Apparently the school board decided to save money by cutting the librarian, and then decided to just move the books out of the school library and into the “nearby” public library.
In reality, there were 95 books in the school library which were being questioned by some parents. Instead of removing just those books, and being accused of book banning, they just removed the entire library. For all intents and purposes, it was a book burning.
Yet the football team is fully funded, and the baseball diamond is kept up.
This society has priorities which aren’t education.
That class was the best kind of unstructured. We had a new teacher with little experience, but she just turned us lose on the school library and let us read whatever and then talk about it in class. I *ADORED* that class. It was getting an hour a day to basically do what I wanted to be doing anyway.
I've often thought it would be a good idea to separate academics from athletics. Have a "school district" that runs the schools in a building next to the football field run by the "athletic district." I think both are important, but you're right, North Texas public schools have fallen quite far from the academic standards they used to hold.
It’s my understanding this is what they do in much of Europe.
The issue is who is ultimately in charge of students and who is responsible for raising them (which should be the same thing, but doesn't have to be), making this ultimately a control issue.
Certain people want to use the school system to raise children based on their own moral system because they could be learning the "wrong" thing at home, and other people want the schools to defer to parents' wishes. Most people want their kid to get a good education and otherwise be left alone by teachers and administrators, but that group gets very little attention.
At the end of the day, parents are legally responsible for their children, and unless that is changed, schools play an important but secondary role in caring for and raising them. Until that is widely accepted or changed, conflict will continue.
Also almost every kid had club activities in and in class all day long. Primary goal is to drill in discipline and conformity over education to be honest.
I have completely separate views on how kids are being raised and educated and how things have changed just in my half century on this planet.
Freestyle[0] FTW! Let's Jam!
Just because it doesn't require a cup or serious risk of CTE/TBI doesn't make freestyle bad, does it?
But disassembling the library bookcases is hardly an appropriate woodworking project.
These challenges are more than a hundred years old! We have turned this into a national issue, made national standards and its not clear we are making that much progress. Many US states are effectively large countries. Why don't we let them decide what they want to do democratically. Whether you agree with it or not, it is what happens effectively. In the US you can move if you don't like where you live.
Any library is a nexus of knowledge and learning. They should be in schools.
The correct response to downvotes is to think about how you could express your point in a way that people can connect with. That's the art of a good comment. The best comments on HN are ones that make a point that many in the community may have disagreed with, but it is expressed in a way that creates a pathway for people to see things in a new way, and persuades them to see the issue from the new perspective you're illustrating.
I believe that's uncalled for. If you're looking for a discussion, that's not the way to go about starting it. You're just turning it hostile before it can even begin; what sort of response do you expect from such hostility?
If not for that pesky education system we could all be hiring fully capable 14 year olds into our empty job postings!
Of course, they might have trouble getting to the workplace. Or doing anything that benefits from a high school education. Maybe shuttle them to the mines?
[As a reminder, this is a thread that is using sarcasm to advocate for a thing opposite of what is explicitly stated. Or at least I think it is.]
Ignoring the existence of well-off suburban public schools.
I don't have data on this, but it certainly SEEMS to be that way.
However, trying my best to answer sensibly:
> Every now and again there is an aberration where teachers actually teach something in a public school, but in the US, why take the chance?
You seem to be backing up your argument that a high school education doesn't have value (and shouldn't be funded) by stating that the US has an overall-poor standard of public education. That's a circular argument which doesn't even try to address the reasons that the quality of education is lacking or comment on whether a higher-quality education would have general value. I can't understand your viewpoint that the actual education of students shouldn't be funded, because the quality is already poor. You seem to be ignoring the fact that a well-funded and correctly-motivated (in terms of education, not just which high school can build the most football fields) education system can produce graduates who go on to add extra value to society.
Why should a decent high school education be reserved for the wealthy who can send their kids to private schools?
Also, I'd recommend against including statements like the one that you make in your last paragraph. Saying (paraphrasing) "I'm right, everyone who downvotes my high controversial and unpopular opinion without spending time to reply is an uneducated idiot" is starting from an unconstructive place.
That being said... there's a critique that keeps coming up that the structure of public education is largely unchanged since Victorian times. I've heard people say that the reason you get kids up in the morning and have them move from class to class every hour is to prepare them for life in the mines and mills. Certainly there is some validity to this observation. If we're trying to prepare students for the world of modern work, maybe they should be in front of a computer monitor for 8 hours a day and run to a local gym in 1 hour shifts in an effort to ensure their lives are not completely sedentary.
There's an "unschooling movement" that has made some interesting points, but still gets some of the details wrong (in my opinion.) "Pedagogy of the Oppressed" is a great read, even if you disagree with Freire's politics or semiotics.
When I say "high school is nothing more than child-care" I should probably say "I fear high school is nothing more than child-care" or "Some high schools are nothing more than child-care." I don't think low academic achievement is universal, but I also think there's a correlation between per-capita spending and academic achievement.
Most (many?) public schools in the US were set up in the post-war period to be funded with property taxes. But since the 60s / 70s many (most?) states have policies similar to California's Prop 13 that limited property taxes. [Don't have the data on this handy, point me at the data if I'm wrong.] So it seems like it's a perfect storm of decreasing teacher salaries, deferred maintenance for school district property and low academic achievement.
As a society, we can have as good a school system as we're willing to pay for.
At this point, if there's any way to supplement public school budgets with money from the football stadium... I'm all for it. I would just prefer that the money goes from the profitable football program to the general academic fund and not the other way around.
[Edit: I'm informed out of band that there's a correlation between a state's median income and public school educational achievement. This is a small, but important update on the assertion above saying there's a correlation between per-capita spending and academic achievement.]
That is not at all the impression that I got reading your original comment. It seemed (and continues to seem, on a second reading), that you disagree with further funding education, because there's no point, high schools "just" day care for teenagers.
Please consider that, just because someone doesn't bother to reply to you, it doesn't mean that you're right. They may simply see no point in arguing with some stranger with whom they'll hopefully never have to interact. With this follow-up comment, it seems to me that your actual opinions are significantly different from both the words and tone in your initial message. That isn't helped by the notes about downvotes without comments (and the Latin snark in the edit).
I was considering commenting when I originally downvoted but thought it would detract from the core conversation.
But now that you’ve added this bit I’ll just say: a number of people (including myself) will auto-downvote any comment that complains about impending downvotes regardless of other content.
https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/per-pupil-s...
https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/educational...
There's broad correlation between per-pupil spending and academic achievement. Massachusets has high per-pupil spending and high academic achievement. Florida's educational attainment is higher than I would have thought, given how little they spend on education. Maybe their graduation requirements are laxxer than Massachuset's? Maybe they're more efficient? Cost of living in rural Florida has to be less than in Mass.
https://www.ecs.org/50-state-comparison-high-school-graduati...
Except for fourth graders in math last year, they do not[0].
[0] https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/profiles/stateprofile/over...
And it's too late for those worthless 12th graders too eh? They're better off in prison anyway, huh?
Gotta keep those prison and prison adjacent services stocks doing well...number go up, yeh bossman!
You’re saying “educational achievement” is measured by graduation rates, not test scores.
The school district might be primarily white, it’s more clearly likely poor and rural, and the electoral college values it more than dense educated rich cities.
Also... great deflecting.
So an addict mother, having to be raised by grand-parents, having to go to the army and then use the GI Bill to study, growing up in an declining small working class town in Ohio, are not enough?
He had to be "feral and unparented" to qualify? Because that's what people mean when they talk about the working and middle class "white American struggles"? Vicorian street urchins?
In any case, by those elements alone, he knows 100x about "white American struggles" than the average champion of the poor at the Met Gala and the New Yorker.
Doesn't that kinda make his current actions worse? The "met gala" people can claim ignorance, he understands struggling and still screws over the struggling.
Are you an AI? Probably not. I think most LLMs would understand the difference between the Army and Marines.
Don't care about the distinction between them either, or their subdivisions. Most of the times I call all of it "the army" (as in armed forces) anyway, chalk it to dyslexia if you wish.
Not that I'm implying you're a Liar or Bullshitter, but we're all bozos on this bus and give a sinner a break.
But specifically, I am not lying when I say that some people have cast doubts as to the degree of poverty Vance lived in as a child. And if you're saying that the people who say Vance didn't live in abject poverty for most of his childhood are lying, then I don't know what to tell you. We all have to choose what we believe. Some people believe vaccines cause autism. The data supporting this assertion seems kinda thin when I look at it. But having tutored a number of pre-med students through stats classes, I'm not confident members of the AMA are the people who should be doing medical research (thankfully that is changing recently as we get more MD/PhD programs where they teach experimental design.) But I digress...
This seems like one of those "fact resistant" issues and I apologize for bringing it up. People on both sides of the "is J.D. Vance a poop-head" debate should understand there's plenty of mis-information out there and while some people may believe he's a cynical charlatan banking coin on the suffering of people in Appalachia, others believe he is bringing light to a largely under-reported pandemic of systemic under-investment in rural quarters of our country.
It's probably a good idea to examine your own beliefs and biases, and maybe this is a good touch-stone to begin that process. Why do you think Vance is a dork? Why do you think Vance is a valiant defender of social justice for an under-served community?
Texans scored highly on Texas state tests, but generally below the national average on national tests like the SAT https://legacyonlineschool.com/blog/texas-sat-score.html I don’t think Texas can be used to make the arguments either way here.
The steel man version of what you’re saying is that American kids do really well on tests, accounting for factors like the large immigrant population. And they choose to invest their significantly greater financial resources in sports rather than improving score even further. Which is a fair argument!
But the formulation of the argument made by OP is just cultural chauvinism. Being culturally open minded has little to do with reading and math scores. Utah performs similarly to states like Minnesota in reading scores, and better than almost any other state in math.
Elementary school libraries are important because kids can check out books at their reading level and you don't need a huge variety.
But in high school, when I wanted a book for research or recreational reading, 99% of the time my high school library wouldn't have it anyways. You had to go to the public library anyways for decent fiction, and the local college library for non-fiction you would need to cite.
I think it's important to preserve the high school library space for working and the computer access. But I'm just not sure how relevant the actual books are. Especially since public libraries now have e-books, so you don't even have to go there in person if it's inconvenient.
Should maintaining a collection of physical library books really still be the job of high schools, when public libraries will do it better and are open to everyone, not just high schoolers?
If we wanted information or recommendations on books to read, that was definitely what our English teachers were for. The library wasn't helping with that.
Learning about a library's complete range of services is a decent idea and I encourage you to do so. If you don't want to read about it on the Wikipedia, I encourage you to engage your local librarian. Just ask them what they do. They will be delighted someone took an interest.
Here are a few examples... In the 70s, our high-school librarian was the go-to person to ask about where to find specific types of information. Before the internet, I think most people didn't know how to look up raw data in the reference stacks. My high school librarian showed me where to find state and federal data and departmental reports. I learned what "semiotics" was by asking my Jr. High School librarian about how the library was structured. When I worked for the government, we had a departmental library whose librarian was much more like a research assistant. The Seattle Public Library maintains 3-d printers they let the public use. I mean... I would not have guessed that was a thing the library would do. (Though I didn't see them the last time I was there, so maybe they're not doing that anymore.)
My previous comment wasn't intended to be patronizing, but I guess I can't control how you interpret comments from other people. Feel free to think I'm a jerk... but please ask your local librarian what services their library offers.
It sounds like you had an exceptional high school library. On the other hand, my high school "librarians" knew how to check books out and shelve them when they were returned and that was pretty much it. And this was one of the best high schools in the area, one of only two that had AP classes.
So my original comment was questioning the utility of book lending in high school libraries specifically. And specifically asking if the focus shouldn't be on public libraries instead, where they do have the funding to hire actual real librarians and put together book collections that are actually decent.
And I guess I didn't find it necessary to say most high school libraries limit their services that way because I think it's common experience? But I'm very happy for students who were lucky enough to get more. Still, like I said, English teachers were usually there if you wanted fiction recommendations at least.
Would those parents really have support in your community if they were named and shamed?
That doesn't make the school caving on the topic any more forgivable, but we can't trivialize how difficult small but dedicated groups in a local community can make things either. The community typically only shows up to worry about it after a bad decision is imminent, the small group shows up 24/7/365 pushing the issue.
I'm not saying their feelings aren't sincerely held. My point is they need community support to ban books in a public school.
What the school board did here is sneak out of the battle, which would continue long after community says "no" once.
That's where naming and shaming comes in. In a small community, there is a long-term cost to trying to game inattention.
Maybe it's not something that can be said for every community, but the same point would apply here in reverse.
That isn't most places, and it isn't that the majority is that extreme almost anywhere. But you can't make assumptions about people having the same point of view as you, or that otherwise reasonable good people believe things you consider only reasonable.
The root cause is unfortunately lost in the ensuing battle between library-defending parents and library-critiquing parents, but the ultimate fault in this situation lies in the needless and self-destructive politicization of librarian training and the lack of standards for younger librarians. They seem to lack the common sense that loud politicking is not exactly befitting of a library, nor beneficial for their ulterior motive of gradual ideological persuasion. Another sad case of politicking and safe-space-signaling ideation being prioritized over preserving institutions and professional integrity.
Their interests were specialized and they got their books online or from larger collections not offered at a school.
It’s fine - libraries aren’t sacred. If nobody uses them we don’t need them.
The joke about football is often made but they pay for it, because people use it.
> “Disassembling the library bookcases”
I am skeptical. This is not the subject of wood working. And why would the school entangle students with a task to be performed by professional vendors.
This is not a joke. At all. There are a LOT of high schools that actively prioritize football facilities over education. I grew up in one. It's very frustrating, and that's coming from someone who DID play football.
But once again… students and community use football. They do not use high school libraries.
That's literally the problem being presented, the "joke" as you called it. This isn't something to be weirdly proud about. This is something to be extremely concerned about. Prioritizing football over education in a place dedicated to the latter is absurd. Like, Idiocracy-levels absurd.
How has it gone so far over your head?
The former is questionable. The latter is a just a waste.
Do you care about education outcomes? Or do you care about 90s symbols of education, like libraries.
That is worse. It's education, not a startup in need of a pivot.
You characterized it as outside the mission and now you're trying to say it's part of the mission. Come on.
It’s not even just a summer thing — a lot of districts have blanket “no public use” policies year-round. They’ll cite liability, vandalism, or “preservation of facilities” as the reason, but the result is the same: empty fields, fenced-off courts, and taxpayers staring at what they bought but can’t touch.
I agree - having an after school video game time would be a better use of resources than an unused library.
Sure it is, it's free wood for the woodshop. Unless the library is very new, those are probably solid planks. No shop teacher is going to say no to free wood.
The real mystery is how the woodshop survived longer than the library did. Usually woodshops are the first thing to go.
I doubt there’s a true budget crisis. It was manufactured to justify getting rid of the books for political reasons.
Perhaps your experience is with states whose legislatures are dominated by trial lawyers, who can hope to retire on one really good, fat personal injury judgment?
Mine is, but I hope that's not the case everywhere.
Why pay a vendor to do it when you can get the students to do it for free?
Also once again, this sounds like what someone would imagine they did in wood shop if they never took wood shop.
You do know what goes on in wood shop class right? Some light demolition is nothing compared to the power tools they'll be using soon.
Similar in woodshop and metal working - doing stuff to fix the schools infra/bldg.
Wonderful idea.
Almost every book that is available at all can be accessed within seconds on any modern digital device. You will learn how extremely valuable that is when you actually are doing research.
Students should be taught how to actually do research, not how to waste time looking things up in some small buildings which doesn't have the resources they need.
It is important that students have quiet space to study. But libraries as book storages have very little utility and seem very hard to justify.
Still, I think we should keep books as available to citizens as possible.
I agree. But it is obviously far more cost effective and useful to have that access be digital first.
Do not understand me wrong, I like physical books. But for doing research it is almost always preferable to have the books be available digitally. And students should learn to make use of that.
The football team makes money, why do people constantly ignore this. There's always money for ventures that have positive ROI. It has nothing to do with priorities.
At schools with top theater programs they're also always fully funded because they bring in outside revenue.
At the school where I’m familiar with the finances, the concessions stands were run by student volunteers from other after school programs. They got a cut of the profit. It was an easy way for different programs to raise money with a much larger audience than they could get anywhere else.
This school wasn’t even a “football school”. The football events were just a big excuse for everyone to come out and do activities at the school.
Also none of the people working the game are paid except for the ref (and the TV crew if you have one). It's all volunteers and students. Our principal was the announcer. The revenue from football paid for every other sport and then some.
Schools that weren't football schools had much more modest stadiums, usually just a field and a pre-fab bleacher.
> why do people constantly ignore this.
Why would he complain, in this context, about a football program that is generating income for the district?
You're always beholden to the person who pays the bills. If your football stadium is paid for by public funds, you're beholden to the voter (by way of elected representatives.) If your football stadium was paid for by the local Ford dealership who asks for a cut of concessions, well... you give them a cut of the concessions.
People in North Texas seem to trust corporations more than they trust local governments. I think that's because they're familiar with whom they elect to office. The local corporations might be run by sociopathic dorks, but at least they're SUCCESSFUL sociopathic dorks. And while it might seem that I'm dissing North Texans... I'm really not. We may be on the road to neo-feudalism, but at least they know what side their bread is buttered on.
The games I have been to recently have a medic of some kind, the coaches, band/drumline director, police officers for security, plus a bunch of teachers doing other things. They may not be getting paid extra to do it, but they're still employees and a portion of their time is being used for the game.
You're just saying football is popular and some revenue comes in, but nothing that proves football is money making for the district.
If it can't help fund things like...checks notes...libraries then it's not really an effective ROI.
I doubt that: My experience is that people who complain about books don't read them, let alone understand them enough to "question" them.
> This society has priorities which aren’t education.
Forgive me, but it's your society: You live there. It's that way because of you.
I know that sucks to hear; it's not all your fault; it seems like there is a lot of inertia; and you definitely can't overcome it all by yourself, and it is was like that before you were born; and so on,
But I urge you to take responsibility to right the ship anyway, and at risk of mixing metaphors too much stop worrying so much about who started the fire and work on putting it out. Make friends with your neighbours, and get them to help you. Stop enabling bad behaviour by referring to those other parents "questions" in their couched weasel-words and call them out for their hate and the spread of hate and ignorance.
Because literally nobody else is going to do it, and we need you.
There are a lot of unwell people; Some of them it might be a literal genetic mental illness, but a lot of them probably only ever experienced joy after misery, and never saw real kindness.
I think you should treat "those" people as if they were abused and vulnerable humans with broken brains, and how you treat "those" people is how I think you will treat other abused and vulnerable humans with broken brains.
This is what I mean: There aren't "questionable passages"
Giving their voice that credit is not necessary.
> The tweet was advocating for the school board to remove the books
People have been putting personals up in newspapers since there were ever newspapers, but a publication or channel is not a discussion forum, and you aren't required to treat it like that.
Listen brother, if you do something, it is your choice. Nobody can make your choices for you. Not the government. Not a god. Not even your wife.
And the choice to do nothing is still a choice.
> Could I go to the school board meetings and raise and issue? Sure, but my son, who would be the recipient of any retribution, requested I not.
You are the adult: You are making this choice.
Your son is the recipient of the future you are creating whether you like it or not.
And what will happen is son's children (if they have any) will have a slightly worse version of the problem you are facing, because of the choices you are making.
> Even if I win a seat on the board, I’d be just one of 7, and nothing would change.
Nonsense. It always starts with one.
Didn't you know the first black person to sit in the front of the bus was just one person?
I bet if you try you can think of a lot of firsts that led to change.
Insofar as the US had a “culture averse to education,” surely that affects white americans as much as it affects anyone else. But, on average, they are not the ones who are behind their peers internationally.
Education outcome massively depends on economic status of the parents. And that, no matter the country by the way, is very closely tied to immigration history and ethnicity.
When parents struggle to afford basic school supplies (to the tune that many teachers have to pay for their students' needs out of their own measly paychecks [1]), that's not exactly conductive to good learning outcomes. When parents don't have the time to sit down with their children and help them with learning because they have to work two jobs to make rent (remember, even two minimum wage jobs is not enough [2]), the kids are put further behind. And they certainly can't afford private after-school tutoring.
The last part is the environment itself - aka the quality of housing (mold, cockroaches and other health impacts) or when gangs lure in kids with the promise of striking it rich by dealing drugs or whatnot...
[1] https://edition.cnn.com/2023/09/02/business/teachers-back-to...
[2] https://www.housingfinance.com/news/rent-remains-unaffordabl...
And to bring this point home, because of systemic racism in the US, race is an indicator of economic status.
Anyone intentionally leaving out this context is contributing to the system.
https://home.treasury.gov/news/featured-stories/racial-inequ...
I knew (second hand) a teacher in a rural area of a low population state. All white kids, she'd have kindergartners cussing her out. Very little hope for any academic future for the other grades as things didn't get better with the older kids.
I knew a white kid who lived in a trailer park whose mom was upset he was getting tutoring after school for his dyslexia because she told him he'd never amount to anything.
My mixed race friend mentioned he was accused of "acting white" in school because he actually tried to get good grades.
What do all of those things have in common? Poverty, yes, but blended with hopelessness. The kids were surrounded by people who didn't have much, didn't think they'd get anywhere, and didn't believe the kids would ever have a chance at a better life.
That last part is what separates them from kids in third world countries who still manage to achieve academic success. Hope and optimism aren't guarantees; they aren't a replacement for social support. They are, however, a necessary ingredient for the intrinsic motivation necessary for personal growth.
At least the parent commenter had the grace to reply with another source instead of falling for it.
The irony of this being every discussion of education on HN.
So does the linked PDF address this proposed "hopelessness" factor, or is it that once someone cites something the discussion becomes restricted to only things that have published study results?
Also, if someone were to cite https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.k5094 on the effectiveness of parachutes, are other commenters then forbidden from citing anecdata that disagree with the findings?
The institutions that build these national and international statistics do so with bias and goals, or without complete data. For example, how can a bureau make a national statistics on crime accurate when cities intentional report crime incorrectly to look better in statistics.
To think "cited findings" is gospel truth is naive. I know it's highly desired here, but I stand by what I'm saying. Data is lovely, but garbage in, garbage out, and most national-level data is complete garbage with an agenda or bias or naivety.
This isn't Proceedings of Hacker News or parliament: we're writing ephemeral internet words and trying to enrich each other.
I posited a cause based on the lived experiences people shared with me.
You're free to disagree with my conclusion, or to suggest an alternative cause. None of the cited data has actually done either of those things.
The history of human civilization.
While there are STEM (Science Tech Engineering and Math) initiatives, I have yet to see one that actually includes math. You see results in science but not math.
I do agree with the general sentiment though and think that too much research/news over the last couple decades has been exclusively ethnically segmented, given the economic segmentation that should always also be involved.
They're perpendicular questions and best triangulate the American experience in tandem.
E.g. what are outcomes for wealthy members of disadvantaged ethnicities? What are outcomes for poor members of advantaged ethnicities?
Those are interesting socioeconomic questions!
They are not perpendicular, which is why it's difficult to separate them. You even seem to know this intuitively, that's why they're "interesting socioeconomic questions".
They may influence each other, but it's obviously physically possible to be a wealthy minority in the US.
I posited a causation based on how the anecdotes countered the general trends in the data. I welcome counter arguments better than "I'm ignoring you because you don't have numbers".
Were I being paid to research this more deeply, I would. I'm not, and if someone doesn't like my argument, they're free to find one of their own.
[1] - https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/pisa-scor...
Most of the EU/lots of Europe focused on getting the kids back in school before the US did. I personally think that was the right trade-off, but obviously people differ.
Edit: to say pupil teacher ratios are low, not high.
Is contradicted by this
> My mixed race friend mentioned he was accused of "acting white" in school because he actually tried to get good grades.
Unless you are taking skin colour very literally, which is obviously not it (someone's academic performance is not going to change if they get a heavy tan or use s kin whitening cream or take a drug that changes skin colour etc.).
I interpreted "white" to mean an ethnic identity, not a literal description.
Really confused by what you are claiming is racist.
Skin color is unfortunately correlated to socioeconomic outcomes in the United States. Once poverty is controlled for, at least in my analysis, most of this difference is ameliorated (though mild correlation persists).
Most people in this vein, at least in my experience, will describe after a long conversation that they think there can only be two sources of correlation - genetic ("nature", which I disagree is a primary cause of socioeconomic outcomes) and a weird subset of nurture that fails to take into account intergenerational impact (history), instead focusing solely on state (assertion of Markovian process to life).
In my view, nuture breaks out into those components -- history defines the resources you have access to in your broader community, and state defines your immediate challenges. It's hard to get resources to change your life if you have a bad state, but it is possible. Americans love an underdog story and the bad-state good-history fits it well. Bad-history leads to a lot of additional issues -- systemic type issues. Americans have seen this in both hostile urban planning to a full community and to hostile resource reallocation to rural areas (towns shutting down with no way to recover) in favor of suburbia. From my studies, I think Strongtown lands the description of the issues (Youtube channel).
I'm not epistemically arrogant enough to assume I am 100% right here -- much of this is from 20 years of research experience but there is always more to understand at a population level and how that relates to the individual level.
I am epistemically arrogant enough to require people to hold to their ideals -- if someone wants to ensure equality of opportunity, that has to both be for the state (Little Jimmy and Jane come from a poor family) as well as history (and none of Little Jane's community has been to college and nor do they understand the college application or financial assistance process; further, most are unbanked and most of the male population can't get gainful employment due prison sentences connected to overpolicing and/or desperation behaviors [a catch-22 for communities wanting to build a brighter future while also exercising punitive justice]).
Honestly this is one of the biggest bullshit I've ever heard. Assuming that this mentality is quite widespread(not necessarily universal) among non White, then any attempt to introduce affirmative action or other equalizer practice would be futile. That kind of mentality must be purged hard from yesterday.
They might call it "gay" or "sissy" or "acting white" or whatever, but the root cause is usually their perception of what masculinity should look like.
The men they look up to are anti-intellectual. This exists in all communities, race is not the main problem here.
I guess primary school teachers in the US are predominantly women as they are in most countries? So boys without intellectually inclined men at home or in their social circles do not have role models for educated masculinity.
Young French author Édouard Louis has written about his experience growing up in an extremely anti-intellectual working class milieu in France. It’s a country where school teachers are traditionally men, and discipline is stricter than in America or the Northern European countries. But that seems to go together with a class separation where the working class boys don’t see the male teachers as role models but more as representatives of the distant authority.
The share of male teachers has trended downward in the 80s and 90s (by ~ -1%/yr), then slowed in the 00s+ (to ~ -0.5%/yr), and now sits at 22.4%.
The share of white teachers sits at 80%+ for post-kindergarten grades.
So if teachers represent academic achievement, then there are certainly a lot of kids (especially male minorities) who don't see themselves in their teacher (ethnically and gender-wise).
Boys from more intellectually inclined backgrounds will have the role models outside school and that correlates with class (as do attitudes to authority, of course).
Absolutely not, this is hilariously wrong. I invite you to find any male role models in China and India (or just outside the Western hemisphere in general, for that matter) pushing such anti-intellectualism.
The male influencers here may misguide on communal lines, but you won't find anyone looking down on studying or considering it "unmanly" in any context.
"Everywhere" as in "across the world and across time", "because testosterone/teen boys will be boys"?
If so, then I can give you an emphatic no, this is not at all true. It is, as with 99% of things, a cultural phenomenon. The degree to which the "bias against putting in the effort to get good grades" exists varies enormously depending on subculture and time. You may have personally only experienced cultures where this is the dominant case, but that does not make it indicative of immutable nature.
If not, then where and when is your "everywhere"?
I'm pretty sure, at this point, this was intentional, individuals and orgs with the resources to create finely tuned systemic problems having been at it since the country's inception.
Not to say that tiktok is innocent, but it certainly isn't the root cause.
Imagine kids glued to an app that shows them engaging and intellectually-positive content. (Which at that scale could actually be inferred)
Fast social isn't intrinsically evil: recommendation algorithms that maximize engagement at the expense of other social goods are. (Or even that operate blind to them)
Education requires sustained engagement. Books are conducive to that kind of deep engagement with the material. It requires perseverance, an ability to sit with a topic at the expense of indulging all the cheap distractions that may be available to them (the internet furnishes these gladly and easily). TikTok and bite-sized social media is certainly not conducive to that. The train never leaves the station. Social media's very form consists of feeding the impulsive indulgence of distraction. It only produces superficiality and trains the user's attention span to contract, or to never develop in the first place.
Gamifying learning is a fool's errand. Children are easily distracted, because they haven't yet learned discipline. They need something to counteract these urges, like removing the tempting distraction, an environment that is saturated with relationships and habits that enable good behavior and pursuits, or the threat of punishment for straying from good behavior.
They're going to be bathed in the omnipresent social environment radiation for a large portion of their time.
And they're going to form part of their self image and life goals from that.
Better to make it as positive as we can. Or at least prevent it from being explicitly anti-intellectual.
You call it an app ban, but really it’s just press censorship.
For more annectdata, this same thing was happening at Berkeley High School around the same time. First hand knowledge from parents of students.
Anecdotally the pressure can be worse with people who have a white parent (either mixed-race or through adoption); I am unsure if the cause more is internal (insecurity about self-image) or external (teenagers can be ruthless when they see differences).
Even traditionally oppressed groups like the Jews or the Chinese (Chinese Exclusion Act anyone?) or descendants of Russian muzhiks or Indian untouchable castes do have good outcomes if they actually motivate their kids to learn.
The groups that are systematically out (in Czechia, the part of the Roma that lives in ghettos - contrary what people tend to think, a lot of the Roma marry into the wider society, mix with it and live quite comfortable self-sufficient lives) tend to be the ones that despise schooling, and it will take a century or so of concerted efforts to change the attitudes.
How do Indian low castes do compared to higher castes in the same country? They often continue to suffer from discrimination from higher castes in the west. I can believe they do better than some other groups, but how to they compare to higher caste Indians?
No, its a terrible identifier.
If you group people by genetic similarity (which is of dubious usefulness) you essentially end up with three different black African races, one Australian, Pacific and Native American, and one everyone else.
There's only one sentient primate race: Homo Sapiens.
There absolutely are genetic differences between groups that were geographically isolated from each other (as you note). However, when genetic variation is compared both between and within those groups, we see more variation within those once isolated groups than we do between those groups[0].
What's more, even within such groups genetic variation is only around 0.5-1.5%.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_genetics#Race_and_hum...
Edit: Cleaned up prose.
Nope, species, not race - or arguable sub-species.
As your link says race is a social construct, so it is whatever society says it means. It means different things in different societies. This is something I experience personally so I am very aware of it: https://pietersz.co.uk/2023/08/racism-culture-different
> However, when genetic variation is compared both between and within those groups, we see more variation within those once isolated groups than we do between those groups
Which is why genetic similarity does not work well as a way defining race, and why the concept of race has no biological basis. This is covered by the wikipedia link in my previous comment too.
> What's more, even within such groups genetic variation is only around 0.5-1.5%.
Yes, but that is just normal for a species. We share a lot of DNA (98%?) with chimpanzees and something like 70% with fish! its not really meaningful. However, its not the main argument, because the variation within vs (lack of) between groups is really the killer argument.
Yes. You are absolutely correct.
That said, I meant it in this sense:
From: https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/human-ra...
the human race
noun [ S ]
all the people in the world, considered as a group
>Which is why genetic similarity does not work well as a way defining race, and why the concept of race has no biological basis. This is covered by the wikipedia link in my previous comment too.
Exactly. Which is why I brought up how genetically similar we all are, regardless of, well, anything.
>Yes, but that is just normal for a species. We share a lot of DNA (98%?) with chimpanzees and something like 70% with fish! its not really meaningful. However, its not the main argument, because the variation within vs (lack of) between groups is really the killer argument.
Yes. And we share anywhere up to 60% of DNA with plants too.
I thought that's what I said. My apologies if I wasn't clear.
The upshot is, as we both are trying to elucidate (at least I think you are as well), that from a biological/genetic standpoint humans, regardless of geographic origin, melanin content and/or other physical features, are incredibly similar.
So much so that trying to define groups of humans by such physical features is idiotic in the extreme. Sadly, that doesn't stop some of our fellow humans from trying to do so. And more's the pity.
Absolutely agree with last para so I do not think we disagree significantly.
I think it is worth adding that, we also get similar behaviour based on other differences: caste in India does not have such obvious physical markers (not to an outsider anyway) but being low caste in India has a history (longer!) very similar to being black in the US. Ethnic splits in other countries might be based on family name, language, religion,.... any identifier that might be even partially inherited.
Edit, to add: This might be a product of living in different countries and cultures, but there are many cases where I cannot tell what "race" people are from their appearance. Light skinned Indians and black Americans, dark skinned Mediterraneans, Central Asians....
You people swapped one religion's mysticism for another.
Praise Jesus and God protect the White Race!
We must strike down those inferior darkies with their small brains and huge penises! They exist to pick our cotton!
You people have had your minds so warped and messed up like is common in most cults, that you can't even see what is right before your very eyes and have to rationalize away what you see due to the abusive conditioning. It's very common among all mentally and emotionally abused people. It's why all abused people will defend their abusers beyond all edges of reality.
Now genetics is also "of dubious usefulness" because it is irrefutable proof and must be rationalized away because your abusers have conditioned you to that position?
It's insanity, my friend. Reality is fine, come join us, even if your abusers hate that you may break away from their abuses and the conditioning that serves them and their sadistic ways. You are better than this, you deserve sanity and reality. You deserve to believe the truth.
It's actually not. Skin color does not correlate well with the genetic diversity among humans at all. It's just one particular trait that is very easy to identify by eye.
> There is absolutely zero reason one would rationally conclude that biological differences would somehow magically stop at the brain.
There is absolutely zero reason to rationally conclude that a random physical trait that happens to be easy to distinguish by eye correlates with brain function at all.
On the other hand, there are massive socioeconomic disparities that arise from the history of slavery, which easily explain both the disparities and the reasons why racists such as yourself want to boil things down to skin color.
Schools in many urban districts where we see this same disparity control for teacher qualifications and per pupil student funding. In fact, various anti-poverty measures and intensive interventions on low performing schools even tip the scale in their favor on thr "supply" side.
Education isn't just something "delivered" like manufactured product; it is something that had to be properly received and used.
We have to start asking some better questions to uncover what's going on, and they will be a lot tougher to quantify.
Remind me when Vivek told his followers that American education need ti be more rigorous to compete with China and other Asian nations he got owned so hard, practically quiting from DOGE before it started.
Now whether ghetto culture or ghetto economics is the main contributor to poor academic performance... I will leave that finer point up for debate, but my point here is the US has big differences in educational outcomes based on NEIGHBORHOOD, if your neighborhood is high crime and the schools are broke, your educational outcomes tend to be bad.
If there is a culture related problem, I think it's that the people pushing this trashy culture, for example music that glorifies rape, drugs and gangs, code it as black culture and use that as a way to deflect criticism. You're a racist if you don't like hip hop! It would be an understatement to say that many black Americans want nothing to do with that lifestyle or image and have evolved well beyond it, yet it still gets called black culture. It is a cultural weakness that we don't see rape, drugs and gangs as bad stuff to promote and reward, full stop, and not a thing we should be educating the next generation with, regardless of the skin color of the performer, or its roots.
BTW for whatever it's worth I'm white and I grew up in the ghetto. My parents forced me to take a public bus for an hour each morning to a magnet school in the rich part of town. Years later I met up with my white childhood friend from down the road who had gone to our local high school. I had a bunch of academic achievements and a college scholarship, he had a gunshot wound in his stomach. He was a smart guy when I knew him but the ghetto had its own plans for him.
Its like you've never lived in America.
Obviously white people are extremely privileged and also have a different culture. Keep in mind that schools in predominantly black areas are typically significantly less funded than those in white areas.
Why is this obviously? It's like /you've/ never lived in America, not outside of some coastal city. Go to anywhere in the Midwest or Southeast and tell me that white people are privileged in some unique way. It's a poverty problem and a problem of cultural priorities, not about race.
A lot of people just don't understand what privilege is. Who has more upward mobility - an impoverished black person, or an impoverished white person? Who is more likely to face systemic factors that influence poverty and outcomes - black people or white people?
And before I hear "well not everything is about race!!1!" Uh, the US has a long history of systemic racism that does continue to this day.
Obviously if you just integrated a few decades ago you're not going to just magically have equal outcomes. People don't move like that, systems are sticky, and the US isn't evenly distributed.
And, of course, race is correlated tightly with culture and with average income and levels of poverty.
No, you can't just ignore race. Well you can, if that's easier for you, but it's dishonest and incomplete.
And, because I know it's coming: yes I'm white, no I don't have white guilt, I just think about the world we live in. Its easy not to think about things. I prefer thinking about things.
If what you say about racism, etc., is true, that is actually an argument against the cultural explanation. That would mean that educational underperformance compared to other countries is caused by internal racism in the U.S., not some anti-educational trend across American culture as a whole. If you somehow erased racism and brought everyone up to the scores of white Americans, then the U.S. would be right behind Japan in educational outcomes—even though the Americans care more about football than reading.
Also, only about 5 states have significantly more funding for white students once you consider federal funds. About twice as many have significantly more funding for black students: https://www.urban.org/sites/default/files/2022-10/Measuring%... (see page 22).
Spending per student is not partially predictive of education outcomes in the USA.
If a cohort in Japan has a median score of X at median household income Y, the American cohort with same median score X has income closer to 1.25Y or 1.5Y.
Whether you want to define your American cohort based on geography or ethnicity doesn't really matter-the result will be preserved up to a point.
[1] https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-eurostat-news/-/e...
When you compare groups of students within the same country and adjust for both household income and intelligence you find that (again, even within the same intelligence brackets and income levels) some ethnic groups simply study more while others spend more time on things like unprovoked violence.
[citation needed]
These reports are becoming to find because measuring racial differences is considered racist, so you'd be asking for something that would not be acceptable in modern studies.
Does the comparison hold if you segment the white Americans, Chinese, Singaporeans, Japanese, etc. by economic class?
It's a bit unfair because the average white American is wealthier than the races you excluded from American. The average Japanese person includes everyone from all classes, it does not skew towards the wealthier. If it did, you might see a different result.
Like I asked, does the comparison hold if you segment the results by economic class?
All humans are the same species, and in a vacuum, have no ideas or inherent behaviors beyond base instinct.
Culture is simply a byproduct of the environment around a segment of humans.
Hence, filtering by white kids in the US simply measures the result of higher average economic status (same as filtering by Asian kids).
American outcomes would look better if the populations they economically disenfranchised historically stayed in other countries like Europeans did with the colonial system (vs importing populations as slave labor domestically in the US). The economic class stratification that still lingers as a result of this in the US is such a unique factor as to make comparisons that don't take this into account worthless.
I'm not sure I support charter schools as a universal good, but they've actually proven to be pretty consistently effective at improving the educational attainment of low-income black/hispanic students [0-1]. When the local school system is a political quagmire and objectively failing in its mission to educate students, it's probably the only way out.
The meta-problem is that the people most actively involved in improving the racial educational achievement gap are precisely the type of people to reflexively dislike charter schools (because it's "right wing", although I see it more aligned with the centralization vs decentralization axis) and maybe even feel overtly threatened by them (because of their union job). Also, charter schools have to actually figure out how to get buy-in from low-income black and hispanic parents, figure out how to serve this community better, and can't hide behind the excuse of cyclical poverty + orwellian bureaucracy anymore.
I think a lot of educators really would rather work in a system where bad outcomes are guaranteed and thus not their fault, than one in which they actually have the ability to make more than just performative progress in serving the needs of their underprivileged student body.
[0] https://hechingerreport.org/proof-points-charter-schools-hav...
[1] https://www.kqed.org/news/11953408/charter-schools-show-gain...
Here’s a modest proposal: American schools are actually quite good across the board.
GP didn't say that, but educators of course see schools as an important area to address the gap. The literature is pretty clear on this being a complex problems with schools being an important wedge to break the vicious circle.
Insofar as charter schools can help, it's because giving enough of a shit to apply for and go to one weeds out enough of the lost causes that would only disrupt everybody else. In fact, I think the best ways to improve those public schools is even simpler; make attendance optional. Families who give a shit will still attend, while all the trash will voluntarily stay home.
It's like reducing incarceration rates by never jailing people for anything short of murder. Sure, it improves on that one metric. Obviously. But the adverse effects elsewhere make it a nonstarter.
If you could trust self-selection to only ever stop the "lost causes" from attending? The absolute worst, most disruptive, least likely to ever benefit from education students? Then maybe.
But in practice, for every student like this there would be ten more who would benefit from school education if they attended, but wouldn't attend if it was optional.
And for those missing students, the difference between getting the classes and being left to their own devices might be the difference between becoming functioning adults, low in income but stable, and being locked in a vicious cycle of poverty, substance abuse, violence and crime.
Which is bad for the students in question, and even worse for the society.
This is before you get into the socioeconomic factors that make one student population more susceptible to starting and falling behind.
The building maintenance is a red herring. I believe in my district, it's about 10% of the budget on average.
Just a couple disruptive kids per class can ruin an entire generation of students for a grade level. And there were far more than just a couple. Not to mention kids who had no business being in those classes - when the class is half full of low-performers they drag the rest of the kids down with them as the environment completely changes.
The focus these public school districts have put on the low performing and low achievers at the expense of those there to learn is astounding and perhaps civilization-ending if it continues. More resources should be spent on those there to help themselves vs. trying to shovel ever-more resources at people that will never provide a return on that investment.
At this point the local district here spends magnitudes more on special education and catering to IEP students than they do any AP level classes or other high performer programs. In fact they continue to destroy any advanced track segmentation in the favor of equity, and the teachers union nearly killed public magnet schools off entirely recently. They will try again until they are successful.
It's an obviously bad strategy, and apparently results don't matter. Dragging everyone down is not a plan for success.
This is the single political hill I will die on. Removing the ability for poor but high functioning families to give their kids a chance to get out of their circumstances because it raises uncomfortable questions is downright evil.
Other western countries everyone loves to champion so much have this figured out. Student tracks are a good thing. Put high achievers on an advanced track earlier than later and get them out of the general population of students before it's too late for them.
And yes, it's obvious to anyone who's ever been to a decent number of different types of schools that the only thing that truly matters is the other students (read: parents) that go there. Anything else is a rounding error.
As bad as it was 30 years ago when I was going to school, it's infinitely worse now from watching nieces and nephews attending their local public schools. Until they were able to transfer out to magnets at least.
Like you said, 99% of what makes a "good" school good is the quality of the other kids who go there. Since there's absolutely no political will for expelling the troublemakers (even in most conservative districts), the only remaining option is to build more lifeboats.
Being able to kick out disruptive students has a pretty big influence on the remaining students.
How do you distinguish between underperforming-non-disruptive students and under-performing-disruptive students, especially as the almost all the disruptive students are going to be underperforming anyway.
What I was getting to WRT to the GP's post about how charter schools kick out under performing students in order to "prove" that the public school system is inferior.
I'm trying to determine how he distinguishes between kids that are kicked out to make the school look better and kids that are kicked out because they are disruptive.
I already know how to do that (cameras, etc), I'm just wondering why he doesn't consider that school that kicks kids out might be kicking out disruptive kids.
Also, while I don't think students should be pushed out of charter schools purely for bad performance (if they are putting in the effort), I do think that poor minority parents should have the right to send their kids to schools that don't force students to share classrooms with disruptive or way-behind-grade-level students. When educational outcomes under the local public school system are really bad I think school-choice just makes a lot of sense as a way of figuring out what policies are popular/effective/unpopular/harmful.
https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/cmd/education-exp...
E.g. Lowell Heights in SF gets less than the average funding, and Stuyvesant in NYC gets the average amount.
Heape-Johnson, A., McGee, J. B., Wolf, P. J., May, J. F., & Maloney, L. D. (August 2023). Charter School Funding: Little Progress Towards Equity in the City. School Choice Demonstration Project.
In some states and cities the difference is more extreme than in others.
Charter schools are I think a direct response to figuring out how to fix low performing, big school districts in the US. So while I have no idea if private or public schools do better in the Netherlands, I think we'd need to find something more like the Baltimore public school system in another country to make the right comparison.
> A commonly given alternative explanation is that the public options in the US are deliberately sabotaged via budget restrictions, and then the resulting poor performance is used to justify further cuts
I find this hard to address because it's not really a matter of policy but of ulterior motives or conspiracy. I personally have no secret plan to make public education even worse by posting about charter schools on hacker news. To me it's just about giving students the option to get educated by an independent institution rather than be forced to attend some of the worst public school systems in the country.
https://freespeechproject.georgetown.edu/tracker-entries/neo...
Honestly, this might be a good opportunity for you to think about why you find charter schools such a nonstarter JUST because they tend to have more support among those on the right (which I'm not) than those on the left. That's actually one of the big problems I was trying to point out: people have extremely strong opinions on educational policy because of these ideological left vs right things rather than on what students actually need!
So my general impression is that the republican party, nationally, note I am distinguishing the republican party form political right in the USA, has not been supportive of education in terms of financing or in promoting the necessary environment to ensure high quality and consistent education.
My general impression is that the republican party is for charter schools.
An argument that says trust/invest in the system promoted by the party that has been undermining/unsupportive of the current system does not invoke my trust/sympathy.
This is not a topic I have done rigorous investigations on, but what little I have done normally shows a lack of hard evidence and apples to apples between charter schools and traditional public schools.
They were registered as an online charter school, which is why the Ohio DOE got involved at all. They wouldn’t have investigated an individual homeschooler. (Many “homeschool networks” or the like do this because it makes it easier for their clientele to prove they’ve met the meager legal requirements of homeschooling. Justifies the price tag, yknow?)
> Honestly, this might be a good opportunity for you to think about why you find charter schools such a nonstarter JUST because they tend to have more support among those on the right (which I'm not) than those on the left
You’ve imagined a whole backstory and character arc for me, which is sadly more interesting than the truth. I think charter schools are repugnant because they operate under little to no oversight and, around these parts, have a reputation for abusing students (see reason one).
You seemed to imply earlier that the right wing connection was irrelevant or unimportant to the concept of a charter school. It isn’t, really. It’s an essential feature of the system, and why they’ve become so popular as of late after decades of failed leftist attempts at the same thing.
Then we also have the pure frauds, no education to the students until the finally gets shut down 5-10 years later when all inspections are done. etc etc.
Why on earth willingly let in the profit motive into this? It was introduced right wingers in Sweden too ofc, boat loads of profit to their supporters.
Now it’s also very hard to get rid of when state capacity has been reduced over the years.
So for instance 55% of the control group ended up being arrested 5+ times by age 40, while 'only' 36% of the experiment group did. I think the thing this demonstrates is that intervention can help, but is also insufficient alone. Students who are in a sufficiently high risk scenario need ongoing support and treatment that they're not going to receive at a normal public institution. And not only that but they will remain disproportionately disruptive to other student's educations at normal institutions, even with years of ongoing care.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HighScope (overview)
[1] - https://highscope.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/perry-presc... (detailed paper)
There are way more metrics in there, including more crime stats. The one somenameforme chose to highlight has a ton of ambiguity, leaving it open to the reader to guess that maybe all the program participants were arrested merely four times by age 40, so in fact this program sucks (plus somenameforme's scare-quotes on "only"), but the paper itself contains far more information and paints a clear picture of outstanding success for a relatively small intervention. Somenameforme's characterization of the study doesn't match the contents.
If that's the evidence a person's citing, the evidence they've cited is screaming "this works great", not the opposite, as implied. It may still not be true, but if so... cite different evidence to support that, because this study says this intervention was wildly successful.
But read further down on the details and that difference disappeared almost immediately after the end of the intervention. It follows in line with a well known fact that childhood IQ is primarily driven by environmental factors whereas adolescent and especially adult IQ is primarily driven by the IQ of your parents - paradoxically, strengths or deficiencies in earlier life notwithstanding.
And their decision to set the baseline for arrests at 5+ is obviously doing something akin to p-hacking. It makes it clear that near 100% of the entire sample (males at least) ended up in prison, likely multiple times. The ROI from the program had nothing to do with increased productivity - it was driven almost entirely by less time spent in prison. It led to the interesting fact that 93% of the ROI came from males, precisely because the females had a much lower baseline criminality rate.
In a nutshell, the main benefit of the program was reducing the criminality rate of the experimental group to a level that is still orders of magnitude higher than for society at large. That is a good thing, but it also emphasizes that something like this would only be the beginning of special care needed to try to ensure these sort of people could live remotely decent lives.
One clever way this is measured is twin studies, which also are not what most people, particularly those who prefer to write more than read, think. You don't search for twins separated at birth, but instead compare the differences in a trait between identical and non-identical twins. If the variation is greater, then the trait is generally significantly heritable. So for example - height would be an obvious one. By contrast the variation in accent between identical and non-identical twins would be zero.
Direct genetic causality is not the only mechanism through which genes select for phenotypical traits. Genes also select and interact with the environment.
Unlike the individuals you have cited, James Watson is a geneticist, spent his entire life studying and working on genetics, and in fact was even the person who discovered the structure of DNA. But because of his views on the genetic aspects of IQ (which inherently becomes intertwined into race, as race is just shared genetic ancestry), he was completely demonized, his career destroyed, and various honors revoked. Higher profile people speaking on these topics publicly know this all too well, so it mostly just turns into cheap virtue signaling as opposed to adding some genuine insight.
In your case, the examples they've offered are simply wrong, as would be immediately apparent with the most typical method of measuring heritability!
This is a "not even wrong" situation. Is cognitive ability significantly genetically determined? Maybe, maybe not. A broad heritability statistic from a twin study isn't going to resolve the question.
Here's a good link for you:
http://bactra.org/weblog/520.html
I promise, the author has studied and thought more carefully about the question than we have.
Fair warning: you would not be happier if I cited a molecular geneticist on this subject. Your argument gets even harder to sustain once you bring GWAS into the picture.
It'd be akin to arguing to somebody who wants to claim the Moon landing was faked, and after the rather straight forward rebuttal of their argument links to some blog in the tens of thousands of words from some statistician they claim is "very smart." It's silly.
If the group-splitting decisions are made by humans, it inevitably introduces a systematic bias. That bias then will show up in the outcomes, and confound the very data you got out of your way to gather.
The easiest way to avoid that is to split the groups randomly.
Obviously we need effective justice.
But since we are on the topic of ineffective schooling, there is an argument to be made that US prisons are more effective at punishment than rehabilitation. Which seems to please some people, but just adds another undertow to society.
A loss for criminal inmates, and everyone they impact, family or stranger, after they are released.
Education is worth looking at with respect to an entire culture, with many important contexts beyond/outside school. From before school age (huge), onward.
He realises that the simplest and easiest intervention is to stop the violent crime happening in the first place, and the cheapest and easiest way to do that is to intervene in the future murderers childhood. The specific example he gives is a client with a schizophrenic mother who needed more support.
Every one of us could have been kicked out of school at one time or another if we had fallen under the microscope looking for an excuse.
https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2014/12/10/are-charter...
https://www.reuters.com/article/world/special-report-class-s...
https://www.edweek.org/leadership/charter-schools-more-likel...
I expected it to be an example of how the school changes their rules to target a student, but it was just a case of school that is very strict.
Moreover, some charter schools require things like parental time volunteering, which eliminates more kids, or introductory essays - they don’t score the essays! They just require it to be done! By horrible coincidence this eliminates more cough lower performing children, who simply never submit a completed application for the lottery, so sad. This definitely happens in multiple states but here’s one specific example:
https://www.latimes.com/opinion/editorials/la-ed-charter-app...
If it's not scored it can't possibly eliminate low-performing children on that unconflated characteristic alone - a motivated underperformer will still get in.
It eliminates the unmotivated, which correlates obviously with underperforming. While it can be a vicious circle, I'd say no-motivation -> underperformance is of much greater relevance than underperformance -> no-motivation.
The obvious hint is how it tests the parents too. sure. maybe they are very motivated but just work so much they cannot volunteer or spare any time, but doesn't that also somewhat render their 'motivation' moot as well?
It's a lofty ideal, don't you think?
And no, I don't think that the advanced education is essential. General education is, but not advanced courses. And of course, everyone absolutely deserves a fair _chance_ to get the best possible education.
It's pretty wild how you can show lower achievement scores for any countries definition of "black" while changing who belongs in that group.
For instance, Italians were considered black in the early 1900s and wouldn't you know it, there was an achievement discrepancy for Italians so long as that definition held.
Or you can look at apartheid and post apartheid South Africa - when the political structure flipped, so did the academic scores of the groups.
The discrepancy follows the social category and power asymmetry and not the actual people. It's a social artifact, not some biologically inert trait.
Do you have a source for this. As far as I can verify this is not true, the gap in achievement persisted and the cause is usually attributed to the legacy of apartheid.
The greatest predictor of academic success is the education level of a student's parents.
we have and should set clear and high education goals. you can adjust teaching strategies towards those goals based on the student and aim to drive those goals even higher, and things like advanced classes are clear ways to do so.
Which barbarian idiot included a question about skin colour in an otherwise-respectable test?
1. Cell phones in classrooms.
I don’t know how or why they were ever allowed. They should have to be in a backpack or in a locker and off during class.
2. Not removing students with bad behavior from classrooms and schools.
The current thinking on how to handle a student who is seriously misbehaving and potentially violent is to remove all of the other students from the classroom versus just removing the problematic student in question. This is because there have been instances where a child has been physically removed and has gotten seriously injured. The thinking on expulsion is that it should essentially never happen because kids who get expelled have bad outcomes later in life. But the net effect is that one bad student can hold an entire classroom hostage and there is nothing the teacher can do. This is obviously detrimental to all of the kids who are compliant and behaving. It also causes burnout which leads me to the next major issue facing public schools.
3. Good teachers are quitting
It isn’t worth it to teach in America. You need a lot of expensive education. You get paid very little. You have no power to remove a student who are major disruptions and make it impossible to teach. And, in many districts, teachers are being accused of trying to indoctrinate children because we live in a politicized world.
4. Too many parents aren’t parenting
The number of kids who are not potty trained by kindergarten continues to rise. This is an issue of parents not wanting to do something that is hard and takes patience.
5. Lowering Standards
When faced with kids failing the solution should never be to lower long held standards. The kids are the same, they are just as capable, it is all of the above that is different.
Bonus. We feed kids junk in schools
This has been going on for decades. Why is it so hard to make fresh food for kids? It could probably cost about the same if done properly. The answer is it takes some effort and people have to think about it.
Yes but they aren’t the things you said:
1. Schools are filled with disruptive kids who use up time and resources and are not removed. 2. Teachers have no enforcement authority so they cannot do any of what you said, including removing phones. 3. Teachers and administrators are generally not smart or capable and continue to spend resources on everything except time spent reading, writing, and doing math. 4. Teachers are trapped in a web of legal red tape, bad incentives, and horrible metrics. 5. The US is segregated by by class and education.
The ones trying to do their best, who are not rude and inconsiderate of others, are usually quietly paying attention regardless of whether or not they have a phone with them. The disruptive ones are going to cause other ways to play up even if they could not have their phones with them.
Sending them home implies there is a parent who cares and will come.
Some school districts are starting to create firmer rules around this.
Part of it is that phones are more expensive, a $900 iPhone vs a $100 Nokia.
Another is (perhaps founded) anxiety about their child needing to have a way to communicate to the outside world in an emergency situation like a school shooting.
Also people get used to things, and modern parents have grown used to being able to text and check on their child any time of day at any location versus sending them off on their bike with no phone and telling them to be back by the time the street lights come on.
It's definitely a problem that needs to be addressed and it needs strong backing from higher levels of administration so it doesn't become an argument of each teacher versus angry parents.
Yes, a situation less likely to happen than being struck by lightning. Very founded!
Not to mention you can just, I dunno, borrow anyone else's phone and have one or two phone numbers memorized? Assuming if they are in an emergency and alone they are not going to be saved by a phone.
I'm not saying it's a good net reason to let kids keep their phones, it's just founded in some real things that have happened in this country, including a famous case where kids were calling/texting parents while police waited for over an hour before entering, while blocking parents who had arrived from entering the school.
Letting kids have their phones isn't an actual solution to that problem, but right now in a lot of places that's the argument each teacher has to have with each parent. It's better for the state, county, etc. to pass an explicit policy about phones in the classroom so teachers can just point to that policy instead of having to rehash the argument with every parent.
If it's school policy, the teacher could say that offending students can get suspended or some similar measure.
And, even in the cases where the state should and could do something, the line for those services is incredibly long and the child will be properly fucked up by the time they get to the front.
Parents in the US don't have any more rights than those elsewhere.
I've never understood this pervasive logic in our culture where a government service that's deemed ineffective has it's budgets and staffing cut. How is that supposed to help anything?
And, in regards to the state getting more power; yes but no? I don't think it's a matter of the state needing more power than it has, I think it's a matter of children needing more legal protections for themselves as people. Like it's wild how authoritarian the American system makes parents, whether they desire that power or not. Parents routinely keep their children from going to school because the schools values "don't align" with theirs, but that's not a choice a parent should be making, not really? If a parent is all about that Jesus life and is blessed in whichever way to not really need to function in society, bully for them. That's not necessarily true for their children and they aren't the ones who will suffer the consequences of that choice, their children are but the children largely have no say in the matter until it's FAR too late.
We're the only developed nation that has not signed onto the UN's charter for children to have rights as people themselves as opposed to simply the property of their parents, subject to the whims of people who supposedly have their best interests in mind, but with absolutely zero recourse for that child if that child disagrees with those whims. It's very strange to me that children effectively exist, in the "land of the free," within tiny totalitarian states until such time as they turn a completely arbitrary age, at which point they're expected to be plus or minus functioning adults, with whatever teaching their parents permitted and completed before then, with, in many places, NO oversight whatsoever.
Tax cuts at the state and local level, which is where these offices receive funding, are not happening on a widespread level to my knowledge. Increases in my personal state and local tax rates have outpaced inflation for approximately the last decade, and yet somehow every government agency feels they have a budget crisis.
> I've never understood this pervasive logic in our culture where a government service that's deemed ineffective has it's budgets and staffing cut. How is that supposed to help anything?
Because no matter how effective a government agency is, the solution is always to give it more money. No matter how wisely it uses any additional money it receives, any issues the agency has are blamed on a lack of funding by many and the only conceivable solution is to increase funding. And there are many places where these agencies are not being cut, but are still not effective.
There is rarely any serious assessment of whether every function currently performed by the government needs to continue to exist.
Take a look at the budget of any government. By and large, their budgets have increased substantially year over year, yet has the quality of service improved or even been maintained? Schools are the perfect example of my point. Throwing money at the problem isn't the answer.
> And, in regards to the state getting more power; yes but no? I don't think it's a matter of the state needing more power than it has, I think it's a matter of children needing more legal protections for themselves as people. Like it's wild how authoritarian the American system makes parents, whether they desire that power or not.
Children have legal protection from abuse and neglect, the standard of which has been continually raised in my lifetime (which is great to be clear).
> Parents routinely keep their children from going to school because the schools values "don't align" with theirs, but that's not a choice a parent should be making, not really? If a parent is all about that Jesus life and is blessed in whichever way to not really need to function in society, bully for them. That's not necessarily true for their children and they aren't the ones who will suffer the consequences of that choice, their children are but the children largely have no say in the matter until it's FAR too late.
This hits on the crux of the issue, and I don't have an answer to be clear. You are highly concerned about some kid slipping through the cracks because his parents are nutjobs. Other people (I fall more on this end of the spectrum, but certainly acknowledge your point) are more concerned about watching their kid's math/science/english teacher bumble their way through the material but being told that the school is doing a great job and they have no right to pull them out to ensure their time in school isn't wasted.
> We're the only developed nation that has not signed onto the UN's charter for children to have rights as people themselves as opposed to simply the property of their parents, subject to the whims of people who supposedly have their best interests in mind, but with absolutely zero recourse for that child if that child disagrees with those whims.
Who cares, the UN is meaningless, particularly around the concept of positive rights that liberals love to invent with no way of actually providing.
Minor children do have rights that increase as they approach the age of majority in their state.
> It's very strange to me that children effectively exist, in the "land of the free," within tiny totalitarian states until such time as they turn a completely arbitrary age, at which point they're expected to be plus or minus functioning adults, with whatever teaching their parents permitted and completed before then, with, in many places, NO oversight whatsoever.
That's not how things work now in the US. Do you live there?
And let's say we give kids more rights than they have now, are you willing to relieve parents from their legal and financial responsibilities and have the state take them on instead, because the kids can't do it themselves (which is the point of them having a legal guardian)? How will you fund and manage that exactly?
In other countries' colleges without this unlimited input second to local students, there is a feedback loop connecting the college back to the local schools. This ensures that schools keep up. In america this is not required, since no matter what standard say UW sets, the corresponding tutoring centres in India, China and Singapore will adapt to that within weeks. And they can send as many students as UW can possibly ever want.
It also doesn't help that international students bring in more money than local students.
Or is San Diego immune to these problems? I think the reality is that these test scores aren't majorly affected by literally any of the things you listed.
That environment makes it risky to punish anyone, and a lack of order causes or compounds almost every other item on your list (which I largely agree with).
This is basically _the_ reason people send their kids to private schools
You attribute this to increased laziness, and that might contribute, but there are other factors at play.
For one, it takes significantly more hours of work from both parents just to provide basic food & shelter than it did a few decades ago. Calling parents who work more hours than any previous generation in history "lazy" is itself lazy and misses the point.
2 and 5 are handily down to No Child Left Behind which is frankly some of the worst legislation ever devised for education.
3 and 4: And these factors are only getting worse as worse and worse kids enter the school systems. Nobody wants to deal with them, including their parents.
Bonus: It's not hard, but we won't allocate the money. School lunch lady is a job considered a punch line because for some reason our culture thinks it's easy to serve food to several hundred people in 45 minutes when the people in question aren't old enough to buy cigarettes, but good fucking luck getting money and people allocated to actually do that.
If a parent has a child that is addicted to an iPad or any other device, the blame is squarely on the parent having let the child use the addictive device so much in the first place. If there needs to be a "detox" period for the child's addiction, so be it, but throwing up one's hands and giving up is parental negligence.
What change has made this impossible?
As an aside: I’m fine ending literally any girls’ program that doesn’t have a boys’ equivalent. Boys are in huge trouble.
Anyways, this doesn’t support your point well, since it ends by saying they ended up coming to an agreement in ‘16 that still focuses on fruits, veggies, and whole grains.
>This year the federal government reimbursed most schools between 77 cents and $4.58 per lunch meal
>[...]
>“You’re wasting white milk and money,” wrote Ben, who identified himself as a fourth grader. “Another reason you should bring back chocolate milk is because students are super MAD.”
Anyone who has ever bought a lunch knows that you can't get something that's healthy and tastes decent for $4.58. Then there's another wrench thrown in the system by insisting on using fresh ingredients like Gordon Ramsey is watching, which forces deeper cuts on everything else. Some public health officials seem to be chasing a mirage of the artisan school chef who forages for edible clover on the school grounds. The result is that students are handed the cheapest apple money can buy and most of them throw it away.
So my anecdotal theory is that the (public) education system is optimized to the edges, abandoning the middle entirely, resulting in majority decline.
They do get computers with TONS of dumb-ass apps and zero reference materials.
How much initiative do you think a random office or retail worker would put into solving a problem they were presented with that they couldn't answer immediately and had no impact on their lives?
Memorize 6 equations, 15 terms of art, and be competent at super simple algebraic expressions and you’re done. Physics in US high schools is taught long before calculus and usually before trig, which is dumb, but they compensate by making the calculation requirements something 6th graders routinely do.
AP Calculus is even easier assuming you’ve taken trig and calculus, but I realize many Americans don’t. But freshman physics is… I generally say a waste of time it’s so easy.
What did your daughter find challenging?
Not saying it won't be hard, but I don't want you to think it's some crazy torture. It should be no harder than doing Bio or Chem first, and for many kids it's easier. (Bio and Chem have way more memorization and vocabulary.)
I don't think physics is hardest. On the contrary, physics is probably the best subject to start with, because everyone (even people who don't know about physics) have experienced physics. People intuitively understand that you go faster down a steep hill, than a gently sloped one.
I'm only aware of schools providing these three courses as independent of each other. Which makes sense, since they are independent.
I took Chem as a sophomore, Physics as a freshman, AP Chem as a senior, and AP Physics as a senior. I didn't take a single bio course after 7th grade.
For what it's worth, both Calculus courses were harder IMO than any of the aforementioned.
More like from what women prefer to what men prefer, they probably do it since most teachers are women and prioritize what girls want. Physics is "hard" as in not soft, not "hard" as in not easy.
The reasonable order is the opposite, physics underpins chemistry and chemistry underpins biology.
I am not sure either, but there is, and ignoring it means that school gets optimized for girls and seatbelts optimized for men. You have to bring that up to change it.
Yep. Those edges are pushed by very vocal parents, usually backed by large communities and interest groups.
And the modern-day politics of American public schools (which generally have very low voter engagement) dictate that only the squeaky wheels get the grease.
I want all people to live fulfilling lives and reach their potential, but we are pouring limited resources into a bottomless pit while intentionally de-emphasizing the fundamentals of education that worked well for decades (or longer), and any question of those methods receives an extremely hostile response.
It's no wonder that people are choosing to opt out in some form or another, or that the results are suboptimal.
Then there's a middle tier, the majority of people, where they might end up at a university but it's not top rated. Increasingly it's not worth the money and simultaneously it seems like our country has become more credentialist about prestigious jobs. But a degree probably isn't necessary for most careers that don't have gatekeepers so for these people the education doesn't really have a big payoff and their education might get de-emphasized.
Then there's the bottom tier which is self explanatory.
In the normal track, you don't eventually take calculus in math, learn much about labwork in science, or even learn how to write a research paper until the last year of classes at 18. (Source: class of 2005, USA)
Based on my anecdotal experience, this is the explanation that makes the most sense to me. I've been hearing constantly for at least a decade how atrocious American public education is, which I can't reconcile at all with my experience as a 2010 graduate of McLean High School. Either my experience was so far outside the national norm that I have no useful perspective on this issue, or the national discourse has been totally corrupted by vocal minorities and political agendas.
Personally, my teachers were consistently amazing and brilliant (RIP Mr. Bigger), curricula were rigorous, and I learned a ton that prepared me well for my life and career after high school. Every time I hear about some factoid or perspective that American schools supposedly don't teach because they're propaganda farms designed to churn out uncurious low-skill workers, I roll my eyes as I vividly recall how it was explicitly covered in my classes. It's possible my experience may have been more the exception than the rule, given that most of my classes were advanced/AP/post-AP, but I also had some of my favorite teachers in regular and honors classes and never felt like I was receiving insufficient value for my time. Maybe I just got incredibly lucky, but I really have nothing but good things to say, and can't relate at all to the picture of American public education that's been painted in the media and social media. Granted, a lot can change in 15 years, and my perspective is already going to be skewed by having attended a top-ranked school in a wealthy district.
On the flip side, my public elementary school experience was the polar opposite. In kindergarten I was tutoring third graders who needed help learning to read, but by second grade I'd been kicked out more or less for being bored with the level and pace of the course material. (Effectively. Specifically, the principal was going to move me to special ed unless my mom agreed to find a doctor willing to put me on Ritalin for my nonexistent ADHD. The 90s were wild.) So there's that. Luckily there are some great private schools in the area which my mom was able to make sacrifices to afford, but I can't help but wonder how many other kids weren't as lucky and had their whole life trajectories sabotaged from an early age. Granted, that particular principal was fired a few months after my de facto expulsion (for many very good reasons), so maybe this was all genuinely just an anomaly and very far outside the norm for completely different reasons than my high school experience.
McLean's formula for success is to be located in an upper-middle class district with parents who value education and are wealthy enough to provide a stable environment, but not so wealthy they must send their kids to a private school. This formula isn't something that can be easily replicated or scaled out nationwide.
The aspiration is to make excellent education available for all children, regardless of what school district their parents can afford to move into. This is a problem that looks easy on the surface, but it seems to be extremely difficult in practice. Education is a social benefit, and a lot of people seem to have rejected the notion that taxes should even pay for social benefits.
I'm also optimistic that physical goods as a whole will become much more affordable over the next decade or two for various reasons, which would further enable the median public school to approach the level of 00s MHS without relying on local concentration of a disproportionate share of national wealth.
All that being said, my point wasn't "look how well-funded my high school was". Regardless of the reasons, it's a bright spot in a narrative of doom and gloom. Only the horror stories seem to get any attention, and if you listen to anyone with strong political views on the topic you'd think each state's governing party had turned its entire school system into a network of indoctrination camps. It's also clearly the case based on my disturbingly bad elementary school experience, and from what I've heard of some other local schools that should have comparable financing to MHS, that money isn't sufficient to provide a top-tier educational experience.
I think it's important to look at schools and counties that perform well and carefully evaluate which elements can be used as a model to help improve public education as a whole, rather than assuming that absolutely nothing is replicable without gobs of cash. For example, off the top of my head, what if the federal government provided an annual budget for a handful of top-ranking districts across the country to have their best teachers of different subjects at each grade level oversee production and maintenance of open source course materials, video lectures, and possibly LLM chatbots? What if teachers all had some equivalent of GitHub to share and collaborate on that stuff? It wouldn't fix problems like rundown facilities or availability of computers and textbooks, but it would allow the worst Latin teacher in the country to provide something a lot closer to the Mr. Bigger experience, and that's just one idea.
#261 in National Rankings #8 in Virginia High Schools #11 in Washington, DC Metro Area High Schools #5 in Fairfax County Public Schools High Schools #302 in STEM High Schools
Are you seriously saying you can't reconcile how America has bad public schools after having gone to to a school ranked #261 in the country?
Can you, just for a moment, consider the situation here and try to reconcile this? It is important for me that you be able to do this.
My point is that US public education isn't universally bad, not that it's universally good.
> Either my experience was so far outside the national norm that I have no useful perspective on this issue, or the national discourse has been totally corrupted by vocal minorities and political agendas
> Every time I hear about some factoid or perspective that American schools supposedly don't teach because they're propaganda farms designed to churn out uncurious low-skill workers, I roll my eyes
> It's possible my experience may have been more the exception than the rule
> Maybe I just got incredibly lucky, but I really have nothing but good things to say, and can't relate at all to the picture of American public education that's been painted in the media and social media
Can you just clarify for me once more: what exactly can you not reconcile? Be very, very specific, please.
I don't have a problem. I went to a well ranked public high school and am grateful for that privilege. It isn't lost on me that many, many, others are less fortunate than I am. But to say you can't reconcile these things is, at worst, tone-deaf, and at best, incredibly ignorant.
Even if you choose to believe there's some interpretation of my original phrasing that could mean what you're suggesting, I've now clarified several times that the idea you're making a fuss over does not reflect my sentiments.
While that might be your cultural understanding of, or personal reaction to, what he said - he actually did not say that.
If this subject is sensitive for you, or useful communication just isn't happening, then it might be better to drop it and move on.
To be clear, I didn't actually need him to clarify it. I wanted him to understand the fallacy in his position.
Here's GPT's response to asking what the reconciliation is. You be the judge:
> The user is having a hard time reconciling the consistently negative narrative they’ve heard about American public education—that it’s failing, propagandistic, or poorly preparing students—with their own lived experience, which was overwhelmingly positive.
> They describe going to a well-resourced high school (McLean High, in a wealthy district) where teachers were excellent, curricula were rigorous, and their education prepared them well for life and career. That stands in stark contrast to the media and social media portrayal of American schools as “atrocious” and failing.
> In short: they can’t reconcile the national discourse (education in crisis) with their personal reality (education that worked extremely well for them).
To reconcile this, he needs to understand that his personal live experienced is independent of the experience lived by others with lesser resources.
When interacting with GPT - telling it that it holds some incorrect belief, then insisting that it acknowledge its belief to be wrong, and that you are right - that conversation can go quite well.
But when interacting with human beings - that conversation style generally works rather poorly.
The Netherlands has settled on three levels of schooling and within that level (according to capacity, and desire to learn) most of the schools show relatively little variation.
The same thing continues into university, with pretty much 99% of all the universities in the Netherlands being public.
You don’t select a university based on level of theoretical educational attainment, you select one by virtue of proximity, or which of them teaches the specific courses you are interested in.
Schoelenopdekaart shows pretty wide variation in how many students go on to vwo etc.
1. Any reform effort needs to ensure that early education isn't overlooked. Elementary schools need capacity, processes, and expertise to appropriately deal with kids of all different knowledge/intelligence levels and backgrounds/skillsets in a personalized way, and they need oversight to ensure that lazy/incompetent/malicious teachers and administrators aren't making poor/abusive decisions that could have lifelong negative impacts on students.
2. AI will be a critical element of future reform. It's too incredibly useful of a learning and scaling tool to sleep on. Of course it's easy to misuse, but that's exactly why responsible use needs to be taught as part of research and fact-checking lessons. If they haven't already, schools need to start running small-scale experiments with incorporation of AI tools into curricula asap.
Imagine how much more you could have learned with a virtual TA in your pocket on call 24/7 for those 13 years, with human teachers in the loop to help guide any self-directed learning you might have chosen to undertake. That bright-eyed kid who never stops asking "why?" will finally have a conversational partner who never tires of answering. All the panic about hallucinations sounds like the same sensationalist takes I grew up hearing from adults about the internet and Wikipedia — a perfectly valid concern, but not sufficient to negate the value of the resource in competent hands.
To your point, I would expect any sanctioned in-school student-facing AI usage to be through a school-provided platform on locked down school-owned hardware, in line with how computer/internet access already works (or how it worked 15 years ago). School-issued mobile devices with AI access could be a nice addition if they were locked down enough to sufficiently minimize distractions, but maybe sticking to laptops and desktops would work better in practice.
I always find it interesting that the anti-schooling mentality is so prevalent here on HN, too. It’s most obvious in threads about cheating, where a popular topic of discussion is to defend cheating as a rational reaction because school doesn’t matter, a degree is “just a piece of paper”, and you’ll learn everything on the job anyway.
It also shows up in the tired argument that college is only really about networking, not learning.
I’ve had some on and off experience mentoring college students in the past. Those who adopt these mentalities often hit a wall partway through college or even at their first job when their baseline intelligence runs out and they realize they don’t have the necessary foundation because they’ve been blowing off coursework or even cheating their way through college for years.
I’m afraid that LLMs are only going to enable more of this behavior. It’s now easier to cheat and students are emboldened by the idea that they don’t need to learn things because they can always just ask ChatGPT.
I once posted in support of general education and it didn’t go so well.
I suppose the people on HN are a certain demographic.
If you have kids and experience it first hand, it's extremely underwhelming. If you were an outlier in any way as a student (and I bet a majority of people here are), it's extremely underwhelming.
My wife and I have advanced degrees and place a very high value on education, and I have very little that's positive to say about the state of education in our very highly ranked public schools. They've completely lost the plot. But any criticism is presumed to be hostility to teachers (and their union) or flat out racism by a vocal and increasingly large segment of the population.
I work in tech and I see this more and more every day. By "cheating", I mean deciding that you don't want to do the thinking or even spot-check the result; you just ask an LLM to vibe-write a design doc, send it out, and have others point out issues if they care.
Programmers are generally more anti-schooling, at least anti-college for a good reason. It's one of the high-paying jobs where a degree is optional in modern days. It's also one of the few fields where the best resources are not gatekept.
Einstein had a few things to say about this. [1]
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/1952/10/05/archives/einstein-stresse...
The real issue isn’t the availability of learning materials, but the healthy pressure and right push from experienced teachers. People tend to overestimate how self-driven most students are. The truth is, most students aren’t naturally motivated to learn. They need society to give them a sense of purpose, and they need teachers to challenge them with problems that keep them just outside their comfort zone. Sadly, the U.S. school system provides neither. Take my kid as an example: even though he’s in a decent public school, he thinks his schoolwork is tough and the SAT is challenging. Yet the SAT wouldn't even measure up to the high-school graduation exam in my country, let alone the college entrance exam. In the end, it’s the broad middle of students who suffer from low standards. With the right motivation and push, they could learn so much more, but instead they end up wasting precious time in high school.
Well, some people claim in these comments that their children don't get textbooks. Not saying that you're wrong, but it's gonna take a lot of 'healthy pressure and right pushes' to account for the fact that they don't have educational material.
Educators have been brainwashed into believing "computers are the future!" and don't seem to be able to even contemplate that reading something on a screen is a poor substitute for physically interacting with something (a pen and paper, a book, or the actual thing being described in a video).
I regularly have to tell my kids to stop doing math and science problems on their computer and get out a pencil and paper to do the work so they can organize it and understand it. They argue at first because their teachers tell them not to (so they say), but stop when they actually see it working.
Like a sorting algorithm which is O(n) on nearly-sorted input - the utility is limited.
I hate to break it to you, but a lot of our most valuable research is produced by people who did their primary education outside the US. Just go to a STEM research lab at any US university connected to a Nobel prize or Fields medal in the last 10-20 years, and it will be almost completely made up of internationally educated students / professors / etc.
Some schools are sports centric. Others have to work hard to get students interested in sports.
I think the implication that sports are bad is also misleading. Sports programs, when run well, can do a good job of getting kids into routines, out of trouble, and keeping them accountable to their peers for something. The TV and movie style sports culture where the football players aren’t expected to even attempt to pass their classes doesn’t actually exist in most schools.
Now show me parents, hell even here on HN, who openly admit that they are addicted to the screens and various 'social' cancers and consider it something profoundly bad and damaging, and that they as parents should really do better and actually try. A rare sight, mostly its brushed off and some even brag how 'digital' and modern their kids are.
But its fine, we all know how these things really are. This is one area where even otherwise disadvantaged parents (ie due to their poor upbringing or ie coming from undeveloped places) can raise their kids to be well above sea of future desperate population with severe social anxieties and addictions (lets not forget addictions ball up since they change personality for the worse).
Think how much lack / minimization of those will give them various advantages in their adult lives, be it professional (focus on work, ability to better socialize and communicate in person) or personal (all kinds of relationships, and finding one's purpose and drive in life). I just mentioned basically whole core of adult existence, no small things by any means.
And its not that hard, we do it with our kids and often see it around us in their peers, just need to put a bit more effort and spend more time with them instead of doom scrolling or binge watching TV. Which are anyway good parenting advices, but one needs to start like that from beginning and lead by example.
My point is that the entertainment was finite, in this case because it was only available for a set duration.
That Dragonball Z came on for a single episode created a dead zone where it made sense to do homework and it wasn't pulling teeth when it came time to sit down for dinner with my family (something we both would be very privileged to have in our youth btw).
It's happening in many Asian countries too.
Korea: https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/pisa-2022-results-volum...
HK: https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/pisa-2022-results-volum...
Like if you take a bunch of steps running from a road to the edge of a cliff, only after the last one over the edge do you experience all the problems
There's good reason for this. Not everyone enjoys learning for the sake of it. The pitch for forced education is that it will help you sustain yourself as an adult. If adults are finding their time in forced public education to be regretted, then they pass that information onto the younger generations. Maybe there are better ways to acquire useful skills.
I'm always a little surprised to see the HN crowd so in favor of education. The median commenter writes programs for a living, and probably acquired that skill mostly on their own. They might enjoy learning for its own sake, but surely they can look at their own situation objectively and realize their marketable skill came more from free time, computer access, and internet access, than an educational institution. If the strategy was to bet on what already worked for oneself, and hope it works for others too, then they would want to pull money out of schools and put it into libraries, computer labs, and internet cafes.
It might be okay that I was self-taught, because I'm special; but we can't let regular people be doing that sort of thing.
That's an interesting theory. It definitely explains a lot of what we see. I don't know if anyone self-describing as progressive would sign off on it as their own thinking.
Phrased the way you put it, it also seems like a kind of cognitive bias almost like the gambler's fallacy. Assuming that the concrete data you have is not representative, and instead the opposite is more likely to occur. The correct reasoning would be "this definitely worked for me, assume I'm not special and try to make the same path easier for others".
The reason I think it might be a strawman is that the ideology your talking about does want to help others, and that thinking would make them less effective at that goal.
I offer an alternative hypothesis: corporations influence policy.
Corporations would simply prefer to import skilled workers than to have to pay taxes to educate Americans. Evidence for my hypothesis can be found in Vivek et al’s endorsement of the lazy Americans hypothesis. It is a narrative the GOP gets from corporate donors and not from Joe Sixpack fox tv viewers who make up the base.
The referendum didn’t pass because a large swath of the community saw no value in having advanced math and reading classes. I have no doubt there was a lot of “I didn’t go to advanced classes and I turned out just fine, that’s a waste of money” thought process.
I think this is a very flawed argument. Immigration was tolerated/encouraged because it kept demographics stable, labor affordable and economic growth high.
Pretending now that the previous generations did this for some "greater good" or out of misguided kindness is disingenuous.
!!
The rate of college graduates has increased nearby 50% over that timeframe.
A rather unexpected result for a cultural aversion to education.
My point is "culture averse to education" seems a strange assertion.
I went to a state school and was one of the “weirdos” that didn’t party or join a fraternity. IMO some of us are there to learn and socialize on the side. Others are there to socialize and learn on the side.
That's literally the definition of cultural influence
- You do not diversify classrooms by academic ability---the high-performing students can be free tutors to the low-performing students.
- You inflate the GPAs and implement no-zero policies.
- You teach to the standardized tests, and don't worry about the material.
- You make lessons "fun and engaging" because you need the attention of the students least likely to give you their attention.
- You eliminate gifted or honors programs, because that's wasted money not improving your bottom line (bottom students).
Those pupils will generally need very structured lessons that directly provide clear information (often in a form that can easily stick in memory and be repeated, even word for word), and straightforward instructions that can immediately inform their practice no matter what their level. I.e. the exact opposite of a so-called "fun and engaging" approach. (Which of course ignores the fact that such students tend to derive the most fun and engagement from being taught in a clear and effective way!)
The underlying issue is that the "progressive" educational strategy taught in Ed Schools is very explicitly a "sink or swim" approach where the student is supposed to be teaching themselves and the teacher isn't doing any real work. The hidden attitude here, coming directly from the "Progressive" era of the late 19th and early 20th century, is that many students will indeed fail but this is not an issue because clearly they were not worthy of entering the educated class with the very best.
(Special Ed is the one remaining niche that still teaches more effective educational methods, but obviously not every remedial student is a Special Ed student, and we should not expect them to be.)
The fact that these institutions can exist at the low-performing state they do is a direct reflection of the culture of the people who run them, send their kids to them, pay taxes to support them, etc.
The schools can only do what they do to the degree that people aren't willing to put up with it.
Or are they dutifully resisting cultural shift that threatens the "don't think critically, just go to work, pay your taxes, don't question the system, don't do drugs, go to college, get a job, lease a new car, buy a condo, cross your fingers that stonks go up enough for you to retire" late 20th early 21st century status quo "ideal citizen" and "ideal culture" that they were built to foster (and who are the kind of people who fill out the majority of the system)?
The way I see it peddling blue state bullshit and red state bullshit (depending on a given school district's location) is simply a common sense adaptation districts are making to garner support from local populations who were willing to support the system so long as it provided useful education at a non-insane cost but are more critical now that the deal is worse.
For example, in my state, it is an annual tradition to slash the budget of schools and/or libraries and funnel the money toward political goals and police retirement funds.
I attended the best public school in the state at one point and literally watched the Governor text someone for 10 minutes and then fall asleep in the middle of a budget presentation specifically put together in order to convince him not to cut more funding the next year, as it would mean the school would have to begin taking federal money and compromising on its values.
I also attended the worst public school in my state, a harrowing and illuminating experience which I've spoken about here a few times before. [0]
I also had my collegiate education robbed from me by a vindictive teacher who illegally falsified my grade out of spite, and an administration who protected her. I was homeless since 16 was and attending high school on my own in a rural community with no economic opportunity.
Due to my circumstances, her falsified grade meant I had to rescind a full-ride scholarship which had been offered to me including boarding and a job, but on condition that my credits included that core class. I had no adults in my life to fight for me, and even though I met with my guidance counselor, the principal, several teachers and the school board, I was not helped and fell through the cracks, despite high standardized test scores and a high GPA.
Instead, I continued to be homeless from 18 to 21 and struggled very badly, starving and sick. I am now employed in my field of choice despite these circumstances, but I overall had a very traumatic experience with the public school system. The institution ultimately failed me, despite my intellect and perseverance.
So I share your concerns deeply! I want nothing of the sort to happen to my kids or anyone else's.
Your work looks very interesting, by the way, leafing through one of your papers.
I gotta say: I had a pretty terrible public-school experience too, which I mostly don't talk about in adulthood. Policywise I'm more anti-anti-public schooling than in favor of the system as I went through it, because I've spent the past couple of years living in a state that allows quite a lot of local control, quite a lot of "school choice", and doesn't invest very much in taxes... and currently attempts to brag that slightly less than one third (yes, 1/3) of its kids score as proficient in reading and math[0]. The idea that basic literacy and numeracy qualify someone as belong to an "upper" or "elite" cohort drives me absolutely freaking nuts -- hence my not really supporting a "shut it all the fuck down for how bad it sucks" approach to public education.
[0] https://www.tn.gov/education/news/2025/1/29/nation-s-report-...
it being available "on the internet" doesn't mean it' available to a child!
it also misses the important aspect that for children you need to nudge them into the right direction of learning
it also misses that children today often get bombarded with a non stop stream of skillfully engineered distractions and dopamine loops, that makes it much harder to nudge them in the direction of educating themself.
oh and all the fake news, fake education etc. isn't helping either,
We could examine the common differences between US education and other high performing nations and try to reform towards something more effective, but really culture is the problem so let's all pack it up and find something else to worry about.
I think the one way that American culture does prevent progress is that Americans tend to be averse to evidence based reforms. They like to atomize responsibility for everything down to the individual. Homelessness, drug addiction, poor education outcomes, poor health outcomes, it's all just individuals making bad decisions or perpetuating bad culture.
If we did anything that actually helped it would somehow be condoning/encouraging the badness of these individuals. Regardless of how effective it would be it's somehow worse than allowing the problem to fester.
It's interesting to blame anti-intellectualism because Republicans are usually labeled with that.
But simultaneously it's Democrats that will dumb down classes to make sure even the worst performing student will pass. And this is also anti-intellectualism, but of a different sort.
The combination is failing our students, doesn't matter the political orientation.
I'm involved in education, I see this every day - I spoke with someone taking a class on how to reach students, and due to no-child-left-behind, this is actually a class on how racism holds back black students and what to do about it (answer: Make simpler, easier classes). It's completely silent on any other type of student.
In a nearby elementary school they are now touting teaching kids “AI literacy”. At an age where they don’t even have enough of a world view to understand anything related to it. Such an asinine idea, and of course it will be at the expense of something non-trendy.
It seems like public education suffers from so much “idea cascade” now and jumps from one fad to the next. Educational paths are more and more left to chance than organized thought.
Republican states aren't doing that. It's not the concept of No Child Left Behind that is bad, it's the implementation (and it's used as a reason to worsen classes).
Republicans want to dismantle department of education, have cut funding for education, food stamps, free meals, etc. they are by definition against education for the outgroup and “the poors”. So I think that label is apt.
On the other hand, Dem leadership is quite racist and has a saviour complex. They identified the right issue — children from impoverished areas that don’t see a future for themselves through education are underperforming — but instead of treating the problem they push stuff like no child left behind. In their defence though, republicans simply don’t allow any legislation that would improve education to go forward, mainly because they benefit from it.
> they are by definition against education for the outgroup and “the poors”
The second does not follow from the first in anyway. You can be against federal education and strongly for education. Just because you think a federal department of education is needed for good education doesn't mean it everyone thinks like you or that people who think differently automatically do not value the things you think having a federal department of education would help.
Red states overwhelmingly occupy the bottom end of leaderboards by all accounts of education except the number of people believing in fairytales about angels.
News to me.
The belief is that any advanced classes increase the achievement gap. People who subscribe to this also believe that advanced placement testing is discrimination and must be eliminated. They want equity of outcome, so reducing the curriculum to a single class at a single level that everyone the same age takes is their preference.
It has been implemented in several places with predictable backlash.
https://www.insidehighered.com/admissions/article/2017/10/09...
All of this is cultural and anyone who thought I implied race — which looks like you did — is a moron and a racist.
IMHO this whole thing is environmental.
I asked a question for details you failed to provide in your first comment.
> All of this is cultural and anyone who thought I implied race — which looks like you did
There’s no way this can be true because I never think before I comment here.
Nay, not "seems", but has indeed subverted education. Hofstadter's Pulitzer-winning book was published 62 years ago [0] and now, in 2025, even the highest office is unrecognisable.
[0] _ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-intellectualism_in_Americ...
I really don't get it. As a total amount of any budget from any perspective, string theory has always been a blip whose cultural impact is much wider than its actual budgetary one. Like this critique about string theory is just a thing that people who are physics "enthusiasts" say and even to the extent that it is true, its really been more than a decade since it was a problem.
There is a warning above about something, but I'm not sure exactly what.
I will say that theoretical physics is in a hard spot, but the problem isn't string theory. It is that we are short experimental data because the domain of validity of our theories is currently somewhat larger (in most obvious ways, anyway) than the domains we can reach with experiment.
I don't think any amount of clever budget allocation is going to make progress in theoretical physics go faster, nor do I think we'd be in a different position if we had allocated the resources differently. Notably, LQG and similar approaches (of which there is hardly any shortage) have not made noticeable progress either.
My perspective is this: string theorists are cheap. We may as well have a few for some long shot research, and while we fund them they teach kids math and physics. Seems like a good trade.
We need kids learning math because it is useful for engineering and other parts of life. However there are large parts of math that are useless in the real world and we don't need to each at all. (we need enough to teach rigorous logical thinking because that is useful in the real world - but there are lots of ways to get there)
Is there value in more theoretical physics - at what point do we know the constants to enough values? This is a reference to just before relativity was discovered when it was thought refining the constants was all that was left - it turned out that some major things were left, but is there anything more? This is an unanswerable question, but what if we redirected those working on string theory to a hobby if they want to and made their day job either teaching math (which they are already doing part time), or some engineering type job? If we distribute the workload that implies everyone could work half an hour less every day, is that a bad trade?
The way I see it is thus: life is objectively pointless. There is no god and time will erase everything anyone ever builds one way or another. Human life is predicated on doing work to survive, but that isn't the point of life. Instead of asking how we can only do what is useful, we should be asking how we can do more and more useless stuff while still providing for our bodily needs. Show me a mathematician working on pure math and I see a person at the absolute peak of human potential. I do not resent the mathematician. On the contrary, I aspire to their place. I guess you see one and you think they are useless and should be writing code for an ad company somewhere.
What a dogshit world.
Those two do not follow. I resent the mathematician because the world can only afford to pay a small number of them (we need to eat and that consumes far more people), not to mention shelter and such - I'm not one of those society has chosen to do math all day (for good reasons - I'm not that great at math - my math minor makes me a better choice than average, but still not anywhere near good enough). Even those who do math all day are mostly professors who do math between teaching classes and advising students. The time / taxes that are spent from my paycheck to pay someone to do math is time that I'm working for someone else to achieve a peak that I cannot and without them I could work less (we are talking a second per year or something, but still...)
Yes I'm admitting to jealousy here. I aspire to their place.
> . I guess you see one and you think they are useless and should be writing code for an ad company somewhere.
You picked a bad example. I'd call most ad work useless too - they are not informing me of something new that I need but trying to get me to buy something either I already know about or worse things that would make my life worse.
We mostly question the fundamental subatomic particle physics that is not producing any returns on the investment. E.g. the galvanic effect was discovered in 1780, and there were long-distance telegraph lines by 1845 - so 65 years.
The last major theoretical advance in particle physics was around 1965 (Higgs mechanism). That's already 60 years ago.
a physicist responds: physics has done very little for like 70 years[0]
In what respect? Did you bother to actually watch the video or read a transcript or did you just watch the first minute and a half and assume that was the point? It wasn't. the ensuing thirty-two minutes serve to debunk the idea that there hasn't been progress in physics over the past seventy years.
Which GP claimed was the case. GP is wrong.
And she covers a wide array of physics areas -- she even mentions that she could have gone year by year starting in 1953 and cover at least one advancement per year, but she limited it to just her top ten which was pretty wide ranging.
And literally nothing in subatomic physics. The theories from 1960-s made predictions that were later confirmed: Higgs boson, neutrino oscillations, etc.
- It's mostly a cultural shift in the western world – we don't value personal responsibility any more. When I was in school in seventies, it was my responsibility to study no matter what since grade 1. It didn't matter whether I liked a teacher, topic or whatever. It's not the case any more.
- Since nineties there has been a shift in educational sciences and practices from "old school" memorizing as "rote learning" and explicit instruction toward "critical thinking skills". Sounds nice for many, but in practice it doesn't work. Barb Oakley has a wonderful paper about it "The Memory Paradox: Why Our Brains Need Knowledge in an Age of AI"[1].
- Smartphones, social media etc certainly contribute and the rise of LLMs will make it even worse.
[1] - https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5250447
You can either mechanically memorize them, which is a boring and mindless activity, or you can be challenged, participate in discussions, projects, and activities that engage the parts of your brain involved with critical thinking.
Both will technically get you to pass a test, but the latter will be better for retaining information, while developing skills and neural pathways that make future learning easier.
The problem is that most academia is based on the memorization approach. Here are a bunch of ideas and facts we think are important; get them into your head, and regurgitate them back at us later. This is not a system that creates knowledgeable people. It doesn't inspire or reward curiosity, creativity, or critical thinking. It's an on-rails pipeline that can get you a piece of paper that says you've been through it, which is enough to make you a tax-paying citizen employed by companies who expect the bare minimum as well.
I get that the alternative approach is more difficult to scale, and requires a more nuanced, qualitative, and personal process. But that's how learning works. It's unique for everyone, and can't be specified as a fixed set of steps.
After all, what is the point of teaching people to be idea and fact storing machines, if machines can do a far better job at that than us? Everyone today can tell you a random fact about the world in an instant by looking it up in a computer. That's great, but we should be training and rewarding people for things computers can't do.
How? The way I think of numbers is actually quite similar to what is currently known as "new math". It's not taught well because almost no teacher was raised with it (and thus lack the ability to think in new math "natively"), but it is based on something real.
Could you give me an example and how it helped you? Thank you :)
Life-changingly useful program for every aspect of my life, when I can finish it every day
My top tips:
- put all decks in a master “daily” deck using the :: syntax in the deck names. Otherwise you feel “done” when having finished one deck, and feel like not starting the next. Have only one goal - finishing today’s Anki - for that master deck (and every other deck) go Study Options > Display Order > New/review order > Show after reviews. Otherwise it’s hard to ever catch up when slipping behind. With this setting, the system becomes somewhat self correcting
My only regret is not being able to pay more than $25 to the developers
Does anyone have any data points that could help me update my world model here?
I certainly feel personally responsible for things and so do many people that I know.
Additionally, it feels like people like to blame systemic issues on lack of personal responsibility in the general public, while ideally, elected officials should take personal responsibility for fixing the system.
Parents are apparently raising their children wrong en masse, so was the parents’ generation rotten too? Which raises questions about the character of the generation that raised the parents…
Growing up in the 80s, I remember having a lot of free time and autonomy. I had soccer or baseballaybe twice a week and guitar lessons once a week, but the other days, I was doing what I wanted, I was expected to get my homework done, but once that was done,I was free to roam the neighborhood or my backyard.
This parenting mindset changed, by the late 80s early 90s and kids started getting more and more scheduled activities and less free time.
Even personally, 6 years ago my wife was very apprehensive about letting our oldest who was then 8, walk to his friend's house who was a 1/4 mile away in the neighborhood. Our youngest, who is 7, walks or bikes to his friend's house the same distance away. And we have other neighborhood kids that also go between people houses. That is the childhood I remember.
I don't think HW I got in elementary school necessarily helped me learn more, but the act of being given work with expectation that I would complete it on my own was a growth activity for me, and that is something that is starting to come back in elementary school, homework for the sake of learning how to do homework.
Wouldn’t you just say “When I was young we were forced to adhere to a tight schedule which taught us to be dependable. Todays kids are allowed to do what they want, which means they never learn any responsibility.”
It wasn't just that kids had autonomy, it's that they also needed to take the initiative to fight boredom and go do something.
Let's say that you give kids today all that autonomy to wander around their neighborhood and explore like they did back in the day -- would they wander and explore, or would they stare at their phones?
And to be clear -- this isn't the kids fault. We've let social media companies peddle their addictive slop and they've eradicated boredom, but it came at the expense of short attention spans, no motivation, no sense of fulfillment.
All these things are not true in the real world, so the conclusion is that a generation doesn't copy the previous generation's culture like a spit image.
We still rely on rote memorization to a greater degree than Finland which is consistently far more successful in their education.
I think the biggest problem with current education is that too many people like you are looking back with rose colored glasses and resisting the kinds of changes we actually need.
We have a crappy mix of outdated 1970s style education with a bunch of enshittified technology layered on top. Google classroom, we also spend too much time and money on sports. Schools shouldn't even be in the football business. CTE is bad for kids.
Imo source criticism is only a thing if you have a well grounded model of the universe. And if you DO have that, then source criticism just falls out naturally and you don't need to discuss that at all anyway.
I don't need to go into the traditional whining, I'm sure you are aware of the changes of the structure of America.
It's not about personal responsibility. There is a reason rich kids do better than poor kids.
The thing nobody wants to say out loud: America's demographics are changing, they are aging. We are producing less wealth. Our country has less potential.
The wealthy members of the past generation have failed to invest in the American project so we are left with a weak, crumbling economy that doesn't have any industry or useful skills to export.
We, as a country, as WEAKER and POORER than EVER.
No?
Most of the parents around me are busy each working a full time job and doing their best to raise their kids.
They now spend some of their free time reading on the phones instead of a newspaper, magazine, or book. Some listen to books while they mow the lawn, clean the house, or do other chores like laundry. They also hang out a mix of kids and parents nearby, both inside and out, in front of bonfires and kitchen tables. RN I'm commenting on HN while my kids and neighbor kids turn dinner into an imaginary cooking show at the table.
Parents around here are also often tending to elderly parents or physically/mentally challenged relatives.
Too few can afford to have one parent stay home fulltime.
Of course there have always been parents neglecting their kids to do anything else: bowling, drinking, partying, traveling, tinkering, obsessively reading, etc. The fact that more activities are behind screens isn't the catch all explanation it's often promoted to be.
Screens and especially active content are incredibly addictive and small kids have no way of being rational and throttle their use. If they see the same behavior in their parents that's it.
Its not about having stay-at-home parent, but about spending the time with kids to be 100% physically there for them and them only, no running screen of any type anywhere in sight. Lets be honest, this is a rather rare sight.
Usually it’s just institutional failure at multiple levels and a whole bunch of people who don’t care about the institution’s output sufficiently.
Every time I read about new education stories they’re busy trying to solve wider social issues instead of being the best place to get an education. Just like how libraries turned into homeless shelters instead of being a place for the community to learn and read.
Reality check, income inequality makes it so that parents have to slave away to earn the bar minimum to survive, participate in the gig economy, and then deal with tax cuts that give the richest of the rich even more money, while suffocating social services in their neighborhoods.
This is end stage capitalism, squeeze the rubes for every cent they have and damn their kids
The end result was huge increases in spending. But not on education. The money was spent on more MacBooks, more iPads, more buildings, more smart TVs, more consultants, more School Bullshit System as a Service, more scoreboards, more $50,000 signs in front of schools.
Meanwhile the good teachers are fleeing the system and test scores are plummeting as schools focus more on day care and “social justice”, and a declining emphasis on teaching core subjects and learning in general, coupled with social promotion where everybody gets a C or higher, and 80% of the school gets on the honor roll (spoiler alert: our district is not some outlier where 80% of the kids are geniuses).
Schools have very little to do with teaching, and really are just about baby sitting and trying to correct social issues.
Oh, and endless buckets of tax payer money with meaningless oversight.
Is that wrong? The government takes away your kid for 12 years, every weekday all day, they might as well solve social issues in the country even if that means, say, kids are 1 year behind Asian kids, or their parents 30 years ago. If they figure out how to solve personal issues, that's even better.
I think there is a logical fallacy here. People assume that the only purpose of school is education. The more the education the better, even if that means deepening social issues, or making kids unhappy (BTW being a kid is like ~20% of someones life, not insignificant in itself). I think they assume it just because 'school' is called 'school', but I don't think the name of an object should determine its purpose.
- - -
When I look at the social issues in my country, I think the school system would be a very natural place to start to solve them (and arguably the current school system just worsens them). Even at the cost of "fall in reading and math scores".
I fully hear you on this. I miss the days where a simple phone call or email communication would occur when needed. Now it's a deluge of daily updates via 2 separate 'apps' for 2 different schools, and a requirement to login to 'app' or website to read the 'email' that they've sent out. Nevermind contacting someone that isn't directly associated with your child at the school -- Guess that's all need to know basis.
I hate it.
The lesson may even be the opposite: "If your school's biggest problem is 'too much money', outcomes will be pretty good."
> “social justice”
So they spend all their effort on social justice, but spend none of their money on it? You should move to the South, you can pick a charter/magnate/whatever school with no special education and no busses. Keeps out the pesky blacks and retarded.
Somewhat of a pain though since my son has autism and services are pretty shit compared to where I lived in NJ
I resisted that narrative for years, thinking it was just a media-hyped scare tactic to get clicks. However, my niece started high school a few weeks ago (in mid-August, which is weird to me); her experience blew my mind.
Her new high school is considered one of the better public high schools in the area. When I asked her how it was going, did she like being a high-schooler, I was expecting her to complain about the course load or something like that. However, she told me that after 2 weeks, they haven't spent one minute on actual education. She said they've been going over rules and policies for 2 weeks. Things like no bullying, inclusiveness, fire safety, bring your own water bottle, how to pray (they have a room dedicated to prayer), etc. Best/worst of all, they did an entire day on active shooter drills - the windows are now bullet-proof!
So yeah, unfortunately, I'm fully onboard with this narrative now. While kids in Taiwan and Japan are learning calc, kids in the US are doing active shooter drills and staring at the Ten Commandments. USA! USA! USA!
A government institution cannot promote any one religion. It's fine to have a multi-denominational non-secular common worship area. You can also promote religion as a general concept, but not a specific religion.
Whether this rule is followed or enforced properly is an entirely separate problem that we are apparently still grappling with.
It’s also in poor taste. Jesus himself commented on performative piety:
“Whenever you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, who love to stand and pray in the synagogues and on street corners so that others may observe them doing so. Amen, I say to you, they have already received their reward. 6 But when you pray, go into your room, close the door, and pray to your Father in secret. And your Father who sees everything that is done in secret will reward you“
This sounds like nobody in a position of power should be allowed to openly do anything that people around them have the right to not do. Which would be kinda bs.
Luckily there are both witness accounts and photos in this case, so it’s pretty clear what was really going on.
Because they're an authority figure in that context.
Same reason I can flirt with you, but your boss can't.
Yes. Apparently that's SB10. SB11 covers praying in school.
When great controversy surrounds the curriculum, the safest thing to teach is nothing at all.
I fixed your verbiage to be more descriptive. They are teaching nothing specifically because they don't want to kill the golden goose. If there wasn't so much money at stake we wouldn't be having this discussion.
> kids in the US are doing active shooter drills and staring at the Ten Commandments. USA! USA! USA!
Not a thing at public schools (despite some attempts to force it)
Between this and the prayer comment, I suspect this comment is either exaggerated or mixed with internet anecdotes rather than actual experience.
>Not a thing at public schools (despite some attempts to force it)
>Between this and the prayer comment, I suspect this comment is either exaggerated or mixed with internet anecdotes rather than actual experience.
Actually, it is a thing in Texas. And unfortunately, it's not exaggerated at all.
From Wikipedia[0]:
"S.B. 10 requires public schools to display the Ten Commandments anywhere clearly visible. The law requires the display to be framed or a poster, and include the exact text of the Ten Commandments provided in the law without alternatives. It must also be at least 16 inches (41 cm) wide and 20 inches (51 cm) tall.[13]"
From the office of the Texas Attorney General:
“In Texas classrooms, we want the Word of God opened, the Ten Commandments displayed, and prayers lifted up,” said Attorney General Paxton. “Twisted, radical liberals want to erase Truth, dismantle the solid foundation that America’s success and strength were built upon, and erode the moral fabric of our society. Our nation was founded on the rock of Biblical Truth, and I will not stand by while the far-left attempts to push our country into the sinking sand.”
Senate Bill 11, passed by the Texas Legislature this past regular session, allows school boards to adopt policies setting aside time for voluntary prayer and the reading of the Bible or other religious texts. The law requires that the board of trustees for each ISD in Texas take a record vote on whether to adopt a policy to implement these periods no later than six months after September 1, 2025. Student participation in these periods requires parental consent."
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_Senate_Bill_10
[1] https://www.texasattorneygeneral.gov/news/releases/attorney-...
Edit: Fixed typo (nor --> not).
More songs about Ken Paxton[0]
Is it possible your niece was joking?
Can I guess.. "bulleted"? Similar to how the creators of brainrot content say "unalive" or "seggs" because they want to make sure their content can go viral, and there's the belief words like "kill", "died" or "sex" will trigger Zuck and Co.'s censorship?
2025, what a year to be alive...
But this is a boring suburban town on the edge of a midsize metro in the PNW, which is not exactly the most exciting place in the country.
What else do you expect government run schools to teach if not "engage the government at any/every opportunity"?
Looking back on my own education what a disservice some of those behavior patterns (not specifically that one) they tried to teach us would be in adult life.
Likewise, I think it is very ill-advised to cram kid's heads full of "dial 911" at the young vulnerable age where repeated messaging goes into the kind of memory that's all but impossible to overwrite.
And ACAB, yeah, sure. Basically true, I agree.
That's still your best first move if there's a mass shooting. Anyone you call's just going to call 911 anyway (god, I hope). You do want hospitals on alert and calling in trauma surgeons, and ambulances on the way. And usually the police aren't that astoundingly useless in these cases, even if their outcomes are mixed.
I do think more often than not police are, in general, a net-benefit and force for "good", if you will, when called in for a mass shooting, and I don't think it's a particularly close call. Though yeah sometimes they are pretty bad even for that purpose (and they're often bad for other purposes, sure), and in the case of Uvalde they were disgustingly bad, and I here employ "disgustingly" with its full force and not flippantly.
Still, like... probably call 911 first if someone's shooting up a school?
(Not to mention the break from teaching/studying.)
What kids do with what they learn in school matter more than whether or not they memorized a calc function.
Besides, who cares if you know cal functions in a post-phone, post-AI world. You look that shit up now.
Lots and lots of stuff that just has to be memorized. It becomes easier the more experiences one gets over time using those, merely memorizing the words alone ofc. is useless and also very inefficient, without other knowledge to create a network the brain will throw pure sentence-memorization out. So you still start the lessons with some memorization, then deepen it by using it in class. But in the end you will still remember those many little "facts".
I say this as someone you drank the "no memorization" koolaid. Now I always start new things with memorization first and I learn so much faster.
There are some subjects where the emphasis on memorization that some places have is detrimental, but that doesn't make memorization bad in general.
As a kid, and probably still now, I was very reluctant to memorise things, for some reason I never understood but that may be connected with distrust of authority. I still remember how long and hard I fought my parents and grandparents who tried to make sure I would eventually memorise multiplication tables. Instead, I had to develop many tricks to be able to retrieve the proper results without memorisation, effectively discovering patterns to retrieve quickly all the tables from very few memorised numbers. Years later, I remember having done a similar thing in history classes, refusing to learn any dates, so instead finding tricks to tell which events must have occurred before or after another, thus again getting more engaged with the material as a result.
Sure, some material do require pure memorisation, like language learning (that I still hate with a passion), but overall I believe memorisation gets the bad rep it deserves.
I said memorization wasn't important...
I find it frustrating people argue against points that were never made.
Our district has eliminated programs for the kids at the top end in the name of equity. They've also eliminated separate spaces for kids with learning and behavioral issues for the same reason. So everyone is in the same classroom and most of the teacher's time is spent on a handful of kids causing trouble and the rest of the class learns nothing.
We can't afford private school, so we're doing a bunch of extra lessons at home to keep them on pace, engaged, and challenged. But really, there are only so many hours in the day and I want them to be outside playing too!
I think you're thinking of it backwards. Inner city Detroit kids probably struggle in school precisely because there maybe isn't a mom at home who's passionate and available to educate them (among plenty of other reasons, to be sure).
Inner city Detroit kids (not gonna lie, feels like a euphemism) aren't just inherently hard to teach for no reason
> (not gonna lie, feels like a euphemism)
Are we still doing not-so-subtle claims of "I think you're a racist?"
Pick any demographic group that gets overwhelmingly bad results and depends on the public school system. Look at the statistics. We aren't going to fix problems we can't acknowledge. Urban public school districts are among the most impacted by bad public schools.
That problem is because school district funding is directly related to tax revenue in said district.
Tax revenue has to go to capital maintenance and repair, and also scholastic budgets (teachers, aides, equipment, books).
Due to 'White Flight' ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_flight) and historical segregation of black people, left primarily poverty in urban city cores. People who later move into empty residences do so with reduced rents, and general poverty problems like food insecurity, bad transportation, and higher crime. (Poverty is a disease and can be modelled as such.)
The poverty is directly related to low scholastic district funding, therefore poor schools.
And to further harm poor (monetary and educational outcome) schools, is Bush's plan in the 2000's to pull funding from underperforming schools. Better funded schools have better educational outcomes, so those schools were less affected, or not at all.
Even a local school in my area had federal funding reduced. I'm in a community with roughly 97% white people, so its not a legacy race thing. But it does turn out that it is a poverty thing.
Some problems can't be solved by money, or even by the public school system.
You make a valid claim that urban schools have highest per-capita expenditures, which I accept.
However, no amount of school funding can fix: violence/crime, food deserts, poverty wages, parent(s) working multiple jobs and not enough parent-child time, or all the other trappings of poverty not explicitly in schools.
Free breakfast/lunch would definitely help, at least in terms of nutrition and hunger.
But we're past just pumping a district with cash to fix it. We would need to pump the whole community to fix the disease of poverty to start turning the academic performance around.
The downside? Fixing poverty proper takes longer than politicians are elected in. Well, that and "those people shouldn't get freebies, cause that's socialism".
("Those people" is obviously barely coded language for ghetto black people. Howls of socialism and not deserving aid. Glad I never had children.)
Oh come on. A quick read on Wikipedia will even tell you the research on outcomes is fraught with biases and lacking evidence. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeschooling
https://www.fox13seattle.com/news/sps-highly-capable-cohort-...
Sure, "special education" has traditionally meant slow, retarded, nonverbal, etc. We all know that euphemism. "Short bus". It always represents basically warehousing the bottom 10% of public education students where they cant affect the majority.
But 'gifted students' also require special education. Its not normal, for reasons of academic rigor. And they are way past the curriculum of the middle 67% of the distribution.
So, the answer is to demand an IEP. It is also a legal document, which outlines scholastic rights to the student, and holds these districts strongly accountable.
And, at least for now, gets more federal funding to 'special education'.
Those kids will always cost society way more than the smart kid that didn’t reach their full potential at Harvard and ended up at UCF.
The shitty parents are the ones who let meta and the like hack them to the point where their children are just following by example - if you stare at the screen all day, so will they.
They don't work hard, they enjoy themselves.
They also have hobbies and my friend is always working on some hobby/home project. His wife is very social and is always planning something and he has no issues following along as he likes going out and doing things. They take the kids because they enjoy being with them and the kids also enjoy going out too.
The big issue today is the fact that parents are distracted by phones so their kids follow that example. It used to be everyone sat around, watching TV or talking to a friend on the phone. Those were limited activities as eventually you got tired of talking or nothing good on the few channels of TV so you found other things to do. Now its phones constantly pumping out attention stealing content 24/7. It's a prison.
It is cheaper, easily available and more fun.
Sure kids also use social networks. But the role reading had was mostly taken over by Netflix, youtube, disney and such.
... huh?
I'm a parent and this just isn't true. My wife and I have phones, our young children do not. We do not own a tablet. Our children have never known what it's like to have the option of resorting to a screen to keep them busy when we're out of the house. TV time is limited on the weekends, extra limited on the weeknights.
My oldest absolutely loves reading, and I watched her sit in the corner for 90 minutes on Sunday with a pile of books and a massive grin on her face the whole time. My youngest is still too young to read, but I'm hoping for results within the same realm.
Your comment about there frequently not being much else to do? It's up to parents to, for lack of a better phrase, teach kids how to be bored.
Edit:
>It's cheaper, easily available and more fun.
What's super fun, easily available and free for us is going to a park on the weekend to play and have lunch, and then driving around to a bunch of Little Free Libraries in the area. Drop off books we don't want, see if the kids or parents find anything that strikes our fancy. Our kiddos love it and so do we, it's great family time.
It's great that your kids are reading, but clearly a lot of kids, and even more adults, aren't.
It's not just "up to parents" because the media, in all its forms, sets collective values.
And the strategic problem in the US is that reading - and culture in general - is caught between a number of competing ideologies, most of which are destructive to what's usually understood as education both in and out of school.
What individual parents do is downstream of all of those cultural influences. It's heavily dependent on socioeconomics, opportunity, and status, with error bars that depend on a random range of individual values.
The US is a competing patchwork of wildly incompatible cultures and traditions, some of which are directly opposed to each other, and all of which - in practice - are suspicious of traditional educational goals.
Put simply, no one is driving the bus. So it's stuck in a ditch, with its wheels spinning. And it's about to burst into flames.
There's only so much individual parents can do to fix that. The problems are strategic and political, not individual, and they're much harder to fix than they seem.
And I wish people wouldn't make assumptions and then respond based on those assumptions.
Assuming they will social, they will have friends to talk with them about anime shows and they will go visit them to watch those shows in their house. The kids in school will talk about anime, about netflix shows, but not about books.
> It's up to parents to, for lack of a better phrase, teach kids how to be bored.
You have full control while they are small. That goes away quickly and obviously even should go away.
But even more importantly, my parents and parents of my peers did not had to put that much work into us reading. They did not had to make the one big family project, they could have spend their weekends working in garden or going to play golf ... and generally speaking kids ended up reading a lot more anyway. They would read, because it was easily available and only fun thing to do.
> What's super fun, easily available and free for us is going to a park on the weekend to play and have lunch, and then driving around to a bunch of Little Free Libraries in the area.
It is not fun except for small kids. All these stats are about kids with agency which yours do not have yet.
[1] https://literacytrust.org.uk/research-services/research-repo...
Seems like the kids just don't read anymore, yours being exception of course
You can teach your kids how to fly a plane, yet gravity is not up to parents.
- There's also a reward issue, in that reading, especially long form is "soft punished." It's not directly punished, yet there's very little reward, mostly a lot of struggle, not much of the candy feedback of TV, movies, and video games. It requires personal imagination and visualization of often difficult concepts rather than simply taking what someone else has "imagined correctly" for you. If you've never seen the Lord of the Rings movies, imaging what Frodo, Aragorn, and the rest are actually doing, where they're going, and the struggling through Tolkien's complicated prose is quite challenging. And socially, there's also significant peer pressure issues involved, that evoke “epidemic” or “contagion” comparisons. Once large numbers of peers discount reading, then the population on average starts receiving negative feedback. Notably, if peers are high achievers, then students who interact with these peers may also adopt those habits. [1]
[1] https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/jameskim/files/jep-peer_in...
- Part that's less nefarious, like a teen highlights about the difficulties of reading in this paper [2] (pg 34.) "You can’t ask a book to explain what it means right now. I go to people because of their interactive nature."
[2] https://alair.ala.org/server/api/core/bitstreams/0051cf84-91...
- The social media companies and the world wide web culture in general have also implemented a form of reading detriment. There's little reward to blogging, writing, or reading long form writing. Incendiary writing and rage-farming was long ago found to be an extremely effective tactic compared to informative discussion. And a lot of the time, almost all you can look forward to with your informative post is your contribution being aggressively scraped, while being compensated nothing, and then churned out to make someone else money.
- There's actually a few positive though, apparently teen and juvenile literature is actually increasing in sales somewhat from [2] compared with adult literature sales. Young adult books have been the fastest-growing category over the last 5 years, with print unit sales jumping by 48.2% since 2018. 35.03 million print copies of young adult (YA) books are sold each year as of 2022. [3]
[3] https://wordsrated.com/young-adult-book-sales/#:~:text=Compa...
- You may be slightly down biasing how much people read Lord of the Rings. The Hobbit edition from 2007 has 76,000 ratings and 12,000 reviews on Amazon. [4]
[4] https://www.amazon.com/Hobbit-J-R-R-Tolkien/dp/0618968636/re...
Adult genre fic, even, is dying, and lit-fic has long been in decline and has pretty much just been for a few nerds since roughly the turn of the millennium.
I think the decline of reading is exactly what’s pushed publishers and agents to favor easier and easier books: you have to pursue as much of the market as possible to make money now because the whole market’s not that big, so you can’t afford to exclude readers. That means favoring ever-easier books as readership declines.
The only other route to make a living is aiming straight at film/TV adaptation, which is very hard to break into but a handful of authors have successfully specialized in that. Their books do OK but they’re watched, as it were, way, way more than they’re read.
The issue a lot of people are talking about is the decline in reading comprehension, lowered reading scholastic scores, the overall lack of reading, and the consumption of entertainment that requires little reading.
Stuff like the "Treasure Island" (#34), "Oliver Twist" (#56), and "The Hound of the Baskervilles" (#66) still rates rather high up on Young Adult literature sales by Amazon's reported numbers, even if romance and such is the top 5-10. They're reading.
1. We pay teachers like shit and treat them even worse. Even if you wanted to do a good job as a teacher, it's fundamentally impossible because:
2. Our schools are structured and run by busybodies that have absolutely no business being within 100 yards of a school. Curricula is set by politics and ideology, not established science. We have book bans and helicopter parents suing teachers for talking about dinosaurs or evolution or even for simply existing as a queer person in any capacity.
Teachers have been fleeing in droves for years, and many states and locales are further reducing the qualifications required to teach, leading to a downwards sprial.
There's also the intentional and systematic disassembling of our education system by the federal government, as a means of voter suppression. This whole situation was created on purpose to keep Americans dumb and complacent.
America is fucked six ways from Sunday and it's hard to even think about a way out of this mess. It's going to take several generations for our society and government to recover, if it ever does.
> Only one study specifically examined the achievement gap for students from low socioeconomic backgrounds (Hampton & Gruenert, 2008) despite NCLB’s stated commitment to improving education for children from low-income families. African American students were often mentioned in studies of general student achievement but none of the reviewed studies focused specifically on the effects of NCLB for this subgroup. Again, this is a curious gap in the research considering the law’s emphasis on narrowing the Black-White achievement gap. Other groups of students underrepresented in the research on NCLB include gifted students, students with vision impairments, and English proficient minority students.
("A Review of the Empirical Literature on No Child Left Behind From 2001 to 2010", Husband & Hunt, 2015)
Everything you see going wrong is downstream of this. Yes, harmful ideologies have done a lot of damage to the education system, but it could easily survive this we had actual signifiers of success.
I read your post and thought it was BS, so I did a little research. According to this, California public school test scores are better than Texas and closing in on New York and Florida.
> California politics is heavily influenced by Teachers Unions, and yet we score near the bottom of the entire US.
California scores better than Texas, a completely Republican-run state where the teacher's unions have almost no influence. How do you account for that?
https://www.ppic.org/publication/californias-k-12-test-score...
https://www.chadaldeman.com/p/which-states-actually-have-the...
https://www.urban.org/sites/default/files/2024-12/States_Dem...
Mississippi, for example, has a third grade reading gate. Texas holds black kids back at a nearly twice the rate of white kids. These kids are older and have repeated the grade so they do better in the 4th grade NAEP assessment.
This is possibly working as intended. However, you can achieve the same results by redshirting your kid or having them repeat a grade.
So the claim from the blog post that
> but Texas has a slight edge for Hispanic students and a huge advantage for Black students.
says that the Texas results are driven by a demographic that's aggressively held back.
In practical terms, the states kind of have different definitions of what it means to be in 4th grade. And that's one way of increasing your score on this particular measurement.
I think the right thing to do is intervene before students are held back. But that costs money and might make your NAEP scores worse if the student just squeaks by this year rather than staying behind a year. But I don't have the data on how much they're attempting to intervene in cases where students look like they're going to be held back.
It would not matter what school you sent me to, I did not care about learning or intellectual pursuits when I was 15.
I would have had to be raised by completely different parents with different values in a different time and place.
This is an easily disprovable statement that calls into question your credibility.
California schools generally score right at or just below the median for the entire US.
That doesn't make them good, but they sure aren't the worst.
> I would not lean too hard at political party affiliation
In the US, it's not hard to look at a map of political party affiliation and a ranking of the worst schools and not notice the correlation.
Unless I missed something?
I wonder where you went to school. Median means that half of the sample is above and half the sample is below.
To explain (and I'll use small words so you'll be sure to understand), the median of the fifty states is that 25 are above the median and 25 are below it. See how that works?
Here's a simpler example in case you're still confused:
Steve makes $5/hour
Bob makes $8/hour
Reggie makes $11/hour
Sylvana makes $14/hour
Benoit makes $17/hour
The median wage is then $11.00/hour. Get it now?
Check out this very complex page[0] (let me know if you need help with the bigger words) that discusses this idea. Good luck. I suspect you're gonna need it.
Yes I understand that, but the sample unit called out in finding the median explicitly was 'schools' not median 'state.' (And before that, test scores, in which the fundamental unit is a child and not a state).
I was trying to come up with an explanation how CA could be at the bottom while still have schools around the median.
If NY/CA/FL/TX are huge and tight to together, the median school or child could be in one of them even if they were amongst the worst 5 or 10 states. The 'median' as used above was in reference to schools, not states.
I think the key piece you're missing here is each state does not have equal number of schools or children. Therefore if a state's schools are all scoring near the median (of schools) as alleged, and the large states are all doing bad, California could be one of the worst few states while having their schools (and children) near the median. You're getting your units mixed up.
I'm guessing you're referring to the statement above from the comment here[0]. Is that correct?
I read that as "[All] The schools in California [in aggregate] generally score right at or just below the median for [other states' schools in aggregate] for the entire US." Which is as Tyr42 (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45191847 ) interpreted it as well.
Perhaps I misunderstood, but I don't believe I've ever seen comparisons of individual schools across the US. Ever. It's always comparisons of all the schools in one state as compared with those in another state.
Sure, there are often comparisons within states between school districts or between schools in the same district, but never one-to-one comparisons of a single school in one state vs. all the other schools in the US.
But yes, i can see how you might read it that way. That said, I guess we won't know which GP meant unless they come back and tell us.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45190611
Edit: Clarified comparison examples within within states/between school districts/schools.
That is how I intended it as, like you, I have never seen anything else.
However, the real comment I was refuting was "This is in California where the test scores are some of the worst in the nation." That statement simply isn't supported by the data.
It is certainly possible that California does have some of the worst individual districts in the nation as it definitely has pockets of incredibly poor socioeconomic areas. However, that does not define "California schools" as an aggregate any more than the fact that California has some of the highest individually performing schools in the country by virtue of demographics as well.
Yep. Your comment here[0] made that clear. I completely misunderstood you. Sorry about that.
I think there may be some confusion about where various states sit WRT schools.
School rankings from the World Population review[1] as compared with state test scores[2] of various types and ages, as well as US News and World Report's State school rankings[3], all of which tell a different, if similar, story.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45196647
[1] https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/public-scho...
[2] https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/profiles/stateprofile?sfj=...
[3] https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/rankings/education
This is part of it. A friend is a teacher and is now in an admin position where he manages teachers. His big gripe is the higher ups have no formal system - every time a new person comes in they bring with them their system and politics, burning down the previous efforts while doing little to nothing for students. Then they leave for greener pastures and the next ideologue comes along with their matches.
Teacher salaries need to keep up. The problem is teacher salaries aren’t a state or a national setup. They depend on the school district you’re in. If you’re in a high income district where higher taxes are afforded. Teacher salaries are good. But then these places also have VERY engaged parents - which makes the scores much better.
If you want rural and inner city scores to improve it will need real funding - 1. For teachers to want to move to small town USA and teach there, 2. Or for them to risk life and limb going to inner cities and 3. Having an extremely high teacher to student ratio - probably 5-10 per teacher to compensate for lack of engagement at home.
Where is your evidence of this? Schools are one of the most locally controlled institutions of our government.
So you support shutting down the federal Dept. of Education? Or is the answer more centralized control of education?
Instead, institute a voucher system and allow parents to literally shop around for the best school. With obvious allowances for children with special needs, rural areas, etc.
Education needs competition. Badly.
Schools are dominated by leftwing CRT ideology. It's the rare exception when there is real pushback against dinosaurs or evolution. I very much doubt that you are as angry about Islamic pushback against sex topics in school.
The reward structures, the dumbing down of courses, removing accelerated courses, passing everyone, the move against merit, the removal of structure, discipline, and punishment for bad behavior all come from liberal ideas on teaching.
Anyone who demands standards, values merit, values hard work with high expectations is labeled a fascist, colonizer, or some other pejorative. "Ways of knowing" is an idea that permeates modern teaching where we can't judge or grade anyone for what they know or don't know because different people just "know" differently. Grades are racist. Expectations are racist. Math is racist.
It’s not that we all got a lecture about no video games in school. It just very self-evidently wasn’t a place you would play video games. It would be like getting a pizza delivered to you at the doctor’s office. Just absurd.
I remember a kid with a Game Gear on the elementary school bus and even that being, well, unusual enough I remember it. Kind of similar to how kids will always remember seeing someone’s family pet run on the bus, because it blows their minds that it can even happen.
not in class, of course, but at lunch and on the bus, it was fair game.
If I was born recently, I'd be just one of the kids that get stuck with a screen from day 0. There's no recovering from that.
Citation? I've routinely seen statistics suggesting the opposite, that parents are moreI involved with their children in the modern time and more likely to play and engage with children.
I’ve seen stay at home parents who put their kids in daycare so they can spend the day shopping and effectively have someone else raise their kids. Their kids end up largely just being status symbols. I’ve also seen parents that go everywhere with their kids, schedule every moment of their day and won’t even let them stand at the school bus stop by themselves. The parents build their entire lives around their kids and live vicariously through them.
IMO, kids need a proper balance and I don’t think a lot of them are getting that.
Why don't they care? I think for many, they have given up any hope that a better life is possible. So education isn't the key, because nothing is the key, because the door doesn't even exist.
The point is that students are doing worse, even though ^ is likely true today just like it was true 5, 10, and 20 years ago.
This is a common trope but I've never seen any evidence.
Go to any sports field/venue and observe the bleachers.
What you find may astound you, even if the percentage isn't literally 50%+.
I do also play with them, but I'm not one of the parents who's always playing with them any time they're playing, they also need space to figure their own stuff out. Adults can do other things a lot of the time, it's fine.
Or you can knock out some schedule stuff or teacher-emailing or bill-paying or whatever that you'd otherwise have to cram in some other time, that's nice too.
Plus, these activities aren't causing missed education. I'm not teaching my kids math while they go on slides.
What exactly do you expect people to do there while doing nothing and while being interrupted every 6 minutes over yet another interesting rock?
What universe do you live in
Meanwhile at home, she's already reading. She's at the hard part, when reading is so slow that it's painfully boring. It's still too slow for the entertainment value to justify the work, so she's not hooked yet. We spend 5-10 minutes a day on it, and I suspect she'll be over the hump in 3-6 months. Public school would have taken another two years to get her there, even though they get her for 7 hours per day.
The one-size-fits-all model of education is a blight on our civilization.
Admittedly my kids get more screen time than I'd like, but we try to make it educational. An observation that I made that is on topic for this thread, is that there are very few modern US shows that seem to fit our criteria of being educational and not over-stimularing. It seemes there are many more international shows that are better.
You must live in a very sad place. This does not describe the average parent of any of the kids around me. I know these people exist, but it’s not the norm at least in my state.
The most common complaint among my teacher friends is about helicopter parents who are too involved.
The costs of this societal shift fall on those who can’t compete for time. Student’s go unparented and unmentioned.
This lazy "answer" to every parenting problem makes me roll my eyes nowadays. It's the equivalent of an umbrella hypothesis, a convenient excuse for not having to consider things in-depth, further justified by seeing parents when they are taking a break and assuming they're always like that.
Also choosing to close schools during COVID was as catastrophic as many predicted. Our kid was in 7th grade during COVID and teachers each year report the effects are still being felt across many students. Of course, naturally great students recovered quickly and innately poor students remained poor but the biggest loss was in the large middle of B/C students.
The agreement I had with him: "Scroll all day, play video games, etc. That is my side of the agreement. And you also do your school work, learn, practice for exams, homework, etc. That is your side of the agreement. I'll trust you. If your grades get worse, i.e. you need help managing device time, we'll review/change this agreement."
We also sat down many times looking at content together, in attempt to teach him what's trust-worthy and what isn't, what's "healthy" and what isn't, etc. And of course we do other things together as well.
So far (knock on wood) my son has managed well - he is 16 now. He organizes his own time, and has learned when to play and when to work. And crucially he has learned when to disconnect from his devices to do what's necessary.
No kid is the same. I am not saying my approach is best or even right, I just offer it as another data point.
https://www.goodmorningamerica.com/family/story/author-sugge...
We should do whatever they do.
On that note, we should also segregate kids by academic desire and achievement like Japan and China. The bullies and underachievers hold back those who are academically excellent. We do this in limited instances, but not enough to really count.
Responding to the OC, this is a downright awful solution to the current education problem in the U.S.
https://www.hup.harvard.edu/file/feeds/PDF/9780674295391_sam...
And some of those kids still struggled. But the response was to push harder. Didn't get adequate grades that school year? You're not doing anything fun this summer, you're studying. Needless to say it was a culture shock going to college and meeting people who were shockingly cavalier about potentially failing classes.
Steven He demonstrates what happens when an Asian kid tells their parents about getting a B.
Baked into it is the assumption that current education models fit both genders equally. Boys respond better to active learning and competitive techniques than the more passive techniques used currently. (Could we just as easily draw the opposite conclusion if our current educational culture was geared towards boys?)
Another thing to consider is the various programs that incentivise/enable girls to get into various subjects (in my n=1 experience I had much fewer programs (programming, robotics, maths, etc.) to join despite being already very interested and strong in those subjects).
By comparing age groups directly we are also not controlling for the fact girls mature faster making them better students earlier in life. We are also not considering tail effects of a normal distribution: e.g. top 5% of all students are male, but majority of students in the top 50% are female.
Maybe the solution is to segregate schools on gender, but that doesn't immediately equate to boys crashing and girls excelling.
Do you have another reason for being against streaming?
In the same way that if we streamed per-subject, there'd still be a significant number of girls in the top set for maths, if we streamed by performance overall, there'd be a lot of boys in the top schools.
Nothing about streaming implies gender segregation, so I'll ask again: do you have another reason for being against it?
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/education/2025/mar/10/boys-widen...
I've asked twice now and you don't seem to be able to justify your position at all. That being the case, all I'm getting from your original comment is boomer incel vibes - a strange need to self-flagellate on behalf of your gender.
Feel free to post whatever bimodal metric you were referring to if I'm wrong :P
> Maybe i have experience teaching and u don't?
I don't see any teaching jobs on your CV.
Do bear in mind that while I also don't have teaching experience, I have been in school where some subjects were streamed (Maths, Sciences, Foreign Languages). It worked absolutely fine.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/education/2025/aug/21/pupils-eng...
"All the research shows single-sex schools are good for girls but bad for boys – both in terms of academic performance and socialisation."
It doesn't take a genius to figure out that grouping students by educational achievement exacerbates the problem.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S07380... https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4022976 https://www.independent.co.uk/news/education/education-news/...
We're not talking about single-sex schools. Even if we were, that line is simply not true.
> Bottom line: based on this analysis, single sex schooling may provide a modest boost to grades for female pupils, but doesn’t seem to make any difference for male pupils.
https://ffteducationdatalab.org.uk/2024/05/do-pupils-in-sing...
As for your links, the first is very tenuous data, finding effects in "Mathematics and English but not Chinese".
The second (about mental health rather than academic performance) doesn't support your claim: "without negative effects for boys". Not exactly crashing out, is it?
The third is simply old and doesn't control for the differing properties that boys' and girls' schools tend to have in the UK for historical reasons. My link corrects for that.
There may be some negative effects on socialization in a single-sex environments, but we're not talking about single-sex environments, nor about socialization.
> Attacking my character to win an internet argument.
You implied you had teaching experience. You do not.
You've invented insane splits like 80/20 when the data don't suggest that at all.
You're now having to scraping the bottom of the barrel for a link to prove your claim while simultaneously suggesting the effect is as well-established as climate change.
Instead of wasting my time with this nonsense, maybe spend some time proof-reading your CV.
I have no reason to waste more time with you. HTH HAND BYE
My very first reply said that "girls do better overall".
The claims I took issue with were that (a) streaming would result in total segregation (b) which would, in turn, cause boys to crash out. I have demonstrated that neither claim is true, while you've posted random links from Google Scholar apparently without reading them.
People keep talking about how catastrophic it was to close schools during COVID. We keep having catastrophes and no one does anything about it. If the kids missed school, make them go back longer. Large chunks of the country still have 2-3 months where the kids don't do anything; send them back then. If they are already doing year-round schooling, cancel after-school athletics and make them learn with that time instead.
This doesn't seem to be a thing anymore, and there probably multiple sad reasons why.
That's why it's nice when states just make it a law. That shuts those people up (or at least forces them to go complain somewhere else, where they're more easily ignored and it takes more effort so they'll probably just give up).
(That's the middle-class schools—in really rough schools, teachers have to pick their battles because actual violence is on the table as a response, even among lower elementary kids, and admin's too busy dealing with things way more serious than some kid texting in class to back teachers up on small stuff like that)
Great onservation and great Fussell reference.
Some/much of the content in Class is a bit dated now, but imho it is still very directionally correct.
Having learned a bit about adult developmental psychology, many of his observations are found in and predictable by modern cognitive psychology.
I distinctly remember seeing, several years ago, a photo of one of (I swear this is going to be basically apolitical) Trump's kids with their family, including one or more kids with toys, sitting in some kind of living-space with this perfectly spotless mirrored-on-all-sides table, and I was like "FUSSELL!!!!". Or all the gold in photos of that family in their home environments (a signal aimed squarely at Fussell's "Middle", which thinks "gold shit everywhere" is an "upper" signal, which it is not—unlike the mirrored table, which is Upper, because nobody who ever does their own cleaning would willingly deal with a fingerprint-magnet like that)
The kids at the new school do their homework, read, play outside. The kids at the old school skipped homework, played call of duty, and could hardly read.
The new school has fun exercises like the "word of the week" -- and they swear they will rarely assign homework. The old school had mandated trips to the library so kids could take home books and ignore them, alongside a minimum of 1hr of homework per night.
In the bad school, a class of 24 had 11 kids who would not behave themselves, ever (one of the kids would often pick up his chair and hit other students and his aide). In the good school, a class of 24 has 1 kid with limited behavioral issues.
Anyways, the people make the place -- and that includes kids.
That appears to be their observation of the two schools they had direct experience with. What else are you asking they provide here in terms of analysis? Maybe average student test scores? Likely available as it appears they are talking about public schools here. If the new school has significantly better scores would that satisfy your analysis requirement? If the test scores within their household subsequently follow this trend would that be sufficient analysis? In general active/concerned parents are going to try to get their kids the best education available right?
Also can you elaborate on where you got the "unfairly placed" part? All that was actually said was they moved from one school district to another. People buy homes for school districts all the time...there's a section dedicated to school rankings on Zillow for a reason.
A reasonable analysis would be less of the anecdotal "evidence" about laziness, and more of the demographics of that particular district.
By "unfairly placed", it addresses what you quoted: "The bad school had dull kids with bad parents." Was the commenter one of those bad parents, since they were by definition in that category? Or are they suggesting they were one of the good parents that was in the wrong place? Or did they become good parents once they found a better school?
Yes, a post that attacks kids is one that seems ripe to be critical about. (To say nothing about the implicit logic that their kids must also have been part of the problem, which goes against the general premise of the comment)
I assume you only read a few messages here, stopped and decided to attack that one.
Surely there were other messages here less deserving of charity?
If you would like to point out a few comments that are hurling blame at children, I'm more than happy to offer my opinion on those as well.
But this became when the discussion continued "hurling blame on children." Which is presented as text not subtext?
And something about implicit logic?
You sure put a lot of work into deciding why that of all comments deserved ire.
I don’t think it’s controversial to say that kids with a great home life _probably_ have parents or grandparents that advocate for them and really try to get them placed into a good school district.
One could argue that getting your child into a good school district is an indirect way of surrounding them with like-minded kids and parental influence.
My premise is that there's underlying causes unmentioned, but implied (like socioeconomic status). You can separate groups from membership, and to oversimplify, if you move something from one side of an equation to the other, with different results, what you moved was truly the constant, and what was left behind was the variable.
specifically, I think the original comment was in poor taste, and there are other factors outside of good home life like you said.
There are so many factors to the negative education outcomes but this policy is just obvious. I guess its actually the parents who insist on being able to reach their kid at any moment?
> 4. Limit the distractions caused by using digital devices in class >Students who spent up to one hour per day on digital devices for learning activities in school scored 14 points higher on average in mathematics than students who spent no time. Enforced cell phone bans in class may help reduce distractions but can also hinder the ability of students to self-regulate their use of the devices.
I don't think a simple blanket ban on smartphones in schools is likely to solve much.
If the emergency is on the outside of school, parents still need to go through the main office to pull kids out of school, so contacting them is also unnecessary. These helicopter parents smh
("A Review of the Empirical Literature on No Child Left Behind From 2001 to 2010", Husband & Hunt, 2015)
Everything you see going wrong is downstream of this. Yes, harmful ideologies have done a lot of damage to the education system, but it could easily survive this if we had actual signifiers of success.
You can call it "juking the stats" or "overfitting", or whatever.
https://sohl-dickstein.github.io/2022/11/06/strong-Goodhart....
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Percent_ACT_Composite_S...
When it increases by 30x in 30 years, it becomes very apparent that standardized tests are simultaneously being gamed by the students and the testwriters. Students (and school districts and states) are choosing the "easier" tests that make them look proficient, so testwriters are making their tests easier to get a bigger market share. And all along, the tests that only care about separating out the top show declining scores every year...
- [AMC Historical Results](https://artofproblemsolving.com/wiki/index.php/AMC_historica...)
- Public school is essentially daycare. They try to integrate special education students more into the regular classrooms, but the teachers end up spending disproportionate time dealing with them and their behavioral issues, which hurts learning for regular students.
- I don't have strong, set in stone opinions about Common Core, but it's approach is certainly hard for parents trying to catch their own children at home. Eg. there is no emphasis on memorizing multiplication tables, but rather it's on learning rather esoteric and hard to remember (albeit valid) math algorithms.
- The teachers are generally poorly trained, poorly motivated, poorly paid, poorly educated, and poorly adapted to teaching students.
- Learning high school math has been enjoyable. I only took up to geometry in high school, but they are doing much more advanced math. I don't know any of it, and they barely do. So it's been fun learning it and then having to teach it to them in the matter of a day or two. Being a programmer has been exceptionally useful in that regard.
Gone are the days you are held back. It’s a classic Goodharts Law problem. We’ve focused on one metric and lost site of the bigger picture.
States improving performance (Mississippi of all places) now are holding you back at certain milestones. IE at 3rd grade if you can’t read, 8th grade for math deficits, etc.
Not supposed to think about it according to whom? Who's telling you that? Why are you listening to him?
The US has some of the best public schools in the world. The US also tops the world on spending per student, especially in poorly performing areas. The education crisis disappears when you control for demographics.
It's right to notice that and remains right no matter how much pushback you get from people who've been pushing the same broken solutions for 50 years.
Congratulations for adopting an independent perspective here. We need more of you.
I'm generally quite progressive but I am beginning to appreciate that the right may have a good argument.
That's also the left. The right holds the differences are genetic, not likely to change, and the only problem to solve is how to keep them out of the country.
And if their children are underperforming in schools it would be important to know.
Citation desperately needed.
How can you prove that empirically? What is your methodology for controlling for environmental factors in making that assertion, including factors associated with access to resources, tutors, having a full belly every morning, and not being constantly flooded with stress hormones as a result of grappling with the daily reality of living in poverty?
It's quite a leap to claim that immigration is the cause of the US IQ decline. The best explanations seem to be that it's environmental [2]. The general decline in IQ is impacting several countries.
0 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heritability_of_IQ
Environmental factors Of China have been changing in the past 3 decades leading to extraordinary gain in IQ. This re normalizes the IQ every year which leads to what appears to be a decline in IQ in the US.
Genetics plays a part because with the economic infrastructure of China supporting students to their maximum potential it brings the playing field on par with US. China no longer has to deal with poverty effecting IQ scores.
This with environment in parity the only thing left is really genetics.
The “IQ is BS” meme mostly comes from misunderstandings and misuse. People often assume IQ is meant to measure all kinds of intelligence when it really focuses on certain reasoning and problem-solving skills. Early tests had cultural biases, and while modern versions address this better, that history sticks. It’s also been used for discriminatory purposes, which has left a bad taste even when the measurement itself is valid. Critics are right that IQ doesn’t capture creativity, emotional intelligence, or practical skills—but psychologists never claimed it did.
In short, IQ is a valid and reliable measure for a specific set of cognitive abilities. It’s not the whole story of intelligence, but dismissing it outright ignores a large and consistent body of evidence.
Also, that replication crisis, that was in psychology, was it?
The replication crisis doesn't apply. IQ is one of the most studied and replicated statistics in psychology. IQ IS in fact the exception to the replication crisis. Your beliefs are a myth.
I'll bet you 3:1 odds embryo selection works. If you're serious about your anti-hereditarian position, take me up on my offer.
So, no, of course I'm not going to take you up on that bet. It's like betting against Bitcoin. I think Bitcoin is a farce but I'm not dumb enough to short it.
I'm not an "anti-heriditarian". I think there's probably a lot of value, long term, in embryo selection for things like disease avoidance. I also believe there's natural variability in cognitive ability; I don't believe all people are "blank slates"; that's a caricature (or, if you like, a deliberate wrong-footing of people who reflexively reject psychometrics and genetics for ideological reasons) of the actual concern I have.
Finally, I don't know what anything you said has to do with what I said. I said, very simply, "heritability != DNA". That's an objective, positive claim. Was this bet your attempt at rebutting it?
I'm sure you've read Gwern's essay on polygenic trait inheritance. I'm not sure repeating the literature would be productive here. We have every reason to believe that embryo selection and genetic engineering more generally won't just "cure disease" but make us taller, smarter, more beautiful, and longer lived -- and there's nothing wrong with that.
Of course there's a lot of variability. At some point technology will improve to the point that denying the effect exists will seem ridiculous, although I'm sure plenty will try.
I will say, though, that downplaying trait inheritance and the way genetics is the mechanism for this inheritance produces models that don't predict reality nearly as well as models that incorporate hereditary via genetics, and especially when it comes to education, we're throwing public money down the toilet as long as we make policy using inaccurate models.
I don't know what any of the rest of this has to do with what I said. I ask again: are you writing all this by way of declaring that "heritability == DNA"? That's a straightforward discussion we can have. Why avoid it?
Wealthier parents tend to be smarter (that's how they got wealthy or managed to keep inherited wealth) and tend to have smarter kids... who then tend to up on the wealthier side of the spectrum.
It's very unfair. It's also very real. Your fantasy is not real.
Your fantasy is not real.
Existence of a correlation is enough reason to break down any analyses by demographic data to have a clearer picture of what's going on. That's just basic data science.
Yet through some black magic that same genetics that allows a person to be taller then another person and that makes a human more intelligent then a fish, this same genetics doesn’t touch intelligence between different humans.
Makes sense.
What I said got you angry. But I am stating a factual truth and opinion. You need to learn how to respect other peoples opinion, because your anger and disillusionment is what causes the same thing as censorship.
The truth hurts, but you can't restrict it just because it hurts.
It’s not immigrants. Immigrants are in general more intelligent than people from the US.
I’m saying the average IQ of people outside of the US has risen and that is a huge part of the declining IQ in the US.
IQ is normalized every year and if the IQ of say China rises significantly every year that would appear as if the US IQ is lowering even if everything in the US actuality stayed the same.
If anything immigrants heighten the IQ of the US. Look at the proportion of Faang engineers. These companies essentially require IQ tests for entry. There’s a reason why these companies are overloaded with immigrants or people with origins from abroad.
A lot of people making stupid assumptions about what I said in this thread. I am in fact really remarking on China. The economic rise to power makes IQ tests originating from China influence the normalization of IQ in a big way.
It’s still offensive to people but I believe on average IQ is generally higher for China than the US. The bell curve is essentially a bit more to the right for China.
Also try not to get offended. These are statistical facts. I feel immigrants got offended but really what I’m saying should be offensive to white people.
The most elegant proof of IQ being linked to genetics:
The same person taking an IQ test twice has mean correlation of 0.85 or above in their scores. Identical twins reared together: 0.86 Identical twins reared apart: 0.76 Biological parent and child: 0.42 Adoptive parent and child: 0.19 And of course, any two random people will have a correlation close to 0.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heritability_of_IQ#Correlation...
If you do not believe this, then I would have to hypothesize you are succumbing to motivated reasoning out of a deeper value system placing equality above all other values. This is a well known pattern of belief amongst leftists, where they think humans are infinitely malleable blank slates and all inequalities can be rectified given enough social engineering. They deny objective group differences because they want a utopia where everyone is equal. This is clearly unrealistic, but furthermore it contradicts their value of diversity, where if people are diverse, then you would expect variation in all traits, intelligence included.
How is this proof of IQ being linked to genetics if adoptive parents can have 1/2 of the correlation that identical twins have? I think this proves that genetics only has a minor part, and upbringing/environment seems to be the most important factor.
But leaving aside things like Trisomy 21, your evidence here is twin study heritability. Heritability is not genetic determinism; it's almost a category error to claim otherwise, since "heritability" is really just a way of framing the question of whether something is genetically determined --- you still have to answer the question! There's a whole big research field controversy about this, "missing heritability", exploring (in part) why molecular genetics results, especially when corrected for things like within-family bias, are returning such lower heritability estimates than classic twin studies.
I do not believe that any random child selected at birth has an equivalent potential to win a Fields Medal, given the optimal environment to do that in. But the "hard truth nobody wants to face", from the parent commenter, is subtextually about race --- and there the evidence is a wreck; extraordinarily unlikely to bear any fruit.
Is there any new reading here? I used to follow this stuff much more closely a decade ago, but came to the conclusion most scientists will go to great lengths to avoid saying some races (if they don’t barrage you with pedantry regarding what race is) are on average different in some axis than others. There were a few out there who were able to say the politically incorrect thing only because objective science was strongly in their favor, but they still had the full force of the consensus academia coming down on them.
I lost interest when, much like history, it became obvious the field was too political for any real truth to be found. Maybe in 100 years or so.
I think what some people are noticing is that there aren't splashy results to confirm, like, The Bell Curve. Yeah, that's because The Bell Curve was really dumb; it's from the phlogiston era of this science.
But keep fantasizing you're born in the best race in the world, lucky you
We just need to compare with country of origin performance. If a family relocates from a place with low scores to a place with high scores, can you explain why you think we would expect their scores to rapidly increase to match the new place? I can think of many factors that would work against this that have nothing to do with race or genetics.
If the study is not controlled for this, then the education system at large may not have the kind of problem we would think about if we ignored this aspect. That seems pretty important to the discussion, I think?
Reading teaching on the other hand was for the most part figured out a long time ago but trendy experimental methods keep getting cycled regardless.
This is a fundamental problem with all learning: it's difficult to get entire group to do something the same way with equal effectiveness... that being said, teaching methods are evolving and it's really on the school system to embrace those changes. My kids are young, and their school teaches math with the Singapore Math system and literacy with the UFLI program. They have both been highly effective.
Their class sizes are also 12:1 students:teacher ratio, and 6:1 in Pre-K/Kindergarten. So that's also probably important.
Absolutely.
The harsh reality: most children infamously still have a hard time even being able to tell the time on an analogue clock. You can try every method under the sun but if a child has a hard time understanding a system with two different base numbers it is usually because they just don't have the capacity. All the handholding in the world isn't going to change that.
I don't see how somebody can learn when they're missing school so much. Math and reading require so much repetition and if you're not in school, you're not getting that time to sit down and do the exercises required to ingrain these topics. It doesn't even matter how a school teaches if the student isn't in class. They're just not going to retain things well.
That said a significant fraction of kids really do need all the help they can get, but catering to them means leaving a lot of slack in the schedule.
The reason it’s since covid up is because (more) parents stopped sending their kids to school when they are sick.
Last year I got a semi-threatening letter from the district for “chronic absenteeism” because I didn’t want to send a sick child to school. To their defense, they did say that the state (California) requires them to send the letter.
The best demographic data I can find is here: https://datacenter.aecf.org/data/tables/103-child-population...
The best data I can find on language spoken at home is here: https://datacenter.aecf.org/data/tables/81-children-who-spea...
The above shows the share of "Non-Hispanic White alone" children (who I'll assume speak English as a first language) going from 52% to 48% from 2015-2024, and the percentage of "Children who speak a language other than English at home" staying flat at 22% from 2013-2023. From 2015-2024, math attainment goes from 62% to 55%.
At a glance, it would seem that the shift in math attainment cannot be explained by demographics/language alone.
Reading: https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/reports/reading/2024/g12/p...
Math: https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/reports/mathematics/2024/g...
Hispanic population has shifted (+3-4%/report) and English learners have shifted (1-3%/report). [Note that reports have variable number (~2-5) of years between them]
English learner scores went up (or stayed the same) and non-English learner scores went down.
The big caveat of course that the English learner average score is still much lower than the non-English learner so if that population increased enough it still drags down the average. (Click the English learners to see their scores or see the National Student Group Score Distributions section for graphs that make this apparent).
But it has to be more complicated than "the English-learning Hispanic population increased" because if you look within racial groups: all groups except Asian are down within their own group.
Or, for example, girls' scores are down more than boys' scores even though girls' scores are still better than boys' on average in Reading (but worse in Math).
I think it's probably multiple factors all adding together. For example, % of public charters has increased but public charter schools have worse scores than public non-charter. % of economically disadvantaged has increased and economically disadvantaged students have worse scores than those not. % of students with disabilities has increased and students with disabilities have worse scores than those without.
The weirdest thing to me is how the population statistics are different between reading and math. From 2019->2024 the reported Hispanic 12th Grade population shifted 3% for Reading but only 1% for Math?
Same with the constant drumbeat of "Americans are getting shorter".
There’s a huge teaching gap between USA and Asia.
See for yourself:
https://youtu.be/wIyVYCuPxl0?si=f6wFv2G3Iru7QFTy
https://en.wikipedia-on-ipfs.org/wiki/James_W._Stigler
Edit: since it may not have been clear from the video, this is my interpretation:
* in the Japanese math class the teacher teaches at the board and then walks around the class to look at the students. Students are not sitting in large groups.
* in the American class the teacher spends practically 0 time at the blackboard, the students sit in large groups, the teacher spends most of the time with one or two groups.
Is staying at the front a sign that the teacher is lazy and not helping students? Or is it that the students are competent enough without aid? That could be good if it indicates your students have been taught well enough to master the material. But it could also be bad, indicating your school does not offer enough incremental challenge, and students who are beyond their current level, but not high enough for the next level (honors or whatever), never reach their full potential.
There's far too many uncontrolled variables here. Also, it seems the wikipedia-on-ipfs page for Stigler is down.
When I was in school, most work & learning happened on the individual level. Sometimes in pairs, where we would have to check each other's answers. But from what I see among my younger relatives and friends with children, there's a lot of group learning going on these days. Groups of five doing all kinds of projects in pretty much any class on any subject. Maybe it's fun to collectively build a diorama of ancient rome for history class, but I doubt you'll improve your maths skills much in this way.
Is this a consequence of a teacher shortage? Are kids in these groups supposed to help other kids? Are they supposed to learn cooperating with (or leeching off) others, at the cost of learning useful skills for themselves?
I find it interesting that James W Stigler doesn't even have a wikipedia page. I'm not sure what that means, but he somehow isn't very notable despite having written popular books and being a university professor. (or he is so controversial that they can't agree on one - which is a sign to not take him too seriously)
Because paper cutters are too easy to disassemble as re-use as a shiv machete? And anyway, it's pretty hard to make cloudy curves with a paper cutter.
> in the American class the teacher spends practically 0 time at the blackboard, the students sit in large groups, the teacher spends most of the time with one or two groups.
Three or four students is a large group?
For the former I'd guess its because they have very strong control on people's behaviors so they just want them more capable to innovate, grow economy, etc.
For the latter I'd guess its because they fear a more educated population will be harder to manipulate and hence erode government power.
On the American side it’s not that they want people to be less educated. It’s the adversarial system of education being run by people whose interests are not aligned with students excelling.
Teacher’s unions, which predominantly exist in the public school system, are not in the business of educating children. They’re in the business of raising costs (their salaries and benefits) and lowering requirements (the work they actually have to do). They’re against measuring progress. They’re against firing for lack of progress.
Compare that to a private system where you only stay employed if you’re actually doing a good job of educating kids. There’s also the advantage of private schools being able to fire their students, but that’s more of an anti-disruption thing.
While not always the case, "measuring progress" makes things worse because they tried this and what you get is standardized tests and teachers teaching to the test (Goodhart's law). Most (not all, there are crap teachers out there) are doing their best despite the rules imposed on them by local schoolboards (which are often a shitshow), and by curriculum mandates which they have no say in. And when given too large classes and next to no resources or support, they are then blamed when the kids don't prosper in that environment. There's grade inflation also, this happens at private schools too. Which teacher is more likely to get fired/disciplined; one who fails a lot of students and hardly ever gives and A, or one that hands out A's like candy and the worst non-performing students get a maybe C- (brought up to a C or C+, once the parents come in to complain to administration).
They do a pretty good job at it when you factor in long term pensions and health care.
> Teachers do not get paid well.
Teachers get paid too much. They create artificial barriers like requiring multiple years of certifications to purposefully limit the pool of competition. Most teachers unions are closed shops that mandate membership.
> They also tend to get paid more at the elite private schools. So if you want to compare, then you would be advocating for public schools to match private school salaries.
If I could waive a wand to immediately increase public teacher’s salaries by 25% in exchange for the elimination of all tenure (which does not exist at K-12 private schools), I would do it immediately.
> While not always the case, "measuring progress" makes things worse because they tried this and what you get is standardized tests and teachers teaching to the test (Goodhart's law).
There’s plenty of objective things to measure in math and science. If little Johnny can’t do basic arithmetic or solve 3x+2=11, you can’t fake that during an exam.
At least with teaching to the test, the kids learned the material on the test.
If you don’t measure things, you will not improve it. And teachers unions are adamantly against measuring things. Because they know it can and will be used against them. It’s an inherent conflict of interest.
They only get good pensions and health care because school districts refuse to give them better salaries instead. And good health care (really, health insurance) is crucial because health care costs can obviously bankrupt you in America.
> They create artificial barriers like requiring multiple years of certifications to purposefully limit the pool of competition
How is requiring the equivalent of a master's degree an "artificial barrier"? Surely, new teachers should have some experience and theoretical background before standing in front of 30-100+ students and being responsible for their education?
Florida passed a law making it possible for veterans to teach without even having a bachelor's degree. Does that sound like a good idea to you? Would requiring even a bachelor's degree be an "artificial barrier" in your opinion?
They are still wining about this number and go on strikes pretty much every other year.
Some quick Googling shows the average age of a Chicago teacher to be 41 years old. Is it insane to think that a professional with a master's degree should make the princely sum of $110,000 a year? Adjusted for inflation, that's less than I got in my first year as a software engineer.
$110,000 is the base salary. Add to this pension contributions almost completely funded (granted this is no longer the case for the new hires), a retirement on a full pension at 55, and a stable job. Good luck having all of this working as a software engineer for a private company. You can be made redundant at no notice, and risk always carries a premium.
Requiring anything at all is by definition an artificial barrier. Some are justified and some are not. In this case, I question whether a longer education necessarily benefits students.
I'm always surprised and disappointed to see such lazy thinking on HN. If teachers' unions were responsible for poor educational outcomes, you would see an inverse relationship between strong teachers' unions and K-12 rankings.
But New Jersey and Massachusetts consistently rank in the top 2 K-12 rankings in the US. And they have ~100% union density among K-12 public school teachers!
Let's test the rest of your little theory. If you believe that pesky teachers' unions are responsible for poor outcomes, then surely states with less teacher's union density and union power will be the epitome of strong K-12 outcomes.
But who ranks at the bottom? New Mexico at #50, Alaska at #49, Oklahoma at #48...
You might, at this point, sensibly say that's due to residents having less money and other disadvantages. But at that point you have to admit that teachers' unions have no correlation to K-12 outcomes.
So, I'm going to flag this as a perfect example of legibility vs. legitimacy[0]. You, probably AP's writers, and much of the public perceive learning as ocurring in a certain way. That isn't the way that 'the best' learning occurs, its the way that most closely resembles where we think learning occurs. Going further, it is much easier to interpret a lecture hall as a learning activity because it is easy to perceive what is being 'learned'. You sort of say it yourself. you are asking a why question about what is being learned - it is less legibile - and that is leveraged into an inference that less is being learned - i.e., it is less legitimate.
The problem is that the comparison you are making is false - but deeply embedded in our minds. Students *feel* like they learn more in lectures than in 'active learning' classes.However, when their actual knowledge is tested the oppostie is actually true. The students perception and actual learning are at odds and mediated by the environment[1]. It is, again, easy to sit in a lecture and overstate (i.e., feel like) you're learning because you are watching someone who is an expert talk about something. No metacognitive monitoring is required on the student's part. In contrast, it is really easy to perceive yourself as struggling in a class where your learning process and your failures in that process become visible. Students are taught to view failures/wrong answers as bad - so they view their process of learning as evidence of not learning.
Pedantically, no one in the picture you reference is cutting paper with scissors. There are scissors on the table, no one is cutting. You made an inference - inferences are important but difficult to test. They are working in groups to learn with peers (a science based best practice). I don't know exactly but I can infer it is related to math, possible learning to calculate area and estimate. Making that tangible, creating and measuring simple then more complex shapes helps them learn - its not arts and crafts. It leads to better conceptual understanding than an abstract explanation.
It may look different, but my hobby horse problem with US education is that everyone's vibes are treated as equivalent to actual scientific evidence. We regularly crator efforts to fix these problems simply because they don't look like the school that the parents went to. We had one parent try and ban school provided laptops (which are used for 20minutes / week) from my daughter's preK class because her kids are zero screen time. I can't imagine a parent in Japan or China even trying that.
[0] https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2010/07/26/a-big-little-idea-call...
[1] https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1821936116
As a CODA - measuring learning is shockingly hard. As an analogy, it is not deterministic it is quantum. Data tells us that if I ask demographic questions before a test, certain groups score lower than if I ask them at the end. If I ask a math question using a realistic scenario, students show higher conceptual understanding than if I ask them a fully abstracted question. If a student is hungry or tired that day, they will score lower. None of those are measuring the latent construct (e.g., math ability) that we need to estimate, even if it is a high variability measure.
Of course “active” learning is better than passively sitting in a lecture. But these kids are not learning. They’re sitting in a group with scissors and markers making a X-y coordinate graph.
Your long diatribe fails to recognize the obvious: that middle school math class has turned into an art and hand labor class / day care.
Without bonus points, DEI-hires at the school would not survive; these racist school districts need a way to ensure these lousy teachers create entire generations of people hostile to learning! The whole system needs to have an emergency cut over to vouchers.. $27k/year/pupil in NYS to get a teacher that looks like me but is functionally illiterate.
These public teachers aren't heroes, they are actively keeping us behind with their pro-union/anti-student behaviors.
Elephant in the room in my state is definitely chronic absence. Depending on source it's when student misses something like 15+ or 20+ school days a school year. More affluent areas have numbers 15% and lower. Less affluent ones it can be well above 50%. And nobody is doing anything.
Test scores substantially mirror this bifurcation.
It is substantially worsened by charter and voucher schools. Which interact with the whole mess in complex and negative ways.
In fact I would argue many of them were a net negative to my learning achievements (or lack thereof).
So yeah, defund public schools as much as possible. That will get my vote.
"Every relationship with {men|women} I've been in has been bad, so romance is obviously worthless."
"My neighbors dog always barks at me, I didn't get why anyone likes dogs."
"I've had a bad experience with ${race} so I really wish we could get rid of them."
"I caught the flu, and it didn't kill me. I don't get why people are always worried about it."
"I've never worn a seatbelt, and I'm still alive. They're a waste of time."
"School was a bad experience for me personally, so best to get rid of it"
Are you serious right now?
You make the mistake of thinking I am one of few, when I am one of many.
Instead of defunding, we should institute a voucher system where parents can choose between a local public school if it's good, charter schools, or towards a private school tuition and pay the difference.
The worst leftists (handshake) the worst right wingers
This kind of thing is unfortunately pretty common in American publications, and it drives me up the wall. If you don't compare US statistics to global ones, it's hard to separate out political / local factors from global trends (and to be fair, this is exactly what some journalists want.)
In particular, I'd be interested in statistics from countries with different lockdown policies, as well as those that banned smartphones in school. Beyond US politics, lockdowns and Tiktok seem like the two most likely factors that may influence this.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_zzkQJq_V0w
He cites and directionally agrees with the decline of reading as the cause.
It's different with friends whose kids attend private schools - most knew it was Singapore Math.
You may like it or not - but it requires parent effort to make sure your child uses their most valuable time to learn something.
But here is a surprise: In college my wife made both PBK and Summa Cum Laude, won both NSF and Woodrow Wilson graduate fellowships, and got her Ph.D.
Her high school? Her family lived in Indiana, in a house her father built from some plans in Good Housekeeping magazine, on a 33 acre farm, surrounded by farms raising mostly corn, soy beans, wheat, and chickens. The local town consisted of a church, a school, and a tavern. The school building was a good accomplishment by the community, big enough for the number of students, taught grades 1-12, but had fewer than 12 classrooms and fewer than 12 teachers! Net, the facilities were poor, but the parents made sure the schooling was good.
The school I went to was relatively large, the pride of the city with a quite good Principal for 1-6 and another for 7-12, no bad teachers, and some good ones. They taught Latin, Spanish, and French and had a good math program. The year before me three guys went to Princeton and two of them ran against each other for President of the Freshman Class. In my year, myself and two others did the best on the Math SATs, all went to college, one MIT.
In both of the schools, 100% of the students were well behaved, i.e., no disruption in classes; this was just expected and without any particular efforts.
I really liked math and physics and wanted much more than the classes offered. So, the classes were beneath me and mostly taught myself from the books. So the school put up with that independent approach and sent me to a Math Tournament and some summer enrichment programs, which was good education: The good parents wanted good education.
Later there were some race riots with that school a target. So, the city changed to teaching cosmotology, etc. and picked another school to be a good one.
Net, with good parents, a school can be plenty good with modest facilities.
Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43522966 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43537808
And that’s nearly the best realistic future. Why wouldn’t students internalize this and start mentally checking out?
- Always online phone access (and everything that comes with it)
- Generative AI for doing assignments without thought
- The COVID year or two that they had to learn from home couldn't have helped develop good habits (I know it would've for me)
while this may seem to align incentives, in reality a school that has struggling students needs MORE resources, not less.
the outcome, in reality, is an extreme desire to "teach to the test," where developing actual skills is secondary to learning the structure of test problems and how to answer them correctly enough to keep the school from being obliterated.
teachers are one of the most valuable, most undervalued positions in society. my mother taught elementary school for 20 years; when she retired, i was making 3 times her salary doing my computer job. this is the sad but inevitable outcome from the policies put in place by a class of people that can afford to educate their children outside of the systems forced upon the working class.
Many of the schools with the most funding per student, like Washington D.C. and NYC currently underperform.
NYC has a spending of $36-40k per student with only 56% ELA, ~47% Math. Washington DC has $27k-31k of spending per student and only 22% proficient in reading and 16% in Math.
Charter schools have been the best bang for the buck. The best all-income schools are catholic schools, averaging at 1 grade level higher. Then private schools do even better, but aren't accessible to everyone, and then the top spot is left to selective high-performing schools, unsurprisingly.
These are not equal comparisons. People who send their kids to a private school are choosing that, and thus care about the education their kids get. While Catholics are all income and choosing for religion reasons, generally catholic implies cultural care for education. Public schools take everyone including those who don't care about education.
In general public schools in the US are very good. However a small number in every school are kids that would be kicked out of private (including catholic) schools. There are also significant variation between schools with richer areas of a city doing better - despite often spending less on education.
That is a lot easier when you can require a transcript from the prospective student, review it, and say, "Uh, no thank you".
There's a private technical college near here that offers EMT and paramedic training. They "guarantee" "100% success in certification and registration" for their students.
How do they get there? They boot students out after they fail (<80%) their second test in the class.
I'm not necessarily opposed to such a policy. It is, however, intellectually dishonest of them to try to tout it as a better school for that reason. Charter schools are free to reject students who will bring their grade averages down.
I believe this is not only restricted to Catholic schools though they are the most common. Most religious schools have higher scoring students.
IMHO, we always hear about such and such school (system) has X% kids proficient with $Y/year per pupil. But what I would really want to know about a school is how does a year change at the school change the proficiency of the class. If the class of 3rd graders starts the year at 20% proficient at 2nd grade level, and ends at 22% proficient at 3rd grade level, that might be a good school, even though a single point in time check says 22% proficient. But the numbers we get aren't really useful for that; a cohort analysis would be better; there's real privacy implications, but that doesn't make the numbers we get useful. :P
I wonder if USA schools are similar. It's next to impossible to require belief.
You need to test to an academic standard of course, as they definitely want to keep the bar rather high. So they won't take all comers. But if you are either just starting out or come with an academic track record/high percentile test scores you shouldn't have much of a problem at all. When I went even 30 years ago there were plenty of low income kids who were not academic superstars. The only real metric that was universal across the board was the requirement for involved parents.
I'm sure other areas are different, but Catholic schools in my region have really suffered in recent years with a lot of them closing down.
How would you explain that temporal gap? If the No Child Left Behind Act is the problem, why was the trend positive for the first 12-14 years of the time it's been in force?
NCLB had some flaws but that wasn't one of them. Before NCLB you were stuck in the poor school district your likely single parent could afford to live in, inevitably doomed to poor education.
I would be interested if this is a nationwide trend or the bad performers are performing even worse. Especially since from my memory, this is mostly a poverty issue. Not a school funding issue, but that per capita income was a good indicator of where that state would score.
France — with all its problems — ensures the same incredibly high standard of curriculum across the country and perhaps most importantly it is actually expected that top university performers who will become researchers teach at high school in the periphery. It’s even a nation-wide competition by discipline (look up the “aggregation”) to obtain these highly sought positions. The idea is something like you teach high school outside Paris while preparing your doctorate and then either return triumphant to the big research institutes or continue teaching in the provinces. Something like this in the US would have immeasurable impact, since probably one of the biggest issues is just convincing well-educated people to teach in rural areas.
This led me into a bit of a rabbit hole trying to understand what in fact the official literacy rate is measured by if it’s so wildly different from - indeed almost double — the portion who can read at an eighth grade level.
The data is actually quite interesting. US National Center for Education statistics administer tests to assess “the ability to understand, evaluate, use, and engage with written texts to participate in society” and an individual falls into one of five categories. Official literacy definition considers above category one (“below basic”), but it is category three that maps approximately onto “eighth grade knowledge” (thus four as high school, five as post-graduate). The most interesting thing I found in the data is exploring that gap between two and three, ie states that have a high attainment of official literacy but then very low rates of the higher levels. California, for example, has the highest percentage of people below level two, but a relatively high percentage at level three and above — obviously I haven’t considered the data for long enough to conclude, but that suggests to me largely a question of immigration/non-English speaking populations. The state I’m from does better than California on attainment of level two, but significantly worse at attainment of three or above.
States where level 3+ > levels 1-2: District of Columbia, Washington, Minnesota, Oregon, Massachusetts, North Dakota / Utah / Colorado.
States with lowest level 3 (ie “eighth grade” equivalent) attainment: Mississippi 35%, Louisiana 35%, West Virginia 37%, New Mexico 39%, Nevada 39%, Alabama 39%, Arkansas 39%, Texas 40%, Tennessee 40%, Kentucky 41%.
TLDR that gap looks like an interesting way to separate issues with a state’s educational system from other questions. Whatever the best measure of literacy may be, it seems like the bar should be a bit higher than just “native speaker of the measured language.”
There's no way such a system can produce uniform results.
(The wisdom in forcing voters to elect all sorts of local commissions is another matter entirely. I struggle to see how anyone can make an informed choice, in ballots with 10 or more elected positions, but they seem normal in America.)
It's pretty simple to vote on local offices: are you happy with the current state of education in your district? Good, keep the incumbents around. Otherwise change out school board members until you achieve the desired results.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/232951/university-degree...
Honestly — and I’m not being at all utopian/overvaluing the present state of the technology — I think AI is one of the few prospects for even just marginal improvement, especially since it’s accessible by phone. Much as I wish it wasn’t the case, it’s hard to even imagine all the things that would have to change (from funding, to legislation, undoing all the embarrassing “teaching the controversy” curriculum, to say nothing of staffing) for a “non-technical solution.”
Combine this with an emphasis on single-tracking students and a de-emphasis of grading in general, and it's not surprising to me that scores are declining.
If social media and smartphones are the problem, I would have expected that results for English proficiency would be steady until the advent of TikTok, right?
On the other hand, it's shallow. Messages are short, and filled with shorthand and emoticons. There's no deep reading or expression of complicated ideas in written form.
I think back to some college peers who even in some more basic classes could clearly read the words of the assigned writings, they couldn't then parse out the deeper meanings behind the assignments. They weren't illiterate, you could ask them to read a passage, and they'd be able to say all the words. You could ask them face value questions about the text, and they'd probably be able to answer most questions right. But any deeper analysis was just beyond them. So, when the professor would ask deeper questions, they'd say "I don't know where he's getting this, the book didn't talk about that at all".
I avoided English Lit in college but thinking back to High School I recognize the "I don't know where he's getting this" reaction. I just rarely engaged with the so-called "classic" stuff we had to read, and like you say I had no trouble reading the words but struggled with deeper meanings or even just getting past the archaic language. And this was in the early 1980s, no chance it was influenced by social media or mobile phones or AI. My parents probably blamed television.
At least we now have AI, where a student could (if motivated) ask questions about the meaning of a passage and get back a synthesis of what other people have written about it. Back then I used Cliffs Notes to do that.
Texting is unironically a better use of time than reading infinite jest, or gravities rainbow, etc.
First: Your HS kids hang out with a different crowd than my HS kids :-)
Second: This is about reading ability (comprehension, etc), not literature. Whether the quality of a text message is superior/inferior to whatever they use in literature classes is irrelevant.
... “How do you feel, Jake?” “Fine, it doesn’t hurt much.” “Are you all right?” ...
(Hemmingway)
That and the culture of anti-intellectualism in the US. I’m completely unsurprised we are falling behind.
It's definitely not just funding.
It might not make it down to teacher salaries or more educators, but the money is absolutely being spent at massive levels.
The best schools where I grew up and around me today have the lowest per-pupil cost. There is basically no correlation between budget spent on education until you get to the extremes on both ends.
Some of that is cultural, some of that is due to parenting. A lot of parents aren't involved in their kids education. Frankly, a lot of them are barely involved in parenting in general.
Now, if someone came with a headline that said "Parents not involved in childrens education because they've been ragebaited into spending all their time yelling on social media" my biases would tend to lend me to believe it's true, even without sufficient evidence. There are other correlations, like cellphone ownership in the population.
Just having social media itself doesn't seem to be an exact fit, but that tells us nothing about the algorithms that social media was using at the time.
What isn't known is how to get parents to do better. Or lacking that, how to get kids to do better anyway. (there have been some successes, but nothing seems to be repeatable)
* Lowered attention spans
* A general reduction in critical thinking - instead preferring headlines, summaries, and easy answers
* Increased partisanship
* Reduction in third spaces and community connections - people becoming more isolated
* Financial stress
I'd say those are the main points. They apply in almost all developed nations, to varying extents.
But as I near parenthood, I feel conflicted. I'm still young enough to remember my state of mind in the early teen years. I remember being surprised at the amount of attention the level "No Russian" from MW2 got. I thought - "It's just a game, why would anyone be offended by this?". Now, having seen similar things happen in my lifetime, it seems very distasteful to me. Even seeing a kid with a realistic looking toy gun gives me mixed feelings. The idea of having my kid being on tiktok for 6 hours unsupervised with all the people feeding their agenda to young impressionable minds makes me uneasy. And I was the one who spent good portion of his day being on 4chan.
My question is to parents of HN - how does one find balance within their parenting? I don't want to be a helicopter parent who blasts their child for not falling in line with all their demands, torturing them with endless extracurricular activities for their own good. At the same time I want them to learn a little discipline and not hate me for forcing things on them. I had zero limits on my screen time, and I'd say I turned out perfectly fine, though I did poorly in school and was a troublemaker. I found my love for studying only after I turned 18 and had some time with my thoughts after I moved out and stopped hanging out with deadbeats. Frankly, I'd say my upbringing was a little too lax.
Younger me would feel betrayed by my changing attitude towards raising kids , and that's what worries me - the disconnect that leads to the repeating cycle of parent-kid conflict. I don't think a parent usually thinks that they'll try to be the world's shittiest parent, yet so many of them are.
Especially when the NCES Data Usage Agreement clearly states "Use the data in any dataset for statistical purposes only."
As an example 4th grade reading has on a scale from 0 to 500 been between 213-223 for 20 years with of course this year (215) not being the lowest point. This is a test where many jurisdictions have 10+ point swings from test to test. There really isn't that much signal in the noise here.
Scores for reading & science had actually been trending upwards in the US, while maths has been trending downwards for some 20 years.
Report: https://www.oecd.org/content/dam/oecd/en/publications/report...
https://www.apmreports.org/episode/2019/08/22/whats-wrong-ho...
> For Goodman, accurate word recognition was not necessarily the goal of reading. The goal was to comprehend text.8 If the sentences were making sense, the reader must be getting the words right, or right enough. These ideas soon became the foundation for how reading was taught in many schools.
> The whole language movement of the late 20th century was perhaps the zenith of the anti-phonics argument.26 Phonics instruction was seen as tedious, time-consuming and ultimately unnecessary. Why? Because — according to the three-cueing theory — readers can use other, more reliable cues to figure out what the words say.27
> "To our surprise, all of our research results pointed in the opposite direction," Stanovich wrote. "It was the poorer readers, not the more skilled readers, who were more reliant on context to facilitate word recognition."13
> The skilled readers could instantly recognize words without relying on context. Other researchers have confirmed these findings with similar experiments. It turns out that the ability to read words in isolation quickly and accurately is the hallmark of being a skilled reader. This is now one of the most consistent and well-replicated findings in all of reading research.14
It's interesting to wonder whether LLMs may struggle with similar issues - while they can intuit a distribution over held-out tokens from context, they famously can't count the number of r's in "strawberry" because they don't have a concept of letters.
Are we holding our LLMs back much the way we are holding back students - or are we holding back students much the same way we're holding back our LLMs?
The kids may become dumber but they aren't stupid.
I get that COVID is part of the cause. Forcing one instructor to teach to 30 kids of widely varied abilities makes it worse. In that model, nobody learns.
The view that the education institutions are bloated and inefficient is a fairly mainstream (because some things like low pay for the actual teachers in the classrooms is quite publicly apparent). I'd hazard to say that there's some truth to it, after taking in the first point into account.
Tl;Dr money is part of the problem on some levels, but it's not primarily a money problem.
Forcing kids to go to school only works as long as you actually have any force at your disposal.
(And convincing them that going to school is in their best interest similarly requires that to actually be the case. Kids who start off bright-eyed and bushy-tailed will quickly reverse their position when they're either below or above the bell curve and their educational needs/welfare are being completely and obviously disregarded.)
https://www.economist.com/united-states/2023/01/19/it-is-sti...
and looking at state maps, beatings look negatively correlated with test scores:
https://reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/1krxcco/oc_ranking_of_...
It’s such an American thing, to blame something on a lack of violence.
The old paradigm produced results(arguably?), but was "gutted". By this train of reasoning, this old, and still "current" teaching paradigm simply does not work without violent coercion is the point I was really trying to drive.
Public Schools: Make Them Private - Milton Friedman
https://www1.racgp.org.au/newsgp/clinical/how-covid-19-leave...
note even infections with no symptoms
Don't forget the brain eating virus we loosed on the population, that probably doesn't help.
Their steaks are obviously inadequetly sauced.
I have not seen a good track record of states privatizing education through the use of charter schools. In the South (US), I have come to view that as a backdoor segregation and religious indoctrination attempt on top of some old-school grifting.
I feel like it was better when we had a book. We would read a couple pages on the lesson and then move on to the problems. We could go back and reference earlier topics.
Now they just click through quizzes on some app or a website for extra help.
Simply put, if you were a child now, why should you care about education when it doesn't appear to be the key to anything you want? Money has taken the place of knowledge. On further inspection, this should not be a surprise to anyone who has bought into the dogma of a transaction-oriented reality.
Children these days are raised just as much by a culture that never figured out how to resolve the contradiction between making money and having values.
Blame is futile, though. Hold your children close and raise them the best you can, for there is no reversing the tide.
The problem is obvious. I don't think people will admit the problem - so this is the new normal.
Education spending has shot up per student because people think it will solve cultural ills.
Every thread about something like this is full of people just blaming it on whatever social trend annoys them personally.
But also this statistic is absolute bullshit. 71% of kids in the US have two parents at home, and the number is going up.
We have decades of evidence yet these types of comments still pop up.
Why aReNt PaReNts HomE eNoUgH? Are they stupid??
Oh, you say that, we are losing some human abilities. Well, Prosperity and easy food removes the need for abilities or hunting. It is all cyclic. Each cycle is a few generations long.
People are too poor and harried to care anymore.
When I was growing up, you could strive for a white collar job and get one, and we assumed it would lead to a decent life.
Now, what are kids supposed to look forward to? Tech is in the toilet, everything is going overseas, everyone is broke.
So many of my friends are unemployed, LinkedIn is filled with people desperately posting looking for jobs. Of COURSE this is going to affect early education as well.
People will get to choose between a vibes-based "equity" ideology where achievement is disregarded or the republican woodchipper of austerity. Either thing leads to the same outcome: everything becomes stupider and shittier. The whole system is moving of its own accord towards enshittification. People should just get the grieving over with and leave
Just grift your way through life like the Pedophile of the United States. Become a jester/influencer. Smell your own farts on a live stream and pump your engagements. Be a clown. It clearly pays to do so.
If "math" does not account for reality, of course people are going to treat it as a meaningless barrier to be overcome rather than learned. Also, math is more than arithmetic. Using picture of coins. For Chrissake.
Students must be accustomed to do simple arithmetic without the help of a calculator, or else their mathematical abilities will be negatively impacted. Same for learning multiplication tables, recognizing the associations between the numbers is important.
Only when they begin to calculate things which exceed the number of mental tokens that they can handle, then they can start using a calculator with no ill effects.
[If you note the slight whiff of sarcasm, that is intentional.]
Oops, it won't: https://tech.co/news/another-study-ai-making-us-dumb
I’m fortunate to send my kid to an excellent private school that is excellent at what it does. They have problems too.
I blame technology. The pivot from books to the lowest common denominator Chromebook homework, reading and testing is a joke.
- Isaac Asimov
The cult of ignorance now rules the country, simple as that. To half the nation, teachers are now all insane satanists out to trans their kids. As a result, they're paid dirt poor and the state, controlled by that anti-science reactionary wave, is making their work harder and less rewarding everyday.
Vaccine mandates are ended on religious grounds, public research is destroyed to save pennies in tax cuts to the wealthy, and foreign researchers are arrested at the borders for no reason but to assert American dominance over them and satisfy the racist folk fueling the machine.
This is what it looks like, witnessing the end of an Empire from the inside.
Textbooks cohesively presented material. Random printouts and notes glued into a notebook do not.
Similarly, we read a whole lot more in Literature classes than kids do now.
I was in High School for the first full class of the new millennium (2000-2004). Being gifted at the time (now we know I just had OCD and hyperfocus), I’m cruising through on Honor Roll and knocking even difficult content out of the park. It’s to the point that I’m sleeping through English with a perfect GPA and have been politely asked by my Social Studies teacher to stop answering questions (to give other students a chance to learn) and just work on my homework in his class while he teaches. Everyone is super chill, happy to teach, and has no compunction failing students who don’t grasp the material and fail to seek help.
January 8, 2002. Social studies is my last class of the day. The teacher storms in, angry, and flips his desk in rage.
Alright, you have our collective attention.
He points furtively at the class while facing the chalkboard before turning around. “Congratulations, you’re the last group of students to get a decent education. Starting next semester, No Child Left Behind means we’ll be teaching to tests and not covering the material, and every single class after you is going to be dumber as a result. You better pay attention, because this is the last good world history class you’ll likely ever have.”
I could not hope to appreciate his wisdom at that moment, but in the years since? Dude was 100% correct. I learned about context and nuance to discuss on essay exams; my siblings who came after me learned rote dates and events for a standardized test. The irony is that they have superior college credentials (MS and BA) than I do (AS), but all three of us are fairly even in footing in our overall intelligence, seeking of new knowledge and data, and ability to teach others. I can anecdotally credit my superior education pre-NCLB for preparing me to succeed in the real world compared to younger peers who have required far more (expensive) education to get to the same point. Introducing KPIs alone won’t fix the problem, it will require rekindling a passion for learning in the hearts of students, teachers, and parents alike to restore our basic comprehension scores.
And before people ask: yes, we too had the dreaded issues of defunding everything to fund the football team. My school closed auto, metal, and eventually wood shop classes to create three more weight training rooms for the sports teams, and cancelled HomeEc in lieu of letting bankers do an hour lecture on credit cards to Seniors.
Parents with higher education and stable incomes have the resources, time, and knowledge to supplement their children's education. This includes tutoring, enrichment programs, monitoring social media and phone use, and advocating within schools, as well as sending their children to smaller, private schools.
Most Joe Six Pack parents hand their children unrestricted iPhones and let the schools raise and baby sit them, while the parents sit back getting fat soaking up social media and TV.
One also sees the "educational" difference. Here a study was published concluding that poorer areas have twice the number of snackbars compared to areas with "higher educated" people. Bad food is also very cheap. It's also very easy to never read about the effects of screens on childeren and I see people with kids of ~1 sitting on the back of a bike with a smartphone blaring... Why not let the kid enjoy and learn from the surroundings? My kids loved riding a bike with me.
