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Comment by lucideng | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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.

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

> 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

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.

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 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.

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 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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

> 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

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

>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.

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.

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.

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