Scores decline again for 13-year-old students in reading and mathematics (2023)(nationsreportcard.gov) |
Scores decline again for 13-year-old students in reading and mathematics (2023)(nationsreportcard.gov) |
There's definitely loads of money in "education". But the actual teachers arent seeing it. No, its in "special interest programs", state/federal compliance, loads of tests, and ordained material from "preferred creators" (cough, pearson etm.)
We can pay teachers better, sure. But there's lots of areas to "pay better". Small classes. 12-17 students. Budget for class resources. No, teachers should NOT be responsible for work materials. Larger classes get aides as well.
Ive also seen what modern teaching is about. The teachers are handed absolutely shit material and required to teach that, with low/no deviation. Like, "New Math" https://www.understood.org/en/articles/9-new-math-problems-a... . None of these methods show WHY, only a rote procedure.
I thought about becoming a teacher. I already teach people (wide array of adults and under 18) in extracurricular groups. Ive seen what works well, and what doesnt. I can tell the 'energy' of a group, especially if theyre confused and angry about something, and how to solve it. But the pay is definitely laughable compared to IT, and the administration demands exacting rubrics put forth by companies who kicked back the state educators.
The responsibility is not worth their salaries or the anti-benefits and other costs.
There are multiple teachers in my local school district whose total compensation is well over $200k: https://transparentcalifornia.com/salaries/search/?a=school-...
And, no, this isn't mainly overtime pay. So they're getting paid this much even though they work only 80% as many days as people with normal jobs. If you multiply the compensation numbers by 100/80 to make them comparable with people working full time, the numbers look really large.
Cherrypicking the most expensive area in the country does not defend your claim. Sure, the most expensive locale in the country has a few up there, but even CA's average is 101K.
Most of the Midwest is 55-65k. And frankly, given the responsibility, is shit pay.
I'm confused by your comment here. Literally the entire point of teaching those various methods is to show WHY the math works. If anything you should be arguing for rote methods. Some are better than others, but ultimately they're all trying give tools to depict the way any math literate adult thinks about arithmetic.
[1] https://theconversation.com/mounting-research-shows-that-cov...
Electronic screens have a profound correlation, positive until the 90s and later until today negative. Other independent factors might be financial deterioration and even microplastics. Quantitative estimates vary. I like the comparison with smoking, which started as a status symbol and ended being banned.
[1] https://quoteinvestigator.com/2010/05/01/misbehave/#e6c0268a...
The reasons to doubt are perfectly known: meritocracy is on a decline in the Western world, there's an ever improving safety net for losers, there's a price to pay for forcing my child to study vs the child spending time with their friends who were left to roam free as their social life will suffer.
I probably met more people whose degrees played little to no role in their professional career than the other way around. I've met lots of people who could never realize their degree because of the hollowed down European industry. Engineers seem to suffer the most. It seems like the few ways where a degree can open the door to a better life must be in a field that provides very localized services s.a. medicine. All else is outsourced. Trades do better in this respect as a lot of them need to be local, but they too are being populated by foreign workers and competition is fierce.
I don't think that COVID or any other "force of nature" is to blame for the outcomes. When there's will, there's a way. It's just that fewer parents see academic achievements as worth pursuing for their children.
I don't want to envision a future where most people besides a few elite have stopped reading and writing but maybe I'm just an old millennial and behind the times.
But the part I want to concentrate on is the education part and the role of tech. Anyone who sells to large bureaucracies like state and federal Education Departments will tell you the skill is in managing the procurement process. It's getting your claws in more than it is in delivering results. Any results tend to be more manufactured than not.
So contracts get signed with states and school districts that will require them to use a particular product, even if it doesn't work. We know how this goes too. Whoever was in charge of that decision will then tend to leave their job and go work for the seller. Shocking.
But we know what works in teaching and it's direct instruction [2] but you don't sell tech platforms or iPads or laptops that way. As a result we now have a disturbing number of people who have never read a book and really can't read a book, going so far as the students of elite colleges [3].
Likewise, we see Education PhDs who won't make a name for themselves pushing ideas from the 1800s. They have to come up with new methods and this was kind of a disaster for literacy [4], which people are finally waking up to as we go back to the 1800s method of phonics eg [5].
But it's hard to succeed when half the country wants the entire system to fail.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZM05gRIROqQ
[2]: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8476697/
[3]: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2024/11/the-eli...
[4]: https://www.apmreports.org/episode/2019/08/22/whats-wrong-ho...
[5]: https://news.stanford.edu/stories/2026/02/science-of-reading...
Sorry - that was reflexive: “… in the US”.
I don’t think there’s any great mystery here. Every few years, you guys elect a bunch of people for whom active sabotage of public education is a sine qua non to political gerrymandering strategies driven by the self-preservation instincts of lobbyists.
You need to repeatedly solve multiple practical problems to internalize the knowledge. And you'll eventually need to do stuff that you don't really like at all.
> Kids are naturally curious
This curiosity extends to simple facts (like "who's the best soccer player: Messi or Ronaldo?") it doesn't help with important subjects that need studying (like, how do you prove Pythagoras' theorem).
> Introduce them to study and scholarship as a means of figuring these things out, so that it becomes natural to them.
Children simply don't "work" like that. If you let children "figure things out", they'll "figure out" if Messi or Ronaldo are the best soccer player, and they will never even ask why is the sum of squares of the catheti equals the square of hypotenuse. Not only will they never ask that, they'll never figure out there are right triangles. Some discoveries in human knowledge took us many generations to make and some are trivial and easily discoverable. The former is difficult for people to learn. It requires effort that doesn't result in instant gratification. It's boring because often you will have to read the same thing many times over. It's frustrating because even after having read the same thing you still might not understand it. You have to be a masochist to like doing that. Generally, people who do it, don't do it because they like it. They like the side effects (eg. you may like to be paid a professor's salary, and so you'd grind the subject you want to be a professor in).
So, it never becomes "natural" to anyone, especially not to the children outside of the very few very simple things one might learn in this way. Left to their own devices, maybe half of all the children would love to become YouTube influencers who make their living by streaming the video games they play. They'd never even consider becoming an accountant or an engineer. They wouldn't even know accountants or engineers exist.
You think 60k in the midwest isn't much, but consider:
- you're talking about salary; teachers' total comp in most places is 25% higher than salary (due to retirement benefits)
- teachers only work 80% as much as regular folk; so you need to add 25% to make it comparable
- in most places, the performance bar for getting and keeping a teaching job is much lower than for other 'professional' jobs
60 × 1.25 × 1.25 ~= 94
Or better yet, its a classical case of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outlier calculations.
Im also going to go on a real limb here and say that since the median for CA is 101k, that $207,869.26 is probably outside of 3 SD's.
Again, you chose the most expensive state and most expensive city in the country. And yeah, Im calling you on that. Its not indicative for most of us, other than you bay area folks.
If these numbers are at all meaningful for determining how much a student has learned as a result of going through schooling, then thye show that white people are consistently better than blacks and Hispanics at school and are consistently worse than Asians.
I'm so relieved I left social media. Sadly, via democracy, even if you leave social media you are still impacted by those who use it and believe what they read.
Just a week ago mine found and devoured a pack of cookies that were meant for supper and then cried at supper that there weren't any cookies left, choking on a hated apple instead.
Guess he won't do it again in a week if there's another pack of cookies in the hand's reach? Guess again!
This was famously tested with the Stanford marshmallow experiment. A sizeable fraction of kids - preschool kids, no less - can in fact learn not to eat the marshmallow.
There are millions of people struggling to get on a diet, to quit smoking, to stop doom-scrolling their choice of social media. Most of them know very well how good it would be to stop doing bad things and start doing something good instead, and yet they don't.
Children are worse, overall, because life isn't as harsh for them as it is for adults. An alcoholic who can't quit drinking is risking his marriage, his career, on top of his health, and still pulls out a stashed flask and takes a sip. The worst that can happen to a child is that their parents will yell at him / her? That's a very weak deterrent against doing something that offers instant gratification.
In Alaska, where I lived most of the last 20 years, education has been largely flat funded for about a decade now. Imagine running an organization in 2026 on that organization's 2016 budget. Schools have a bunch of obligations they have to spend on. Every time health care costs for staff go up, and funding is flat, something gets cut. You can't cut education for a decade straight without impacting student learning.
I don't think Alaska is that much of an outlier in this regard.
https://educationdata.org/public-education-spending-statisti...
The funding for dept of ed has _exploded_ after 2000
https://educationdata.org/public-education-spending-statisti...
At the same time, school scores started to sag after 2014
https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/ushistory/results/scores/
There are highly politicized blogs which can discuss this further and offer opinions as to the correlation.
When DJT talked about cancelling the Dept of Edu, I got ahold of all the teachers I knew and asked them what impact it would have, and their response was mostly that they would lose their school lunch benefits.
That's at the state level. But that doesn't account for the explosion in admin salaries and positions. The actual money a district spends on each student has been going down every year. Those funds are going more towards admin activities.
> I got ahold of all the teachers I knew and asked them what impact it would have, and their response was mostly that they would lose their school lunch benefits.
Teachers have a very poor understanding of where their funding comes from. Most just assume "property taxes", but it's far more complicated than that. The department of Ed provides a lot of funding to states that is passed through to the schools. They also enforce the education titles.
Cutting the department of Ed may not have a direct, immediate impact on classroom teachers, but it will have a large downstream effect in a few years.
That's around the time a bunch of districts in a state I lived in at the time had multi-year teacher pay scale freezes due to budget crunches. Not saying it's necessarily connected to the scores dropping, but still.
Total spending across the country may be high, but it's very much state-by-state and local how much is spent and where it goes. Some states pay teachers pretty well. Some states, the pay really is pretty awful. Some states are OK on staffing levels. Others are in an ongoing staffing catastrophe that's forcing them to cut school days to try to get by.
Meanwhile, school performance is heavily tied to home life and broader community support for students' families. That's why all this effort to improve schools hasn't been as effective as one might hope: the attention needs to go toward much harder problems that have little to do with schools and are really hard to get any progress on in the US. Worker protections, better and less-stressful "safety nets", better policing and a better justice system. That kind of thing. I'd look at least as much at what's been going on with those, and with security and home life for those in the lowest three quintiles of household income, as at schools themselves, to try to find reasons for trends like this.
I'm not criticizing your take, although I suspect teachers might lose more than their lunch, just pointing out how terrible the plot is.
Not the most convincing sample size.
Michigan notably does not fund schools through homeowner property taxes. I suspect that's probably the difference here and a reason we shouldn't use it as a representative example.
Public education has vast amounts of funding in the U.S. compared to other developed countries. If it does badly despite that, it's very likely that "more funding" is not the answer.
Public schools are subsidizing charter schools
Public schools have many legal requirements to provide services that charter schools don't have to deal with. Charter schools also have a lot of freedom to refuse problematic kids, that public schools have to take.
Parents who don't need those services keep taking their kids out of public schools and putting them into charter schools, charter schools kick out problem kids. Public schools end up having a higher cost per student because of that.
Schools have to finance an entire security apparatus because assholes keep doing mass shootings.
Public school systems _also_ are terrible at spending money on bullshit that has absolutely nothing to do with schools. The amount of money spent on administration is way way out of line. There are so many layers between the top and teachers and so many people with their hands out. Big school systems could probably fire half of their administration and literally nobody would notice. They would probably run better. When they do internal reports on how to save money, it always comes back to the most trivial shit or even worse, pulling it out of _education_ and is _never_ 'you need to fire a bunch of people collecting a paycheck for doing nothing'.
I genuinely think most big school systems would be vastly improved by firing half of the administration at random and doubling teacher salaries.
I don't know what state you are in, and there are a number of them where the charter systems are absolute messes and have become fraud paradises (looking at you Florida), but other states things are much better.
Fo instance my kids are in charter schools in California. All charter schools here are required to have tiered lotteries to get in, and after siblings and teachers' kids, the first tier is always kids with an IEP (the problematic/expensive ones). And at my kids school we know one of the kids with a severe problems that the school has bent over backwards to provide the best environment for that little girl.
And every 4 years they have to re-apply for their charter, and one of the front-and-center numbers required for that is how many kids they kick out. And they got grilled on that (which our school passed with flying colors). The charters absolutely had to prove that they are doing things better than the local schools, and our school worked very hard to prove that (and had the numbers to do so). If they didn't, then their charter would have been cut (we heard about other schools that failed this grade).
So I am experiencing a well run charter school, inside a well policed system (California). If you are not, then make that one of the things you cast your vote on: regulations on where your school dollars flow to.
I will note that there is one important advantage that charter schools have: you have to make a choice to get into them. That means that the parents tend to be more involved in their kids' education (if only minority so), and so you get kids that are a bit more motivated to do well. This one area is unfair to the public schools.
To some extent, this shift is inevitable due to demographics changes - but I don't think that there has been realistic planning on how to manage a future with dramatically fewer children.
big if true. we should probably cut 100% of spending in that case.
edit: not sure if people are missing the /s, or if people legitimately believe that cutting spending has no impact.
While I am not saying give kids more homework for the sake of work -- you do need to have some rigour. There was a movement about 10 years ago to let kids be kids and have lots of free time for exploration etc, remove competition at schools. These are all great things worth pursuing but not at a complete lack of work.
Also add in all the other things including funding - though funding doesn't solve all woes.
https://educationdata.org/public-education-spending-statisti...
https://ctmirror.org/2024/01/28/ct-budget-fiscal-guardrails-...
ai summary: "According to that piece, K-12 education has been losing $407 million each year since 2017 due to inflation, even as Gov. Lamont called current funding levels the "largest ever commitment." The author also noted that $2.4 billion in urgent legislative funding requests were denied in one spring session alone, with needs for fully funding education among the shortfalls."
Some data.
https://www.learner.com/blog/states-that-spend-the-most-on-e...
its weird that they used the state that they live in and have lived in for the last 20 years as an example?
If this style of education helped Feynman to get Nobel prize should be enough for current gen of pupils. And it is not expensive.
"Inflation-adjusted public school funding per student in the United States has increased significantly over the long term, with a roughly 34% increase in inflation-adjusted revenue per student over the last two decades alone. Looking at a broader historical view, inflation-adjusted spending per student has risen by over 200% since the 1960s."
AI is what shitty-capitalism wants to do to get money for themselves and try to push the society to defund public education
Looking back, I don't think Chromebooks, iPads and the like would have been beneficial to my elementary/middle/high school education at all.
Our primary instrument of learning was the teacher and really thick textbooks that were passed down student to student, and you could see that journey inside the in front cover where you signed it out for the year.
As someone who would protest at learning long division when a calculator was around, in retrospect, the teacher was right.
One thing that was evident to me from the sidelines was how much admin work was continually added to her workload without any consideration for the amount of class time she had. The focus on data derived from continuous testing of the students resulted in her and her peers sticking ever more closely to a continuously disrupted and rotated collection of commercially sourced curriculum and materials. This constant flux disincentivized teachers augmenting with their own content (although they still often do) because it could fall out of line with next years 'innovative new approach' to teaching basic arithmetic.
Her role as educator started to take a back seat to facilitator, focused on classroom management and data collection. Add in differentiated instruction, where she was held accountable to develop personalized lesson plans for individual students and asked to track all of that and you end up with way too much workload to stay engaged and engaging year after year.
She was in a pretty good school district. A friend of mine had a similar role in a city district for a regional metro area and her students were horrific. She felt physically unsafe and ultimately quit.
It's a complex problem with many contributing factors. It's also difficult to experiment or strike out on your own as an educator when the future of the students in front of you could be negatively impacted by any mistakes made (not to mention job/test scores/etc) so most just ride the rail all the way down.
(Also, at least in the US, you can get stuck to a district b/c the value-add of a seasoned teacher doesn't really move the metrics in the current system enough to offset the fact that you can hire two junior/fresh grads for the same money.)
> It's also difficult to experiment or strike out on your own as an educator when the future of the students in front of you could be negatively impacted by any mistakes made (not to mention job/test scores/etc) so most just ride the rail all the way down.
It's pervasive and makes things move so slowly. The biggest issue I have with it is that the system is so protective of doing no harm, but doing no harm to a system that is failing students is a poor decision imo. We should be more experimental if things are generally bad. Be protective of the mechanisms when we have good results, not when we have bad ones.
2012 2020 2023
Reading 263 260 256
Math 285 280 271
"The law allowed the state to abolish these districts’ local school board and remove the local superintendent in favor of a state appointee who would report directly to the state board of education. A later amendment provided that removed local-school-board members would be barred from serving in that capacity again."
Politically unpopular in some cases (which local jurisdiction wants the state coming in and replacing your local school board?), but seems to be pretty effective.
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/04/mississippi-educat... (gift link)
There are some interesting ethical questions about disparity of outcomes, but we should aim to have a system that educates each individual as best we can (without leaving kids behind). The current system of bludgeoning every individual student to be the same is not working well.
". . . did you ever attend school from home or somewhere else outside of school because of the COVID-19 outbreak?"
Can someone else confirm?
Not enough investigation there. Of course, the trend was already going down, but the new slope is obvious.
Prediction in next three years will be same or greater - technology, ai, screentime.
Significant parts of our society and government are actively hostile to education. Blaming the students is convenient, but probably not accurate.
I wonder if there’s a way to validate the hypothesis that post-shutdown, some of the cohort that would have missed a day here and there now see school as optional and miss more days.
Overall, the reported effect is sad and should be addressed. These are people’s lives.
It's really really difficult to worry about school when your in a homeless shelter or living in a motel.
https://www.wtxl.com/thomasville/school-bus-dropoff-reveals-...
I do well now , but as a teenager I didn't give a shit about high school. If anything I wanted to graduate early, and get a job to ward off the next eviction.
We really need to go back to occupational training in high school. I should be able to graduate and earn enough to get an apartment. It's not like you can't get a degree in Midwestern Poetry later in life.
Fortunately there are some great resources, far better than the average colorful school textbooks :
- aops.com and their BeastAcademy cartoon series
- an old book "Algebra" by Gelfand
- W W Sawyers old books on how math should be taught
- Geogebra and Desmos web tools
- 3Blue1Brown
- KhanAcademy
I try and introduce math in a more visual way, with multipication as rectangles and the distributive rule being central concepts that lead into all other areas of math :
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tu8hxgQdvRo&list=PLEInJ-Z4qB...
Constituencies of both parties found reasons to hate it, so its foundational accountability requirements were watered down by succeeding administrations.
I’m perfectly willing to be convinced NCLB had nothing to do with the evolution of test scores over the last 25 years, but the circumstantial evidence is not easy to dismiss.
comparing Fall 2019 to Fall 2022
It doesn't seem to be about 13-year-old students in general
Then AI takes over the world not out of calculated cruelty but by accident, then messes it up by hallucinating. Humans die out to being too thick. AI bumbles on for a bit but eventually model collapse and rusting electricity infra put an end to it.
The level is so low in my local elementary school that the single track math class is still doing addition within 20 for first grade.
The funny thing is that the state standard actually measure 2 and 3 digit addition for K and 1st graders, and proficiency at that level would be p75 for a 1st grader. So why is the actual class teaching level at p<50?
https://www.nysed.gov/sites/default/files/programs/curriculu...
My child took the “CASTL” test as part of IEP assessment. According to the result percentiles, a 6 year old who can do 2 digit vertical addition is at the 70th percentile of 6 year olds.
How come in kindergarten the curriculum is counting to 100 and addition within 10, while the assessment test shows double digit addition is well within the norm?
BTW my child didn’t learn any arithmetic from school.
EDIT: In case I wasn’t clear: there is a huge discrepancy between the standardized tests and the actual curriculum “standards”.
The decrease is consistent across performance levels which should be a pretty decent proxy for tracks.
https://oxfordeagle.com/2025/01/30/mississippi-4th-graders-n...
One overlooked problem is imo that you can't just waste their time with nonsense and get good results.
A lot of people in the education system are so full of shit that they believe it's good for children to sit there the whole day.
Improving exercises and lectures should be a priority.
To be perfectly frank....
Learning to sit down and do things you don't like is a fundamental part of education and a necessary life skill for adult employment.
What do you mean by "little results" and what data supports it?
I'm definitely in the camp that thinks cell phones have something to do with what's happened since 2012. If we start from the iPhone in 2007, it seems plausible to me that a 5-ish year lag is consistent with the time it took for smartphones to rise in popularity and their effects to filter into society. (I got my first smartphone around 2012, by which time pretty much everyone else I knew already had one.) That's at least a gesture toward explaining why there was a peak around 2012. What it doesn't explain is why the ascent to that peak was so much steeper in math than in reading.
The main assessment has been performed every two years recently, so 2024 data is most recent. They can all be seen here[2].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Assessment_of_Educati...
Dr's Deposition on How Screen Time Hurts Kids' Cognitive Development https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fd-_VDYit3U
As a 30-something, basic AI uses completely blow my mind. It has never been this easy to be curious, because there is a machine in my pocket that reduces the cost of finding answers to nearly zero. I can point my phone at a painting and dig as deep as I want into its subject, artist, movement and so on. It's a real world Pokédex.
Then there are countless well-made tutorials for every imaginable topic on YouTube, and more high-quality old-fashioned websites that Google cares to index.
Claude is really cool too. If you care to look at its output, you can see a fairly good translation of your thoughts into code. You can translate your projects from one language or framework to another. We used to read textbooks cover to cover. Now we get custom examples for any imaginable idea.
So why are these technologies failing our kids? Why are they so powerful in the hands of a curious person, yet making everyone dumber?
The fundamental problem seems to be that screens as a basis for learning how to learn, study, and retain information in kids appears to be detrimental to developing that core skill we have already developed.
Curiosity level varies per individual. I find certain things fascinating that many others don't. AI has been a boon for me and others who may be limitlessly curious, and it may be a negative for the uncurious.
There's no comparison with an engaging Youtube lecture.
Yes, and so’s the available distractions and entertainment.
"Technology" has been an education buzzword since I was in school and it needs to be taken out and shot.
Ironically...
https://macleans.ca/society/life/why-your-teenager-cant-use-...
- tech apps starting with infinite scroll (facebook, 9gag, Instagram, etc.)
- media/tech shortened content: shorter tv shows, short video content, etc.
(Tiktok is the "state of the art" of those 2 trends pushed to the max)
Specifically, we're getting more & more addicted to things that increase the dopamine spikes frequency, making it increasingly difficult to go in deep focus work.
For example I remember reading a lot of science magazines / articles growing up (granted popsci but for a kid it still teaches some things) and as I grew up things like the Economist.
Similarly I also played games like math blaster as a kid and have realized I need to intentionally provide games like this to my kids that ideally teach something (the bar being greater than zero learning) rather than playing one of those infinite running games or whatever.
I think we're probably talking about the exact same thing but am curious where content vs. short form media is.
Thanks for sharing :)
We do have the NAEP main series test results[2]. At a first glance at the math results[3][4], it appears they peaked in 2013, then fluctuated through 2019, then dropped significantly in 2022 and somewhat rebounded in 2024, which really does suggest COVID.
[1]https://www.edweek.org/teaching-learning/debate-flares-anew-...
[2]https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/report_archive.aspx
[3]https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/highlights/mathematics/202...
[4]https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/reports/mathematics/2024/g...
My answer to this is approximately: “yes they’re all relatively bad compared to the thing that came before so they were all right!”
Even books. If the option were between my child reading about blacksmithing/compsci and DOING blacksmithing/compsci I’d choose the latter every time. It gives you real experience and opinions.
The difference with each successive new wave is that it becomes increasingly addictive. It’s possible to read one book and stop for a while. Shorts can hook you for hours and then draw you back the next day with no natural stopping point.
Who do you think suffers when elites attack public education? It's always the children.
Fun fact: Silicon Valley elites are big proponents of school vouchers because, like their hatred of American labor, they also hate public schools and don't want to pay for that either.
School boards are inherently poltical because as long as a publicly-run school system exists, how it is run and what things it will attempt to teach are political questions. There's no apolitical school board that existed 40 years ago that has been altered since then, they have always been poltical.
Like, I get the desire in a hypothetical, that you hope that people in power would use their power to make public schools better if their kids were forced to go there.
But in reality, the actually powerful can just pay for private schools out of pocket and the vouchers help a lot of middle-income families send their kid to a school that can provide a better environment for whatever definition of better is relevant to that individual.
It just seems like such misplaced anger and energy. You could just advocate for improving public schools, without attacking regular families trying to do their best while trapped inside a system they have very little influence on.
Seattle's Public Schools district is among the leading in the nation on per-student spending, yet the test scores are cratering. Its previous superintendant had an official platform of not disciplining students.
Vouchers would _improve_ the situation.
Exactly. And who benefits from a less educated, less aware populace? The answer is pretty clear: look at who is benefiting right now!
That is a blanket statement that is not true everywhere. There is, yes the money going with the student, but there is also money from the general funds that goes to subsidize various aspects of running charter schools.
> I don't know what state you are in, and there are a number of them where the charter systems are absolute messes and have become fraud paradises (looking at you Florida)
you guessed the one :)
One could say it's the entire point of them existing to begin with. Self-selection of the student body is the only thing that actually matters. The rest is a bunch of minor details. Everyone more or less intuitively understands this point but doesn't want to admit it in public.
And no, I do not see that as a bad thing. I see it as a great thing. It's the closest thing to public school academic tracking as we are likely to get. Other western democracies have this one figured out. They don't throw endless amounts of money into bottomless pits with zero expectation of a payback to society.
I would be nothing today if my very working class parents didn't have the ability to opt me out of the local urban school system. I likely would be dead or in prison. What they had going for them was "giving a shit" and a still-functional system where motivated highly engaged parents could opt out of the status quo. Most of my peers would have had similar stories if not for tracking and academically based magnet schools and the like. The system I was able to use to get ahead has since been torn down.
If it had been the choice of "pay for private school" or "go to the local public school" I'd have been forced into the latter with almost zero chance to succeed in life. I ended up back in that system my final year I attended K-12, and the education offered was laughable and perhaps 6-7 year behind what I had become used to. Plus a moderately violent environment on top of it all.
My point is different. Study after study shows that below a specific floor spending has almost no impact on educational outcomes. The correlation is such that you can both determine that there is likely no leak and also that it has no effect.
The stuff that does have an impact is much harder to move the needle on though so everyone just scapegoats funding instead. Stuff like building up the nuclear family in an area, increasing income mobility, and holding parents accountable for child outcomes do have a measurable effect but are politically intractable today.
But as a practical matter that is not what happens when a campaign to increase funding for a school happens. The problem is not insufficient money, the problem is not enough skill and political will in how you spend the money.
As I like to say, AI is great for those of us who "learned it the hard way", be it coding and learning, but I suspect I would not have bothered learning it the hard way if I had it available when I was younger.
If enough people use the voucher system it basically forces the per student spending to get closer to a purely egalitarian spending per student, with the result that public schools have to spend about the same amount on special ed kids as the voucher kids get (in the extreme, that's all the students they're left with). While this is objectively fairer in my opinion, it's viewed as an entitlement that the special ed kids can take more money at the expense of everyone else.
Obviously though this has to be carefully framed to sell it properly. Very few are going to knowingly sign up to lose funding for their own student to help some other student who is already getting 3x the money as them, so instead it's framed as some sort of evil capitalist agenda against public schools.
It depends on the state. In Texas, property taxes from wealthier districts are redirected to poorer districts to ensure more equitable funding (search for "texas robin hood").
The result is that most public schools are funded about the same regardless of where they're located.
The paper gives an overview of more recent research mostly using quasi-experiments. Before 2000 or even 2010 just doing some linear regressions was more common. Anyway my view is similar to Hanushek in short/medium terms. I do believe long term the pay of teachers, and therefore extra spending, is an important factor in keeping teaching prestigious compared to other jobs. In the US partly because of its strong private sector this is a lot more difficult/failed, I'm not sure if it's possible to fix since spending is only one part of it.
Unfortunately, people hate it when you close their local school, and fight tooth-and-nail against it, but almost never fight for the funding needed to keep those schools open.
In the SF Bay Area almost all of the school districts are facing this. Oakland and San Francisco both had school closures canceled by parent revolts, but are still stuck with the budget shortfalls (and are handing out pick slips). One of the school districts in San Jose looks like they are going to make it through closing 5 elementary schools this year, but it has been a close fight all the way.
Then why are their reading scores improving so dramatically compared to wealthier states? Especially for under-privileged populations?
> This embrace of phonics education and the near-complete rejection of whole language theory was a key component of the program's success.
Back in 2022 I spoke with the principal of a nearby government-run school. She told me:
- under no circumstances would a kindergarten teacher teach any first grade content, and
- grade skip is so rare that she'd seen it only once in her entire career
My 3rd grade daughter was unlucky with various illnesses and missed about 12 days this year (so far). I got a letter from her principal attempting to guilt trip me for her "Chronic absence".
I wrote an angry response (in retrospect it was too angry since he had no choice about the letter) where I asked if he would prefer my sending sick children to school.
Her grades (for whatever value grades have in 3rd grade) are fine. I'll take the chance on her reading her "Diary of a wimpy kid" book when sick, or when a sane system would have given a snow day.
Imho you did the right thing. Everyone has a choice.
I did the same (but instead of an email it was an angry speech, face to face), with the exact same question (if they would prefer my sending sick children to school). My child's grades were fine, too. Haven't received any letters after that.
Regardless, I'd think that a study trying to find a correlation among practice, funding, and measurement would need at least a generation (~thirty years yea?) of results to show meaning
I disagree. I cannot count the times I typed a documentation from an audio device without pausing the device once. Even short converstions in parallel are no problem. Being able to type without sight, by pure muscle memory is an invaluable skill.
Edit: also, try typing a dissertation in a two finger henpeck system and see how long it takes you.
you do know we have tools that transcribe audio, yes? :)
Would you agree with that argument? Why or why not?
Could simply be doing the bullshit "spend down the year's IT budget on stuff likely to sit in shipping crates at district HQs until it gets e-wasted". The latter being one of the few I directly witnessed - millions of dollars of Cisco gear sitting there for 5 years before it was trashed. Never needed in the first place. I have no reason to believe anyone was on the "take" for it - just general incompetence and grifting to keep one's Very Important job going for internal politics.
This was for a district where a few million could easily have paid to fund a district-wide music program that was recently cut, among myriad of other in-the-classroom things.
The older I get and the more I witness things like this, the more I understand why a large and growing segment of society has completely tuned out the "experts" trotting out studies and reports. Those have largely been weaponized, and the erosion in trust of both institutions and expert knowledge may now be terminal due to it. You can only be told the sky isn't blue by so many experts until you tune them out entirely.
It used to be this kind of thing was - maybe not exceptional, but certainly not expected.
Now it's common but underreported.
So there's a kind of dream world where "education" and "health" are still considered official public goals. But the reality is that government procurement is mostly grift and corruption. There's been an epic collapse of almost any kind of public service ethic in favour of opportunism and profiteering, sometimes covered over with religious/moral pretexts.
Those are all gone, either shuttered or snapped up by huge companies that fired most of the staff and are milking them for the last money they can provide, or using them to distribute propaganda (e.g. Sinclair), and nobody's ever going to (be able to) do a proper accounting of how much the resulting waste and corrosion of public trust has cut into the actual overall cost/benefit of this whole "Internet" thing.
At one point one of my colleagues asked for assistance in getting an order of 500 iphones approved. As "spares".
Fortunately the corp had a policy that phone purchases needed to have a named individual declared.
I declined politely to assist.
It was common to see certain mid level execs churning through 2x - 5x the equipment of IC's (who would never get out-of-lifecycle approvals anyeay) and some quid pro quo stuff. As a fraction of their total comp it was modest ultimately, and for this reason my boss advised me to keep my mouth shut.
Unfortunately, I don’t see a way out of that loop. Move to a state that still has some civic pride I guess.
What shocks me is how open they’ve become about it.
The people are too fat and impotent to care. Plus the average retard will convince themselves that it’s something only the other guy will do.
Meanwhile, once upon a time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Athens_(1946)
These men didn’t let a little threats and intimidation stop them, though tbf they just returned from a war.
It's an all time high because it started declining after that. You'd expect some regression, but you don't expect it to fall back to 1980s levels.
It most certainly is.
The adults in the room saying you don't need that in order to learn are doing a disservice to the next generation.
There is also a lot of busy work but again work and being able to do work, sustain focus requires the development of that skill and muscle. Especially in this day and age where everyone is vying for your attention.
If you want to argue some children learn faster and can level up faster thats obviously a true statement.
i dont think this is true.
there is an art to educating (especially the ~10-15 year old range) that does not just manifest itself because you are smart: how to engage students, how to keep them engaged, how to adjust the message to the audience's level and communicate it effectively (which changes kid to kid), how to earn a kids respect without becoming over-bearing (or too friendly), and dozens of other things that your PhD in compsci or whatever does not teach you.
some of the smartest PhD holders i know would be very shitty elementary/high school teachers.
(context: i teach at the college level. its a lot easier than teaching at the high school level.)
ED as a field is 100% all-in on AI, too, so there's a lot of discussion amongst them about what skills in the field need to be automated and what has to stay artisanal. But I'm sympathetic to zozbot's claims too - I do think the reading scores would be higher if there were more comp/rhet specialists in sec. ed.
And parents play an equally important role. One of the best things you can do for your child's education/life is support the teacher when they call you up and say, "Your child is making poor decisions..."
Teachers get paid peanuts.
Unions are similar. People cry about them being a huge problem, but they have effectively no power (as in: don't even collectively bargain for contracts) in lots of states, including many of the ones with poor school performance. In other states, they really do have quite a bit of power.
Newbie teachers start around $70k last I checked, and hit six figures in 5-6 years.
This is roughly double median salaries.
That said, I think they earn every bit of it even with "summers off" and their relatively lucrative benefit packages. The work environment is utter shit. Basically zero ability to manage a classroom and get rid of any shitheads - with very little supportive parenting or administration having your back. Even if salaries were $500k/yr I wouldn't remotely consider taking such a job.
Pay itself though? Not an issue for one of the worst performing major urban school districts in the nation.
You can do a lot with $60k.
Teachers are put in an impossible position with students who come from homes where the parents don't do their proper jobs. It's never been easier to be a neglectful parent. Your child will be entertained non-stop by an iPad and a video game system. They won't get bored and bother you. You can send them to their room and do whatever you want if you don't care if they are sleeping or not, as long as they are quiet.
The "iPad babies" are an epidemic in schools.
Source:
My sister is a K-12 educator in a poor, rural public school system in southeastern Virginia.
In recent years, she's seen a surge in students who are sorted, improperly, into special education classes. These are students that exhibit symptoms of various learning disabilities, but these symptoms heavily overlap with the symptoms of children who are sleep deprived and over stimulated by dopamine activating content on the devices they are addicted to.
Or put another way: The quality and involvement of the average parent.
A school can absorb an extremely small minority of "problematic" students if the rest of the student body is stellar, but that's about it.
There is not a single thing any public education system can do to counteract that simple fact. If the average student in the classroom is uninterested at best and troublemaking at worst, it doesn't matter how good the teachers are or what the ratios are, or if the classrooms are old and busted or brand new.
Until society becomes serious again, this problem will only get worse as education continues to be a political and culture war football. The best realistic thing I can think of is take a look at nearly all other western social democracies who have much better outcomes and immediately implement student academic tracking. But that would be politically impossible to do in the current state of the US.
I fear that things are going to get far worse before they get better. You could 10x the primary school education budget and likely continue to see worsening results.
When I went from private (poor) primary and middle school, to a rich suburban high school, to a poor inner city high school back in the 90's this was self evident. I didn't think it could get much worse than that, but the administrative and political classes figured out how to wildly beat even my exceedingly low expectations.
I think if anything parents are more involved now than they used to be.
The most obvious difference to me other than ipads/social media is we don't beat kids anymore and we give them way less autonomy.
At varying times in various places, public school is or will become just like riding the bus: technically a viable option for a needed service, if you have no other choice and are ready to suffer in a place that tolerates all manner of dysfunction.
And I'm a former high school teacher and my wife is a current high school teacher so I've experienced all of this first-hand.
Perhaps some wonder why they should try so hard in HS, when most anyone that graduates can get into college, and no employer is asking a college grad what their high school grades and scores were.
There was a time back in the 60s or 70s or earlier when anyone that graduated HS could get a decent job. And a time now where most anyone who wants a decent job, must complete college or trade school. The latter are increasingly becoming less correlated with HS performance. The importance of HS performance needed to succeed is regressing back towards what was needed back in the 70s or before, so long as you actually graduate so you can go on to further schooling. In the 80s -00's was a time where you where the ladder was shut off if you didn't go to college, but going to college was far more correlated with having the highest marks.
Ok? Seems like that's more of a problem than the funding. Or whatever is causing that is more of a problem, but it does a disservice to the general argument of "kids aren't receiving the same level of care" argument to blame a drop in funding--especially when it was so easily falsified.
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2009/mar/27/david-simon-wi...
> "Oh, to be a state or local official in America over the next 10 to 15 years, before somebody figures out the business model," says Simon, a former crime reporter for the Baltimore Sun. "To gambol freely across the wastelands of an American city, as a local politician! It's got to be one of the great dreams in the history of American corruption."
I'm not sure there is a viable business model for local investigative reporting waiting to be discovered, any more. At least not in the US, not in mid-sized or smaller markets. It's semi-functional in rich, dense cities. Might remain so for a while longer. It's just everywhere else that now has no watchdogs aside from the occasional, lazy, probably partisan look-see from state regulatory agencies, and maybe resource- and access-starved hobbyists if they're lucky. The pros are gone. A few still watching big national-scale stuff (bigger audience!) but all the smaller parts of the system have gone dark.
I have taught 5 years at a private school. I do not have a teaching credential.
Knowing the stuff you're teaching is the easiest part. And I say that despite teaching in an environment with far better behavior, student buy-in, family support, and academic accomplishment than most places.
I thought that when I launched a student team doing spacecraft design (selected for orbital flight on the basis of the quality of their mission, btw, not their age) that the hard part would be teaching kids about power budgets, radiation aging, and the thermal environment.
Turns out the hard part is helping them figure out how to navigate the social dynamics of talking to each other, organizing their work, realizing what other people know, and coping emotionally with setbacks. Kids will teach themselves the stuff if you have buy-in and the culture in the room is right.
My mother retired after working her entire career as a teacher, and I earned close to double her final salary my first year working in tech. She has her masters degree and I did not graduate college. And if you count the stocks I got at the end of that first year, it was over triple.
She was a special ed. teacher teaching emotionally disabled grade schoolers (including a first grader that tried to kill his grandmother with a tv power cord). There is no way that I worked harder than she did.
I've known plenty of highly credentialed teachers that were very poor communicators and/or could not manage their classroom. I think the idea that this can be, or is, effectively taught as part of the "education major" is very suspect.
Indeed, the worst-performing school districts are precisely those where "classroom management" is a serious problem, versus better districts where the children come to school ready to be managed. It seems older styles of classroom management now out of vogue and untaught by universities were more effective.
Regarding managing kids...every school I've worked at (or my wife has worked at) has a mix of kids who are ready to learn and who need to be taught to learn. That includes districts in more wealthy areas and less wealthy areas.
In fact, my wife would tell you the students who cause the most problems in her classroom are from more affluent families. Why? Because they have entitled parents who don't hold their kids accountable and don't support the teacher.
The idea of it actually sounds initially fun to me, until I talk to friends who actually work those jobs. For my temperament I know better. At best I'd rage quit, at worst I'd end up in prison.
Nowadays parents are very strict about the age gaps between their kid's friends, especially with how older kids usually know how to get into risque stuff online. They aren't exposed to differences of opinion and ability as much in real life, and that somewhat hinders their development. There's nothing that can teach you patience like trying to calm down one of the younger kids so you don't get kicked out of a friend's house during the basketball game. Just like there's nothing that motivates you to get better than your six foot two friend intercepting every single pass to your receiver.
And this isn't even getting into the hobbies, interests, and skills kids can learn just by watching adult neighbours. While this year I'm seeing more people outside doing things, for a long while everyone was inside. That meant there weren't older people outside working on cars, tending to their gardens, preparing their boats for fishing season, or just sitting around talking about activities from the past that might be interesting. Kids are more likely to take an interest in a new activity if somebody they know does that activity, because that person is much easier to ask questions and directly show problems to. If they see something online it will probably be a momentary passing interest that they'll forget by the end of the day because once that video's gone so is their interaction with it.