US HS students lose ground in math and reading, continuing yearslong decline

I live in the US in New Jersey, and here a big problem was the State flooded school districts with money during Covid with no material oversight of its spending.

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.

> The majority of the public school system has devolved into day-care, not education.

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!

Parent here with school-aged kids. I think this sub-thread blaming the parents is particularly depressing and not founded in reality. Here is the way I see it. The social media companies with quasi infinite resources have won. They hired the best and the brightest engineers to hack our minds and steal our attention and they have succeeded beyond expectations. As evidence look that the market capitalization of Meta, etc. The data showing that children are reading way less compared to when I was growing up is consistent with what I see, but I did not an infinite ocean of distractions available via device that has become indispensable for modern living (i.e., the smart phone). By the time I was thirteen, I had read the Lord of the Rings to completion, but if I had grown up in present times I doubt that would be the case.

> Most parents just watch TV, stare at their phones and don't want to be bothered by anything that requires effort

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.

Yes, and it's quadratically worse for the people that are on the lowest end.

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.

Not to be too pessimistic, but it feels like this is impossible given how hyper-optimized our devices are to retain our attention. They’re beyond “tools” now and profits of countless companies are tied to our fixation on our phones.

The level of tolerance for phone use in the classroom in the last decade blows my mind. It would be like letting kids pull out a GameBoy back in the 2000s, which where I was would have it promptly confiscated.

>Most parents just watch TV, stare at their phones and don't want to be bothered by anything that requires effort

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.

Jonathan Haidt has a lot of good material on this. He is leading the charge in encouraging parents to delay giving their child a phone until high school and not allowing them to have social media accounts until age 16.

https://www.goodmorningamerica.com/family/story/author-sugge...

We've got one locked-down shared phone for our kids, for scheduling stuff with friends and calling & texting relatives or whatever. We almost have a teen so we'll see how long we can keep that up, but we only relented that much within the last year and a half, zero phones before that (which seems like it should be normal, but there are a lot of e.g. 4th grade classrooms out there where most of the kids have phones, seems super popular especially among the Fussellian middle class, I think in part for status reasons, like, "well if my kid doesn't have a phone people will think it's because we can't afford it!" which of course Fussell's upper-middle and higher don't give a shit about, so there's less child phone-ownership among them)

I guess one could quibble about the effectiveness of testing, but the longer trend was… upwards. Eyeballing the math graph, we’re at 55% basic competence. The peak was 65%. But doing a totally informal eyeball projection, we ought to be above 70% by now.

We're seeing more districts ban cell phones in the classroom. It makes sense; in my day, the most you could do is text and play Tetris. We didn't have apps that were weaponized to capture our attention and memory like the kids do now.

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.

It does. I went down a rabbit hole for this once and yes children of immigrants underperform for math and reading testing v immigrant groups. Can go dig up the .gov links assuming they didnt go away

Genetics is also a factor that everyone conveniently avoids as the statistical science tells a hard truth that no one wants to face. IQ is highly linked to genetics.

Not saying the US has bad genetics but certainly there’s a new pool we are competing with that wasn’t as large pre 2000s

> not supposed to think about this

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.

Net immigration has been trending down for a decade, but I'm not cynical enough to think we're not churning out some pretty smart kids of our own!

It depends, is this a federal problem, or a local problem? Because I don't see the federal department of education has really done anything to improve scores. So this may be a local issue, and of local resources.

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I'm missing something. What change in demographics are we talking about, and why would that influence math results?

Yup, more article slop without accounting for demographic data.

Same with the constant drumbeat of "Americans are getting shorter".

What is the video supposed to suggest? I think it's extremely hard to conclude anything from a plot of the teacher's position over time throughout the classroom.

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 someone links to a video I assuming that the video was heavily edited and cherry picked to show whatever point they want. I'm not wrong often enough to bother clicking on yours.

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)

I think this is because Asian governments want their populations to more educated and American governments want their populations to be less educated.

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.

What else would you have them cut paper with?

I'm not smart enough to understand what are the conclusions of the patterns observed in the video.

> Just looking at the picture triggered me. Why are the students sitting in groups and cutting paper with scissors?

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.

early on in the bush (ii) administration, they passed a bill called "no child left behind" that would cut funding from schools that couldn't achieve desired standardized test scores.

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.

As always with these things, I'm curious what are the results by state. I wish I could find it again, but I saw some results by state and some of our states scored the same as the top rank nations and some score with 3rd world nations.

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.

I’m from a US state with a 40% adult literacy rate (=above eighth grade reading level). At least there, none of those three things are even close to the root causes. The average school in the US outside of the big cities, especially the farther you get from the coasts, is just not fit for purpose — and funding only seems to ever go down (not that throwing money at the problem alone would solve it).

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.”

Phones/screens is one I'm not sure about. On the one hand, to use a mobile phone, and social media, and messaging apps, you have to read and write. I certainly spent a lot less time reading and writing messages to my friends in the 1980s than the typical kid does today. We just talked, in person or on an old-fashioned phone call.

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.

It’s decades of defunding schools. I used to work in education and I have never in my career experienced “more” money coming in. It’s always, cuts, cuts, cuts.

That and the culture of anti-intellectualism in the US. I’m completely unsurprised we are falling behind.

It started in 2013. If we have to blame technology, social media seems more likely than AI, I guess.

This trend of decline significantly predates either COVID or GenAI.

The US has been on a steady decline in global education rankings since the 70s IIRC. Can’t remember where I saw the stat.