My son and daughter both went to the same elementary school, but at different times. We chose this school in particular because was well-funded (for a public school anyway), had a good reputation, and was diverse. My daughter is now a teenager and is an A and B student. Zero problems academically, other than constantly forgetting to turn in already-completed assignments. Despite going to the same school and having the same teachers, parents, and home life, etc my son is really struggling, though. They're both bright kids, but what changed for him?
Two things that I can see. One is that the COVID quarantine, while necessary for public safety, set most kids back developmentally at least a year, often two. It was far worse for younger kids than older kids because Kindergarten through 2nd grade are absolutely foundational points in their education. Kids who don't get a solid grasp of reading, spelling, and arithmetic at this point sometimes never catch up to where they should be. Hopefully my son will.
The other is that around the time my son started at the school, they got rid of the special education (or whatever is the correct phrase) classrooms, laid off those teachers, and put the students in regular classes instead. This is going about as well as you'd think.
The kids with emotional issues do not get the special attention and resources that they need, and the rest of the class is severely disrupted to the point that almost no learning gets done. According to my wife who works at the school, his class this year had four special-needs students in it. My son says that these students were constantly disrupting the classroom. They bullied the other students, they verbally and physically fought with everyone (including teachers), they scream when they don't get their way. The teacher is not allowed to send them to the office or another room. The whole class didn't get recess for over half the year because the teacher couldn't handle the kids outside. (One of them would just run right off the school grounds every time, apparently.)
The school used to have a strong positivity vibe and a zero-tolerance anti-bullying policy. Now, when an emotionally-troubled child draws blood on my child (which happened), the response from the faculty and staff is so silent it's deafening.
Do ya mind me asking where you are in the country? I ask because I have a severely disabled nephew, and if I recall a few years before Covid our corner of California tried to get rid of special ed in elementary school. It went about as well as its going for your kid. My nephew literally couldn't integrate with the rest of the class, he's got severe epilepsy, even if he could understand the material, he couldn't actually write because his hands shake horribly! It was actually insane to put him in a normal class, the only thing he could do was disrupt it. It was bad for everyone involved.
Fortunately though, they had kept special ed programs at other schools nearby and he got transferred pretty quickly for being a severe case. It was my understanding that our school district backpedaled and reinstated special ed, but maybe that's not the case? I thought that it was just a crazy liberal California thing, but is this cancelling of special ed a more widespread phenomena? Why the hell is that happening?
Not OP but if you're in the Bay Area a lot of that was because sales tax revenue collapsed during COVID.
School district budgets are heavily dependent on local taxes, which in turn are heavily dependent on sales tax.
Some districts have larger pockets than others due to a diverse tax base and thus were able to keep paying for those services in each school (eg. Palo Alto, Cupertino, MTV, the Tri-Valley districts) but others didn't have as deep pockets and as such had to cut down on programs and merge them.
> ??
> No money in jurisdiction
> Cut special Ed
> Education quality takes a hit for all families
> Some families move, taking their tax dollars with them
> No money in jurisdiction
Sales Tax and Property Taxes recovered by 2022-23 in most counties within the Bay Area (excluding SF county which only represents 9-10% of the Bay's population) as RTO began being enforced, Asian and South American tourists returned (with some new countries now - lots of Thai and Argentine tourists now beyond the traditional SK/PRC/IN/HK tourists), and the spike in high value property sales refilled coffers.
That said, the 1-2 school years spent remotely will continue to have a statistical impact in the coming years.
> they got rid of the special education (or whatever is the correct phrase) classrooms, laid off those teachers
How did they lay off special education teachers?
Special Education is funded via the Federal DoE because of a mix of requirements from the ADA and NCLB.
Unless you mean low severity student cases which might not be classified as SpED.
Edit: Now that I think about it, it might be dependent on your school district and state's fiscal condition too. There might have been a reclassification done by the school district as a personnel cutting measure
In NJ, there is a severe deficiency in this in many schools, and federal funding does not come into play directly. Here, when your school can’t provide services, they can be forced to pay for another school that offers those services. Our district spends hundreds of thousands of dollars a year paying for out of district schooling because they don’t have the resources themselves.
That makes sense. How is the fiscal health of school districts in NJ? I'd assume they aren't the greatest because of how Balkanized NJ local govt seems to be, but you guys also have variable property taxes and that might make it better than a lot of those in CA.
It is all over the place. Some districts are great, some are terrible. There is a theoretical framework of accountability at the County and State level, but it is not enforced hardly at all.
So it is up to local school boards and superintendents, and the local municipal tax levy. Most medium and small districts’ BOE members are regular citizens who are elected with no qualifications at all, and lean on the Superintendent for everything. So if you get a bad one (and it is common), your district is screwed for many years.
>This has been known for a while yet does not receive any real attention.
because school teachers are overwhelmingly female, and overwhelming biased against male students? And there's a political/cultural movement built around promoting female academic advancement, while no such movement exists for male students?
>Results show that, when comparing students who have identical subject-specific competence, teachers are more likely to give higher grades to girls. Furthermore, they demonstrate for the first time that this grading premium favouring girls is systemic, as teacher and classroom characteristics play a negligible role in reducing it.
I remember in my high (private, religious) school social justice class talking about this. The teacher's contention was that this was a form of patriarchy: that boys were held to higher standards because more was expected of them.
I wish I had asked the teacher what he'd have thought had the shoe been on the other foot and girls were receiving lower grades for the same competence.
Since those kids have IEPs the main recourse you have will be lawyering up because there are a bunch of backwards incentives if someone at the top thinks they can excessively mainstream self contained needing kids.
The saying, "Every idea contains the seeds of its own destruction" keeps popping into my head.
The notion that children shouldnt be excluded for their differences is laudable, and led to IEPs, mainstreaming, and lots of progress. And then calcified into dogma that no child should be excluded no matter how disruptive they were.
Anti-bullying and "empower yourself to solve your problems" became the dogma of zero-tolerance and non-intervention. Children and staff are attacked in school and the administration doesn't do a thing.
There is plenty of blame to go around, but as a left leaning kind of person it is obvious now how calcification of some progressive ideas into rigid dogma is sending people screaming into the arms of the authoritarian right. Religious schools, charter schools, andnthe right wing etc are going to win because the combination of entitled parents, frustrated teachers, weakened administration and a educational academic establishment that has had essentially no intellectual rigor while still being able to suggest pedagogical approaches that affect millions of children are busy policing one another's adherence to dogma.
I wouldn't claim I know "the reason", but it often feels like there's just a lot less enthusiasm for education and learning in the US, across the whole society. My relatives have been screamed at every day for decades that teachers are clearly overpowered by their unions, or that they are trying to undermine your authority as a parent because your local school teaches basic biology, or that they're pawns of the gay agenda and trying to turn your kids into trans or something, meanwhile actual small town school teachers are pretty fucking conservative, including being openly and vocally "covid is a hoax" in front of their whole class of first graders.
Everyone is convinced they are the smartest one in the room even though they haven't read a book in a decade and their child can't even do their basic times tables. Meanwhile teachers are finally giving up after what amounts to direct abuse for at least 4 decades, with stagnant pathetic wages, zero support from administration, absurd requirements placed on them by people with ulterior motives, now bullshit book bans, outright parent hostile actions, and nevermind the fact that in many places the "requirements" to be a teacher is have an occasional pulse.
Oh, and lets not talk about the abysmal state of education materials companies, which are hollowing out and rent seeking just like every other corp in the US, so it's not like we are even giving our kids helpful tools.
I live in the UK, but a few kids in my family are around this age and we've had similar declines in test scores here too. I'll comment on a few things I've notice - at least as someone from my working class background.
Covid lockdowns were brutal for kids of this age bracket.
Kids in my family were mostly just locked in doors watching Netflix and playing video games during lockdowns and did next to no physical activity, socialising, or anything mentally simulating.
A couple of kids in my family have also developed mental illnesses as a result of lockdowns – and I don't use this word lightly.
For kids from my background school is really the only opportunity they get to experience normality. A space free from all the various social issues that plague families from this socioeconomic background.
To be more specific here, one kid ended up becoming extremely anti-social during the lockdowns since violence is normal and common within his household. The other has develop extreme social anxiety and depression and now refuses to attend school. I'm sure other kids have developed post-Covid anxiety, but those kids probably have parents that care enough about their children to ensure they attend school.
Obviously if they had better parents this stuff probably wouldn't have happened, but school is so important for people of my background. It's the only place in their life where order and discipline will be enforced. It's also the only place they get to socialise with normal people who are not criminals or drug users. And the only place they'll get to feel safe.
I have no idea how much of this decline in tests scores is related to the pandemic, but if other kids took the pandemic as bad the kids in my family then I'm not surprised by this at all.
> A couple of kids in my family have also developed mental illnesses as a result of lockdowns – and I don't use this word lightly.
I've witnessed the same among several kids I know, they're really suffering and worse yet there's no supports for them. My province had some of, if not the strictest measures in Canada and honestly people just don't seem okay in general.
I myself got to experience my first psychotic break in 2022 after never having had any such issues in my life. It is the single scariest thing I've ever gone through and it's not an understatement to say the last few years have permentantly changed me.
Before the pandemic, he was a pretty smart kid, around the top half of his class, with an interest in learning for the sake of learning itself. During the pandemic, classes happened online(microsoft teams) and almost all his friends were playing video games while teaching was ongoing and disconnecting if asked a question(Not chastising him here, I did this too at times ha!)
Back to school, he's been struggling with simple algebra and geometry, which should have been clear(in a normal scenario) a year ago. The desire to learn, has been replaced with other more short-term pleasures like watching yt,gaming etc. School teachers are ill-equipped to address this but thats a tangent I'll not go off right now.
My parents have hired a private tutor for math to help him address the struggles he's facing right now, because the school sure as hell wont.
If there is a more convincing indicator of a failing school system, it's that a 13 year old no longer wants to do schoolwork and instead play video games with his friends.
Seriously, puberty is a thing. Math in particular can go from clear to impenetrable surprisingly quickly.
Sorry, I intended two separate concepts. Puberty can mess with motivation. A new math subject can suddenly present a mental block that is hard to overcome.
I understand the addictive and short-term-reward nature of video games.
But for many, video games are also a gateway drug into technology!
I tend to think that video games (and tabletop games) are educational on their own. For example, I think RPGs, strategy games, and puzzle games are pretty good for thinking and planning, while shooters and action games are good for eye-hand coordination and reaction time. I also think it's educational to build, configure, benchmark, and optimize a gaming PC.
Also if gaming is something you do with friends (especially in-person), then it has social benefits as well.
If he's interested, I'd encourage him to get involved in game programming and mods. I think that programming in particular can synergize with algebra (e.g. variables and expressions) and geometry (since logical reasoning is used in algorithms as well as geometric proofs, and graphics often require geometry and trigonometry.)
Robotics and real-world computing and electronics can also be fun and game-like. For some (many?), hands-on activities can be more engaging than pure software. Maybe he might enjoy building robotics or electronics kits or projects, or building something at a local wood, metal, or machine shop or maker space. We live in such a virtual world of screens that it is often refreshing to work with our hands with physical things.
Also sports and physical activity are good for getting away from youtube and improving the delivery of oxygen to your brain (excepting possible head injuries that are common in certain sports.)
"Percentage of students missing 5 or more days of school monthly has doubled since 2020" seems like it might have some explanatory powers. How can you miss a quarter of the school days and keep up?
I forget where you're from, but I know you're a little older than me. In my public school, 8th grade tracked some students into high-school math (New York Regents Course 1) and the others into math that they'd need for the next year. But in 7th grade, all students were solving some algebra problems, graphing and plotting, etc. basic geometry, some constructions, etc. 11th grade (Regents, not Honors) Chemistry had equilibrium problems, etc., although it was hit or miss whether the teacher could teach them. It was also not required, as only 2 years of science were required, and most students would have taken Earth Science/Geology and Biology. However, it shows that public schools can get teach it, and the standards can require it.
I do wish people would give up on teaching Physics without Calculus. Kind of a wasted year for me, and everything made sense as soon as you added differentiation and integration. I think the two courses should be taught together in the same class.
Presumably, the No Child Left Behind act and the Common Core curriculum are supposed to provide a baseline for the country that is well above "times tables in 8th grade". Common Core seems to me to suffer from a second-system effect, eschewing some of the tried-and-true for the experimental, but the motivation is a reasonable one. I never understood why they didn't take a successful state's curriculum and adapt it to all the states, but that's politics more than anything else. I'm pretty concerned though, now that I'll be having kids go through the system, that the parties involved (teachers, administration, politicians) will conspire to avoid doing work while avoiding responsibility. But that's local politics, not national.
Calculus had this fearsome reputation in high school of being terribly difficult. When I finally learned the basics of it (in college) I thought "is that all?" Of course, it wasn't all at all, but the calculus needed for high school physics is pretty simple.
I took every honors class in high school. Everything they had. I was terribly, woefully underprepared for college. It took a year and a half before I had my legs back under me. It was a wonder I didn't flunk out.
But I had a great time in high school. I had little responsibilities, a little money, and lots of friends to hang with.
For certain kids, HS is pretty easy academically, even if you play it on hard mode. It comes as a huge shock when hitting university in how hard things can get, and how you weren't really being challenged with homework you could do in class the period before it was due.
Washington state has the option for kids to take some college courses in HS. I hope my kid can take advantage of that (but he just graduated from Kindergarten, so we are a ways off from determining anything).
Ya. And it really isn't that hard if you have a solid understanding of algebra. Linear algebra on the other hand...I wish I started earlier on that so I could really get all the cool stuff happening in ML today.
There's plenty of physics you can teach without calculus. I wish the curriculum here wouldn't start with kinematics. When I did physics without calculus, I was taught forces, force diagrams, torque, pulley systems, buoyancy, work and energy, and some basic electric circuits (including Kirchhoff's Rules). The only bit of kinematic was motion with constant velocity, which doesn't need any calculus.
As someone who graduated valedictorian but skipped more days than allowable to graduate (my parents had to fight with the district to let me graduate), there is no correlation between days attended and skill/aptitude.
So you are saying that because you, a presumably exceptional student since you mention being valedictorian, could afford to skip days at school, the same applies to average or below-average students? Could you elaborate on how you came to that conclusion?
A lot of this is mandated by the school: you have a cough? Go home, it might be COVID!
It gets annoying as a parent: the kid wants to be in school, they aren't really sick (well, above the normal level of snifflies a kid has during much of the winter), but the system is ultra conservative right now.
Really? When I was in school I always wanted to NOT be in school, same for all my friends. It's always weird now hearing people my age or older saying things like this when my personal experience was completely the opposite.
My sister was like you, she never wanted to be in school. I felt bored staying at home, so always wanted to go. My kid is just a Kindergartener and still likes to go meet up with his friends and play vs. not getting enough screen time while staying home. We don't make it a free Nintendo Switch/iPad day when he comes home sick.
There are lots of kids who would rather be at school than home. It is not that they really liked school, just that being home watching soap operas isn't very fun at all (in my case, this is before the internet).
> How can you miss a quarter of the school days and keep up?
In middle school I missed quite a bit of school, even more in high school (sometimes missed entire weeks at a time) . It's not really that difficult, most of the time was spent on fluff. I passed with nothing lower than a B if my memory serves me, got accepted to every school I applied to so I was definitely performing well enough.
In Poland it was a very common thing in high school for us to skip school and study for high school exam on our own, as that was more effective usage of time we felt.
In our public school,the true tragedy is how the school union took advantage of Covid to push for teachers to have almost zero accountability or responsibility anymore.
Remote learning was an obvious disaster, but problems continued post-Covid. Some teachers stayed remote (!), requiring assistants in the classroom. Teachers rely on a host of shitty online platforms and expect the kids to figure out how to navigate all of them. Class is often little more than an email “read chapter 7 and do the problems”.
The icing on the cake was the grading system that gave kids a B for showing up.
Ourselves and many parents didn’t know how bad it was until standard testing came up and our kids were scoring in the single digits in percentile.
We have since moved to a private school for both. The first year was rough as they over came the Learning deficit and learned how to study again, but both are back as normal students with the kind of understanding in math, science, reading, etc they never would have gotten in public school.
You are not alone, looking at enrollment for most public schools they are falling across the board with many choosing homeschooling[1] or private school[2]. On the homeschooling article one thing that blew me away was 16.1% of black families now homeschool their kids(from 3.3%). Private school admittance went up 53% as well during the pandemic. With my daughter I am extremely disappointed in the quality and difficulty(way too easy) of her schoolwork(1st grade public school). The school iving out 2-3 homework assignments a week with mindless addition and subtraction really makes me feel like my Daughter is wasting her time and even she says she doesn't know why she is doing the same problems over and over. Overall we may look to pull her and move to a private school if the low quality of this education continues.
Usually enrollment declines on a regional basis have more to do with generational variances. People have smaller families at different times.
In some areas you have more religious fanatics driving homeschooling, but the COVID numbers were really kids dropping out. Urban and rural schools did a particularly shitty job during the pandemic.
Private school is no panacea either. My kids have been in private schools, and you have to keep an eye on what’s going on. The teachers get paid a lot less and they have a tendency to paint a rosy picture. You need to be a strong advocate for your kid, especially if they have needs for extra help.
- You can pick your private school. There is choice. Public school, you can’t (with some caveats). People who say you can just move so it’s not a monopoly are fooling themselves, moving with a family is a very large decision not taken lightly.
- Private schools are aware you picked them and are paying them directly with your hard earned dollars. This motivates them to provide superior service. If they don’t, people will send their kids elsewhere.
- Many (most) private schools do not have a teacher’s union. My kids’ teachers are very proud to be non-union.
I'm curious why private school? The usual reason people don't unschool is they haven't really heard of it (or they've heard of it but believe some boomer conventional wisdom like muh socialisation or it's just for extreme Christians). You obviously have, so like... what evidence are you seeing that's convincing you of school?
I think the true tragedy of public education in the US is the sentiment of the public itself. The thinking that it's a conveyer belt where we put our children "on-rails" for 6 hours a day and they'll come out the other side with a strong education and high test scores. This is bolstered by yet more poor reasoning that any failures to reach that metric must surely be the fault of the workers in the factory. Workers who don't even get paid a livable wage but yet have to front the cash for tools just to do the job.
Absent from your comment is the reality of just how much a shit job it is to be a teacher under normal circumstances, with the pandemic being unequivocally abnormal. Teachers are still stuck in this whirlwind trying to figure out how to teach in the post-pandemic ruins that's not just our education system, but our public sentiment that is bursting with shitty expectations.
The problem here is we are required by law to pay taxes for schools, and the people running the schools have almost zero accountability on anything.
In our tiny regional district, the yearly school budget is $25 million a year, for less than a thousand students. Our combined municipal budgets, by comparison, are about $6 million.
For that $25 million a year, we are forced to pay, we get crap teachers and kids who can’t read or do math.
We are now in private school, for a total of $25,000 a year we pay ourselves, and we still have to pay the school taxes too.
You know what’s truly amazing is that in some states, a person like me (no kids) pays taxes into your kid’s private school. If it seems nuts that you have to pay twice to get one quality service, imagine how I feel about paying once for a kid to go to religious school.
Well, unfortunate that the school is religious, but I wouldn’t say that a childless person paying for school is “outrageous.”
After all, most people grow old, retire, and become dependent on the young workers in the economy to carry the tax burden, defend the nation, serve as doctors, nurses, caretakers, and so on.
It takes a village to raise a child, but it also takes children to have a village at all. So I don’t think it’s crazy if we spread the cost of education not just among parents but across the whole population.
One other point that may be worth making is that if the kids I rely on to take care of me when I am old are very religious, they will probably not take care of me, which gives me a vested interest in the undertaking of teaching the next generations not to hate me because I don’t share their beliefs.
I wouldn't say that a childless person paying for school is "outrageous" either. If I said that, would I be entitled to a doctor when I'm old?
The better we educate these little people the better the future will be. Letting people take this money that we set aside to invest in the future seems unwise.
You will depend on today's children to uphold society and care for you in your old age, so asking you to contribute to their education is perfectly reasonable
not necessarily true. I'm an antinatalist planning to kill myself once I get too old to take care of myself on my own. There are many people who are childless because they believe that making children to take care of our selfish needs is horribly wrong.
Correct. I'm not sure I have a huge problem with non-religious schools, but on the other hand I'm not really sure to whom they're accountable or how they spend that money. I am not completely sold.
Charter Schools seem to often have trouble maintaining financially viable operations, let alone outcompeting other schools despite being able to pick and choose what students they accept: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l_htSPGAY7I
It's been messy to watch this play out in Portland, the quality of education delivered is not consistent and each charter school (or chain) is on its own to reinvent the wheel (and waste resources doing so) on common infrastructure many districts would otherwise share.
The myth of common infrastructure is a common theme in schools. Our own district “regionalized” across three towns to get those infrastructure savings.
They were non-existent.
The reality, in NJ at least, is that a school’s budget will balloon to the maximum size legally allowed, and expand from there forever. On occasions when stupid BOE’s back themselves into a corner, they rook the residents into a referendum to get a zillion dollar bond.
The common theme in public schools is: mandatory funding via taxation, and no accountability at all.
Public charter schools in Oregon (and most other states) are not able to pick and choose what students they accept. As long as they have space they have to take any student in the district who applies, and if they are short of space then slots are allocated by lottery.
Could you please stop posting in the flamewar style to HN? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly, and we're trying to avoid that here. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
The key word is "repeatedly" - the issue isn't just one comment, it's that your account has a pattern of commenting in the flamewar style, which I suppose could be described as the popular internet commenting style that combines snark, swipes, name-calling, and tropes with indignant, grandiose rhetoric. Your account has been posting a ton of these - here are a few examples I just randomly picked out:
What we want on HN is thoughtful, substantive, and above all curious conversation. That and the flamewar style are basically disjoint—and what's worse, the one destroys the other, which means we have no choice but to moderate and/or ban accounts that persist in posting that way. I don't want to ban you, so if you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and recalibrate, we'd appreciate it.
So again, in each of the examples you listed I was on topic and directly addressed the argument being made. And on the contrary, many of the comments replying to me in the examples you listed have done everything you accused me of. Do you have a specific example you want to discuss?
It's the difference between paying to have a public school system, and paying to send people's kids wherever they like. It's not necessarily hypocrisy to be OK with the former (wanting to live in a society that has public schools available to all, and being willing to pay for that) and not OK with the latter.
There is no difference between you forcing me to pay for one thing and me forcing you to pay for another. whether or not it is voluntary doesn’t depend on who it benefits.
I shouldn't need to point this out, but this is plainly nonsense. Do you not see how people might not mind paying for e.g. a public park even if they don't personally use it, but might object to paying the exact same amount of money to upgrade the pool at a country club they're not a member of? There absolutely is a difference.
If there were no difference, why would we ever argue over how public money is spent? It's all the same, right?
If I forced you to pay a dollar for a bag of M&Ms and you forced me to pay a dollar to cut off my foot with a chainsaw, would that be exactly the same thing? Why or why not? Of course, we have both forced each other to do something...
(which is to say I not sure I believe that I have gotten the point of this conversation across to you effectively, which is unfortunate).
This quote was not present in your original post. Accordingly, no, I did not read it. You said "There is no difference" but of course, there is. I could tell you what the difference is, but then I would have been successfully trolled, so I think I'll just leave the rest to you. Good luck!
The private school charges you the same amount for one student that the public school has to spend -- but doesn't need to support expensive or difficult cases.
How can you then claim that public schools are somehow massively inefficient?
Private schools are acutely aware that you are paying them to educate your kid, and have mobility if you are unhappy. The result is higher efficiency.
Public schools are effectively a monopoly with a captive audience,and in NJ at least, no true accountability. The result is they spend money on all sorts of crap having little to nothing to do with education.
NJ has overall decent schools that are well funded with huge local control in many areas broken up into an insane number of small towns. The kicker is all children need to have a minimum education regardless of cost - so if an educational plan needs multiple teachers following a student cost is no factor and I don’t think that’s a bad thing. The richer towns subsidize some of the poorer towns as well. I think that if a private school were to get any public funds at all they immediately should also be required to at no extra cost to the sender have the same requirements with out being able to get rid of problem children.
Public schools have less accountability than private schools. Because the one local government is the customer for public schools, and the student is the customer for private schools. Parents have more micro accountability actions than governments.
> I think the true tragedy of public education in the US is the sentiment of the public itself.
Are there any other countries that don't rely heavily on public education? Europe seems to lean on schools even more for shaping society, especially Swiss schools, which aggressively integrate immigrants into a common Swissness model. China, well, not 6 hours, maybe 8 hours, and boarding schools are common, see mom and dad on the weekend. They probably weathered COVID better than we did, however, just given that they went to back school much earlier or never left.
Families with more resources/education did OK during COVID, the real negative effects were felt in lesser resourced families, who depended on the schools more and weren't able to provide alternatives because they had to work their non-WFH friendly jobs.
Of course the teachers weren't the perpetrators here, I'm not sure the unions were either (I don't equate teachers with teacher unions, its not like they have so much choice in union representation).
>This is bolstered by yet more poor reasoning that any failures to reach that metric must surely be the fault of the workers in the factory.
Even if the workers in the factory made faulty parts, in the United States, it would be incredibly hard to fire the workers. Their are no incentives on either side, for the worker nor the student. Their needs to be higher pay to attract people to want to do the job.
Union teachers in Massachusetts were among the worst. They used COVID to lobby hard to end the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS) standardized tests.
The teacher’s union leadership wanted to cover up their tracks and hide objective measures of how harmful remote learning was to the Commonwealth’s children, including how it was especially harmful to poor minority children who lacked proper IT (laptops, reliable internet, etc…) and where many of whom many came from single parent households where the parent could not work from home.
Another poster [1] gives the answer: their children's report cards looked great, and they had no idea how poorly they were doing until they got standardized test results.
I'm sorry that they're a "drag", but standardized tests are the only way to tell if children are learning or if they're just being gifted grades, and the only way to compare children across different schools. As much as that article wants to blame them on racism, nearly every country in the world uses them, and there's a reason for that.
I wouldn't exactly say that standardized tests are the only way to judge, as GWB asked, "Is our children learning?" It would of course be possible to talk to a child and figure out if, for instance, they were illiterate.
I agree that a standard test across schools would be a useful way to standardize or normalize the educational results of all the children. I'm not sure the juice is worth the squeeze.
One other thing I'll mention is that it was SOP in our middle school to just answer randomly because there was no recourse to the individual student for low scores, and as soon as we were done with the test, we were released outside. This may have been addressed procedurally in the MCAS because I think I actually took a slightly older precursor which may have been called the MSAT.
I think you can imagine how useful a test is if there's not any incentive to pass it. It might be possible that the reason the scores are dropping is because more and more children are realizing there is no reason (local to them) to score well on the test.
Students have little incentive, but the point is to have some measure of teacher success. The tests can also identify kids that may need intervention, which is some incentive to kids that don't need it to still do well on the test.
Yeah. I’m all for paying teachers better to get the best and brightest. But to be honest, the thing the teachers union doesn’t seem to get is that getting the best and brightest strongly implies that most teachers would have to leave the profession to make way for the best and brightest.
Schools comprised of smarter teachers would look a lot more like charters. They would prioritize removing disruptive students because they recognize that it drives away the critical mass of kids that can behave well enough to learn. They would know that public school systems have an insurmountable reputation problem, and champion a solution that gradually sends kids who have a chance to make it to a different school over time. The fact that they don’t see it, and still think they can fix the public schools, tells me we don’t have the best and brightest in our education system.
I think it's hard to say who to remove and who not to remove. I was removed from school because I didn't fit the system. Now I have a PhD in physics and work successfully as a research scientist. I would say the problem with schooling is that it's seen as some assembly line of learning goals for various topics. I was removed when I was 11 and had basically no math or science after that. But somehow I was able to succeed in physics. So the entire idea that school should academically prepare students doesn't make much sense to me. Perhaps school should be more about metacognition, emotional intelligence, and encouraging creativity and exploration.
For another example, Andrew Huberman got kicked out of school and sent to juvenile hall as a child. Now he has a PhD in neuroscience and is a professor at Stanford University. The public school system doesn't serve such pupils well and I suspect we're wasting a huge amount of human potential.
These are fun examples - do you think it would be hard to find 2 examples of students who were kicked out of school and did not reach the PhD level? Perhaps these examples don't necessarily inform good policy?
> But to be honest, the thing the teachers union doesn’t seem to get is that getting the best and brightest strongly implies that most teachers would have to leave the profession to make way for the best and brightest.
We're actually in a teaching shortage, so I don't think this is true.
I think you're confusing public charter schools with private schools. Charter schools can't prioritize removing disruptive students any more than other public schools. Private schools can expel students for almost any reason.
Honest question: how many public school districts don't have a Teachers Union? My understanding is that it's close to none, and private and charter schools are the only ones without unions. A quick google search isn't returning a conclusive answer though.
In some southern states, the "Teachers Unions" are forbidden from collective bargaining by law, and are also optional, so they literally do nothing. On average, these states have worse pay for teachers and worse student test scores.
Some whole states have (due to state laws) very weak teacher's unions that can barely do anything to protect teachers when they should be protected, and that hardly have any say in anything. I think if it were at all possible to spin those states as having better educational outcomes, Republicans would be crowing about it on Fox News 24/7.
Indeed, those who dislike teachers' unions (and unions in general) are quite quick to blame those unions for all the woes of modern education. I'm sure it is possible that they have downsides, but I wonder what the small government, free-market solutions for better education are? I was listening some conservative podcast talk about how teachers and unions need to be punished for these failures, but that just doesn't feel like the kind of thing that fosters a nurturing environment for learning. Certainly the for-profit colleges are seen as a scam rather than being held in good regard.
How do parents not know how bad the school is? Are you not, on a daily basis asking what they learned in school and challenging them on it?
I do it whenever I have a chance with my niece and nephew. They're learning about multiplication? We're doing times tables in the car trip. History of some Native American tribe? What happened, who were their leaders, etc.
With my son it's simpler stuff - what color is this? What letter is that? Does our house have a door? And it's mainly my wife and I teaching him, but still - evaluation is critical.
During the lockdown it took my sister one to two weeks to move her kids to private schools.
I can't imagine not understanding, first intuitively, and second empirically, that online education is a poor fit for young children.
> How do parents not know how bad the school is? Are you not, on a daily basis asking what they learned in school and
A lot of parents work 2, 3 jobs to make ends meet. When they get home there's barely enough money left over for food. They get up at 4, 5 am and work until 10 or 11pm. Working 8 hours a day 5 days a week is a real luxury for some people.
Looks like it's a little less than 5% of job holders working multiple jobs [1][2]. Average hours of work per week is around 34 [3].
If you're telling me that you don't know how your kids are doing in school because you never get a chance to talk to them because you're so busy working, that's sad, but it's probably not typical.
It's also the case that people with greater income work more hours [4]. So, maybe you should reprioritize money versus family if you're working more than you need to.
"Looks like it's a little less than 5% of job holders working multiple jobs "
What's 5% of 300 million??
That's not an insignificant amount of people, so I'm not sure what your point is at pointing that out.
15 million people is insignificant to you? It doesn't take away from what they were saying that a lot of times people don't have time to do the job of being the teacher. They cannot reinforce the job every day.
This assumes there isn't a statistical deviation in who is working multiple jobs amongst the working parent community.
Just look at https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/chart-gallery/gallery... and tell me there isn't a severe income issue in 1 out of 5 kids lives that causes them to be SNAP eligible. You don't end up on SNAP cause your parents are doing well financially!
Your post is clearly an example of "You said X, so you mean worse Y??" In general, you should try to engage with X and not invent your own Y.
As I previously wrote working so much you can't talk to your kids is not typical. Not every multiple job holder has kids, not every multiple job holder has multiple full time jobs, not every multiple job holder lacks ten to fifteen minutes a day to talk with their kids, some multiple job holders have spouses/parents/etc who can talk to their kids on their behalf, some multiple job holders could afford to work less.
I don't know, but I suspect the previous reply comes from someone not in the situation they're describing. That is - the basic question I posed is how you could not know that your kid's school was bad. A response was that poor people had to work so many jobs they have no time to talk to their kids and I responded in turn by explaining that no, that's not the answer. I suspect the respondent is not particularly poor and isn't even explaining his own situation.
Now, as for what my point is - my guess is that the modal reason people don't know how bad their kids schools are is that they aren't evaluating what their kids learn. I think that's bad and I'm trying to shame that behavior. Parents should be involved, should be tracking what their kids learn, and should be doing something about it when problems arise.
I think attitudes like "some people have to work multiple jobs so we can't blame parents for being complacent with the poor public school system" are bad.
Going back to what I wrote about the previous commenter not being in the situation he's describing - I think it's a common pattern for the rich to give bad advice to the poor. "Oh, you poor poor person, don't worry that you don't know how your children are doing at school, it's probably because you're so busy working! This isn't your fault, etc etc". I would say that if you don't know how your kids are doing in school you are failing as a parent and should immediately correct that. Education is vital to improving your child's circumstances and if you want a better life for your child you should do your best to insure your child is well educated.
Again, just going off guesses, I bet the previous commenter holds himself to a higher standard. He won't ignore the education of his children, but will defend others doing so - assuming they're too busy to pay attention.
Religion. Terrible sex education due to the terrible school system. No access to abortion.
If they were in a better spot financially before having kids, they could've been pushed into poverty in any number of ways--medical issues in the United States would be the easiest example.
The minimum should be to ask what happened in school , how’s home work is it done and seeing the work sent home. It isn’t hard to see how engaging school is and what they are learning instead of waiting for gasp…test scores to go down. Some of these responses look like they are guesses from people who aren’t in schools or don’t have kids. Seriously 10 min from the above you’ll have and idea of how school is going.
In our case, the school was OK but became progressively worse as a new Superintendent came in.
We do check our kids general knowledge, but we don’t grill them regularly or anything. We are all too busy for that, and given the amount of time they are at school, and how much it costs, it’s not unreasonable to assume a bit that it going well when the report cards look good.
Our first hint was when our daughter stopped having any homework. Her teacher said it “upset the children’s work-life balance” (really!). We started to see declining proficiency in reading and writing at home.
Then the standardized test scores started dropping precipitously. They are reported on by grade, and you can literally see which grades have the higher percentage of bad teachers from that.
It is crazy that our kids were in a legally required and tax payer funded school for 6-7 hours a day, 9 months a year, and weren’t being taught.
Pretty much what I expect from a union fighting a society who refuses to value the work that they do.
I really have a hard time blaming teachers for anything. We (America) seem to expect them to perform miracles. We are not their "customers", public eduction is not a business, but we insist on treating it like one. We get what we deserve.
Union teachers have long campaigned for having no accountability. They've been pretty successful at it. When was the last time you heard a public school teacher take any responsibility at all for poor academic achievement? I've never heard one. They always blame:
1. the parents
2. the students
3. the administration
4. not enough pay
5. not enough technology in the classroom
6. the tests
The answer is to give a bonus to teachers depending on their students meeting the grade level academic standards. I've proposed this many times, and the pushback on it is fierce.
Yes, I would agree the current state of the profession absolutely attracts low quality candidates. It's a self fulfilling prophecy. Every other wealthy nation understands this.
> Pretty much what I expect from a union fighting a society who refuses to value the work that they do
I’d suggest that pre-Covid teachers unions worked to communicate how essential and valuable they were to society, but during the pandemic the unions strangely shifted gears and devalued their members work by basically arguing that the teaching profession was less important then a grocery bagger.
Essential workers showed up during the pandemic and did yeoman’s work. Teachers unions argued that they didn’t need to show up to educate our children and failed miserably.
Ironically the union’s stupidity by pursuing school closures and remote school illustrated how truly valuable teacher’s are, but destroyed their reputations at the same time.
Most amusing is that in 2019 the teachers union was fighting the government over a proposed change which would see students take two mandatory online classes as part of their completion requirements. The teachers claimed it would be devastating to the kids if just two classes were online. The government finally relented and agreed to not force that upon the students, but then what seemed like only days later all classes were taken online with no pushback from the union to be seen.
>The icing on the cake was the grading system that gave kids a B for showing up.
This has happened worldwide. /u/k1next has made several Reddit posts on how German high-school graduates' grades jumped up during COVID-19. <https://www.reddit.com/user/k1next/submitted/>
> > rely on a host of shitty online platforms and expect the kids to figure out how to navigate all of them.
> This sounds like good real world preparation
Or, we could push to have a better standard for them, and get them to see and treat the shitty software as something other than an unavoidable and unchangeable status quo.
My kids go to a charter school.
They went very hard on the online learning during Covid. Crazy amount of assignments. Lots of online time.
As parents the workload was totally overwhelming to stay on top of everything.
They ended up going back early because the test results were just atrocious even with how hard they were pushing.
My wife teaches kindergarten there. There have been massive problems with the kids that came in that missed preschool during Covid. No idea how to share or interact with others. Had to spend a lot of time with basic life skills.
Lots of students that had severe mental problems / disabilities that were completely missed since they missed preschool. Basically shutting down entire classes for months while various testing and placements were handled. Lots of “Jimmy is a genius” 4 months later. He has an IQ of 50.
The masks also destroyed many students. Many highly depressed kids became happy cheerful kids once the masks were removed.
It's almost like deemphasizing personal health, nutrition, and thousands of years of natural human communal relationships, and focusing entirely on vaccines, social distancing, masks, and computers wasn't a good thing.
I think it’s a sign that the social fabric is deteriorating from so many angles that as a society, we’ve become unable to cope with any hardship at all.
There is no reason why covid shutdowns and school closures means children can’t socialize. You could easily get 2-3 kids together under one roof for 3, 4 or 5 days if they’ve been tested 24 hours before. Everyone goes home, 2-3 days later, rinse and repeat.
Small controlled gatherings like this should have doable but everyone is always too damned busy all the time…we’ve come to rely on the school system for all of their social interactions and used the extra free time we got as parents to just “work more”.
It’s very clear to me from covid that what actually needs to happen is for the world to collectively slow the fuck down a little. And I don’t mean wipe out all ambitions but like, figure out what we value as a society and codify it rather than worshipping this bizarre work culture we have in the west.
Public schools aren't a monopoly. People are free to move if they would like to switch schools. Also, a major difference is that residents usually have some power over the school board, e.g. by directly electing them or electing a mayor who chooses them.
I guess we have this kind of anti-union, anti-teacher propaganda to thank for anyone still choosing to major in education (such enrollment has been declining for some time, with good reason). An easy-street gravy train with no accountability and perfect job security? Sign me up!
In fact, the work sucks—and parents with this kind of perspective are part of why—and the pay's bad. Accountability-seeking regulation and admin overhead gets more onerous every year. Time actually productively teaching kids keeps dropping. It's a miserable career.
Get into ordinary state government then lateral-hop jobs until you land in some do-nothing office (they exist! Hop around, and you will find one!) where you can truly screw around most of the day and collect your paycheck as long as you know how to work the rules, if you want the secure, barely-working, low-paid-but-at-least-you-have-retirement "paradise" that certain folks believe teaching to be. If you go into teaching thinking these folks are right about it, you're gonna have a very bad time.
> Some teachers stayed remote (!), requiring assistants in the classroom.
Schools were facing the loss of a ton of their teachers, if they forced them back to the classroom, for a fairly long stretch of Covid. They kept trying, and teachers kept pushing back. Many teachers personally at high risk of serious illness if they caught Covid, or with close family members at high risk, were wiling to walk if forced back. In the earlier, less-certain phase of the whole thing when the threat wasn't as clearly defined, many were offended by the "die for the children" vibe they were getting from admin. Classrooms that opened back up before the vaccine was available faced their own challenges, due to high rates of absence and teachers often being out sick or quarantining after close exposure (you know, because of Covid spreading). There's an ongoing staffing crisis as a result of stress from dealing with the school environment during Covid, which was not a cakewalk and was far worse than usual (which is saying something), and other factors (pay stagnating for years in many districts, even as high inflation hit, would be a big one). If you think the way things went was a disaster, try losing 20+% of teachers in a district in a single year. They're not in the military, you can't just order them to do whatever.
> Teachers rely on a host of shitty online platforms and expect the kids to figure out how to navigate all of them.
They don't always get to pick them, and often hate those too :-/
They're also not tech or ed-tech experts and have little or no support from people who are. And they often had a few days or weeks to put this together, with minimal assistance with ongoing support. I assure you, none of them were happy about spending a quarter of their time doing tech support.
> The icing on the cake was the grading system that gave kids a B for showing up.
Schools had a choice during Covid of failing a shitload of kids, or doing this. Ultimately, they answer to parents, and were not prepared to deal with the fallout of 50%+ of their constituent families seeing F grades on report cards. This goes for in-person and remote, both. A similar effect is why grading has become more and more lax over the years—many teachers hate this and wouldn't choose to operate that way if it were up to them, but admin doesn't want to deal with a bunch of angry parents, in part because those parents can and will agitate enough to get them fired if they're upset enough, so they follow incentives. Failing kids isn't really a thing, anymore, period, even before Covid, and it's mostly not teachers making that call.
Covid was a disaster for education—that's true! It was really bad!—but if you think it's because teachers don't actually care about teaching kids, you're not going to find useful solutions to those or similar problems in the future. Most of them care about that a lot—again, the job's shit, so it's a minority, overall, who are willing to tolerate that without the positive-vibes experience of teaching children. That's what most of them are there for. Certainly not the work environment, the parents (the ones who make the most noise, anyway), or the pay.
> We have since moved to a private school for both. The first year was rough as they over came the Learning deficit and learned how to study again, but both are back as normal students with the kind of understanding in math, science, reading, etc they never would have gotten in public school.
Selection bias is a hell of a thing. Nb we've sent our kids to private school at times, too—it may not be fair, and much of the difference probably is, in fact, due to that ability to select for easy-to-teach students and parents who are on-board with your particular program, but that doesn't make the advantage less real, and ultimately we personally have to play the game the rest of the table's playing, no matter what we wish it were.
Incidentally, you know what enabled one private school we were involved with to open for in-person sooner and safer than area public schools? The parents. They had selected for a pool of parents who were highly likely to comply with Covid protocols and take them seriously. While a bunch of public schools were contending with a large body of parents who were evading rules and telling their kids they were bullshit and that they should chin-wear their masks, this private school could tell such parents to get fucked because they had a waiting list for admission, and, besides, had already cultivated a rather, I suppose, liberal-leaning set of parents, so it largely wasn't an issue. Fewer parents modeling poor adherence to masking and distancing for their kids, fewer parents sending their kids when they knew they were sick or had been exposed, fewer having ill-advised outings to restaurants and other high-risk places or holding family reunions or whatever during Covid infection peaks, and, go figure, they weren't dealing with as many teacher absences in the middle of a (very much related) substitute shortage, kids weren't sick or exposed as often, the families weren't sick or exposed as often, and so on. SES (socio-economic status) also helped, as many parents were well-off and had the kind of jobs where they could work from home, not performing jobs where they had to go in or else get fired, which meant fewer exposures. IOW the private school did better in part because they had Covid on easy mode, largely because the parents of the attending kids weren't giant assholes and also had the money and freedom to mitigate the risk of Covid. When they were remote, parents were better-able to help the kids learn, for similar reasons. They had tons of advantages that public schools didn't.
It's not false that teaching has seen terrible attrition since 2020, and I know personally of several early-in-the-pandemic "go back, in-person only" efforts that were scrubbed because the number of teachers who were ready to walk was high enough that it would have shut down the entire school district. This, in a purple-leaning-red area of a red state. I assume resistance in blue states would have been even higher, but admit it's possible that my sample of three suburban districts in my area and one in another state weren't representative (every single one saw this happen).
[EDIT] It can both be true that Sweden did fine but that US schools would not have. It depends on how teachers perceived the situation. I bet parents and students in Sweden took distancing and avoiding gatherings more seriously, and didn't send their kids to school sick as often, and that may have made teachers feel more comfortable returning. I know a private school in our area that had far fewer illnesses after returning in-person, because they'd selected, in advance, for parents who weren't assholes, so adherence to spread-prevention efforts was much higher than at local public schools (plus the parents were richer and more likely to be able to avoid going in-person to work, to be fair). Meanwhile public schools were having to stick multiple classes in the cafeteria for babysitting by vice principals and such a day or two a week, because too many teachers caught Covid or had close exposures, and they couldn't get enough substitutes—and this went on for most of a year. The attitudes and situations of everyone involved made a huge difference (I bet much higher amounts of paid time off even for low-wage workers helped Swedes cope with it better, for instance—the temptation to send your kid when they're sick, because you're out of days of all kinds and can't afford to miss the hours, in the US, is high)
Schools should have stayed open and compensation should have been let to adjust for those who were willing to take on the additional risk of in class work.
1) I don't think anyone was ready to give teachers a raise/bonus—I expect they'd especially have been concerned that teachers might get used to being paid almost as much as they'd be worth in private industry, and resist letting wages fall again after the crisis was over. No idea where the money would have come from. Around here, at least, no way voters would have gone for that.
2) I think the amount necessary would have been pretty high. 20+% raises. It doesn't take a lot of teachers lost in an environment in which replacements and even substitutes are hard to come by, before your in-person teaching falls apart due to insufficient staffing (the first year back, here, was about as bad as remote—too many sick teachers, not enough subs, lots of days in which no teaching happened at all for many of the kids, kids missing many days per month, et c, it was basically like they only got half a year of school) so you need to keep nearly all of them if you want this scheme to be at all valuable. If you're one district "defecting" and paying higher wages, sure, that might work out for you, using a smaller raise to attract teachers from neighboring districts (however, see above re: teachers maybe not wanting to see their paychecks shrink again later) but it wouldn't work as an across-the-board solution where every district's doing it. It'd have been way too much money.
I agree it would have been a fortune, but at the same time the US has consistently proven it has no problem spending an unlimited amount of money and then never actually paying for it. It seems like a weird line to draw to me, especially when they could have adjusted the pay via a hazard pay line item to keep it from being sticky.
Compared to how much the US has spent on Ukraine over the past couple years, how much more would've it cost to fund teachers at that time?*
*I've read the Budapest Memorandum is not legally binding; plus the US didn't do much when Chrimea happened anyway.
I've read the Budapest Memorandum is not legally binding
Unfortunately what you were reading were statements from Vladimir Putin to that effect. The view of international law scholars is that it is in fact legally binding in that it is essentially an extension of the Helsinki Accords.
At any rate, the main case for the illegality of both the 2014 and 2022 invasions rests with the UN Charter, not the Budapest Memorandum.
Illegality of the invasion is not akin to a commitment of defense from the US. I am more concerned with what the US' legal obligation is to Ukraine. There is no reason to dump money into the country if we don't have a legal obligation. It's more akin to insanity.
If the US is legally obligated to provided funding only due to the Budapest Memorandum, I understand. Short of that it makes little sense considering how the US already refuses to pay its debt. It's selling out its position in the world for almost no gain.
The fact is that the vast majority of people who go into "education" do it because it is the one of the least demanding career paths. Yes, there are some "true believers" who go into teaching because they truly seek to make a difference, but they are the tiny minority. Majoring in education is even less rigorous than majoring in liberal arts and is more akin to majoring in gender studies or basket weaving. This is even more true of the administrators who bloat the schools and drain crucial funding from actual teachers and classrooms while adding nothing in terms of educational value (and often detracting from it). But teachers certainly aren't entirely to blame for the mess we've gotten into to - there is more than enough blame to go around. The unfortunate truth is that our educational system is horribly broken, corrupt and inefficient. We hear far more from the leadership of the teacher's union and from school administrators about diversity nonsense than we do about the fact that they are churning out a generation of kids who are not literate and cannot do basic math. The "remote learning" nonsense was the final nail in the coffin as far as many public schools were concerned. They were already on life support before the pandemic when it came to academic achievement, and "remote learning" pulled the plug entirely. "Chronic school absenteeism", defined as missing at least 15 days of school per year (3 school weeks) is 16% nationally, and much higher in many large cities. Achievement is so bad that states like New York are lowering their standards across the board so that it appears that more students are proficient.
When a massive number of kids aren't even showing up at schools, teachers aren't very well educated, administrators are more interested in promoting their social and political agenda than they are in teaching children how to read and write and standards for achievement are being lowered and/or eliminated you end up with the situation we have today.
You're taking it as a given that people perceive education to not be a demanding career, and I find that incredibly absurd. I've known since I was a young child that teachers didn't get paid much, and since I was a teen that the job required a lot of extra work for grading and buying your own supplies. As an adult I've known teachers, and those things are very clearly true.
I don't know what world you're from, but I want to live where everyone "knows" that teaching is easy and lucrative.
> You're taking it as a given that people perceive education to not be a demanding career, and I find that incredibly absurd.
It's comically wrong. People choosing education for that reason are in for a rude awakening. Many of that sort figure that out during their student-teaching phase, I suppose. Lots of teachers also leave within the first few years, and it's pretty much never because they found it too easy. It's a hard job, with an abusive strain of "you should make this sacrifice—for the children, you know, and of course we won't compensate you in any way, because we're not going to sacrifice for the kids, don't be silly" running through it, and bad pay, especially if you've got the kind of mind, interpersonal skills, and work-ethic we'd hope the median teacher would have.
Reports I've heard of truly bad teachers in-the-wild are mostly ones who are power-tripping jerks who like being "liked" by (some of) the kids (and who are typically fairly dumb, besides), not ones who are hanging around for an easy job where they can sponge off the taxpayer, because that's not really what it's like. The bad ones who stick around, it's not mainly because admin can't get rid of them, but for the same "admin has no idea WTF is going on with them" visibility-problems that are also common in private industry, plus they aren't necessarily totally bad at the job, in the ways that are being measured. Teacher efficacy measurements keep being attempted, and keep turning out to be so noisy they're nearly useless—even ones you'd expect to work, turn out not to, when you look at the statistics. That part's an unsolved problem that, believe me, plenty of teachers wouldn't mind seeing solved (they don't like their bad co-workers, either) though none of them like it when crappy solutions are pushed, since, you know, they don't actually work and are highly likely to punish/reward practically randomly.
> I've known since I was a young child that teachers didn't get paid much
They don't? The government publishes the names of all government workers with incomes >$100,000. All of the teachers I personally know are found on it, and they aren't special outliers. The same teachers also collectively own one of the world's largest hedge funds.
For perspective, median employment income is $38,000. $100,000 puts one in the top 9%. Is this some kind of twist on the no true Scotsman, where no matter how much a teacher is paid it isn't enough?
Cool. In my city, there's a gas station chain that pays better (total comp) after a year than teaching with 10 years of experience (without a graduate degree). The gas stations don't require any degree at all, either. I hear they're pretty nice places to work. I know because my wife heard one of her brighter students was going to do that while attending college part-time, got curious (the girl had talked about what a good situation it'd be for her) and found out the girl'd be earning more than she did, before long.
You can break $100k here, but it requires a PhD or a couple master's degrees, and for you to have been in so long that you're near retirement. What's a starting teacher make in your area? How does that compare to others with bachelor's degrees? The useful comparison isn't overall median, it's what someone with the skills we'd hope even a middling teacher had, and a degree, could be making elsewhere. I can tell you that's definitely more than teachers make, at least here, which means their pay sucks. Lots of those jobs are less stressful, too.
$60k first year, $80k in year 5, $100k by year 10.
> How does that compare to others with bachelor's degrees?
$50k first year, $55k in year 5, 10 year information not available.
But isn't this like asking how does the pay compare to others who take a vacation during the summer or some other irrelevant metric? Maybe things are different where you are, but here we can clearly see in the data that there was no change to incomes as people started attaining bachelor degrees – incomes have held as stagnant as stagnant can be – so it is not like a bachelors degree has an impact on pay. Is there relevance to the question?
It is true that the school system works to filter out those with disabilities and other life struggles; factors which do impact earning potential. Are you asking with the intent to see if teachers make more than someone with down syndrome or some such condition?
Those holding bachelor's don't have higher median wages than those without, in your area? That's wild. Yikes.
$60k's not so bad to start. IIRC it's still like $38-42k here—in a city and its 'burbs, not rural districts. They're slowly adjusting to the fact that low-end wages shot way up & inflation is hitting hard, and now their pay, which was just sad-making before, is absolutely pathetic, and their 1.5% annual bumps an insult, but they're not adjusting fast enough. Staffing's getting really tight and lots of teachers have left for 25-50% raises and less stress in other industries—and, go figure, the ones best-positioned to do that are the best teachers. Many districts are dropping to 4-day weeks to cut costs, better deal with the still ongoing substitute shortage, and attract more teachers. We're leaving for a state with pay more like what you mention, because we don't want our kids attending schools that are experiencing a slow-motion catastrophe—this state's gonna be in for a rough time in the coming years.
> Those holding bachelor's don't have higher median wages than those without, in your area? That's wild. Yikes.
Overall median is $38k.
But, again, bachelors degrees have never shown to have any bearing on income, aside from the aforementioned filtering mechanism, so what makes it wild? It is not surprising at all that regularly functioning, able-bodied, people are going to make the approximately same amount of money. The productivity potential across them is approximately the same. It is clear that those with disabilities and other life struggles which impact productivity do make less than the typical, able-bodied person, and understandably so.
What would be wild is if someone's hobby they engaged in for a few years during their early adult years made a radical difference.
Ah, I see. Yeah, credential inflation's a whole thing. The GI Bill and its consequences et c. et c. Effectively paying a giant tax to make it somewhat easier for companies to filter workers, to little other benefit. ... Well, it does also keep the seeking-employment pool down, mitigating the effects of some other changes in the economy, so I guess there's that. Be better if we could figure out something else, though. Lots of better things we could spend that money (and a shitload of person-hours) on, IMO. But companies sure don't mind making others spend $10 to save them $1.
> What would be wild is if someone's hobby they engaged in for a few years during their early adult years made a radical difference.
For real. Messing with .ini and autoexec.bat files so I could play vidja led me down a path that did more, ultimately, for my lifetime income than nearly all hours spent on education past elementary school. It's weird.
If it were a thing, it could be a whole thing, but since it has never been a thing...
What does have a measurable impact is supply management. Artificially constraining the number of workers allowed to work in a profession does boost incomes where sufficient demand is found. Think doctors, lawyers, engineers, etc. And teachers (here) are also a prime example of exactly that. The government sets quotas for how many new teachers are allowed to teach. You could be the best teacher in the world, but if you aren't among the chosen few, you cannot legally take on the job.
Because such quota oversight is often administered through colleges and universities, you do find some conflation out there. But you can just as easily maintain a quota system outside of the school system. They are not intrinsically linked. We have examples of that as well.
For older grades, lots of states let you teach with a degree in the relevant content area—have a math degree? You can teach math. Some may require a graduate degree, but others, a bachelor's is enough. Might need to take a couple classes or do a short practicum and pass a test to get a certificate, but it's not a large burden. Not a lot of people take them up on the offer, AFAIK, and the ones who do usually don't last.
Technically, you don't need a degree. However, you must be blessed by a university which administers the teacher quota on behalf the government, and they do play favouritism towards those who have degrees, naturally. They've got services to sell after all!
Areas that are hard to fill (technical classes, especially) will sometimes see allowances to any random hobo, but one must still be blessed. Simply having the desire and ability to be a teacher does not permit you to legally be a teacher.
Stands to reason that where there is more freedom for anyone to be a teacher that the pay would trend lower. Supply and demand, as usual.
This off-the-wall shit is part of why people leave teaching. Being constantly criticized by people living in a fictional world, and blamed for tons of things that are simply made-up or that you had no say in, gets old.
Teachers are getting to be in short supply because people aren't choosing the job, because it's kinda shit in much of the country (and it's extremely shit in a whole lot of districts). It's not as if there's a strictly limited set of residency slots strangling supply, like in medicine. Not enough people want to do it, given the offer on the table. That's the whole story.
> Stands to reason that where there is more freedom for anyone to be a teacher that the pay would trend lower. Supply and demand, as usual.
Some of the places with very lax standards for becoming a teacher are nonetheless struggling to fill positions. The standards aren't the problem, the overall deal—work conditions, stress, pay, seeing the profession demonized by talking heads on TV and your own neighbors—is just not good enough to get people to sign on the dotted line. You're not going to get more people signing up to teach who you'd like to have teaching without making the deal better—it's got nothing to do with quotas or whatever.
Yes, much like the dairy quota system. The government anticipates how many teachers will be needed and only blesses that many to practice. For sure, it sometimes gets things wrong. Quotas were reduced considerably a few years back because there were too many teachers being produced, which was impacting pay. For what $60-100k is worth, it is actually less than teachers were making before that mistake (or "mistake"; some government assemblies are less friendly towards teachers than others).
> This off-the-wall shit is part of why people leave teaching. Being constantly criticized by people living in a fictional world, and blamed for tons of things that are simply made-up or that you had no say in, gets old.
Okay. What off-the-wall shit might that be?
> Some of the places with very lax standards for becoming a teacher are nonetheless struggling to fill positions.
Struggling to fill positions, or there isn't demand for the positions? Saying "Boy, it sure would be nice if we had more teachers" is no more demand than a 14 year old kid with $100 to his name and a poster of a Ferrari on his wall imaging having one of his own sitting in the family's garage. That's merely dreaming. Very much not the same thing as demand. Only demand is significant here.
> it's got nothing to do with quotas or whatever.
It doesn't sound like you have a teacher quota system in place in the part of the world you exist in, so that goes without saying. Obviously there is no universal standard here. Different jurisdictions are going to have different rules.
But it is clear that supply management does artificially increase wages, and teachers here (not the world over) leverage it. Why do you think that virtually everyone agrees that monopolies/monopsonies are bad for buyers? Why do you think tech companies want to build "moats"? Exactly, because constraint in participation is how excess money is made.
Sorry, didn't realize you're not in the US (the article's about US scores, so I made some assumptions—my bad, as they say). I'm not aware, and can find no evidence with a couple searches, of limits on annual count of issued teacher licenses or total active licenses in any US states, but that might be A Thing in other countries.
> Struggling to fill positions, or there isn't demand for the positions? Saying "Boy, it sure would be nice if we had more teachers." is no more demand than a 14 year old kid with $100 to his name and a poster of a Ferrari on his wall imaging having one in his family's garage. That's merely dreaming. Very much not the same thing as demand.
They're cutting electives, dropping 20% of school days, and increasing class sizes because they're having trouble finding teachers. Regardless, vacancies remain, and schools rarely open positions they don't need—education quality and workload for the teachers they do have just get worse, typically, when positions aren't filled. I don't think that's "I wish I had a Ferrari" levels of need, but actual need. Inflation, the hangover from Covid stress that's been the final straw for a lot of teachers already on the fence about staying (it was not a happy, kick-back-and-relax time for most teachers—quite the opposite) and the current political winds have hit the profession hard.
> I'm not aware, and can find no evidence with a couple searches, of limits on annual count of issued teacher licenses or total active licenses in any US states
I understand the pay is dismal, so that tracks. Pay would be dismal here too if there weren't the artificial constraints propping up incomes. Teaching isn't unpleasant enough to see some kind of natural supply constraint emerge. It is a job a large segment of the population is willing to do.
> They're cutting electives, dropping 20% of school days, and increasing class sizes because they're having trouble finding teachers.
That doesn't mean there is demand. If I start eating more rice and beans, that doesn't mean I'm in the market for steak. Class sizes are a hot topic here too. It is not because we can't come up with enough teachers, it is because the current government doesn't want to hire more teachers. Are you sure that is not what is going on there too?
> That doesn't mean there is demand. If I start eating more rice and beans, that doesn't mean I'm in the market for steak. Class sizes are a hot topic here too. It is not because we can't come up with enough teachers, it is because the current government doesn't want to hire more teachers. Are you sure that is not what is going on there too?
They didn't suddenly make these changes because they want to provide worse education, certainly. It's true that demand is weak in the sense they're not paying enough to keep teachers in the profession, or draw back those who left—it's taking some time for school districts (run by elected school boards, at least in much of the US, if not in all of it, and with funding largely determined by public votes on taxes and bonds) to catch up with the current "going rate" for the level of education they used to provide, just four years ago, at the tail of a decade of stagnating wages (pay freezes that were never made up, so, cuts; inflation adjustments that didn't quite keep up with even pre-pandemic inflation rates) punctuated by the pandemic, an inflation spike, and a sharp jump in bottom-end wages in the rest of the economy. I suspect many districts will ultimately not meet the new rate, and education quality will settle into a new, significantly worse level in much of the country (a "new normal", if you will) but right now they still want more staff than they're able to obtain, as they try to return to the state of things pre-pandemic. Once they accept the new situation and stop so-trying, yes, I think it'd be fair to say that demand has dropped, as they'll be aiming for a lower level of quality than they are now. Maybe they'll surprise me, though, and voters will decide to make up the ~30% drop in total comp teachers have seen (around here, at least) since 2005 or so. Doubt it, but maybe.
So, in a sense, I think we're headed to what you're describing as "reduced demand", but right now schools are still trying to get back to pre-pandemic staffing levels, though their funding has yet to increase enough to make that happen—and I doubt it will. I expect education to become/remain a lot worse, instead, as average teacher quality drops, class sizes grow, time in class is reduced or remains at already-reduced levels rather than rebounding, and opportunities offered to students are withdrawn.
Certainly, the problem isn't that the supply-side of the teacher equation is constrained, in the US, but that the career's just not as appealing anymore (which, again, I can see why you'd describe that as insufficient demand)
Many families will eat some of what could have been increased school funding, in the form of higher childcare expenses; taxes won't go up much or at all; and public education will get worse, is my prediction for the mid-term trajectory of public education in (at least much of) the US. Probably going to be lots of opportunities for startups to grift public dollars for ineffective computer learning systems, though, as schools desperately try to compensate for all of that without raising taxes (or reducing administration overhead...). Maybe cheap "para-educators" monitoring classrooms while kids watch YouTube lectures? Who knows. Probably lots of things will be tried, and none of them will help much, if history is any guide.
I'd expect a boom market for tutors in the nearish future in the US, as the above state of affairs becomes more widely-appreciated. Not many parents can afford actually-consistently-better-than-public-schools $25k+/yr private schools, or are willing/able to homeschool, but quite a few can afford some tutor hours each month—and they're going to need them, if they don't want to lose ground. Kids whose parents can't do that, or choose not to, will join a widening cohort of students whose future prospects are... grim.
(for bonus fun, we're speeding toward a healthcare cost crisis, and we've got a retirement crisis—a paucity of retirement savings, in every generation after the "Boomers", with worse at-same-year-of-life savings rates for each subsequent generation and already a large gap between "X" and "Boomers", that is—all set to hit more or less at the same time. I reckon we'll have beat the odds if we still have anything resembling free and fair elections by 2050, what with all those stressors on the system and the increasing sophistication of political-legal games-playing, plus stuff like the gradually-worsening housing supply & ownership consolidation problem)
> Maybe they'll surprise me, though, and voters will decide to make up the ~30% drop in total comp teachers have seen (around here, at least) since 2005 or so. Doubt it, but maybe.
So, what would voters hope to get out of the deal?
As you might have guessed, here is, according to the OCED, the most educated place on earth. From your outsider perspective, I am curious: How does this part of the world shine in your eyes for being so educated?
While our culture unsurprisingly has a strong bond with schooling, it has largely become religion, right down to threats of ending up in purgatory if you don't buy into the message. I don't think we are able to even recognize what we get out of it anymore, and largely envy what the US has instead, so I am quite interested in how others see us.
> So, what would voters hope to get out of the deal?
Well, if teacher total comp has been declining (health insurance getting worse without getting cheaper, and often while getting more expensive; wages not keeping up with inflation, especially post-Covid) and the headline says "scores decline again..." (emphasis mine) I'd think, scores going back to what they were when teacher compensation was better, is what the voters might hope to get out of the deal. I think some other things might also need to change, but I don't see a path to that outcome that doesn't involve significantly higher pay.
But, maybe the US doesn't need stronger public education. Maybe it's not as important to democracy as some suppose. Maybe it's not as important to having a strong developed-world economy as some suppose. We aren't the most-educated place on Earth, but it's still possible it's true that we don't need to educate our children any better than we are now.
> I'd think, scores going back to what they were when teacher compensation was better, is what the voters might hope to get out of the deal.
What is the value proposition in seeing higher scores? It does not appear the population sees value in scores in general. I am not aware of them dumping millions into pinball to see someone reach a high score, for example.
Compensation comes from trade. Someone else has to give in order from someone else to get. If you are going to give up something you hold near and dear, you are going to want something in return. How much is one really going to give up to be able to say "Look ma, a larger number!"?
Is that worth an extra hour at work? One less vacation to your favourite destination? One less cup of coffee? I struggle to want to give up anything for a number, frankly. I guess I'm just not that enthralled by numbers. The are a useful tool, but just a tool in my mind.
I think it's two things. I grew up in fairly well-off areas (despite being rather poor ourselves), so teachers in comparison made quite little. And your examples are outliers, most teachers make quite a bit less than $100,000 [1]. Those salaries are above the median, but not as much as I think they deserve. With how important it is, I think teaching should be a competitive and well-compensated field.
With respect to the world? Yes. No doubt teachers in Niger are making pennies a day and most teachers somewhere in between. But with respect to here? No. That is very much typical.
> With how important it is
How important is it? This is the most educated place on earth, according to the OECD. What do we have to show for it? Presumably you live in another part of the world. When you think: Educated utopia, no doubt this is where you think of (I am curious if you guess right). What stands out about it?
> I think teaching should be a competitive and well-compensated field.
This is contradictory. Competition drives down wages. Monopoly is the way to fortune!
Teaching here is supply managed. The government controls how many accredited teachers are produced each year, and has reduced the number of would-be teachers allowed to be accredited in the past when there was too much competitive pressure. This creates an Old Boys Club that keeps the hobos who would drive down wages out. As such, they can demand just about anything they want, hence being amongst the top earners.
About the only job that might pay more is software developer (if just barely), and only because software developers have figured out how to scale their work. Teachers are reluctant to scale.
> Those salaries are above the median, but not as much as I think they deserve.
If all the income in this jurisdiction was evenly divided amongst the working population, each person would make approximately $60,000 each year.
While an economy need not be zero sum, it will be zero sum if there is no change in behaviour. As a thought experiment, if we assume that teachers want to keep on teaching the way they always have, who do you want to take from in order to pay them more?
national (US) average teacher salary this year is estimated to be $68,469. zero states have an average over $100k, though NY is in the high 90s. do you just happen to live in NY and know a lot of late-career teachers then?
>You're taking it as a given that people perceive education to not be a demanding career, and I find that incredibly absurd.
No, I went a state school here in New York for a graduate degree in a program that included many teachers that were seeking to get their Master's degree (which is required to teach here in New York within 5 years of becoming a teacher). All of the teachers in the program were actively employed as teachers at the time of their enrollment. Most of them were barely literate. At least two I would classify as not literate. Not a single one could be characterized as "well educated". None were especially intelligent. They were all nice, well-meaning people - but they were certainly not the best and brightest.
>I don't know what world you're from, but I want to live where everyone "knows" that teaching is easy and lucrative.
I certainly didn't say it was lucrative to be a teacher (though it can be after many years in the system). Most of them were paid very poorly. But it is a stable career. And it is easy to keep your job - which doesn't mean it is an easy job to perform (it isn't).
> The fact is that the vast majority of people who go into "education" do it because it is the one of the least demanding career paths.
I'll never understand why the people who think teachers are glorified babysitters complain that those glorified babysitters aren't dramatically improving test scores. To say nothing, of course, of the abject, utter nonsense that statement is.
>I'll never understand why the people who think teachers are glorified babysitters complain that those glorified babysitters aren't dramatically improving test scores.
Perhaps if you had better teachers, you'd understand the difference between explaining a situation and complaining about it.
>What, specifically, do you mean by that?
I mean that any school that is turning out a school population where less than 20% of the students can read and write at grade level should spend 0% of their time talking about pronouns, cultural or social issues of any kind.
> I mean that any school that is turning out a school population where less than 20% of the students can read and write at grade level should spend 0% of their time talking about pronouns, cultural or social issues of any kind.
About half of US adults can barely read, or can't at all. Another 25-30% can't read at a "high school level", which is not a high bar (as regarded by strong readers, anyway). Many of these were educated well before anyone was talking about "pronouns" in school. Maybe it was the student smoke breaks that were the education-ruining distraction, back then.
Do you understand that in dozens or hundreds of schools *0%* of students can read at a high school level? Are New York State officials lying when they say they have to permanently lower standards because "this is the new normal"?
>Last year some schools posted shocking results — in Schenectady, no eighth grader who took the math test scored as proficient.
>The committee is resetting the lowest scores — called cut scores — for each achievement level on this spring's new ELA (English language arts) and math tests.
>“Right now we’re setting new cut scores for 2023. This is the baseline moving forward,” Perie said.
>Over the summer the committee will do the same for the U.S. history Regents exam, with the change taking effect in 2024.
Most of what causes low performance in schools is beyond the ability of schools to address. It's why we keep trying reforms and they don't do much—and when they appear to, it usually turns out, in the long run, to have been dumb luck or number-fudging, either intentional or because the people involved don't know how statistics work. "Bussing" is within the scope of schools (kinda...) and that worked—it's got little company, in the things-that-worked category—but practically everyone hated it, so that's out.
Properly fixing all this either means launching massive social programs that have little to do (directly) with schools and will likely take years to really bear fruit, in terms of educational outcomes—good luck with getting that done in the US—or letting schools do things we've decided (largely for good reasons) they aren't permitted to, like simply declining to serve a whole lot of kids.
(separately, yes, Covid was an absolute disaster for education and we'll be dealing with that damage for generations—that's just true, and I think much of society's kinda in denial about exactly how bad it was—but it certainly wasn't because teachers were, in general, kicking back and having a great, relaxing time for that couple of years; I also think there's a set of people who credit teachers with a much greater degree of influence on school policy than they actually have; further, I think these discussions can be difficult because the facts on the ground re: union power and such vary wildly across the country, though, I'm pretty sure, without strong and clear correlation to educational outcomes—my state has very weak teachers, on that front, but still has plenty of schools posting terrible outcomes)
As for the baseline-resetting, a lot of these measures are, for good reasons, concerned with relative achievement—achievement year-over-year, not absolute achievement, i.e. they're looking to measure growth—so it's a little hard for me to tell if that's a totally normal thing being spun as bad, or in-fact bad. Could be the latter and it's every bit as bad as you suggest, IDK, I've only a little familiarity with NY's achievement metrics. Your article leads me to believe it's the former, actually ("A scoring committee that reports to the Board of Regents said Monday that they must take into account the results of last year’s tests for students in grades three through eight to determine whether schools are showing improvement from year to year") despite framing the move as unusual/remarkable, though it's hard to be sure just from that source. School admin and state governments definitely aren't above screwing with those kinds of stats to make themselves look better, though—seen it happen, it's pathetic, and a dereliction of their duty to the kids, but it can be effective at achieving their ends of making it look like they're doing anything useful.
>Most of what causes low performance in schools is beyond the ability of schools to address. It's why we keep trying reforms and they don't do much—and when they appear to, it usually turns out, in the long run, to have been dumb luck or number-fudging, either intentional or because the people involved don't know how statistics work.
I disagree completely. I contend that the "reforms" we try don't do much because the people in charge of deciding what "reforms" are needed are incompetent, corrupt bureaucrats, lobbyists and union officials. The state of Mississippi, which is far poorer and spends far less than the ~$26,000 per student per year than New York spends has had far better educational outcomes (Despite the fact that Mississippi is one of the poorest states with a much higher level of poverty).
Another good example of how the standardized tests are incredibly poor indicators of actual success on a wholistic basis. These gains you pointed out actually disappear (in the naeb’s own data) by eighth grade — furthering the idea that the changes done my Mississippi are not, in fact, a miracle but another political effort to put a band-aid on a problem.
The article is paywalled so I can't read it, but I don't believe for a second that Mississippi has better educational outcomes than New York. Every single ranking I have seen puts Mississippi in the bottom 3 in terms of educational outcomes, with it usually coming dead last. New York at worst is somewhere in the top half of states, I usually see it in the top 10.
In terms of raw scores, Mississippi is slightly ahead of New York on the NAEP 4th grade math test, and substantially behind on all other tests. But NAEP claims that if you adjust the raw scores by the state's poverty and other disadvantage level, Mississippi would actually be ahead of NY.
>I don't believe for a second that Mississippi has better educational outcomes than New York.
Unfortunately objective reality is never a factor when it comes to zealots and true believers. The facts remains the facts - which is why zealots and true believers seek to abolish standardized testing and objective metrics wherever they are found.
Oh the irony. You are right the facts don't lie. From the sibling comment. "Mississippi is slightly better on the NAEP 4th grade math test, and substantially behind on all other tests."
Come on man, this is Mississippi. You really think it is doing better than New York in education? Only a zealot ranting about bureaucrats and unions could believe such nonsense.
The effects of Covid on primary education were almost entirely self inflicted. We could have and should have kept the schools open for full-time in person learning as was done in some other countries such as Sweden.
I'm not sure why you think being pedantic about explaining/complaining gets you out of anything. Acting like only lazy idiots go into teaching is rank nonsense, in either case.
> I mean that any school that is turning out a school population where less than 20% of the students can read and write at grade level should spend 0% of their time talking about pronouns
Why? Do you think it's irrelevant to basic language education to understand what a pronoun is? Do you think that maybe using "their" in your previous sentence is something no one should teach and is unimportant to writing? Do you think that students are failing at reading because they can properly use 'you' and 'I' in sentences?
"Sold a Story" paints a very compelling case for what went wrong with reading. I wouldn't be shocked to see some bleed in of that across to math, as well. In particular, decoding a word phonetically is a very "interact with the characters of the word" activity that many students weren't taught for many years. Literally teaching you to look around the word for context as a starting point for how to interact with a word. The same approach in math would reach similarly bad results, I'd wager.
Apparently the same sort of analysis with math isn't quite as straightforward. There is some evidence that pure constructivism is not successful with struggling math students. But unlike reading instruction where skilled readers never use the strategies taught in things like three-cueing (for "decoding", anyway), skilled mathematicians do approach novel problems in an exploratory manner.
Oddly, I'd expect skilled readers do use cueing. But, I'd expect that understanding and interpreting the different cues around requires experience. I also expect that it is never done "blind" on the word. For example, if you see the word "sake", cues let you know if it is one or two syllables. But the cues alone are almost certainly not usable for determining what word would appear somewhere. (edit: LLMs and an interpretation of them being only the connection of cues not withstanding.)
As we went over in the last discussion, "Sold a Story" can be a grueling podcast because of the ratio of information to cliff hangers.
The short version, and maybe the entirety of the information in the 15+ hours of podcast is:
Phonics works. While some kids can learn to read English without phonics, many kids can't, and there are periodic trends to teach reading without phonics, which causes a lot of problems when a school district follows one of those trends.
I'm not pushing it as a total answer. My assertion, though, is that reading is a fundamental part of math. We talk about them as if they are separate topics, but learning to "read" a math statement is a big part of learning how to use a math statement.
In very "phonetic" style. You aren't necessarily looking for the phonemes, of course, but you are looking for what the constituent parts mean. For example, if you see "Sigma x", you almost certainly pronounce that as "sum". And you don't necessarily do that from "cues" around the symbol/letter sigma, but by learning how to decode it at a symbolic level. Same would go for "F = ma", you learn to read that as a relation of the three symbols. And you can play with it, "if that is F, what is m?" You can go further in the exploration and start learning units attached to the symbols, such that you can put it together.
I had a friend who needed to upgrade his math in order to qualify for a particular college program and asked me to tutor him. Ultimately didn't take very long because he showed me a sheet of problems he was working on and I noticed right away that he was writing our all of his equations horizontally (ex. 1 + x = y = x = y - 1) like one would write a sentence. All I had to do to significantly increase his grade was show him how to work through equations vertically. When I asked why none of his teachers berated him for this he said he just did it like he was taught. Afterwards I phoned my mother and told her she was definitely correct in her assessment that the Catholic school I was sent to provided a much higher quality education than the public schools in the area.
Wait, so the idea that I've used for years, which is deriving meaning of a word based on context clues around how its used in a sentence, is a sham?
I have been doing this my whole life nearly, at this point. This hits me hard for some reason. And I tested in the top percentiles for reading too! (in 1997, 2004, and 2008)
EDIT: I may be completely misunderstanding this here. Are you saying using context for word pronunciation or for trying to derive meaning?
Not exactly. Most models of reading involve at least two steps: (i) decoding and (ii) assigning meaning. Decoding is translating written letters into blended sounds, then meaning is assigned.
There is very strong evidence that skilled, fast readers rarely rely on context for decoding, and conversely, that students who are only taught context-based strategies for decoding rather than phonics tend to struggle with reading, find it a chore, and have trouble reading quickly.
But for the next step, assigning meaning, context is valuable. Skilled readers do use a variety of context clues, including images, to infer meaning of words they have not encountered before or whose meaning is potentially ambiguous.
I'm definitely talking about the second example here (assigning meaning). I learned Phonics as a kid (Hooked On Phonics and all that), guess I never thought about it much as an adult.
Though I'm not the fastest reader, my retention is typically higher than average, even as I age, and I wonder if that has anything to do with it.
I mean, sorta? Odds are super high that you learned to decode a word into constituent parts. This includes syllables, letters, and phonemes. For some languages, this also includes gender, tense, etc.
The sham is that you can basically learn to read by learning to predict the missing word in a sentence all of the time. And that you can treat words in a phonetic alphabet as the same as words from a logographic set. To the point that many teachings flat out ignore the phonetic breakdown of how to decode a word. This is often hilariously displayed by having people not realize that English uses a phonetic symbol set.
To your edit, both? I used the example of "sake" earlier. Just decoding that word, you can see roughly how it can be pronounced. Knowing that I said I was "drinking sake" likely changed how you originally pronounced it. But if you don't know what sake is, then it will take a lot of context to fill in the meaning for you.
And a lot of learning is pitting words against expected meanings. Amelia Bedelia is a great set of books that go into this. Such that, yes, you almost certainly have to use context to really get the meaning of words, but you need to know how to decode words for a lot of that context to work out.
Not the meaning, but the pronunciation. Phonics is about teaching the sounds each letter, or letter combination ("th", "sh", "ch", etc.) produces and equipping students with the ability to sound out words they don't recognize. "whole word" approach is geared around making students memorize entire words, and hope that they can guess at how to pronounce unrecognized words based on context.
You're definitely still supposed to derive meaning from context and clues. But you should be able to pronounce the word without this context.
What is being discussed is using context clues to determine what a word is, in the sense of mapping the sequence of symbols on paper to a word. When you teach children to read, you want to use words that they already know.
Once you have the word, infering the meaning of it is a seperate skill.
I also seem to recall that most concerns over "teaching to the test" were themselves misguided. Is like being worried that you are training to the sport, for kids that are getting into sports.
Not that there isn't systemic cheating that can be done by some places. There can also be neglect of topics. That said, for the most part, if you can do the test, you have learned more of the topic than if you can't.
I think the original criticism surrounding "teaching to the test" was that students were being taught useless shortcuts to answers rather than actually learning the material. I've never personally felt that the teachers I had ever did it though.
One contrived example might be, "If you see "states' rights" anywhere in the question, then the answer is most likely going to be Daniel Webster, John Calhoun, or Henry Clay."
That seems to be a round-about criticism of the design of the individual tests. Ideally, the tests should be comprehensive enough that "gaming" the tests still requires mastering the material.
Yeah, but again, this isn't as damning as it sounds. Teaching kids to play sports, you definitely start with the "stand out there and watch the ball in motion." Ideally, you want them to engage with the sport, but just getting them there with the gear is a big part of it.
I think it's pretty damning, actually. Spending most of your time circumventing the test and rote repetition undoes any learning of the real subject.
I taught AP Microeconomics this past year. About a third of my time was spent teaching about different ways that the AP grading standards are picky and ways to exploit the test, because this is what is most important for the outcome they're worried about-- scoring a 5 on the exam. In turn, it didn't leave a lot of time for deeper discussions, simulations, etc, engaging with microeconomics.
How my AP Econ (Macro+Micro) teacher tackled that was spend the majority of the the time teaching the Samuelson and Mankiw books and then spend 1 month having everyone practice College Board style tests.
Tbf, in our HS AP Econ was gatekept for 12th graders, and most of us had at least 6-7 AP tests done already so we had experience with the exams already.
I had mostly seniors with lots of AP experience too.
AP Macro+Micro can work a lot better, because there's a few weeks of overlapping material. So it's the difference between fitting 45 hours of instructional material into 50 hours vs. fitting 80-85 into 100.
The tight fit annoyed me, as did the strictly graded nature of the course.
Two areas of particular annoyance:
- I had a cohort of students who had entirely been through AP Calc, but fitting into the explanations expected for HS meant making somewhat bogus algebra based explanations (the slope of this line is double the other one, just because!!). A student who gave a calc-based explanation on the test would probably not get the points (frankly, a lot of the readers would not understand it).
- About a third of the students had founded a "Game Theory" club on their own and were off in the weeds exploring game theory. I'd have loved to have taken a couple extra classes on the topic since they were already so interested and engaged, but I had no margin. I was forced to give the very simple 2 person payoff matrix form and leave the topic there. Again, I spent more time encouraging my students to not think too fancy.
This low key sounds like the environment in my high school XD.
> had a cohort of students who had entirely been through AP Calc, but fitting into the explanations expected for HS meant making somewhat bogus algebra based explanations
Yep. I remember that. We had the same problem as well in our class so our teacher spent that month prior to the exams teaching us Econ the Wrong/College Board Way.
> I was forced to give the very simple 2 person payoff matrix form and leave the topic there
Yep, I remember that too. A bunch of us were CS/Applied Math bound so we ended up expanding further on Optimization Theory and Game Theory via competitive math exams or working with our supportive AP Calc and E&M teachers who taught us how to hone knowledge in both concepts using math.
Odds are high we are talking past each other. Teaching the rules of the game is the same as teaching grading rubrics in many ways. And yes, learning the nature of rubrics is very important for students to know.
Now, can you devolve to completely degenerate states where they are only playing the "meta topic" and not learning the topic? I mean, yeah? I'd wager the folks that can complete the meta topic still know more than the folks that can't even do that. You can also devolve into stagnation by thinking you can reduce all learning to "first principals." Such that I just don't see that as damning on its own.
Back to my sports comparison, the technicalities and fundamentals of a sport are important. But you also do well to teach kids to get out there and play the game, even with loose rule enforcement and heavy help. Bumpers in a bowling match, as it were.
> Teaching the rules of the game is the same as teaching grading rubrics in many ways.
I'm a big fan of teaching rubrics and even test-taking skills.
But that's a far different thing from eviscerating your subject in order to teach points tests are likely to hit in isolation, which is happening a whole lot, especially when teachers are evaluated heavily on test outcomes.
Right, this is why I'm guessing we are talking past each other. I fully believe some places got degenerate and did it poorly. I'm not convinced every "teaching to the test" case our there is that, though. Often folks would whine about teaching to the tests for teaching how tests are scored.
I'd love to see a large study on this. And now that I have kids in schools, I'm very interested in ways I can help them learn. At the same time I also want them to do well with grades. Knowing that is often two separate things.
For an example of how it can go wrong: I know for a fact that the competitive math class I teach makes a couple of standardized test measures go down-- especially "procedural knowledge". I know this because I've compared changes in performance to similar control students not taking the courses.
I also know that it has a big positive impact on performance overall. And our students do pretty well in comp and a lot reach state championships.
If I were strictly evaluated on standardized test outcomes, I would be asked to figure out how to pull those procedural knowledge scores up.
Right, and I am not really arguing against you on this. For an example of places where not teaching to the test can go wrong, though, I need only look at some extended family that were only taught evolution, as it would be on some tests.
Anecdotes being what they are, I'm interested in knowing if there is a large study on this. I'm also very open to thoughts on how to fix things. Knowing that it typically comes around to better tests...
Edit: To be clear, my evolution example was supposed to be that they were only taught it because it would be on the tests. Not that they were only taught evolution.
I'm not sure what "this" is, though. The question isn't well-posed, so I'm not sure what you would study.
Absolutely there are many public school teachers that report that they are spending a lot of time teaching "to the test" rather than what they consider important. And this is a case of misaligned incentives. Overall mastery is important for the student's outcome going forward; the outcome of this, say, 5th grade standardized test doesn't affect their educational trajectory at all.
But the outcome of that test is very important to the school's perception and the teacher's career.
We'd all love better tests that really measure what we're trying to inculcate in students. But we also want tests that are easy to grade and very quantitative, which is in opposition to the other goal.
"This" would be how many places are harmed by "teaching to the tests."
For example, you are asserting that "there are many public school teachers that report that they are spending a lot of time.." but... where is this tabulated? Are there biases mitigated in the self reporting side of what you are talking about?
I don't want to be dismissive of the idea that it is harmful. I have seen very little compelling evidence that it is as harmful as it is asserted. Both as a student and as a parent. Is akin to employees that are upset about long term compromises for short term gain. Yes, it happens. All too often, short term survival is the best thing for long term survival. (With the ack that it is until it isn't.)
Which is why I would love to see data and studies on this. Indeed, if "teaching to the test" is the concern, how do I then interpret declining test scores? Failing to teach either to the test or the subject?
How would one tabulate this or conduct such a study? Usually the main outcome measure you're looking at is something like the test.
> if "teaching to the test" is the concern, how do I then interpret declining test scores?
Exactly what you mentioned before and dismissed: short term gain is not necessarily long term gain.
There's not enough high quality educational research. But one area we have strong research is on what kinds of learning are durable. The National Training Laboratory Institute has done a whole lot of research on what results in retention at 6 months, and the things you do for immediate test performance (rote practice, mnemonics, tricks to answer specific subject-specific questions, etc) are the least durable things.
Test focused classrooms spend a whole lot of time on this stuff, and less time on things that work to create durable understanding (think-pair-share, low intensity practice built around spaced repetition, mastery-based methods, etc).
Note that I am not a career teacher. I am a retired entrepreneur who now happens to teach. I have extraordinary programs that get extraordinary results-- despite being a small school, we're routinely having multiple students reaching state level championships in things I teach. Under test-focused pressure I could not achieve these things. Similarly, if I was spending a huge portion of my energy on classroom management and behavioral norms, I couldn't do them either.
(Of course, on most test measures my students do pretty well, too).
Indeed, I've written here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36423142 (and in the grandchild comment) about my experience teaching a very heavily test-focused course. I know I could have given my students a better and more durable knowledge of economics with less of the test-focused pressure.
My assertion, then, would be to point that "teaching to the tests" concerns started and continued through a time that tests scores have decreased. If they really are teaching to the tests, they are doing a bad job at that, as well. :D
I didn't dismiss the idea that short term gain can be a long term loss. I question if that is a panacea of a claim. Specifically, all too often, I see it pushed by fellow programmers when they are pushing for a harder solution and have stalled out on it. I have been said programmer doing that, before. It is best exemplified in the nonsense talk people have about how "worse is better." Antifragility appeals to me. Total ordering of ideas, required for "worse is better," do not.
Worse, I've seen students that did a lot of these supposed better methods fall flat on their faces when in a new environment. And then it falls back to an obnoxious "true scotsman" debate about how they must not have been in these superior settings, as otherwise they would have succeeded.
To that end, I would challenge that you could have really given them more durable knowledge of anything, right off. If only because I have yet to see anyone succeed at giving durable knowledge of anything that wasn't flat facts. I'd love to be shown how that is wrong, so please don't let my skepticism keep you from doing what you do. I'll go further and say that it is very likely that my skepticism is unhealthy at some levels.
And again, I am interested in seeing more exploration of all of these ideas. As a parent, I'd love for my kids to get good at all they want to do. Rote practice and simple following of recipes and such is far better at that than it often gets stated. (And a big "f you" to "sight words." I can't believe how misguided that is and how it set back one of my kids in reading.)
> would be to point that "teaching to the tests" concerns started and continued through a time that tests scores have decreased
This is false. The concerns of teaching to the tests, from my memory, peaked around 2005. No Child Left Behind was a major driver of these concerns, passed in 2001. Test scores peaked in 2012. This is exactly what you would expect if "teaching to the test" yielded a short term benefit but longer term harms, and was increasing during this interval.
> Worse, I've seen students that did a lot of these supposed better methods fall flat on their faces when in a new environment.
NTL did pretty simple experiments: teach something various ways, and see what ones resulted in best performance 6mos and 12mos later.
Having students themselves pair off, teach, and explain ideas is the most durable thing we know. It requires active engagement with the material in order to reformulate it to help someone else through understanding. It requires being able to do this while multitasking and attending to social cues. And it can be a powerful motivator for students to fully understand before undertaking explanation.
> (And a big "f you" to "sight words."
I can't figure out what you're saying. "sight words" are a classic example of a hyper-focused rote memorization practice.
I'm not saying rote is worthless. From my perspective, a perfect math class equally emphasizes intuition, rote practice, and rigorous explanation. What we tend to get, instead, is that once a student falls at all behind, they get 80+% rote practice. Worse, this practice is often subtly faulty and on topics that the student doesn't have the higher level explanations necessary to monitor their own performance.
Teaching to the tests never stopped being a concern from the circles I can remember. No Child Left Behind is an interesting fence post on this, though. "Sold a Story" was rather effective at showing the major opposition to all things Bush in that legislation and how it backfired heavily for reading. As so many opponents of that act railed against how it was pushing for reading to be tested, and how we are still struggling from that.
That said, I do not have hard data here. Happy to be shown I was wrong that that peaked about that time.
For teaching/learning, I confess I'm more partial to https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/getting-it-wrong/. I'm curious to know more on studies like this, so I'll be looking up some of the NTL studies you are referencing. Would be delighted if you have a good reference on them.
My "f you" to sight words is just hearkening back to the "Sold a Story" thing. So many of the "best practices" for teaching reading from teachers centered around "sight words" and such. Which, I suppose you can frame that to teaching to a test. But I think it is more teaching the wrong things. And flat out not teaching any technique to reading.
Which, that last is fully to your point. I don't want techniques ignored or passed over. So if there is large scale evidence that that is happening, I'm very interested in the evidence.
> That said, I do not have hard data here. Happy to be shown I was wrong that that peaked about that time.
I'm consistently confused about what you're saying. Peaked during what time? You've said it peaked -after- test scores started declining. I said it peaked before tests started declining in 2012.
I have no problem with hard tests given to students as a learning tool, which is what your article advocates for. Indeed, I use difficult pre-tests a lot, and my target % correct on tests that I give to students is a 60% average, because this gives me the most statistical power to measure knowledge and students performance. Because a very large proportion of my students are above 80% in national norms, giving them a test that they'll miss 40% of available points is a quite difficult one.
I am not a fan of tests used to measure educators: not because measuring educators isn't useful, but because I believe it incentivizes the wrong behaviors from educators. I consider myself fortunate to not be managed in this way. The time when I got close to this (teaching an AP class) is an experience that I don't really care to repeat, even though my students did well and and my class was one of the most popular at the school. I felt like I did not have enough freedom to do well (discussed above).
I don't actually see a defined peak in that trend chart. Such that I'm not clear what point that is making, all told. Though, I also didn't claim that worries on "teaching to the test" had peaked. That is your claim. If it did indeed peak during that timeframe, I'd be game to see explorations of that. If the linked chart is all we have, that looks more like noise and hints that the regional variation in how hot of a topic it is dominates. Which could explain why you noticed it drop off in your circles, but I did not.
I also fully suspect we would be in more violent agreement on these topics than this thread looks. :D I also do not like scoring teachers in that way, necessarily. I don't have a good alternative, but I fully agree that it screws up incentives and is the direct reason we get the degenerate cases. Cheating, in particular, being far worse than teaching to the test.
You claimed they -started during declining test scores-: "My assertion, then, would be to point that "teaching to the tests" concerns started and continued through a time that tests scores have decrease"
Meanwhile, they clearly were very big from 2001-2005 (and according to linked chart, have decreased in intensity since that time). And test scores started to decline around 2012. That is why I mentioned that they had peaked around 2005, because that was well before the period of declining test scores.
Most of the time I hear folks talking about "teaching to the tests" they are upset that they are just getting kids so that they can pass the tests. Indeed, even one of your complaints was that you had to compromise your teaching so that they could score better. My point is that if that is the concern, they are failing even at that. Test scores are going down, such that most of the arguments that they learned the tests, but not life skills, are moot. They aren't even passing the tests.
That is, I didn't mean to claim that they simply started during declining scores. I meant more that the scores are declining now. If the concern is that they are "teaching to the tests", my bigger concern is why are they so bad at that, even?
For timing, the assessments seem to be that they have been declining steadily since 2012. If your claim is that the "teach to the tests peaked in 200x" and that that is why tests are failing, that should have started reversing with kids this year? (I assume the assertion is there would be a 7ish year lag on kindergarten kids getting to age 13, to be reflected in this story. Obviously not a full step function, but I don't have a solid model on that. Love it if you have one.)
To that end, my assertion would be that if they were at least able to pass the tests, that would still be an improvement over where we seem to be. Test scores are falling. Why? It can't be that teachers are just teaching to the tests. Or, rather, if it is, they are doing a bad job at that, even.
I'm assuming the idea is that the kids are passing lower level tests better, but failing later tests? I'll take a quick dive on some of that later, to see if that hypothesis holds up.
> If the concern is that they are "teaching to the tests", my bigger concern is why are they so bad at that, even?
Again, I think purely teaching to the tests is short term gains for long term losses.
To take my example: I expect my students are going to be mostly 4's and 5's on the AP Microeconomics exam (this is good). But if I could have taught them why the functions looked the way they did, they'd have a better understanding of microeconomics. This would have been a dangerous thing to actually teach them, because if they used this knowledge on the test, there's no guarantee a pair of readers would understand it and give them the point. Better to dumb it down and teach the graph-based and algebra-based reasoning rather than the calculus-based reasoning of how it actually works, even though my students were capable of it.
I got to teach students stuff that they'll have to unlearn for deeper study, but maximized their short term performance. I'm totally willing to do this because it is in the students' interest: they really want a "5" on that exam to prove their capability to colleges and to skip a course. But if the test results weren't important to the students (like most of these standardized tests) but were important to -me-, that would be a terrible conflict of interest.
> I'm assuming the idea is that the kids are passing lower level tests better, but failing later tests?
4th grade scores kept climbing longer and have been flat for the past 7-8 years even as 7th grade scores have slowly slid downwards.
The problem is that there are plenty of valuable skills that are difficult to test in a standardized way. Most standardized test questions focus on Bloom levels 1-3 (remember, understand, apply) and struggle to test higher order skills (analyze, evaluate, create). Those questions are harder to write, usually take much longer for students to answer, and it's hard to format them such that they can be graded in a standardized manner (e.g., how do you test the skills ability to "create", to generate new ideas, to plan, to design, using a multiple choice question?)
Placing a heavy emphasis on teaching to standardized tests means that teachers spend less time fostering higher order thinking skills.
But you need to master the lower order skills before you can master the higher order skills. If someone is unable to evaluate a multi-digit sum, they'll be unable to devise creative solutions that use multi-digit sums.
Of course, I'm not saying that the lower order skills are not important -- as you say, they're foundational. And I'm not even saying that it's a bad idea to test lower order skills. But they're not the only important thing, and "teaching to the test" tends to treat them like they are and prioritize them over critical thinking, synthesis, and creative skills.
>how do you test the skills ability to "create", to generate new ideas, to plan, to design, using a multiple choice question?
The real answer to this is "don't use multiple choice questions", but that would require significant investment in actually properly grading the outputs. One of course could say that then you're going to teach to criteria (IE, what are the evaluators looking for?) but that may or may not be a bad thing, depending on how its handled.
There's a clue later on in the article, when it describes reading for fun almost every day is also lower than previous years.
The goal of school is not for students to learn what The Pearl by Hemingway is about. The goal is for students to learn "to read"— ie, learn what to skim, what to pay attention to, what's being said between lines, how literary devices are used, how to piece different layers of ideas from a stream of words, etc. And importantly, to enjoy it at least to some degree, since it's a healthy habit
Teaching the test in this context would be similar to teaching students to write some "top 20" algorithms, and recite their time complexities, knowing at least some of them will be on the test. It's definitely easier than teaching students the parts that make up a programming language, what big-O notation actually means, and the sort of generalized knowledge that will not only allow them to write and analyze _any_ program, but to see the beauty in programming and maybe even inspire a few to program for fun.
This view of school as some sort of "training camp" for a test, is a terrible manifestation of focusing on the metric to the detriment of focusing on the goal.
Answers like this worry me, because it implies you believe that general principles can be taught without teaching basic facts or learning specific examples. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think it's generally agreed upon that it's easiest to learn a specific example first, then use that as a jumping off point to take on the more daunting task of learning general principles.
Programming languages are a great example of this -- in an introductory programming class, you're going to learn to create programs in a specific language, using all the constructs necessary to do so. And after you have some experience and mastery with that language, you have something to compare and contrast other languages against. And it's that mastery that actually inspires (more than) a few to program for fun.
I have a buddy who managed to pass his engineer PE without studying and is generally very good at all math and logic based problems without really having to "learn the test". What he excels at though is breaking down a problem and deriving the solution rather than pattern matching. It isn't a very good skill for a timed test, but it is a very good skill in real life in engineering and pretty much everything else. Teaching the test takes away the learning of this valuable skill to have.
If they passed the PE Exam, they are good at testing. They may also be good at other things, but that is the measuring problem, in a nutshell. How do you build a measuring mechanism that measures what you care about, and not only what it is good at measuring?
The best example of this is a car's speedometer. It doesn't actually measure how fast the car is going. Mainly because that is a surprisingly hard thing to do. Instead, it measures something that is easy to measure and converts to what we care about. Specifically, how fast are the tires rotating?
Which is all to say, hard problem space. I have no doubt there are degenerate cases out there. My assertion is that is largely in the noise, at the moment. Happy (well, mayhap that isn't the correct word, but interested?) to be shown data that shows otherwise.
Related skills that are useful outside the limited form the standardized test takes.
To take a practical example, if you wanted to get a group of kids to get best high marks in my high-school CS final exams, it'd been very effective to have them drill a a few standard sorting algorithms and a pile of formal definitions, so they are certain to be able to perfectly reproduce them from memory when prompted. But I'm fairly sure the few extra weeks of messing around with graph algorithms, despite that not being material relevant for the exams, probably were more useful for everyone in the class despite someone typoing a heapsort or not remembering how UTF-8 bit encoding works under pressure and loosing some points on that.
I think teaching the test is common everywhere. I remember the same thing for my GCSEs and A levels (UK pre-university qualifications) growing up, and my Russian partner says it was the same for them in school.
For us, the teachers would almost tell us with 100% certainty what was going to be on the test, and what keywords/phrases to include to boost your marks. They also ran us through past papers from previous years, and lo and behold, we had the exact same questions, just worded slightly differently.
I’m in basically the first cohort to get fully fledged (web browsing, YouTube, social media, games, porn) unmonitored smartphone access at those ages and I think it did not mess me up much if at all. I was living in isolated suburbia so it’s not like playing outside was an option anyway.
If those are a problem, it’s more likely to be from getting access at a younger age IMO. I have a theory that it’s primarily the increasing use of video as a medium that is damaging. Not only does video prevent building literacy skills, it also tends to be used to deliver content that leads to parasocial relationships and celebrity worship which is frankly concerning IME.
I know we're talking about kids here, but as an adult, I'm not a video learner. I need written material (with good examples, usually) to really learn something. I need to read to understand and then apply and be able to check what I'm doing against a crop of known good implementations.
The trend in learning, like Frontend Masters, while amazing for what it is, its all video, and I'm finding people are putting out more and more video to teach topics, and less and less written works to teach stuff, and I'm getting more and more frustrated at this, as it takes me longer to digest videos than written materials.
I don't know how anyone learns to become a developer from just watching videos and doing exercises, my pace would be that of a snail.
And yes, I get that everyone learns differently, but us who learn best from reading are being left out in the cold.
Oh, completely agree. Same with podcasts honestly. I can consume the content way faster, search and skim more easily, determine relevancy in a flash with text vs video. It’s why I have no interest in TikTok and never developed the YouTube addiction that seems so common among tweens.
Bringing it back to kids, I realized you could draw some parallels to TV. The thing about TV is that you had much fewer choices in what to watch and it was harder to “hide” from your parents compared to smartphone videos - if your parents thought something was stupid they could just overhear it and make you turn it off more easily than the smartphone equivalent. Also, with TV the branding is usually not done on the e-celeb/individual level, it’s more show-based branding, so it’s a little less tilted towards parasocial content.
There are a few things driving this trend towards video I think, one is that a lot of consumers now are less literate/educated than would be on the internet in the past, as well as younger with poorer reading skills - video has relatively more demand vs text. The other is that videos are easier to monetize and from what I understand have higher paying ads.
I'd also argue to some degree, that video is easier to produce well vs the written word. Its a lot harder to become a block buster author than it is to become a block buster video feed producer, in my observation.
You're right the continuing trend of less and less "serious" readers continues unabated as it has for decades
This has been an on-going (escalating) trend for a while; over 20 years ago the short-lived sketch show Bruiser already did a parody of it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qb_dIsnDJGk
And it pretty much matches my experience in school at the time. You could also see this with school books, where the older books were "serious" and the newer ones "fun".
I also find it rather funny that the "Sold a Story: How Teaching Kids to Read Went So Wrong"[1] that was mentioned in another thread is only available as a podcast, and isn't a written story (there's a transcript, but it's very hard to follow).
I'm reading the transcripts of this, and I do find it interesting. Linear presentation of transcripts makes it hard to follow sometimes but these are good enough that I was able to follow mostly without issue. I think, to be completely honest, this right here is the summary of the problem with education in the United States:
>Who thinks about that? I don’t know how to teach a child how to read, so I just assumed that the children I sent to school would come back to me literate. Cause that’s what school does, right?
Parents, even well meaning ones, just not digging into what it is there kids are doing in the classrooms, not really investing in learning on a high level how the kids are learning and its effectiveness.
If more parents cared about that, I think we'd have way better schools on the whole
> I was living in isolated suburbia so it’s not like playing outside was an option anyway.
Obviously not really addressing your childhood in particular, but this is insane to me. Isn’t playing outside the whole point of moving to the suburbs? I grew up in Brooklyn and we played outside all day. I have a hard time seeing how more space, more grass, and less traffic makes that not really an option. Maybe this is a generational thing?
I think it’s a generational thing for sure. I guess when I say suburbia I mean something kind of in between culdesac master-planned communities (which are easier to play in) and an actual urban environment. There are too many roads with too many cars, and it’s not the 70s anymore, so proportionately fewer houses have kids at all, and if they do they’re not likely to be your school mates. Plus, stranger danger came and changed everything. I’m not saying no teenagers run around outside anymore but among middle class teens it’s a lot less common than it was - life is more like being shuttled to an fro extracurriculars or friends’ places by your parents’ car.
I think you should provide your age as a reference. As smartphones have proliferated, companies have gotten better at making their products more addictive. So even if you had unfettered smartphone access at 13, you probably weren't watching TikTok.
I’m 27. 12 years old when the iPhone 3G came out (15 years ago… doesn’t that make you feel old?). No TikTok. But YouTube did have a recommendation engine, and Facebook was a thing.
I am a few years older than you and also had unlimited access to the internet. The internet back in 2005 - 2013 was nothing like it is today. It was far less addictive, it was more anonymous, and most of your friends weren't addicted to it as much.
If we take facebook for example. We did have it when I was in high school but it was far less addictive. It was invite-only, no dark patterns, no ads, no games, no suggested posts, no celebrities, no "influencers", no political campaigns, no activism, no clickbait articles to create outrage. There was also no family member on it and only your "real" friends would see your posts. When we posted something stupid, we knew that only our classmates and close friends would read it, not our parents/teachers/boss/journalists/neighbor/etc.
I've seen my younger cousin pull up his phone for a dopamine hit during the 17 seconds he waits for his video game loading screen to finish. It just isn't the same as it was 20 years ago. The algorithms are crazy and extremely effective, and it's all so accessible.
And of course it's not just kids, it's everyone. But kids are the only humans that are regularly and uniformly tested for aptitude with public results we can all look at and discuss. Just for a random statistic to support this assertion, over 50% of US adults haven't read a single book in the past 12 months. Something that would have been unthinkable in the 1990s.
I recall protesting to my parents by asking if they got shit from their own for being glued to the tv as kids but they also explained it was different back then.
I mean look, it very well may be different now. I don’t have kids and have no expertise on any science of child rearing. But “it isn’t the same as it was 20 years ago” is also something I heard 20 years ago.
Are you watching TV when you have a free thirty seconds at the urinal? Waiting for the elevator for a minute? The red light? Any waking moment at all with the TV in front of you? It was certainly not ideal then given how addictive marketing on these screens has always been, but its even worse now in terms of attention span.
Reading is more than interpreting simple letters, words, sentences or even paragraphs. It is just as much about following an argument, retaining information from reading, and being critical of the information in parallel. There is very little written content of sufficient length to practice such skills online, especially content to which children and teens would be exposed.
People have always taken the path of least resistance. Radio, TV, and now the internet has gradually shifted the path of least resistance away from reading.
Not to mention the constant distractions one is constantly bombarded with even if one where to try. Popup ads, newsletter signups, inline gifs and memes, notifications, etc. Heck, even Wikipedia breaks up the text with constant hyperlinks which break up the linearity of the page.
Get yourself a job at one of the social media giants, or one of the ad tech companies and see the investments they make into engagement and addicting young people to their apps and devices. It’s appalling. Not many kids are reading articles on the internet, they’re consuming TikTok for hours. The newfangled Internet thing can be a blessing and a curse, and it can curse some more than others.
This is an incredibly myopic view, the "internet" is now composed of the most psychologically addicting programs known to man, and no one is safe. It's so powerful it's having meaningful negative impact on our democracy and meaureable impact on childrens' mental health.
It would be like if we completely deregulated all gambling and allowed extremely perverted betting systems and advertising all around encouraging addiction.
Actually we are going in that direction with all the sports betting bullshit too.
The scores have increased since the 70s until a peak in 2012. Social media may play a role, but "computer games in general" have existed for decades, and been blamed for decades, and in most of those decades test scores have improved. Leave blaming "computer games" to the 90s.
Opiates have existed since ancient times so fentanyl is not a problem.
Potency and availability matter. I've heard of multiple cases of kids soiling themselves rather than stop playing a game. I never heard of that growing up surrounded with video games.
Games have changed significantly though. I feel like the PS4 in 2013 was the first games console to make online gaming widespread. Playing a self contained game by yourself or in person with friends is a very different experience to loot boxes, IAP’s, and games designed to make you play more and more. Maybe it’s not impactful but I don’t think you can dismiss it as easily as you have.
Agreed, but I would argue that the PS3/Xbox 360 generation was the first where the majority of console owners played online. I was an adolescent/teenager at the time and it was almost a guarantee that any other boys in my class had one of those consoles and played online. Almost invariably first person shooters.
Very different from today's pay-to-win manipulative Skinner Boxes, but probably not very healthy. Living someplace where I couldn't physically hang out with other kids easily after school (thanks, car culture) it probably helped me build better social skills. But at the cost of my attention span and physical social skills.
It certainly makes me wonder what skill tradeoffs today's video game kids are making.
How much of this is continuous decline and how much is sudden post-Covid decline? From the graphs it looks like a pretty sudden decline, and therefore not a systemic issue.
it shows scores have been in decline for over 10 years before a sharp covid related decline. And worse is that scores are now back to where they were in the early 70s. So despite the massive increase in spending and in theory the fact that all the spending dedicating to researching how to improve education, results are the same.
Salaries for educators isn't great, there were strikes right up until the pandemic started. Pay hasn't increased since then; whatever the money is being spent on it's not teachers. My first thought was maybe "mohr teachers" but I believe there's a shortage, they can't hire more math or science teachers here in western MA.
It has me wondering where this money is actually being spent!
> I believe there's a shortage, they can't hire more math or science teachers here in western MA.
This is probably a symptom of, amongst other things, unsatisfactory salaries over generational time-periods; people might simply don't grow up wishing to be a teacher. I think this cultural phenomenon struck me when I watched Breaking Bad, where Walter being a high-school teacher is often presented as proof that he "failed", something undesirable and to be ashamed of.
I'm from outside the USA and over here being a teacher is considered a pretty good gig— if you're in a private school because you can earn good money. If you're in a public school because you get access to state benefits; better free health-care, retirement benefits, etc, with the largest (albeit a pretty controversial one too) union in Latin America [1] standing by you.
My perspective as an American with school teachers in my family: Being a teacher is a coveted job in America, it offers a lot of flexibility and fulfillment. Salaries are low because there's a surplus of young people who want to teach. Getting a teaching position at a nice school is very competitive, but bad schools always need new teachers because the unruly kids chase new teachers away (the root cause of schools being bad is usually bad parenting.) It is common for newly minted teachers to take jobs at bad schools in the hopes of getting enough experience to later get a job at a good school, but most wash out before they get that far. Others try to get in "the back way" by working as substitute teachers for many years to accumulate experience and get a good teaching job; the poor and irregular pay for substitute teachers makes this possibly an even worse strategy, but a lot of people still try it because these jobs are desired.
What are the numbers, adjusted for inflation and taking into account a rising population of students, in terms of spending on education? Where did that money go exactly, was it spent on teacher salaries or was it spent on administrative overhead and "services" unrelated to the business of actually teaching? How evenly is that spread?
Those all seem like important questions to ask and answer before we talk about an alleged "massive increase in spending" around education.
YouTube, Fortnite, cell phones. People worried about MTV rotting the brain back in the day but we really are frying attention spans with an arms race of color, editing, explosions, excitement, and fast movement. I’m willing to bet almost anything home reading is down.
School has not caught up to other more engaging temptations. A question is, should it.
> I’m willing to bet almost anything home reading is down.
Your implication is that children, famous for their love of texting rather than calling, are reading less than a generation of tv watching phone callers?
Don’t discount the idea that children are simply better at reading digital content and these tests are testing analogue reading skills.
Keep in mind we just invented the machine that takes complex abstract writing and makes it easy to digest (and takes simple thoughts and expands them into rich texts).
I think it's pretty clear that the critical reading skills required to handle the information density in a tiktok caption or the average message between 15 year olds is a little different than what we're aiming for in an educational setting.
Language informs thought, in a very concrete way. If I can't write it, or read it, I can't think it (to some degree). We abandon formal reading and writing educational standards at the risk of handicapping a generation of young people with poor cognitive scaffolding.
All the Covid explanation folks should try this: take away phones and computer for six months and have your kids read (old!) fiction books and good (challenging) non-fiction. Limit TV to a few approved shows/movies as a rare treat.
I bet you ‘ll be surprised.
Texting with your peers (people at roughly the same reading level as you) won't teach you much compared to reading increasingly challenging books written by adults who actually know what they're doing with words.
It's not about the informational "nonfiction" content of the books, we're talking about teaching kids how to use language. Expanding people's vocabulary and awareness of all the language has to offer so that more cultural and informative works might become accessible to them. If you're not challenging yourself, you're not learning.
Sure, but keep in mind, we just invented the machine that takes hard-to-digest content and transforms it into something easy to understand.
It's challenging to read the original classics in Greek (and for a while, doing so was considered the epitome of linguistic education), but we have all agreed that it's not worth it given the realities of the modern world.
Take agape for example. Understanding the various ways in which that was used to express 'love' is a masterclass in the history of human emotional development, but I can also read Shakespeare (which is at least in English, sort of), or watch Her (which is a beautiful and compelling film) and arguable have a better understanding of how love is expressed in modernity.
I think "reading" is usually shorthand for reading material that is intellectually and/or grammatically/vocabularily challenging. In short, something that can expand your ability to understand and communicate ideas.
I don't think it hurts or kids should stop doing it but I don't think reading text messages from your peers is going to do that.
Imagine how much easier it would be to answer that question if there was NAEP data from 2016, or if there was post-2012 data for the 17-year-old group.
I spent my summers at that age reading lots (probably a book per week) and spending 6 or more hours a day learning guitar and listening to the same handful of CD’s. If not doing those things I was out with my friends playing a sport in the street. I imagine if I was that age now I would be spending a huge amount of time on TikTok and the remainder on Netflix. I fall into the same traps as an adult with responsibilities despite wanting to spend more time reading, playing guitar, and hanging with my friends.
Yet another anecdote here but I have an 8 year old that had a "covid kindergarten" as her teachers call it.
She's now about to finish 2nd grade and is doing a summer reading program with her school because she's in the ~40% percent of her grade that are behind state standards. As her parent, I almost feel helpless here. I want her to enjoy reading. I try not to push her "too" hard at home to the point where it's a constant fight.
One thing that helped me as a kid was that my dad made time for us both to sit down and write a free form "story" (really a big paragraph) as kids. It could be on any topic but sometimes we'd all agree to write on the same topic if we were having trouble starting.
My siblings, father, and I would all write one over half an hour, and then read them to each other and discuss them.
I did fight it plenty, but in the end it was fun and helped make reading and writing more of a natural thing for me.
At this rate, if two trains depart their depot at the same time, one leaving Wichita eastbound at 45 mph and the other departing St. Louis westbound at 58 mph, we may never know where they are going to meet, let alone how long it will take them to get there.
Teaching philosophy in the US is deeply flawed. Memorization has been deemphasized and "understanding" is being promoted. Ask the proponents of "understanding" and "critical thinking" based education to explain what the terms actually mean.
I have a simple definition of "understanding".
Understanding is when you've developed an accurate, predictive, mental model for some topic.
It's much easier to develop an accurate mental model when you memorize all the components of some topic.
I think memorization is deemphasized because memorization is painful and benefits from having an invested family that will encourage and even force the student to practice.
As a parent with a child in public grade school, the whole rote memorization of facts vs trying to help him understand and think isn't the real problem.
The thing that makes him an A/B student (and sometimes almost C) instead of a straight A student is that my ability to help him is virtually nil because all his tests, classwork and even homework are done electronically. I never get to see an actual graded copy of anything that would tell me exactly where he is struggling. Instead, I'm supposed to trust that he is getting adequate guidance from his teacher when they review classwork but given a classroom size of 20+ students I have serious doubts that that is actually happening.
I hate to say it - but I really am coming around to the idea that having computers in classrooms and digitization of tests, classwork and homework is actually a hindrance to learning because of the missing feedback loop. :-/
Why are you less able to ask to see the electronic version than the paper version? I don't think kids are eagerly sharing their graded papers with their parents otherwise.
In most cases, it is a result of the teacher immediately "closing" the assignment/test after it has been submitted and you are only then able to see the final score.
For the couple of teachers that actually use canvas properly, I am actually able to see his answers and see which ones he missed and work with him to help him better understand.
In such a situation, a (possibly poor) mitigation would be to ask your child to go through practice standardized tests (e.g. 10th grade PSAT, SAT, ACT) earlier to see which areas they might need help with.
At least you’d have a (little) bit more visibility into possible areas to work on with your child in the future instead of the black box that you are both currently facing.
I have fond memories of my calculus teacher being confused when she realized everybody had been made to memorize basic trig identities in the previous grade but were never taught their very basic and intuitive relationship and derivation from the Pythagorean theorem.
A great shocked pikachu moment for the class to realize, collectively, that they were all being dumbasses in their empty understanding of things.
I've been a librarian for 20 years and have watched the decline of children's literacy firsthand. Here's my random thoughts:
1) No Child Left Behind really siloed the schools: Back in the early 2000s, partnering with schools for literacy was incredibly easy: teachers would walk kids over to the library and we'd work together to promote summer reading. Now talking to administration is like talking to a brick wall. Even if you make contact with a simpatico teacher, they are often forbidden to lose class hours to come over to the library.
2) The public schools in my area are physically crumbling, and there's no feasible method to replace them. I currently live in a very rural area. My small county (15k residents) has 5 school districts that all need new facilities. These facilities cost between $40-65 million dollars. Even if the new buildings get funded/constructed, enrollments are falling and it's impossible to convince new teachers to come out to the boonies. A school district in the next county is importing teachers from the Philippines because there are no local teachers to hire.
3) There has been a change in parental behavior for the worse. Children are a lot less free-range than they were in the early 2000s, so every library visit has a parent tapping their foot waiting for their child to finish. Sports have become ascendant, even though no professional players in anything have ever come from here. When we have literacy events like Summer Reading, the parents want to know what the prizes are and if they're good enough; if the prizes don't meet their standards, the child doesn't get to participate.
A common narrative is that a lot of kids were set back by the quality of remote or in person education due to a covid. Another common narrative is that these kids are screwed for life because of this setup back. I would just like to remind people Black Americans and poor whites often deal with lower quality of education compared to white and upperclass peers for their entire K-12 experience.
While the scores do appear to reflect a real decline (ie not just noise), we are talking about a 4 & 7 point decline for reading and math respectively on a 500 point scale.
The reading scores in particular seem to reflect a fairly normal variance.
Take that into account before posting your hobby horse narrative as to why society is falling apart.
If the data is taken from a wide range of plentiful sources, then even a small variance can be very significant. What is the 95%, 99%, or 99.9% confidence intervals for this data?
“Significant” from a statistical perspective typically means “not 0 effect size”. It does not follow that the magnitude of the real life impact is particularly notable.
There's a problem. Don't every ask why though. The only acceptable solution is to throw more money to institutional authorities claiming to represent the best interest of children. Looking any deeper or suggesting any other solution is not acceptable. Now move along.
I'm not the original poster, but I'll share an anecdote from tutoring in a bad public school district. The kids, in the first 5 minutes of class (and these are the supposedly good, motivated kids - in an elective CS class) make more trouble than would have been allowed in an entire school day in a class entirely composed of the biggest class clowns from my private high school.
No amount of money fixes that culture problem. Better parenting does. I'm convinced that the only way to spend money to fix schools is to not give money to the actual school and put it towards social programs (which I am in favor of.)
I've always believed that schools should see themselves as community centers. They should invite everyone in their tax base for activities, especially parents. They should do little BBQs, potlucks, have little plays or movie nights, etc.
They should offer all children in their tax base breakfast, lunch, and/or dinner. They should encourage students to stay after for sports, to read in the library, or just to hangout.
Basically schools should be like libraries or churches. I hate that the culture is moving in the other direction.
Our school does much of what you suggest, but only for students. They are tightly locked away from the general public now, because some people think schools make a nice place for live target practice. I don't see this changing for the better anytime soon, it'll probably get worse. Guns are more popular than ever in the US, and with prevalence comes increased risk.
It seems like we forgot the immense value of an ingrained culture of education, where practically all kids get some form of schooling. Where I live (Wales, UK), the government statistics on school attendance post-Covid are grim, if you are anything less than middle class.
I do not expect this trend to reverse, due to increases in carbon dioxide levels contributing to a decline in (the way we currently measure) intelligence, generation by generation.
And nobody mentions brain damage (proved) from Covid, from each infection. Sure, it's because of Lockdowns, nobody ever saw that virus can infect some neurons.
Pretty sure cognitive reasoning is declining too. School choice is the way to go. This does two things (1) forces parents to at least be involved enough to make a decision and (2) incentivizes schools to improve
As a parent of quite a few kiddos, I’ve noticed a massive lack of involvement with most parents. It shows
Since the fixed costs of running a public school are effectively covered, the public school saves the marginal cost of educating the student that has diverted their funds. The school then has the same means to improve on a per student basis.
Also keep in mind that "improving" often means replacing costly and ineffective process with better ones.
Potentially. For example, Oklahoma now allows "public" parochial charter schools.[1]. The end game here is any district that can only support a single school pyramid will have a privately-run, religious school funded by public tax dollars.
I'll be following Oklahoma - it will be interesting to see how quickly Islamic schools, or The Satanic Temple get their requests for schools submitted. And how quickly Oklahoma approves/denies them.
Not if families choose the public school. I think private school choice is unequivocally bad, but charters might be good depending on the situation. Charters have quickly risen to serve 1/4 of the highschoolers in my district because the public options available to poor families are legitimately violent, as in students being shot on campus. The school district was counting on poor families having no other choice so they allowed those schools to languish while they invested in the schools in wealthier areas in order to keep middle+ class families from fleeing for the suburbs. The charter schools have forced the district to at least attempt to serve the poor students.
Posted this in another response. Oklahoma is testing the waters with publicly-funded parochial charters. The end-game for many proponents of school choice, vouchers, and charters is absolutely a parochial education for everybody. Or at least parochial education for their family and friends, and everybody else can get fucked.
it’s implemented in a variety of ways, the simplest way is every parent gets an account with $X. They can then choose to spend that money on education similar to an Healthcare Spending Account.
What this results in, many schools, typically smaller. Where I’m at no one sends their kids to public schools if they’re well off. We create our own pods or select one of the larger private schools.
Really only poor people, with parents who don’t home school, send their kids to the public schools. School choice helps the poor, because it gives them the freedom of choice they wouldn’t otherwise have.
The wealthy already choose better options.
In way of example, we have 30 kids in our neighborhood. We can hire 3x teachers and build a small school house for $10-12k per student. We now have a neighborhood school and school choice would allow that.
People on this thread don’t really know what they’re talking about. Everyone in the school choice system still pays into taxes, it’s just you get a voucher / credit / account to apply to your place of choice. This allows for greater variation in education and more diversity of thought. It also reduces segregation due to redlining, etc of the past.
Increasing school choice incentivizes the stratification of schooling, by changing the choice from "free, probably adequate" public schools versus "expensive, maybe better" into "free, where all the poor kids go", "mid-priced, where everyone who gives a shit and can afford to goes", and "expensive, maybe better". Adding that middle tier charter school leaves the public school with only the poor or uncaring, leading to worse outcomes.
And that's before the absolutely, stark-raving mad suggestion that religious institutions should be able to collect from state-funded education allowances, introducing a healthy mix of indoctrination into the mix.
> And that's before the absolutely, stark-raving mad suggestion that religious institutions should be able to collect from state-funded education allowances, introducing a healthy mix of indoctrination into the mix.
Yeah we can’t have those silly people educating their kids how they see fit — you know better! \s
You can’t argue public schooling is good, when by any metric public schools are worse than private options. There’s more violence, more indoctrination, are often less diverse (it’s based off neighborhood) and worse outcomes at public schools. The data backs up how bad they are.
There are also a lot of different school choice options. For instance, the state can impose restrictions on which institutions can get funds, etc.
That said, in the US you really can’t stop anyone from hiring public tutors and homeschooling. So what you’re arguing is basically that the rich get this method and the poor get to go to the public schools. This leads to a much larger stratification than allowing school choice
> any metric public schools are worse than private options
This is highly case by case. Sure, the very worst schools are public, but that's because they're in the worst areas, where people are definitely too poor to be sending their kid to private schools. On the upper end, though, it's far from clean cut.
Comparing Bay Area schools, both the best and the worst schools are public. You have to go down the list of top ACT/SAT scoring schools a-good-long-while to find a private school. Because we just have really good public schools available.
> more indoctrination
What could possibly be more indoctrinating than in-school religious practice? Religious private schools definitely blow any secular institution out of the water when it comes to indoctrination.
The key issue is introducing price discrimination into an already blighted schooling environment just exasperates the brain drain. The only reasonable solution is making the schools available in those areas better, not giving up on them entirely.
Yes, it absolutely does. It also uses public funds for private religious institutions, which I personally believe goes against the separation of church and state.
How about letting kids earn screen time points through learning apps.
The current time based blocking in iOS doesn’t mean the kids will do homework when device is locked.
The largest factor in good v bad schools is already selection bias. Turning up the temperature on that (if you will) is not gonna help a thing, except the people itching like a goddamn meth addict at the prospect of getting a piece of those sweet, sweet public dollars. They'll benefit.
And betrays how little those parents care for the children without which they share DNA. When the rich pull their kids and taxes away from the common good of public schools, it degrades that common good all the faster.
You're saying you prioritize the well being of strangers above your own family? That's not how the human brain works. We are tribal primates. In a zero sum game, you're going to pick your in-group over the out-group. Any insistence otherwise just virtue signaling with no credibility.
The better question is why the US education system has become a zero sum game. But don't blame affluent parents for following the incentives the system has forced on them.
The better question is why the US education system has become a zero sum game.
I'm not sure I agree with that assertion. But, if it is, my vote would be to fix that instead of throwing out the system. Public education works - it worked in the US for decades and it works in most of our peer nations.
Yeah, there are all sorts of primal instincts which human beings modify or suppress. In fact, most of what people recognize as common sense morality is restrictions on exactly what would be base primal instincts.
In some sense, can virtue signal all I want, because I have no children. It's very much in my interest that education be distributed evenly, rather than hoarded by a minority of monied families.
> In some sense, can virtue signal all I want, because I have no children.
Well, you're admitting there's no personal cost to your advocacy, which makes sense and I can't really argue you're not entitled to feel that way. Like in criminal justice reform, homelessness advocacy, etc. everyone is a liberal until the first time they get robbed, the first time someone smashes their car window, etc. Personal cost has a way to delivering reality to people who are disconnected from it.
> It's very much in my interest that education be distributed evenly
If there was no cost to the high performing students to keep everyone in public schools, I would actually 100% agree with you. But limiting the upper percentiles' outcomes to deliver almost negligible changes to the bottom percentile doesn't seem fair, either.
It's going to be very hard to improve society if I cannot convince others to act against against their own narrow, immediate self-interest at least some of the time. Society rapidly dissolves under such conditions. Indeed, can such an arrangement be called "society" at all?
School choice is controversial because it is associated with right wing attempts to undermine public schools and, among other things, teacher's unions. In fact, the school choice movement as we know it goes back to desegregation in the south: https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2021/09/27/school-cho....
That is just one article about it, but someone close to me was involved in the original litigation on the subject. It was not uncommon in the south for districts to close public schools and almost literally give public land and equipment from those schools to private schools which could more easily remain segregated.
There are other dimensions to school choice as well. In particular, some parents would prefer to "insulate" their children from information about sexuality or uncomfortable truths about american history.
And, I admit, public schools often are struggling to teach, so its not entirely black and white. But school choice is politically fraught.
But many people see it as the standard republican strategy: first, starve public services of funding, then claim that they are bad, and then get rid of them.
I come from a Nordic country, where many things are different from the US. When I was a kid, I could choose what public school I wanted to go to. I'm trying to understand the situation you describe better.
First of all, are kids not free to choose which public school they will attend in the US? If so, is that by law? Do any US states allow a choice of public schools? If not, why not? Also, school curriculums were standardized where I was a kid, so there wasn't ever the problem of creating siloed "thought" schools. Isn't school curriculum standardized in the US?
This was such a non-problem in my experience, I am honestly a bit surprised how controversial it is. It would be great if anyone gave more context, as that article relies on quite a lot of US life experience.
America funds public education locally, so you are limited to public schools that you can attend by what schools are being funded by your property taxes. Some districts setup public choice schools in their districts, especially if the districts are large (e.g. Seattle, my son goes to an area choice school). Some states will also provide more equity to school districts (Washington state shifts education funding to east of the mountains from much richer Seattle area school districts), but in general you still aren't allowed to attend schools outside of your district without some kind of exception.
Education is also governed largely locally with a few state/federal standards in the background that are often not seen as a good thing (e.g. Bush's No Child Left Behind).
It's interesting that NCLB is seen in negative light, it is similar to what I had as a kid. It seems to be one of those things that was fundamentally good-spirited but corrupted. I think it could have been done well. It shouldn't cast doubt on standards in education.
Or maybe it was a failure. It would be interesting to know how education changed when NCLB was introduced and how many people liked it vs how many disliked the change.
Most of the belly-aching about NCLB that you'll hear comes from relatively affluent people (who are disproportionately represented on this site, since it's a forum for people in a relatively high-paying field), because it required school districts to focus disproportionately on getting closer to average outcomes for the worst performing students, rather than letting the best performing students excel even further.
For example, if your school district had 2 high schools, one that was extremely high achieving to the point that anything short of a perfect score on standardized test was considered a moral failing, and the other that was struggling to keep the school average at the state/national average, the school district, in order to get more funding from the fed, would need to spend as much as possible on the lower achieving school. Secondary things, like a new pool, or new buildings, or in some cases basic renovations would be denied to the higher achieving school, because they still had a far way to fall before they represented a failure of the school district.
> if your school district had 2 high schools, one that was extremely high achieving to the point that anything short of a perfect score on standardized test was considered a moral failing
That would never really happen though. The poor high school is very likely to be in a completely different school district with a completely separate local funding source. Rich schools mostly complained about having to prep students for NCLB when they were also prepping them for AP exams and otherwise helping getting their students into an Ivy league.
To a less extreme extent, that was the case in my Bay Area school district. One school had phenomenal scores (due to a feedback loop of parents willing to pay more for housing to send their kid to a higher achieving school force their kid to achieve highly making the school higher achieving, raising house prices), and the others ranged from so-so, to pretty meager.
They were probably all fine on a national average, but the funding definitely got dumped exclusively into the worse off schools, while the high achieving one couldn't scrape enough money together to repair their busted pool.
Hell, the entirety of Los Angeles is under 1 school district. You're going to try and claim there isn't variance in student success/socioeconomic status between the highschools in Koreatown and Beverly Hills versus those in Compton?
Maybe California has different incentives when it comes to school district organization, but that scenario definitely "really happens" here.
Doesn't California have a more state wide funding model due to Proposition 13? They basically have to send sales tax back to schools to make up for property tax revenue losses, which they can do more equitably. The same thing happens in Washington state due to a supreme court ruling (but with property taxes instead of sales taxes). Still, Palo Alto High School isn't in the same district with East Palo Alto High School, and it is pretty obvious which one has access to more resources.
Seattle is like LA, we are all one school district. But there is a huge difference between the poorest public school in Seattle vs. the richest public school in Yakima. And we have equalization of school funding via the state. What winds up happening here, however, is that school districts use funding from normal students to subsidize special education students, but have to be careful because they get funding from the state for each student equally (so if they lose their cheaper to educate advanced students to private schools or adjacent school districts, they have less money to educate their expensive to educate special ed students).
Criticism on NCLB is basically criticism on standardized testing. Higher performing schools are going to opt out anyways (they would rather focus their kids on prep for college), lower performing schools focus on the tests with hyper focus to the expense of everything else.
The main thing to be aware of is charter schools and school vouchers. The latter literally diverts public funds to parents who want to send their kids to private schools.
Charter schools are more subtle. They are privately run schools which often can work around regulations which restrict public schools (for example, they may not have to hire union teachers). There are de jure rules to make sure that these schools are accessible to everyone in the community, but often there are informal methods by which these schools end up being just for white students (for instance, the administration will wait until the school choice period is over and then selectively eject non-white kids).
Well, good news! Vouchers are, basically, a liberal policy. You'd vote against it if you were a socialist but you can keep your lib credentials and still favor vouchers.
Politics aside, you should check to see if they are available in your area. They are often only for people below a certain income level, however.
I think “school choice” in most places is just a front for a movement to shut down public schools or at least kill funding for them. That’s my guess why he’s being downvoted.
For me, it might be a way to give richer parents access to further away nicer schools and limit choices for poorer parents by way of economics, therefore increasing inequality. And HN considers, AFAIK, inequality bad.
I think “school choice” in most places is perceived to be just a front for a movement to shut down public schools or at least kill funding for them.
But if you're a parent who wants decent schools for your kids, and your current schools are lousy, and you aren't a big enough fish to move the school board, and you can't afford private school... what else are you going to try to do other than push for school choice? (You could homeschool, I guess, but not everybody feels like they're cut out for that.)
So the specific term is the problem, but the verbatim plain reading is not?
fascinating.
isn't that we all do for higher education? some community colleges are free for nearby residents now, everyone that is privileged enough to go to a university is secretly into segregation!
I didn't downvote, but I suspect some of it could be because "school choice" probably doesn't solve the problems it claims to solve. After all, school choice already exists - just move to the district you prefer. Vouchers might allow a student to travel to a better school, but outside the densest urban areas, that means a lot of time spent on a bus (or parents driving even more than they do today) - not always feasible.
IMHO, we should be able to train an AI to be a constant in-the-student's-ear teacher. The AI should be able to learn about the student's specific learning style and hence, the student and AI teach each other.
If every student is taught in the style that they learn the most efficiently with, could we expect performance to increase dramatically overall? Would it work to close the socio-economic performance gap among schools? How would the role of human teacher change?
I am sure there are people who've been focusing on this, it can't be novel, would appreciate to know what's being done in this realm.
No. LLMs aren't capable of learning how a student best learns. Nor are they capable of really "teaching".
At best, using an LLM this way would get it to parrot out existing, common explanations for some math topics.
If you asked it something outside its existing knowledge base (or asked it a question from a different perspective), it would make up fake or logically inconsistent, but very reasonable-sounding explanations which would be horrific for a student trying to learn.
It cannot actually learn mathematics or logic itself, so it has no way to ensure that its explanations are logically or mathmatically sound.
idk. I think if I were a kid provided with a curriculum of math, I could have grinded out many years of progress in a fraction of the time using an LLM. I would probably not have practiced the execution of curriculum, but I would have been hitting a lot of different reasoning models. The ability to ask followup questions in LLMs is great. And its proficiency in grade school math is very good.
I'd rather be able to think through vector spaces than be able to solve algebraic equations effectively and efficiently.
Anyhow, this is not a good idea. We are having issues with their scores and performance declining. We have to find the root cause, not try to patch it with another band-aid by saying "Here, lets try this OTHER NEW THING", on top of the hundreds of other tools students already have.
Yes, I’m adamant. But schools are very slow to react and commercial initiatives are hardly a substitute for school curriculum at least where I’m from. School teach and then teach to test. So even a little bit different way of phrasing could throw a students ability to score the local test. In the long run you’d be learning but the signaling function of education is then missing. Plus what I notice in one of my kids: tests below his level get abysmal performance due to lack of interest. Again teaching to test in his class with him lacking the grit to just perform regardless of his feelings regarding the difficulty of the test. (He is nine so nothing lost yet.)
Hmm... that's a clue to how I may have poorly constructed my post.
The point is that the AI is already fully trained on teaching. But it uses the student's learning progress to determine how that specific student learns the most efficiently.
Yes, possible dystopian outcomes abound, maybe they can be mitigated.
If you were extremely rich and lucky in the time of Aristotle, you could have Aristotle as a tutor. Why can't everyone have their own personal digital 24/7 tutor?
Two things that I can see. One is that the COVID quarantine, while necessary for public safety, set most kids back developmentally at least a year, often two. It was far worse for younger kids than older kids because Kindergarten through 2nd grade are absolutely foundational points in their education. Kids who don't get a solid grasp of reading, spelling, and arithmetic at this point sometimes never catch up to where they should be. Hopefully my son will.
The other is that around the time my son started at the school, they got rid of the special education (or whatever is the correct phrase) classrooms, laid off those teachers, and put the students in regular classes instead. This is going about as well as you'd think.
The kids with emotional issues do not get the special attention and resources that they need, and the rest of the class is severely disrupted to the point that almost no learning gets done. According to my wife who works at the school, his class this year had four special-needs students in it. My son says that these students were constantly disrupting the classroom. They bullied the other students, they verbally and physically fought with everyone (including teachers), they scream when they don't get their way. The teacher is not allowed to send them to the office or another room. The whole class didn't get recess for over half the year because the teacher couldn't handle the kids outside. (One of them would just run right off the school grounds every time, apparently.)
The school used to have a strong positivity vibe and a zero-tolerance anti-bullying policy. Now, when an emotionally-troubled child draws blood on my child (which happened), the response from the faculty and staff is so silent it's deafening.