Acectdotally, most of my wife's friends are teachers, mostly for private schools but a couple for public too, between grades 4 and 11, none less than for 15 years. Across the board they report declines in math and reading and just about everything else. Curiously some of them teach foreigners, so this is not just a U.S. phenomena.
When asked why they universally point the finger at phones. This affirms my confirmation bias but seems plausible as well.
> When asked why they universally point the finger at phones
Teachers universally believe all sorts of things that turn out (or long ago turned out) to be false or detrimental. They may be right about phones or they may be wrong, but I'd guess their professional intuition on stuff like this is no better than random chance.
"One such factor [of increasing ADHD prevalence] may be audiovisual media exposure during early childhood. Observational studies in humans have linked exposure to fast-paced television in the first 3 years of life with subsequent attentional deficits in later childhood." [1]
but also
"The diagnosis of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) among children and adolescents has increased considerably over the past decades. Scholars and health professionals alike have expressed concern about the role of screen media in the rise in ADHD diagnosis. However, the extent to which screen media use and ADHD are linked remains a point of debate. (...) The available evidence suggests a statistically small relationship between media and ADHD-related behaviors. " [2]
Modern cartoons and movies are now really fast paced. We've adapted to them that it makes watching the older stuff painful. YouTube and game videos take this to an extreme. So that is probably evidence of an attentional feedback loop.
Don't assume they haven't performed experiments. If performance improves after removing devices from class, in multiple classes in various situations, teachers won't be relying on "intuition" to know what's going on.
We call them "professionals" so we don't have to pay them overtime, but teachers are working people. Their mission is not to advance scientific understanding. Their mission is to impart knowledge to children. It's not as though the idea that modern smartphones are distracting is a novel result. No one who has observed distracted drivers on the highway would be surprised.
When you need your car fixed, do you ask the repairman which scientifically valid studies he bases his methods on? Scientists study things and advise on new methods (that often turn out to be worthless). Front line workers do the work they are paid for. But when the repairman says "I think that's your gear box", it often turns out to be true. And yes, a teacher is a professional. Teaching is a profession, and probably one the topmost important in Our society. If one day you end up trying to teach something to a bunch of angry teenagers, you'll quickly realize why. It's really fucking sad that so many people don't realize that.
There's a difference between a repairman and a teacher.
The repairman's techniques are immediately assessable. If you pick up your car and it doesn't work, his technique failed.
A teacher's results are not obvious until many years after the fact.
It is for this reason that when purchasing a car, we expect manufacturers to use engineering processes informed by scientific study that lead to longer-lasting cars. When mistakes in their quality are discovered, their cars develop particular reputations and sometimes have to be recalled.
Indeed, and that's why teachers are analogous to repairmen and the engineering equivalent is called a researcher in education science. The latter has nothing in common with teachers and effectively doesn't teach except sometimes at the college or university level. It's a bit rich to blame teachers when they're not actually empowered with the ability to redesign pedagogy principles. Additionally, everyone bitches about the lack of research, but I'd be very interested to know how many financially able families would keep their children in an experimental school ('cause you'd have to inform them). Interventional education research has a huge selection bias, and I'm speaking from personal experience.
All in all, the schooling system issues are analogous to those of the industry. How often do I read about devs complaining that management is stupid and academics are in ivory towers and know nothing of the front lines? Certainly, many teachers are quirky, but people dismissing them altogether live comfortably in their fantasy world.
There is a lot of education research done in both public and private schools. Everything from the school lunch programs to textbook paper has been invested, in practice it’s largely ignored because education is very highly politicized. Mandates for more testing are pushed by companies that administer standardized tests etc etc.
Something as simple as testing which Math textbook to use is never part of the process.
"Professionals keep up with developments in their field, insist on scientifically valid studies to inform their methodology, and so on."
That's ironic, because amongst the group of teachers that's much of their discussion. They've also been poo-pooing the learning styles business that you linked to as long as I can remember.
Now, these are high achieving teachers, winning state academic competitions with their students and what not, so I'll admit they might not be the norm.
Learning Styles and other silver bullet education things tend to be pushed hard by clueless administrators. The teachers I work with have been calling it BS from the start.
> Professionals keep up with developments in their field...
Teachers are required to do a ridiculous amount of ongoing education, inservice stuff, credentialing. Typically on their own time with their own money.
Whatever your obvious grievance is with teaching, it's not for lack of professionalism or training.
While we now know a lot about teaching, a lot of misconceptions have been found recently regarding “truths” about teaching, its a fascinating subject really, and the main problem seems to be lack of rigorous repeatable double blind testing for all of those things.
I happen to work in academic research. Let me just say that research in 'soft science', i.e. that which uses statistics to 'prove' things does very little to convince me. I'd trust a senior pro over the last shiny study anytime, precisely because I happen to produce such studies.
Yes, often times they are incredibly jaded and abused by the system. For example, my mom was a public school teacher. Lots of boys in her class were diagnosed with ADHD. She would make the children run off their energy before lessons, but this is not policy. The other teachers would just take a rowdy kid and send him off to assessment for ritalin or whatever drug they give these days. That was the 'standard practice'. Guess which one actually works?
I feel bad for the boys who would have excelled academically had they been chasing after farm animals the first two hours of the day instead of being given neurodepressents to calm down.
Yes my mom did too. After several times she failed to deliver them to the school nurse for their daily tranquilizers, she was eventually put on administrative leave and then denied tenure. unfortunately, you cannot fight the system. The boys she had were excelling, but the schools could not stand that they were being showed up by a mother of boys with no 'formal' research experience.
That depends on if you think the equilibrium will be something like 25% of boys needing drugs to normalize them (where it is trending in ‘leading’ counties).
Ritalin, obviously. ADHD isn't "too much energy", it's a neurological condition that, to a first approximation, can be defined as "the cluster of problems that respond well to treatment with stimulant medication".
I do feel bad for kids whose symptoms were ignored or mitigated by interventions as described, and therefore were not diagnosed, only to discover at age 30 or 50 that the reason they've struggled so much through life is because they have an executive function disorder, the methods for effectively managing it have existed for decades, and they could've made use of them if only people didn't dismiss them in childhood as "rowdy kids" in need of more exercise.
I strongly disagree. Math and other stuff such as reading or writing requires focus. That's what is degrading. Kids can't focus anymore, not by choice but because they're simply unable to do it (even for stuff they like).
Focus/Attention and patience are the skill that is degrading and proficiency in it is probably the pre-requisite for any successful growth in most other academic skills.
I'd be curious to see if those skills are being explicitly taught in preK and Kindergarten.
My wife is a teacher. She (and some of her colleagues) do blame phones somewhat, but they blame parents even more. Not necessarily the individuals themselves, but rather "parenting" and how society has changed that concept.
Society has changed a lot. Compared to a few decades ago, in more households both parents are working. Moreover, I would assume that we (parents) spend more time working or thinking about work when we are at home. Which leads to less time focussing on family.
My wife sees several symptoms of this: parents expect the school to fix/improve behavioral issues in their children (iso them). Parents now come with excuses for their children not doing their homework. Plenty more examples like this..
This could be the typical trope of "things were better when we were young". I do feel like parents these days spend less time raising their children. (which perhaps is partly due to.. phones, but I think is due to a much broader societal shift)
Glad you are reconsidering your assumptions. Being a parent is hard. It is not like kids come with an instruction book especially for very difficult behaviors and other things like adhd, autism, anxiety and depression.
"Parents expect the school to fix/improve behavioral issues in their children"
Of course we do. The kids spend 7 hours a day in class and their behaviors directly impact what and how they learn. Regulating behavior is a life long skill that you learn. We send our kids off to school at age 5 typically.
I am tired of the blame the parents trope. We know and have therapies and interventions to reinforce positive behaviors and the schools should be working with parents to help them learn how to apply these in both the home as well as school.
I know. I've got two kids and a third one on the way.
I should have chosen my words better. Both parents and the school system are responsible for educating & raising children.
There are some parents that expect the school to do most of that work. On the other hand, there are also parents that go above and beyond. Likewise some schools and teachers do an amazing job and can have a huge positive impact on our children, while other schools and teachers barely seem to care at all.
I'm not sure what my take-away is. I'm just very disappointed whenever I hear (some) kids say that their parents barely make time for them. The parents typically say they are just "too busy".
> When asked why they universally point the finger at phones.
A smartphone is an easy scapegoat, but I think its role is greatly exaggerated. People simply like to complain about things they are not used to. It does not mean it is not the root cause, only that a “gut feeling” reasoning can easily be wrong. Not so long ago teachers were still trying to “correct” left-handedness.
That said there are certainly many issues surrounding modern use of smartphones (starting with microtransactions), but I doubt that it is the main issue there.
By the way: While I can’t find the website where I read it, there was supposedly a period before widespread TV, when reading too many books was considered a developmental issue for a child.
Friend of mine teaches college English. She says teenagers don't write. They text sentence fragments back and forth with each other. As a result her students can't string two sentences together coherently.
> She says teenagers don't write. They text sentence fragments back and forth with each other.
Ah yes, the old days before the mobile phone was invented, when teenagers everywhere were writing novels in their spare time.
Teenagers who didn't want to be writers weren't writing back then. Same as now. Although the average teen is almost certainly "writing" more than ever because the primary mode of communication now is typing, not talking.
Before phones, were teenagers writing full-length letters to each other in order to communicate? Were most of them writing at all, even just sentence fragments, outside of school? I wasn't alive so I can't say for sure, but I have a pretty good guess.
My intuition, is that a phone is both a visual and written media, and extended exposure to writing via phones should improve reading skills. (I have nothing to back this up)
The skills to read txtspeak are the same as to read normal english. The grammar and vocab rules are slightly different but its still fundamentally reading.
My kids taught themselves to read using Siri voice to text chat in Roblox. It was amazing. I mean, yes we read to them too and have them read books and they had some reading lessons in school but this all happened when the pandemic hit so I am pretty convinced it was Siri and Roblox. My kids are in 2nd grade and reading at the 4th-5th grade level.
I'm skeptical of the tests core result that reading performance has dropped to 1970s levels among thirteen year olds. 13 year olds today almost exclusively communicate through text, whereas in the 70s it was quite plausible for a 13 year old to simply not spend time reading.
I think its worth questioning the test and whether there has been a shift in reading/math skills since the last iteration which de-emphasizes skills the test pushes. Mental math in particular is a skill which was borderline relevant with the advent of calculators and is highly questionable when everyone has a calculating machine in their pockets 24/7.
We should expect that we need to adjust our educational standards from time to time less we continue to teach alchemy, or meta-physics.
If you deep dive into demographic groups (https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/reading/nation/groups/?gra...), you get a bit of a different story, showing a lot of the drop might just be Simpson's Paradox at play and the educational outcomes getting worse for the lower performing students.
For instance, non English language learner's reading scores are unchanged over the last 3 decade. It's crashing lower for ELL students.
Dive into other metrics and you see the pattern of the lower performing groups performing worse and better performing groups roughly holding.
Simpson's Paradox isn't really relevant here. All you're describing is the average going down because one group goes down a lot. But that's how averages generally work.
Which is not actually surprising because the dominant change is the migration from non-poor to poor, not the change of the average score - 1980 has only 9% poor results, 2020 has 40% poor results.
When scores change, at first the average scores within groups will change, but if the scores change enough they will eventually cross group boundaries at which point the group averages become more or less irrelevant and the changes are mostly reflected by changes in group sizes. The group averages are bounded by the range of each group and can only indicate if the group is moving towards one of the boundaries, but as scores cross boundaries they start contributing to different group averages and at opposite ends, e.g. decreasing scores will at first contribute at the lower boundary of one group and then at the upper boundary of the next lower group which may increase the average score of both groups, in one case by loosing a low score relative to the group range, in the other case by gaining a high score within the group range.
I was inclined to agree, but the questions seem to be as simple as "add 32 and 14" [1]. I doubt students failed to answer this question on the basis of what field the numbers belonged to :)
That said, the emphasis on rote memorization through multiplication tables has long been utterly useless. So, there is fault in the purpose of instruction as well. As an aside on this notion of rote learning, I recall some of my high school's top students (by GPA) could not solve a simple ODE, despite getting the highest score on the AP Calculus exams (granted, this doesn't mean much when such a score can be attained with a 70%)
Maybe it's just me, but multiplication tables are one of the few useful things I got out of primary school. To this day I use this often, almost daily. I mean to call them USELESS is pretty severe mischaracterization of them.
Yeah, I'm really confused how someone could see multiplication tables as useless. I'm not sure how anyone could become adept at multiplying without memorizing the relationships between common numbers. Are there grown people out there who add up 8 8's when they need to solve 8*8?
A calculator, for me, really doesn't replace the utility of being able to do some basic mathematics in my head. Even if you don't run into a lot of uses for mental math, I'm in the camp that thinks learning 1-10*1-10 and building a sense for numbers will aid in understanding of other concepts and in developing other cognitive abilities. Some carefully designed experiments could convince me otherwise.
It's not about having a calculator. It's about making quick connections when encountering new facts or numbers.
Without sizeable core of memorized facts, results and numbers you will miss a lot of those. It's the very definition of being not that smart.
I often leave my phone at home to clear my mind and get away from things. I try to be phone free for about 4 hours a day. And during this time I almost always go out. And often I use my multiplication table during this time.
You can skip the whole memorization pain by rigging at most 3 additions together. You just have to know that adding a number to itself is doubling and adding it again is tripling and multiplication by 10 can be done by simply writing zero on the end.
2x = double it.
3x = triple it.
4x = double it twice.
5x = ...
6x = triple it then double it.
7x = ...
8x = double it thrice.
9x = from 10x subtract it once.
10x = put "0" on the end.
That gets you everything but 5x5, 5x7, and 7x7. That's just 3 things to memorize instead of 55. I usually get the 5s by just halving 10x, which then handles every case but 7x7. The overhead of doing 2 (sometimes 3) mental additions isn't much worse than memorizing everything as a singular operation and this way of doing things makes it a bit clearer what multiplication represents rather than being an arbitrary thing to memorize because teacher said so.
To hell with primary school. Memorizing is for suckers.
Congratulations, you now do multiplication like my 8 bit 6502 used to do..
BTW 5x is "double it twice (4x) and add it (1x)"
Personally, for up to 10x10 - I prefer a lookup table
(both mentally and in code)
P.S.
It's been 30 years? since I had to implement it, but as I recall multiplication could be done by any number with just doubling and adding the initial value..
2x = double 3x = double +x 4x = double the double, etc.
any even multiple be done just by repeating the doubling, and odd multiples are gotten by repeated doubling + adding the starting value.
This worked great for cpu's as 'doubling' was just a bit shift left 'x' number of times - very fast.
This worked great for cpu's as 'doubling' was just a bit shift left 'x' number of times - very fast.
Except that you'd get a summation with the number of terms equal to the number of bits in the source operands. Multiplication in a CPU only seems very fast because the theory is simple. Building a fast multiplier in silicon requires a lot of area and a lot of interconnect, because you don't require "just" a massive addition table, you also need carry lookahead logic to perform fast carry propagation otherwise you get no speed increase.
A naive multiplier in a CPU requires 1 cycle per result bit (multiplying two 32-bit numbers requires 32 additions, then you need to wait another 32 cycles for full carry propagation). That's very slow, in CPU terms.
not quite sure what your getting at here...on a simple 8 bit like the 6502, you were generally dealing with plain binary, not some IEEE standard, so you get at most a single addition (if the multiplicand was odd), and just threw an 'overflow error' at the end if the carry/overflow bit was set...
Now arbitrary length BCD...THAT was a PITA
But again, it was 30 years ago so my memory may be fuzzy.
Edit: Hmm - if I recall, it was something like:
and the value with x01 to check LSB,
asl value, (multiplicand masked with LSB=0),
if LSB check was true, add value to result,
check overflow flag ?
Again, this was simple binary data usually of a fixed 1 byte or 2 byte length. we used BCD for 'real work' and I can't even remember how that was done...
How do you get to "at most a single addition"? Even when multiplying any N with a 4-bit number like 14 (0b1110), you'd get at least two additions: (N << 1) + (N << 2) + (N << 3). And that is assuming you already have spent the additional lookahead logic to skip the addition step if the source operand has a 0 bit (which most implementations don't do, because the zero detection logic requires even more logic gates in addition to the adder tree).
I always remember it being much simpler then it appears it was. Guess I'm getting rusty from using fancy languages with built in multiply instructions :-)
Don't know if I'm the weird one but I always do 5x as "multiply by 10 then divide by 2" you just need to put a 0 at the end and get half of that result which is not a complicated mental calculation.
I know. And 7x can be done from taking 3x off the 10x, and 8x can likewise save an addition by taking 2x off the 10x I intentionally left the 5s and 7s blank because they are 3-addition operations and also require you to mentally hold on to the very first number. Instead of the overhead of juggling an extra value and doing an extra step, I find it easier to switch around the multiplication terms and handle them using a different rule. The remaining cases of 5x5, 5x7, 7x7 are small enough to effortlessly memorize. Especially since 5x can be done with counting by 5 (which is just normal counting but with 0 and 5 appended to everything). 6 ends up being the only thing in the 10x10 table that requires 3 additions to reach. All the others can be done with just 2 additions/subtractions. For 8 you get a choice between 3 additions or 2 subtractions but with temporarily juggling one extra number.
If you add division by two into the list of primitives, 5 and 6 become accessible within 2 steps and so the system can reach the whole 10s table within a cost of 2 (times 10 is considered a zero cost step). That makes the cost one step worse than traditional memorization but you end up being faster overall because you only need to focus on being fast at the three primitives.
Recognizing the general principle that you can change A into BC or (B+C) where B and C are both easier to multiply with than A is far more useful than memorizing the table. The best part is except for the (optional) division by two, all the primitive operations are things you already learned how to do at that stage. You can short circuit a tedious, long and wasteful part of the early math curriculum AND walk away with genuine understanding of why the rules are and how to figure things out for yourself. While everyone else struggles to multiply by 17, you can be the smarty who doubled 4 times and added once. Or put zero at the end, doubled, and subtracted 3x. Or put zero at the end, subtracted 1x, doubled it, subtracted 1x. With a bit of thought, you can extend the entire multiplication table to 20x20 such that very few rarely does anything cost more than 3 steps.
I often find myself wishing my mental maths was better in general, I'm pretty dreadful at it and while I'm never more than five seconds or so away from a calculator it's still sometimes a slowdown and context switch I could do without.
(20% serious) Play Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri. A useful thing to do there is to rush-buy improvements, but to spend just enough energy credits that it gets finished the next turn. For example, if it would take 52 credits to purchase a Recycling Tanks, and the base produces 3 minerals per turn, then you want to spend 52 - 3 * 2 = 46 energy, and the game would let you do that. One does quite a lot of arithmetic that way...
"Add 32 and 14" is from the directions page of the test -- it's not an actual question. It's intentionally easy so as not to distract from the point, which is to tell students how to fill in answers.
I wouldn't really expect them to be able to solve a simple ODE with just Calculus BC. It's been about a decade since I took it, but to my memory, it concluded with basic elements of real analysis after getting pretty far along with single variable integral calculus techniques. We never discussed ODEs as such, but some clever students would probably recognize how to solve them on sight without being acquainted with the broader fields of differential equations
My job involves 80% rote memorization including a lot of mental math. No being able to calculate simple stuff would slow me down at least 2X. It's a high-pay job.
> What do you do, if I may ask? The only roles that I'd characterize as you describe are fixed income management and some actuarial roles
What? As a software engineer, I'm constantly doing mental math to determine things like "how much memory will this take up when the input size is X". Sure, Big O notation is nice for limits, but in real life, there are typical input ranges, and you have to do the calculation. Can I use a calculator? Maybe sure, but why would I?
* 13 year olds today almost exclusively communicate through text, whereas in the 70s it was quite plausible for a 13 year old to simply not spend time reading.*
Comparing the way teenagers text to reading an actual book seems a bit ridiculous to me. Have you read a 13 year old's text thread? The standardized ways of measuring reading performance have much to with vocabulary and comprehension skills. Are you suggesting that if kids can read each other's texts, and maybe Instagram comments, they are in good shape?
They might be in fine shape, I remember back when we had to learn cursive in school because if you couldn't read or write cursive then you might as well have been illiterate. Does cursive have any relation to literacy now-a-days? Absolutely not. Whats to say that being able to read or write instagram comments doesn't fully encapsulate what literacy entails in the 21st century?
I love to read fiction, but for me its just a hobby. Is the ability to read an old book actually all that important? I never actually read any of my textbooks in high school or college and I even stopped buying them because I realized how pointless and expensive they were. I'm well into my career and haven't ever touched a book related to my field. Communicating with my boss through email or chat is far more important than any formal reading comprehension.
I'd say if anything, modern day literacy is more about understanding fragmented conversations, reading between the lines and conceptualizing meaning, understanding context and being able to converse with colleagues including familiarity with memes, recognizing clickbait and being able to sort through misinformation. All of which is are skills the older generations exceptionally lack. Perhaps they are the ones who are actually currently illiterate.
No I am not, however I'm old enough to briefly recall childhood life before computers were commonplace. There was a time when I was in elementary school where getting children to read at all was an activity.
Mental math in particular is a skill which was borderline relevant with the advent of calculators and is highly questionable when everyone has a calculating machine in their pockets 24/7.
As someone with kids, I’d say the public school educators and teachers we dealt with very much mirrored your attitude, and that’s a big part of why scores are down. Lots of soft curriculum, math games, but no emphasis on learning things like multiplication, grammar, vocabulary, spelling.
I'm sure there are many causes of this. After recently looking for a home, I have my own theory: schools in the U.S. are absolutely terrible.
When looking for a home in the NYC metro area (one of the wealthiest in the country), I was absolutely appalled at the quality of the schools in 90% of the places I looked. As an affluent person with the means to choose, I chose to look elsewhere. The experience got me thinking, however: 90% of people go to terrible schools because they don't have a choice.
Taxes are continually cut. Districts are gerrymandered so the most residents don't get an equal say. Interest groups take over local and state politics and de-prioritize investing in the future in the name of profits and short-term political gains. If nations grow great when people sew the seeds of trees in whose shade they will never sit, then we're in the clear-cutting stage of our society.
This study provides quantitative evidence that something is wrong with education, but there is qualitative evidence as well. The frequent politicization of events and susceptibility to fake news indicates a lack of critical thinking skills.
Taxes aren’t going down in New York, and more is being spent on education than ever, even adjusting for inflation. The money just isn’t well spent, and doesn’t make it to the classroom.
Your chart shows that the student population increased 96%, teachers increased 252%, and non-teacher staff has increased by 700%. But what does that mean in terms of the typical school budget? Going from 1 to 7 non-teacher staff doesn't seem like that big of a deal. A baseline related to the school budget would make these stats more useful.
Also, the article clearly has a political axe to grind. For instance, they compare the Chicago BOE to the Japanese Ministry of Education. The Japanese Ministry of Education is actually called "The Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology." You can read their Wikipedia page, but they're not directly involved in providing education to the population, so it makes sense that they would have a small staff:
> The Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (文部科学省, Monbu-kagaku-shō), also known as MEXT or Monka-shō, is one of the eleven Ministries of Japan that composes part of the executive branch of the Government of Japan. Their goal is to improve the development of Japan in relation with the international community. They are responsible for funding research under their jurisdiction, some of which includes: children's health in relation to home environment, delta-sigma modulations utilizing graphs, gender equality in sciences, and other general research for the future
Going from 1 to 7 non-teacher staff doesn't seem like that big of a deal. A baseline related to the school budget would make these stats more useful.
It's a good point. I don't know the budget, but NY has a lot of admin overhead with a 13:1 teacher to admin ratio.
edit: for the country overall, 54% of the spending is going to teachers, 27% to staff. It is a high number compared to OECD average which is 15% to staff.
Again, this stat is totally devoid of information. From your link, non-teacher staff is defined as:
> Nonteaching staff includes administrative and support personnel, such as administrators, supervisors, counselors, school psychologists, health personnel, librarians, building operations staff, and maintenance personnel.
If you had a specific education system to point to, where you could clearly highlight the waste, then that would be one thing. But on a high level, I can see the U.S. having way more services than Europe. For instance, Football is very popular in the U.S. with many high schools having full blown stadiums for their teams. That type of infrastructure is going to come with overhead. The U.S. also has terrible mass transit, meaning that schools need to maintain their own bussing systems. That also takes people to maintain. Population density is also lower, so the cost of transporting a single student will be higher. You can’t point to a few top-level numbers in isolation and say “See! Look at all the waste!” All of the school spending is public information. If there was a lot of waste, it shouldn’t be hard to find specific instances of waste.
This is a direct result of elimination of the middle class, the relatively rich getting richer, and those below well, not.
The tax base just evaporates. I've seen literal unincorporated swapland turned into a subdivision, well more of a little city, for the 'haves', complete with its own elementary school. Top rated, of course.
Bussing attempted to solve this problem, in my belief in the wrong way. For a public good, especially one for non taxpaying class(children), the state should probably take the taxes and divvy it up fairly. I'm a big believer in personal property rights, hard work, all that jazz...but not that rich children deserve a better education than the less fortunate.
Pre-K decreases educational attainment and increases criminality. The effects are not small. We have evidence from Quebec where they introduced universal childcare and Tennessee where we have evidence from randomised controlled trials.
> Past research has demonstrated that positive increments to the non-cognitive development of children can have long-run benefits. We test the symmetry of this contention by studying the effects of a sizeable negative shock to non-cognitive skills due to the introduction of universal child care in Quebec. We first confirm earlier findings showing reduced contemporaneous non-cognitive development following the program introduction in Quebec, with little impact on cognitive test scores. We then show these non-cognitive deficits persisted to school ages, and also that cohorts with increased child care access subsequently had worse health, lower life satisfaction, and higher crime rates later in life. The impacts on criminal activity are concentrated in boys. Our results reinforce previous evidence on the central role of non-cognitive skills for long-run success.
> In second grade, however, the groups began to diverge with the TN‐VPK children scoring lower than the control children on most of the measures. The differences were significant on both achievement composite measures and on the math subtests.
Taking 5min out of my morning routine to create a throwaway so I can say this is blatantly false. Pre-K does not, in general, decrease educational attainment or increase criminality and high quality Pre-K does quite the opposite.
The Quebec study is an indictment against the poor quality of studied Pre-K provision, that's it.
The quote you pulled from the Vanderbilt study doesn't seem to exist. It's not in the linked paper, which actually states "The effects on the early literacy, language, and math skills of children who attended TN‐VPK were all statistically significant with gains ranging from 37% to 176% greater than those of children not in TN‐VPK." (pg 4).
High-quality early childhood education (Pre-K) works really well, especially when combined with positive parent engagement. Rubbish early childhood education often doesn't work, and can lead to worse attainment than no early childhood education, again also dependant on learning at home. A reasonable assumption is that Pre-K/early childhood education is a garbage in, garbage out function - just like parenting.
It's more complex than that. The Quebec paper suggests that there may be an association between the introduction of low-cost, universal Pre-K education and poorer life outcomes in some groups later on. Even with the 'natural experiment' that happened in Quebec it's still hard to prove causality.
But the authors explicitly say that high quality Pre-K programmes targeted at relatively deprived groups are beneficial. The take-home might be 'state-run, large-scale Pre-K programmes might be good for you if your home life already sucks but might be worse than the best quality care you could receive at home' (and even then I think you'd have to qualify the finding by measuring the potential positive effects on maternal incomes). They also say that the effects probably don't translate to Europe.
And... they offer the suggestion that you could significantly improve Pre-K education by focusing on (and measuring) 'non-cognitive' development. That seems like a good thing to try...
In my state we're already paying more than Finland per pupil: $13K/yr, with nowhere near the results. It's not the money that's causing this. It's that there are too much "administrative" and "service" staff feeding at the trough, and schools play political / virtue signaling games instead of relentlessly drilling STEM curricula into kids' heads.
These comparisons are also complicated by two other factors:
American school systems are expected to provide special needs care. One aide for a child with severe disabilities might cost as much as their teacher. This is one of the most common reasons for charter schools giving the impression of producing higher scores at lower cost – if you don’t have a robust program, the most expensive students won’t enroll.
American schools also enroll a very broad range of students with the expectation that they’ll make it all the way through high school. That includes children of recent immigrants who have very limited English proficiency, and the deeper poverty which the U.S. allows without tracking those kids into early graduation or a secondary system. When you compare international test scores among socioeconomic-matched students, the U.S. scores well – not Finland but solidly among our peers.
As an immigrant and a parent myself, I think you meant to say "children of illegal aliens". US _legal_ immigration is means/skill based and requires a paying job, so kids of immigrants mostly are fine economically.
Illegal migration is a big problem, but I'd also counter that this problem should be mostly confined to the Southern states and CA.
No, I meant legal immigrants — for example, my son's school has a fair number of children from Central America and Ethiopia and, unsurprisingly, their math scores fare better than their English.
Legal immigration is a substantial majority of the total (roughly three quarters):
High-skill immigrants are certainly a great economic contribution but they're far from a majority with less than 20% percent having a Bachelor's degree:
… and even if they were, that doesn't mean that they and their families have high English fluency. Unless they happen to have grown up in a bilingual household or attended a bilingual school, their children are almost certainly going to have to catch up to their peers before they'll be able to understand their teachers and read the coursework no matter how skilled their parents are.
This stat is largely meaningless without knowing the state. Salaries in certain parts of the U.S. are much higher than in Finland. The average salary in NYC is like 4x the average salary in Helsinki. Not sure why you’d expect the cost per student to be the same?
I believe it's higher than Finland on average, too, as well as in absolute terms in each state. NYC spends even more, for even worse education. You can easily the statistics, and once you do, you'll see that throwing even more money at this problem will only exacerbate it.
Are these results broken down by race? If not, we could be seeing static or even improving results, hidden by the shifting demographics of the USA.
When you examine Goodschools data for a given area, there is a very high correlation between the White/Asian student population and the overall performance of the school, including for Black/Hispanic children.
Additionally, how much have politics impacted results for the worst performing students? Anecdotally, its a lot harder to expel or discipline certain consistently disruptive students now.
More ominous were the results for 13-year-olds, who experienced statistically significant drops of three and five points in reading and math, respectively. Compared with math performance in 2012, boys overall lost five points, and girls overall lost six points. Black students dropped eight points and Hispanic students four points; both decreases widened their score gap with white students, whose scores were statistically unchanged from 2012.
It is curious - according to the article the tests were cancelled due to budget issues. How expensive is this testing? Is it really believable that we couldn't actually afford it???
I notice the attempt to blame common core, but... Nobody ever actually implemented common core (No True Scotsman). The whole thing was completely messed up by educational corporations "buying" state boards of education.
There's mountains of paper, or proprietary software used for these tests. And that's before we pay for graders and monitors(and many schools need a few extra hands to do the test according to standard due to crowding).
Getting questions on a test is actually really expensive for a standardized test. It's been a while, but I believe it cost was in the $3-4k range per question for my state's tests. These test questions go through significant amounts of review for various biases and whether they actually measure understanding/mastery of the intended knowledge standard.
That seems pretty cheap. That would mean designing the SAT would cost $0.6 million. Compare that to the $640,000 million we spend per year and it seems absolutely negligible.
America typically spends up there in the top 10 of OECD countries in terms of dollars per capita on education.
Unfortunately it’s horribly spent. I wouldn’t mind testing a voucher program to see if that would add some innovation by letting parents choose how to spend the $13k allocated per their student. All spending instead is going to a snowballing administrative bureaucracy. Oh well.
I am quite sympathetic about too much administration; however, the difference is more fundamental.
America doesn't "track" students and teaches everybody. Other countries flush away the lower performing students to non-academic education as the years progress.
We see what this does even here in the US. Every charter school always manages to claim to be "cost effective"--except that they always manage to do this by effectively flushing the lower performing (read "expensive") students back to the public schools. When you force the charter schools to accept via lottery so they can't cherry pick only the decent students, their cost effectiveness vanishes.
And, by the way, the Gates Foundation actually had solid research about this from following several programs. For middle school age and below students, you need to spend roughly $15K per student (and that was 5+ years ago--so adjust upward), hold class sizes at about 15 students maximum, and have 2 adults in the room. This allows you to bring poorly performing students up to average over several years.
ALL of those programs were eventually cancelled for lack of money. Everybody wants "educational excellence" until somebody hands them the bill--then everybody pisses and moans about cost.
The only people who don't moan about cost are the upper class--they fund the hell out of the schools their kids go to. Funny that.
The comparisons of education systems measure everybody, no matter how you track them. If measurements of a "tracking" system shows better results (measured on as average of everybody) than teaching everyone together, that doesn't imply a bad measurement, that implies that tracking may be beneficial.
Also, you yourself provide explicit examples of de facto "tracking" in USA, just the separation is based on parents' financial means instead of educational attributes.
America doesn't "track" students and teaches everybody. Other countries flush away the lower performing students to non-academic education as the years progress.
This study was about 13-year olds. Most countries "flush away" (thank you for using a gratuitously denigrating term here) their students after 13, not before.
In my country, it was in the news that this year's language test for teachers (really basic stuff) resulted in 100% of the candidates failing. How is that even possible?
switzerland he....
That one is easy, useless education up to 8P, check the books used for these classes, it's a total joke. Add a fairly large non native language immigration, and you have kids up to 7 years old who can't speak more than one sentence in the local language (only my daughter could speak French properly in her class, in 4P, she is the only one who can actually read so far, her teacher says so to her class ffs).
Also don't forget that generally non science path are for the second rate students in europe, and the HES are generally also targeted to drop out students, and you get such results.
That particular test was funny as the students were arguing the course prepared them for another tests, yeah, correcting primary school level essay needs an actual course to find French mistakes. That tells everything on the so call great Swiss education.
This is a very complicated thing to try to unwind, but the expectation of an increase in scores seems to rely on faith in the exam itself, and that changes in how school is taught would necessarily lead to improvement in scores.
Obviously there are a billion other things that could affect these scores, such as electronics or the general societal and technological trend (and I am as guilty as anyone) towards shorter attention span, lack of delayed gratification, etc.
California, the most populous state in the nation, removed the statewide mandate for these programs in 2014, so the timeline fits. That doesn't mean it's the predominant cause of the drop, or even a major contributing factor. But it sure doesn't help.
I've been shocked to see how little interest the public schools have in educating students who are more advanced. We live in Menlo Park, and it's like pulling teeth to get the school to allow our daughter to do advanced math. Many families are leaving the public schools because of this, and we're considering our options as well. This is a sharp contrast to my experience growing up and going to public schools in Sacramento, where there were (and still are) many good options.
But have the Gifted and Talented programs been eliminated? My children are in LAUSD, the second largest school district in the country, where we have regular Gifted and Talented meetings, including one tomorrow. No one here speaks of eliminating the programs, but I do read about it in national news sometimes.
There are zero GATE offerings here. At the district level, they said that students should be allowed to do math with the grade level that is appropriate for that student.
But at the school level, the principal has fought us every step of the way. He didn't even want to do a math assessment, which the district had promised. He literally did not want to find out what level our child is at. And the teacher has said that she does not wish for our child to learn any new math skills this year.
How do these people call themselves educators, when they aren't actually interested in educating students?
My advice would be to talk with an attorney who focuses on education and schools. These are usually special education attorneys who focus mostly on kids with disabilities but they also help gifted kids as well.
They are worth every penny. And they are the key to unlocking individualized public education.
There are ways to get an IEP for a gifted student as well, if they can qualify as twice exceptional.
"Because gifted children demonstrate greater maturity in some domains over others, they may be at greater risk for specific kinds of social-emotional difficulties if their needs are not met."
With the destruction of GATE programs and the return to local funding I imagine that there will be many lawsuits from parents like yourself asking the school districts to actually provide free appropriate public education (FAPE) for gifted kids. This may take the form of a class action Federal lawsuit. Eventually, Congress will have to act but this is going to take 5-10 years.
In the meantime you should think about private school, supplementing your child's education and see about the "twice exceptional" thing and talk to a special education attorney.
If you dive into the data, the higher performing groups are stable. Lower performing groups are falling. (E.g. non English language learners are at stable reading scores, English language learners scores keep falling).
...in a 2019-2020 assessment compared with the previous test which was completed in 2012.
Reviewing 'Trend in NAEP long-term trend reading average scores for 9- and 13-year-old students', we see the score has fluctuated between 255 and 263 for fifty years.
Remote learning that was "online first" reflected the erroneous idea that most American homes have internet access. We taught in a county where 50% of families don't have internet, and 20% don't even have a land line in 2020-2021.
The decline in learning was astonishing. Many of these children simply did not do any reading at all for a whole year.
> The latest release comes from NAEP’s 2020 assessment of long-term trends, which was administered by the National Center for Education Statistics to nine- and 13-year-olds before COVID-19 first shuttered schools last spring.
> The long-term assessment is a crucial piece of data for another reason: It was administered to students between October 2019 and March 2020, making it a final snapshot of academic trends before the emergence of COVID-19. Loveless said he hoped future analyses of how kids learned during and after the greatest disaster in K-12 history wouldn’t overlook the “deeper,” persistent stagnation that preceded it.
So my school district's last day of in person instruction was March 12, 2020. Which leads me to wonder if the plan was to end testing in March 2020, or if testing was ended because schools were being shutdown and testing wasn't feasible.
If testing for the 2019-2020 school year stopped rather than completed, then you've got a data problem because it's not clear that tested performance is independent of scheduling.
Also, even if the testing was all completed as scheduled, COVID-19 was on at least some student's minds throughout February, which could reduce test scores. It can be difficult to focus on testing when a not yet declared pandemic is starting up.
> The latest release comes from NAEP’s 2020 assessment of long-term trends, which was administered by the National Center for Education Statistics to nine- and 13-year-olds before COVID-19 first shuttered schools last spring.
You mean we don't have math competitions like the spelling bee for language. I'm not convinced that there is a lot of value in being a human calculator. Knowing how to do the math is important, being able to do it all in your head is not.
> Knowing how to do the math is important, being able to do it all in your head is not.
Respectfully that is such a myopic argument that it is not even funny. If all one knows is how to press buttons to get some answers, one doesn't truly understand what one is doing.
Also, what if one doesn't have a calculator and needs to do some math? Or, do it quickly as a sibling comment made...
I don't think that this is what the person you're replying to meant..
For example, say you need to do matrix multiplication. What's more important, knowing how to do it and when to apply it or meticulously doing the whole computation without a computer?
I chose this example because it's nothing more than a focus exercise and as the complexity increases, the chance of you making an error increases too. Most people know what multiplication and addition are but there would still be a high chance that they make small errors due to not paying attention.
On the other hand if you come across this problem, know that you need to do this now and let the computer do the operation you decrease the chance of such mistakes.
The same is true for many other concepts... What's more important, knowing every system call by heart or knowing how to look up their documentation? No, the important part is knowing what system calls are and when you might need them, for the rest it's just about looking up information.
The thing is, you can study a lot of things so that you can do them by heart and it's just an exercise of remembering. But if you grasp the logics of something or start seeing patterns etc. that's ultimately more valuable. It's true for learning a language too.. of course you can learn everything by heart but if there are certain logical rules for how certain words are built up, those are more important.
Knowing the operations and being able to do them, say on paper, is important. In my teens I worked as a cashier, I was able to calculate change in my head - pretty straight forward and no one dies if I get it wrong. If I need to do something more complicated, or where a wrong answer would have a bad outcome, then I want to be sure I'm getting it right by using a machine to help me.
I'm talking about knowing the math and recognizing that I'm human.
>The latest release comes from NAEP’s 2020 assessment of long-term trends, which was administered by the National Center for Education Statistics to nine- and 13-year-olds before COVID-19 first shuttered schools last spring.
And, as the article notes, this test could prove useful in testing against later COVID related effects:
> The long-term assessment is a crucial piece of data for another reason: It was administered to students between October 2019 and March 2020, making it a final snapshot of academic trends before the emergence of COVID-19.
Gosh, it's almost like there are consequences to allowing the right wing and rich people to privatize education for the wealthy, take all that money out of the public education system, and replace it with...nothing.
Spend time on the teachers subreddit. It's not so much money that's the primary problem. It's poor parenting, inability of teachers or administrators to actually implement any sort of punishment or discipline that a student would care about, and cultural decline.
This is the real answer and no one really wants to talk about it because solving it is easily one of the greatest challenges of our time.
It is very hard for most to take ownership of the fact that their child is a misbehaved little shit because they were raised from birth on iPad, YouTube and Fortnite instead of more enriching activities. Virtually everyone has a burned out dopamine loop at this point and it's impossible to get kids excited about education anymore. You want to talk about drug problems, this one is easily the worst.
Would you please stop posting flamewar comments? You've been doing it repeatedly lately, and we've had to ask you this kind of thing multiple times in the past, going back years. That's really not cool.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful. Maybe you don't owe the pilferers of public resources better, but you definitely owe this community better if you're participating in it.
Don’t know where you live or what you refer to. Public schools where I live are paid through (very high) property taxes, anyone who wants to put their kids through private school needs to pay that tuition on top of what they’re paying in property taxes, essentially paying twice for schooling.
It seems like young people (particularly the 15-20 year-old range) are so much smarter and better informed than decades ago or even just 10 years ago. The fear about the US falling behind seems unfounded. Then again, I have to remind myself that Reddit and NH is not reality...these sites are probably only representative of the top 20% or so of ability. The bottom 50% are either less active online or more inclined to major social networks.
What makes you believe they are better informed?
From my experience of:
1. being a not-quite-old person (33)
2. step son (16)
3. step daughter (15)
4. having a step mother teaching elementary school
5. my mother teaching middle and high school
I see kids as overly exposed to dramatic information. Both of my kids thought they were gay prior to hitting puberty and realizing they weren't. Both of my kids have taken political extremist positions, one identifying as communist and the other identifying as a libertarian. Most of the children I know are participating in very adult discussions without giving any hint of their age. Children are exposed much earlier to sex and pornography and fringe groups.
In addition to this, reading and writing skills have anecdotally declined considerably. When I was 16, I read at least one book per month, usually one per week. Most of the children I've had experience with will never read a book unless ordered to, and have no desire to read one either. Children are unable to write coherently; they pump out barely understandable slang prose, throw it through grammarly, and assume that it's good.
Hell, for one other anecdote, my wife is in college right now and I've been reading her peers' essays for English and History class and I can't imagine how these people are capable of operating in society with their absolute bottom of the barrel writing ability. Professors are having to give passing grades to what could be considered 6th grade writing levels in order to not fail the entire class.
Maybe things were the same when I was a child and I just wasn't exposed to it, but I don't have a lot of hope in the education of the future generations with access to social media. I do feel a lot of job security, however.
The question I have is how much of that is actually different and how much is worse? I knew lots of communist/libertarian high schoolers. Teenagers get extreme views.
Also regarding the rate of book reading - could it be that your childhood was not the norm? I too read a lot, but I was the only one on the school bus home who did, and it was so remarkable I was picked on for it. And complaining about a lack of book reading could be like lamenting we aren't all reading the newspaper anymore either - does that mean our reading and writing is worse? Is the general essay writing of this decade actually provably that much worse than a decade or three ago? Is the general population actually less literate or can we not remember decades past?
I'm not saying you're entirely wrong, but there's some "old man yells at cloud" vibes here too.
I agree with your general skepticism - I believe there is evidence of every generation claiming that the younger cohorts are no longer up to par. Still, even without specific evidence to back up my claims, I can't imagine that childhood exposure to the internet and video games hasn't had a profound effect on our youth.
I am limited in my ability to only experience my immediate surroundings, and statistics are limited by sample sizes, bias, and reporting techniques. I can tell you, however, that the children I have direct experience with are generally worse at writing, reading, focus, and the ability to troubleshoot and critically think.
It is difficult to make comparisons to childhoods other than my own experience, but I was not an exceptional child. I made poor grades in high school and college, and was generally considered average in most subjects, and yet when I compare my skills and abilities at a similar age to the children I see now (most who are in exceptional private schools), I feel as though my toolbox was much more robust.
Granted, I was not nearly as good at memes and youtube and online social etiquette as children are these days. They are still learning quite a bit. I just worry that what they are learning does not prepare them to live a life in which they have to participate in society.
When asked why they universally point the finger at phones. This affirms my confirmation bias but seems plausible as well.