Tablets/Phones/screen time disables cognitive abilities of kids and reduces them to dumb clicking machines.
Schools were doing pretty lousy job before proliferation of screens, and I have little hope they can do anything better. The recent dumbing down the math curriculum is just a last straw to keep students not failing on paper.
I haven't followed up in a while, but last I did the research indicates that digital media generally underperform good old-fashioned print books in terms of learning outcomes.
They're certainly more enjoyable and easier to breeze through, which is a large factor behind their popularity. But I suspect that that might also be why they're less good for learning. Cognitive load is an important factor in forming strong memories of things you're studying, and optimal levels of cognitive load are inherently uncomfortable.
When I first learned to code, google had yet to be founded and we had no internet. I had to go to the library and buy books that were much too hard for me and bang my head against the crt monitor until I got things to work.
Now I have access to YouTube tutorials, hacker news, reddit forums, personalized instruction via AI... and I still feel like sitting down with a book, a pen and a notebook or a disconnected computer with a compiler is the way I learn best.
Problem is, it doesn't feel efficient. At my age I have too many pressures to learn as efficiently as possible but not necessarily as deeply as possible. And doing both might well be impossible.
It's possible, too, that a distinction needs to be made between "thoroughly learning" and "familiarizing". Or something like that? I'm not sure we have good words for this in English.
But yeah, sometimes I just need a quick overview of something, and it's perfectly fine (maybe even good) if I forget 90% of the details. I feel like this actually describes a lot of learning later in one's tech career. It's hard to predict what knowledge is worth retaining in a vacuum. Fumbling with it at work, though, is a great signal.
For fundamental skills, though? I'm kind of surprised how little "instinct" for programming undergraduates and recent graduates that I mentor have nowadays. I'm part of the last generation to go through CS programs at a time when programming assignments were often done on pencil and paper. For some classes the development tools we used were only available in a computer lab, and a decent proportion of students didn't even own their own computers. It was decidedly Not Fun, but those of us who went through it seem to have an easier time mentally "compiling and running" code as they read it.
> I haven't followed up in a while, but last I did the research indicates that digital media generally under perform good old-fashioned print books in terms of learning outcomes.
I bet a lot of that has to do with the fact that you cant open a new tab in a book to watch youtube or browse the web. You're stuck with whatever book you decided to open.
Yeah, but I grew up in a rural county in Virginia where when we first moved there, the county library was a carrel of used paperbacks in the basement of the old courthouse --- some sort of book, even if on a screen should be way better than no book.
How do e-ink e-book readers fare? I do pretty well reading every evening on my Kindle Paperwhite, and have a fair quantity of notes on my Kindle Scribe, as well as using it for reference for technical subjects.
Whatever happened with "One Laptop Per Child"? Apparently it's now an Android tablet?
I would guess that ebooks are fine. It's been a long time since I looked into this, but as I recall the important distinction the research found was more like, "Multimedia purely for the sake of multimedia seems to be verschilmmbessern, because it tends to inhibit the kinds of deep cognitive processing that lead to effective encoding."
"Screens = bad" seems to be, as far as I can tell, the kind of unhelfpul massive oversimplification that always happens when science gets filtered through the rumor mill. Because the truth is too nuanced to make for a fun anecdote you can tweet or share in light social conversation.
Project Gutenberg and the matching audiobook effort at Librivox are two of the best things on the internet (and I say that as a person who struggled to get corrections accepted by PG, but fortunately, Michael S. Hart, the founder intervened).
>Whatever happened with "One Laptop Per Child"? Apparently it's now an Android tablet?
It was a pretty huge failure. They couldn't produce a laptop as cheap as they initially wanted, power infrastructure to recharge them was just not there, and most importantly, the prime belief of "just give everyone a computer and education will magically improve" of technologists has not born out at all.
The vast majority of "technology" that got injected into classrooms has had zero impact. Your average teacher is not given the time, material, money, or experience to leverage the technology in a way that multiplies their ability to educate.
My mother is a renowned teacher in the state, since about the late 80s, and lived through both the proliferation of technology in education in general, and specifically the "MLTI" program that gave every single Maine middle school student a personal iBook laptop to use. In the 80s, she learned how to program BASIC in school. In the 90s, she used the nascent internet, before Google, to research my sister's medical condition to discover treatments and support and resources despite literal poverty and living 500 miles from the nearest hospital that even had familiarity with the problem. In the 2000s, she digitized her gradebook and started to keep in touch with parents through regular email, and learned how to use digital tools to build tests and homework assignments. During the 2010s, she had an entire corpus of digital test systems that could autogenerate completely new and distinct tests from a single click. Over COVID, she attempted to teach herself OBS to improve the production quality of her remote lessons. Despite her empirical experience with tech in education, despite her outright buy-in of new techniques to improve her teaching, despite her willingness to learn new methods, none of it really improved her ability to teach a body of students a lesson.
The vast majority of teachers in all the schools in northern Maine had less aptitude with tech than she did and barely used any of the tech, and NONE of their lessons were less useful for it. The best use of "tech" I experienced during education was ONE teacher using a shared notebook application to digitize their entire lesson into digital notes that were automatically distributed to the class in a nice way that could be referenced, and that did not educate students better than a Xerox'd handout.
Tech is simply not a force multiplier in education. It's almost entirely a farce in fact. Khan academy has probably helped a few people improve their understanding on a few topics, but it's been two decades since Ivy League colleges first offered massively open online classes, and they have not moved any needle on education, as this very article shows.
The reality is that motivated people who want to learn haven't been hurting for information access since the proliferation of public libraries. Even in my shithole, dead end rural town, we had a Carnegie library that could borrow a book on any topic from most other libraries across the country. Any book that existed could be yours within a week or so. By the 90s, digital encyclopedias were in vogue and also pretty good.
The primary difficulty in teaching children anything is motivation. You can't really teach a child that doesn't want to learn. Kids in the US want to learn less than they previously did. Part of this is that education is no longer seen as an easy way to money, with those kids instead thinking they'll just become fortnite streamers or influencers or grifters. The large cohort of children of evangelical and fundamentalist families have never had it easier to deny things taught to children either, as we are seeing an outright anti-intellectualism we haven't seen since the scopes-monkey trial. Kids see their parents diss education. Kids don't think education is important.
I just want to say that Khan Academy can't be compared to major universities releasing some of their content in a spotty way. Khan Academy provides a complete pedagogical treatment for elementary math.
No, no, no. We can't be in 2024 post COVID and wondering why we can't just say "Oh look, a laptop and world class pedagogical videos, go ahead." Because every other educator, administrator, parent, and entrepreneur has tried this.
We all know that Khan Academy is top class material, but it's not even close to enough.
i mean, that would be excellent, but that's not what children will use the internet for when unsupervised and immature. there's nothing wrong with accessing educational texts or using computers as classroom/teaching aids.
kids under a certain age should not have an internet-connected dopamine dispenser in their pocket as it is incredibly detrimental to their development.
Maybe set up a society where intellectual effort and achievement is rewarded and teachers get paid well enough to make being knowledgeable seem a laudable thing?
I think we are observing a shift of tectonic proportions in the opposite direction that is picking up steam each year, at least from the US perspective: flat earth movement, vaccine skepticism, climate change denial, “you don’t need college” meme, anti-intellectualism of the sort of “your educated opinion is no better than my pulled out of the ass opinion”, defunding of public education, calls to eliminate Department of Education… I could probably name more, but this seems like enough.
And this before we get into structural things that seem to be designed to thwart the goals of advancing knowledge economy: soaring costs of higher education, making college loans non dischargeable in bankruptcy, schools unable to eject disruptive students that are at the same time burdened with security preparedness caused by constant active shooter threat.
Ironically, arguably part of the problem was the greater availability of college --- back when only a few folks could go to college, it had a marked influence on lifetime earnings.
I’d argue the causality runs the other way. The popularity of YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, and casual games is a consequence of declining literacy, not a cause. The real cause was the abandonment of phonics in favor of whole-word approaches to teaching reading in the early 2000s. Those kids are now in their mid-20s and making their own purchase and usage decisions; with poor reading skills, is it any wonder that they prefer video and image forms of media?
The timing doesn’t really line up for the screen time hypothesis. Tablet mobile games became mainstream in the mid-2010s; the kids who grew up with them are now about 15 and younger. We’ve been seeing an inability to grasp complex written discourse and perform critical thinking since about 2016; the kids on tablets would’ve been in elementary school then, but the first cohort of students who grew up with whole word reading methods was just entering adulthood.
Teaching phonics is good, but your history is off by about a century. The abandonment of phonics happened in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Whole word approaches with readers like Dick and Jane dominated 20th century reading instruction in the US. 4th grade reading results kept going up all the way until 2017. https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/reading/nation/achievement...
its not only mobile games, it is proliferation of youtube and stupid streamers targeted for kids (colomelon and alike for elementary kids) and social media for middle schools (snap / tiktok)
Nah, screen time is the video games (1980s) of the 21st century, or the TV (1960s), or the radio (1930s), or the gin (1800s).
I’m on mobile now, but if I were on desktop I’d dig up Clay Shirky’s essay on gin and the Industrial Revolution. There has always been a moral panic about new forms of entertainment and time-wasting, because people look at these diversions and think “Why don’t people use all that time to benefit society (ie me)?” That’s just a refusal to admit that people don’t have any obligation to you or larger society, and fundamentally are out to make themselves feel good.
I don't disagree, but I think we often look at the past through rose-colored glasses of survivorship bias. Most parenting was bad by those standards.
If you look at how children have historically been parented across a wide range of pre-industrial cultures, it's alloparenting (care by someone other than the biological parent). You had a village of extended family, neighbors, tribewomen, clan members, whatever, and they would trade off care of large groups of village children. Or the kids would just run around and make up their own games. This is actually considered fairly healthy today - it's what daycares, preschools, schools, aftercares, etc. do in an institutionalized setting, but maintained through person-to-person relationships.
The nuclear family and industrial revolution was pathological from an anthropologic POV, and brought all sorts of other pathologies into child-rearing.
Or maybe like Dungeons and Dragons, Rock and Roll, Harry Potter and other things parents got hysterical about but turned out to not actually lead us into evil. The jury seems to be still out. We don't really know yet if "screens" are bad, but that hasn't stopped a lot of people from pointing their fingers at them.
What we know about screens so far is that they're the perfect distraction and put processing of emotions on hold. That in turn creates a backlog which, as it grows, makes the person increasingly miserable.
Personally I use the amount of screen time as an indicator of how bad I'm doing mentally at the moment.
And therein lies the crux of the issue: we optimised ourselves out of downtime which traditionally allowed us to deal with emotions. Screens are just a side effect.
>Tablets/Phones/screen time disables cognitive abilities of kids and reduces them to dumb clicking machines.
Sure, if you hand your kid a phone and walk away, that's a likely outcome.
Phones/tablets/etc. are tools that can and should be leveraged. But you need to teach your kids how to properly use the tools (which is not a one-time conversation). It seems like many people skip that part for some reason or another. Age-appropriate oversight is also a necessity that is often skipped.
Having a pocket library/language instructor/graph calculator/music theory coach/etc. (i.e. a phone) is an absolute superpower that can accelerate learning significantly.
However, every time I suggest that you can teach kids to responsibly use technology it seems to be an unpopular opinion. I'm not exactly sure why, though. So if you don't agree, I'd love to hear your side.
It's because of school privatization. Notice the sharpest declines in low performing students based on race and income. It's a disgrace. Idiocracy is booooooming.
Specifically the problem is tax vouchers. It's fine to send your kids to a private school, but that shouldn't have any bearing on where your tax dollars go.
I don't think there's a need to distinguish for those alive in USA. This has all happened in the past 10 years. It was accelerated with DeVos in DoEd ... which is literally the epitome of regulatory capture. Coincidentally, this push for privatization coincides with the time frames in the study. Correlation ... causation ... Who cares. Fuckem let's get rich.
I talk to many people who get excited about school choice and not having the state tell them how to educate their kids and totally gloss over the fact that your taxes are not for your kids, but for those of every other taxpayer, so I think it's an important callout.
There's room for private schools, but vouchers can't be a thing. I understand public schools can't accommodate every crazy religion, but public education is a necessity for a successful country.
Once people get enough first hand experience with schools being horrible, constantly closing, uneducated children, etc. They'll blame whatever their social media tells them to.
Inequality can't get much worse before there's a tipping point. People are reallllllly dumb now though so change won't be for better when it comes.
Assuming vouchers are enough to pay for each student, why is public education specifically necessary as opposed to universally funded education? It seems very non obvious that outcomes would be worse when private schools are currently considered a privilege of the rich.
Go speak to 10 new teachers at charter schools in poor neighborhoods. Get the fuck out of your own head.
The "charter schools" are scamming us for tax dollars. They hire fresh grads, tell them to make a lesson plan for the year, and that's about it. The schools often don't last more than a couple years.
People are greedy. We don't need to regulate a solution. KISSSSSSS
My sister went to a charter school until around 5th grade until IIRC she became too stressed out with the work load. I remember my mom telling me that when they switched to normal public school, it was essentially like moving 2-3 years back (which is pretty bad when you're only in elementary school), and she pretty much phoned it in from then on.
My experience with public k-12 was that AP chemistry was the only time I remember actually having to put in any effort at all, and I took almost all of the honors/AP classes I could.
So maybe some charters are a scam. Others are vastly more rigorous than their neighboring public schools. Some public schools offer essentially no education (are the public schools in those same poor neighborhoods any good?). Again, it's not obvious that giving parents some choice means outcomes must be worse. You could still hold charters to the same low bar public schools are held to for standardized tests.
Charters also select for more involved parents by nature of not being the default, so you would a priori expect them to outperform just from that.
They're both scams, just targeting different market segments. The ones in rich neighborhoods are trying to create this prestige/competition environment which excludes anybody who is going to be hard to teach. They're acting as a filter for latent talent / parents that are motivated to help teach. Perhaps some growth happens along the way, but that's not the goal.
By contrast, if you accept everybody then growth has to be a goal. You can't just push out the challenging students to improve your performance against whatever metrics you selected for yourself.
If you filter for kids that are able to learn at a faster pace, and then expect them to perform at a faster pace (as in you actually teach them more), I'm not seeing where the scam is. It sounds like they're serving a group of students that normal schools don't. It's also bizarre to characterize that as "some growth" incidentally happening; the schools challenge their kids more, and the kids grow more. It's very much an explicit reason people choose them. The alternative is those kids with latent talent/supportive parents sit in classes with other kids where they repeat the same material for 8+ years, and the only thing they grow is resentment for their peers and the adults that put them into that situation.
I'm not sure about that alternative. Once I ran out of science classes to take in-house my public school just sent me to college early and paid for the classes. This was 2004, not sure if that's a thing anymore.
The scam is that there's nothing at the end of the road. You get these students that are borderline suicidal because they absolutely must outperform their peers, but it's all just ladder climbing and performance for performance's sake. That takes a toll on a person. And for what? Nobody under that kind of pressure is capable of learning anything.
Then they get to college or industry and they have to work with their peers, or apply creativity in some way, but they can't do either of these things because they're either burned out or preoccupied with scoring points in a game that nobody else in the room is playing--or at least that has been my experience with the people who made me aware that they went to private school: too focused on value to be useful in achieving outcomes. Incapable of making the best of a situation that they feel they're too good for.
Admittedly, there may be people around me who came from that background and I just don't know. It's not like I question people on it. But if that's a blindness I have it's not one I can introspect my way out of. You don't know what you don't know. All I have is these anecdotes about folks who are a sort of walking ad for whatever prestigious rigmarole they managed to survive. Eager to establish some kind of pecking order wherever they go and not invited places because of it despite being otherwise pretty cool.
I don't know if charter schools do the same thing to people, but they appear to be trying--and they've found a way to make the rest of us pay for it despite it being exactly the opposite of the what we're ostensibly paying those taxes for.
I agree that pushing kids too hard to perform at a level that they're barely capable of is bad, and a lot of middle/upper-middle class parents seem to do that when it's totally unnecessary for them. I don't plan to pressure my own kids just for the sake of it.
That said, I was incredibly bored in school with a bunch of AP classes, and still didn't feel much pressure with a double major in math and engineering in university. Like I would skip my real analysis lectures sometimes because they felt like a waste of time (in retrospect I probably should've talked to my advisor to see if I could take the graduate version instead, but oh well). Some kids need a faster pace, and it's good to have somewhere for them to go. The trend seems to be if anything (particularly in certain major west coast cities) that public schools are opting out of being that place. Especially when it comes to non-AP classes, you'd might as well let those kids go home and play video games. They might actually learn more.
We're in agreement about most of that. Except that I don't think that public schools are opting out so much as being forced out because charter schools are taking the funding and the easy students away and leaving them only with the difficult ones--many of whom also need a faster pace.
That was me. I wasn't bored in school because I occupied with other things like how to steal the projector (not that I needed one, but it was an adequately challenging target). It took some very patient and clever public school teachers to refocus that energy in an academic direction. The charter school solution would've been to make me someone else's problem.
You literally agreed with the assertion that rich schools "are trying to create this prestige/competition environment which excludes anybody who is going to be hard to teach". That's agreeing factually with what I'm saying; I'm just saying that that (separating out the kids that will learn at a higher pace and teaching them at an appropriate pace) is a totally reasonable thing to do.
"You're only able to teach kids more because they're the kids that will actually learn" isn't some gotcha. It's the point. Those kids are otherwise neglected. If public schools were still willing to hold kids to some standard, parents wouldn't be looking for alternatives.
And the point of charters or vouchers is to make that more accessible to lower income people, as opposed to today's system where private schools (which in general outperform public in almost every way) exclude most people based on cost rather than aptitude or work ethic. The school my sister went to is in a median-priced neighborhood, for example. Middle class people would like a high-quality education too.
This comment[0] had the statement I quoted. This comment[1] was you saying you completely agree. Admittedly I went to public school, so I might have trouble following, but it sure seems like you're at least conceding that charter schools in better areas are better than their neighboring public schools, and you just don't like the mechanism behind that fact. Or are you saying that a prestigious, competitive environment is a bad thing?
I have to say this is probably the first time I've ever seen someone argue that public schools have always worked and are proven, and that by contrast private schools are prone to have quality issues.
The more usual thing you hear is something like [0], which is something I can't personally attest to or anything, but I've seen it expressed on places like /r/teachers as well. If true and at all common, then that sounds to me like public schools have given up entirely.
> public education is a necessity for a successful country.
Every time it’s studied it’s really hard to tell whether the system has any learning effect. Of all my peers you could pretty much identify their academic ability at age 8.
When you push on this the answer is it’s actually for socialization and day care while parents work. That starts to sound like compliance training and seems like a weird thing to spend 40% of state budgets on in addition to local and federal funding.
> People are reallllllly dumb now
Is this the pro-democracy pro-public schooling take?
> Of all my peers you could pretty much identify their academic ability at age 8.
We're not funding education so that the talented ones can be identified and elevated. We're finding it so that the others can be helped to grow. Latent academic ability at age 8 is a pretty small slice of the task.
The ranking of academic performance at 8 years old remained stable for the next 10 years. Not just the top.
If teaching had a positive effect then why would that be stable? That implies that there was no difference caused by course choices, nurturing by a better teacher, etc. so where is the growth?
And that’s my anecdote. Some studies indicate you can probably skip a decade and show up to college and catch up to your peers in no time.
I don’t think I believe instruction cannot give you useful information, but that the 3rd-12th grade knowledge is thin, artificial, and non-transferable.
I see a lot of growth among high schoolers (my wife is a teacher and I volunteer in the math center at the public school where she works, so I have a lot of contact with them). I also experienced it myself. My shift from picking locks (with mischeif in mind) to an enthusiasm for math and science was mediated by four or five great teachers.
> Some studies indicate you can probably skip a decade and show up to college and catch up to your peers in no time.
That might be true, but it comes at a cost which is that the first two years of college are just high school again.
I've been taking college classes for the last 20 years (most of it far less than full time). It's a bit of a hobby. Every time I switch majors I have to slog through this barrier of classes full of things I already know before I can get on to the good stuff. It's a really stark transition, after which the instructors start treating you like you're there to learn instead of like you're there to score points in some status game.
I always end up with really close relationships with the instructors when I'm wading through highschool 2.0 because they're usually pretty happy to have somebody asking questions about the content and not about what's going to be on the test and when I talk to them about this problem they tell me that they've had to realign the curriculum downward because there's a bunch of stuff which they can no longer rely on high school to teach.
So yeah, is broken. But it didn't used to be broken. Do you really think the way to fix it is to further lower our expectations about what can be usefully done in k-12?
Exempting charter schools from curricular oversight and letting them figure it out (or not) amongst themselves is only going to make for an even wider band of preparedness among college freshmen, which correlates with an even longer slog through highschool 2.0 while the colleges now do even more of the level-setting work that the highschools used to do. That makes the classes more boring, which make college a less attractive option. Plus the taxpayers aren't getting what they're paying for. It's a lose lose scenario.
I don’t understand. school budgets are based on the number of pupils. It’s pretty clearly something that can be divided. Of course there is some fixed costs, but those can be subtracted out of the pool before dividing which voucher policies do.
I pay taxes so that education will be available for the kids growing up in my community. Part of that deal is establishing a set of standards which their education must meet and periodically checking to see whether those standards are being met. It's got flaws, but there is at least some oversight over what that money is being spent on--oversight which is directed by elected officials which I get to vote for. You know, taxation + representation... democracy and all that.
If an organization wants that tax money, it should have to do the work for the community that the tax exists to pay for. The most important part of that work is accepting students of all stripes. If a charter school is trying to set up some kind of exclusive k-12 ivy league then they're not doing the work and they therefore shouldn't be paid for it. And even if they aren't being exclusive, they still should only be paid if they submit to the same degree of oversight--something that charter schools don't do.
None of this has any bearing on where the taxpayers decide to send their kids--the tax obligation is not individually about each taxpayer's kids. That's called tuition, pay it separately if you want. Those of us without kids are on the hook for making the system work for everybody, those with kids should be too, regardless of where their kids go.
This is kind of just a list of school related ideas where each paragraph doesn’t build on the next. Is this a bot post?
> I pay taxes so that education will be available for the kids growing up in my community
Vouchers give money to education for all kids.
> a set of standards which their education must meet
Voucher qualified schools meet the same state test standard and exceed public school performance on those metrics. That’s true of home school.
Inb4 selection effects. Thats a good thing.
If you know anything about metrics in large organizations you probably know that whether those standards mean anything is also questionable.
> elected officials which I get to vote for
Who did you vote for in the department of education? How many people did you vote for in your district? When was the last time one of these people found and corrected poor spending?
> is accepting students of all stripe
Your own public school doesn’t do this. What’s the difference between internal segregation and external, except external does more to keep them physically safe.
And your phrasing implies it’s discriminating on something other than academic aptitude, or at least reasonable participation.
> the tax obligation is not individually about each taxpayer's kids
Yes it is. There is a fixed number of kids in the system. That’s how the budget is set. Let me repeat. If you subtract out the fixed cost from the pool before dividing by student number, than you get a voucher amount which should have no impact on the public schools funding. Because by removing your child you are only reducing the variable cost spent on them.
We want schools to be good for everyone in the country. The only reason we're seeing change now is because of regulatory capture. If we continue to privatize schools, everyone is going to be really stupid.
Voucher schools should be free to exist and collect tuition. It's absurd to give our tax dollars to them.
If you only want certain people to be educated, then we should have private charter schools with tax payer dollars. Given that model, I'm opposed to my tax money funding education because it's for profit MBA nonsense that ruins everything good.
Public education is fundamental infrastructure like roads. We should fund it and have the best in the world. If our schools are lacking, we should correct it. If we leave education to the market, that's pretty brutal gambling with the future. I'd like everyone to have an opportunity.
I also consider jobs and benefits for my neighbors a good thing. It benefit me greatly and it's insane to pull up the ladder on these kids and future generations. You're disgusting.
No, it's really just a single idea about what constitutes corruption and what constitutes doing the work of the people. I don't know how to put it more clearly: If we pay for the solution to a problem, people who aren't addressing that problem shouldn't end up with the money.
> Voucher qualified schools meet the same state test standard and exceed public school performance on those metrics.
>> A charter school has flexibility through waivers; however, in exchange for this flexibility, the charter school is bound by contract to be held accountable for meeting the performance-based objectives specified in the charter.
They only have to meet goals that they set for themselves, not the state's goals.
> And your phrasing implies it’s discriminating on something other than academic aptitude, or at least reasonable participation.
It was not trying to imply that something like racial discrimination was going on. My objection is to publicly funded institutions selecting students by academic aptitude (or how well they speak english, or whether they have health problems that will interrupt with the school day. As it turns out, those things correlate with skin color around here, but that's a separate conversation).
I mean, by all means be selective, just don't expect to get tax money for it. What the public is paying for is the educator of last resort. We're not paying taxes so that your A student can go to Harvard, we're paying taxes so that your D student has a shot at community college. One of those is cheap to teach, the other is expensive. Charter schools scoop up the cheap ones and pocket the extra, leaving public schools without the resources to handle the difficult ones. That's why this isn't the case:
> Vouchers give money to education for all kids.
Public schools do things like vision and hearing tests or free lunch so that all of their students have an equal shot at basic things like being able to see the board and study without being hungry. That's not a model that works if you just allocate the same dollar amount to each student and make policies that act like kids are fungible.
Doing so would be like funding the 911 call center such that each citizen gets one call per quarter, and you get cut off once you run out of calls. This whole every-man-an-island perspective just isn't effective at solving any of the problems we have.
There is also the loosening of education standards since covid. I think literally anybody can just say they're a teacher in Florida now. That might be an exaggeration, but slightly.
I'm wondering if there is another significant variable here. I'd assume there that most of the other countries on the list would also have kids that have youtube and and increased screen times for kids.
no it's not. it is because our schools are underfunded and our people have gone through multiple massive market contractions.
We don't put enough money into our schools. Our teachers are incredibly overworked and underpaid.
You can't get blood from a stone. If you make being an educator a loser job that doesn't make any money, ONLY LOSERS WILL DO IT. And then the loser teachers do a shitty job teaching your kids, because why bother if you are never rewarded for trying?
I would have LOVED the self-learning resources kids have today. When I was growing up, you had a textbook. Now they have Brilliant and endless youtube tutorials.
NYC spends about $40,000/student (including teaches benefits, or $23,000/student without benefits and capital expenses) on average and the results are, how do I put it, suboptimal. Schools in the London spend $9,000/student. The CoL between NYC and London is similar. So, how much more money should we pour into DOEs to achieve better results?
In other words: our schools fail not because of the lack of funding (on average, some probably are worse because they have no money), but for totally different reasons.
I think it could be argued the problem isn't schools, but families. Or, more precisely, a large subset of families with school aged children do not value education, whether out of apathy or survival. Educational outcomes across socioeconomic strata vary greatly in the USA. Schools cannot educate kids that are not invested in their own education.
I think if you corrected for household income, the disparities between NYC and London would be significantly smaller. My hypothesis is that students from upper- and middle-class households would come out looking fine, but lower-class students would lag significantly.
Kids aren’t stupid. They see their elders (Millennials) outperform in school, all go to college, get buried in student debt, and then have no jobs or money to show for it.
When it comes to making a memecoin and shilling it for a quick $50k in profit, you’d be amazed at how many subpar students can very quickly master some pretty complex technologies if there’s a quick buck involved.
>NYC spends about $40,000/student
>So, how much more money should we pour into DOEs to achieve better results?
How much of that money is going to teacher salaries, and how much to administrator salaries? I'm hearing crazy stories these days about American schools, that there's more administrators than teachers now.
Pouring more money into schools doesn't help if it just goes to a bunch of overpaid administrators who do nothing, and nothing goes to the actual teachers.
Your thesis is that we are having poor educational outcomes due to poor funding of schools. Based on the latest numbers I could find, funding per pupil was $15,591 in 2022. Because of "cost disease", I would hypothesis that it makes sense to adjust for GDP per capita (a teacher in Poland might be just as good as a teacher in America but paid but be paid ~4x less and the primary cost in education is labor). GDP per capita in 2022 was $77,246. So per pupil we spend ~(15,591/77,246) people worth of labor on their education or .201 of a person.
I notice Norway is on the list ahead of us and I often see them being called out as a country with policies and outcomes that are more close to ideal (although to be honest Asian countries dominate the list!) so let's look at their ration..
In 2023 Norway spend $18,207 per pupil while gdp was 87,961 so the ratio there was (18,207/87,961) or .206 of a person. You might say this is higher and it's true but.. it's very close to us and if you use 2022 numbers Norway comes in dramatically below .201.
Right off the bat you will notice that Utah spends the least amount of money per pupil and has the second highest average score while New York has the highest spend and comes in 23rd place.
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I recognize that the data I found is not in any way comprehensive, but do you have any data which indicate that I'm wrong and the issue really does have to do with underfunding?
I think it's possible that your numbers of amount spent per pupil don't take into account the total benefit to that pupil towards their education. If Norway say also helps comparatively more with housing, food, and medicine, then that might also factor into the educational outcome of their pupils, especially if it means parents can spend more time helping their children.
Anecdotally the smallish town I grew up in had good public schools, and many of my teachers lived in nice homes nearby the schools they taught at. The HCOL city I currently live in has (supposedly) poor public schools and one of the issues I hear is that teachers can't afford to live anywhere near them and don't want to commute hours to work, so they have high turnover. If housing weren't so expensive the public schools here might be better while appearing to spend the same amount on education.
>I would have LOVED the self-learning resources kids have today. When I was growing up, you had a textbook. Now they have Brilliant and endless youtube tutorials.
Do you think that's what the kids are doing with their screens? Watching youtube tutorials? Dedicating hours each days to education content?
Because I don't. I think they're glued to tiktok, youtube shorts and they're doing their homeworks with chatGPT, while reading nothing and getting fat on McDonald's.
>We don't put enough money into our schools. Our teachers are incredibly overworked and underpaid.
As others have told you, this is wrong.
New York City spends more per student than anywhere else in the US. <https://www.silive.com/news/2019/06/how-much-does-new-york-c...> Baltimore, an incredibly poor and run-down city, spends the third most. #4-6 and #8 are all wealthy suburbs of Washington DC, but their schools are all far better than those of Baltimore or NYC on average, despite Baltimore spending slightly more per student and NYC spending 60-70% more.
Is there some way to normalize the amount spent on education per student with the need per student? NYC is also the most expensive place to live in the US, so conceivably the amount spent per student doesn't go as far towards their educational outcome. Baltimore is very poor, so conceivably the gap between the amount spent per student and the need per student is still high. Wealthy suburbs in Washington DC might already have so much support per student that their education system would do fine spending even less per student.
Or I suppose in other words: do education spending numbers actually cover what it takes to provide good educational outcomes? And if not, and we wanted to specifically improve education outcomes, could increased education spending still do that by offsetting other deficits? In more concrete terms: if we did something like give schools way more money could they pay for more things like after school tutoring and recreational opportunities to improve educational outcomes that might be happening in places like wealthy suburbs of Washington DC but not as much in Baltimore?
NYC is one of the most expensive place in the world to live, so of course they need to spend more on students there. How much of that money actually goes to teacher salaries though? How much are teacher salaries there compared to other professions? Can teachers make more money by quitting and working as bus drivers or janitors or wearing costumes in Times Square? If the answer is yes, then the teachers are being vastly underpaid.
a contributing factor for sure... but this is a lot more complicated than a single factor, and is an endemic problem to the whole of american society
I'll also point out that whats additionally concerning is that parent's behaviors regarding smartphones can be even worse, at least kids aren't regularly operating heavy machinery.
Tablets/Phones/screen time disables cognitive abilities of kids and reduces them to dumb clicking machines.
Schools were doing pretty lousy job before proliferation of screens, and I have little hope they can do anything better. The recent dumbing down the math curriculum is just a last straw to keep students not failing on paper.
check movements like Wait Until 8th https://www.waituntil8th.org/ if you want to learn more