where they do have the funding to hire actual real librarians and put together book collections that are actually decent.

Your point would have been clearer if you said "But most high school libraries limit their services to circulation" instead of taking offense and down-voting. But I'm happy you're currently familiar with your library's services.

I'm not one of the people downvoting you. HN doesn't even let you downvote replies to your own comment.

And I guess I didn't find it necessary to say most high school libraries limit their services that way because I think it's common experience? But I'm very happy for students who were lucky enough to get more. Still, like I said, English teachers were usually there if you wanted fiction recommendations at least.

I got my first reading itch from my school library. For most of my childhood the fiction I read (and I read a LOT) was from my school library.

It’s a place for students to get exposed to a wider range of material than they otherwise would have.

> there were 95 books in the school library which were being questioned by some parents. Instead of removing just those books, and being accused of book banning

Would those parents really have support in your community if they were named and shamed?

In my community, those parents occasionally get elected to the school board.

Those parents genuinely believe the presence of certain books in school is harming children, they are unlikely to throw in the towel because someone runs a shame campaign against them for it.

That doesn't make the school caving on the topic any more forgivable, but we can't trivialize how difficult small but dedicated groups in a local community can make things either. The community typically only shows up to worry about it after a bad decision is imminent, the small group shows up 24/7/365 pushing the issue.

> Those parents genuinely believe the presence of certain books in school is harming children, they aren't looking for community support

I'm not saying their feelings aren't sincerely held. My point is they need community support to ban books in a public school.

They just need the school board to cave to the constant annoyance. The community only shows up when the bad decision is imminent (or, often, has already passed) because they cannot treat this issue as their only #1 priority, as a small group can.

What the school board did here is sneak out of the battle, which would continue long after community says "no" once.

> community only shows up when the bad decision is imminent

That's where naming and shaming comes in. In a small community, there is a long-term cost to trying to game inattention.

I dunno I agree, it's at least not been my experience with these types of parents over 10 years in my local meetings. Again - if you genuinely think children are being harmed in your community you're unlikely to care Jim from down the road doesn't let you borrow his tractor anymore (or whatever).

Maybe it's not something that can be said for every community, but the same point would apply here in reverse.

That mechanism usually goes the other way in these escalations - all it takes is one of the school librarians being a stubborn ideologue, not stocking classical literature (effectively censoring) and filling shelves with anti-capitalist pop lit and low-brow Tumblr graphic novels with obscene sexual depictions. It reaches the point where it's obvious to anyone walking into the library, replete with colorful signage on frontal shelves dedicated to narrow progressive fads. The kids post about it or check it out, parents notice. The librarian is named and shamed. Then, sadly, the library overall loses support in addition to the librarian.

The root cause is unfortunately lost in the ensuing battle between library-defending parents and library-critiquing parents, but the ultimate fault in this situation lies in the needless and self-destructive politicization of librarian training and the lack of standards for younger librarians. They seem to lack the common sense that loud politicking is not exactly befitting of a library, nor beneficial for their ulterior motive of gradual ideological persuasion. Another sad case of politicking and safe-space-signaling ideation being prioritized over preserving institutions and professional integrity.

This feels like a comment from a person not from the USA. Where my wife grew up there are really nice, established people who are proud to tell you that they don't believe in evolution and do believe in a young-earth creationism (though they wouldn't call it that). Essentially they believe stuff some people would laugh at and are proud about it and would be glad to attach their name to banning a book like Anne Frank's diary.

That isn't most places, and it isn't that the majority is that extreme almost anywhere. But you can't make assumptions about people having the same point of view as you, or that otherwise reasonable good people believe things you consider only reasonable.

The town I’m in has grown 1000% in the last 20 years. The original residents were almost all from a very conservative religious group. That group had power over all politics back then, and have retained power today. They’re very aligned with removing the books, and there’s no communication to the 90% of parents in the district who, although conservative, aren’t from the previously dominant religious group. They do it quietly, don’t communicate what they’re doing or why, and they just get their way with nobody to object.

People in power pushing their ideology is a common thing. Not exclusive to religious people.

Shame, shame, shame... is that really the way we should be dealing with things, or is there any better way?

Ugh, I was born in 68 and I always advocate for doing some research in libraries. The important factor is the serendipity of finding random stuff as you walk around and the narrowed part when you get to your target's area on the shelves and seeing other volumes in the same subject area.

I'm much younger than you, but I had the experience of having a difficult-to-find-info-on-the-internet subject for a high school paper, and the opporunity to researching the subject at a well stocked library. There was a lot of friction to the process that I wasn't used to, but the serendipity aspect was absolutely revelatory. There is something fundamentally unfiltered about walking past shelves of books with titles on subjects you never even knew existed.

Sounds like a town named Southlake.

Good riddance. Libraries are totally pointless and a waste of money.

Almost every book that is available at all can be accessed within seconds on any modern digital device. You will learn how extremely valuable that is when you actually are doing research.

Students should be taught how to actually do research, not how to waste time looking things up in some small buildings which doesn't have the resources they need.

Have you not been in a library in like 50 years? It’s a hell of a lot more than a “small building which doesn’t have the resources they need”.

Without a doubt in my entire academic life the books have been the least useful thing libraries contained. Getting rid of them provides space for the good and productive things people do in a library.

It is important that students have quiet space to study. But libraries as book storages have very little utility and seem very hard to justify.

Ah, from that point of view, I can agree. It’s shocking how few books I can find in my local library. Not a single one by GK Chesterton, and half a million people live in my town. Wtf?

Still, I think we should keep books as available to citizens as possible.

>Still, I think we should keep books as available to citizens as possible.

I agree. But it is obviously far more cost effective and useful to have that access be digital first.

Do not understand me wrong, I like physical books. But for doing research it is almost always preferable to have the books be available digitally. And students should learn to make use of that.

>libraries as book storages have very little utility and seem very hard to justify.

Great, let's pass laws that give parity rights to digital goods, including ebooks. You have a copy? You can lend that copy. Yes, forever.

Sounds like a reasonable decision to me: let the schools teach and let the city/county maintain the library separately.

But disassembling the library bookcases is hardly an appropriate woodworking project.

I consider the 'freedom' felt in the library as a successful part of my growth in elementary and beyond, and I don't like moving that further away from the education environment--even though city/county libraries in my experience have been fantastic.

Having a library on location at a school is valuable. You can do research, you can discover new books, you can have a quiet place to study... I have loved every school library I've ever been in.

Any library is a nexus of knowledge and learning. They should be in schools.

The libraries in the schools I attended were primarily used to detain misbehaving students in quiet. The public library was much larger and was indeed worthwhile as a library per se. But our school libraries were small and poorly funded. That was fine: they still served a useful purpose.

It appears that today's school libraries and libraries in general have become a means for activist liberal political groups to introduce children to political/social ideas that, perhaps, those children are not yet prepared to deal with (YMMV). As a child I went to the public library for science and they had it in spades. Nowadays the science is still there but the librarians would rather you read something else.

My inclination is to de-fund any organization that pursues a political/social agenda by taking control of established institutions of government (schools, libraries, etc.). If necessary, I would de-fund the institution being abused.

Not to me! But then I think we should stop trying to think of K-12 education as a national issue because clearly there are regional differences and regional preferences. And I don't mean this as a red / blue thing-- there are places where the challenge is bilingual education and their are places where parents are uncomfortable with a non-christian education.

These challenges are more than a hundred years old! We have turned this into a national issue, made national standards and its not clear we are making that much progress. Many US states are effectively large countries. Why don't we let them decide what they want to do democratically. Whether you agree with it or not, it is what happens effectively. In the US you can move if you don't like where you live.

The woodworking teacher also doesn’t have much funding, and free furniture grade lumber is attractive. I completely understand why the woodworking teacher is doing it, and I have no problems with my son helping in that endeavor… besides the… getting rid of the library thing

> which were being questioned by some parents

I doubt that: My experience is that people who complain about books don't read them, let alone understand them enough to "question" them.

> This society has priorities which aren’t education.

Forgive me, but it's your society: You live there. It's that way because of you.

I know that sucks to hear; it's not all your fault; it seems like there is a lot of inertia; and you definitely can't overcome it all by yourself, and it is was like that before you were born; and so on,

But I urge you to take responsibility to right the ship anyway, and at risk of mixing metaphors too much stop worrying so much about who started the fire and work on putting it out. Make friends with your neighbours, and get them to help you. Stop enabling bad behaviour by referring to those other parents "questions" in their couched weasel-words and call them out for their hate and the spread of hate and ignorance.

Because literally nobody else is going to do it, and we need you.

I live in a town of over 200k people. When I moved here, it was 12k residents, and dominated by religious conservatives. When I graduated high school, I vowed to never return. My wife however had other ideas, and as soon as my kids were school age, we were back. The town remains politically dominated by the same conservative religious group, even though they’re less than 20% of the population. Could I go to the school board meetings and raise and issue? Sure, but my son, who would be the recipient of any retribution, requested I not. I even offered to pay for private school for him, but he still wasn’t willing. Once he graduates, maybe I’ll spend my time fighting this fight. My peers from high school who weren’t from this religious group fled. None remain to fight. Even if I win a seat on the board, I’d be just one of 7, and nothing would change.

> When I graduated high school, I vowed to never return. My wife however had other ideas, and as soon as my kids were school age, we were back

Listen brother, if you do something, it is your choice. Nobody can make your choices for you. Not the government. Not a god. Not even your wife.

And the choice to do nothing is still a choice.

> Could I go to the school board meetings and raise and issue? Sure, but my son, who would be the recipient of any retribution, requested I not.

You are the adult: You are making this choice.

Your son is the recipient of the future you are creating whether you like it or not.

And what will happen is son's children (if they have any) will have a slightly worse version of the problem you are facing, because of the choices you are making.

> Even if I win a seat on the board, I’d be just one of 7, and nothing would change.

Nonsense. It always starts with one.

Didn't you know the first black person to sit in the front of the bus was just one person?

I bet if you try you can think of a lot of firsts that led to change.

As for the books being questioned by other parents - I was only aware of it when I searched for the high school name and library on Twitter. First and only hit was for a parent posting a link to some website that alerts parents for books with questionable content in their children’s libraries. Had they read the books? Of course not, but the web site allows you to read all the questionable passages. The tweet was advocating for the school board to remove the books.

> read all the questionable passages

This is what I mean: There aren't "questionable passages"

Giving their voice that credit is not necessary.

> The tweet was advocating for the school board to remove the books

People have been putting personals up in newspapers since there were ever newspapers, but a publication or channel is not a discussion forum, and you aren't required to treat it like that.

I don't think we have a singular society at this point. As in, we've got large majorities on both sides who simply don't see their opposition as a part of their society, but rather as external threats to it.

Society is the conditions of living with other people; you do not get your society and my society because if we can both coexist it is the same society.

There are a lot of unwell people; Some of them it might be a literal genetic mental illness, but a lot of them probably only ever experienced joy after misery, and never saw real kindness.

I think you should treat "those" people as if they were abused and vulnerable humans with broken brains, and how you treat "those" people is how I think you will treat other abused and vulnerable humans with broken brains.

The majority of the public school system has devolved into day-care, not education. Most parents just watch TV, stare at their phones and don't want to be bothered by anything that requires effort. A major societal shift needs to happen for this to be reversed. It's many factors... the parents, the food system, various inequalities, social media, technology, healthcare... the solution is multi-pronged. But if I had to choose id start with social media, smart phones, tablets, etc. Technoloy needs to be seen as a tool and a resource, not primarily as the brainwashing entertainment that it is, and brainwashing them with entertainment is how most people introduce tech to their kids.

Not to be too pessimistic, but it feels like this is impossible given how hyper-optimized our devices are to retain our attention. They’re beyond “tools” now and profits of countless companies are tied to our fixation on our phones.

One day we will look at social media, end less scrolling algos, 5 second clips as we do at cigarettes.

It might not be causing cancer, but there is going to be a generation of people lacking emotional regulation because their dopamine circuits have been fried since they were 3 years old

> Most parents just watch TV, stare at their phones and don't want to be bothered by anything that requires effort

The point is that students are doing worse, even though ^ is likely true today just like it was true 5, 10, and 20 years ago.

The generation raised by iPads are in HS now and American IQ tests scores are in decline, especially in the last 10-15 years.

Yes, and it's quadratically worse for the people that are on the lowest end.

If I was born recently, I'd be just one of the kids that get stuck with a screen from day 0. There's no recovering from that.

Is there any study or evidence supports that MOST parents "watch TV, stare at their phones and don't want to be bothered by anything that requires effort?"

This is a common trope but I've never seen any evidence.

Go to any park/playground sometime and observe the benches.

Go to any sports field/venue and observe the bleachers.

What you find may astound you, even if the percentage isn't literally 50%+.

Taking your kid to a playground is a parents chance to get a break! Everyone judges parents constantly and blames them for everything, parents in general are doing their best.

It's legit kind-of great, because you can't be doing much productive, so the dozen things you should be doing (most of them due to kids...) if you were at home are out the window. You can just chill for a long stretch of time, without concern. Taking your kids to the park or whatever is awesome, it's one of the best breaks a parent gets during daylight hours.

Or you can knock out some schedule stuff or teacher-emailing or bill-paying or whatever that you'd otherwise have to cram in some other time, that's nice too.

If I'm in those situations and staring at my phone, it's because I forgot to bring a book. Staring into the middle distance while my kid sits on the bench for fifteen minutes and a bunch of kids I don't know ineptly play soccer, or closely watching my 500th hour of kids playing "tag", is a last resort. Hell sometimes I'll just start trying to find weird bugs or something.

I do also play with them, but I'm not one of the parents who's always playing with them any time they're playing, they also need space to figure their own stuff out. Adults can do other things a lot of the time, it's fine.

I'm at those things. I don't see even 10% of people on their phones. Yeah people check in but I see involved parents.

Plus, these activities aren't causing missed education. I'm not teaching my kids math while they go on slides.

Like yeah, waiting in the park while kids plays is the most boring thing in the word. You have to do it, so that kid is not licked inside whole day.

What exactly do you expect people to do there while doing nothing and while being interrupted every 6 minutes over yet another interesting rock?

Parents aren’t supposed to be engaged when kids are engaging in free play at the playground or under the supervision of a coach. That’s the definition of a helicopter parent.

I find restaurants more eye-opening. Amount of toddlers being fed while their mind is zombified with a screen are astonishing. Parents don't want to put effort in engaging the child and screen is an easy legal drug.

Do you take your toddlers out to eat a lot?

Gen x’er. My parents didn’t help me with homework. I was expected to be independent. There was a culture shift in 2000s and we are involved daily with our kids and their homework. This is all anecdotal and I can’t find any studies on the subject.

I think the root of the problem is that education is no longer seen as a fundamental foundation to a better life. Kids aren't doing well because kids don't care. They don't care because their parents don't care.

Why don't they care? I think for many, they have given up any hope that a better life is possible. So education isn't the key, because nothing is the key, because the door doesn't even exist.

I live in the US in New Jersey, and here a big problem was the State flooded school districts with money during Covid with no material oversight of its spending.

The end result was huge increases in spending. But not on education. The money was spent on more MacBooks, more iPads, more buildings, more smart TVs, more consultants, more School Bullshit System as a Service, more scoreboards, more $50,000 signs in front of schools.

Meanwhile the good teachers are fleeing the system and test scores are plummeting as schools focus more on day care and “social justice”, and a declining emphasis on teaching core subjects and learning in general, coupled with social promotion where everybody gets a C or higher, and 80% of the school gets on the honor roll (spoiler alert: our district is not some outlier where 80% of the kids are geniuses).

Schools have very little to do with teaching, and really are just about baby sitting and trying to correct social issues.

Oh, and endless buckets of tax payer money with meaningless oversight.

They do a pretty poor job at babysitting too. They do very little to create a calm and disciplined environment.

> more School Bullshit System as a Service

I fully hear you on this. I miss the days where a simple phone call or email communication would occur when needed. Now it's a deluge of daily updates via 2 separate 'apps' for 2 different schools, and a requirement to login to 'app' or website to read the 'email' that they've sent out. Nevermind contacting someone that isn't directly associated with your child at the school -- Guess that's all need to know basis.

I hate it.

Hard to conclude much from this, given New Jersey is consistently rated one of the top 2 states in the nation for K-12 education.

The lesson may even be the opposite: "If your school's biggest problem is 'too much money', outcomes will be pretty good."

The conclusion I drew is that even schools in the "top 2 states for K-12 education" are piss poor at education.

Where are you comparing to that has better outcomes?

Homeschool or China.

Homeschooling (in particular) has a bimodal distribution of outcomes depending on the reasons the parents do it.

New Jersey is probably the most socioeconomically segregated state in the country, mostly based on its school districts. It has crazy real estate prices precisely so parents can get their children into specific, high-performing school districts. These districts bring the state average up very high, but best of luck if your district is in the bottom 50%.

Which county in New Jersey?

Hunterdon. One of the richest counties in the United States.

> Schools have very little to do with teaching, and really are just about baby sitting and trying to correct social issues.

Is that wrong? The government takes away your kid for 12 years, every weekday all day, they might as well solve social issues in the country even if that means, say, kids are 1 year behind Asian kids, or their parents 30 years ago. If they figure out how to solve personal issues, that's even better.

I think there is a logical fallacy here. People assume that the only purpose of school is education. The more the education the better, even if that means deepening social issues, or making kids unhappy (BTW being a kid is like ~20% of someones life, not insignificant in itself). I think they assume it just because 'school' is called 'school', but I don't think the name of an object should determine its purpose.

- - -

When I look at the social issues in my country, I think the school system would be a very natural place to start to solve them (and arguably the current school system just worsens them). Even at the cost of "fall in reading and math scores".

> The money was spent on more MacBooks, more iPads, more buildings, more smart TVs, more consultants, more School Bullshit System as a Service, more scoreboards, more $50,000 signs in front of schools.

> “social justice”

So they spend all their effort on social justice, but spend none of their money on it? You should move to the South, you can pick a charter/magnate/whatever school with no special education and no busses. Keeps out the pesky blacks and retarded.

Somewhat of a pain though since my son has autism and services are pretty shit compared to where I lived in NJ

> Most parents just watch TV, stare at their phones and don't want to be bothered by anything that requires effort

Citation? I've routinely seen statistics suggesting the opposite, that parents are moreI involved with their children in the modern time and more likely to play and engage with children.

I think it’s more a matter of both extremes.

I’ve seen stay at home parents who put their kids in daycare so they can spend the day shopping and effectively have someone else raise their kids. Their kids end up largely just being status symbols. I’ve also seen parents that go everywhere with their kids, schedule every moment of their day and won’t even let them stand at the school bus stop by themselves. The parents build their entire lives around their kids and live vicariously through them.

IMO, kids need a proper balance and I don’t think a lot of them are getting that.

> The majority of the public school system has devolved into day-care, not education.

I resisted that narrative for years, thinking it was just a media-hyped scare tactic to get clicks. However, my niece started high school a few weeks ago (in mid-August, which is weird to me); her experience blew my mind.

Her new high school is considered one of the better public high schools in the area. When I asked her how it was going, did she like being a high-schooler, I was expecting her to complain about the course load or something like that. However, she told me that after 2 weeks, they haven't spent one minute on actual education. She said they've been going over rules and policies for 2 weeks. Things like no bullying, inclusiveness, fire safety, bring your own water bottle, how to pray (they have a room dedicated to prayer), etc. Best/worst of all, they did an entire day on active shooter drills - the windows are now bullet-proof!

So yeah, unfortunately, I'm fully onboard with this narrative now. While kids in Taiwan and Japan are learning calc, kids in the US are doing active shooter drills and staring at the Ten Commandments. USA! USA! USA!

>Things like no bullying, inclusiveness, fire safety, bring your own water bottle, how to pray

When great controversy surrounds the curriculum, the safest thing to teach is nothing at all.

A lot of controversy is fabricated willfully by ideologues who believe absolutely batshit insane things.

True enough, but that has always been true. Something has changed on the institutional side such that it is no longer willing and/or able to simply reject batshit insanity and continue teaching children such that they are as well informed or better informed and capable as the last generation. What results is a positive feedback loop where a poorly educated public puts increasing pressure on an institution who's members are themselves poorly educated. The result is paralysis, and eventually, societal death.

>When great controversy surrounds the curriculum, the safest way to keep the gravy train rolling to teach is nothing at all.

I fixed your verbiage to be more descriptive. They are teaching nothing specifically because they don't want to kill the golden goose. If there wasn't so much money at stake we wouldn't be having this discussion.

Among other things an entire day on active shooter drills?

Is it possible your niece was joking?

Unfortunately, no. My niece's mom, my sister, called her school to ask wtf was going on. They gave her a lame, lawyer-approved response about their responsibility to protect children and the drills are mandated by the state, blah blah blah. So yeah, my niece said they practice how to respond (call 911, not your parents?), what to do if the teacher is shot (they don't use the word "shot", though), and they talked about tactical gear, like bullet-proof backpacks, which my niece wants now.

>call 911, not your parents?

What else do you expect government run schools to teach if not "engage the government at any/every opportunity"?

Looking back on my own education what a disservice some of those behavior patterns (not specifically that one) they tried to teach us would be in adult life.

I don’t think advising kids to make their first and possibly only call to an emergency number where someone’s all but guaranteed to pick up quickly and dispatch help instead of to a parent who might not pick up for any number of reasons and can’t personally dispatch emergency responders (but will surely just themselves turn around and call 911) is, like, a Big Government propaganda conspiracy. Seems more like plain old good advice.

While probably appropriate for a shooting, "when shit's going down, call the government first" is generally not a terrible way to handle things as an adult as it tends to reliably turn N-figure problems into much more complicated N+1 or N+2 figure problems. Running your situation by a cooler head not immediately involved is almost always better and the government is always slow enough to show up that you don't lose anything if you do go that route.

Likewise, I think it is very ill-advised to cram kid's heads full of "dial 911" at the young vulnerable age where repeated messaging goes into the kind of memory that's all but impossible to overwrite.

Given the recent school shooting where police waited around outside as the shooting was happening and parents were the only ones to intervene, it doesn't seem like such good advice.

Yeah, I wouldn't mind seeing the LE leadership at that particular, ah, event, plus maybe many of the other law enforcement folks present, subjected to some... consequences. Whatever the victims' parents want, really, I'd be pretty open to anything. I have ideas but I'd not suggest my preferences matter here, and would rather leave it to them, even if they settled on "nothing".

And ACAB, yeah, sure. Basically true, I agree.

That's still your best first move if there's a mass shooting. Anyone you call's just going to call 911 anyway (god, I hope). You do want hospitals on alert and calling in trauma surgeons, and ambulances on the way. And usually the police aren't that astoundingly useless in these cases, even if their outcomes are mixed.

I do think more often than not police are, in general, a net-benefit and force for "good", if you will, when called in for a mass shooting, and I don't think it's a particularly close call. Though yeah sometimes they are pretty bad even for that purpose (and they're often bad for other purposes, sure), and in the case of Uvalde they were disgustingly bad, and I here employ "disgustingly" with its full force and not flippantly.

Still, like... probably call 911 first if someone's shooting up a school?

lol, our legal system helping to destroy education via risk mitigation.

That's wild. My daughter just started public high school last week and they haven't had any meaningful talk about safety, no active shooter drills, nothing like that. They did waste several days on orientation and how class will be organized, stuff like that, but since she's a freshman I guess maybe that makes sense. This week she's been assigned homework.

But this is a boring suburban town on the edge of a midsize metro in the PNW, which is not exactly the most exciting place in the country.

> they don't use the word "shot", though

Can I guess.. "bulleted"? Similar to how the creators of brainrot content say "unalive" or "seggs" because they want to make sure their content can go viral, and there's the belief words like "kill", "died" or "sex" will trigger Zuck and Co.'s censorship?

2025, what a year to be alive...

My employer has us do active shooter training once a year. It only takes a couple hours, but I'm not surprised at all that many schools would spend a whole day (or more) on it, considering the attention paid to school shootings.

(Not to mention the break from teaching/studying.)

I don't like the comparisons to other schools or cultures where memorization is the priority.

What kids do with what they learn in school matter more than whether or not they memorized a calc function.

Besides, who cares if you know cal functions in a post-phone, post-AI world. You look that shit up now.

Why think when your phone or the AI can do it for you? I imagine there are a few people in this forum who might have some thoughts about that.

Recalling math trivia is not thinking... that's why it's called memorization...

I find this attitude to be really frustrating. Based on my experiences teaching math a student is not going to learn how to do the impressive things that you might call thinking if they don't have a solid foundation in how to do the basics. Imagine saying that learning the alphabet or spelling rules is just rote memorization and therefore not worth doing. If a person needs to spend all of their brain power thinking through elementary operations then they will have very little left over for the things that we might call thinking. I have seen too many kids who struggle with Algebra not because they can't understand the concepts but because they cannot do basic things like multiply 3x4 without needing to add 3 to 3 to 3 to 3.

I didn't say learning the basics was a bad thing...

I said memorization wasn't important...

I find it frustrating people argue against points that were never made.

That's a great question! Let me go ask Claude and get back to you..

At the early stages memorization is essential for some subjects. I still benefit greatly - like many - from very early having to memorize the complete lower multiplication table (12x14, 15x15 and all that, the 20-square). I actually need that in daily life all the time (and I'm old and skeptical about teaching too much stuff that just drowns kids and prevents deeper understanding because they are always chasing the next subject with little time to let anything sink in deeper). What is sine, tangent, cosine. At least a few digits of pi. Language and grammar too.

Lots and lots of stuff that just has to be memorized. It becomes easier the more experiences one gets over time using those, merely memorizing the words alone ofc. is useless and also very inefficient, without other knowledge to create a network the brain will throw pure sentence-memorization out. So you still start the lessons with some memorization, then deepen it by using it in class. But in the end you will still remember those many little "facts".

I didn't say all memorization was bad, just that we should understand we are comparing cultures that treat rote memorization differently.

I wish this narrative that memorization is bad would die. Yes, understanding concepts is also important, but memorization is incredibly useful for learning and applying knowledge. The faster you can recall "trivia" the better you are able to make connections.

I say this as someone you drank the "no memorization" koolaid. Now I always start new things with memorization first and I learn so much faster.

Yep, the most obvious example (besides language) would be of math. Despite what kids (and unfortunately, some adults) say, it's worth memorizing the tables from 1->10 despite the ubiquity of calculators because the process of memorizing them helps with seeing the patterns that provide a deeper understanding, and it's much faster than pulling out a calculator and plugging the numbers in.

There are some subjects where the emphasis on memorization that some places have is detrimental, but that doesn't make memorization bad in general.

Doing math without memorizing some basic arithmetic facts is like reading without knowing what the hundred most common words in the English language mean, and having to look them up every time you encounter one. Sure I guess you can do that, but… you definitely shouldn’t.

This contradicts my own experience.

As a kid, and probably still now, I was very reluctant to memorise things, for some reason I never understood but that may be connected with distrust of authority. I still remember how long and hard I fought my parents and grandparents who tried to make sure I would eventually memorise multiplication tables. Instead, I had to develop many tricks to be able to retrieve the proper results without memorisation, effectively discovering patterns to retrieve quickly all the tables from very few memorised numbers. Years later, I remember having done a similar thing in history classes, refusing to learn any dates, so instead finding tricks to tell which events must have occurred before or after another, thus again getting more engaged with the material as a result.

Sure, some material do require pure memorisation, like language learning (that I still hate with a passion), but overall I believe memorisation gets the bad rep it deserves.

In what state are public high schools allowed to "how to pray"? It sounds like her new high school isn't that good. I have a daughter at a good public high school in California in a quite liberal area. There was none of what you mentioned. One day of reviewing the syllabi and rules and quizzes in most subjects starting less than a week later.

The law is extremely specific about this one, and this is constitutional law that overrules all other laws.

A government institution cannot promote any one religion. It's fine to have a multi-denominational non-secular common worship area. You can also promote religion as a general concept, but not a specific religion.

Whether this rule is followed or enforced properly is an entirely separate problem that we are apparently still grappling with.

Well our insane Supreme Court ruled a few years ago on a case involving a football coach praying at games that schools are forced to allow religious employees to do their weird religious ceremony at school events.

Why shouldnt the football coach be able to pray on the field, alone, without forcing their belief on others? That seems extremely reasonable. Making students also pray would be bad,but he didnt do that.

Because he's an employee being paid to do what he's told and the school told him not to because it was causing a disturbance. Why does he have to practice his religion on his employer's time? Let's say he was cussing during school hours, would it violate his 1st amendment rights if the school told him to stop?

> Why shouldnt the football coach be able to pray on the field, alone, without forcing their belief on others?

Because they're an authority figure in that context.

Same reason I can flirt with you, but your boss can't.

Who says you can’t find true love on Hacker News!

Because he’s a football coach and there is almost always an implication that you toe the line or face reprisal.

It’s also in poor taste. Jesus himself commented on performative piety:

“Whenever you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, who love to stand and pray in the synagogues and on street corners so that others may observe them doing so. Amen, I say to you, they have already received their reward. 6 But when you pray, go into your room, close the door, and pray to your Father in secret. And your Father who sees everything that is done in secret will reward you“

Fortunately for the coach, the gospels are not binding precedent.

> Because he’s a football coach and there is almost always an implication that you toe the line or face reprisal.

This sounds like nobody in a position of power should be allowed to openly do anything that people around them have the right to not do. Which would be kinda bs.

Very much not an accurate description of what was actually happening, despite what the court’s majority claimed (egregious and surely, at least often, willful factual errors in majority opinions are a hallmark of the Roberts court)

Luckily there are both witness accounts and photos in this case, so it’s pretty clear what was really going on.

I strongly encourage you to glance at the dissents for that case. That is very much not the case. The Supreme Court willingly ignored very important evidence that was the case.

I don't know if "how to pray" is covered, but Texas passed legislation requiring the display of the Ten Commandments in public schools.

>I don't know if "how to pray" is covered, but Texas passed legislation requiring the display of the Ten Commandments in public schools.

Yes. Apparently that's SB10. SB11 covers praying in school.

cf. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45194376

Would you be open to identifying the state where this school is?

It's Texas.

I went to public high school in the 70s. The honors chemistry class spent an entire semester on what a molar mass was.

Either this is a bizarre backwards school, or your niece is exaggerating for effect.

> kids in the US are doing active shooter drills and staring at the Ten Commandments. USA! USA! USA!

Not a thing at public schools (despite some attempts to force it)

Between this and the prayer comment, I suspect this comment is either exaggerated or mixed with internet anecdotes rather than actual experience.

>> kids in the US are doing active shooter drills and staring at the Ten Commandments. USA! USA! USA!

>Not a thing at public schools (despite some attempts to force it)

>Between this and the prayer comment, I suspect this comment is either exaggerated or mixed with internet anecdotes rather than actual experience.

Actually, it is a thing in Texas. And unfortunately, it's not exaggerated at all.

From Wikipedia[0]:

"S.B. 10 requires public schools to display the Ten Commandments anywhere clearly visible. The law requires the display to be framed or a poster, and include the exact text of the Ten Commandments provided in the law without alternatives. It must also be at least 16 inches (41 cm) wide and 20 inches (51 cm) tall.[13]"

From the office of the Texas Attorney General:

“In Texas classrooms, we want the Word of God opened, the Ten Commandments displayed, and prayers lifted up,” said Attorney General Paxton. “Twisted, radical liberals want to erase Truth, dismantle the solid foundation that America’s success and strength were built upon, and erode the moral fabric of our society. Our nation was founded on the rock of Biblical Truth, and I will not stand by while the far-left attempts to push our country into the sinking sand.”

Senate Bill 11, passed by the Texas Legislature this past regular session, allows school boards to adopt policies setting aside time for voluntary prayer and the reading of the Bible or other religious texts. The law requires that the board of trustees for each ISD in Texas take a record vote on whether to adopt a policy to implement these periods no later than six months after September 1, 2025. Student participation in these periods requires parental consent."

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_Senate_Bill_10

[1] https://www.texasattorneygeneral.gov/news/releases/attorney-...

Edit: Fixed typo (nor --> not).

dismantle the solid foundation on which America’s success and strength were built

>dismantle the solid foundation on which America’s success and strength were built

More songs about Ken Paxton[0]

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cUqTNDJjdLw

Texas seems pretty medieval : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cRIfsFefatg

>Most parents just watch TV, stare at their phones and don't want to be bothered by anything that requires effort

This lazy "answer" to every parenting problem makes me roll my eyes nowadays. It's the equivalent of an umbrella hypothesis, a convenient excuse for not having to consider things in-depth, further justified by seeing parents when they are taking a break and assuming they're always like that.

Not only that, but it's a dead end for societal policy. Even if a person actually believed parents deserve the most blame for kids' educational outcomes, that person should recognize there's no real way to influence this (short of dystopic levels of forcing kids into foster care). They would then find the second most blame-worthy cause to fix.

Parent here with school-aged kids. I think this sub-thread blaming the parents is particularly depressing and not founded in reality. Here is the way I see it. The social media companies with quasi infinite resources have won. They hired the best and the brightest engineers to hack our minds and steal our attention and they have succeeded beyond expectations. As evidence look that the market capitalization of Meta, etc. The data showing that children are reading way less compared to when I was growing up is consistent with what I see, but I did not an infinite ocean of distractions available via device that has become indispensable for modern living (i.e., the smart phone). By the time I was thirteen, I had read the Lord of the Rings to completion, but if I had grown up in present times I doubt that would be the case.

Of course kids are reading less. When I was growing, there was frequently not much else to do. Reading was replaced by movies and shows on demand and wont come back no matter what educators or parents do.

It is cheaper, easily available and more fun.

Sure kids also use social networks. But the role reading had was mostly taken over by Netflix, youtube, disney and such.

>Reading was replaced by movies and shows on demand and wont come back no matter what educators or parents do.

... huh?

I'm a parent and this just isn't true. My wife and I have phones, our young children do not. We do not own a tablet. Our children have never known what it's like to have the option of resorting to a screen to keep them busy when we're out of the house. TV time is limited on the weekends, extra limited on the weeknights.

My oldest absolutely loves reading, and I watched her sit in the corner for 90 minutes on Sunday with a pile of books and a massive grin on her face the whole time. My youngest is still too young to read, but I'm hoping for results within the same realm.

Your comment about there frequently not being much else to do? It's up to parents to, for lack of a better phrase, teach kids how to be bored.

Edit:

>It's cheaper, easily available and more fun.

What's super fun, easily available and free for us is going to a park on the weekend to play and have lunch, and then driving around to a bunch of Little Free Libraries in the area. Drop off books we don't want, see if the kids or parents find anything that strikes our fancy. Our kiddos love it and so do we, it's great family time.

I wish people would understand that their personal experience doesn't automatically generalise to collective trends.

It's great that your kids are reading, but clearly a lot of kids, and even more adults, aren't.

It's not just "up to parents" because the media, in all its forms, sets collective values.

And the strategic problem in the US is that reading - and culture in general - is caught between a number of competing ideologies, most of which are destructive to what's usually understood as education both in and out of school.

What individual parents do is downstream of all of those cultural influences. It's heavily dependent on socioeconomics, opportunity, and status, with error bars that depend on a random range of individual values.

The US is a competing patchwork of wildly incompatible cultures and traditions, some of which are directly opposed to each other, and all of which - in practice - are suspicious of traditional educational goals.

Put simply, no one is driving the bus. So it's stuck in a ditch, with its wheels spinning. And it's about to burst into flames.

There's only so much individual parents can do to fix that. The problems are strategic and political, not individual, and they're much harder to fix than they seem.

>I wish people would understand that their personal experience doesn't automatically generalise to collective trends.

And I wish people wouldn't make assumptions and then respond based on those assumptions.

Alas, the evolution of societies is dictated by rules that no individual cases, however inspirational, can radically influence.

You can teach your kids how to fly a plane, yet gravity is not up to parents.

>Fewer than 1 in 5 (18.7%) 8- to 18-year-olds told us that they read something daily in their free time in 2025, again, the lowest levels we've recorded, with daily reading levels decreasing by nearly 20 percentage points since 2005.

[1] https://literacytrust.org.uk/research-services/research-repo...

Seems like the kids just don't read anymore, yours being exception of course

Your kids are small. They wont have other kids in school to talk about books with and to show them different books. The discovery of books and social aspect of it ends with you. It is completely different social environment compared to what I had. There used to be cheap junk book stories, journals about books, things like that. These do not really exist anymore, but similar structures exist for movies.

Assuming they will social, they will have friends to talk with them about anime shows and they will go visit them to watch those shows in their house. The kids in school will talk about anime, about netflix shows, but not about books.

> It's up to parents to, for lack of a better phrase, teach kids how to be bored.

You have full control while they are small. That goes away quickly and obviously even should go away.

But even more importantly, my parents and parents of my peers did not had to put that much work into us reading. They did not had to make the one big family project, they could have spend their weekends working in garden or going to play golf ... and generally speaking kids ended up reading a lot more anyway. They would read, because it was easily available and only fun thing to do.

> What's super fun, easily available and free for us is going to a park on the weekend to play and have lunch, and then driving around to a bunch of Little Free Libraries in the area.

It is not fun except for small kids. All these stats are about kids with agency which yours do not have yet.

My friend has kids, 8 and 10, who run around outside and play with neighborhood kids as well as read books. They are very active in their kids lives and constantly bring them to events and other social gatherings. This keeps them active physically and socially making things like screen time seem boring.

The shitty parents are the ones who let meta and the like hack them to the point where their children are just following by example - if you stare at the screen all day, so will they.

If the system is such that you have to be an exceptional parent not to fuck up your kids, the system is the problem. Like I applaud your friend with kids, but I think its worth considering that their might be an issue if you need to be working very hard to give your kids a stimulating, healthy, childhood.

> if you need to be working very hard to give your kids a stimulating, healthy, childhood.

They don't work hard, they enjoy themselves.

They also have hobbies and my friend is always working on some hobby/home project. His wife is very social and is always planning something and he has no issues following along as he likes going out and doing things. They take the kids because they enjoy being with them and the kids also enjoy going out too.

The big issue today is the fact that parents are distracted by phones so their kids follow that example. It used to be everyone sat around, watching TV or talking to a friend on the phone. Those were limited activities as eventually you got tired of talking or nothing good on the few channels of TV so you found other things to do. Now its phones constantly pumping out attention stealing content 24/7. It's a prison.

Yes. Phones are part of the system and they are part of the problem.

Add a couple thoughts to that general idea:

- There's also a reward issue, in that reading, especially long form is "soft punished." It's not directly punished, yet there's very little reward, mostly a lot of struggle, not much of the candy feedback of TV, movies, and video games. It requires personal imagination and visualization of often difficult concepts rather than simply taking what someone else has "imagined correctly" for you. If you've never seen the Lord of the Rings movies, imaging what Frodo, Aragorn, and the rest are actually doing, where they're going, and the struggling through Tolkien's complicated prose is quite challenging. And socially, there's also significant peer pressure issues involved, that evoke “epidemic” or “contagion” comparisons. Once large numbers of peers discount reading, then the population on average starts receiving negative feedback. Notably, if peers are high achievers, then students who interact with these peers may also adopt those habits. [1]

[1] https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/jameskim/files/jep-peer_in...

- Part that's less nefarious, like a teen highlights about the difficulties of reading in this paper [2] (pg 34.) "You can’t ask a book to explain what it means right now. I go to people because of their interactive nature."

[2] https://alair.ala.org/server/api/core/bitstreams/0051cf84-91...

- The social media companies and the world wide web culture in general have also implemented a form of reading detriment. There's little reward to blogging, writing, or reading long form writing. Incendiary writing and rage-farming was long ago found to be an extremely effective tactic compared to informative discussion. And a lot of the time, almost all you can look forward to with your informative post is your contribution being aggressively scraped, while being compensated nothing, and then churned out to make someone else money.

- There's actually a few positive though, apparently teen and juvenile literature is actually increasing in sales somewhat from [2] compared with adult literature sales. Young adult books have been the fastest-growing category over the last 5 years, with print unit sales jumping by 48.2% since 2018. 35.03 million print copies of young adult (YA) books are sold each year as of 2022. [3]

[3] https://wordsrated.com/young-adult-book-sales/#:~:text=Compa...

- You may be slightly down biasing how much people read Lord of the Rings. The Hobbit edition from 2007 has 76,000 ratings and 12,000 reviews on Amazon. [4]

[4] https://www.amazon.com/Hobbit-J-R-R-Tolkien/dp/0618968636/re...

I wonder how much of the YA uptick is driven by adults who prefer less-challenging reading. If that's the case it just makes the picture appear even more bleak.

It’s mostly that. Basically the only genres that still sell meaningful numbers are YA (with lots of adult readers, and if we want to count that as its own genre) and romance (99.9% of which isn’t more challenging than average YA, and usually has even less going on as far as ideas and theme—not to knock it, I mean hell, it’s no worse a use of time than tons of other things).

Adult genre fic, even, is dying, and lit-fic has long been in decline and has pretty much just been for a few nerds since roughly the turn of the millennium.

I think the decline of reading is exactly what’s pushed publishers and agents to favor easier and easier books: you have to pursue as much of the market as possible to make money now because the whole market’s not that big, so you can’t afford to exclude readers. That means favoring ever-easier books as readership declines.

The only other route to make a living is aiming straight at film/TV adaptation, which is very hard to break into but a handful of authors have successfully specialized in that. Their books do OK but they’re watched, as it were, way, way more than they’re read.

That kind of issue is very much "eh" for me personally. They're reading. Not everybody's motivated to read "Ulysses" or "War and Peace". Probably a significant percentage move to reading more challenging material with time.

The issue a lot of people are talking about is the decline in reading comprehension, lowered reading scholastic scores, the overall lack of reading, and the consumption of entertainment that requires little reading.

Stuff like the "Treasure Island" (#34), "Oliver Twist" (#56), and "The Hound of the Baskervilles" (#66) still rates rather high up on Young Adult literature sales by Amazon's reported numbers, even if romance and such is the top 5-10. They're reading.

Man don't gate keep reading. I don't care if an adult is reading 'see spot run' so long as they're reading and enjoying it. Reading begets reading. It's a muscle that must be exercised.

The level of tolerance for phone use in the classroom in the last decade blows my mind. It would be like letting kids pull out a GameBoy back in the 2000s, which where I was would have it promptly confiscated.

I was thinking about that recently. I don’t anyone ever pulling out a Game Boy in elementary or middle school in the 90s, even though many of us had them at home.

It’s not that we all got a lecture about no video games in school. It just very self-evidently wasn’t a place you would play video games. It would be like getting a pizza delivered to you at the doctor’s office. Just absurd.

I remember a kid with a Game Gear on the elementary school bus and even that being, well, unusual enough I remember it. Kind of similar to how kids will always remember seeing someone’s family pet run on the bus, because it blows their minds that it can even happen.

by the time i was in elementary school, it was common enough for geeky kids to have game boys at school. this was the height of the pokemon craze, after all.

not in class, of course, but at lunch and on the bus, it was fair game.

what you are suggesting means that economic activity will decrease. we are a consumerism driven society, we want people looking at screens and watching ads. that's how we grow the economy.

The core problem is actually twofold:

1. We pay teachers like shit and treat them even worse. Even if you wanted to do a good job as a teacher, it's fundamentally impossible because:

2. Our schools are structured and run by busybodies that have absolutely no business being within 100 yards of a school. Curricula is set by politics and ideology, not established science. We have book bans and helicopter parents suing teachers for talking about dinosaurs or evolution or even for simply existing as a queer person in any capacity.

Teachers have been fleeing in droves for years, and many states and locales are further reducing the qualifications required to teach, leading to a downwards sprial.

There's also the intentional and systematic disassembling of our education system by the federal government, as a means of voter suppression. This whole situation was created on purpose to keep Americans dumb and complacent.

America is fucked six ways from Sunday and it's hard to even think about a way out of this mess. It's going to take several generations for our society and government to recover, if it ever does.

Where my wife works the average salary is over 100K per year, so not bad for 9 months of work. This is in California where the test scores are some of the worst in the nation. I would not lean too hard at political party affiliation, California politics is heavily influenced by Teachers Unions, and yet we score near the bottom of the entire US.

> This is in California where the test scores are some of the worst in the nation.

This is an easily disprovable statement that calls into question your credibility.

California schools generally score right at or just below the median for the entire US.

That doesn't make them good, but they sure aren't the worst.

> I would not lean too hard at political party affiliation

In the US, it's not hard to look at a map of political party affiliation and a ranking of the worst schools and not notice the correlation.

It's not hard to be in the median yet one of the worst states, if NY/CA/FL/TX all have shit scores (I have no idea if that's the case). You could conceivably be at the median while being one of the worst 5 or 10 states.

Median means that half the states are worse than you. Unless there are ties, it's impossible to be the median and the 10th percentile.

Unless I missed something?

I was thinking median meant enough population of below states to reach half of populace, are doing worse.

>It's not hard to be in the median yet one of the worst states, if NY/CA/FL/TX all have shit scores (I have no idea if that's the case). You could conceivably be at the median while being one of the worst 5 or 10 states.

I wonder where you went to school. Median means that half of the sample is above and half the sample is below.

To explain (and I'll use small words so you'll be sure to understand), the median of the fifty states is that 25 are above the median and 25 are below it. See how that works?

Here's a simpler example in case you're still confused:

Steve makes $5/hour

Bob makes $8/hour

Reggie makes $11/hour

Sylvana makes $14/hour

Benoit makes $17/hour

The median wage is then $11.00/hour. Get it now?

Check out this very complex page[0] (let me know if you need help with the bigger words) that discusses this idea. Good luck. I suspect you're gonna need it.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_tendency

>I wonder where you went to school. Median means that half of the sample is above and half the sample is below.

Yes I understand that, but the sample unit called out in finding the median explicitly was 'schools' not median 'state.' (And before that, test scores, in which the fundamental unit is a child and not a state).

I was trying to come up with an explanation how CA could be at the bottom while still have schools around the median.

If NY/CA/FL/TX are huge and tight to together, the median school or child could be in one of them even if they were amongst the worst 5 or 10 states. The 'median' as used above was in reference to schools, not states.

I think the key piece you're missing here is each state does not have equal number of schools or children. Therefore if a state's schools are all scoring near the median (of schools) as alleged, and the large states are all doing bad, California could be one of the worst few states while having their schools (and children) near the median. You're getting your units mixed up.

>California schools generally score right at or just below the median for the entire US.

I'm guessing you're referring to the statement above from the comment here[0]. Is that correct?

I read that as "[All] The schools in California [in aggregate] generally score right at or just below the median for [other states' schools in aggregate] for the entire US." Which is as Tyr42 (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45191847 ) interpreted it as well.

Perhaps I misunderstood, but I don't believe I've ever seen comparisons of individual schools across the US. Ever. It's always comparisons of all the schools in one state as compared with those in another state.

Sure, there are often comparisons within states between school districts or between schools in the same district, but never one-to-one comparisons of a single school in one state vs. all the other schools in the US.

But yes, i can see how you might read it that way. That said, I guess we won't know which GP meant unless they come back and tell us.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45190611

Edit: Clarified comparison examples within within states/between school districts/schools.

I think the way you read it is the more likely way to read it. But the way I read it for my comment was the way I had to read it to come up with California coming at the bottom while having schools all scoring near the median of schools. I was trying to come up with a way to read it to make the assertions possibly true.

>I think the way you read it is the more likely way to read it. But the way I read it for my comment was the way I had to read it to come up with California coming at the bottom while having schools all scoring near the median of schools. I was trying to come up with a way to read it to make the assertions possibly true.

Yep. Your comment here[0] made that clear. I completely misunderstood you. Sorry about that.

I think there may be some confusion about where various states sit WRT schools.

School rankings from the World Population review[1] as compared with state test scores[2] of various types and ages, as well as US News and World Report's State school rankings[3], all of which tell a different, if similar, story.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45196647

[1] https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/public-scho...

[2] https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/profiles/stateprofile?sfj=...

[3] https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/rankings/education

> I read that as "[All] The schools in California [in aggregate] generally score right at or just below the median for [other states' schools in aggregate] for the entire US."

That is how I intended it as, like you, I have never seen anything else.

However, the real comment I was refuting was "This is in California where the test scores are some of the worst in the nation." That statement simply isn't supported by the data.

It is certainly possible that California does have some of the worst individual districts in the nation as it definitely has pockets of incredibly poor socioeconomic areas. However, that does not define "California schools" as an aggregate any more than the fact that California has some of the highest individually performing schools in the country by virtue of demographics as well.

> This is in California where the test scores are some of the worst in the nation

I read your post and thought it was BS, so I did a little research. According to this, California public school test scores are better than Texas and closing in on New York and Florida.

> California politics is heavily influenced by Teachers Unions, and yet we score near the bottom of the entire US.

California scores better than Texas, a completely Republican-run state where the teacher's unions have almost no influence. How do you account for that?

https://www.ppic.org/publication/californias-k-12-test-score...

Maybe California just has more rich people. When you control for demographics/SES, Texas schools seem far superior:

https://www.chadaldeman.com/p/which-states-actually-have-the...

https://www.urban.org/sites/default/files/2024-12/States_Dem...

Texas, Mississippi, and others partially achieve this by holding students back.

Mississippi, for example, has a third grade reading gate. Texas holds black kids back at a nearly twice the rate of white kids. These kids are older and have repeated the grade so they do better in the 4th grade NAEP assessment.

This is possibly working as intended. However, you can achieve the same results by redshirting your kid or having them repeat a grade.

So the claim from the blog post that

> but Texas has a slight edge for Hispanic students and a huge advantage for Black students.

says that the Texas results are driven by a demographic that's aggressively held back.

Isn’t that a good thing? Should students be promoted to a higher grade if the aren’t doing well. It’s really difficult to do this in California. My wife has dealt with high school seniors who are functionally illiterate. Maybe if they were held back they might catch up.

I'm not making a judgment about whether it's a good or bad thing for the kid. I don't know the literature to have a position. I'm just contextualizing the data.

In practical terms, the states kind of have different definitions of what it means to be in 4th grade. And that's one way of increasing your score on this particular measurement.

I think the right thing to do is intervene before students are held back. But that costs money and might make your NAEP scores worse if the student just squeaks by this year rather than staying behind a year. But I don't have the data on how much they're attempting to intervene in cases where students look like they're going to be held back.

Good point, a true apples-to-apples comparison would be based on age rather than grade level.

Adjusted for income its really bad. Income is the strongest causes of academic performance, so if you adjust for them California is doing way worse than other states.

CA also scores middle of the pack on nominal poverty rate (OPM), but last in the country on cost of living adjusted poverty rate (SPM). If anything though, that means backwards from what I would expect for income controlled education scores... ?

This is false. Adjusted for income CA students outperform most other states because CA has one of the largest populations of low income students.

Huge ESOL population, too (but to be fair, Texas and several other states also face that challenge)

Yes they have large ESL populations but CAs is much larger and those other states fare worse by any breakdown.

Exactly. The problem is the students and parents.

It would not matter what school you sent me to, I did not care about learning or intellectual pursuits when I was 15.

I would have had to be raised by completely different parents with different values in a different time and place.

> There's also the intentional and systematic disassembling of our education system by the federal government

Where is your evidence of this? Schools are one of the most locally controlled institutions of our government.

Parents need to take responsibility for outcomes. Education happens as much at home as it does in school. You need engaged teachers AND parents.

Teacher salaries need to keep up. The problem is teacher salaries aren’t a state or a national setup. They depend on the school district you’re in. If you’re in a high income district where higher taxes are afforded. Teacher salaries are good. But then these places also have VERY engaged parents - which makes the scores much better.

If you want rural and inner city scores to improve it will need real funding - 1. For teachers to want to move to small town USA and teach there, 2. Or for them to risk life and limb going to inner cities and 3. Having an extremely high teacher to student ratio - probably 5-10 per teacher to compensate for lack of engagement at home.

It's a pipe dream. I live in a fairly high income district. The school's attitude is my way or the highway. Neighboring municipalities do not fare any better in this department. From my experience, schools will fight tooth and nail to defend the status quo. I gave up.

> systematic disassembling of our education system by the federal government

So you support shutting down the federal Dept. of Education? Or is the answer more centralized control of education?

I fully support shutting down the DoE and starting from scratch. It has failed.

Instead, institute a voucher system and allow parents to literally shop around for the best school. With obvious allowances for children with special needs, rural areas, etc.

Education needs competition. Badly.

> Curricula is set by politics and ideology, not established science.

This is part of it. A friend is a teacher and is now in an admin position where he manages teachers. His big gripe is the higher ups have no formal system - every time a new person comes in they bring with them their system and politics, burning down the previous efforts while doing little to nothing for students. Then they leave for greener pastures and the next ideologue comes along with their matches.

You are hilarious.

Schools are dominated by leftwing CRT ideology. It's the rare exception when there is real pushback against dinosaurs or evolution. I very much doubt that you are as angry about Islamic pushback against sex topics in school.

The reward structures, the dumbing down of courses, removing accelerated courses, passing everyone, the move against merit, the removal of structure, discipline, and punishment for bad behavior all come from liberal ideas on teaching.

Anyone who demands standards, values merit, values hard work with high expectations is labeled a fascist, colonizer, or some other pejorative. "Ways of knowing" is an idea that permeates modern teaching where we can't judge or grade anyone for what they know or don't know because different people just "know" differently. Grades are racist. Expectations are racist. Math is racist.

> Only one study specifically examined the achievement gap for students from low socioeconomic backgrounds (Hampton & Gruenert, 2008) despite NCLB’s stated commitment to improving education for children from low-income families. African American students were often mentioned in studies of general student achievement but none of the reviewed studies focused specifically on the effects of NCLB for this subgroup. Again, this is a curious gap in the research considering the law’s emphasis on narrowing the Black-White achievement gap. Other groups of students underrepresented in the research on NCLB include gifted students, students with vision impairments, and English proficient minority students.

("A Review of the Empirical Literature on No Child Left Behind From 2001 to 2010", Husband & Hunt, 2015)

Everything you see going wrong is downstream of this. Yes, harmful ideologies have done a lot of damage to the education system, but it could easily survive this we had actual signifiers of success.

Chicago public school teachers salaries will reach over $110,000 by 2029 or earlier. Just going by the track record, this will not result in a better quality of education.

I wouldn’t work in Chicago for that amount of money

> Most parents just watch TV, stare at their phones and don't want to be bothered by anything that requires effort.

No?

Most of the parents around me are busy each working a full time job and doing their best to raise their kids.

They now spend some of their free time reading on the phones instead of a newspaper, magazine, or book. Some listen to books while they mow the lawn, clean the house, or do other chores like laundry. They also hang out a mix of kids and parents nearby, both inside and out, in front of bonfires and kitchen tables. RN I'm commenting on HN while my kids and neighbor kids turn dinner into an imaginary cooking show at the table.

Parents around here are also often tending to elderly parents or physically/mentally challenged relatives.

Too few can afford to have one parent stay home fulltime.

Of course there have always been parents neglecting their kids to do anything else: bowling, drinking, partying, traveling, tinkering, obsessively reading, etc. The fact that more activities are behind screens isn't the catch all explanation it's often promoted to be.

People always want to blame the new thing in culture. Some collective sin if only we had better self control. Every generation has one.

Usually it’s just institutional failure at multiple levels and a whole bunch of people who don’t care about the institution’s output sufficiently.

Every time I read about new education stories they’re busy trying to solve wider social issues instead of being the best place to get an education. Just like how libraries turned into homeless shelters instead of being a place for the community to learn and read.

I agree, but it’s tough to see the studies showing average daily screen time of different age groups and not see that as a pretty obvious contributor.

Nothing wrong with a bit of social control if you’re doing it in a controlled measurable way. As long as you’re not just treating it like a boogieman while ignoring how schools are simultaneously becoming less motivating places to learn. Bore a kid to death by not challenging them or holding them accountable then they will 100% default to their phone to escape the tedium.

Wait, you’re literally on your phone while your kids entertain you…?

Yes? You mention it too - parents glued to their phones, part of the problem. Kids seeing their parents reading a book vs being glued to their phones really isn't the same thing, far from it. They can come and see pages of printed text in a book, vs some endless tiktok/instagram feeds of shallow video entertainment. Guess which they will stay around and stare endlessly without even blinking.

Screens and especially active content are incredibly addictive and small kids have no way of being rational and throttle their use. If they see the same behavior in their parents that's it.

Its not about having stay-at-home parent, but about spending the time with kids to be 100% physically there for them and them only, no running screen of any type anywhere in sight. Lets be honest, this is a rather rare sight.

Get off the phone! I see so many parents are restaurants, both glued to their phones while their kid is bored our on their tablet.

> Most parents just watch TV, stare at their phones and don't want to be bothered by anything that requires effort.

What universe do you live in

I generally agree. However, I don't think most parents are neglectful for using a screen. The ones that can't be bothered would just be drinking, reading gossip magazines, going to bars, or whatever else they felt like if screens simply stopped existing.

Admittedly my kids get more screen time than I'd like, but we try to make it educational. An observation that I made that is on topic for this thread, is that there are very few modern US shows that seem to fit our criteria of being educational and not over-stimularing. It seemes there are many more international shows that are better.

Maybe. I've definitely seen that anecdotally in some cases. But the school system is also problematic for the families that do value education and the kids that could excel in the classroom.

Our district has eliminated programs for the kids at the top end in the name of equity. They've also eliminated separate spaces for kids with learning and behavioral issues for the same reason. So everyone is in the same classroom and most of the teacher's time is spent on a handful of kids causing trouble and the rest of the class learns nothing.

We can't afford private school, so we're doing a bunch of extra lessons at home to keep them on pace, engaged, and challenged. But really, there are only so many hours in the day and I want them to be outside playing too!

do you live in Canada or is this happening elsewhere?

Chicago for example. Look up recent action on magnet schools.

> Seattle Public Schools cancels gifted program 'cohorts' for equity reasons

https://www.fox13seattle.com/news/sps-highly-capable-cohort-...

Then I think its time for an IEP to be formed for each of those students, for "special education".

Sure, "special education" has traditionally meant slow, retarded, nonverbal, etc. We all know that euphemism. "Short bus". It always represents basically warehousing the bottom 10% of public education students where they cant affect the majority.

But 'gifted students' also require special education. Its not normal, for reasons of academic rigor. And they are way past the curriculum of the middle 67% of the distribution.

So, the answer is to demand an IEP. It is also a legal document, which outlines scholastic rights to the student, and holds these districts strongly accountable.

And, at least for now, gets more federal funding to 'special education'.

In general, I agree. Just playing devils advocate: society problems dont come from the smart kid that wasn’t challenged enough in school. They come from the kids that never had their behavior issues addressed.

Those kids will always cost society way more than the smart kid that didn’t reach their full potential at Harvard and ended up at UCF.

IEPs and other accommodations are becoming more common with high achievers like with ADHD, anxiety, or depression. On the LSAT test takers with accommodations for extended testing time score 5 points higher on average than the overall pool of test takers, and ADHD is the most common request reason. https://www.lsac.org/sites/default/files/research/TR-24-01.p... (page 4)

At a certain level “homeschool” is going to be more effective. Ive seen parents get together with 3-6 similar aged students, and then do a combination of hiring a teacher/tutor for them and splitting duting to making it tenable.

This is an empirical claim and there's statistics already available. Almost every study of student performance dramatically favors homeschool over American public school. I'm not saying this in support of homeschool, but as an indictment of public school. It's wild that schools spend many millions of dollars on hundreds of professionals, materials, and centuries of institutional knowledge, and yet are trivially outcompeted by just a mom who puts in the hours with a curriculum from the internet.

To be fair: that mom gets to pick and choose which kids to teach. She probably wouldn’t get the same result if she had to apply the same techniques to inner-city Detroit kids six hours a day and five days a week.

>She probably wouldn’t get the same result if she had to apply the same techniques to inner-city Detroit kids six hours a day and five days a week.

I think you're thinking of it backwards. Inner city Detroit kids probably struggle in school precisely because there maybe isn't a mom at home who's passionate and available to educate them (among plenty of other reasons, to be sure).

Inner city Detroit kids (not gonna lie, feels like a euphemism) aren't just inherently hard to teach for no reason

Obviously that's the case, which is why it's not fair to claim homeschooling parents "trivially outcompete" the public school system. That was my point.

> (not gonna lie, feels like a euphemism)

Are we still doing not-so-subtle claims of "I think you're a racist?"

Pick any demographic group that gets overwhelmingly bad results and depends on the public school system. Look at the statistics. We aren't going to fix problems we can't acknowledge. Urban public school districts are among the most impacted by bad public schools.

> We aren't going to fix problems we can't acknowledge. Urban public school districts are among the most impacted by bad public schools.

That problem is because school district funding is directly related to tax revenue in said district.

Tax revenue has to go to capital maintenance and repair, and also scholastic budgets (teachers, aides, equipment, books).

Due to 'White Flight' ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_flight) and historical segregation of black people, left primarily poverty in urban city cores. People who later move into empty residences do so with reduced rents, and general poverty problems like food insecurity, bad transportation, and higher crime. (Poverty is a disease and can be modelled as such.)

The poverty is directly related to low scholastic district funding, therefore poor schools.

And to further harm poor (monetary and educational outcome) schools, is Bush's plan in the 2000's to pull funding from underperforming schools. Better funded schools have better educational outcomes, so those schools were less affected, or not at all.

Even a local school in my area had federal funding reduced. I'm in a community with roughly 97% white people, so its not a legacy race thing. But it does turn out that it is a poverty thing.

If the problem could be solved by throwing more money at it, it would have been solved long ago. Some poorly performing inner-city school districts are among the highest of per-pupil spenders in the country.

Some problems can't be solved by money, or even by the public school system.

I made the point of calling the whole situation 'poverty'.

You make a valid claim that urban schools have highest per-capita expenditures, which I accept.

However, no amount of school funding can fix: violence/crime, food deserts, poverty wages, parent(s) working multiple jobs and not enough parent-child time, or all the other trappings of poverty not explicitly in schools.

Free breakfast/lunch would definitely help, at least in terms of nutrition and hunger.

But we're past just pumping a district with cash to fix it. We would need to pump the whole community to fix the disease of poverty to start turning the academic performance around.

The downside? Fixing poverty proper takes longer than politicians are elected in. Well, that and "those people shouldn't get freebies, cause that's socialism".

("Those people" is obviously barely coded language for ghetto black people. Howls of socialism and not deserving aid. Glad I never had children.)

Agreed on all points.

As a homeschooler raised ~20 years ago, the key insight is that outcomes are bimodally distributed based on an overlayed function of parental socioeconomic status and student talent.

The question is which causes which. Does homeschool follow or bolster student talent. Is high parental involvement a meaningless correlation of some other aspect of high SES which actually explains these results, or is it that high SES homes are more involved, and the money itself is the mere correlate?

> yet are trivially outcompeted by just a mom who puts in the hours with a curriculum from the internet.

Oh come on. A quick read on Wikipedia will even tell you the research on outcomes is fraught with biases and lacking evidence. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeschooling

Thankfully, my reading of the research didn't begin or end with "a quick read on Wikipedia"

Are your kids old enough to run amok at home instead of going to school? Would the police arrest you if you left them home alone instead of sending them to school?

Check the private schools a few more times - some offer quite competitive financial aid packages that even people who feel they’re “high wage” can take advantage of.

It’s a function of time. For far too many people, the existence of modern life consumes more time than it did a generation ago. We work more hours, we work harder hours, we consume entertainment for more hours.

The costs of this societal shift fall on those who can’t compete for time. Student’s go unparented and unmentioned.

I graduated from high school less than ten years ago. I'm sure screens have become a big issue in many (or most) schools, but that was not the case at my high school. It still was mostly daycare, not education, so banning screens will not be enough.

> Most parents just watch TV, stare at their phones and don't want to be bothered by anything that requires effort.

You must live in a very sad place. This does not describe the average parent of any of the kids around me. I know these people exist, but it’s not the norm at least in my state.

The most common complaint among my teacher friends is about helicopter parents who are too involved.

Public school is a joke. My 5 year old started kindergarten recently. They're currently learning shapes, which she (and every other child I've encountered) knew when she was two years old.

Meanwhile at home, she's already reading. She's at the hard part, when reading is so slow that it's painfully boring. It's still too slow for the entertainment value to justify the work, so she's not hooked yet. We spend 5-10 minutes a day on it, and I suspect she'll be over the hump in 3-6 months. Public school would have taken another two years to get her there, even though they get her for 7 hours per day.

The one-size-fits-all model of education is a blight on our civilization.

As someone old (60+) who was a teacher in school and thinking a lot about it:

- It's mostly a cultural shift in the western world – we don't value personal responsibility any more. When I was in school in seventies, it was my responsibility to study no matter what since grade 1. It didn't matter whether I liked a teacher, topic or whatever. It's not the case any more.

- Since nineties there has been a shift in educational sciences and practices from "old school" memorizing as "rote learning" and explicit instruction toward "critical thinking skills". Sounds nice for many, but in practice it doesn't work. Barb Oakley has a wonderful paper about it "The Memory Paradox: Why Our Brains Need Knowledge in an Age of AI"[1].

- Smartphones, social media etc certainly contribute and the rise of LLMs will make it even worse.

[1] - https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5250447

I've related this story here before. I was a first year in physics grad school, and my professor told me he heard rumours of students telling each other memorising formulae was a waste of time, and that as a physicist one should just be good at deriving results. The professor scoffed at that and sardonically surmised that may be the person who said that was intentionally trying to stiffle their competition in the class. Memorisation while limited in some ways is a part of the whole in addition to creative and critical thinking. Without facts and ideas in your mind, you have nothing to think criticall about.

I grew up being told by my peers in school that memorising things was a waste of time and critical thinking was all that mattered. Now I use Anki to literally memorize programming language syntax and ideas and facts that are relevant to my job (like data structures and algorithms). I wish I'd valued memorization when I was in school, because it's such a foundational thing to have knowledge upon which to build everything else.

I find that very interesting and also thought of using Anki for that but decided it wouldn't be useful for me now.

Could you give me an example and how it helped you? Thank you :)

- memorising names and birthdates of relevant people - private life and work life - anything I’m looking up more than ~5 times can go in Anki - spelling of words I often misspell (eg bureaucracy) - when reading anything technical I need for my work or study I have Anki open and type in what I learn in QnA format, and I will never forget it but have it easy within reach for an investment of only a few minutes per QnA over its (and my) life time - just for fun, the cantons of Switzerland, landskap of Sweden, provinces of Canada, and states and capitals of the USA - NATO phonetic alphabet which comes in useful more often that you’d think

Life-changingly useful program for every aspect of my life, when I can finish it every day

My top tips:

- put all decks in a master “daily” deck using the :: syntax in the deck names. Otherwise you feel “done” when having finished one deck, and feel like not starting the next. Have only one goal - finishing today’s Anki - for that master deck (and every other deck) go Study Options > Display Order > New/review order > Show after reviews. Otherwise it’s hard to ever catch up when slipping behind. With this setting, the system becomes somewhat self correcting

My only regret is not being able to pay more than $25 to the developers

And creativity is often putting seemingly unrelated things together. If you don't have the required things floating around in your mind at the same time, it is not possible.

The way of getting those facts and ideas into your head can be very different, though.

You can either mechanically memorize them, which is a boring and mindless activity, or you can be challenged, participate in discussions, projects, and activities that engage the parts of your brain involved with critical thinking.

Both will technically get you to pass a test, but the latter will be better for retaining information, while developing skills and neural pathways that make future learning easier.

The problem is that most academia is based on the memorization approach. Here are a bunch of ideas and facts we think are important; get them into your head, and regurgitate them back at us later. This is not a system that creates knowledgeable people. It doesn't inspire or reward curiosity, creativity, or critical thinking. It's an on-rails pipeline that can get you a piece of paper that says you've been through it, which is enough to make you a tax-paying citizen employed by companies who expect the bare minimum as well.

I get that the alternative approach is more difficult to scale, and requires a more nuanced, qualitative, and personal process. But that's how learning works. It's unique for everyone, and can't be specified as a fixed set of steps.

After all, what is the point of teaching people to be idea and fact storing machines, if machines can do a far better job at that than us? Everyone today can tell you a random fact about the world in an instant by looking it up in a computer. That's great, but we should be training and rewarding people for things computers can't do.

Exactly. I'm not able to memorize multiplication tables or even listen to math lectures - I can't hold more than one or two numbers in my head before they start disappearing. However, I am capable of learning and using math to an advanced level, at least temporarily.

How? The way I think of numbers is actually quite similar to what is currently known as "new math". It's not taught well because almost no teacher was raised with it (and thus lack the ability to think in new math "natively"), but it is based on something real.

Personal responsibility was on the rise until 2013, after which it started to decline?

Every cultural/policy/etc change in society has huge delays. Especially in education - changes you implement have an impact 10+ years later. Culture, even if it's dying, dies slowly. Here in Estonia where I live at the moment educational systems is falling completely apart – overworked and bullied teachers escape from schools in unprecedented rate, there is 20% less teachers than there is a need etc. But Estonia is still in top of the PISA. Why? Because this culture of personal responsibility and valuing education is still alive in the generation of todays parents. But it's certainly dying here as well.

It became politicized because politicians latched onto it as a way to cutback entitlement spending which is unfortunate.

Similarly there's a bunch of talk of "source criticism" in Swedish schools, but when you look closer at what is actually taught it sounds more like conspiracy theory or dogma and never anything actually useful.

Imo source criticism is only a thing if you have a well grounded model of the universe. And if you DO have that, then source criticism just falls out naturally and you don't need to discuss that at all anyway.

Personal responsibility, or lack thereof always seemed to me like one of these memes that are used to explain phenomena in a handwavy fashion.

Does anyone have any data points that could help me update my world model here?

I certainly feel personally responsible for things and so do many people that I know.

Additionally, it feels like people like to blame systemic issues on lack of personal responsibility in the general public, while ideally, elected officials should take personal responsibility for fixing the system.

No jard data, but from talking to teachers there was a shift sometime in the last few decades were parents got really aggressive towards teachers when they should have been aggressive towards their children. This idea that their kids were no longer accountable and that poor performance or discipline had to be the fault of the teachers.

Your first point is a favorite of a lot of people, but doesn’t make a lot of sense to me: how is your generation with the ostensibly correct culture producing a generation with the wrong culture?

Parents are apparently raising their children wrong en masse, so was the parents’ generation rotten too? Which raises questions about the character of the generation that raised the parents…

I think social norms in child rearing have changed drastically, though I think, at least in my neighborhood, they are swinging back.

Growing up in the 80s, I remember having a lot of free time and autonomy. I had soccer or baseballaybe twice a week and guitar lessons once a week, but the other days, I was doing what I wanted, I was expected to get my homework done, but once that was done,I was free to roam the neighborhood or my backyard.

This parenting mindset changed, by the late 80s early 90s and kids started getting more and more scheduled activities and less free time.

Even personally, 6 years ago my wife was very apprehensive about letting our oldest who was then 8, walk to his friend's house who was a 1/4 mile away in the neighborhood. Our youngest, who is 7, walks or bikes to his friend's house the same distance away. And we have other neighborhood kids that also go between people houses. That is the childhood I remember.

I don't think HW I got in elementary school necessarily helped me learn more, but the act of being given work with expectation that I would complete it on my own was a growth activity for me, and that is something that is starting to come back in elementary school, homework for the sake of learning how to do homework.

I think this just kinda sounds like a retroactive rationalization if I’m honest. Imagine if the order was reversed: if you had filled your childhood with mandatory activities and todays kids were mostly left to do what they want.

Wouldn’t you just say “When I was young we were forced to adhere to a tight schedule which taught us to be dependable. Todays kids are allowed to do what they want, which means they never learn any responsibility.”

Unfortunately, I don't think we can every really go back.

It wasn't just that kids had autonomy, it's that they also needed to take the initiative to fight boredom and go do something.

Let's say that you give kids today all that autonomy to wander around their neighborhood and explore like they did back in the day -- would they wander and explore, or would they stare at their phones?

And to be clear -- this isn't the kids fault. We've let social media companies peddle their addictive slop and they've eradicated boredom, but it came at the expense of short attention spans, no motivation, no sense of fulfillment.

If parents could perfectly pass their culture down to their children, no religious country would ever turn secular. Gay marriage would never have been legalized. Black people would have no right to cast vote today.

All these things are not true in the real world, so the conclusion is that a generation doesn't copy the previous generation's culture like a spit image.

I don’t think you need to be able to clone yourself to raise a child with broadly similar values to yourself. My point is that I don’t think you can simultaneously argue that the older generations were raised in a way that was succesful at making them responsible individuals (in ways kids these days aren’t) and that that same generation is systematically failing at passing on responsibility to their children. Which leads me to believe these generational differences in responsibility don’t really exist

I don’t think you need to be able to clone yourself to raise a child with broadly similar values to yourself. My point is that I don’t think you can simultaneously argue that the older generations were raised in a way that was succesful at making them religious individuals (in ways kids these days aren’t) and that that same generation is systematically failing at passing on religion to their children. Which leads me to believe these generational differences in religion don’t really exist

I think this also applies in the case of religion yeah, in the sense that many people who "fail" to pass on religion to their children were mostly just not actually that religious in the first place. So you've helped me reaffirm how consistent, smart and true my beliefs are.

When you were younger a much larger portion of the student body dropped out to work construction or drive truck, that's less of an option now.

We still rely on rote memorization to a greater degree than Finland which is consistently far more successful in their education.

I think the biggest problem with current education is that too many people like you are looking back with rose colored glasses and resisting the kinds of changes we actually need.

We have a crappy mix of outdated 1970s style education with a bunch of enshittified technology layered on top. Google classroom, we also spend too much time and money on sports. Schools shouldn't even be in the football business. CTE is bad for kids.

Gotta say it: School was easier back then, the US was less populated. There was way more opportunity. Kids these days are treated like slaves stuck in child-jail.

I don't need to go into the traditional whining, I'm sure you are aware of the changes of the structure of America.

It's not about personal responsibility. There is a reason rich kids do better than poor kids.

The thing nobody wants to say out loud: America's demographics are changing, they are aging. We are producing less wealth. Our country has less potential.

The wealthy members of the past generation have failed to invest in the American project so we are left with a weak, crumbling economy that doesn't have any industry or useful skills to export.

We, as a country, as WEAKER and POORER than EVER.

There's a longer trend but also a clear inflection point around the rise of mobile phones and social media. N=1 but we delayed getting a phone for our kid until a few months after she turned 13, which was a good choice because now we wish we'd gone longer. We can see how social media and app snacking clearly have negative effects on attention span, attitude, etc.

Also choosing to close schools during COVID was as catastrophic as many predicted. Our kid was in 7th grade during COVID and teachers each year report the effects are still being felt across many students. Of course, naturally great students recovered quickly and innately poor students remained poor but the biggest loss was in the large middle of B/C students.

Jonathan Haidt has a lot of good material on this. He is leading the charge in encouraging parents to delay giving their child a phone until high school and not allowing them to have social media accounts until age 16.

https://www.goodmorningamerica.com/family/story/author-sugge...

How do Asian countries and top-performing countries deal with this?

We should do whatever they do.

On that note, we should also segregate kids by academic desire and achievement like Japan and China. The bullies and underachievers hold back those who are academically excellent. We do this in limited instances, but not enough to really count.

I only know through cultural osmosis and not real data but it sure seems like the expectation is for the kids to be up till midnight grinding away on homework.

As someone with difficulties early on in life and thus showing behavioral issues (what you describe as bullies and underachievers), I went through a system like this and I despised it. N=1 but segregating children at early age based on the behavior they're showing, i.e. the difficulties they're having, felt kinda cruel. It worked academically I guess, I ended up ok, but for many it just meant they just simmered in an environment of mediocrity and rarely made it out.

I get it especially with younger ages, but on the other hand if the student is persistently disruptive they should be removed for the sake of the other students. It's also unfair that 1 student hinders the education of 20+ others.

Cultural pressure towards education, and phone bans left and right. Also, people are still addicted to their phones, including kids. But more controlled, I guess.

In Japan and China, high-stakes entrance exams come earlier and play a stronger role than in the U.S. In China, the zhongkao (high school entrance exam, around age 15) and gaokao (college entrance exam, age 18) largely determine access to selective schools and universities. In Japan, competitive entrance exams for high schools (age 15) and universities (age 18).

That's really underselling it. Gaokao determines where you can live, where you can work, who your friends are, occasionally how much your family values you. They shut down airspace and conduct military/police patrols during examinations to sniff out cheaters. It's only the very wealthy who can just uproot their lives and send their kids to an Ivy/Stanford/Oxbridge/MIT and just skip the whole thing.

Responding to the OC, this is a downright awful solution to the current education problem in the U.S.

https://www.hup.harvard.edu/file/feeds/PDF/9780674295391_sam...

I grew up a white kid in a very (90+%) Asian community. IMO, the biggest difference I observed comparing my white friends from other communities to my Asian friends in my community was the expectation of excellence. For the Asian kids, either they were succeeding, above and beyond, or they were a failure. "B is for 'Better not come home tonight', A is for 'Adequate'", as the jokes went.

And some of those kids still struggled. But the response was to push harder. Didn't get adequate grades that school year? You're not doing anything fun this summer, you're studying. Needless to say it was a culture shock going to college and meeting people who were shockingly cavalier about potentially failing classes.

https://youtu.be/q9ijfnlF_24

Steven He demonstrates what happens when an Asian kid tells their parents about getting a B.

There were some responses about educational expectations, but I would love to hear how folks in these Asian countries specifically deal with cell phones, social media, and these general media/online distractions.

We're seeing more districts ban cell phones in the classroom. It makes sense; in my day, the most you could do is text and play Tetris. We didn't have apps that were weaponized to capture our attention and memory like the kids do now.

People keep talking about how catastrophic it was to close schools during COVID. We keep having catastrophes and no one does anything about it. If the kids missed school, make them go back longer. Large chunks of the country still have 2-3 months where the kids don't do anything; send them back then. If they are already doing year-round schooling, cancel after-school athletics and make them learn with that time instead.

It's weird to me that cell phones in the classroom is even controversial. When I was in school, some kids had Walkmans, CD players, and game boys. You could bring them to school but they weren't allowed in the classroom without prior approval. In class, you were expected to pay attention to the teacher, even if you didn't want to. If you got caught with a device instead of listening, the teacher simply took it away until after class. If you kept bringing it in, you'd lose it until the end of the week, semester, or school year.

This doesn't seem to be a thing anymore, and there probably multiple sad reasons why.

To be very blunt: trashy parents with too much time on their hands will become enraged and raise a huge stink if their kid can't text them or answer their calls(!) while in class. So many will do this that schools just gave up.

That's why it's nice when states just make it a law. That shuts those people up (or at least forces them to go complain somewhere else, where they're more easily ignored and it takes more effort so they'll probably just give up).

(That's the middle-class schools—in really rough schools, teachers have to pick their battles because actual violence is on the table as a response, even among lower elementary kids, and admin's too busy dealing with things way more serious than some kid texting in class to back teachers up on small stuff like that)

I think as a general societal change, we need to stop catering to people simply because they "become enraged."

To be fair, there’s also a set who think their kid needs a phone on them at all times so they can make a call if there’s a school shooting. This doesn’t make any statistical sense as a justification (it might if more “school shootings” were indiscriminate mass shootings, but only a very tiny fraction are—not to downplay them, at all, but there are a couple statistical sieves here filtering for “a personal cell phone a student had saved a life” and the very first one is already filtering it down to almost nothing) but it’s a little easier to sympathize with the basic impulse, at least.

I guess one could quibble about the effectiveness of testing, but the longer trend was… upwards. Eyeballing the math graph, we’re at 55% basic competence. The peak was 65%. But doing a totally informal eyeball projection, we ought to be above 70% by now.

We've got one locked-down shared phone for our kids, for scheduling stuff with friends and calling & texting relatives or whatever. We almost have a teen so we'll see how long we can keep that up, but we only relented that much within the last year and a half, zero phones before that (which seems like it should be normal, but there are a lot of e.g. 4th grade classrooms out there where most of the kids have phones, seems super popular especially among the Fussellian middle class, I think in part for status reasons, like, "well if my kid doesn't have a phone people will think it's because we can't afford it!" which of course Fussell's upper-middle and higher don't give a shit about, so there's less child phone-ownership among them)

> e.g. 4th grade classrooms out there where most of the kids have phones, seems super popular especially among the Fussellian middle class, I think in part for status reasons, like, "well if my kid doesn't have a phone people will think it's because we can't afford it!" which of course Fussell's upper-middle and higher don't give a shit about, so there's less child phone-ownership among them)

Great onservation and great Fussell reference.

Some/much of the content in Class is a bit dated now, but imho it is still very directionally correct.

Having learned a bit about adult developmental psychology, many of his observations are found in and predictable by modern cognitive psychology.

Fussell was such a fun read, and so useful in little (also fun) ways.

I distinctly remember seeing, several years ago, a photo of one of (I swear this is going to be basically apolitical) Trump's kids with their family, including one or more kids with toys, sitting in some kind of living-space with this perfectly spotless mirrored-on-all-sides table, and I was like "FUSSELL!!!!". Or all the gold in photos of that family in their home environments (a signal aimed squarely at Fussell's "Middle", which thinks "gold shit everywhere" is an "upper" signal, which it is not—unlike the mirrored table, which is Upper, because nobody who ever does their own cleaning would willingly deal with a fingerprint-magnet like that)

We did something similar. My daughter got her first phone last month, just in time to start high school. And I'm happy to say that the school district adjusted their mobile phone policy this year from being pretty restrictive, to an outright ban. I completely support that.

I followed a different approach with my son. We gave him a phone pretty early, and didn't even have a lot of rules around it (no family controls, etc).

The agreement I had with him: "Scroll all day, play video games, etc. That is my side of the agreement. And you also do your school work, learn, practice for exams, homework, etc. That is your side of the agreement. I'll trust you. If your grades get worse, i.e. you need help managing device time, we'll review/change this agreement."

We also sat down many times looking at content together, in attempt to teach him what's trust-worthy and what isn't, what's "healthy" and what isn't, etc. And of course we do other things together as well.

So far (knock on wood) my son has managed well - he is 16 now. He organizes his own time, and has learned when to play and when to work. And crucially he has learned when to disconnect from his devices to do what's necessary.

No kid is the same. I am not saying my approach is best or even right, I just offer it as another data point.

We did something similar with our now 12yo. She self-regulates and tries to stay off the worst doom scrolling garbage sites, and tries to explore different sites and such like Pinterest cards and so on. She knows intellectually that the apps and services are designed to suck away attention. This kinda broke my heart but the other day she made a "bored jar" probably based on a Pinterest card which is a jar filled with little scraps of paper with ideas for what to do when you're bored. It felt like I was watching a drowning person trying their best to stay afloat if that makes sense.

Why is that a bad thing? Choosing to be bored instead of mindlessly scrolling is great. Boredom was an important part of growing up for me.

After moving my kids out of a bad elementary school and into a fantastic district with a highly ranked school, the differences are obvious. The good school has smarter kids with better parents. The bad school had dull kids with bad parents.

The kids at the new school do their homework, read, play outside. The kids at the old school skipped homework, played call of duty, and could hardly read.

The new school has fun exercises like the "word of the week" -- and they swear they will rarely assign homework. The old school had mandated trips to the library so kids could take home books and ignore them, alongside a minimum of 1hr of homework per night.

In the bad school, a class of 24 had 11 kids who would not behave themselves, ever (one of the kids would often pick up his chair and hit other students and his aide). In the good school, a class of 24 has 1 kid with limited behavioral issues.

Anyways, the people make the place -- and that includes kids.

In your discussion of "bad kids", it seems like there's a subtext you're not saying out loud.

I have not read that subtext, maybe is your own unconscious bias...

The commenter suggested the old school was filled with bad kids and bad parents, and by definition, this would include the commenter and their kids. Unless they are suggesting they weren't the bad ones, and were somehow unfairly placed with the riff raff. If that's the case, some analysis of why that is seems in order.

From the commenter: "The good school has smarter kids with better parents. The bad school had dull kids with bad parents. The kids at the new school do their homework, read, play outside. The kids at the old school skipped homework, played call of duty, and could hardly read."

That appears to be their observation of the two schools they had direct experience with. What else are you asking they provide here in terms of analysis? Maybe average student test scores? Likely available as it appears they are talking about public schools here. If the new school has significantly better scores would that satisfy your analysis requirement? If the test scores within their household subsequently follow this trend would that be sufficient analysis? In general active/concerned parents are going to try to get their kids the best education available right?

Also can you elaborate on where you got the "unfairly placed" part? All that was actually said was they moved from one school district to another. People buy homes for school districts all the time...there's a section dedicated to school rankings on Zillow for a reason.

Yes, and performance is often correlated with property tax revenue. Low funds means less resources which influences the outcomes and behaviors of those kids. Put differently, "Anyways, the people make the place -- and that includes kids." is less true than the available resources make the place.

A reasonable analysis would be less of the anecdotal "evidence" about laziness, and more of the demographics of that particular district.

By "unfairly placed", it addresses what you quoted: "The bad school had dull kids with bad parents." Was the commenter one of those bad parents, since they were by definition in that category? Or are they suggesting they were one of the good parents that was in the wrong place? Or did they become good parents once they found a better school?

Of all the comments here in this 900 comment discussion, you thought that innocuous one had to be picked apart?

"Anyways, the people make the place -- and that includes kids."

Yes, a post that attacks kids is one that seems ripe to be critical about. (To say nothing about the implicit logic that their kids must also have been part of the problem, which goes against the general premise of the comment)

Still wondering how you decided that particular message deserved this uncharitable response.

I assume you only read a few messages here, stopped and decided to attack that one.

Surely there were other messages here less deserving of charity?

Unfortunately I didn't have time to load them all into a spreadsheet, perform sentiment analysis, and pick a few based on a proprietary scoring algorithm. Like most people, I scroll HN when I have some free time, and respond to a few comments here and there that catch my eye. It seems to me that you're seeing a deeper meaning to what you see as an "attack".

If you would like to point out a few comments that are hurling blame at children, I'm more than happy to offer my opinion on those as well.

If that comment was so bad I don't get why your initual complaint shifted from GP having "a subtext you're not saying out loud."

But this became when the discussion continued "hurling blame on children." Which is presented as text not subtext?

And something about implicit logic?

You sure put a lot of work into deciding why that of all comments deserved ire.

kids with a poor home life often act out in class, or have other behavioral issues. It’s not their fault, and it’s not “fair”, but it IS a valid characterization.

I don’t think it’s controversial to say that kids with a great home life _probably_ have parents or grandparents that advocate for them and really try to get them placed into a good school district.

One could argue that getting your child into a good school district is an indirect way of surrounding them with like-minded kids and parental influence.

True, but look to the generalization presented in the original comment, where an overall trend was suggested. What makes one district filled with "good" parents and kids, whereas another was "bad"? To say nothing of the implication that the commenter was one of the good ones in the land of the bad.

My premise is that there's underlying causes unmentioned, but implied (like socioeconomic status). You can separate groups from membership, and to oversimplify, if you move something from one side of an equation to the other, with different results, what you moved was truly the constant, and what was left behind was the variable.

I can see that - and i agree.

specifically, I think the original comment was in poor taste, and there are other factors outside of good home life like you said.

Go ahead and make your accusation, you wimp.

Reading a french book ''enfances de classes'' from bernard lahire, it explains exactly that. Children from low ''resource'' family have agressive behavior, they are left as animals because their parents are not teaching them.

In my state, to live in an excellent school district is very expensive. We've been trying to move but always get out-bid and out-priced. Mind you we earn well above median but unfortunately, we were not "born early enough." Many folks living in the districts have been there well before it was expensive and probably cannot afford their own home if they had to buy it again. Shit sucks.

How do you determine what is a good district or not?

The fact that there’s even a debate about banning smart phones in classrooms tells you all you need to know. Cell phones were de facto banned in school in like 2002, not sure when it became the norm but it seems like a no brainer.

This is what I thought of immediately as well. I remember being shocked to learn that phones were allowed. Of course thats not going to work out well.

There are so many factors to the negative education outcomes but this policy is just obvious. I guess its actually the parents who insist on being able to reach their kid at any moment?

To some extent this is one of the recommendations of the PISA 2022 report, but it comes with a big caveat:

> 4. Limit the distractions caused by using digital devices in class >Students who spent up to one hour per day on digital devices for learning activities in school scored 14 points higher on average in mathematics than students who spent no time. Enforced cell phone bans in class may help reduce distractions but can also hinder the ability of students to self-regulate their use of the devices.

I don't think a simple blanket ban on smartphones in schools is likely to solve much.

Agreed. The argument "I want to know if my child is safe in an emergency" is incredibly flawed. God forbid there is a shooting, kids should be listening to their teachers to be instructed to safety not distracted. And their phones should not make noise when they are hiding.

If the emergency is on the outside of school, parents still need to go through the main office to pull kids out of school, so contacting them is also unnecessary. These helicopter parents smh

- The Pandemic really set that generation of kids back, particularly kids who were in elementary during that time.

- Public school is essentially daycare. They try to integrate special education students more into the regular classrooms, but the teachers end up spending disproportionate time dealing with them and their behavioral issues, which hurts learning for regular students.

- I don't have strong, set in stone opinions about Common Core, but it's approach is certainly hard for parents trying to catch their own children at home. Eg. there is no emphasis on memorizing multiplication tables, but rather it's on learning rather esoteric and hard to remember (albeit valid) math algorithms.

- The teachers are generally poorly trained, poorly motivated, poorly paid, poorly educated, and poorly adapted to teaching students.

- Learning high school math has been enjoyable. I only took up to geometry in high school, but they are doing much more advanced math. I don't know any of it, and they barely do. So it's been fun learning it and then having to teach it to them in the matter of a day or two. Being a programmer has been exceptionally useful in that regard.

If public school is essentially daycare, why did the pandemic set a generation of kids back?

It's a cascading failure. I live in another part of the world, and we have been witnessing the actual toll of the pandemic unravel in the past couple of years.

Because it was essentially solitary confinement of children. It's not normal for developing brains to be isolated like that.

This was trending long before the pandemic.

My oldest has done both common core math(kinder and 1st grade) and Singapore math(2nd through 5th). Both emphasize understanding over procedure and repetition. I do think in the long run it's more valuable since she has an understanding of concepts instead of just having things memorized. She never really her learned her multiplication tables as it was never required, her homework is real world word problems that challenge even me. I think it's much more valuable than rote memorization that traditional math education focused on. It's just a lot of work from both the teacher and the student. That's the challenge teaching these types of math educations over traditional math.

We’re also trying to force the dropout rate lower. So naturally test scores will decline.

Gone are the days you are held back. It’s a classic Goodharts Law problem. We’ve focused on one metric and lost site of the bigger picture.

States improving performance (Mississippi of all places) now are holding you back at certain milestones. IE at 3rd grade if you can’t read, 8th grade for math deficits, etc.

The core problem is actually very simple. Education studies do not measure what they claim to measure. When they say, "education outcomes improve when..." they usually mean the pass rate, i.e. they only measured a signal among the bottom 20% of students. When they say, "test scores improve when..." they are, at best, measuring up to the 90th percentile. When they say, "the white/black attainment gap," or "socioeconomic disadvantages," they're usually just fishing for funding money, and their study will not actually attempt to measure either of those things. From a review of the literature on No Child Left Behind (NCLB) in 2015: > Only one study specifically examined the achievement gap for students from low socioeconomic backgrounds (Hampton & Gruenert, 2008) despite NCLB’s stated commitment to improving education for children from low-income families. African American students were often mentioned in studies of general student achievement but none of the reviewed studies focused specifically on the effects of NCLB for this subgroup. Again, this is a curious gap in the research considering the law’s emphasis on narrowing the Black-White achievement gap. Other groups of students underrepresented in the research on NCLB include gifted students, students with vision impairments, and English proficient minority students.

("A Review of the Empirical Literature on No Child Left Behind From 2001 to 2010", Husband & Hunt, 2015)

Everything you see going wrong is downstream of this. Yes, harmful ideologies have done a lot of damage to the education system, but it could easily survive this if we had actual signifiers of success.

Test scores do not measure directly what they purport to measure. They are a proxy, and when you have a system designed to optimize for a proxy of the thing you want to improve, then the system will always find ways to exploit the difference between the proxy and the underlying thing.

You can call it "juking the stats" or "overfitting", or whatever.

https://sohl-dickstein.github.io/2022/11/06/strong-Goodhart....

We can only ever have proxies. The issue (at least here) isn't Goodharting, it's that the proxy does not even measure what the researchers claim it measures. For example, pretty much the only study of its name, "High-Achieving Students in the Era of NCLB" (Lovelass, Parkas, Duffett) uses the NAEP, which only releases 10th, 20th, ..., 90th percentile scores. Gifted programs are ~95th percentile. Or, look at this lovely graph of 36 ACT scores:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Percent_ACT_Composite_S...

When it increases by 30x in 30 years, it becomes very apparent that standardized tests are simultaneously being gamed by the students and the testwriters. Students (and school districts and states) are choosing the "easier" tests that make them look proficient, so testwriters are making their tests easier to get a bigger market share. And all along, the tests that only care about separating out the top show declining scores every year...

- [AMC Historical Results](https://artofproblemsolving.com/wiki/index.php/AMC_historica...)

I know we’re not supposed to think about this, but is this controlled for region of origin? That has been changing, and so if that impacts school performance (schools designed by westerners, mind you, in a societal model designed by the same), then we would expect this to change as well right?

It depends, is this a federal problem, or a local problem? Because I don't see the federal department of education has really done anything to improve scores. So this may be a local issue, and of local resources.

There are very large regional effects. We talk about Finland's scores being great, but I have no idea what France's scores are... We should compare US scores to all of the EU if we want to fair comparison.

Net immigration has been trending down for a decade, but I'm not cynical enough to think we're not churning out some pretty smart kids of our own!

Perhaps, but the percentage of Americans foreign-born is at a 100 year high. And the percentage of under 18s who have a foreign-born parent is at an all-time high (25.6% of students, the previous peak was 21.6% in 1920).

And if their children are underperforming in schools it would be important to know.

It does. I went down a rabbit hole for this once and yes children of immigrants underperform for math and reading testing v immigrant groups. Can go dig up the .gov links assuming they didnt go away

Is that signal, or is it just mean-reversion, because first-generation immigrant groups tend to have strong academic performance?

Every immigrant I've known that's around my age has told me basically the same story. When they came to the US as a child, and got put into public school, they struggled with reading (they could barely speak English, much less read it), but they excelled at math. I've heard this from people born in China, Taiwan, Mexico, Iraq, Iran, Japan, etc.

Is every immigrant you've known about your age someone you met through work / school and do you work in tech / on a STEM degree? If so then your sample is obviously biased.

That’s a strange one. The highest performing public schools are generally where Chinese and Indian origin kids are a significant minority - I.e. around 20-30%.

Chinese and Indian kids being above is outweighed in this case by others. Look at the volume of immigrants and whatever countries they come from. The east asians are the exception not the norm.

> not supposed to think about this

Not supposed to think about it according to whom? Who's telling you that? Why are you listening to him?

The US has some of the best public schools in the world. The US also tops the world on spending per student, especially in poorly performing areas. The education crisis disappears when you control for demographics.

It's right to notice that and remains right no matter how much pushback you get from people who've been pushing the same broken solutions for 50 years.

Congratulations for adopting an independent perspective here. We need more of you.

Sounds like we need to spend even more on those “demographics” to get their performance up!

Are you serious? Because I've heard it argued that this is one of the fundamental differences in the approach between left and right. The left thinks money can solve all problems if we just spend more of it in the right place. The right thinks there is a cultural problem to be solved.

I'm generally quite progressive but I am beginning to appreciate that the right may have a good argument.

> The right thinks there is a cultural problem to be solved.

That's also the left. The right holds the differences are genetic, not likely to change, and the only problem to solve is how to keep them out of the country.

What do you think you mean with "cultural problem to be solved" that doesn't involve "putting money in the right place"?

Education in the US as a whole may be on the decline, but for math specifically I’m not sure that we ever figured out teaching methodologies that work for all children. Every math teacher I’ve ever had was very theory-minded and could barely understand students who weren’t — those who learn through practical example and hands-on activity for instance usually get left in the dust.

Reading teaching on the other hand was for the most part figured out a long time ago but trendy experimental methods keep getting cycled regardless.

>I’m not sure that we ever figured out teaching methodologies that work for all children.

This is a fundamental problem with all learning: it's difficult to get entire group to do something the same way with equal effectiveness... that being said, teaching methods are evolving and it's really on the school system to embrace those changes. My kids are young, and their school teaches math with the Singapore Math system and literacy with the UFLI program. They have both been highly effective.

Their class sizes are also 12:1 students:teacher ratio, and 6:1 in Pre-K/Kindergarten. So that's also probably important.

"Their class sizes are also 12:1 students:teacher ratio, and 6:1 in Pre-K/Kindergarten. So that's also probably important."

Absolutely.

Every teaching method you can think of has been tried. What you are describing is called scaffolding with manipulatives which you can find dozens of for maths. Schools have also tried making worksheets catered to multiple skill levels within the same classroom.

The harsh reality: most children infamously still have a hard time even being able to tell the time on an analogue clock. You can try every method under the sun but if a child has a hard time understanding a system with two different base numbers it is usually because they just don't have the capacity. All the handholding in the world isn't going to change that.

The answer NYC schools have come to is to relax /TEACHER/ basic knowledge requirements: https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-education/the-teach...

Without bonus points, DEI-hires at the school would not survive; these racist school districts need a way to ensure these lousy teachers create entire generations of people hostile to learning! The whole system needs to have an emergency cut over to vouchers.. $27k/year/pupil in NYS to get a teacher that looks like me but is functionally illiterate.

These public teachers aren't heroes, they are actively keeping us behind with their pro-union/anti-student behaviors.

The article mentions the chronic absenteeism which is mind blowing: https://apnews.com/article/school-attendance-sick-day-chroni...

I don't see how somebody can learn when they're missing school so much. Math and reading require so much repetition and if you're not in school, you're not getting that time to sit down and do the exercises required to ingrain these topics. It doesn't even matter how a school teaches if the student isn't in class. They're just not going to retain things well.

I think you’re overestimating how much actual education takes place each day. Most kids can catch up fine on double the workload after some extended break even without in class lectures. Just abstractly the extreme example is someone skipping a full grade, but consider the huge middle ground between that and needing to be in class essentially every single day.

That said a significant fraction of kids really do need all the help they can get, but catering to them means leaving a lot of slack in the schedule.

Chronic absenteeism is a huge misnomer. The statistic covers both excused and unexcused absences.

The reason it’s since covid up is because (more) parents stopped sending their kids to school when they are sick.

Last year I got a semi-threatening letter from the district for “chronic absenteeism” because I didn’t want to send a sick child to school. To their defense, they did say that the state (California) requires them to send the letter.

Almost all of the comments have someone’s pet theory about the cause of the decline in achievement. The truth is we don’t actually know why there is a decline or how to stop it.

Maybe start with ousting the most anti-intellectual administration in existence? Whatever the solution is, they won't be the one to implement it.

The truth is obvious, you just don't like the solution.

FTA: "While the pandemic had an outsize impact on student achievement, experts said falling scores are part of a longer arc in education that cannot be attributed solely to COVID-19, school closures and related issues such as heightened absenteeism. Educators said potential underlying factors include children’s increased screen time, shortened attention spans and a decline in reading longer-form writing both in and out of school."

We do know; it's just not in the popular conscience yet. Read a bit of Marshall McLuhan.

Unless this accounts for the change in population demographics, it's a pointless study, or are we still pretending that doesn't exist at a macro level?

Yup, more article slop without accounting for demographic data.

Same with the constant drumbeat of "Americans are getting shorter".

I'm missing something. What change in demographics are we talking about, and why would that influence math results?

I don't intend this as a dig against Spanish-speaking students. But many school systems in the US have tons of Spanish-speaking students who know very little English. But all of the homework, readings, and classroom instruction are given in English. If you don't know the language of instruction then it puts you at an immediate disadvantage. This might be what they're referring to.

Curious what percentage of school districts fall into this purported category. And is that number continually increasing? Share some data on this please.

Even second generation Latin American folks who speak English fine often perform poorly. It's cultural but we're not supposed to talk about it. Saw a lot of it first hand via the family business; it's truly bewildering and even disheartening.

> It's cultural

How do you know?

Intuitively, I can understand that English Second Language students would struggle in classes other than English, but are the demographics really shifting enough to explain the drop in attainment shown in the article?

The best demographic data I can find is here: https://datacenter.aecf.org/data/tables/103-child-population...

The best data I can find on language spoken at home is here: https://datacenter.aecf.org/data/tables/81-children-who-spea...

The above shows the share of "Non-Hispanic White alone" children (who I'll assume speak English as a first language) going from 52% to 48% from 2015-2024, and the percentage of "Children who speak a language other than English at home" staying flat at 22% from 2013-2023. From 2015-2024, math attainment goes from 62% to 55%.

At a glance, it would seem that the shift in math attainment cannot be explained by demographics/language alone.

The NAEP site has performance by student group sections. It includes breakdowns for Hispanic and English/non-English learners and includes a section on demographic changes (ctrl+f Group Population Percentages).

Reading: https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/reports/reading/2024/g12/p...

Math: https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/reports/mathematics/2024/g...

Hispanic population has shifted (+3-4%/report) and English learners have shifted (1-3%/report). [Note that reports have variable number (~2-5) of years between them]

English learner scores went up (or stayed the same) and non-English learner scores went down.

The big caveat of course that the English learner average score is still much lower than the non-English learner so if that population increased enough it still drags down the average. (Click the English learners to see their scores or see the National Student Group Score Distributions section for graphs that make this apparent).

But it has to be more complicated than "the English-learning Hispanic population increased" because if you look within racial groups: all groups except Asian are down within their own group.

Or, for example, girls' scores are down more than boys' scores even though girls' scores are still better than boys' on average in Reading (but worse in Math).

I think it's probably multiple factors all adding together. For example, % of public charters has increased but public charter schools have worse scores than public non-charter. % of economically disadvantaged has increased and economically disadvantaged students have worse scores than those not. % of students with disabilities has increased and students with disabilities have worse scores than those without.

The weirdest thing to me is how the population statistics are different between reading and math. From 2019->2024 the reported Hispanic 12th Grade population shifted 3% for Reading but only 1% for Math?

Florida has a huge hispanic population but is ranked #2 in K12 education rankings. Kids are actually remarkably fast at picking up on English even if they were born and raised in Spanish speaking homes or in Spanish speaking countries.

Using a metric like SAT math scores, the demographic breakdown is: Asian > White > Hispanic > Black. The youth population is becoming less White and more Hispanic, therefore we should expect lower math scores.

Just looking at the picture triggered me. Why are the students sitting in groups and cutting paper with scissors?

There’s a huge teaching gap between USA and Asia.

See for yourself:

https://youtu.be/wIyVYCuPxl0?si=f6wFv2G3Iru7QFTy

https://en.wikipedia-on-ipfs.org/wiki/James_W._Stigler

Edit: since it may not have been clear from the video, this is my interpretation:

* in the Japanese math class the teacher teaches at the board and then walks around the class to look at the students. Students are not sitting in large groups.

* in the American class the teacher spends practically 0 time at the blackboard, the students sit in large groups, the teacher spends most of the time with one or two groups.

I think this is because Asian governments want their populations to more educated and American governments want their populations to be less educated.

For the former I'd guess its because they have very strong control on people's behaviors so they just want them more capable to innovate, grow economy, etc.

For the latter I'd guess its because they fear a more educated population will be harder to manipulate and hence erode government power.

> I think this is because Asian governments want their populations to more educated and American governments want their populations to be less educated.

On the American side it’s not that they want people to be less educated. It’s the adversarial system of education being run by people whose interests are not aligned with students excelling.

Teacher’s unions, which predominantly exist in the public school system, are not in the business of educating children. They’re in the business of raising costs (their salaries and benefits) and lowering requirements (the work they actually have to do). They’re against measuring progress. They’re against firing for lack of progress.

Compare that to a private system where you only stay employed if you’re actually doing a good job of educating kids. There’s also the advantage of private schools being able to fire their students, but that’s more of an anti-disruption thing.

It's easy to blame the teachers unions, but if their goal was to only raise their own salaries and benefits, they are doing a very poor job at it. Teachers do not get paid well. They also tend to get paid more at the elite private schools. So if you want to compare, then you would be advocating for public schools to match private school salaries.

While not always the case, "measuring progress" makes things worse because they tried this and what you get is standardized tests and teachers teaching to the test (Goodhart's law). Most (not all, there are crap teachers out there) are doing their best despite the rules imposed on them by local schoolboards (which are often a shitshow), and by curriculum mandates which they have no say in. And when given too large classes and next to no resources or support, they are then blamed when the kids don't prosper in that environment. There's grade inflation also, this happens at private schools too. Which teacher is more likely to get fired/disciplined; one who fails a lot of students and hardly ever gives and A, or one that hands out A's like candy and the worst non-performing students get a maybe C- (brought up to a C or C+, once the parents come in to complain to administration).

> It's easy to blame the teachers unions, but if their goal was to only raise their own salaries and benefits, they are doing a very poor job at it.

They do a pretty good job at it when you factor in long term pensions and health care.

> Teachers do not get paid well.

Teachers get paid too much. They create artificial barriers like requiring multiple years of certifications to purposefully limit the pool of competition. Most teachers unions are closed shops that mandate membership.

> They also tend to get paid more at the elite private schools. So if you want to compare, then you would be advocating for public schools to match private school salaries.

If I could waive a wand to immediately increase public teacher’s salaries by 25% in exchange for the elimination of all tenure (which does not exist at K-12 private schools), I would do it immediately.

> While not always the case, "measuring progress" makes things worse because they tried this and what you get is standardized tests and teachers teaching to the test (Goodhart's law).

There’s plenty of objective things to measure in math and science. If little Johnny can’t do basic arithmetic or solve 3x+2=11, you can’t fake that during an exam.

At least with teaching to the test, the kids learned the material on the test.

If you don’t measure things, you will not improve it. And teachers unions are adamantly against measuring things. Because they know it can and will be used against them. It’s an inherent conflict of interest.

> They do a pretty good job at it when you factor in long term pensions and health care.

They only get good pensions and health care because school districts refuse to give them better salaries instead. And good health care (really, health insurance) is crucial because health care costs can obviously bankrupt you in America.

> They create artificial barriers like requiring multiple years of certifications to purposefully limit the pool of competition

How is requiring the equivalent of a master's degree an "artificial barrier"? Surely, new teachers should have some experience and theoretical background before standing in front of 30-100+ students and being responsible for their education?

Florida passed a law making it possible for veterans to teach without even having a bachelor's degree. Does that sound like a good idea to you? Would requiring even a bachelor's degree be an "artificial barrier" in your opinion?

https://www.fldoe.org/teaching/certification/military/

I'm not as familiar with the US, but Australia moved from requiring teachers to complete a 1-year graduate diploma, to a 2-year master of education. This is effectively doubling the commitment for someone to transfer into teaching from another field.

Requiring anything at all is by definition an artificial barrier. Some are justified and some are not. In this case, I question whether a longer education necessarily benefits students.

An average teacher salary in Chicago projected in their new contract is $110,000, plus pensions and heathcare on top of that. What better salary do you have in mind? An average individual salary in Chicago is about 45k.

They are still wining about this number and go on strikes pretty much every other year.

> An average teacher salary in Chicago projected in their new contract is $110,000

Some quick Googling shows the average age of a Chicago teacher to be 41 years old. Is it insane to think that a professional with a master's degree should make the princely sum of $110,000 a year? Adjusted for inflation, that's less than I got in my first year as a software engineer.

That same quick googling would have told you that it is enough to have a BA degree and to pass a fairly short teachers prep program. You are comparing apples and oranges.

$110,000 is the base salary. Add to this pension contributions almost completely funded (granted this is no longer the case for the new hires), a retirement on a full pension at 55, and a stable job. Good luck having all of this working as a software engineer for a private company. You can be made redundant at no notice, and risk always carries a premium.

Compare teacher salaries to the overall population's. They're paid very well.

> Teacher’s unions, which predominantly exist in the public school system, are not in the business of educating children

I'm always surprised and disappointed to see such lazy thinking on HN. If teachers' unions were responsible for poor educational outcomes, you would see an inverse relationship between strong teachers' unions and K-12 rankings.

But New Jersey and Massachusetts consistently rank in the top 2 K-12 rankings in the US. And they have ~100% union density among K-12 public school teachers!

Let's test the rest of your little theory. If you believe that pesky teachers' unions are responsible for poor outcomes, then surely states with less teacher's union density and union power will be the epitome of strong K-12 outcomes.

But who ranks at the bottom? New Mexico at #50, Alaska at #49, Oklahoma at #48...

You might, at this point, sensibly say that's due to residents having less money and other disadvantages. But at that point you have to admit that teachers' unions have no correlation to K-12 outcomes.

https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/rankings/education

What is the video supposed to suggest? I think it's extremely hard to conclude anything from a plot of the teacher's position over time throughout the classroom.

Is staying at the front a sign that the teacher is lazy and not helping students? Or is it that the students are competent enough without aid? That could be good if it indicates your students have been taught well enough to master the material. But it could also be bad, indicating your school does not offer enough incremental challenge, and students who are beyond their current level, but not high enough for the next level (honors or whatever), never reach their full potential.

There's far too many uncontrolled variables here. Also, it seems the wikipedia-on-ipfs page for Stigler is down.

I'm not smart enough to understand what are the conclusions of the patterns observed in the video.

What else would you have them cut paper with?

Guns. /s

When someone links to a video I assuming that the video was heavily edited and cherry picked to show whatever point they want. I'm not wrong often enough to bother clicking on yours.

I find it interesting that James W Stigler doesn't even have a wikipedia page. I'm not sure what that means, but he somehow isn't very notable despite having written popular books and being a university professor. (or he is so controversial that they can't agree on one - which is a sign to not take him too seriously)

Well, someone has to write the page. They don't self-manifest. The draft is currently here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Draft:James_W._Stigler but was rejected for mainspace because it was written too promotionally. It will take some work, but he looks to be notable enough to deserve the article.

> Just looking at the picture triggered me. Why are the students sitting in groups and cutting paper with scissors?

So, I'm going to flag this as a perfect example of legibility vs. legitimacy[0]. You, probably AP's writers, and much of the public perceive learning as ocurring in a certain way. That isn't the way that 'the best' learning occurs, its the way that most closely resembles where we think learning occurs. Going further, it is much easier to interpret a lecture hall as a learning activity because it is easy to perceive what is being 'learned'. You sort of say it yourself. you are asking a why question about what is being learned - it is less legibile - and that is leveraged into an inference that less is being learned - i.e., it is less legitimate.

The problem is that the comparison you are making is false - but deeply embedded in our minds. Students *feel* like they learn more in lectures than in 'active learning' classes.However, when their actual knowledge is tested the oppostie is actually true. The students perception and actual learning are at odds and mediated by the environment[1]. It is, again, easy to sit in a lecture and overstate (i.e., feel like) you're learning because you are watching someone who is an expert talk about something. No metacognitive monitoring is required on the student's part. In contrast, it is really easy to perceive yourself as struggling in a class where your learning process and your failures in that process become visible. Students are taught to view failures/wrong answers as bad - so they view their process of learning as evidence of not learning.

Pedantically, no one in the picture you reference is cutting paper with scissors. There are scissors on the table, no one is cutting. You made an inference - inferences are important but difficult to test. They are working in groups to learn with peers (a science based best practice). I don't know exactly but I can infer it is related to math, possible learning to calculate area and estimate. Making that tangible, creating and measuring simple then more complex shapes helps them learn - its not arts and crafts. It leads to better conceptual understanding than an abstract explanation.

It may look different, but my hobby horse problem with US education is that everyone's vibes are treated as equivalent to actual scientific evidence. We regularly crator efforts to fix these problems simply because they don't look like the school that the parents went to. We had one parent try and ban school provided laptops (which are used for 20minutes / week) from my daughter's preK class because her kids are zero screen time. I can't imagine a parent in Japan or China even trying that.

[0] https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2010/07/26/a-big-little-idea-call...

[1] https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1821936116

As a CODA - measuring learning is shockingly hard. As an analogy, it is not deterministic it is quantum. Data tells us that if I ask demographic questions before a test, certain groups score lower than if I ask them at the end. If I ask a math question using a realistic scenario, students show higher conceptual understanding than if I ask them a fully abstracted question. If a student is hungry or tired that day, they will score lower. None of those are measuring the latent construct (e.g., math ability) that we need to estimate, even if it is a high variability measure.

They are cutting paper. You can see scraps of paper on the desk.

Of course “active” learning is better than passively sitting in a lecture. But these kids are not learning. They’re sitting in a group with scissors and markers making a X-y coordinate graph.

Your long diatribe fails to recognize the obvious: that middle school math class has turned into an art and hand labor class / day care.

> Why are the students sitting in groups and cutting paper with scissors?

Because paper cutters are too easy to disassemble as re-use as a shiv machete? And anyway, it's pretty hard to make cloudy curves with a paper cutter.

> in the American class the teacher spends practically 0 time at the blackboard, the students sit in large groups, the teacher spends most of the time with one or two groups.

Three or four students is a large group?

If it's not clear, arts and crafts sessions are occasionally included in classroom material, especially at younger ages. A single picture is not indicative of how most classrooms operate, or even how this particular classroom operates most of the time. It looks like a quick group project for a basic presentation on some subject matter.

Ignoring your huge generalisations based on one silly picture and a bunch of Asian clichés, I think you have a point when it comes to the group thing.

When I was in school, most work & learning happened on the individual level. Sometimes in pairs, where we would have to check each other's answers. But from what I see among my younger relatives and friends with children, there's a lot of group learning going on these days. Groups of five doing all kinds of projects in pretty much any class on any subject. Maybe it's fun to collectively build a diorama of ancient rome for history class, but I doubt you'll improve your maths skills much in this way.

Is this a consequence of a teacher shortage? Are kids in these groups supposed to help other kids? Are they supposed to learn cooperating with (or leeching off) others, at the cost of learning useful skills for themselves?

Some amount of this has got to be due to Covid. I used to tutor a middle school boy, and he was probably two years behind where he should have been. Because of this, he was lacking the foundation that he needed to progress. It was so bad.

Tiktok also gained popularity the same time as covid. Someone needs to do a study on screen time over the last 5 years for school age children. We do know screen time is correlated to poor academic performance.

Not limiting myself to just high schools:

Elephant in the room in my state is definitely chronic absence. Depending on source it's when student misses something like 15+ or 20+ school days a school year. More affluent areas have numbers 15% and lower. Less affluent ones it can be well above 50%. And nobody is doing anything.

Test scores substantially mirror this bifurcation.

It is substantially worsened by charter and voucher schools. Which interact with the whole mess in complex and negative ways.

When I think of all my teachers I had throughout K-12 public school, not one of them stands out as having meaningfully impacted my life.

In fact I would argue many of them were a net negative to my learning achievements (or lack thereof).

So yeah, defund public schools as much as possible. That will get my vote.

"America is bad and should be destroyed without regard to the people living there"

The worst leftists (handshake) the worst right wingers

How is America destroyed if people own their labor (money) and where they invest it?

That's unfortunate, I had at least 6 or 7 I could point to from that time that were outstanding teachers who instilled passion into their subject.

That is good to hear. In which subjects? Did that carry out throughout your entire life so far? Or did one particular subject end up taking more of your time, and if so, do you attribute that to specific characteristics of those who mentored you? Do you know if those mentors were elevated over time in their organizations?

I had a number of good teachers at the various public schools I attended, though the best ones were at a private school.

Instead of defunding, we should institute a voucher system where parents can choose between a local public school if it's good, charter schools, or towards a private school tuition and pay the difference.

What characteristics of the teachers and/or student body made the private school experience better?

The teachers were all highly motivated and skilled, with a great interest in each student on a personal level. This was the Dunn Middle School, located in the Santa Ynez Valley. The classrooms were repurposed bungalows on a large ranch. I remember my history class was taught by a recent Stanford graduate, and we took notes on couches in a living room. A few times she had brought her hippie dad to teach us how to make bagels from scratch, and shared various musings about how without bacteria / fungi all the dead organic matter would keep piling up forever. The student teacher ratio was about 10:1, and there were lots of character building activities like week long backpacking trips near Joshua Tree, mandatory triathlons, hobby classes on Fridays like woodworking / cycling / hiking. There were about 20 students per grade, and it skewed high income as you can imagine. None of the students were really toxic or a problem, I remember one kid was either autistic / severely introverted, but otherwise a nice dude.

I guess your teachers failed you, since that's a hasty generalization (your experience isn't universal) and a non sequitur (defunding public schools wouldn't address the problem of poor schooling).

It's hard to talk about public education on HN because so many people posting here live in exclusive and expensive Bay Area communities with some of the best public schools in the world.

It’s hard to argue a point when the people you are arguing with have lived experience that contradicts your point yeah

I was happily lurking until I saw this astounding response.

"Every relationship with {men|women} I've been in has been bad, so romance is obviously worthless."

"My neighbors dog always barks at me, I didn't get why anyone likes dogs."

"I've had a bad experience with ${race} so I really wish we could get rid of them."

"I caught the flu, and it didn't kill me. I don't get why people are always worried about it."

"I've never worn a seatbelt, and I'm still alive. They're a waste of time."

"School was a bad experience for me personally, so best to get rid of it"

Are you serious right now?

Yes, I'm serious.

You make the mistake of thinking I am one of few, when I am one of many.

I went to a private school and then a public school. All of my private school teachers were worse than the public school teachers, without exception.

Do we know how much of this decline is US-specific versus a global phenomenon? The article cites no data on that score.

This kind of thing is unfortunately pretty common in American publications, and it drives me up the wall. If you don't compare US statistics to global ones, it's hard to separate out political / local factors from global trends (and to be fair, this is exactly what some journalists want.)

In particular, I'd be interested in statistics from countries with different lockdown policies, as well as those that banned smartphones in school. Beyond US politics, lockdowns and Tiktok seem like the two most likely factors that may influence this.

I have thought that The "Mississippi Miracle" was a successful model for what could be done in other areas in other states. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mississippi_Miracle

It is, and it shouldn't be surprising that introducing or increasing the amount of rigor in education improves outcomes. But that flies in the face of educational trends in the US overall, so adoption is slow.

Cal Newport talked on his podcast this week about declining IQs, too - a reversal of a decades-long trend:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_zzkQJq_V0w

He cites and directionally agrees with the decline of reading as the cause.

Most of my friends have no idea what math and reading curriculum is used in their kids public schools.

It's different with friends whose kids attend private schools - most knew it was Singapore Math.

You may like it or not - but it requires parent effort to make sure your child uses their most valuable time to learn something.

My parents didn’t care about the details of my education yet I did well. I don’t think most parents ever cared so it doesn’t explain the decline. I had discipline instilled in me however, and I am guessing that’s what is lacking nowadays.

The Average College Student Is Illiterate. Students are not what they used to be. The crisis is worse than you think: https://www.persuasion.community/p/the-average-college-stude...

Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43522966 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43537808

Spent a lot of time in education, K through Ph.D and as a college professor. Net, it seemed that the keys to good or better quality K-12 public school education was simply the parents, their quality that also showed in careers, income, standard of living, socialization, etc. A lot of that quality gets inherited, and Darwin wins again.

But here is a surprise: In college my wife made both PBK and Summa Cum Laude, won both NSF and Woodrow Wilson graduate fellowships, and got her Ph.D.

Her high school? Her family lived in Indiana, in a house her father built from some plans in Good Housekeeping magazine, on a 33 acre farm, surrounded by farms raising mostly corn, soy beans, wheat, and chickens. The local town consisted of a church, a school, and a tavern. The school building was a good accomplishment by the community, big enough for the number of students, taught grades 1-12, but had fewer than 12 classrooms and fewer than 12 teachers! Net, the facilities were poor, but the parents made sure the schooling was good.

The school I went to was relatively large, the pride of the city with a quite good Principal for 1-6 and another for 7-12, no bad teachers, and some good ones. They taught Latin, Spanish, and French and had a good math program. The year before me three guys went to Princeton and two of them ran against each other for President of the Freshman Class. In my year, myself and two others did the best on the Math SATs, all went to college, one MIT.

In both of the schools, 100% of the students were well behaved, i.e., no disruption in classes; this was just expected and without any particular efforts.

I really liked math and physics and wanted much more than the classes offered. So, the classes were beneath me and mostly taught myself from the books. So the school put up with that independent approach and sent me to a Math Tournament and some summer enrichment programs, which was good education: The good parents wanted good education.

Later there were some race riots with that school a target. So, the city changed to teaching cosmotology, etc. and picked another school to be a good one.

Net, with good parents, a school can be plenty good with modest facilities.

The US is practicing a mass production approach to education still. Drill students with excessive facts and expect them to remember it. 3 minute passing periods, 15 minutes for lunch, scolded for socializing. Etc. It's intensive and counter productive. Now there's an over reliance on tech that degrades rather than improves the experience. A link in Google classroom to an exercise that expires after a day, a PDF instead of a handout. Etc

Curious what the causes are and how their weighted. Seems like it'd be too complex to actually figure out what's causing the most damage, but it's very interesting. There are so many factors I'd argue are probably negatives:

- Always online phone access (and everything that comes with it)

- Generative AI for doing assignments without thought

- The COVID year or two that they had to learn from home couldn't have helped develop good habits (I know it would've for me)

It started in 2013. If we have to blame technology, social media seems more likely than AI, I guess.

From 2011 to 2013 smartphone adoption in the US went from 35 to 55%, and by 2016 was 75%. While not proof of causation, the correlation is very strong.

Social media AND smartphones became popular around that time. I think it's the toxic combination that's the worst - easy, low effort dopamine hits that are available everywhere via your phone, whenever you are bored.

In 2013 social media was still a textual medium, right? There was Vine, but that died pretty quickly, from what I remember.

If social media and smartphones are the problem, I would have expected that results for English proficiency would be steady until the advent of TikTok, right?

Pfft, it started in 2007. Kids couldn’t deal with the orange box, cod4, halo3, all coming out at once.

Actually, it is a good point that this is a lagging indicator.

Phones/screens is one I'm not sure about. On the one hand, to use a mobile phone, and social media, and messaging apps, you have to read and write. I certainly spent a lot less time reading and writing messages to my friends in the 1980s than the typical kid does today. We just talked, in person or on an old-fashioned phone call.

On the other hand, it's shallow. Messages are short, and filled with shorthand and emoticons. There's no deep reading or expression of complicated ideas in written form.

There's a difference between reading and writing, and reading and writing well. I would expect the tests to expect higher proficiency than what is expected in your usual text messages.

The quality of most text msgs is higher than what passes for “quality literature” in many lit classrooms.

Texting is unironically a better use of time than reading infinite jest, or gravities rainbow, etc.

While you can certainly argue that some texts have more substance to them than these literary works, you cannot deny that most texts have worse prose than the books.

Hum... "R U OK" is sooo much better than

... “How do you feel, Jake?” “Fine, it doesn’t hurt much.” “Are you all right?” ...

(Hemmingway)

> The quality of most text msgs is higher than what passes for “quality literature” in many lit classrooms.

First: Your HS kids hang out with a different crowd than my HS kids :-)

Second: This is about reading ability (comprehension, etc), not literature. Whether the quality of a text message is superior/inferior to whatever they use in literature classes is irrelevant.

There is also quite a difference between being able to type out and read short messages to friends like "who wants to go to the park today" or read a menu and know if a sandwich has mustard on it or not and being able to have deeper inferential and evaluative understandings of written thoughts and ideas.

I think back to some college peers who even in some more basic classes could clearly read the words of the assigned writings, they couldn't then parse out the deeper meanings behind the assignments. They weren't illiterate, you could ask them to read a passage, and they'd be able to say all the words. You could ask them face value questions about the text, and they'd probably be able to answer most questions right. But any deeper analysis was just beyond them. So, when the professor would ask deeper questions, they'd say "I don't know where he's getting this, the book didn't talk about that at all".

Agree, but I'm not sure how much worse this is today?

I avoided English Lit in college but thinking back to High School I recognize the "I don't know where he's getting this" reaction. I just rarely engaged with the so-called "classic" stuff we had to read, and like you say I had no trouble reading the words but struggled with deeper meanings or even just getting past the archaic language. And this was in the early 1980s, no chance it was influenced by social media or mobile phones or AI. My parents probably blamed television.

At least we now have AI, where a student could (if motivated) ask questions about the meaning of a passage and get back a synthesis of what other people have written about it. Back then I used Cliffs Notes to do that.

Disturbing % of people just consume tiktok style video and that's it.

As always with these things, I'm curious what are the results by state. I wish I could find it again, but I saw some results by state and some of our states scored the same as the top rank nations and some score with 3rd world nations.

I would be interested if this is a nationwide trend or the bad performers are performing even worse. Especially since from my memory, this is mostly a poverty issue. Not a school funding issue, but that per capita income was a good indicator of where that state would score.

Sure, but you could do the same in pretty much any country.

I’m originally from a US state that currently sits at a 40% literacy rate, but I’ve lived for the last decade in various European countries. I say this only because, even if still anecdotal, I feel like I have a decent basis for comparison. Certainly there are educational disparities from center to periphery and across income brackets everywhere, but I have never lived somewhere that the division was as stark as the US.

France — with all its problems — ensures the same incredibly high standard of curriculum across the country and perhaps most importantly it is actually expected that top university performers who will become researchers teach at high school in the periphery. It’s even a nation-wide competition by discipline (look up the “aggregation”) to obtain these highly sought positions. The idea is something like you teach high school outside Paris while preparing your doctorate and then either return triumphant to the big research institutes or continue teaching in the provinces. Something like this in the US would have immeasurable impact, since probably one of the biggest issues is just convincing well-educated people to teach in rural areas.

from https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/us-literacy... "California’s 23.1% of adults lacking basic prose literacy skills make California have the lowest literacy rate of 76.9%". I don't know where you are from with a 40% literacy rate, but it isn't any US state.

I had to double-check my source and I realize the error was mine. “40% read at or above an eighth grade level” is the correct description of the state-level data I was looking at, which is distinct from the general metric used for literacy.

This led me into a bit of a rabbit hole trying to understand what in fact the official literacy rate is measured by if it’s so wildly different from - indeed almost double — the portion who can read at an eighth grade level.

The data is actually quite interesting. US National Center for Education statistics administer tests to assess “the ability to understand, evaluate, use, and engage with written texts to participate in society” and an individual falls into one of five categories. Official literacy definition considers above category one (“below basic”), but it is category three that maps approximately onto “eighth grade knowledge” (thus four as high school, five as post-graduate). The most interesting thing I found in the data is exploring that gap between two and three, ie states that have a high attainment of official literacy but then very low rates of the higher levels. California, for example, has the highest percentage of people below level two, but a relatively high percentage at level three and above — obviously I haven’t considered the data for long enough to conclude, but that suggests to me largely a question of immigration/non-English speaking populations. The state I’m from does better than California on attainment of level two, but significantly worse at attainment of three or above.

States where level 3+ > levels 1-2: District of Columbia, Washington, Minnesota, Oregon, Massachusetts, North Dakota / Utah / Colorado.

States with lowest level 3 (ie “eighth grade” equivalent) attainment: Mississippi 35%, Louisiana 35%, West Virginia 37%, New Mexico 39%, Nevada 39%, Alabama 39%, Arkansas 39%, Texas 40%, Tennessee 40%, Kentucky 41%.

TLDR that gap looks like an interesting way to separate issues with a state’s educational system from other questions. Whatever the best measure of literacy may be, it seems like the bar should be a bit higher than just “native speaker of the measured language.”

That's by design. France has a cabinet with full control over education in the entire nation. In the United States, education is in the hands of locally elected school boards and the role of the federal and state secretaries of education seems to be mostly limited to dumping money on those people. (And attaching conditions to that money in general seems to be fairly controversial, as the present discussion shows.)

There's no way such a system can produce uniform results.

(The wisdom in forcing voters to elect all sorts of local commissions is another matter entirely. I struggle to see how anyone can make an informed choice, in ballots with 10 or more elected positions, but they seem normal in America.)

The US has always had a state-run or private education system, since even before it was founded as a country. And the U.S. is among the top 10 most educated countries in the world, with over 50% of population having at least a bachelor's degree.

It's pretty simple to vote on local offices: are you happy with the current state of education in your district? Good, keep the incumbents around. Otherwise change out school board members until you achieve the desired results.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/232951/university-degree...

How about the quality of the education and curriculum itself?

The curriculum can be amazing, but it doesn't matter if the students don't care. And frankly, a lot of them don't.

Some of that is cultural, some of that is due to parenting. A lot of parents aren't involved in their kids education. Frankly, a lot of them are barely involved in parenting in general.

But I mean, I remember hearing this back in the 80s, so in itself is not a great indicator unless we can see something that would point at why parents stopped caring as much.

Now, if someone came with a headline that said "Parents not involved in childrens education because they've been ragebaited into spending all their time yelling on social media" my biases would tend to lend me to believe it's true, even without sufficient evidence. There are other correlations, like cellphone ownership in the population.

Just having social media itself doesn't seem to be an exact fit, but that tells us nothing about the algorithms that social media was using at the time.

It is just as true today as the 1980s - parents have long been the largest indicator of how well kids do in school.

What isn't known is how to get parents to do better. Or lacking that, how to get kids to do better anyway. (there have been some successes, but nothing seems to be repeatable)

But that's just punting the original question. Obviously parents aren't getting better, they are getting worse. Why is the question.

* Social media (Echo chambers, propaganda bots, algorithmic content designed to get attention and emotion)

* Lowered attention spans

* A general reduction in critical thinking - instead preferring headlines, summaries, and easy answers

* Increased partisanship

* Reduction in third spaces and community connections - people becoming more isolated

* Financial stress

I'd say those are the main points. They apply in almost all developed nations, to varying extents.

This trend of decline significantly predates either COVID or GenAI.

I think it's all of the above and probably more. It might be difficult to find a biggest culprit since they all feed each other. As an example: COVID forced people inside onto their screens and now that people are more screen addicted they use more gen ai or lost the skills to solve things themselves. Gen ai reliance leads to more gen ai use as skills wither.

early on in the bush (ii) administration, they passed a bill called "no child left behind" that would cut funding from schools that couldn't achieve desired standardized test scores.

while this may seem to align incentives, in reality a school that has struggling students needs MORE resources, not less.

the outcome, in reality, is an extreme desire to "teach to the test," where developing actual skills is secondary to learning the structure of test problems and how to answer them correctly enough to keep the school from being obliterated.

teachers are one of the most valuable, most undervalued positions in society. my mother taught elementary school for 20 years; when she retired, i was making 3 times her salary doing my computer job. this is the sad but inevitable outcome from the policies put in place by a class of people that can afford to educate their children outside of the systems forced upon the working class.

The no child left behind act was enacted in 2001. If you check the article, it has a nice little chart, showing a decline that starts in 2015. Prior to 2013, the results show a clear trend of improvement (in regards to the percentage of students achieving a minimum level of proficiency).

How would you explain that temporal gap? If the No Child Left Behind Act is the problem, why was the trend positive for the first 12-14 years of the time it's been in force?

Gifted programs dropped from ~72% of elementary schools to ~65% by 2013, and probably have continued declining. Given it takes 10+ years to educate a child, the school culture to change, and so on, we should expect to see quite a lag between policy and outcomes.

The Obama administration reversed this in the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) in 2015.

Many of the schools with the most funding per student, like Washington D.C. and NYC currently underperform.

NYC has a spending of $36-40k per student with only 56% ELA, ~47% Math. Washington DC has $27k-31k of spending per student and only 22% proficient in reading and 16% in Math.

Charter schools have been the best bang for the buck. The best all-income schools are catholic schools, averaging at 1 grade level higher. Then private schools do even better, but aren't accessible to everyone, and then the top spot is left to selective high-performing schools, unsurprisingly.

> The best all-income schools are catholic schools, averaging at 1 grade level higher. Then private schools do even better

These are not equal comparisons. People who send their kids to a private school are choosing that, and thus care about the education their kids get. While Catholics are all income and choosing for religion reasons, generally catholic implies cultural care for education. Public schools take everyone including those who don't care about education.

In general public schools in the US are very good. However a small number in every school are kids that would be kicked out of private (including catholic) schools. There are also significant variation between schools with richer areas of a city doing better - despite often spending less on education.

> Charter schools have been the best bang for the buck.

That is a lot easier when you can require a transcript from the prospective student, review it, and say, "Uh, no thank you".

There's a private technical college near here that offers EMT and paramedic training. They "guarantee" "100% success in certification and registration" for their students.

How do they get there? They boot students out after they fail (<80%) their second test in the class.

I'm not necessarily opposed to such a policy. It is, however, intellectually dishonest of them to try to tout it as a better school for that reason. Charter schools are free to reject students who will bring their grade averages down.

Yeah, that's very selective. Catholic schools on the other hand just require you to be Catholic and be somewhat involved in the Parish and score much higher.

I believe this is not only restricted to Catholic schools though they are the most common. Most religious schools have higher scoring students.

If nothing else, parental involvement correlates with higher test scores and being enrolled in a non-default school correlates with parent involvement. So it's no surprise that being enrolled in a non-default school correlates with higher test scores.

IMHO, we always hear about such and such school (system) has X% kids proficient with $Y/year per pupil. But what I would really want to know about a school is how does a year change at the school change the proficiency of the class. If the class of 3rd graders starts the year at 20% proficient at 2nd grade level, and ends at 22% proficient at 3rd grade level, that might be a good school, even though a single point in time check says 22% proficient. But the numbers we get aren't really useful for that; a cohort analysis would be better; there's real privacy implications, but that doesn't make the numbers we get useful. :P

Catholic schools in Australia don't required you to be Catholic. Although, I'm sure most kids are. And enrolling there will expose you to Catholic teaching.

I wonder if USA schools are similar. It's next to impossible to require belief.

The vast majority to all Catholic schools in the US have no requirement of you being Catholic.

Correct. Your chances of getting in are just much better if you are, then even better if you're in the Parish.

At least around me, it's pretty easy to get into one due to enrollment not being very full in most if not all. They will of course give automatic enrollment for anyone in the parish, but I can't really argue with that since these schools are usually subsidized by the parish and local dioces.

You need to test to an academic standard of course, as they definitely want to keep the bar rather high. So they won't take all comers. But if you are either just starting out or come with an academic track record/high percentile test scores you shouldn't have much of a problem at all. When I went even 30 years ago there were plenty of low income kids who were not academic superstars. The only real metric that was universal across the board was the requirement for involved parents.

I'm sure other areas are different, but Catholic schools in my region have really suffered in recent years with a lot of them closing down.

I'm sorry but some F rated schools getting closed down needed to happen. There are institutions either so toxic at the administrative level or so heavily populated with kids with behavioral issues that it's impossible to fix without divvying up the student population into other schools that can better handle the load.

NCLB had some flaws but that wasn't one of them. Before NCLB you were stuck in the poor school district your likely single parent could afford to live in, inevitably doomed to poor education.

The US has been on a steady decline in global education rankings since the 70s IIRC. Can’t remember where I saw the stat.

I’m from a US state with a 40% adult literacy rate (=above eighth grade reading level). At least there, none of those three things are even close to the root causes. The average school in the US outside of the big cities, especially the farther you get from the coasts, is just not fit for purpose — and funding only seems to ever go down (not that throwing money at the problem alone would solve it).

Honestly — and I’m not being at all utopian/overvaluing the present state of the technology — I think AI is one of the few prospects for even just marginal improvement, especially since it’s accessible by phone. Much as I wish it wasn’t the case, it’s hard to even imagine all the things that would have to change (from funding, to legislation, undoing all the embarrassing “teaching the controversy” curriculum, to say nothing of staffing) for a “non-technical solution.”

It’s decades of defunding schools. I used to work in education and I have never in my career experienced “more” money coming in. It’s always, cuts, cuts, cuts.

That and the culture of anti-intellectualism in the US. I’m completely unsurprised we are falling behind.

NYC, DC, and LA all have over $20k of funding per student, with NYC projecting to hit $42k/student this year and are scoring at 12-56% ELA and Math.

It's definitely not just funding.

How can it be "defunding" while the US spends far more per student than just about any other country in the world?

Except for a brief blip around the housing crash inflation adjusted per pupil spending has steadily increased for decades.

Do you have evidence of this? I have never seen a shred of it even though the claim is repeated endlessly. I think it's a conspiracy theory.

Education spending by all metrics has only gone up - beating inflation nearly every single year since I've been alive.

It might not make it down to teacher salaries or more educators, but the money is absolutely being spent at massive levels.

The best schools where I grew up and around me today have the lowest per-pupil cost. There is basically no correlation between budget spent on education until you get to the extremes on both ends.

To add to your list, in my kids' school district, they spent about 4 - 5 years trying to compensate for kids who didn't do well during COVID by basically slowing every class down to the pace of the kid who struggled the most.

Combine this with an emphasis on single-tracking students and a de-emphasis of grading in general, and it's not surprising to me that scores are declining.

You need to look at who the kids look up to. What attributes do their role models have?

A head singing through a toilet seat

They used to look up to professional athletes.

It is more statistically realistic for them to want to be a successful influencer than it is for them to be a professional athlete.

Isn’t contemporary education just a preview of the highly competitive white collar rat race? Constant grading, judgement and ranking? And for what? For some coveted yet mind-numbing tech job so can stay one step ahead of your peers and afford a decent place to live?

And that’s nearly the best realistic future. Why wouldn’t students internalize this and start mentally checking out?

It's consuming rather than creating, it's products aimed at sating short attention spans, it's superficial social media rather than books, it's instant answers from LLM rather than thinking through. We created this, and its fallout throughout society and politics. Yet we refuse to fess up.

Maybe 6 hours of tiktok a day is not giving the brain the rest it needs to process and store any learned skills?

Looking at the PISA 2022 results (2022 is the most recent report, PISA is the Programme for International Student Assessment), this is clearly a way bigger problem than just the US. Many Western countries have a downward trend in maths, reading, and science scores, including Canada, France, the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, ...

Scores for reading & science had actually been trending upwards in the US, while maths has been trending downwards for some 20 years.

Report: https://www.oecd.org/content/dam/oecd/en/publications/report...

I'm 24 and I've used internet heavily completely unsupervised since around 7-ish years old. As I've grown older I notice myself using my phone and be on the web less and less, it is a conscious decision. My access to youtube is blocked except on my laptop, though I have noticed not watching any videos for weeks now. My phone is B&W and has it's browser disabled. Being more mindful of technology use is definitely a positive trend within my generation.

But as I near parenthood, I feel conflicted. I'm still young enough to remember my state of mind in the early teen years. I remember being surprised at the amount of attention the level "No Russian" from MW2 got. I thought - "It's just a game, why would anyone be offended by this?". Now, having seen similar things happen in my lifetime, it seems very distasteful to me. Even seeing a kid with a realistic looking toy gun gives me mixed feelings. The idea of having my kid being on tiktok for 6 hours unsupervised with all the people feeding their agenda to young impressionable minds makes me uneasy. And I was the one who spent good portion of his day being on 4chan.

My question is to parents of HN - how does one find balance within their parenting? I don't want to be a helicopter parent who blasts their child for not falling in line with all their demands, torturing them with endless extracurricular activities for their own good. At the same time I want them to learn a little discipline and not hate me for forcing things on them. I had zero limits on my screen time, and I'd say I turned out perfectly fine, though I did poorly in school and was a troublemaker. I found my love for studying only after I turned 18 and had some time with my thoughts after I moved out and stopped hanging out with deadbeats. Frankly, I'd say my upbringing was a little too lax.

Younger me would feel betrayed by my changing attitude towards raising kids , and that's what worries me - the disconnect that leads to the repeating cycle of parent-kid conflict. I don't think a parent usually thinks that they'll try to be the world's shittiest parent, yet so many of them are.

There are 3 grade levels and 9 subjects giving 27 possible groups. It seems entirely inappropriate to pick out 3 and highlight the fact that (on a different test of students studying a different curricula) the results went down.

Especially when the NCES Data Usage Agreement clearly states "Use the data in any dataset for statistical purposes only."

As an example 4th grade reading has on a scale from 0 to 500 been between 213-223 for 20 years with of course this year (215) not being the lowest point. This is a test where many jurisdictions have 10+ point swings from test to test. There really isn't that much signal in the noise here.

Out of all the taxes I pay, the one I would put more money in is for public library funding. This funding is indiscriminate of races, wealth, and social status ear mark. Everyone would receive the benefits from a library.

Adults can't dismiss experts and expertise all the time on every topic (climate, health, economy) and worship know-nothings, and expect their children to invest time and effort to learn stuff.

The kids may become dumber but they aren't stupid.

You think they are better at detecting the know-nothings than the adults?

Who said "the king has no clothes" in the classic tale?

This 2019 article about how reading strategies have shifted in recent decades away from phonics to "three cueing" - which attempts to incentivize reading by encouraging students to interpolate words they don't understand from context, but may lead to bad practices that skip over the ability to recognize words in isolation - may be related to this trend.

https://www.apmreports.org/episode/2019/08/22/whats-wrong-ho...

> For Goodman, accurate word recognition was not necessarily the goal of reading. The goal was to comprehend text.8 If the sentences were making sense, the reader must be getting the words right, or right enough. These ideas soon became the foundation for how reading was taught in many schools.

> The whole language movement of the late 20th century was perhaps the zenith of the anti-phonics argument.26 Phonics instruction was seen as tedious, time-consuming and ultimately unnecessary. Why? Because — according to the three-cueing theory — readers can use other, more reliable cues to figure out what the words say.27

> "To our surprise, all of our research results pointed in the opposite direction," Stanovich wrote. "It was the poorer readers, not the more skilled readers, who were more reliant on context to facilitate word recognition."13

> The skilled readers could instantly recognize words without relying on context. Other researchers have confirmed these findings with similar experiments. It turns out that the ability to read words in isolation quickly and accurately is the hallmark of being a skilled reader. This is now one of the most consistent and well-replicated findings in all of reading research.14

It's interesting to wonder whether LLMs may struggle with similar issues - while they can intuit a distribution over held-out tokens from context, they famously can't count the number of r's in "strawberry" because they don't have a concept of letters.

Are we holding our LLMs back much the way we are holding back students - or are we holding back students much the same way we're holding back our LLMs?

Outside of the US but past the daycare, covid, etc issues that have been mentioned everywhere I see a focus on money making. Highschoolers are still kids but I feel the new generation is more aware of the fact that the end goal is making as much money as possible, so if they feel like learning something they lean more towards reading/watching about investing/hustling which doesn't translate well into academia.

This is interesting data. For all the talk of bringing up the bottom and "No child left behind" this suggests we're still succeeding. And as anyone in California will tell you, schools are doing this at the expense of the top students.

I get that COVID is part of the cause. Forcing one instructor to teach to 30 kids of widely varied abilities makes it worse. In that model, nobody learns.

Watch the movie Idiocracy for the entertaining answer

Accepting the premise, this outsider's view of the US is that there seems to be an increasing reluctance to fund "public" goods (e.g. infrastructure, population healthcare, etc) of which public education is one such service. Is this decreasing investment an actual thing, and could it (in aggregate) cause an overall drop in achievement?

US spend per student per year is $16,000. Fairly high investment on the international playing field, especially when adjusted for the poor results.

The view that the education institutions are bloated and inefficient is a fairly mainstream (because some things like low pay for the actual teachers in the classrooms is quite publicly apparent). I'd hazard to say that there's some truth to it, after taking in the first point into account.

Tl;Dr money is part of the problem on some levels, but it's not primarily a money problem.

I wonder if red state forcing bible curriculum, alternative history, and erasing factual information will help improve scores…

I think part of this is we don't know where progress will lead us right now- partly because the "ai" hype is choking natural social communication and organisation. What's the point in being educated in an uneducated society with no intellectual future?

it's about to get worse, maybe every year

https://www1.racgp.org.au/newsgp/clinical/how-covid-19-leave...

note even infections with no symptoms

It's because they don't allow GPT in exams. Students are accustomed to using it.

The kids are not doing as well at home, the parents are struggling economically, the teachers are struggling, and the government doesn't care. Perfect storm.

Don't forget the brain eating virus we loosed on the population, that probably doesn't help.

My completely unfounded theory about why education is declining: Teachers don't get to beat kids anymore. (I'm not saying they ought to). If it's one mentally completely exhausted adult doing nothing but "use their words" against 25 kids/teenagers with nothing but energy, and a feeling that the system, which the teacher is the agent of, is their enemy, the power balance flips radically.

Forcing kids to go to school only works as long as you actually have any force at your disposal.

(And convincing them that going to school is in their best interest similarly requires that to actually be the case. Kids who start off bright-eyed and bushy-tailed will quickly reverse their position when they're either below or above the bell curve and their educational needs/welfare are being completely and obviously disregarded.)

This is not just an unfounded theory but a completely insane theory. Many (all?) of the countries ahead of the US in test scores also don’t “beat their kids” because that is absolutely fucking insane.

It’s such an American thing, to blame something on a lack of violence.

I'm not referring to the gap between the countries, I was focused on the historic development of the one population.

The old paradigm produced results(arguably?), but was "gutted". By this train of reasoning, this old, and still "current" teaching paradigm simply does not work without violent coercion is the point I was really trying to drive.

Teachers still beat kids:

https://www.economist.com/united-states/2023/01/19/it-is-sti...

and looking at state maps, beatings look negatively correlated with test scores:

https://reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/1krxcco/oc_ranking_of_...

Milton Friedman was there, signed the guest book, and left.

Public Schools: Make Them Private - Milton Friedman

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45197646

Rent is out of control. I am amazed that anyone can afford kids, much less afford to dedicate the time necessary for kids to succeed in school. Then you have the brain rot that has infected youth and efforts to defund public schools.

I have not seen a good track record of states privatizing education through the use of charter schools. In the South (US), I have come to view that as a backdoor segregation and religious indoctrination attempt on top of some old-school grifting.

They should add more A1 to the classrooms.

Their steaks are obviously inadequetly sauced.

The biggest irony is that spending more money is not going to help things.

Regardless of the arguments, it's encouraging to see people interested enough in public education to take the time to comment (even if it's a comment I don't agree with.)

There cannot be a coherent discussion on this topic without also taking race-adjusted scores in account. America's demographics are changing and this must be understood by all.

Bringing race into it will surely increase the coherence of the discussion.

I just made a new Math Education tool called https://fuzzygraph.com. Hope it will increase interest in math.

I think too much is done on computers and not pencil and paper.

My daughter's math is all on tablet. I don't even know how to help.

I feel like it was better when we had a book. We would read a couple pages on the lesson and then move on to the problems. We could go back and reference earlier topics.

Now they just click through quizzes on some app or a website for extra help.

Taking bets on how fast Marshall McLuhan re-enters the public conscience :)

The final answer to the perennial question "What is algebra good for?" is found in the success or failure of society as a whole. The same can be said for many other oft-questioned values, like "What does it matter if I'm a hypocrite?" In truth no-one really knows what the future will bring - it's always possible to construct a scenario where ignorance and irrationality will save society from extermination. But in the "horses, not zebras" sense it pays, I think, to play the odds and consider the most likely scenarios that put a society at risk: invasion, revolution, natural catastrophe, and then ask those questions again. Much of history can be read as a set of experiments testing various social theories, and the failure modes of not knowing algebra (Cambodia), or not caring about logical consistency or truthfulness (Russia) are well-known. Education is an insurance policy against a threat that may occur a generation or two in the future, and so the feedback loop is very long. This says, to me, that any change to education policy or practice should be very slow, incremental, and based not in aesthetics or ideology, but on the need for society's continued existence. It would be optimal to have many parallel longitudinal incremental educational experiments going on all the time, and then adopt the changes that bear fruit. It would be optimal to require that ALL educational policy makers be experts in history.

I offer another explanation: we simply don't value educated people. Kids have few role models who are educated or value knowledge. Careers emphasize narrow expertise. Business leaders often show very little understanding of the world outside of squeezing money out of others. We live in an age where access to knowledge is prioritized over knowledge itself, and dogma is difficult for most to tease from contradictory observations. We no longer portray reading or discovery as pleasureful in itself. Why would we? There is no money in showing the complexity of the world.

Simply put, if you were a child now, why should you care about education when it doesn't appear to be the key to anything you want? Money has taken the place of knowledge. On further inspection, this should not be a surprise to anyone who has bought into the dogma of a transaction-oriented reality.

Children these days are raised just as much by a culture that never figured out how to resolve the contradiction between making money and having values.

Blame is futile, though. Hold your children close and raise them the best you can, for there is no reversing the tide.

Nearly half of kids aren’t being raised with their parents in the home. This was rare 50 years ago, and all the research shows that home dynamics matters the most.

Education spending has shot up per student because people think it will solve cultural ills.

It's worse than that, the only authority figure in most kids' lives are women -- there are no male authority figures for over 80% of their upbringing between the ages of 0-18 years old, and most years it is 100%.

I wonder why parents are not in the home. Could it be a rising cost of living far outpacing the wage increases? Decades of wage stagnation? Decades of boomers ripping up our safety nets? Decades of Reaganomics that have eroded trust in our government?

We have decades of evidence yet these types of comments still pop up.

Why aReNt PaReNts HomE eNoUgH? Are they stupid??

25% of kids in the US don't have a father present.

> Nearly half of kids aren’t being raised with their parents in the home. This was rare 50 years ago, and all the research shows that home dynamics matters the most.

Every thread about something like this is full of people just blaming it on whatever social trend annoys them personally.

But also this statistic is absolute bullshit. 71% of kids in the US have two parents at home, and the number is going up.

60% of kids are growing up with their biological parents. This matters due to the statistics on time allocation from other arrangements. 60% is nearly half, especially when you factor in absenteeism that happens at home due to other social ills. Our country has never been as unhealthy.

Lol. Any parent immediately knows. iPhone. Just passive entertainment and sweet sweet dopamine hits. Nothing else for 12 hours a day + both days on the weekend. This also decreases the kids ability to ask questions, go outside, meet people.

The problem is obvious. I don't think people will admit the problem - so this is the new normal.

I don't see what's new here. This trend is not unexpected with our goals as a society. The overall goals are in the other direction. We don't want to work hard or think hard. That's precisely what is driving tech, business and lifestyle here. We have outsourced all of our hard work and hard thinking to machines and cheaper workforce elsewhere. For some reason, it seems to work fine. With all the dumbness and weakness, we still seem to be doing well as a country. So, why the concern?

Oh, you say that, we are losing some human abilities. Well, Prosperity and easy food removes the need for abilities or hunting. It is all cyclic. Each cycle is a few generations long.

We are in an kakistocracy. Nobody cares about merit anymore.

Just grift your way through life like the Pedophile of the United States. Become a jester/influencer. Smell your own farts on a live stream and pump your engagements. Be a clown. It clearly pays to do so.

The US is just one giant corporate playground that companies force people to move to for the regulatory climate. It isn't meant for raising a family. People will either be transplants or neo-feudal serfs working in kitchens. The whole thing will turn into the Bay Area

People will get to choose between a vibes-based "equity" ideology where achievement is disregarded or the republican woodchipper of austerity. Either thing leads to the same outcome: everything becomes stupider and shittier. The whole system is moving of its own accord towards enshittification. People should just get the grieving over with and leave

It's fine. The required and qualified people for the upcoming jobs will be imported from the bountiful overseas.

My youngest is now 19, but all of my kids had "common core" math in Denver Public Schools. That was an utter travesty. I had the tail end of the "new math", and it was obvious even then that arithmetic drills were monumental wastes of times. Apparently, the common core folks had not heard of pocket calculators, or calculator apps on cell phones.

If "math" does not account for reality, of course people are going to treat it as a meaningless barrier to be overcome rather than learned. Also, math is more than arithmetic. Using picture of coins. For Chrissake.

For the first years of school, it is actually very beneficial to pretend that calculators don't exist.

Students must be accustomed to do simple arithmetic without the help of a calculator, or else their mathematical abilities will be negatively impacted. Same for learning multiplication tables, recognizing the associations between the numbers is important.

Only when they begin to calculate things which exceed the number of mental tokens that they can handle, then they can start using a calculator with no ill effects.

I mean, is it any question it's about money? And I don't mean money spent on education.

People are too poor and harried to care anymore.

When I was growing up, you could strive for a white collar job and get one, and we assumed it would lead to a decent life.

Now, what are kids supposed to look forward to? Tech is in the toilet, everything is going overseas, everyone is broke.

So many of my friends are unemployed, LinkedIn is filled with people desperately posting looking for jobs. Of COURSE this is going to affect early education as well.

But at least we're not paying teachers as much as we used to (in real dollar terms): https://www.nea.org/resource-library/educator-pay-and-studen...

[If you note the slight whiff of sarcasm, that is intentional.]

Everyone wants to shit on teachers and schools. Both get alot of blame.

I’m fortunate to send my kid to an excellent private school that is excellent at what it does. They have problems too.

I blame technology. The pivot from books to the lowest common denominator Chromebook homework, reading and testing is a joke.

I find it funny that schools took away textbooks and then wonder why scores went down.

Textbooks cohesively presented material. Random printouts and notes glued into a notebook do not.

Similarly, we read a whole lot more in Literature classes than kids do now.

> There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.

- Isaac Asimov

The cult of ignorance now rules the country, simple as that. To half the nation, teachers are now all insane satanists out to trans their kids. As a result, they're paid dirt poor and the state, controlled by that anti-science reactionary wave, is making their work harder and less rewarding everyday.

Vaccine mandates are ended on religious grounds, public research is destroyed to save pennies in tax cuts to the wealthy, and foreign researchers are arrested at the borders for no reason but to assert American dominance over them and satisfy the racist folk fueling the machine.

This is what it looks like, witnessing the end of an Empire from the inside.

If you can't fail students and hold them back, poor students will continue and pull down the average of later grades. News at 11.

Good source of factory labor.

We have a powerful right-wing political party that is aggressively anti-academic.

OpenAI Study Mode will fix it. https://openai.com/index/chatgpt-study-mode/.

Oops, it won't: https://tech.co/news/another-study-ai-making-us-dumb

Adding to the swath of anecdotes here so wiser policymakers and teachers than myself have more perspectives to draw from in addressing the ongoing learning crisis.

I was in High School for the first full class of the new millennium (2000-2004). Being gifted at the time (now we know I just had OCD and hyperfocus), I’m cruising through on Honor Roll and knocking even difficult content out of the park. It’s to the point that I’m sleeping through English with a perfect GPA and have been politely asked by my Social Studies teacher to stop answering questions (to give other students a chance to learn) and just work on my homework in his class while he teaches. Everyone is super chill, happy to teach, and has no compunction failing students who don’t grasp the material and fail to seek help.

January 8, 2002. Social studies is my last class of the day. The teacher storms in, angry, and flips his desk in rage.

Alright, you have our collective attention.

He points furtively at the class while facing the chalkboard before turning around. “Congratulations, you’re the last group of students to get a decent education. Starting next semester, No Child Left Behind means we’ll be teaching to tests and not covering the material, and every single class after you is going to be dumber as a result. You better pay attention, because this is the last good world history class you’ll likely ever have.”

I could not hope to appreciate his wisdom at that moment, but in the years since? Dude was 100% correct. I learned about context and nuance to discuss on essay exams; my siblings who came after me learned rote dates and events for a standardized test. The irony is that they have superior college credentials (MS and BA) than I do (AS), but all three of us are fairly even in footing in our overall intelligence, seeking of new knowledge and data, and ability to teach others. I can anecdotally credit my superior education pre-NCLB for preparing me to succeed in the real world compared to younger peers who have required far more (expensive) education to get to the same point. Introducing KPIs alone won’t fix the problem, it will require rekindling a passion for learning in the hearts of students, teachers, and parents alike to restore our basic comprehension scores.

And before people ask: yes, we too had the dreaded issues of defunding everything to fund the football team. My school closed auto, metal, and eventually wood shop classes to create three more weight training rooms for the sports teams, and cancelled HomeEc in lieu of letting bankers do an hour lecture on credit cards to Seniors.

American high school is just preparation for prison: anyone that's been in the joint tell me that American public schools and prisons don't, "kind of smell the same."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discipline_and_Punish

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/School-to-prison_pipeline

I am not sure why this is news. Classic economic warfare.

Parents with higher education and stable incomes have the resources, time, and knowledge to supplement their children's education. This includes tutoring, enrichment programs, monitoring social media and phone use, and advocating within schools, as well as sending their children to smaller, private schools.

Most Joe Six Pack parents hand their children unrestricted iPhones and let the schools raise and baby sit them, while the parents sit back getting fat soaking up social media and TV.

Well, it's put in a bit of a disrespectful tone, but I think you are right. Unrestricted access to a smartphone will lead to 6 hours + a day screen time. And it's all addictive junk. That can't be good.

One also sees the "educational" difference. Here a study was published concluding that poorer areas have twice the number of snackbars compared to areas with "higher educated" people. Bad food is also very cheap. It's also very easy to never read about the effects of screens on childeren and I see people with kids of ~1 sitting on the back of a bike with a smartphone blaring... Why not let the kid enjoy and learn from the surroundings? My kids loved riding a bike with me.

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