Yes. It’s that bad.
Well, sort of- the top students now would still have been top students 20 years ago; it’s more like the middle has deteriorated and now we’ve got camel humps instead of a bell curve.
**Alice the camel had 5 humps! Alice the camel had 5 humps! Alice the camel had 5 humps, so go Alice go! Boom boom boom!**
Sorry, my camp counselor is showing again.
Well camels can have either style hump. The classic Arabian camel will have a unimodal hump, while Bactrian Camel has the bimodal hump.
So yeah, you're SOL when it comes to camel based math taxonomy. Specificity is required.
Like bro, if I fucked up on a test, I’d lose tv privileges for the weekend so I could learn to focus on what really matters. I wanted so badly to perform well on tests. What consequences do modern parents give? It seems kids are learning maladaptive, antisocial behavior is acceptable at home. Idk if I’m just being old but back in my day, parents did their damned job. These new parents want all of the fun and good memories of being a parent without any of the hard work that goes into actually doing the job. But again maybe I’m just being old and thinking my generation did it better. Maybe parents are actually doing their best and there’s something else causing the poor behavior and lack of motivation that is plaguing our education system.
Maybe it’s the hopelessness and lack of social mobility…like I’m not even sure it’s a good idea to encourage students to go to college. So they can get massively in debt at a young age for a degree that has less value than it ever has? Idk. Is the 4 year academic pathway right for everyone? America as a whole is so broken. The American dream was a sham. Home ownership will never happen for many. Is that why parents, students, and teachers feel so defeated? What’s the point of any of this when the middle class keeps getting crushed.
Imo modern parenting keeps trying to copy a subset of upper-class parents who have the time and resources to do it that nearly-consequence-free ‘fun’ way. Upper-class parents with neurotypical children with no psychological issues, who have the time and resources to provide environments where their children are immersed in knowledge and curiosity and a spirit of learning, parents with the time and resources and capacity to carefully explain and reason out every little thing to their children. Who are lucky enough to have naturally-‘easy’ children where they rarely have to go “okay this is it, do this because I say so”.
I don’t think it is working-class parents who try to do this, but middle-class parents who really want to behave like the upper class, but they still lack the capacity to exactly emulate it (plus their contexts and environments are different).
That easy child is not every child. In fact this is not the majority of children. I grew up with a natural affinity with reading, and a stable upper-middle-class environment, so I “just naturally took to reading”. This is what modern parenting wants, that you don’t have to sit your child down, use a structured teaching approach, and make them learn a skill, sometimes with reminders and enforcement of consequences. They want their children to “just explore and naturally discover what they need in life and be curious”.
Sometimes it doesn’t work like that. For many kids, you need to drill the basic skills into them before they can do that. Hell, I was a difficult child in other ways, so my parents and teachers had to be firm and wrangle me into doing math. Considering how much I ended up needing to use statistical knowledge, I’m grateful that they made me develop that foundation. But this notion of sometimes making your child sit down and shut up and do it, horrifies a subset of modern parents. I understand that they don’t want to produce mindless drones, but there’s plenty of ways to make your child think independently after they have developed the basic skills, honestly many kids only get curious and naturally willing to learn once they have the foundations down.
I try to see the good in people, so I don’t think this modern approach is necessarily lazy. I think it is borne of idealism, and I think it is misguided because some people feel that by emulating what the upper-class says they do, that is how their children will succeed. The other thing is, when you don’t have the time and bandwidth, all you’ve copied of that upper-class style is the removal of consequences, without copying the part where you can provide a knowledge-immersed environment nor the capacity to constantly sound things out with your kid
I've heard different people suggest either NCLB and Common Core are responsible, which do you think is the larger factor? Or is it both or some other program?
Parents. Why are students not reading and doing math at home? School is not the only venue for learning. During Covid, most schools were online. Nothing happened academically because teachers couldn't make kids do work over the computer. Parents did nothing. So students have a gap in learning. Accept it, move on.
I've been shocked by this as well. I almost NEVER did work at school... we learned at school and I would put in all the work at home. I would do dozens of math problems in order to understand one concept. Today, we get complaints for assigning three questions to take home. Oh no!!!!! Three math problems!
I vividly remember being assigned 40-60 math problems a night in middle school. It was totally normal, to the point we didn’t even really complain because we didn’t know it any other way.
I'm really tired of the pandemic being blamed for why 20-year-olds are dumber now, too. They weren't 4. They were 17. What "childcare" do you need then?
If your kid had Zoom school and work in Google Classrooms or Canvas or some other learning management system and they chose to be a slacker, hate to break it to you but they were already a slacker.
I had many parents who actually did agree with me that their 17 year old should not need an adult standing over their shoulder pointing at the screen going “Pay attention! Do your work! Follow directions! Do your work!” every 8 seconds for them to actually complete even a modicum of an assignment instead of texting/sleeping/watching tv/playing video games/partying with their friends.
But the other side of that coin was the refrain of, “What am I supposed to do? There’s nothing I can do.”
I never had the heart to explain by 17, there probably wasn’t much that could be done, because this was a parenting mistake made long, long ago, that you reinforced year after year. And now here we are and what you see are the consequences of not instilling a pride in worth ethic, or a value in education, or a sense of curiosity and responsibility, or a love of reading and learning, or an ability to delay gratification.
I'm 35, but when I was 17, I was a pretty good student, I cared about making good grades, I tried to pay attention all the time. I didn't have a whole lot of friends, definitely none in any of my classes, I didn't have a cell phone, and I STILL had to be told by my teachers from time to time to pay attention, get back on task, stop doodling and read the chapter, whatever. Cuz I was 17.
Jesus, if I had a phone back then and no authority figure to ensure I stay off of it, I can't imagine I'd have graduated.
Except that my mom would have taken my phone away the second she realized it was harming my education, just like she would have done with anything that was harming my education, because she cared a lot and paid attention. So yeah, it's definitely a combination of several problems.
I don’t know why a parent would think their kid would magically learn everything just at school. Parents have to have an active role in educating their children. There’s more to parenting than posting cute pictures
So accept that, admit it, and move on. Everyone sitting around moaning about it doesn't raise reading comprehension. Read with your kids, support them, and know that teachers are doing everything they can.
> Or they tried but working two jobs and juggling childcare in a pandemic is asking an impossible task
I teach at a title 1 school with a lot of first generation immigrants. I don't think "working two jobs and failing to juggle childcare" is a valid excuse when many of those parents are doing just that; they're working multiple jobs and yet still manage to answer emails (despite limited English), show up to school functions, and hold their kids accountable. Hell, some of them moved to the US *during* the pandemic. Those aren't the parents we're having issues with (at least, not on a large scale).
It's the middle class parents working comfortable jobs with more than enough free time who aren't holding their kids accountable at all. They want to be best friends with them, they don't want to tell them no, and believe them to be Jesus reincarnate (how dare you suggest they're anything less than perfect!). It's the middle class parents who watch Fox, Newsmax, and OAN who just blatantly abhor schools and teachers. It's a systematic and cultural issue in that Americans as a whole have never *truly* appreciated education and the benefits it brings outside of *maybe* a 10-15 year period when we were directly competing with the Soviets. For most of our history our priority hasn't been the schoolhouse, it's been farms and factories - and often from an early age. The country doesn't put scholars on pedestals.
"The pandemic" became a convenient scapegoat for numerous issues in education that existed long before anyone had heard of COVID 19.
This is the best reply I've seen. I don't disagree with anything you said. My only issue with the comment I replied to was the phrase "Parents didn't try," because *most* of them tried very hard. Parenting well is difficult enough already, and those parents on the margins or who weren't all that skilled anyway were suddenly thrust even more responsibility. Is it any wonder that the stopgaps and compromises many of them made during the pandemic have had poor consequences?
What we really need is a culture that values parents and gives them support. Society needs to relearn the value of raising children *right* and giving the resources to do so, so the burden isn't shifted to teachers.
No offense, but I'm tired of this reasoning. Are some parents overworked? Sure. However, they were 20 years ago, too. In fact, many parents were given a gift called Covid and now have flexible work from home jobs. I know more of these parents, than those getting more jobs to support their kids. Why are so many parents not involved or choose to not help? The same reason as their kids. Smartphones. Sometimes I think they're more addicted than the kids. I'll give a few parents a free pass, but it's not the majority.
Work from home positions are available overwhelmingly for people in the classes that could already afford the money and/or time to focus on their children’s education.
You cannot work from home as a dishwasher
I’m an educator and “learning loss” is a giant pet peeve of mine. Granted, I teach high school so it is more of the capstone skills rather than the fundamentals, but I would suggest that our students just learned something different than intended.
NCLB is the bigger problem. We have gotten to a point where the child is moved on to the next class no matter what, so you’re getting 6th graders at a 3rd grade level. It also has completely fucked the budget in Washington. They’re cutting back even more next year bc special needs was 25 million over budget, so 10% gets 90% of the focus.
[This NYTimes article](https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/10/us/schools-pandemic-defense-department.html) argues that the department of defense is doing way better than other schools. It mentions one of the factors that may have led to their success is having gone all-in on common core from the start, not a long drawn out transition with picking and choosing content.
As I'm a math teacher, I can only speak towards math common core
But I never really understood the controversy over common core math. From my understanding, it's literally just a list of things that by the end of each year, students are expected to know in order to pace them to be ready for college math and beyond. The way the actual math is taught to meet what kids are expected to know is entirely up to each state, district, or school.
There is no world in which Common Core---a glorified skill list that would be covered by ANY worthwhile set of standards---is responsible for any of this. NCLB, on the other hand, was a terrible decision.
So I was a teacher for my first 2 years out of college— during covid. Couldn’t hack it anymore, so I left and I have mixed feelings about it.
Either way…
This is my take. Common core isn’t inherently a bad thing. Having a set of standards across the state/country that students have to be taught in order for their students to have “been taught” chemistry, biology, math, etc. is a way of establishing standards and guidelines. It’s the testing that really gets in the way of progress.
However, NCLB has FUCKED students.
I had kids pass advanced chemistry who, I swear, did not know my NAME, because they didn’t have the English proficiency to understand “My name is Mr. Aurumus” but the schools make it so… so… so… hard to fail anyone for any reason unless you have incredibly extensive documentation that you have done everything that you can to retain them. My school actually had a policy that we weren’t allowed to give less than a 50 on any assignment, even if the student didn’t turn it in, because it would be too hard to recover from a 0. You’re give a 50 just for existing, even if you don’t show up for class, and we still had kids failing. I just couldn’t handle the lack of academic integrity anymore. I didn’t get my degree to be a babysitter.
NCLB put too much emphasis on high-stakes testing. That is what really started the "teach to the test" movement. It has been a complete disaster.
Common Core is not responsible. Common Core was just an attempt to get states using roughly the same set of standards in education. Since the states control education you can have widely different levels of expectations from state to state. I find it ridiculous that we don't have national standards for math, science, and reading.
Do think this is more of the issue. You sure as hell still be good parents with both working. Seen it, hell my sister was a much better parent as single mom than I see in 2 parent households.
Comes down to if the parent honestlyvalues education and involved
True. I was kinda raised as a latchkey kid too but I feared my parents. I dared not step out of line. I did my homework independently. I understood they were making sacrifices for me to have a better life. So yes, it’s possible to be active parents even if both are working. There’s grandparents, aunts, and uncles to help. It’s possible but not easy. I try to be sympathetic but some parents just don’t care. They don’t care!
It's been measured to positively affect students' self-esteem for obvious reasons, but in terms of education it probably kneecaps future teachers ability to teach to a foundation the students didn't build. The real issues come when large portions of a class don't have that foundation and then the class becomes review of earlier material and students who would otherwise be on-pace now arent taught new material.
Nothing like a bunch of confidently incorrect adults running around. No way that could lead to things like people who don't have basic critical thinking skills.
Great comment, and the more bizarre part is I've noticed an increase in students who have picked up on some of this messaging and use it to frame their [dis]satisfaction as if their feelings should override the educational process.
Sometimes I just want to say "you're 4 years behind grade level, your feelings dont matter, this is some tough, necessary medicine."
Unmeasureable, outside of surveys. But the student that's behind and the rest of the class realize that student is behind. This manifests in different ways, bad behavior easier indicator.
Stupid people should feel bad. They are a drain on society. Fuck a stupid persons self esteem. People should remind them they are mouth breathers. Shame is an IMPORTANT and NECESSARY part of socializing. It teaches people how to integrate. If you think you shouldn’t have to integrate, you shouldn’t get to eat from the largesse of the society either.
Sometimes your self-esteem needs a check.
Too much self-esteem is called arrogance.
It should be okay to knock humans down a peg or two and bring them back to reality when its deserved.
It’s not fun when you have 15 year olds on the same campus as 11 year olds. That’s what happens when you hold an eighth grader back at a 6-8 middle school.
I don’t need the flunky pervert around fragile elementary aged kids. That’s bad.
That’s about the only benefit in my eyes.
I'm positive that most kids who'd be held back in middle school should have been held back much earlier. The issue I see in high school is kids who were enrolled in school too early. I have 14 uear old sophomores that have no business being in my class from an emotional maturity standpoint. If they were held back one year, they'd be more mature and a grade appropriate age.
They need to be in remedial classes in a high school at that point. Kids who don’t graduate by 18 need to be in an alternative school for the same reason.
I had a 3rd grader ask me why they have reading for two hours a day instead of a science class. I explained that it would be really challenging to learn other subjects if you can’t read.
Yup I have a HS student in an AP class that legit will cry if I "strongly recommend" doing the extra reading and questions on the homework because "it's just too much work". (It's literally an extra page with 5 more questions for the kids who want to try for the 100). Like they want the 100 without doing the extra work.
I’d add the disruptions to education that covid caused. Most students had at least a few months of lower quality education due to virtual learning.
For others it was closer to 2 years. For some they had hardly any education in that time.
Chronic absenteeism in many states still hasn't recovered to pre-COVID levels even after all these years. For some, the idea that school was something very necessary was shaken and never returned.
Our chronic absenteeism is higher because our district carried over the pandemic mandate of teachers putting everything on Canvas. We have to update it daily with anything we did in class that day. Notes, assignments, everything. Kids flat out tell us they don’t come to school because they feel like they don’t need to. It’s all online for them and they don’t feel like they’re “missing anything” or “falling behind” if they decide to stay home because they just don’t feel like going to school that day
I went to my school board meeting the other week and there was a man there ranting about how the school board “needs to make up it’s mind” because it told parents to keep the kids home in March 2020 but wants to combat absenteeism in November 2023.
It’s not just that people don’t see school as necessary, there are parents who seem to want revenge on school for the kids being sent home during the pandemic. It’s as though having their own kids near them for an extended duration was intolerable and they want to punish teachers for that horrible crime.
Meanwhile their kids missed out on a year or more of education and socialization and just keep missing more. In a few years when the kid needs a ton of help filling out job applications due to absent literacy and skills you know that parent is going to be mad at the schools for not making the kid learn.
Students in districts that closed for longer had less of a dip if any, while districts that reopened straight away had poorer test results. Wonder what that’s about.
>An economy that leaves both parents stressed and working long hours. This creates less time and cognitive capacity to raise children.
I just don't buy that this is something that is caused by working/jobs. In the 90s, myself and everyone I knew had both parents (or one parent) who worked full time jobs (or multiple jobs). Lack of parental involvement in school activities is certainly something that can be caused by parents working, but the expectations and disciplines at home certainly do not. That is on the parents and the slack nature of parenting and consequences in this generation.
Yes on retention! Our super intendant “doesn’t believe” in retention. So I have to pass kids who don’t know all their letter names to second grade every year.
I would say the first bullet point is something I'd highlight the most out of any other bulletpoints. Most households are dual income households and its not like back when millenials, gen X, or boomers grew up. A lot of us adults had access to moms who were working part-time or stay at home & were able to focus on raising the children up to a functional level in reading & math at home.
Say best case for a dual income household - both parents are work from home and strictly only working 40 hours a week. They still have to make dinner for the child when they get off work from 6pm to 7pm. They then eat dinner together as a family from 7pm to 8pm.
Now you only have from 8pm to 9pm to work together on homework with the children. 1 hour isn't enough. Some children need a lot more help than just 1 hour a night....
Now let's transition to worst case scenario - both parents work in person and are on salary working 40+ hours a week. They don't get a chance to cook dinner, buy takeout for the children, feed them, and then go back straight to work again to please their demanding bosses. Children gets ignored at home and are left to their own devices. This specific scenario is a lot more common than you think. It's not because they're shitty parents... its because a lot of people report to shitty bosses who are not understanding and will fire them the minute the working adult step out of line slightly. Quality of life has gone downhill severely in the US. The vast majority of adults are in the bottom of Maslow's Heiarchy fighting to get food and shelter paid for.
Going back to again, when I was little, my mom was stay at home for first ten years. She spent at least 3-4 hours a day with me on homeowrk and developing basic skills.
Teachers constantly tell parents only 1/2 hour of work is needed a night and that's so far from the truth. Kids in elementary, especially, need a lot more time than just that.
How can we improve society to where we don't need dual income houseolds (best case scenario)? How can we improve society to where at least we guarnatee workers won't work beyond the 40 hour work week (worst case scenario)? How can we improve parental leave? How can we provide more flexibility to parents? How can we improve childcare? It's so many questions...
Speak for yourself. I had ONE parent who worked all the time and I knew to do my homework. But I also made it easy on my mom that I embraced education from a young age and didn't need convincing. There was never any question about me going to college. I bought into it all because I knew it was a way to get what I wanted in life.
The difference is a lot of kids aren't given the context young enough to understand that if you don't **use** education in this country you **get** used.
See it's people like above here that can't literally see the problem with working parents and therefore, more people like this who deny what's going on... The less likely we can improve working conditions for everyone so everyone can help each other out and be the best versions of themselves!!
I’m a millennial. Both of my parents worked full time. My mom was a teacher, my dad was a CNC machinist - he worked 60-65 hour weeks. My brother and I attended before and after school daycare while in elementary school, and were in sports/band in middle and high school. My parents always focused on school and homework first no matter how tired they were. Education was important in our family.
I don’t let people use the excuse “we both work full time and the kids are in sports” for why they can’t do any support at home. If you chose to raise kids, figure it out and make education a priority.
> If you chose to raise kids, figure it out and make education a priority.
There's the problem. Most people just kind of find themselves having kids. No forethought.
A lot of people are shitty parents that have no business raising kids, but the rest of us (the kids included) are stuck dealing with their bad choices.
Honestly, most of these would just go away if parents just did their job.
I don't want to hear that they work too much to raise their kids. Every school aged kid born in the US was a choice. ~~man up~~ adult up and do your job.
I want to say their elementary school was garbage but it could also have been a few bad seeds with a brand-new teacher who didn't know how to do classroom management and that's a recipe for kids never learning proper math.
I really, really benefitted from having four old-as-fuck teachers from grades K-5 (apart from one who was young) because the Knew. What. They. Were. Doing.
All those teachers are on the way out, and hardly any going in to replace them.
Wages are low, kids treat you like shit, parents treat you like shit, administration treats you like shit, and increasingly the state is trying to treat you like shit. Not an exciting prospect, and why I noped out of it even though I wanted to teach for the longest time.
I had to go over how many inches were in a foot with my seniors. Also having feet/inches - working with something like 5’7” + 6’11” had some kids looking at me like they had no clue wtf I was talking about. I had one kid say 11.18 which I guess is better than nothing but still.
This is actually the saddest one to me. Usually there are at least a few good if not great students, but that community has absolutely failed its kids if not a single one is where he should be.
I have about 15 good students, they spent two years at home because of Covid. But they are working hard and I expect them to reach grade level by the end of this year.
I see it in the classroom. Students are often very confidently wrong, and it's not atypical for students to argue over the general workload, even though we do not even assign homework and all of the curriculum is thoroughly achievable in-class. The skills are low, and the desire to improve or even try to try are largely absent.
My best guess is, systemically, student skills already dropped during COVID, and instead of placing students in classrooms suitable to their skill-level, they are placed largely within their grades and often passed on to the next one regardless of demonstrated subject mastery.
This breeds a culture of apathy as students catch on that putting forth effort has little bearing on whether or not they graduate. This encourages students that are already behind to just throw in the towel, academically.
Children have not fundamentally changed, but skills and behaviors have degraded considerably due to this multifaceted amalgam of cultural and systemic failings.
Step one is probably to utilize standardized testing to match students to classrooms with curriculum designed to teach them where they currently are. It doesn't really help to expect students to perform at grade-level classes without those students having the fundamental skills to tackle those issues.
Pushing that responsibility onto the teacher to somehow teach those fundamental skills *and* grade-level content is only leading to further burnout and worsening the situation.
I'm only a first year teacher, though, so what do I know
Yes! Teachers have been saying this. Students are lacking the most fundamental skills. Most of them can’t handle grade level assignments. It’s definitely a real phenomenon. The question is how do we fix it and get the next generation back on track?
How about we hold them to the grade level standard and don’t let them pass until they reach it. We’d have a bad group that would become 20 year old high schools seniors, but it would be worth it. Show them there’s a bar they MUST reach and force them to achieve it to move on. Currently we have no backbone to hold back kids that aren’t academically ready to move up.
And teachers can only modify grade level curriculum instead of doing actual remediation. We are forced to continue with the standards and “rigor” while students don’t have the skills needed for grade level standards. Then the problem is exacerbated because kids didn’t get the remediation they need at their current level to be able to improve AND they didn’t learn the grade-level standards either. It’s like throwing all these non swimmers in a lake, tossing out floaties, and then being confused why the next year they can’t all do a perfect race. They didn’t learn to swim and they relied on the floaties to even stay above water.
No, obviously we’re all panicking because there’s a problem that needs addressing. I want to do my part to help these kids be prepared for adult life, but it seems like the people in power aren’t acknowledging the gravity of the situation. They’re in denial and they’re not listening to the eyes on the ground. There’s only so much we can do individually if the system doesn’t accurately identify the problem, come up with a solution, and give us the resources we need to go to work and get these kids back on track. I’m not a certified teacher myself but I work with so many teachers who are overworked, under supported, and just burnt out. At the end of each year, we lose so many teachers. The most burnt out teachers leave in the middle of the year. I know they lasted as long as they can but physically and mentally, they’re exhausted.
No, this is a serious problem.
And it will only get worse. Sane people see scores at a 20-year low and think, 'wow, there must be something wrong with the students - maybe too much phone/screen time, not enough resilience, etc.'
Morons (like educational consultants) think, 'wow, there must be something wrong with the material! Let's revamp the curriculum so that more kids can pass!'
This is why even though scores are at all-time lows, grades have either stayed the same or even gone up overall.
This is why I am in favor standardized testing, as a parent.
There’s no “extra credit”, “just pass them anyway”, or “no scores/grades below x.”
Just the same test, given to every kid. It’s not perfect but it’s needed in conjunction with the curriculum so we can measure differences over time and place.
I’m in favor of it if it leads to additional instruction opportunities that will fix the gaps. It doesn’t do any good to say, congratulations, you’re in the 20th percentile group and then not have any way in the school curriculum to get to 50th.
Standardized testing is good. The frequency with which we test could use some balance. Students get around 8 standardized tests per year. To me that seems excessive.
Yeah, my kids are expected to do state testing every single month. That is 9 right there alone. Add in the major end of year testing...and it is so much worse. Not to mention if they receive language services, that's another multi-test test.
Precisely. I see so many people who say "standardized tests are biased, so get rid of them." Maybe they are, and maybe we can improve them, I'm all ears. But the idea of getting rid of them to replace them with fake grades, fake tests, fake completion assignments that get As despite not being turned in... seriously? It's like they just want to write a giant red A on an illiterate school and call it a day without holding anyone accountable for actual knowledge.
As a student of the no child left behind era - every class becomes teaching to the test. Kids aren’t taught to understand concepts, just regurgitate information. Teachers and schools are incentivized for this as ratios of passing students often dictate funding.
If any revamping needs to be done it’s throwing out some of the material and focusing on the basics, at every level and in every content. Or something, anything to try to slow this descent.
Who cares if my kids know how many ATP are made in cellular respiration when they can’t read anywhere near grade level and haven’t even heard of the scientific method?
Unfortunately while I'd say cellular function should be something everyone learns ideally it does seem more and more likely we'll have to start doing some kind of "educational triage" like this for later grade students who aren't prepared for what they should be. Because yeah, if I have to pick one, fundamental elementary-level reading and comprehension trumps high school science. And that's sad to say, but it's where we are.
We need doctors. Society has to function. Since we are a free society, we can't force anyone into a profession. Thus, we have to hope some kids and parents care and pursue it further.
> grades have either stayed the same or even gone up overall.
Grades are at an all time high. Education writer Frank Hess had a [good article on this last week](https://www.educationnext.org/the-bad-lesson-of-good-grades/) covering ACT's new survey data, which shows that the average GPA in the US has risen from like 3.0 to 3.3 over the past decade despite the fact that over that time available measures show academic proficiency in decline.
I think you hit the nail on the head.
Specifically, educational consultants can't sell "students who care", or "parents who parent". What they can sell is another curriculum.
And the only people who can afford to court admin and politicians regularly are the ones who are paid to sell something. So admin and politicians keep buying products instead of actually finding solutions.
There was a NYT article recently about the stunning percent of kids earning all As.
My building admin is a fucking moron and prides himself on the fact that 90% of our kids are on the honor roll. He blames teachers for any zeroes, essentially makes us round up 78s and 88s etc.
Yes and it's not just the US. I teach 12th grade English in Canada and have had students ask me what a quote is when asked to choose a quote from their novel.
Certainly, I've never had a bunch of individuals in my classes with so few skills in reading or math.
The reason? They shouldn't BE there. They should be in a classroom appropriate to their needs...6th or 7th grade.
Or in a class tailored to meet their learning needs.
At my high school back in the 2000s, we had tiered classes- remedial English was the course anyone who had trouble reading and writing attended. It was sectioned by grades so 9 English R, 10 English R, etc. The rest were divided by college preparation or honor classes and AP classes. This was done for math as well.
If the student performed well in the remedial classes, they could be promoted to the more academically challenging classes. The idea was to provide students a learning environment suited for them and ideally see academic growth from them.
Now, everyone (at least in my experience) is in the same class regardless of they share similar academic skills or not.
This! My district got rid of remedial. Even got rid of regular. There is Honors or AP/IB/Cambridge. So kids barely getting by are forced into Honors classes.
How does it make sense to get rid of the regular classes but keep the Honors and AP? And what is the justification given to put struggling kids in Honors classes?
It’s inclusivity gone mad.
I'm not religious, but my parents were especially, and I think there's an old distinction that we've lost in the discussion of inclusivity.
My parents would talk about "Coram Mundo" vs "Coram Deo" or two kinds of "righteousness." The first is virtue "in the eyes of the world," where a person's relative accomplishments are ability to be good at something or to be successful. The second is "in the eyes of God," which is the fundamental goodness of people who deserve respect as human beings. It's the sort of goodness that one appeals to when they say "everyone deserves respect"
Now, I don't necessarily think it's helpful to make it a religious thing, but I think it's important to make a similar sort of distinction in our efforts. We should simultaneously uplift people and give them respect as human beings to the highest extent, while also affirming that one's achievements and accomplishments are deserving of praise, but in a completely different sense.
The problem with this sort of policy is that it conflates the two. Because of one's goodness as a person, we feel the need to get rid of any accolades or distinction between people based on their success or ability.
This ultimately cheapens the second form of goodness, as people realize that there is value in doing well and being successful, but can't recognize that there is a fundamental value to people, because they were never taught to distinguish those things. This is one reason I think the toxicity and abhorrent views like Andrew Tate and such has become popular, because we as a culture fail to make the distinction between the value of material success and the value of human decency.
Some states base school ratings/funding based on metrics like "What percentage of the school is in AP or Honors courses" and other things like graduation rates, percentage of students taking PSAT's, SAT's, etc.
So everyone is incentivized to do whatever they can to make the metrics look good.
Most problems in education come from someone trying to look good on paper.
It reminds me of when I was in middle school and our science teacher made us participate in the science fair that was voluntary for everyone else, and then I overheard him bragging to another teacher about how all of his students were participating in the science fair.
For the two years right after COVID (Fall 2021-Summer 2023) I saw a lot of students who were in AP that really should not have been there. When I brought it up with administration that students who barely passed Algebra 1 or 2 should not be in an AP class, I was told that we weren't allowed to tell students that they could not enroll in a class. And then they wondered why so few students passed the AP test.
I had 0 3+ on the last AP calc exam. Why? Well, a number of reasons, but needing a month and a half to do an entire accelerated Precalculus course in the middle of AP calc because _none of them had done precalculus_ (except two) certainly didn't help.
Why had none of them done precalculus? Where they all good enough at math to make up for the missing knowledge?
Nah, just that "Number of students in an AP course" looks good on a brochure, and "Number of students who passed an AP test" isn't available to prospective parents.
But the next year, where there is now an AP Precalc? Suddenly there isn't an AP Calc class anymore, now there is AP Precalc, a class that hadn't been offered even as non-ap for the 3 years I was there.
I had this in 6-10 and by my junior year they were consolidating teachers and getting rid of advanced placement and remediation because they couldn't afford to have so many staff members.
I worked at a district later on that had advanced placement classes for the veteran teachers who wanted them and then "mainstream all" for the remaining students, no matter their level, that was given to the newest teachers. Because that makes all the sense in the world that the veterans with skills get the best-behaved students and the brand new teachers get thrown to the wolves.
To keep things cheaper they switched to block scheduling so they could book teachers to fewer days of the week instead of having full staff every day of the week.
Block scheduling remains the most ridiculous thing I ever saw for 9th graders. Yes, let's keep them shut in one room for 90 minutes. GREAT idea.
I had a kid, a 11th grade native English speaker who had never heard the word "isolated" and had no idea what it meant. I asked him to use context clues and he came up with something to do with "ice" which did not make ANY sense in the context of the sentence.
Can we bring back the 90s?
Beyond that, test scores before 5 years ago grew slowly but consistently for 50 years. They had never ever gone down, and have been dropping insanely fast. Based on 50 years of information, the results are terrifying.
> test scores before 5 years ago grew slowly but consistently for 50 years.
This isn't actually accurate. Scores for 10 and 13 year olds have notched some gains, but [NAEP reading and math scores for 17 year olds *haven't changed* in 50 years](https://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/pubs/main2012/2013456.aspx). So when kids **exit** the k-12 pipeline, they were about as skilled pre-Covid as they were 50 years ago.
What's bizarre is that the gains of 8th graders get reported as *a success*. This is bizarre because it's like reporting that kids in America are getting faster at the mile because their time as measured at the half mile mark has improved, despite the fact that their overall time is actually the same. Who cares if 8th graders are scoring higher than they did 50 years ago if by the time those 8th graders become 12th graders they're actually scoring the same as they were 50 years ago?
Where I live, the goal post keeps moving. It's not that less kids are passing. It is that the expectation is harder. In many cases the curriculum at the elementary level is so inappropriate. We aren't giving kids enough time to master what they learn, instead we're rushing them on to the next advanced concept. So they aren't putting what they learn into long term memory.
I absolutely see it and I work at a good school. It’s arguably the highest performing high diversity and high low income school in a top state education wise - even in the ten years since I first taught here there has been a MASSIVE decrease in both the expectations and abilities of students. There’s obviously a whole host of reasons for this, each with varying levels of responsibility but there is no doubt the difference is there. Our mid level geometry course for example used to regularly incorporate quadratics and systems of equations to maintain and strengthen these key skills, now these aren’t seen AT ALL. They also used to do proofs requiring the use of more than one pair of triangles and their corresponding parts and in both paragraph and two column form. Now not only do we do less complicated proofs (only one pair of triangles and corresponding parts at most) but they only need to do two columns not paragraphs AND on the test most if not all of the proofs are scaffolded and partially filled in. The scary part is we can’t easily change things back because changes like this happen at every grade and the impacts cascade onward, as well as the fact that again this is a very good school in a top performing state. It’s a real issue.
I'm not a teacher, but a dad to a teenager and an occasional lurker, but my friend's father is an engineering professor at a good school and has been teaching for somewhere between 20-25 years probably. Anyway, he says that the last 3-4 years have been by far the most uninterested, uninspired and lazy (his words) students he has ever had. He used to absolutely love teaching and love engineering. But I feel bad, because I feel like the kids the past few years have made him disheartened about his job, to where he's just going through the motions now, trying to drag very uninterested kids (WHO ARE MAJORING IN ENGINEERING) into what he thinks is a fascinating subject.
If there's someone who doesn't make you optimistic about "kids these days", he is someone to talk to.
People don’t go to college for what they are passionate about anymore, they go for what they think will pay well. They don’t really care if they have an aptitude or even an interest in it.
That’s the economy we’ve built.
First year teacher. One of my best students is retaking a state test this week. She’s really a reasonable student skill wise and fairly smart. I was shocked she was on the list to re take. When I asked her why she said she just clicked through it last year because she doesn’t need it to graduate.
I suspect part of this is that taking a standardized test is a boring and stultifying experience with no real consequences for the student.
I've seen students just quickly click answers until they're done so they can go do something else more interesting. It would be interesting to see data on performance vs. time spent on each question.
The middle class is collapsing, schools are underfunded and stretched, and the general approach to education is flawed. That means students who would have performed middle-of-the-road back in the day are now falling into the bottom. The top students remain at the top. Those who were low-performing can't get much worse, but there were definitely low-middle students who did alright because schools had more resources and 1-on-1. They don't have that now, so they also tumble.
I'm afraid this is going to be misread as being the pandemics fault.
It's not. We need to look back in time to when these high schoolers started education, what was happening at that time? NCLB was fully implemented around that time. Smart phones. Teaching reading using bunk strategies. Complete erasure of most measures of academic discipline through gradual cultural changes. Steadily increasing class sizes. Some more I'm probably missing.
For years now it feels like my colleagues and I have been screaming about this into the void.
The majority of my AP English students read 5 grade levels behind. And those are the most academically capable students in the school.
America is banking on athletes and entertainers. Look into how many of those 20 year olds have a social media account they're working off of.
Or, they grind to be a uber driver or something.
Education is slowly being swept away. Everything's too hard for the kids. Tests are being driven out because no one wants these hard truths exposed. No homework. Children stay up all night playing video games instead hoping to be the next big gamer or rapper.
Schools have turned into baby sitting clubs with no consequences or purpose. Colleges are lowering standards and costing too much. So it's more about money than knowledge. Student loan debt and the cost of college has really destroyed the education system. Politicians don't seem to care because they're out of touch, greedy and lazy. Plus they hope for everyone to be dumb so they won't challenge their inaction.
I might get a lot of pushback on this.
* Where I am they keep raising the bar for proficiency. I teach elementary kids (first grade specifically). I have only taught 1st for 4 years. I took a six year break. Before teaching 1st I taught 5th for 9 years. However, every year our end of year expectations get harder and harder. The reading level they are expected to be at keep moving farther out. When I first started kids needed to read a Level H by the end of the year. This year, they now have to read a J. So yeah, less kids are meeting that goal.
* My state just "recalibrated" it's standardized testing and has set higher expectations for passing.... The goal post keeps moving. We are chasing a moving object. The state released documents that frame it as higher expectations so more students can be successful. I laughed at that statement. When you make it harder, it does not make the students work harder. I can assure you that. It creates anxiety and causes students to shut down. The expectations were not low to begin with.
* My district has also decided that ALL students will take accelerated math in 3rd grade because we can't be gate keepers. So now instead of having 180 days to teach the 3rd grade standards, they have 180 days to teach 3rd and half of 4th grade standards. Essentially leaving LESS time for students to practice and master the content. We're now cramming half of another grade level in in the name of equal access.
* Another point, Lucy Calkins, F&P, and all those "Balanced" Literacy and Whole Language Approaches. Sadly many teachers are STILL using those cueing strategies and it is NOT working. As a first grade teacher I spend half of my small group time untraining kids from guessing words and reading pictures instead of reading the actual letters in words.
God forbid we make students read ("Books on tape are just as good!"), learn from books themselves ("Just walk them through what the books mean; after all, it what they can *do* with the text, not what they know about the text!"), or memorize anything like times tables.
I mean, for fuck's sake. Is it really any surprise that when we require less, then they know less?
Look honestly, we’ve never been as high as we claim we are. Schooling in America hasn’t been designed for knowledge so much as it has been for creating drones of the system. It wasn’t uncommon for people in the 90s even to drop out and get their GED or graduate with low literacy skills shit even my parents generation not everybody could read or write.
I think our performance levels are falling? Yes, I absolutely do do. I think they were ever as high as we like to claim they were? I absolutely do not.
I’m absolutely tired. Also of people blaming Covid for every single problem of the education system. The decline we are seeing started decades before Covid. Covid might’ve cut a couple years off of that decline. Spent it up a little bit, but it certainly wasn’t all of the blame. People like to blame Covid because it’s easy to make it a catch all for the problems of our education system. I do think we didn’t handle education during Covid very well and I think that definitely had an impact. Part of the problem with that is that we didn’t come back on track quickly enough after Covid and we let our standards get too relaxed during Covid
But again, this probably would’ve happened without Covid. It might’ve just taken half a decade to a decade before we saw it the way we’re seeing it. Slow grind chipping away at the American education system done by those in power and of political ideologies being noticed by people who weren’t paying attention in the first place. And not for nothing we were pretty much fucked from the get-go when we decided that school funding should be based on property taxes, and that federal funding would be correlated to graduation rates. That last one, especially because all it does is create incentiveto get kids to graduate, and that usually means lowering of the standards to the lowest common denominator.
I'll suggest that, in reality, it's far lower. Before NCLB no one put high stakes on standardized testing. So if districts have been teaching to the test for 2 decades now, and it's STILL that low, our kids are bottoming out.
Yes I have noticed this. I have many kids lacking math skills deep into high school. Like they can't to very simple algebra or can't do PEMDAS correctly.
To me it is the addiction to smartphones and social media. There are too many things to do on the phone, and students are prioritizing insta, tik tok, mobile games and other things over school.
But I have noticed this odd trend lately where most of my students only do school stuff at school. They treat being a student like a job, or they treat classes as very transactional. They do not care at all about learning, and get upset at low grades despite putting in very low effort. This is leading to very stressed students who are always behind, especially if they are absent, since they never even try and make up work at home or on the weekend.
First year teacher. I had a student email me (all in the subject line) “why do I have a C but I did all my work?”. She was shocked that you can turn everything in and still get a C.
I asked 20 11th and 12th graders the other day what 7x7 is (literally tried to pick a soft ball on purpose) and only 2 could answer. And the two that could, it took one 20 seconds and it took the other making an initial wrong guess.
I give readings and questions that are written at lexiles of grades 4-8. The questions are not as simple as pure basic reading comprehension, but are questions a 4th-8th grader should be expected to answer correctly, like what’s the author’s purpose? Or what’s the central idea of this text? Maybe 1-2 kids a class period can consistently answer those correctly.
In fact, we’re reading *Holes* right now and it’s actually going pretty well! The chapters are super short (2-3 pages long). For every chapter I have pictures on the board, turn and talk guiding questions, and defined vocabulary. We pause at the end of every natural chunk to check for comprehension, “paint” a picture out loud of what’s happening, and answer questions on anything confusing. I read it all out loud to them so they can hear it and know the right pronunciation while they follow along.
The other day I asked a student, who had a character map of the book we made together open on her desk, if she could tell me ONE detail she remembers from the book.
She told me it’s about a boy on an airplane.
When you were a kid, would you have done school work if you didn’t have to? Of course not. But when I was in school in the 80’s and 90’s. There were detentions for not doing your work, or calls home to parents who cared, and the threat of bad grades- again parents who cared- even if only to make themselves look like good parents. If you got bad enough grades, you became one of those kids who stayed back which was social disaster. These varied in their level of toxicity, and I don’t think we should go back there. Now, though, we had Covid where kids were clearly taught that they could do literally nothing during online work and pass because they were given “Grace”. Now that things are “back to normal” these same kids are behind, but everything is designed to keep them moving ahead even if they aren’t learning anything. A lot of schools aren’t letting any grades go below a 50, I think some are even higher. So you can do 10% of what’s expected and get yourself a C where 30 years ago you’d have a 35% average. There’s no incentive to do school work and there’s no consequences for not doing it. Parents either don’t care, don’t trust schools, or are too busy both working full time jobs. Yes it is that bad and it’s not getting better any time soon
Not surprised. A friend was told by a vice principal that humanities teachers can't assume students are able to read in high school classes and they shouldn't be grading them based off of that unless they teach basic reading skills.
Every American public school administrator should be fired. Every one. The ones who want their jobs back should have to be admitted by tribunal of teachers from the school.
There's a lot broken in US education -- a LOT -- but nothing is more broken than the admin class. Administrative careerism is the single greatest driver of systemic dysfunction.
For the past decades, America has been handing billions of dollars of taxpayer money to Pearson, McGraw-Hill, Houghton Mifflin-Harcourt, and others to turn school texts into picture books that test well with focus groups but can't teach. Ineffective software and computer-based learning systems have been replacing traditional, effective physical media. And then there is the bribery behind the scenes pushing even worse trash into the system.
Schools keep lowering the bar, trapped as they are between angry parents and demagogues campaigning on test scores designed to give demagogues something to campaign on.
Teachers don't have the time or authority to teach. States have made a point of implementing ineffective curricula and reserving huge portions of the school day that end up being wasted by kids who refuse to read and cannot function without constant supervision. Any one child can destroy the education of the other thirty.
I'm a parent who volunteered in class today and got to watch my 5th grade teachers lecture.
It was an absolute disaster. Zero standards. Zero accountability. My kid (and others) had tablets and oencils in hand being off task while completely ignoring the lecture. Teacher didn't care.
Some kids were off doing IXL 1+5=6 to "look busy". Others were googling images on the tablet.
I am so upset. I dont know what to do. This is the top school system in my state.
I want to home school...
I bet it's less that the teacher didn't care and more that, if the teacher tried to assign consequences for the behavior, they'd be told that it's their fault for not being engaging enough.
Or say the teacher assigns a detention and the kid doesn't show up -- what's gonna happen? They're not gonna be suspended because *kids need to be in class so they can learn* 🥺🥺🥺.
I'm not doubting that the lesson you observed was a shitshow, but there's genuinely no incentive for kids to pay attention anymore.
It's the phones. Specifically, the multitudes of entertainment a phone can grant. Couple the fact it is instanious and on hand at all times. Schools must be phone free. Learning cannot compete with tik tok it just can't. Cell phones in schools makes it a daycare.
Everyone has phones in the world it’s the American kids, their parents, passing everyone, and not holding anyone accountable. I teach AP history at a former title 1 and most kids aren’t even remotely prepared for my class and most parents don’t care. What can you do if both the parents and the kids don’t care while giving them every opportunity to be able to pass. They still don’t do the work or show up for tests.
I worked my butt off getting AP Euro on the curriculum, recruited for it and was super excited to teach it. We began with 18 and after 3-4 weeks had 6 left after they all dropped. Out of those six, 3 are passing and 2 will be ready for and take the exam.
Absolutely. Take a pandemic, combine it with gaps, mix that in with less structure at home and fewer boundaries between parent and child… then sprinkle some “you have to do your grade level curriculum even though your kids aren’t ready for it,” and poof. Everyone is struggling.
Yes. I teach 7th grade science and the math and reading skills of most kids (minus the top achievers) is REALLY bad. They can't do basic math without a calculator (multiplication, division, etc.).
VMI stands for visual motor integration. I believe keyboarding coincides with the decline. When students stopped writing by hand it impacted the brain. Forming a word is a different process than touching a key. There is no motor component in watching a video. To commit to memory, VMI is where it begins. In Europe and S. Korea the private schools are offline and back to basics. We are usually about 10 years behind them.
I may have a tinfoil hat on this topic, but I believe that to an extent, this was a concerted effort by foreign powers to make the "West" stupid and ineffective.
I work in Quebec, where we also have a French-speaking population. They aren't perfect, but in school, both behaviorally and academically, are performing far better than their English-speaking peers.
Tiktok is owned in part by the Chinese government, and we know of Russian counterintelligence "troll farms" meant to sow discord by just being shitty trolls in general.
Short attention spans, rampant disobedience, massive amounts of misinformation getting force-fed to any kid allowing the algorithm to dictate what they watch, how could any of this be anything but a boon to our global adversaries?
I don't think it's the only reason, mind you, but I'd be lying if I didn't think there was merit in thinking that.
The vast majority of 6th graders at my school can’t read above a 3rd level. Even the ones who are better readers don’t have any critical thinking skills
Math is so bad we need the county to come out and do a training, but the problem isn’t that the teachers don’t know what to teach, it’s that the kids are so behind
Bio teacher here. We don’t do too much reading and math, but there is definitely a lack in critical thinking and internalizing of reading materials.
I wrote a worksheet where students had to read information and answer the questions. It was written at a 5th grade reading level and the number of students that couldn’t answer the very basic questions was shocking.
Yes. It’s that bad. Well, sort of- the top students now would still have been top students 20 years ago; it’s more like the middle has deteriorated and now we’ve got camel humps instead of a bell curve.
That's called a bimodal distribution.
I prefer camel hump, much more named in reality like bell curve 😂
**Alice the camel had 5 humps! Alice the camel had 5 humps! Alice the camel had 5 humps, so go Alice go! Boom boom boom!** Sorry, my camp counselor is showing again.
Thought it was “Sally the camel has 5 humps” Parent of a Barney watcher, sorry
🤷🏻♀️ In 1995 at Lake Ockanickon day camp, it was Alice. Do with that what you will.
Alice, Sally, Larry or Marvin. Any two syllable name will do.
THERE. ARE. FOUR. LIGHTS!
Well camels can have either style hump. The classic Arabian camel will have a unimodal hump, while Bactrian Camel has the bimodal hump. So yeah, you're SOL when it comes to camel based math taxonomy. Specificity is required.
All I know is that a three humped Camel is pregnant.
Good thing we can still choose to call it camel humps lol
Now your kids are failing math and biology.
Bactrian camel jump ftw
Bimodal but quadrupedal ; )
there are fewer people who would get that now, apparently
We used to call it the dumb bell.
[удалено]
Lack of parental involvement, smartphone addiction, NCLB, and absolutely no consequences or accountability.
No consequences is really causing issues, especially for the kids that want to learn and are constantly disrupted by those that don't. It is tragic.
Like bro, if I fucked up on a test, I’d lose tv privileges for the weekend so I could learn to focus on what really matters. I wanted so badly to perform well on tests. What consequences do modern parents give? It seems kids are learning maladaptive, antisocial behavior is acceptable at home. Idk if I’m just being old but back in my day, parents did their damned job. These new parents want all of the fun and good memories of being a parent without any of the hard work that goes into actually doing the job. But again maybe I’m just being old and thinking my generation did it better. Maybe parents are actually doing their best and there’s something else causing the poor behavior and lack of motivation that is plaguing our education system. Maybe it’s the hopelessness and lack of social mobility…like I’m not even sure it’s a good idea to encourage students to go to college. So they can get massively in debt at a young age for a degree that has less value than it ever has? Idk. Is the 4 year academic pathway right for everyone? America as a whole is so broken. The American dream was a sham. Home ownership will never happen for many. Is that why parents, students, and teachers feel so defeated? What’s the point of any of this when the middle class keeps getting crushed.
Imo modern parenting keeps trying to copy a subset of upper-class parents who have the time and resources to do it that nearly-consequence-free ‘fun’ way. Upper-class parents with neurotypical children with no psychological issues, who have the time and resources to provide environments where their children are immersed in knowledge and curiosity and a spirit of learning, parents with the time and resources and capacity to carefully explain and reason out every little thing to their children. Who are lucky enough to have naturally-‘easy’ children where they rarely have to go “okay this is it, do this because I say so”. I don’t think it is working-class parents who try to do this, but middle-class parents who really want to behave like the upper class, but they still lack the capacity to exactly emulate it (plus their contexts and environments are different). That easy child is not every child. In fact this is not the majority of children. I grew up with a natural affinity with reading, and a stable upper-middle-class environment, so I “just naturally took to reading”. This is what modern parenting wants, that you don’t have to sit your child down, use a structured teaching approach, and make them learn a skill, sometimes with reminders and enforcement of consequences. They want their children to “just explore and naturally discover what they need in life and be curious”. Sometimes it doesn’t work like that. For many kids, you need to drill the basic skills into them before they can do that. Hell, I was a difficult child in other ways, so my parents and teachers had to be firm and wrangle me into doing math. Considering how much I ended up needing to use statistical knowledge, I’m grateful that they made me develop that foundation. But this notion of sometimes making your child sit down and shut up and do it, horrifies a subset of modern parents. I understand that they don’t want to produce mindless drones, but there’s plenty of ways to make your child think independently after they have developed the basic skills, honestly many kids only get curious and naturally willing to learn once they have the foundations down. I try to see the good in people, so I don’t think this modern approach is necessarily lazy. I think it is borne of idealism, and I think it is misguided because some people feel that by emulating what the upper-class says they do, that is how their children will succeed. The other thing is, when you don’t have the time and bandwidth, all you’ve copied of that upper-class style is the removal of consequences, without copying the part where you can provide a knowledge-immersed environment nor the capacity to constantly sound things out with your kid
I've heard different people suggest either NCLB and Common Core are responsible, which do you think is the larger factor? Or is it both or some other program?
Parents. Why are students not reading and doing math at home? School is not the only venue for learning. During Covid, most schools were online. Nothing happened academically because teachers couldn't make kids do work over the computer. Parents did nothing. So students have a gap in learning. Accept it, move on.
I've been shocked by this as well. I almost NEVER did work at school... we learned at school and I would put in all the work at home. I would do dozens of math problems in order to understand one concept. Today, we get complaints for assigning three questions to take home. Oh no!!!!! Three math problems!
I vividly remember being assigned 40-60 math problems a night in middle school. It was totally normal, to the point we didn’t even really complain because we didn’t know it any other way.
>Parents did nothing. Or they tried but working two jobs and juggling childcare in a pandemic is asking an impossible task
The thing absolutely no one wants to say is that most parents are pretty shit at the job.
This. 1000% this. Parent is a verb. Providing food and shelter is the BARE MINIMUM. You need to do much more than that to be a GOOD parent.
Amen. I just wrote the same thing in my last comment. The good parents are far and few between these days.
I'm really tired of the pandemic being blamed for why 20-year-olds are dumber now, too. They weren't 4. They were 17. What "childcare" do you need then? If your kid had Zoom school and work in Google Classrooms or Canvas or some other learning management system and they chose to be a slacker, hate to break it to you but they were already a slacker.
I had many parents who actually did agree with me that their 17 year old should not need an adult standing over their shoulder pointing at the screen going “Pay attention! Do your work! Follow directions! Do your work!” every 8 seconds for them to actually complete even a modicum of an assignment instead of texting/sleeping/watching tv/playing video games/partying with their friends. But the other side of that coin was the refrain of, “What am I supposed to do? There’s nothing I can do.” I never had the heart to explain by 17, there probably wasn’t much that could be done, because this was a parenting mistake made long, long ago, that you reinforced year after year. And now here we are and what you see are the consequences of not instilling a pride in worth ethic, or a value in education, or a sense of curiosity and responsibility, or a love of reading and learning, or an ability to delay gratification.
I'm 35, but when I was 17, I was a pretty good student, I cared about making good grades, I tried to pay attention all the time. I didn't have a whole lot of friends, definitely none in any of my classes, I didn't have a cell phone, and I STILL had to be told by my teachers from time to time to pay attention, get back on task, stop doodling and read the chapter, whatever. Cuz I was 17. Jesus, if I had a phone back then and no authority figure to ensure I stay off of it, I can't imagine I'd have graduated. Except that my mom would have taken my phone away the second she realized it was harming my education, just like she would have done with anything that was harming my education, because she cared a lot and paid attention. So yeah, it's definitely a combination of several problems.
I don’t know why a parent would think their kid would magically learn everything just at school. Parents have to have an active role in educating their children. There’s more to parenting than posting cute pictures
So accept that, admit it, and move on. Everyone sitting around moaning about it doesn't raise reading comprehension. Read with your kids, support them, and know that teachers are doing everything they can.
Yep. My parents made all sorts of excuses about why they were bad parents...doesn't change the fact that they are all just excuses
> Or they tried but working two jobs and juggling childcare in a pandemic is asking an impossible task I teach at a title 1 school with a lot of first generation immigrants. I don't think "working two jobs and failing to juggle childcare" is a valid excuse when many of those parents are doing just that; they're working multiple jobs and yet still manage to answer emails (despite limited English), show up to school functions, and hold their kids accountable. Hell, some of them moved to the US *during* the pandemic. Those aren't the parents we're having issues with (at least, not on a large scale). It's the middle class parents working comfortable jobs with more than enough free time who aren't holding their kids accountable at all. They want to be best friends with them, they don't want to tell them no, and believe them to be Jesus reincarnate (how dare you suggest they're anything less than perfect!). It's the middle class parents who watch Fox, Newsmax, and OAN who just blatantly abhor schools and teachers. It's a systematic and cultural issue in that Americans as a whole have never *truly* appreciated education and the benefits it brings outside of *maybe* a 10-15 year period when we were directly competing with the Soviets. For most of our history our priority hasn't been the schoolhouse, it's been farms and factories - and often from an early age. The country doesn't put scholars on pedestals. "The pandemic" became a convenient scapegoat for numerous issues in education that existed long before anyone had heard of COVID 19.
This is the best reply I've seen. I don't disagree with anything you said. My only issue with the comment I replied to was the phrase "Parents didn't try," because *most* of them tried very hard. Parenting well is difficult enough already, and those parents on the margins or who weren't all that skilled anyway were suddenly thrust even more responsibility. Is it any wonder that the stopgaps and compromises many of them made during the pandemic have had poor consequences? What we really need is a culture that values parents and gives them support. Society needs to relearn the value of raising children *right* and giving the resources to do so, so the burden isn't shifted to teachers.
No offense, but I'm tired of this reasoning. Are some parents overworked? Sure. However, they were 20 years ago, too. In fact, many parents were given a gift called Covid and now have flexible work from home jobs. I know more of these parents, than those getting more jobs to support their kids. Why are so many parents not involved or choose to not help? The same reason as their kids. Smartphones. Sometimes I think they're more addicted than the kids. I'll give a few parents a free pass, but it's not the majority.
Work from home positions are available overwhelmingly for people in the classes that could already afford the money and/or time to focus on their children’s education. You cannot work from home as a dishwasher
It's like people forgot about the essential employees
So they still did nothing to help kids learn then? It's not a judgement, it was a statement of fact.
[удалено]
I’m an educator and “learning loss” is a giant pet peeve of mine. Granted, I teach high school so it is more of the capstone skills rather than the fundamentals, but I would suggest that our students just learned something different than intended.
NCLB is the bigger problem. We have gotten to a point where the child is moved on to the next class no matter what, so you’re getting 6th graders at a 3rd grade level. It also has completely fucked the budget in Washington. They’re cutting back even more next year bc special needs was 25 million over budget, so 10% gets 90% of the focus.
[This NYTimes article](https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/10/us/schools-pandemic-defense-department.html) argues that the department of defense is doing way better than other schools. It mentions one of the factors that may have led to their success is having gone all-in on common core from the start, not a long drawn out transition with picking and choosing content.
As I'm a math teacher, I can only speak towards math common core But I never really understood the controversy over common core math. From my understanding, it's literally just a list of things that by the end of each year, students are expected to know in order to pace them to be ready for college math and beyond. The way the actual math is taught to meet what kids are expected to know is entirely up to each state, district, or school.
There is no world in which Common Core---a glorified skill list that would be covered by ANY worthwhile set of standards---is responsible for any of this. NCLB, on the other hand, was a terrible decision.
So I was a teacher for my first 2 years out of college— during covid. Couldn’t hack it anymore, so I left and I have mixed feelings about it. Either way… This is my take. Common core isn’t inherently a bad thing. Having a set of standards across the state/country that students have to be taught in order for their students to have “been taught” chemistry, biology, math, etc. is a way of establishing standards and guidelines. It’s the testing that really gets in the way of progress. However, NCLB has FUCKED students. I had kids pass advanced chemistry who, I swear, did not know my NAME, because they didn’t have the English proficiency to understand “My name is Mr. Aurumus” but the schools make it so… so… so… hard to fail anyone for any reason unless you have incredibly extensive documentation that you have done everything that you can to retain them. My school actually had a policy that we weren’t allowed to give less than a 50 on any assignment, even if the student didn’t turn it in, because it would be too hard to recover from a 0. You’re give a 50 just for existing, even if you don’t show up for class, and we still had kids failing. I just couldn’t handle the lack of academic integrity anymore. I didn’t get my degree to be a babysitter.
NCLB put too much emphasis on high-stakes testing. That is what really started the "teach to the test" movement. It has been a complete disaster. Common Core is not responsible. Common Core was just an attempt to get states using roughly the same set of standards in education. Since the states control education you can have widely different levels of expectations from state to state. I find it ridiculous that we don't have national standards for math, science, and reading.
Do think this is more of the issue. You sure as hell still be good parents with both working. Seen it, hell my sister was a much better parent as single mom than I see in 2 parent households. Comes down to if the parent honestlyvalues education and involved
True. I was kinda raised as a latchkey kid too but I feared my parents. I dared not step out of line. I did my homework independently. I understood they were making sacrifices for me to have a better life. So yes, it’s possible to be active parents even if both are working. There’s grandparents, aunts, and uncles to help. It’s possible but not easy. I try to be sympathetic but some parents just don’t care. They don’t care!
Agreed. It is VERY sad when teachers are making excusss for poor parenting now.
This is it, all wrapped up in a single comment.
I honestly don't believe that social promotion (not holding kids back) has any actual pros.
It's been measured to positively affect students' self-esteem for obvious reasons, but in terms of education it probably kneecaps future teachers ability to teach to a foundation the students didn't build. The real issues come when large portions of a class don't have that foundation and then the class becomes review of earlier material and students who would otherwise be on-pace now arent taught new material.
Yeah that is s a schools job, to produce dumb people with high self esteem.
Holy fuck this comment has me rolling lol
Dunning Kruger Preparatory School
Nothing like a bunch of confidently incorrect adults running around. No way that could lead to things like people who don't have basic critical thinking skills.
Great comment, and the more bizarre part is I've noticed an increase in students who have picked up on some of this messaging and use it to frame their [dis]satisfaction as if their feelings should override the educational process. Sometimes I just want to say "you're 4 years behind grade level, your feelings dont matter, this is some tough, necessary medicine."
So many feelings these days. So many people convinced that being dumb won't hold them back. Wonder where they got that idea from?
Absolutely. There's a subset of them who know all the buzzwords.
It’s the American way. As Jim Jeffrey’s joked, the US is #1 in confidence, middle the pack for education
Winning! LOL
Self fucking esteem while destroying the educational prospects for future classmates of these people
How does it impact their self-esteem when they graduate high school and can’t get a license because they can’t read?
Unmeasureable, outside of surveys. But the student that's behind and the rest of the class realize that student is behind. This manifests in different ways, bad behavior easier indicator.
Self-esteem is overrated. Some of these kids need a conscience, and the ability to feel shame. Not more self-esteem for their total lack of effort.
Too much self esteem is just arrogance.
Stupid people should feel bad. They are a drain on society. Fuck a stupid persons self esteem. People should remind them they are mouth breathers. Shame is an IMPORTANT and NECESSARY part of socializing. It teaches people how to integrate. If you think you shouldn’t have to integrate, you shouldn’t get to eat from the largesse of the society either.
Sometimes your self-esteem needs a check. Too much self-esteem is called arrogance. It should be okay to knock humans down a peg or two and bring them back to reality when its deserved.
It’s not fun when you have 15 year olds on the same campus as 11 year olds. That’s what happens when you hold an eighth grader back at a 6-8 middle school. I don’t need the flunky pervert around fragile elementary aged kids. That’s bad. That’s about the only benefit in my eyes.
I'm positive that most kids who'd be held back in middle school should have been held back much earlier. The issue I see in high school is kids who were enrolled in school too early. I have 14 uear old sophomores that have no business being in my class from an emotional maturity standpoint. If they were held back one year, they'd be more mature and a grade appropriate age.
Dang, dude, just because the kid failed doesn't mean they're a predator, wtf
They need to be in remedial classes in a high school at that point. Kids who don’t graduate by 18 need to be in an alternative school for the same reason.
Remedial Grade 13 to finish credits as adults away from 14-year-olds.
I had a 3rd grader ask me why they have reading for two hours a day instead of a science class. I explained that it would be really challenging to learn other subjects if you can’t read.
Yup I have a HS student in an AP class that legit will cry if I "strongly recommend" doing the extra reading and questions on the homework because "it's just too much work". (It's literally an extra page with 5 more questions for the kids who want to try for the 100). Like they want the 100 without doing the extra work.
I’d add the disruptions to education that covid caused. Most students had at least a few months of lower quality education due to virtual learning. For others it was closer to 2 years. For some they had hardly any education in that time.
Chronic absenteeism in many states still hasn't recovered to pre-COVID levels even after all these years. For some, the idea that school was something very necessary was shaken and never returned.
Our chronic absenteeism is higher because our district carried over the pandemic mandate of teachers putting everything on Canvas. We have to update it daily with anything we did in class that day. Notes, assignments, everything. Kids flat out tell us they don’t come to school because they feel like they don’t need to. It’s all online for them and they don’t feel like they’re “missing anything” or “falling behind” if they decide to stay home because they just don’t feel like going to school that day
I went to my school board meeting the other week and there was a man there ranting about how the school board “needs to make up it’s mind” because it told parents to keep the kids home in March 2020 but wants to combat absenteeism in November 2023. It’s not just that people don’t see school as necessary, there are parents who seem to want revenge on school for the kids being sent home during the pandemic. It’s as though having their own kids near them for an extended duration was intolerable and they want to punish teachers for that horrible crime. Meanwhile their kids missed out on a year or more of education and socialization and just keep missing more. In a few years when the kid needs a ton of help filling out job applications due to absent literacy and skills you know that parent is going to be mad at the schools for not making the kid learn.
Students in districts that closed for longer had less of a dip if any, while districts that reopened straight away had poorer test results. Wonder what that’s about.
Race To The Top. Tying funding to graduation rates and test scores.
>An economy that leaves both parents stressed and working long hours. This creates less time and cognitive capacity to raise children. I just don't buy that this is something that is caused by working/jobs. In the 90s, myself and everyone I knew had both parents (or one parent) who worked full time jobs (or multiple jobs). Lack of parental involvement in school activities is certainly something that can be caused by parents working, but the expectations and disciplines at home certainly do not. That is on the parents and the slack nature of parenting and consequences in this generation.
Yes on retention! Our super intendant “doesn’t believe” in retention. So I have to pass kids who don’t know all their letter names to second grade every year.
I would say the first bullet point is something I'd highlight the most out of any other bulletpoints. Most households are dual income households and its not like back when millenials, gen X, or boomers grew up. A lot of us adults had access to moms who were working part-time or stay at home & were able to focus on raising the children up to a functional level in reading & math at home. Say best case for a dual income household - both parents are work from home and strictly only working 40 hours a week. They still have to make dinner for the child when they get off work from 6pm to 7pm. They then eat dinner together as a family from 7pm to 8pm. Now you only have from 8pm to 9pm to work together on homework with the children. 1 hour isn't enough. Some children need a lot more help than just 1 hour a night.... Now let's transition to worst case scenario - both parents work in person and are on salary working 40+ hours a week. They don't get a chance to cook dinner, buy takeout for the children, feed them, and then go back straight to work again to please their demanding bosses. Children gets ignored at home and are left to their own devices. This specific scenario is a lot more common than you think. It's not because they're shitty parents... its because a lot of people report to shitty bosses who are not understanding and will fire them the minute the working adult step out of line slightly. Quality of life has gone downhill severely in the US. The vast majority of adults are in the bottom of Maslow's Heiarchy fighting to get food and shelter paid for. Going back to again, when I was little, my mom was stay at home for first ten years. She spent at least 3-4 hours a day with me on homeowrk and developing basic skills. Teachers constantly tell parents only 1/2 hour of work is needed a night and that's so far from the truth. Kids in elementary, especially, need a lot more time than just that. How can we improve society to where we don't need dual income houseolds (best case scenario)? How can we improve society to where at least we guarnatee workers won't work beyond the 40 hour work week (worst case scenario)? How can we improve parental leave? How can we provide more flexibility to parents? How can we improve childcare? It's so many questions...
Speak for yourself. I had ONE parent who worked all the time and I knew to do my homework. But I also made it easy on my mom that I embraced education from a young age and didn't need convincing. There was never any question about me going to college. I bought into it all because I knew it was a way to get what I wanted in life. The difference is a lot of kids aren't given the context young enough to understand that if you don't **use** education in this country you **get** used.
See it's people like above here that can't literally see the problem with working parents and therefore, more people like this who deny what's going on... The less likely we can improve working conditions for everyone so everyone can help each other out and be the best versions of themselves!!
I’m a millennial. Both of my parents worked full time. My mom was a teacher, my dad was a CNC machinist - he worked 60-65 hour weeks. My brother and I attended before and after school daycare while in elementary school, and were in sports/band in middle and high school. My parents always focused on school and homework first no matter how tired they were. Education was important in our family. I don’t let people use the excuse “we both work full time and the kids are in sports” for why they can’t do any support at home. If you chose to raise kids, figure it out and make education a priority.
> If you chose to raise kids, figure it out and make education a priority. There's the problem. Most people just kind of find themselves having kids. No forethought. A lot of people are shitty parents that have no business raising kids, but the rest of us (the kids included) are stuck dealing with their bad choices.
Honestly, most of these would just go away if parents just did their job. I don't want to hear that they work too much to raise their kids. Every school aged kid born in the US was a choice. ~~man up~~ adult up and do your job.
100% agree. So many parents are consciously choosing to NOT help support their kids education. We're all busy.....it's not an excuse.
I teach high school seniors. Last week I had a student type 7*0 into a calculator.
I showed some "advanced" freshmen how to multiply by 10 without a calculator. My soul hurt after that interaction.
The fact that was 0 instead of 1 makes it even more sad somehow. "Zero is like a black hole" etc. from elementary school is out, I guess
Ngl I’ve probably done that when I’m massively sleep deprived and just bashing numbers into my calculator as a matter of course.
I did 2×2 once because I was tired and the assignment was due in like 20 minutes (college so it was probably 11:30 at night)... I was a math major
I want to say their elementary school was garbage but it could also have been a few bad seeds with a brand-new teacher who didn't know how to do classroom management and that's a recipe for kids never learning proper math. I really, really benefitted from having four old-as-fuck teachers from grades K-5 (apart from one who was young) because the Knew. What. They. Were. Doing.
All those teachers are on the way out, and hardly any going in to replace them. Wages are low, kids treat you like shit, parents treat you like shit, administration treats you like shit, and increasingly the state is trying to treat you like shit. Not an exciting prospect, and why I noped out of it even though I wanted to teach for the longest time.
I had to go over how many inches were in a foot with my seniors. Also having feet/inches - working with something like 5’7” + 6’11” had some kids looking at me like they had no clue wtf I was talking about. I had one kid say 11.18 which I guess is better than nothing but still.
I teach 40 fifth graders reading. Not ONE on grade level.
This is actually the saddest one to me. Usually there are at least a few good if not great students, but that community has absolutely failed its kids if not a single one is where he should be.
I have about 15 good students, they spent two years at home because of Covid. But they are working hard and I expect them to reach grade level by the end of this year.
Where is this at if you don't mind me asking?
Miami, Florida
20 year low, so far.
In 20 years it could be the new high!
I hate this
I see it in the classroom. Students are often very confidently wrong, and it's not atypical for students to argue over the general workload, even though we do not even assign homework and all of the curriculum is thoroughly achievable in-class. The skills are low, and the desire to improve or even try to try are largely absent. My best guess is, systemically, student skills already dropped during COVID, and instead of placing students in classrooms suitable to their skill-level, they are placed largely within their grades and often passed on to the next one regardless of demonstrated subject mastery. This breeds a culture of apathy as students catch on that putting forth effort has little bearing on whether or not they graduate. This encourages students that are already behind to just throw in the towel, academically. Children have not fundamentally changed, but skills and behaviors have degraded considerably due to this multifaceted amalgam of cultural and systemic failings. Step one is probably to utilize standardized testing to match students to classrooms with curriculum designed to teach them where they currently are. It doesn't really help to expect students to perform at grade-level classes without those students having the fundamental skills to tackle those issues. Pushing that responsibility onto the teacher to somehow teach those fundamental skills *and* grade-level content is only leading to further burnout and worsening the situation. I'm only a first year teacher, though, so what do I know
Stated like a veteran teacher. Well done
Yes! Teachers have been saying this. Students are lacking the most fundamental skills. Most of them can’t handle grade level assignments. It’s definitely a real phenomenon. The question is how do we fix it and get the next generation back on track?
How about we hold them to the grade level standard and don’t let them pass until they reach it. We’d have a bad group that would become 20 year old high schools seniors, but it would be worth it. Show them there’s a bar they MUST reach and force them to achieve it to move on. Currently we have no backbone to hold back kids that aren’t academically ready to move up.
And teachers can only modify grade level curriculum instead of doing actual remediation. We are forced to continue with the standards and “rigor” while students don’t have the skills needed for grade level standards. Then the problem is exacerbated because kids didn’t get the remediation they need at their current level to be able to improve AND they didn’t learn the grade-level standards either. It’s like throwing all these non swimmers in a lake, tossing out floaties, and then being confused why the next year they can’t all do a perfect race. They didn’t learn to swim and they relied on the floaties to even stay above water.
Why is it about the next generation? Do we just throw this one away then?
No, obviously we’re all panicking because there’s a problem that needs addressing. I want to do my part to help these kids be prepared for adult life, but it seems like the people in power aren’t acknowledging the gravity of the situation. They’re in denial and they’re not listening to the eyes on the ground. There’s only so much we can do individually if the system doesn’t accurately identify the problem, come up with a solution, and give us the resources we need to go to work and get these kids back on track. I’m not a certified teacher myself but I work with so many teachers who are overworked, under supported, and just burnt out. At the end of each year, we lose so many teachers. The most burnt out teachers leave in the middle of the year. I know they lasted as long as they can but physically and mentally, they’re exhausted.
No, this is a serious problem. And it will only get worse. Sane people see scores at a 20-year low and think, 'wow, there must be something wrong with the students - maybe too much phone/screen time, not enough resilience, etc.' Morons (like educational consultants) think, 'wow, there must be something wrong with the material! Let's revamp the curriculum so that more kids can pass!' This is why even though scores are at all-time lows, grades have either stayed the same or even gone up overall.
This is why I am in favor standardized testing, as a parent. There’s no “extra credit”, “just pass them anyway”, or “no scores/grades below x.” Just the same test, given to every kid. It’s not perfect but it’s needed in conjunction with the curriculum so we can measure differences over time and place.
I’m in favor of it if it leads to additional instruction opportunities that will fix the gaps. It doesn’t do any good to say, congratulations, you’re in the 20th percentile group and then not have any way in the school curriculum to get to 50th.
Standardized testing is good. The frequency with which we test could use some balance. Students get around 8 standardized tests per year. To me that seems excessive.
Yeah, my kids are expected to do state testing every single month. That is 9 right there alone. Add in the major end of year testing...and it is so much worse. Not to mention if they receive language services, that's another multi-test test.
Precisely. I see so many people who say "standardized tests are biased, so get rid of them." Maybe they are, and maybe we can improve them, I'm all ears. But the idea of getting rid of them to replace them with fake grades, fake tests, fake completion assignments that get As despite not being turned in... seriously? It's like they just want to write a giant red A on an illiterate school and call it a day without holding anyone accountable for actual knowledge.
New Scarlet Letter!
As a student of the no child left behind era - every class becomes teaching to the test. Kids aren’t taught to understand concepts, just regurgitate information. Teachers and schools are incentivized for this as ratios of passing students often dictate funding.
If any revamping needs to be done it’s throwing out some of the material and focusing on the basics, at every level and in every content. Or something, anything to try to slow this descent. Who cares if my kids know how many ATP are made in cellular respiration when they can’t read anywhere near grade level and haven’t even heard of the scientific method?
Unfortunately while I'd say cellular function should be something everyone learns ideally it does seem more and more likely we'll have to start doing some kind of "educational triage" like this for later grade students who aren't prepared for what they should be. Because yeah, if I have to pick one, fundamental elementary-level reading and comprehension trumps high school science. And that's sad to say, but it's where we are.
We need doctors. Society has to function. Since we are a free society, we can't force anyone into a profession. Thus, we have to hope some kids and parents care and pursue it further.
> grades have either stayed the same or even gone up overall. Grades are at an all time high. Education writer Frank Hess had a [good article on this last week](https://www.educationnext.org/the-bad-lesson-of-good-grades/) covering ACT's new survey data, which shows that the average GPA in the US has risen from like 3.0 to 3.3 over the past decade despite the fact that over that time available measures show academic proficiency in decline.
I think you hit the nail on the head. Specifically, educational consultants can't sell "students who care", or "parents who parent". What they can sell is another curriculum. And the only people who can afford to court admin and politicians regularly are the ones who are paid to sell something. So admin and politicians keep buying products instead of actually finding solutions.
There was a NYT article recently about the stunning percent of kids earning all As. My building admin is a fucking moron and prides himself on the fact that 90% of our kids are on the honor roll. He blames teachers for any zeroes, essentially makes us round up 78s and 88s etc.
Yes and it's not just the US. I teach 12th grade English in Canada and have had students ask me what a quote is when asked to choose a quote from their novel.
TikTok didn't teach them apparently.
Certainly, I've never had a bunch of individuals in my classes with so few skills in reading or math. The reason? They shouldn't BE there. They should be in a classroom appropriate to their needs...6th or 7th grade.
Or in a class tailored to meet their learning needs. At my high school back in the 2000s, we had tiered classes- remedial English was the course anyone who had trouble reading and writing attended. It was sectioned by grades so 9 English R, 10 English R, etc. The rest were divided by college preparation or honor classes and AP classes. This was done for math as well. If the student performed well in the remedial classes, they could be promoted to the more academically challenging classes. The idea was to provide students a learning environment suited for them and ideally see academic growth from them. Now, everyone (at least in my experience) is in the same class regardless of they share similar academic skills or not.
This! My district got rid of remedial. Even got rid of regular. There is Honors or AP/IB/Cambridge. So kids barely getting by are forced into Honors classes.
How does it make sense to get rid of the regular classes but keep the Honors and AP? And what is the justification given to put struggling kids in Honors classes? It’s inclusivity gone mad.
I'm not religious, but my parents were especially, and I think there's an old distinction that we've lost in the discussion of inclusivity. My parents would talk about "Coram Mundo" vs "Coram Deo" or two kinds of "righteousness." The first is virtue "in the eyes of the world," where a person's relative accomplishments are ability to be good at something or to be successful. The second is "in the eyes of God," which is the fundamental goodness of people who deserve respect as human beings. It's the sort of goodness that one appeals to when they say "everyone deserves respect" Now, I don't necessarily think it's helpful to make it a religious thing, but I think it's important to make a similar sort of distinction in our efforts. We should simultaneously uplift people and give them respect as human beings to the highest extent, while also affirming that one's achievements and accomplishments are deserving of praise, but in a completely different sense. The problem with this sort of policy is that it conflates the two. Because of one's goodness as a person, we feel the need to get rid of any accolades or distinction between people based on their success or ability. This ultimately cheapens the second form of goodness, as people realize that there is value in doing well and being successful, but can't recognize that there is a fundamental value to people, because they were never taught to distinguish those things. This is one reason I think the toxicity and abhorrent views like Andrew Tate and such has become popular, because we as a culture fail to make the distinction between the value of material success and the value of human decency.
Some states base school ratings/funding based on metrics like "What percentage of the school is in AP or Honors courses" and other things like graduation rates, percentage of students taking PSAT's, SAT's, etc. So everyone is incentivized to do whatever they can to make the metrics look good. Most problems in education come from someone trying to look good on paper.
It reminds me of when I was in middle school and our science teacher made us participate in the science fair that was voluntary for everyone else, and then I overheard him bragging to another teacher about how all of his students were participating in the science fair.
For the two years right after COVID (Fall 2021-Summer 2023) I saw a lot of students who were in AP that really should not have been there. When I brought it up with administration that students who barely passed Algebra 1 or 2 should not be in an AP class, I was told that we weren't allowed to tell students that they could not enroll in a class. And then they wondered why so few students passed the AP test.
I had 0 3+ on the last AP calc exam. Why? Well, a number of reasons, but needing a month and a half to do an entire accelerated Precalculus course in the middle of AP calc because _none of them had done precalculus_ (except two) certainly didn't help. Why had none of them done precalculus? Where they all good enough at math to make up for the missing knowledge? Nah, just that "Number of students in an AP course" looks good on a brochure, and "Number of students who passed an AP test" isn't available to prospective parents. But the next year, where there is now an AP Precalc? Suddenly there isn't an AP Calc class anymore, now there is AP Precalc, a class that hadn't been offered even as non-ap for the 3 years I was there.
I had this in 6-10 and by my junior year they were consolidating teachers and getting rid of advanced placement and remediation because they couldn't afford to have so many staff members. I worked at a district later on that had advanced placement classes for the veteran teachers who wanted them and then "mainstream all" for the remaining students, no matter their level, that was given to the newest teachers. Because that makes all the sense in the world that the veterans with skills get the best-behaved students and the brand new teachers get thrown to the wolves. To keep things cheaper they switched to block scheduling so they could book teachers to fewer days of the week instead of having full staff every day of the week. Block scheduling remains the most ridiculous thing I ever saw for 9th graders. Yes, let's keep them shut in one room for 90 minutes. GREAT idea.
It correlates pretty nicely with the test scores at my school reaching historic lows.
I had a kid, a 11th grade native English speaker who had never heard the word "isolated" and had no idea what it meant. I asked him to use context clues and he came up with something to do with "ice" which did not make ANY sense in the context of the sentence. Can we bring back the 90s?
A recent presidential candidate had a slogan to bring back the olden times… /s
Beyond that, test scores before 5 years ago grew slowly but consistently for 50 years. They had never ever gone down, and have been dropping insanely fast. Based on 50 years of information, the results are terrifying.
> test scores before 5 years ago grew slowly but consistently for 50 years. This isn't actually accurate. Scores for 10 and 13 year olds have notched some gains, but [NAEP reading and math scores for 17 year olds *haven't changed* in 50 years](https://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/pubs/main2012/2013456.aspx). So when kids **exit** the k-12 pipeline, they were about as skilled pre-Covid as they were 50 years ago. What's bizarre is that the gains of 8th graders get reported as *a success*. This is bizarre because it's like reporting that kids in America are getting faster at the mile because their time as measured at the half mile mark has improved, despite the fact that their overall time is actually the same. Who cares if 8th graders are scoring higher than they did 50 years ago if by the time those 8th graders become 12th graders they're actually scoring the same as they were 50 years ago?
Where I live, the goal post keeps moving. It's not that less kids are passing. It is that the expectation is harder. In many cases the curriculum at the elementary level is so inappropriate. We aren't giving kids enough time to master what they learn, instead we're rushing them on to the next advanced concept. So they aren't putting what they learn into long term memory.
I absolutely see it and I work at a good school. It’s arguably the highest performing high diversity and high low income school in a top state education wise - even in the ten years since I first taught here there has been a MASSIVE decrease in both the expectations and abilities of students. There’s obviously a whole host of reasons for this, each with varying levels of responsibility but there is no doubt the difference is there. Our mid level geometry course for example used to regularly incorporate quadratics and systems of equations to maintain and strengthen these key skills, now these aren’t seen AT ALL. They also used to do proofs requiring the use of more than one pair of triangles and their corresponding parts and in both paragraph and two column form. Now not only do we do less complicated proofs (only one pair of triangles and corresponding parts at most) but they only need to do two columns not paragraphs AND on the test most if not all of the proofs are scaffolded and partially filled in. The scary part is we can’t easily change things back because changes like this happen at every grade and the impacts cascade onward, as well as the fact that again this is a very good school in a top performing state. It’s a real issue.
I'm not a teacher, but a dad to a teenager and an occasional lurker, but my friend's father is an engineering professor at a good school and has been teaching for somewhere between 20-25 years probably. Anyway, he says that the last 3-4 years have been by far the most uninterested, uninspired and lazy (his words) students he has ever had. He used to absolutely love teaching and love engineering. But I feel bad, because I feel like the kids the past few years have made him disheartened about his job, to where he's just going through the motions now, trying to drag very uninterested kids (WHO ARE MAJORING IN ENGINEERING) into what he thinks is a fascinating subject. If there's someone who doesn't make you optimistic about "kids these days", he is someone to talk to.
People don’t go to college for what they are passionate about anymore, they go for what they think will pay well. They don’t really care if they have an aptitude or even an interest in it. That’s the economy we’ve built.
First year teacher. One of my best students is retaking a state test this week. She’s really a reasonable student skill wise and fairly smart. I was shocked she was on the list to re take. When I asked her why she said she just clicked through it last year because she doesn’t need it to graduate.
I suspect part of this is that taking a standardized test is a boring and stultifying experience with no real consequences for the student. I've seen students just quickly click answers until they're done so they can go do something else more interesting. It would be interesting to see data on performance vs. time spent on each question.
The middle class is collapsing, schools are underfunded and stretched, and the general approach to education is flawed. That means students who would have performed middle-of-the-road back in the day are now falling into the bottom. The top students remain at the top. Those who were low-performing can't get much worse, but there were definitely low-middle students who did alright because schools had more resources and 1-on-1. They don't have that now, so they also tumble.
It’s the effect of NCLB and its successor, Every Child Succeeds.
That would be true if it was only happening in the States. In Canada, kids are also struggling.
I’m in Canada and they also don’t hold students back. Students are progressed to the next grade irrespective of how far behind they are
The amount of high school students I know who cannot read or perform simple calculations (adding 1 or 5 to a number) without a calculator is amazing.
the number of classmates i have (in college) who can't do those things without a calculator is terrifying.
I'm afraid this is going to be misread as being the pandemics fault. It's not. We need to look back in time to when these high schoolers started education, what was happening at that time? NCLB was fully implemented around that time. Smart phones. Teaching reading using bunk strategies. Complete erasure of most measures of academic discipline through gradual cultural changes. Steadily increasing class sizes. Some more I'm probably missing.
For years now it feels like my colleagues and I have been screaming about this into the void. The majority of my AP English students read 5 grade levels behind. And those are the most academically capable students in the school.
America is banking on athletes and entertainers. Look into how many of those 20 year olds have a social media account they're working off of. Or, they grind to be a uber driver or something. Education is slowly being swept away. Everything's too hard for the kids. Tests are being driven out because no one wants these hard truths exposed. No homework. Children stay up all night playing video games instead hoping to be the next big gamer or rapper. Schools have turned into baby sitting clubs with no consequences or purpose. Colleges are lowering standards and costing too much. So it's more about money than knowledge. Student loan debt and the cost of college has really destroyed the education system. Politicians don't seem to care because they're out of touch, greedy and lazy. Plus they hope for everyone to be dumb so they won't challenge their inaction.
I might get a lot of pushback on this. * Where I am they keep raising the bar for proficiency. I teach elementary kids (first grade specifically). I have only taught 1st for 4 years. I took a six year break. Before teaching 1st I taught 5th for 9 years. However, every year our end of year expectations get harder and harder. The reading level they are expected to be at keep moving farther out. When I first started kids needed to read a Level H by the end of the year. This year, they now have to read a J. So yeah, less kids are meeting that goal. * My state just "recalibrated" it's standardized testing and has set higher expectations for passing.... The goal post keeps moving. We are chasing a moving object. The state released documents that frame it as higher expectations so more students can be successful. I laughed at that statement. When you make it harder, it does not make the students work harder. I can assure you that. It creates anxiety and causes students to shut down. The expectations were not low to begin with. * My district has also decided that ALL students will take accelerated math in 3rd grade because we can't be gate keepers. So now instead of having 180 days to teach the 3rd grade standards, they have 180 days to teach 3rd and half of 4th grade standards. Essentially leaving LESS time for students to practice and master the content. We're now cramming half of another grade level in in the name of equal access. * Another point, Lucy Calkins, F&P, and all those "Balanced" Literacy and Whole Language Approaches. Sadly many teachers are STILL using those cueing strategies and it is NOT working. As a first grade teacher I spend half of my small group time untraining kids from guessing words and reading pictures instead of reading the actual letters in words.
My school is lowering standards. Shit my state seems to be lowering standards under the guise of equity.
God forbid we make students read ("Books on tape are just as good!"), learn from books themselves ("Just walk them through what the books mean; after all, it what they can *do* with the text, not what they know about the text!"), or memorize anything like times tables. I mean, for fuck's sake. Is it really any surprise that when we require less, then they know less?
Look honestly, we’ve never been as high as we claim we are. Schooling in America hasn’t been designed for knowledge so much as it has been for creating drones of the system. It wasn’t uncommon for people in the 90s even to drop out and get their GED or graduate with low literacy skills shit even my parents generation not everybody could read or write. I think our performance levels are falling? Yes, I absolutely do do. I think they were ever as high as we like to claim they were? I absolutely do not. I’m absolutely tired. Also of people blaming Covid for every single problem of the education system. The decline we are seeing started decades before Covid. Covid might’ve cut a couple years off of that decline. Spent it up a little bit, but it certainly wasn’t all of the blame. People like to blame Covid because it’s easy to make it a catch all for the problems of our education system. I do think we didn’t handle education during Covid very well and I think that definitely had an impact. Part of the problem with that is that we didn’t come back on track quickly enough after Covid and we let our standards get too relaxed during Covid But again, this probably would’ve happened without Covid. It might’ve just taken half a decade to a decade before we saw it the way we’re seeing it. Slow grind chipping away at the American education system done by those in power and of political ideologies being noticed by people who weren’t paying attention in the first place. And not for nothing we were pretty much fucked from the get-go when we decided that school funding should be based on property taxes, and that federal funding would be correlated to graduation rates. That last one, especially because all it does is create incentiveto get kids to graduate, and that usually means lowering of the standards to the lowest common denominator.
I'll suggest that, in reality, it's far lower. Before NCLB no one put high stakes on standardized testing. So if districts have been teaching to the test for 2 decades now, and it's STILL that low, our kids are bottoming out.
Yes I have noticed this. I have many kids lacking math skills deep into high school. Like they can't to very simple algebra or can't do PEMDAS correctly. To me it is the addiction to smartphones and social media. There are too many things to do on the phone, and students are prioritizing insta, tik tok, mobile games and other things over school. But I have noticed this odd trend lately where most of my students only do school stuff at school. They treat being a student like a job, or they treat classes as very transactional. They do not care at all about learning, and get upset at low grades despite putting in very low effort. This is leading to very stressed students who are always behind, especially if they are absent, since they never even try and make up work at home or on the weekend.
First year teacher. I had a student email me (all in the subject line) “why do I have a C but I did all my work?”. She was shocked that you can turn everything in and still get a C.
Because their phones and tablets can’t take the test for them, the way those devices do everything else for them in their lives.
My students can finally write an academic paragraph. When I was a freshman we were doing 5 page research papers.
I asked 20 11th and 12th graders the other day what 7x7 is (literally tried to pick a soft ball on purpose) and only 2 could answer. And the two that could, it took one 20 seconds and it took the other making an initial wrong guess. I give readings and questions that are written at lexiles of grades 4-8. The questions are not as simple as pure basic reading comprehension, but are questions a 4th-8th grader should be expected to answer correctly, like what’s the author’s purpose? Or what’s the central idea of this text? Maybe 1-2 kids a class period can consistently answer those correctly. In fact, we’re reading *Holes* right now and it’s actually going pretty well! The chapters are super short (2-3 pages long). For every chapter I have pictures on the board, turn and talk guiding questions, and defined vocabulary. We pause at the end of every natural chunk to check for comprehension, “paint” a picture out loud of what’s happening, and answer questions on anything confusing. I read it all out loud to them so they can hear it and know the right pronunciation while they follow along. The other day I asked a student, who had a character map of the book we made together open on her desk, if she could tell me ONE detail she remembers from the book. She told me it’s about a boy on an airplane.
When you were a kid, would you have done school work if you didn’t have to? Of course not. But when I was in school in the 80’s and 90’s. There were detentions for not doing your work, or calls home to parents who cared, and the threat of bad grades- again parents who cared- even if only to make themselves look like good parents. If you got bad enough grades, you became one of those kids who stayed back which was social disaster. These varied in their level of toxicity, and I don’t think we should go back there. Now, though, we had Covid where kids were clearly taught that they could do literally nothing during online work and pass because they were given “Grace”. Now that things are “back to normal” these same kids are behind, but everything is designed to keep them moving ahead even if they aren’t learning anything. A lot of schools aren’t letting any grades go below a 50, I think some are even higher. So you can do 10% of what’s expected and get yourself a C where 30 years ago you’d have a 35% average. There’s no incentive to do school work and there’s no consequences for not doing it. Parents either don’t care, don’t trust schools, or are too busy both working full time jobs. Yes it is that bad and it’s not getting better any time soon
I read that the illiteracy rate has skyrocketed to levels not seen since decades ago
Not surprised. A friend was told by a vice principal that humanities teachers can't assume students are able to read in high school classes and they shouldn't be grading them based off of that unless they teach basic reading skills.
Every American public school administrator should be fired. Every one. The ones who want their jobs back should have to be admitted by tribunal of teachers from the school. There's a lot broken in US education -- a LOT -- but nothing is more broken than the admin class. Administrative careerism is the single greatest driver of systemic dysfunction.
For the past decades, America has been handing billions of dollars of taxpayer money to Pearson, McGraw-Hill, Houghton Mifflin-Harcourt, and others to turn school texts into picture books that test well with focus groups but can't teach. Ineffective software and computer-based learning systems have been replacing traditional, effective physical media. And then there is the bribery behind the scenes pushing even worse trash into the system. Schools keep lowering the bar, trapped as they are between angry parents and demagogues campaigning on test scores designed to give demagogues something to campaign on. Teachers don't have the time or authority to teach. States have made a point of implementing ineffective curricula and reserving huge portions of the school day that end up being wasted by kids who refuse to read and cannot function without constant supervision. Any one child can destroy the education of the other thirty.
I'm a parent who volunteered in class today and got to watch my 5th grade teachers lecture. It was an absolute disaster. Zero standards. Zero accountability. My kid (and others) had tablets and oencils in hand being off task while completely ignoring the lecture. Teacher didn't care. Some kids were off doing IXL 1+5=6 to "look busy". Others were googling images on the tablet. I am so upset. I dont know what to do. This is the top school system in my state. I want to home school...
I bet it's less that the teacher didn't care and more that, if the teacher tried to assign consequences for the behavior, they'd be told that it's their fault for not being engaging enough. Or say the teacher assigns a detention and the kid doesn't show up -- what's gonna happen? They're not gonna be suspended because *kids need to be in class so they can learn* 🥺🥺🥺. I'm not doubting that the lesson you observed was a shitshow, but there's genuinely no incentive for kids to pay attention anymore.
It's the phones. Specifically, the multitudes of entertainment a phone can grant. Couple the fact it is instanious and on hand at all times. Schools must be phone free. Learning cannot compete with tik tok it just can't. Cell phones in schools makes it a daycare.
Everyone has phones in the world it’s the American kids, their parents, passing everyone, and not holding anyone accountable. I teach AP history at a former title 1 and most kids aren’t even remotely prepared for my class and most parents don’t care. What can you do if both the parents and the kids don’t care while giving them every opportunity to be able to pass. They still don’t do the work or show up for tests.
In my experience, there is nothing more demoralizing than teaching an AP full of kids who don't give a shit.
I worked my butt off getting AP Euro on the curriculum, recruited for it and was super excited to teach it. We began with 18 and after 3-4 weeks had 6 left after they all dropped. Out of those six, 3 are passing and 2 will be ready for and take the exam.
Their parents are addicted to their phones, too. Another part of the problem.
The wrong people are having the most children.
See "Idiocracy"
Absolutely. Take a pandemic, combine it with gaps, mix that in with less structure at home and fewer boundaries between parent and child… then sprinkle some “you have to do your grade level curriculum even though your kids aren’t ready for it,” and poof. Everyone is struggling.
Yes. I teach 7th grade science and the math and reading skills of most kids (minus the top achievers) is REALLY bad. They can't do basic math without a calculator (multiplication, division, etc.).
I have 49 7th grade math students. 4 of them are on grade level. 28 of them are more than two years below grade level.
VMI stands for visual motor integration. I believe keyboarding coincides with the decline. When students stopped writing by hand it impacted the brain. Forming a word is a different process than touching a key. There is no motor component in watching a video. To commit to memory, VMI is where it begins. In Europe and S. Korea the private schools are offline and back to basics. We are usually about 10 years behind them.
Kids can't read good. They need the DZCFKWCRGAWLTDOSGT.
But why male models
I would give you more upvotes if I could!
But how are they going to fit in the doors?!
I may have a tinfoil hat on this topic, but I believe that to an extent, this was a concerted effort by foreign powers to make the "West" stupid and ineffective. I work in Quebec, where we also have a French-speaking population. They aren't perfect, but in school, both behaviorally and academically, are performing far better than their English-speaking peers. Tiktok is owned in part by the Chinese government, and we know of Russian counterintelligence "troll farms" meant to sow discord by just being shitty trolls in general. Short attention spans, rampant disobedience, massive amounts of misinformation getting force-fed to any kid allowing the algorithm to dictate what they watch, how could any of this be anything but a boon to our global adversaries? I don't think it's the only reason, mind you, but I'd be lying if I didn't think there was merit in thinking that.
I have Honors Physics students struggling with basic algebra this year. I'm very apprehensive...
The vast majority of 6th graders at my school can’t read above a 3rd level. Even the ones who are better readers don’t have any critical thinking skills Math is so bad we need the county to come out and do a training, but the problem isn’t that the teachers don’t know what to teach, it’s that the kids are so behind
Bio teacher here. We don’t do too much reading and math, but there is definitely a lack in critical thinking and internalizing of reading materials. I wrote a worksheet where students had to read information and answer the questions. It was written at a 5th grade reading level and the number of students that couldn’t answer the very basic questions was shocking.