Oregon raised spending by 80%, math scores dropped
educationnext.org
educationnext.org
Consider Oregon. Had it merely kept pace with inflation, it would have
increased school spending by about 35 percent from 2013 to 2023. In
actuality, it raised spending by 80 percent. Over the same period, math
and reading performance tanked, with math posting a remarkable 16-point
decline—the equivalent of 1.5 grade levels. Oregon is spending much more
and achieving much less.
My youngest child is just starting high school at the moment, and for the last several years much of math education seems to have been farmed out to really crappy software and short video clips running on chromebooks. She'd really be suffering without parental intervention.
Our local school committee is debating this currently. There was a book mentioned "Ditch That Textbook" about using EdTech to reimagine curriculums. I have a hard time imagining actual high quality math education not using a textbook, and I don't really see how crappy software (and I do not for a second doubt that most ed tech is crappy - almost all software is crappy really, it's a total tragedy and a separate discussion) can possibly do better.
Personally I'd like to see fewer Chromebooks and iPads and such in classrooms and more textbooks and notebooks. I'm open to being convinced I'm just a curmudgeon, but it'll take real results in schools to do so.
Students are also not allowed personal devices while school is in session, and social media ban for under 16s is hopefully coming here too (New Zealand).
Genuine question: why? Specifically, why with textbooks?
Even if textbooks are suboptimal, they’re the way a lot of human information is organized. Just developing the skill of being able to work through a textbook is probably massively productive.
The comment was also a bit facecios. I'd be surprised if we have arrived at the absolute best way to do anything - so of course there will be some better way to educate.
> I think that Oregon teacher salaries have gone up quite a bit more than the national average in the last 10 years, less so in the last couple.
Yeah, Covid is at the tail end of the time period but it would be an error to make assumptions about the rates of change being constant over these periods. We've all seen that El Nino graph that is used to misrepresent climate change by careful windowing...
But the article doesn't even cherry pick the window, but they do cherry pick the interpretation. How does anyone ignore the fact that from 2013 to 2020 is fairly flat in scores[0] and then sharply decreases after that. Similarly spending sharply increases.
It is so weird to do this because the main argument still exists when you account for Covid. It's the intellectual equivalent of taking a cookie, taking a shit on it, and then selling it for more because it has more chocolate. Who the fuck does that? It's manipulative and entirely unnecessary. From 2013 to 2020 scores are relatively flat and spending increases above inflation. It's still a lazy analysis since you don't analyze what the spending went to, but it's a million times better than pretending a shit cookie is made of chocolate.
But the title is also incredibly editorialized (against the guidelines[1]), but why are commenters not picking this apart? It's such an easy flaw to notice. This article contains zero evidence of their claims. You have to explain data, not just present it and conjecture.
[0] 2020 is as far down as 2015 was up. Normal variance?
Eliminating the DOE and most of our current approach to K-12 education seems entirely prudent!
Just compare what students learned circa 1900 before graduating high school to today…
> it’s now four years later
Also yes, that's kinda the point. You don't think doing poorly in a grade below makes it likely you won't do good in the next level? The data points are 2019, 2022, and 2024. You got a sharp decrease from 2019 to 2022. Then a lower decrease from 2022 to 2024. Isn't that what you'd expect from a recovery? And only 2 years after the damage from the pandemic?
You sure wouldn't expect it to instantly jump back to 2019 levels (V shaped). They'd only do that if they didn't do worse during the pandemic. Effects compound. The years aren't independent measurements
As someone who cares deeply about education, I just want to say it's awesome that you're taking an active role in your child's development.
Mixed results. There's whining about standard testing .. . There's whining without it too. But states brought that on themselves.
I raised two boys one a plain-joe kid, one with special needs. The older, regular kid got into and out of university in four years.
Seeing what I see now, and what I saw over those years:
- pay teachers more with commensurate increase in accountability. (You can't have only one.)
- focus on academics only. Too much resources are wasted in our American daydreaming that schools can be some kind of utopia superceding home, family. Regretably, if parents don't care, there's a tiny chance only the kid will change in school. Here i mean anything that detracts from language, math, science, arts, sports. Having different makes and models of kids at school? That's great; i like that. My kids have got to see our house isn't the only game in town.
- maybe eliminate all federal forms of funding by sending less money to the fed redistributed back later. Control and accountability has to be less complex with fewer regs from fewer places. Education is operationally local in the US and yet somehow the fed and national unions are big players too. We can't be serving two masters.
- withhold kids by class until they succeed. Kids must be held accountable too. If you can't deal with algebra I you are not doing algerbra II so you can suck at that too.
- contribute to kid's self esteem and confidence right: you're not graduating in this class, and I (as a teacher) will help you figure out a way forward by tackling what's in front of you. That's real success. That's real learning. That's better for kids.
- put principals and teachers top echelon. If they want/need admin staff, fine counter balanced by cost & success on accountability side. US schools like US medicine is phenomenal at having paper pushers suck up resources. Yah, I'm not a fan of this to put it politely.
I would bet 90% of the problem is the attitude towards learning at home and among the peer group, who also get their attitudes from home. Doesn’t seem effective or fair to hold teachers accountable for that.
Obviously unions aren't designed to protect students, they represent workers, however their negative impact on the quality of schooling students get is often quite significant despite being overlooked.
"Here's what happened to teachers after Wisconsin gutted its unions":
* https://web.archive.org/web/20171117133914/https://money.cnn...
[citation needed]
There are all sorts of folks saying all sorts of things on the topic. Right wing publications have said it's been great:
* https://www.city-journal.org/article/wisconsin-act-10-consti...
Others are saying it reduced test scores:
* https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S02727...
It is clear that public schooling in the US was originally designed to build obedient citizens and efficient factory workers. Horace Mann’s love of the Prussian model, the use of bells to condition timely synchronized movement between activities, the focus on testing and measurable output, etc… All other goals over the years were half-heartedly bolted on to that structure and it’s showing its age.
What can we do to hold the parents accountable?
Even taking a non-cynical look at certain parents' level of interest/ability/care/etc, we go as far as taking students and teachers out of the rest of the workforce for the express purpose of being able to assign them accountability for education instead. There just aren't levers like that available on the parental side to try to trigger meaningful actions with, nor is there anything close to consensus on how those might be put into place to begin the debate on what parents should be made accountable for with them.
The best chance I've seen to increase the amount of involvement from parents in their child's education is to try to have enhanced their own childhood education well enough to see why it's so important they be actively involved.
Maybe we should start by identifying metrics that enable us to measure the impact that a parent is having on their child's education?
To me, accountability requires an added component of being held answerable for said impact. E.g. "John was held accountable for the damage to the car" would mean John had to answer for the damage, not just "the damage John had was measured" or "John's actions were found to cause the damage". This answerability to the impact is the only part of accountability which I think we can't realistically do with parents as we are able to for students or educators.
And why isn't this experimentation being done all the time, not randomly but competitively/cooperatively between school districts and individual schools? Each making small changes toward getting better results and sharing what they have learned. With most cross adoption happening naturally.
Creating and managing the context for the latter is what people with power should be doing. Not making top-down decisions devoid of the bottom-up wisdom and visible exemplars that big changes need to succeed.
Then you can't really measure outcomes, because the strongest predictor of student performance is parents interest and resources.
You also run into issues with teaching skills and standards, you need a high level of planning and adherence to the supplied plan in order to measure outcomes; otherwise it's just vibes based on individual teachers.
But most improvements in any complex system happen iteratively, and benefit from clusters of subtle changes found to work well together. At some point enough experience is gained to characterize the change, and give others a chance to consider it.
I suggested incremental adoption, and organic adoption, of successful changes, precisely because of this need for significant bottom up testing before spreading something widely. Success at one scale, and location, doesn't always translate directly to another context, or might not work in another context at all.
> You also run into issues with teaching skills and standards, you need a high level of planning and adherence to the supplied plan in order to measure outcomes; otherwise it's just vibes based on individual teachers.
You point out a very important concern. Good measurement doesn't make bottom-up improvement impossible, unnecessary, or any less important. The point of measurement is to make improvements easier to see, and not get in there way.
This is what I was referring to when I said at the top, the job is to create a context where improvements can happen.
One of the simplest ways to balance top-level and bottom-up concerns, is to communicate the actual top-level needs (not just current practices) clearly, then let front line educators propose changes to measurement practices, where they feel the current practice is holding them back. That gets both scales working together to enable improvements to happen, and to be seen. There is no (competent) conflict here, the opposite.
What happens a lot:
1) Someone (a researcher, usually) comes in and tries some radical new program in some school.
2) (sometimes) It works! It works great, in fact.
3) This new system or approach or framework gets publicized. This may include dissemination through academic channels, but also (and especially if it's really going to take off) through a kind of reform-grifting network that turns the whole thing into a bunch of stuff that can be sold, for actual money (training, materials, consultants). Turns out being an education researcher pays dick-all, but selling a "system" pays real cash dollars—for many researchers, admin, and curriculum-design folks, getting a windfall from being part of one of these is their most promising path to "making it" before they're old.
4) Some districts adopt the new thing, often with initial pilot programs. Some spend a lot of money doing it.
5) Few of them spend much time considering whether there are material differences between their schools and the one(s) where the system was proven (the experimental program was proven in a troubled inner city school? Surely our middling suburban school can expect similar improvements!). Expertise of and authority granted to the person or persons implementing the system also isn't considered as a factor (one or both are usually lacking, compared with the case or cases on which the promise of the system is judged).
(My personal "here's what to do if you want to fix schools" is "fix our justice/corrections system, worker protections, healthcare, and our social safety net". I think the biggest improvements to our schools would be found there. It's all stuff outside schools. That's why we keep struggling to make headway by monkeying around with schools themselves. It's why more money for schools doesn't help much. That the US finds it basically impossible to do anything constructive about any of those problems is... a sign we can expect not to see any huge across-the-board positive changes in US public school performance any time soon, I reckon)
Meanwhile, within and among districts, individual schools do pilot new programs, et c. All this stuff happens. Does it always happen with everything that turns into a broader reform? No, not always. Is this kind of activity constant, and common, in schools? Absolutely. Frankly it happens way too much (because people are desperate and flailing around to find a path to improvement through school reform, but see above about why I think they are doomed to remain desperate). There's an absolute shitload of process and curriculum churn in schools.
Consider also that while all the above is going on, you have the usual incompetence and principal agent problems you see in any organization. Important tasks are handed to the person an assistant superintendent's having an affair with (god, so common) for whom they invented a paid position. Systems are picked apart and bits adopted piecemeal while ones admin find too uncomfortable or scary are dropped up-front without even trying them, while anyone used to analyzing systems like this can see that the parts their dropping support and are necessary for the success of the parts they're keeping, dooming the reform before it's even implemented. Empire-building happens. Things get hijacked for personal gain. Powerful folks' own inept efforts at breaking into the reform-grift industry get pushed on those under them, as they try to get their own success story to sell. Superintendents or principals fall for obvious bullshit at one of their drinking-and-driving retreats er I mean conferences, because frankly most of them are kinda dumb, and then a whole district gets to suffer for a couple years. Et cetera. Same crap you see in big corporations.
But! Despite all that, lots of people are out there running experiments and reform pilot programs just as you suggest, and for the right reasons, and sometimes even competently. It's just that as soon as it goes past that, it tends to get caught up in all the above. However, even the best-considered reforms that show promise in early experiments and trials are rarely broadly-applicable enough, and familiar enough, and simple enough, and easy enough, and effective enough, to survive that process of wider application without being destroyed. Plus (to repeat, and IMO) I just don't think there are many big wins to be had with educational reform on its own, without working on things outside schools that are resulting in lots of hard-to-educate-in-a-classroom kids.
Every now and then, though, you get a really solid improvement, like, "hey that Whole Language thing that sure seemed to a lot of us to be backwards-ass garbage that really looked like it was making kids worse readers, in-fact, whatever its proponents claimed? Yeah, turns out it is backwards-ass garbage, we can improve reading markedly by knocking that off". (see process and systemic pitfalls outlined above for how it ended up widely in-use in the first place)
Principal agent problem is a huge part of it. How do you keep school leadership accountable and effective? It's super hard in any organization.
School system leadership at the very top. Instead focusing on fixes or specific initiatives at the top, needs to understand their job as creating the culture, climate and support for improvement by lower levels of leadership, with strong emphasis on everyone working to enable and support teachers support students.
That is how accountability and responsibility, and initiative get distributed together to everyone who can contribute. And power doesn't "choose" what is expedient.
But given education at the State and Federal levels is highly politicized, this necessity of enabling and supporting the organization, as apposed to controlling it, is hard to accomplish directly.
Because the results that come back are always politically inexpedient to agendas--generally for all sides.
Examples:
1) Charter schools: As soon as you force charter schools into an actual lottery which normalizes their student body relative to the public schools, their performance relative to the public schools craters. Quelle surprise: Expensive students are expensive and take up a disproportionate amount of your smaller budget. Quelle surprise deuxième: motivated parents means better student performance.
2) Low end performance: low performers actually make up some of the gap during the school year. This creates the obvious suggestion of year round school which runs into the fact that would require an immediate 25% pay raise to every teacher.
3) Raising the average/median: Even the Gates foundation documented the solution but stopped short of suggesting it--focus most of your resource on the lowest performers as they are the easiest to improve. I don't even have to suggest the firestorm that causes.
4) Proper student:teacher ratios: Again even the Gates Foundation (whom I loathe) documented it correctly--1 classroom with 2 credentialed teachers (randos aren't enough) per 15 students (middle and elementary was the focus--high school is a bit different). Every program that followed that formula had solid documentable success. Every single program that followed that formula got closed for being "too expensive".
I can go on and on. The problem is that the US education system is at a solid local minimum and getting out of it requires significant amounts of focused resource. And when you finally ask folks to start writing checks for your education system, you suddenly find out exactly how much folks want to improve education (aka nothing for teachers or students, but they'll happily fund that new stadium).
And, I would like to point out that it was school spending that went up by 45% more than inflation (which was 35% over the same period). In addition, teacher salaries didn't go up 45% relative to inflation. So, might I suggest that perhaps the problem is what we are spending the money on?
That depends heavily on the pedagogical approach. There are approaches that are quite effective in bringing low performers up to near-par (so-called "direct instruction", in a broad sense) but teacher actively hate them because they're viewed as "demeaning" the profession, and ed schools don't teach them. Special Ed teachers actually get extensive instruction in these approaches, but obviously we cannot and should not treat every low performer as Special Ed.
> Proper student:teacher ratios
What's "proper"? Teacher-centered and direct approaches cope quite well with greater class sizes, but again they're unpopular among teachers.
Cite. All research I have seen completely contradicts this.
The limitation with larger class sizes is not "knowledge transfer"; it's "classroom management" aka dealing with a student causing an interruption for some reason (bathroom, injury, sickness, etc.).
I use the Gates Foundation as my primary citations because they are easily findable on the web and simply match all of the other findings. You max out at about 15 students per 2 teachers because one of the teachers can handle the inevitable disruption while the other teacher can continue teaching. The more students you add on top of the roughly 15, the more likely you wind up with 2 interruptions which stops the class cold irrespective of teaching technique.
And, as I have stated, most of the research focuses on elementary to middle levels. High school requires teacher specialization which confounds a lot of the data.
But on the topic, I suspect the best time to have high teacher ratios is in the earliest years. Help children learn to manage themselves, focus, follow through, etc. Then work up to large class sizes in the upper years.
For me, two things pop out in particular.
Firstly, in math, if you look at how the percentiles break down, it seems clear that while there an overall drop in performance from 2020-2023, it also seems clear to that the top end of doing relatively ok. For example, at the 75th percentile, the we are basically flat from 2008 to 2020 (before dropping in 2023) - 2008: 305, 2012: 309, 2020: 307, 2023: 301 (net -4). This contrasts with the median which went from 2008: 283, 2012: 287, 2020: 282, 2023: 274 (net -9).
This implies to me that whatever flaws are in the overall system (at least pre COVID), the top end was relatively durable.
Secondly, if you go the "student group scores" section and click through all of the different sub-groupings, the only group that looks to have an overall flat score at all is "Private: Catholic".
I think the combination of the upper end being pretty durable, as well as the higher scores in the only "self selecting" category in the dataset may support what a lot of people tend to grumble about - the distribution of domestic situations is not favorable.
Depending on what exactly you are looking at the places that it grew or was flat or declines change, but overall the big picture look gives me more "keep an eye on it" vibes than "we've got a crisis" vibes that some people seem to think are justified.
I think the "crisis" is that we've been spending more and more resources just to stay "flat".
Can someone better informed about these metrics (the NAEP specifically) comment: how exactly do we know that we're comparing the same thing each year? Is the NAEP based off answering the same questions every year? Because if it's just like "average exam result" - those can change a lot. And can in fact trend, meaning change in the same direction for several years (e.g. becoming harder, becoming easier)
Unrelated: schools with effective phone bans are seeing improved grades and less absences.
>> (2008) Primary school teachers in England are often scared of basic numeracy and should be required to study English and maths at A-level, a report suggests.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/education/8162803.stm
>> This lack of confidence on the part of teachers can be transmitted to students and result in their own lack of mathematical confidence
I have a feeling many of my greatest teachers wouldn't take the same path today, a lot more burdens and enough other 'intellectual' jobs to go for.
Of course teacher options are limited when the pay is the same as a walmart cashier.
> Otherwise please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize.
I'm also a little surprised that more people aren't talking about it and that it hasn't been changed. There's definitely a culture shift happening in HN...
If you've never read the guidelines, now is a great time. Seriously, it isn't that long and captures why many of us come to HN over other sites.
had that extra spending gone to pay math teachers the results might be different
Large institutions in the USA are grossly mismanaged and/or corrupt. Normalize the amount of public money pupils cost and it easily dwarfs most elite private schools. Multiply by class size and an elementary school class can cost $500k+. The teacher is not making $100k.
In Massachusetts 8th grade math is down about 17 points. In Mississippi math down about 2 points. (I'm using 2022 scores).
That could give the impression that math scores are higher in Mississippi since the math line on the Massachusetts graph is way lower than the corresponding line on the Mississippi graph.
But the actual scores those years were 284 for Massachusetts and 268 for Mississippi.
The chart in the link below shows employee vs students headcounts over 6 years. Even though student rolls went down almost all employment in the school system went up. Do we really need a +22% increase in Student Support Services when there are fewer students? Even teachers (only?) went up by 2.8% according to this (and again, students went down)? And why would librarians of all positions seem to be the ones whose positions were cut?
Basically, 'education' is nothing more than a jobs program for the politically connected, as clearly the focus is not on kids. And education is safe, because it's hard to argue against it, even if you're not talking about actual teachers.
Honestly I would expect if funding were cut, and particularly the admin, support, 'paraprofessional', and other non-teaching staff were fired, you'd find those test scores approach the pre-pandemic levels.
Will that happen? Of course not. These are politically connected people after all. We should all be angry.
In terms of the continuing "education depression" as discussed by this article, we still haven't gotten rid of "No child left behind". Of course kids are less educated than they used to be, you don't need to be educated to graduate.
Maine specifically is an important example. There has been no real change in education policy in the state, yet there is still significant reduction in outcomes.
The much maligned unscientific way of teaching reading was adopted in Caribou Maine far far far earlier than educational outcomes started dropping. The neighboring town did not adopt that way of teaching reading. They did not see different outcomes. IMO, the outcomes clearly follow the generation of kids growing up in a school system where you cannot be held back for not doing the work.
The entire time education outcomes have been going down, state highschool graduation rates have been going up. This is not because teachers like giving good grades to kids who don't learn things.
"No child left behind" is a disaster.
I know many people in the state who are looking to become teachers. Everybody always reminds them how terrible an idea that is for them in particular. Schools cannot hire people, because even with "Higher" salaries, the salaries are still bad. They have mostly been adjusted for inflation, so it seems like they have gone up a lot, but they have been adjusted from a point when they were already terrible and not a good salary.
Meanwhile, my mother is a 40 year teacher here. The rich neighborhood school she switched to pays her well, but provides zero institutional support. They did not allow her to purchase anything. No textbooks, no test generators, no enrichment videos, nothing. They don't support her at all.
She's one of the best educators I've ever known and every student she has taught agrees. She's so effective at being an educator that students who come from shitty families and cause disruption in other classes choose to spend time in her classes, and choose to spend time in her study hall to do their homework and become better students. This is true for thousands and thousands of students who went through her classes. She is the sole reason some northern maine kids know how to do math. She's a french teacher.
She has a genuine-ness that is palpable, something that I've also inherited. My girlfriend describes it as "You have golden retriever energy" and it gets people engaged with you. She's a very fun teacher.
She treats kids like people, yet the way the interactions go and the way she gets to kids ensures that they still generally respect her. She also used to have an administration that recognized her talent and value, and would stand behind her when a kid was a serious problem. She has helped "bad" kids do better, and helped bullied kids, and has helped needy kids, and this gives her a sort of legendary status. Everyone knows and loves Madame.
She was well experienced dealing with stupid shitheads because she grew up next to my dad's family (lol small towns) and raised three kids that were pains in her ass in diverse ways.
She works her absolute ass off. She habitually showed up to work ten minutes late (ADHD runs in our family quite bad), but the admin ignores that when she is teaching every student in the school and grading assignments until 8pm most nights, and building the curriculum for all the other teachers. I once stayed up with her until early in the morning grading a writing project she had given. Hundreds of students, every year, and she would always know their name and lives and all about them even though she's bad at remembering names otherwise. She was willing to teach kids how grammar worked and how to diagram sentences when they came into her class and didn't know. She was also able because of her education.
She comes from a family tradition that treated education as a total good, something everyone should seek out as much as possible, and something that would lift you up, along with your family, despite ostensibly being a very rural lineage. We have the journal of a woman in our ancestry 200 years back talking about how she learned to read and write because that's just how great education was in general. We aren't nobility or anything that would traditionally do that kind of thing.
A crazy mix of genetics: We are all super neurodivergent and probably super inbred and the latest generation is experiencing crazy illnesses and autoimmune disorders, but my mom's family consistently scores above average on standardized tests and has done so for generations. So she has a good brain to use the things she learned, even though there's tons of "smart" things that isn't so good at. The role of a good educator just happened to really fit well with her mix of beneficial and problematic brain issues.
So, you know, luck. She picked this career path because she was 20 and her marriage failed and she suddenly had to support three kids. Turns out she's really good at it. We aren't ambitious people, but this general theme is the same for my entire extended family.
It means the problem is unfortunately local and you have to actually go to the schools and see what the issue is. Based on what my former HS spent money on I figure we will eventually find some commonalities:
* New computer labs, laptops, digital textbooks, learning software licenses, smart boards, and other and other expensive crap that is at best neutral from a learning perspective.
* Pointless building improvements that don't service education but instead service the prestige and egos of the administrators of the schools.
* Chronic long-term understaffing and light-speed "just get through it" lesson plans that makes teachers not give a shit, and powerless to do better even if they do.
I think "just blame the administrators" is too easy a cop-out because I've yet to meet one who isn't also underpaid and dying of stress. Although maybe I just don't have access to the real higher ups.
I think we should be actively removing these things from schools, but it's a tough fight as parents against an entire well-funded EdTech industry pushing these things with a firehose of VC money.
>> * Pointless building improvements that don't service education but instead service the prestige and egos of the administrators of the schools.
This makes me crazy. We have a very fancy, very large new school building my city which is LEED platinum certified. I can't possibly imagine that that certification level is cost effective. I'm sure we could have built a very good school with a healthy safe learning environment and environmentally conscious decisions for heating, cooling, power, etc. for significantly less if the city were willing to forego the press release headline. This is also a really hard problem that pits taxpayers against a well-funded industry full of lobbyists.
Both of these can be traced back to the principal agent problem, which really is blaming the administrators, because they're making decisions and then don't have to deal with the consequences (actually integrating and using EdTech in a classroom, paying more taxes for the same or worse education, etc.).
I think, in general, that the whole system is backwards and instead of giving money to school administrations to teach, we should be trying to figure out what are the obstacles to students learning.
I've seen this on the front page of HN like three times now.
2022 8th grader cohort missed much of 6th and 7th grade. 2024 cohort missed 4th and 5th grade. These results are extremely in line with that effect, despite what people want to say about social media, teacher pay, etc.
Lockdowns did not last more than a few months for the vast majority of school districts in the US.
https://ballotpedia.org/School_responses_to_the_coronavirus_...
The science for what's actually causing cognitive decline is linked more to the neurological damage from poor ventilation and lack of hygienic conditions in the schools causing kids to get sick multiple times a year, directly causing neurological damage.
In the most expansive study of its kind, researchers have for the first time shown serious and prevalent symptoms of long COVID in kids and teens. The August study, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, is among the first large comprehensive studies of the disorder in this age group. The study, which followed 5367 children, found that 20% of kids (ages 6-11) and 14% of teens met researchers' threshold for long COVID.
We know that COVID harms the brain. Neuroinflammation, brain shrinkage, disruption of the blood-brain barrier and more have been documented in adults, as have cognitive deficits. These deficits have been measured as equivalent to persistent decreased IQ scores, even for mild and resolved infections. Millions of people have, or have experienced, “brain fog.” What, then, do we guess a child’s COVID-induced “trouble with focusing or memory” might be?
When you put together the estimate that 10 to 20 percent of infected kids may experience long-term symptoms, that many of the most common symptoms affect cognition, energy levels and behavior, and that children are being periodically reinfected, you have a scientific rationale to partly explain children’s widely reported behavioural and learning challenges.
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/article-abstract/28227...
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-025-96191-4
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/71/wr/mm7131a3.htm?s_cid=mm...
https://theconversation.com/long-covid-puzzle-pieces-are-fal...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2024/07/23/covid-te...
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapediatrics/fullarticle/...
https://www-news--medical-net.cdn.ampproject.org/c/s/www.new...
At a broad policy level, government should focus its effort in other areas of basic NEEDS first. Stable jobs for parents, housing and food needs met, etc. Being a successful student when your families basic needs are not met is an uphill battle.
Selling a narrative that money can fix, getting funds, and then allocating funds is comically easy and less risky than trying to fix something broken. You're capturing sentiment into political momentum, when you're the one who allocates money you are very, very popular and interesting and can make many things happen.
You can do all of this and move on independently of any results in the problem statements that may or may not have been written to begin with.
Contrast that with telling people hard truths like deified educators aren't effectual, or that per-capita pupil spending doesn't correlate with outcomes, or how parents and home culture are stronger effects than whether you offer rich IEPs or adopted Common Core - you can be tarred and feathered for rocking the boat before you get to make any change.
It's not that anyone thinks we should give up on the children, it's that we should probably give up on direct democracy in some areas, and at best, these spending splurges are incompetence and at worst, outright wealth transfers to the PMC and NGOs or fraud.
Not that I agree with GP, but the problem is that no one (in positions of power in the educational system) is thinking of the children (in SFW ways, given the recent release of the Epstein files)
I think there's room for improvement on both sides; supporting families and students to create space and safety for them to learn and to improve teaching quality with evidence based training.
[1] https://www.brookings.edu/articles/why-common-core-failed/
Their class sizes are much higher - 40 kids for 1 teacher. But there is a lot more discipline, the teachers teach only a few classes, spending most of their time on curriculum preparation, and the children have 3 hours of vigorous exercise everyday.
I think that would solve a huge number of issues. Teachers and admins seem to have no ability to kick repeated problem students out. My wife works as a para professional sub at our local elementary school. Twice this week a special needs girl was having a meltdown in a hallway and they essentially had to "quarantine" it until she calmed down. Students and teachers had to take other hallways to get where they needed to go. These children have educational needs that public schools cannot provide, but the burden largely falls onto them as an incredibly expensive (to the tax payer) babysitting service. Get them and the slowest students out of the general pipeline. They have been clogging it up and holding everyone back far too long.
And no. I don't have an adequate solution to handle the bottom X% of students who are beyond help from the general system. I just know the system can't function effectively with them in it. There are all sorts of other systemic issues I've seen through her experiences. But this is a major one which impacts all of the students. Classes cannot move at the pace of the slowest and / or most disruptive student. The slowest students need to be left behind for others to thrive. If they cannot reach the already low minimum standards, they cannot advance in grades. If they cannot behave to the low minimum expectations, their parents need to find other accommodations.
How are they gonna fix education, if they cannot even grasp:
If the method does not work, try a different method.- Apathy is rampant in most workforces, presumably also teachers.
- In unionized workplaces where greater performance != greater pay, and greater pay is guaranteed regardless... No surprise there wasn't better outcomes.
- Not sure if this site has such a bent, but to me if the funding was going to rise 80% (twice as fast as inflation), it would have been nice to also see what market forces could have done via a voucher system.
Edit:
It will be really interesting to compare oregon public outcomes to something like this school in Austin https://nypost.com/2026/01/30/business/new-65k-private-schoo...
https://www.npr.org/2025/03/17/nx-s1-5328723/alabama-math-le...
Was this misinformation?
If not, I wonder why these results don't show in the nationwide aggregation?
There's a belief that the bottom 10-20% is more important than the top 80% to bother spending on, which I think is reflected in the budgets.
https://www.commonsenseinstituteus.org/oregon/research/educa...