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Comment by a1pulley | Hacker News Reader

This is (anecdotally) not true for families in the highest income decile (in California). Kids are pushed harder to learn things earlier than when I was growing up. For example, nearly all of my kid's classmates could read before they started kindergarten. All could do basic arithmetic. Now that he's in first grade, most can read chapter books and have a grasp of multiplication. My mom pushed me hard to get me ahead of my peers, but I didn't hit those milestones until a year later. The standards and expectations are extremely high now because it's never been harder to get a spot at a top 20 university—perhaps because a top 20 school is the best chance you can get to maintain your living standards.

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I've not seen anything saying all kids are lacking in important skills these days, but rather they all seem (to me) to imply that we're on the way to an even more-stratified society. Smart kids will be just as educated as smart kids used to be - probably even moreso. Dumb kids will fall further and further behind, and the middle range of "kinda smart at a bunch of stuff" will disappear.

With the extreme stratification of wealth follows the stratification of... everything else, really.

Everything is bifurcating now. Haves are having more and more, and have-nots are having less and less. Middle class jobs are disappearing in favor of a mix of 1. low-wage unskilled/service jobs and 2. "elite" jobs for the upper crust. There used to be a place in society for A, B, C, and D students, but now you're either top-college material or you risk being swept into a growing underclass.

> With the extreme stratification of wealth follows the stratification of... everything else, really.

That's one reason that the solution to educational inequalities may not lie in education policy at all, but in tax/economic policy. Maybe the most expedient way to improve education outcomes is to just take a large amount of money from wealthy people and give it to everyone else.

> Maybe the most expedient way to improve education outcomes is to just take a large amount of money from wealthy people and give it to everyone else

Given the evidence in the article, wouldn't it make sense to try simply holding students to standards--the thing that caused the last wave of achievement gain--instead of another novel and divisive policy treatment?

> This is (anecdotally) not true for families in the highest income decile

FTA: “High-achieving kids are doing roughly as well as they always have, while those at the bottom are seeing rapid losses.”

How are they teaching 4 year olds reading and arithmetic? That wasn’t an option in my affluent area in SoCal. Somehow Chinese and some Russian kids can do it, but mine didn’t. Despite my paying $20k/year per child for preschool.

Same way they used to teach it in 1st grade, but 2 years earlier. There's often more of an emphasis on visuals, manipulatives, and songs too, eg. my kid's kindergarten teacher linked us to this song [1] on the first day, and there's dozens of similar resources on YouTube.

A family friend of ours (retired Tesla engineer) taught his 18 month the alphabet. He did it with a bunch of alphabet puzzles [2] and blocks. My 16mo is showing similar interest, but unfortunately I don't have the time to sit down with him, go over each letter, and explain how they go together. He will grab a book (or 5) off the bookshelf, bring it over to me, and say "Read this", though.

For math - my kid had learned the powers of two up through 4096 by kindergarten through playing Snake-2048. My wife and I started introducing addition and subtraction just in ordinary life - we'd say "Okay, if we have 4 strawberries, and you reserve one each for mommy and daddy, how many do you get to eat?"

Now (age 7) he'll quiz me in the car with seemingly random numbers like "What's 177 * 198?", and it's a good opportunity for me to introduce a bunch of mental math tricks like binomial expansions for multiplying numbers near 50 or 100, or prime factorizations. I'll usually turn the questions back on him too, like "Well, that's 200 * 177 - 2 * 177. What's 2 * 177?" and then he's like "I dunno" and then I'll say "What's 2 * 180?" and he says "360" and then I say "Now subtract 2 * 3" and he says "354" and then I'm like "Okay, if 2 * 177 = 354, what's 200 * 177" and he'll say "35,400" (because he already knows the trick for adding zeros) and then I'll say "Subtract 354" and he'll say "35,046" which is the correct answer.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=36IBDpTRVNE

[2] https://www.amazon.com/Attmu-Toddlers-Alphabet-Preschoolers-...

[3] https://www.miniplay.com/game/snake-2048-io

There’s a huge difference between knowing the alphabet and being able to read a decodable book like Bob, let alone getting to chapter books.

Similarly there’s a huge difference between knowing how to count up and down between small numbers under 10 and mastery of arithmetic.

Here, double digit addition is not covered until late 1st grade. The focus is addition under 20.

But there's also a big difference between 18 months and 4 years.

There are definitely preschools in Silicon Valley where the kids are reading chapter books by 4. We chose not to send our kids to one (we don't want them to miss out on play and socialization for academics), but we have a few friends that have sent their kids there.

Really? Can you share the school’s name? Can you give an example of chapter book so I understand the reading level?

I'm from a blue class family in a non-affluent area and I could already read going into Kindergarten because my mom spent a lot of time reading with me before I got to school. This was 25+ years ago.

You touch upon an issue near to my heart but I am loathe to utter it: women in workforce is robbing our children and country of a future.

Disagree if you will.

You probably get disagreement becasue your focused on one gender. No reason why we can't have stay at home dads.

Unless you think that men can't be good caretakers or something about it being a women's job, then good luck, your on your own lol

Men are pretty bad at breast feeding or carrying a pregnancy.

You can formula feed or feed with pumped milk. Father's are capable of feeding children.

Formula is not as nutritious as human breast milk. Bottle feeding leads to long lasting anatomical changes. You can look at the research confirming these uncomfortable and inconvenient truths.

What are the long lasting anatomical changes? Would love to learn more because my kids were bottle fed.

Narrowing of jaws, airway, and higher change of sleep apnea into adulthood. You can see the difference even as a lay person.

This is false.

Whooaa! You're going to give people whiplash with how quickly you're changing what's being discussed. Men are perfectly capable of reading to kids! That you use things men are perfectly able to do, rather than the things they're not, as justification for why women should not be in the workplace makes me think you're not nearly so loathe to utter it as you say.

I was responding to someone claiming dads are just as good caretakers as moms. Clearly false.

Relitigating what's always been said seem like a waste of everyone's time, especially when you're already going to ignore the context in which you're having a discussion.

I have no idea what you’re saying. You could interact with the claims made instead of making a meta point using corporate speak.

You are being intellectually dishonest. What do carrying pregnancy and breastfeeding have to do with caring for a kindergarten age child?

1. Younger siblings 2. Spending enough time to teach reading and arithmetic BEFORE kindergarten.

So actually in this sub thread the relevant age is 0 to 5.

Breastfeeding generally stops at age 2 (or earlier). Your contention is that literacy is significantly affected by whether the mom or the dad is taking care of the child at age 2 and below?

Not just literacy but everything is significantly affected by the care rendered from 0 to 4. My concern was broader: the children’s and society’s future.

By your own admission, a father cannot alone provide care for an infant. And if there are siblings then the critical time period will stretch - perhaps to 3 or 4 years.

Apparently the eldest would be reading chapter books by then, according to other comments in this thread. But I do not understand it.

It is a bitter choice. For mothers to have a life outside of motherhood it is the children who are deprived.

Fathers can't care for an infant alone? Damn shame that every single child with a mother who died in child birth never survived to adulthood. Damn shame. Also, just so tragic that a gay couple will never know the joy of raise a child from infancy. Pete Buttigieg has a hell of a fine imitation of an infant.

Cmon what you are saying is 100% false. Men are 100% capable of caring for infants and toddlers. Formula exists and there has been no large scale study that has shown a significant long term impact for formula usage. All benefits of breastfeeding are minor or unable to be separated from characteristics of the mother.

Women entering the workforce is not the death of child achievement. It is not even parents having time since there was only an extremely narrow window where the one parent household was a thing and it wasn't even the majority of the population. Income has always correlated with achievement and wealthy parents pay money for their child's enrichment not particularly engage with the children themselves. There are kindergarteners at my kid's school in tutoring to get them ahead. These kids are not even behind. That's not the mother spending time on their kid that's boosting the test scores in my district. It's wealth.

There are plenty of studies. Formula is convenient but it is deficient. If it were such a perfect replacement, why do parents go to such length as breast feed, pump, or get donor milk?

Breast feeding increases IQ: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26211556/

Formula causes obesity and diabetes: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2812877/

Breast feeding decreases infant mortality: https://bmcpublichealth.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1...

You can do more of your own research if you want to be convinced. You can ignore it if you don’t like the sound of it.

Because American culture has for 30 years told them to do so. It may be a valid impulse or it may not be but it's not evidence in itself.

Did you look at my references?

women are better than men at housekeeping and raising children. why do women take this as an insult? its a compliment.

I never mentioned housekeeping.

I take it as an insult as a guy! Theres nothing in my gender that precludes me from being as good at housekeeping (cleaning, cooking). Unscientific drivel!

What do you mean? Fathers can teach their kids to read too right? In what sense are mothers specifically at fault?

I don't know, but I new a guy who had gotten a 5 in AP calc BC before entering high school. He was understandably depressed

My mom taught me math by playing cards with me, and taught me reading by reading me books. It has nothing to do with money. I grew in a house that had a giant hole in the floor, lead paint, and asbestos tiles in North Carolina at that time. My mom is a high school graduate from New Jersey, my parents were late 20s and made barely any money in the 1980s.

Some things you cannot buy for love or money!

This is generally true for all professional (white collar) families.

Yes, but what is the proportion of the population reaching those standards? High income families are a very small percentage of the US demographics.

Depends where you set the bar, but GP's post explicitly said "Highest income decile", which means 10% by definition.

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