One thing that was evident to me from the sidelines was how much admin work was continually added to her workload without any consideration for the amount of class time she had. The focus on data derived from continuous testing of the students resulted in her and her peers sticking ever more closely to a continuously disrupted and rotated collection of commercially sourced curriculum and materials.
Her role as educator started to take a back see to classroom management and data collection. Add in differentiated instruction, where she was held accountable to develop personalized lesson plans for individual students and asked to track all of that and you end up with way too much workload to stay engaged and engaging year after year.
She was in a pretty good school district. A friend of mine had a similar role in a city district for a regional metro area and her students were horrific. She felt physically unsafe and ultimately quit.
It's a complex problem with many contributing factors. It's also difficult to experiment or strike out on your own as an educator when the future of the students in front of you could be negatively impacted by any mistakes made (not to mention job/test scores/etc) so most just ride the rail all the way down.
(Also, at least in the US, you can get stuck to a district b/c the value-add of a seasoned teacher doesn't really move the metrics in the current system enough to offset the fact that you can hire two junior/fresh grads for the same money.)
> It's also difficult to experiment or strike out on your own as an educator when the future of the students in front of you could be negatively impacted by any mistakes made (not to mention job/test scores/etc) so most just ride the rail all the way down.
It's pervasive and makes things move so slowly. The biggest issue I have with it is that the system is so protective of doing no harm, but doing no harm to a system that is failing students is a poor decision imo. We should be more experimental if things are generally bad. Be protective of the mechanisms when we have good results, not when we have bad ones.
In Alaska, where I lived most of the last 20 years, education has been largely flat funded for about a decade now. Imagine running an organization in 2026 on that organization's 2016 budget. Schools have a bunch of obligations they have to spend on. Every time health care costs for staff go up, and funding is flat, something gets cut. You can't cut education for a decade straight without impacting student learning.
I don't think Alaska is that much of an outlier in this regard.
https://educationdata.org/public-education-spending-statisti...
The funding for dept of ed has _exploded_ after 2000
https://educationdata.org/public-education-spending-statisti...
At the same time, school scores started to sag after 2014
https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/ushistory/results/scores/
There are highly politicized blogs which can discuss this further and offer opinions as to the correlation.
When DJT talked about cancelling the Dept of Edu, I got ahold of all the teachers I knew and asked them what impact it would have, and their response was mostly that they would lose their school lunch benefits.
That's at the state level. But that doesn't account for the explosion in admin salaries and positions. The actual money a district spends on each student has been going down every year. Those funds are going more towards admin activities.
> I got ahold of all the teachers I knew and asked them what impact it would have, and their response was mostly that they would lose their school lunch benefits.
Teachers have a very poor understanding of where their funding comes from. Most just assume "property taxes", but it's far more complicated than that. The department of Ed provides a lot of funding to states that is passed through to the schools. They also enforce the education titles.
Cutting the department of Ed may not have a direct, immediate impact on classroom teachers, but it will have a large downstream effect in a few years.
Teachers are put in an impossible position with students who come from homes where the parents don't do their proper jobs. It's never been easier to be a neglectful parent. Your child will be entertained non-stop by an iPad and a video game system. They won't get bored and bother you. You can send them to their room and do whatever you want if you don't care if they are sleeping or not, as long as they are quiet.
The "iPad babies" are an epidemic in schools.
Source:
My sister is a K-12 educator in a poor, rural public school system in southeastern Virginia.
In recent years, she's seen a surge in students who are sorted, improperly, into special education classes. These are students that exhibit symptoms of various learning disabilities, but these symptoms heavily overlap with the symptoms of children who are sleep deprived and over stimulated by dopamine activating content on the devices they are addicted to.
Or put another way: The quality and involvement of the average parent.
A school can absorb an extremely small minority of "problematic" students if the rest of the student body is stellar, but that's about it.
There is not a single thing any public education system can do to counteract that simple fact. If the average student in the classroom is uninterested at best and troublemaking at worst, it doesn't matter how good the teachers are or what the ratios are, or if the classrooms are old and busted or brand new.
Until society becomes serious again, this problem will only get worse as education continues to be a political and culture war football. The best realistic thing I can think of is take a look at nearly all other western social democracies who have much better outcomes and immediately implement student academic tracking. But that would be politically impossible to do in the current state of the US.
I fear that things are going to get far worse before they get better. You could 10x the primary school education budget and likely continue to see worsening results.
When I went from private (poor) primary and middle school, to a rich suburban high school, to a poor inner city high school back in the 90's this was self evident. I didn't think it could get much worse than that, but the administrative and political classes figured out how to wildly beat even my exceedingly low expectations.
I think if anything parents are more involved now than they used to be.
The most obvious difference to me other than ipads/social media is we don't beat kids anymore and we give them way less autonomy.
And I'm a former high school teacher and my wife is a current high school teacher so I've experienced all of this first-hand.
Ok? Seems like that's more of a problem than the funding. Or whatever is causing that is more of a problem, but it does a disservice to the general argument of "kids aren't receiving the same level of care" argument to blame a drop in funding--especially when it was so easily falsified.
That's around the time a bunch of districts in a state I lived in at the time had multi-year teacher pay scale freezes due to budget crunches. Not saying it's necessarily connected to the scores dropping, but still.
Total spending across the country may be high, but it's very much state-by-state and local how much is spent and where it goes. Some states pay teachers pretty well. Some states, the pay really is pretty awful. Some states are OK on staffing levels. Others are in an ongoing staffing catastrophe that's forcing them to cut school days to try to get by.
Meanwhile, school performance is heavily tied to home life and broader community support for students' families. That's why all this effort to improve schools hasn't been as effective as one might hope: the attention needs to go toward much harder problems that have little to do with schools and are really hard to get any progress on in the US. Worker protections, better and less-stressful "safety nets", better policing and a better justice system. That kind of thing. I'd look at least as much at what's been going on with those, and with security and home life for those in the lowest three quintiles of household income, as at schools themselves, to try to find reasons for trends like this.
Then why are their reading scores improving so dramatically compared to wealthier states? Especially for under-privileged populations?
Not the most convincing sample size.
It used to be this kind of thing was - maybe not exceptional, but certainly not expected.
Now it's common but underreported.
So there's a kind of dream world where "education" and "health" are still considered official public goals. But the reality is that government procurement is mostly grift and corruption. There's been an epic collapse of almost any kind of public service ethic in favour of opportunism and profiteering, sometimes covered over with religious/moral pretexts.
Those are all gone, either shuttered or snapped up by huge companies that fired most of the staff and are milking them for the last money they can provide, or using them to distribute propaganda (e.g. Sinclair), and nobody's ever going to (be able to) do a proper accounting of how much the resulting waste and corrosion of public trust has cut into the actual overall cost/benefit of this whole "Internet" thing.
What shocks me is how open they’ve become about it.
The people are too fat and impotent to care. Plus the average retard will convince themselves that it’s something only the other guy will do.
Meanwhile, once upon a time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Athens_(1946)
These men didn’t let a little threats and intimidation stop them, though tbf they just returned from a war.
Michigan notably does not fund schools through homeowner property taxes. I suspect that's probably the difference here and a reason we shouldn't use it as a representative example.
It depends on the state. In Texas, property taxes from wealthier districts are redirected to poorer districts to ensure more equitable funding (search for "texas robin hood").
The result is that most public schools are funded about the same regardless of where they're located.
Regardless, I'd think that a study trying to find a correlation among practice, funding, and measurement would need at least a generation (~thirty years yea?) of results to show meaning
Public education has vast amounts of funding in the U.S. compared to other developed countries. If it does badly despite that, it's very likely that "more funding" is not the answer.
i dont think this is true.
there is an art to educating (especially the ~10-15 year old range) that does not just manifest itself because you are smart: how to engage students, how to keep them engaged, how to adjust the message to the audience's level and communicate it effectively (which changes kid to kid), how to earn a kids respect without becoming over-bearing (or too friendly), and dozens of other things that your PhD in compsci or whatever does not teach you.
some of the smartest PhD holders i know would be very shitty elementary/high school teachers.
(context: i teach at the college level. its a lot easier than teaching at the high school level.)
ED as a field is 100% all-in on AI, too, so there's a lot of discussion amongst them about what skills in the field need to be automated and what has to stay artisanal. But I'm sympathetic to zozbot's claims too - I do think the reading scores would be higher if there were more comp/rhet specialists in sec. ed.
And parents play an equally important role. One of the best things you can do for your child's education/life is support the teacher when they call you up and say, "Your child is making poor decisions..."
I've known plenty of highly credentialed teachers that were very poor communicators and/or could not manage their classroom. I think the idea that this can be, or is, effectively taught as part of the "education major" is very suspect.
I have taught 5 years at a private school. I do not have a teaching credential.
Knowing the stuff you're teaching is the easiest part. And I say that despite teaching in an environment with far better behavior, student buy-in, family support, and academic accomplishment than most places.
I thought that when I launched a student team doing spacecraft design (selected for orbital flight on the basis of the quality of their mission, btw, not their age) that the hard part would be teaching kids about power budgets, radiation aging, and the thermal environment.
Turns out the hard part is helping them figure out how to navigate the social dynamics of talking to each other, organizing their work, realizing what other people know, and coping emotionally with setbacks. Kids will teach themselves the stuff if you have buy-in and the culture in the room is right.
Teachers get paid peanuts.
Unions are similar. People cry about them being a huge problem, but they have effectively no power (as in: don't even collectively bargain for contracts) in lots of states, including many of the ones with poor school performance. In other states, they really do have quite a bit of power.
To some extent, this shift is inevitable due to demographics changes - but I don't think that there has been realistic planning on how to manage a future with dramatically fewer children.
While I am not saying give kids more homework for the sake of work -- you do need to have some rigour. There was a movement about 10 years ago to let kids be kids and have lots of free time for exploration etc, remove competition at schools. These are all great things worth pursuing but not at a complete lack of work.
Also add in all the other things including funding - though funding doesn't solve all woes.
My point is different. Study after study shows that below a specific floor spending has almost no impact on educational outcomes. The correlation is such that you can both determine that there is likely no leak and also that it has no effect.
The stuff that does have an impact is much harder to move the needle on though so everyone just scapegoats funding instead. Stuff like building up the nuclear family in an area, increasing income mobility, and holding parents accountable for child outcomes do have a measurable effect but are politically intractable today.
big if true. we should probably cut 100% of spending in that case.
edit: not sure if people are missing the /s, or if people legitimately believe that cutting spending has no impact.
Edit: actually, this is an insult to Georgia. I apologize, brothers and sisters. You have much to teach us.
"Inflation-adjusted public school funding per student in the United States has increased significantly over the long term, with a roughly 34% increase in inflation-adjusted revenue per student over the last two decades alone. Looking at a broader historical view, inflation-adjusted spending per student has risen by over 200% since the 1960s."
https://ctmirror.org/2024/01/28/ct-budget-fiscal-guardrails-...
ai summary: "According to that piece, K-12 education has been losing $407 million each year since 2017 due to inflation, even as Gov. Lamont called current funding levels the "largest ever commitment." The author also noted that $2.4 billion in urgent legislative funding requests were denied in one spring session alone, with needs for fully funding education among the shortfalls."
https://www.learner.com/blog/states-that-spend-the-most-on-e...
its weird that they used the state that they live in and have lived in for the last 20 years as an example?
Public schools are subsidizing charter schools
Public schools have many legal requirements to provide services that charter schools don't have to deal with. Charter schools also have a lot of freedom to refuse problematic kids, that public schools have to take.
Parents who don't need those services keep taking their kids out of public schools and putting them into charter schools, charter schools kick out problem kids. Public schools end up having a higher cost per student because of that.
Schools have to finance an entire security apparatus because assholes keep doing mass shootings.
Public school systems _also_ are terrible at spending money on bullshit that has absolutely nothing to do with schools. The amount of money spent on administration is way way out of line. There are so many layers between the top and teachers and so many people with their hands out. Big school systems could probably fire half of their administration and literally nobody would notice. They would probably run better. When they do internal reports on how to save money, it always comes back to the most trivial shit or even worse, pulling it out of _education_ and is _never_ 'you need to fire a bunch of people collecting a paycheck for doing nothing'.
I genuinely think most big school systems would be vastly improved by firing half of the administration at random and doubling teacher salaries.
Some data.
AI is what shitty-capitalism wants to do to get money for themselves and try to push the society to defund public education
Looking back, I don't think Chromebooks, iPads and the like would have been beneficial to my elementary/middle/high school education at all.
Our primary instrument of learning was the teacher and really thick textbooks that were passed down student to student, and you could see that journey inside the in front cover where you signed it out for the year.
As someone who would protest at learning long division when a calculator was around, in retrospect, the teacher was right.
Ironically...
"Technology" has been an education buzzword since I was in school and it needs to be taken out and shot.
2012 2020 2023
Reading 263 260 256
Math 285 280 271
- tech apps starting with infinite scroll (facebook, 9gag, Instagram, etc.)
- media/tech shortened content: shorter tv shows, short video content, etc.
(Tiktok is the "state of the art" of those 2 trends pushed to the max)
Specifically, we're getting more & more addicted to things that increase the dopamine spikes frequency, making it increasingly difficult to go in deep focus work.
For example I remember reading a lot of science magazines / articles growing up (granted popsci but for a kid it still teaches some things) and as I grew up things like the Economist.
Similarly I also played games like math blaster as a kid and have realized I need to intentionally provide games like this to my kids that ideally teach something (the bar being greater than zero learning) rather than playing one of those infinite running games or whatever.
I think we're probably talking about the exact same thing but am curious where content vs. short form media is.
Thanks for sharing :)
We do have the NAEP main series test results[2]. At a first glance at the math results[3][4], it appears they peaked in 2013, then fluctuated through 2019, then dropped significantly in 2022 and somewhat rebounded in 2024, which really does suggest COVID.
[1]https://www.edweek.org/teaching-learning/debate-flares-anew-...
[2]https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/report_archive.aspx
[3]https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/highlights/mathematics/202...
[4]https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/reports/mathematics/2024/g...
". . . did you ever attend school from home or somewhere else outside of school because of the COVID-19 outbreak?"
Can someone else confirm?
Not enough investigation there. Of course, the trend was already going down, but the new slope is obvious.
Prediction in next three years will be same or greater - technology, ai, screentime.
Significant parts of our society and government are actively hostile to education. Blaming the students is convenient, but probably not accurate.
I wonder if there’s a way to validate the hypothesis that post-shutdown, some of the cohort that would have missed a day here and there now see school as optional and miss more days.
Overall, the reported effect is sad and should be addressed. These are people’s lives.
My 3rd grade daughter was unlucky with various illnesses and missed about 12 days this year (so far). I got a letter from her principal attempting to guilt trip me for her "Chronic absence".
I wrote an angry response (in retrospect it was too angry since he had no choice about the letter) where I asked if he would prefer my sending sick children to school.
Her grades (for whatever value grades have in 3rd grade) are fine. I'll take the chance on her reading her "Diary of a wimpy kid" book when sick, or when a sane system would have given a snow day.
The level is so low in my local elementary school that the single track math class is still doing addition within 20 for first grade.
The funny thing is that the state standard actually measure 2 and 3 digit addition for K and 1st graders, and proficiency at that level would be p75 for a 1st grader. So why is the actual class teaching level at p<50?
The decrease is consistent across performance levels which should be a pretty decent proxy for tracks.
Dr's Deposition on How Screen Time Hurts Kids' Cognitive Development https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fd-_VDYit3U
My answer to this is approximately: “yes they’re all relatively bad compared to the thing that came before so they were all right!”
Even books. If the option were between my child reading about blacksmithing/compsci and DOING blacksmithing/compsci I’d choose the latter every time. It gives you real experience and opinions.
The difference with each successive new wave is that it becomes increasingly addictive. It’s possible to read one book and stop for a while. Shorts can hook you for hours and then draw you back the next day with no natural stopping point.
It most certainly is.
Who do you think suffers when elites attack public education? It's always the children.
Fun fact: Silicon Valley elites are big proponents of school vouchers because, like their hatred of American labor, they also hate public schools and don't want to pay for that either.
School boards are inherently poltical because as long as a publicly-run school system exists, how it is run and what things it will attempt to teach are political questions. There's no apolitical school board that existed 40 years ago that has been altered since then, they have always been poltical.
Like, I get the desire in a hypothetical, that you hope that people in power would use their power to make public schools better if their kids were forced to go there.
But in reality, the actually powerful can just pay for private schools out of pocket and the vouchers help a lot of middle-income families send their kid to a school that can provide a better environment for whatever definition of better is relevant to that individual.
It just seems like such misplaced anger and energy. You could just advocate for improving public schools, without attacking regular families trying to do their best while trapped inside a system they have very little influence on.
If enough people use the voucher system it basically forces the per student spending to get closer to a purely egalitarian spending per student, with the result that public schools have to spend about the same amount on special ed kids as the voucher kids get (in the extreme, that's all the students they're left with). While this is objectively fairer in my opinion, it's viewed as an entitlement that the special ed kids can take more money at the expense of everyone else.
Obviously though this has to be carefully framed to sell it properly. Very few are going to knowingly sign up to lose funding for their own student to help some other student who is already getting 3x the money as them, so instead it's framed as some sort of evil capitalist agenda against public schools.
Exactly. And who benefits from a less educated, less aware populace? The answer is pretty clear: look at who is benefiting right now!
Seattle's Public Schools district is among the leading in the nation on per-student spending, yet the test scores are cratering. Its previous superintendant had an official platform of not disciplining students.
Vouchers would _improve_ the situation.
https://oxfordeagle.com/2025/01/30/mississippi-4th-graders-n...
comparing Fall 2019 to Fall 2022
It doesn't seem to be about 13-year-old students in general
[1] https://theconversation.com/mounting-research-shows-that-cov...
The main assessment has been performed every two years recently, so 2024 data is most recent. They can all be seen here[2].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Assessment_of_Educati...
One overlooked problem is imo that you can't just waste their time with nonsense and get good results.
A lot of people in the education system are so full of shit that they believe it's good for children to sit there the whole day.
Improving exercises and lectures should be a priority.
What do you mean by "little results" and what data supports it?
Constituencies of both parties found reasons to hate it, so its foundational accountability requirements were watered down by succeeding administrations.
I’m perfectly willing to be convinced NCLB had nothing to do with the evolution of test scores over the last 25 years, but the circumstantial evidence is not easy to dismiss.
But the part I want to concentrate on is the education part and the role of tech. Anyone who sells to large bureaucracies like state and federal Education Departments will tell you the skill is in managing the procurement process. It's getting your claws in more than it is in delivering results. Any results tend to be more manufactured than not.
So contracts get signed with states and school districts that will require them to use a particular product, even if it doesn't work. We know how this goes too. Whoever was in charge of that decision will then tend to leave their job and go work for the seller. Shocking.
But we know what works in teaching and it's direct instruction [2] but you don't sell tech platforms or iPads or laptops that way. As a result we now have a disturbing number of people who have never read a book and really can't read a book, going so far as the students of elite colleges [3].
Likewise, we see Education PhDs who won't make a name for themselves pushing ideas from the 1800s. They have to come up with new methods and this was kind of a disaster for literacy [4], which people are finally waking up to as we go back to the 1800s method of phonics eg [5].
But it's hard to succeed when half the country wants the entire system to fail.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZM05gRIROqQ
[2]: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8476697/
[3]: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2024/11/the-eli...
[4]: https://www.apmreports.org/episode/2019/08/22/whats-wrong-ho...
[5]: https://news.stanford.edu/stories/2026/02/science-of-reading...
If these numbers are at all meaningful for determining how much a student has learned as a result of going through schooling, then thye show that white people are consistently better than blacks and Hispanics at school and are consistently worse than Asians.
I'm so relieved I left social media. Sadly, via democracy, even if you leave social media you are still impacted by those who use it and believe what they read.
There's definitely loads of money in "education". But the actual teachers arent seeing it. No, its in "special interest programs", state/federal compliance, loads of tests, and ordained material from "preferred creators" (cough, pearson etm.)
We can pay teachers better, sure. But there's lots of areas to "pay better". Small classes. 12-17 students. Budget for class resources. No, teachers should NOT be responsible for work materials. Larger classes get aides as well.
Ive also seen what modern teaching is about. The teachers are handed absolutely shit material and required to teach that, with low/no deviation. Like, "New Math" https://www.understood.org/en/articles/9-new-math-problems-a... . None of these methods show WHY, only a rote procedure.
I thought about becoming a teacher. I already teach people (wide array of adults and under 18) in extracurricular groups. Ive seen what works well, and what doesnt. I can tell the 'energy' of a group, especially if theyre confused and angry about something, and how to solve it. But the pay is definitely laughable compared to IT, and the administration demands exacting rubrics put forth by companies who kicked back the state educators.
The responsibility is not worth their salaries or the anti-benefits and other costs.
I'm confused by your comment here. Literally the entire point of teaching those various methods is to show WHY the math works. If anything you should be arguing for rote methods. Some are better than others, but ultimately they're all trying give tools to depict the way any math literate adult thinks about arithmetic.
I don't want to envision a future where most people besides a few elite have stopped reading and writing but maybe I'm just an old millennial and behind the times.
The reasons to doubt are perfectly known: meritocracy is on a decline in the Western world, there's an ever improving safety net for losers, there's a price to pay for forcing my child to study vs the child spending time with their friends who were left to roam free as their social life will suffer.
I probably met more people whose degrees played little to no role in their professional career than the other way around. I've met lots of people who could never realize their degree because of the hollowed down European industry. Engineers seem to suffer the most. It seems like the few ways where a degree can open the door to a better life must be in a field that provides very localized services s.a. medicine. All else is outsourced. Trades do better in this respect as a lot of them need to be local, but they too are being populated by foreign workers and competition is fierce.
I don't think that COVID or any other "force of nature" is to blame for the outcomes. When there's will, there's a way. It's just that fewer parents see academic achievements as worth pursuing for their children.
You need to repeatedly solve multiple practical problems to internalize the knowledge. And you'll eventually need to do stuff that you don't really like at all.
Sorry - that was reflexive: “… in the US”.
I don’t think there’s any great mystery here. Every few years, you guys elect a bunch of people for whom active sabotage of public education is a sine qua non to political gerrymandering strategies driven by the self-preservation instincts of lobbyists.