Fortunately there are some great resources, far better than the average colorful school textbooks :
- aops.com and their BeastAcademy cartoon series
- an old book "Algebra" by Gelfand
- W W Sawyers old books on how math should be taught
- Geogebra and Desmos web tools
- 3Blue1Brown
- KhanAcademy
I try and introduce math in a more visual way, with multipication as rectangles and the distributive rule being central concepts that lead into all other areas of math : https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLEInJ-Z4qBKYxbK1Mm13g...
In Alaska, where I lived most of the last 20 years, education has been largely flat funded for about a decade now. Imagine running an organization in 2026 on that organization's 2016 budget. Schools have a bunch of obligations they have to spend on. Every time health care costs for staff go up, and funding is flat, something gets cut. You can't cut education for a decade straight without impacting student learning.
I don't think Alaska is that much of an outlier in this regard.
https://educationdata.org/public-education-spending-statisti...
The funding for dept of ed has _exploded_ after 2000
https://educationdata.org/public-education-spending-statisti...
At the same time, school scores started to sag after 2014
https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/ushistory/results/scores/
There are highly politicized blogs which can discuss this further and offer opinions as to the correlation.
When DJT talked about cancelling the Dept of Edu, I got ahold of all the teachers I knew and asked them what impact it would have, and their response was mostly that they would lose their school lunch benefits.
Public education has vast amounts of funding in the U.S. compared to other developed countries. If it does badly despite that, it's very likely that "more funding" is not the answer.
To some extent, this shift is inevitable due to demographics changes - but I don't think that there has been realistic planning on how to manage a future with dramatically fewer children.
My point is different. Study after study shows that below a specific floor spending has almost no impact on educational outcomes. The correlation is such that you can both determine that there is likely no leak and also that it has no effect.
The stuff that does have an impact is much harder to move the needle on though so everyone just scapegoats funding instead. Stuff like building up the nuclear family in an area, increasing income mobility, and holding parents accountable for child outcomes do have a measurable effect but are politically intractable today.
we should probably cut 100% of spending in that case. kids wont be impacted, and we'll have a bunch more money in the coffers.
or maybe we can realize that there is some baseline amount of spending that is required, with diminishing returns after that? and, perhaps, the amount of spending remaining flat for decades risks the spending amount going under the baseline where it starts affecting student outcomes.
https://ctmirror.org/2024/01/28/ct-budget-fiscal-guardrails-...
ai summary: "According to that piece, K-12 education has been losing $407 million each year since 2017 due to inflation, even as Gov. Lamont called current funding levels the "largest ever commitment." The author also noted that $2.4 billion in urgent legislative funding requests were denied in one spring session alone, with needs for fully funding education among the shortfalls."
https://www.learner.com/blog/states-that-spend-the-most-on-e...
Some data.
One thing that was evident to me from the sidelines was how much admin work was continually added to her workload without any consideration for the amount of class time she had. The focus on data derived from continuous testing of the students resulted in her and her peers sticking ever more closely to a continuously disrupted and rotated collection of commercially sourced curriculum and materials. This constant flux disincentivized teachers augmenting with their own content (although they still often do) because it could fall out of line with next years 'innovative new approach' to teaching basic arithmetic.
Her role as educator started to take a back seat to facilitator, focused on classroom management and data collection. Add in differentiated instruction, where she was held accountable to develop personalized lesson plans for individual students and asked to track all of that and you end up with way too much workload to stay engaged and engaging year after year.
She was in a pretty good school district. A friend of mine had a similar role in a city district for a regional metro area and her students were horrific. She felt physically unsafe and ultimately quit.
It's a complex problem with many contributing factors. It's also difficult to experiment or strike out on your own as an educator when the future of the students in front of you could be negatively impacted by any mistakes made (not to mention job/test scores/etc) so most just ride the rail all the way down.
(Also, at least in the US, you can get stuck to a district b/c the value-add of a seasoned teacher doesn't really move the metrics in the current system enough to offset the fact that you can hire two junior/fresh grads for the same money.)
> It's also difficult to experiment or strike out on your own as an educator when the future of the students in front of you could be negatively impacted by any mistakes made (not to mention job/test scores/etc) so most just ride the rail all the way down.
It's pervasive and makes things move so slowly. The biggest issue I have with it is that the system is so protective of doing no harm, but doing no harm to a system that is failing students is a poor decision imo. We should be more experimental if things are generally bad. Be protective of the mechanisms when we have good results, not when we have bad ones.
Looking back, I don't think Chromebooks, iPads and the like would have been beneficial to my elementary/middle/high school education at all.
Our primary instrument of learning was the teacher and really thick textbooks that were passed down student to student, and you could see that journey inside the in front cover where you signed it out for the year.
As someone who would protest at learning long division when a calculator was around, in retrospect, the teacher was right.
2012 2020 2023
Reading 263 260 256
Math 285 280 271
- tech apps starting with infinite scroll (facebook, 9gag, Instagram, etc.)
- media/tech shortened content: shorter tv shows, short video content, etc.
(Tiktok is the "state of the art" of those 2 trends pushed to the max)
Specifically, we're getting more & more addicted to things that increase the dopamine spikes frequency, making it increasingly difficult to go in deep focus work.
For example I remember reading a lot of science magazines / articles growing up (granted popsci but for a kid it still teaches some things) and as I grew up things like the Economist.
Similarly I also played games like math blaster as a kid and have realized I need to intentionally provide games like this to my kids that ideally teach something (the bar being greater than zero learning) rather than playing one of those infinite running games or whatever.
I think we're probably talking about the exact same thing but am curious where content vs. short form media is.
Thanks for sharing :)
". . . did you ever attend school from home or somewhere else outside of school because of the COVID-19 outbreak?"
Can someone else confirm?
Not enough investigation there. Of course, the trend was already going down, but the new slope is obvious.
Prediction in next three years will be same or greater - technology, ai, screentime.
Significant parts of our society and government are actively hostile to education. Blaming the students is convenient, but probably not accurate.
I wonder if there’s a way to validate the hypothesis that post-shutdown, some of the cohort that would have missed a day here and there now see school as optional and miss more days.
Overall, the reported effect is sad and should be addressed. These are people’s lives.
The level is so low in my local elementary school that the single track math class is still doing addition within 20 for first grade.
The funny thing is that the state standard actually measure 2 and 3 digit addition for K and 1st graders, and proficiency at that level would be p75 for a 1st grader. So why is the actual class teaching level at p<50?
https://www.nysed.gov/sites/default/files/programs/curriculu...
My child took the “CASTL” test as part of IEP assessment. According to the result percentiles, a 6 year old who can do 2 digit vertical addition is at the 70th percentile of 6 year olds.
How come in kindergarten the curriculum is counting to 100 and addition within 10, while the assessment test shows double digit addition is well within the norm?
BTW my child didn’t learn any arithmetic from school.
EDIT: In case I wasn’t clear: there is a huge discrepancy between the standardized tests and the actual curriculum “standards”.
The decrease is consistent across performance levels which should be a pretty decent proxy for tracks.
My answer to this is approximately: “yes they’re all relatively bad compared to the thing that came before so they were all right!”
Even books. If the option were between my child reading about blacksmithing/compsci and DOING blacksmithing/compsci I’d choose the latter every time. It gives you real experience and opinions.
The difference with each successive new wave is that it becomes increasingly addictive. It’s possible to read one book and stop for a while. Shorts can hook you for hours and then draw you back the next day with no natural stopping point.
Who do you think suffers when elites attack public education? It's always the children.
Fun fact: Silicon Valley elites are big proponents of school vouchers because, like their hatred of American labor, they also hate public schools and don't want to pay for that either.
School boards are inherently poltical because as long as a publicly-run school system exists, how it is run and what things it will attempt to teach are political questions. There's no apolitical school board that existed 40 years ago that has been altered since then, they have always been poltical.
Exactly. And who benefits from a less educated, less aware populace? The answer is pretty clear: look at who is benefiting right now!
Seattle's Public Schools district is among the leading in the nation on per-student spending, yet the test scores are cratering. Its previous superintendant had an official platform of not disciplining students.
Vouchers would _improve_ the situation.
Dr's Deposition on How Screen Time Hurts Kids' Cognitive Development https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fd-_VDYit3U
https://oxfordeagle.com/2025/01/30/mississippi-4th-graders-n...
comparing Fall 2019 to Fall 2022
It doesn't seem to be about 13-year-old students in general
[1] https://theconversation.com/mounting-research-shows-that-cov...
I'm definitely in the camp that thinks cell phones have something to do with what's happened since 2012. If we start from the iPhone in 2007, it seems plausible to me that a 5-ish year lag is consistent with the time it took for smartphones to rise in popularity and their effects to filter into society. (I got my first smartphone around 2012, by which time pretty much everyone else I knew already had one.) That's at least a gesture toward explaining why there was a peak around 2012. What it doesn't explain is why the ascent to that peak was so much steeper in math than in reading.
One overlooked problem is imo that you can't just waste their time with nonsense and get good results.
A lot of people in the education system are so full of shit that they believe it's good for children to sit there the whole day.
Improving exercises and lectures should be a priority.
But the part I want to concentrate on is the education part and the role of tech. Anyone who sells to large bureaucracies like state and federal Education Departments will tell you the skill is in managing the procurement process. It's getting your claws in more than it is in delivering results. Any results tend to be more manufactured than not.
So contracts get signed with states and school districts that will require them to use a particular product, even if it doesn't work. We know how this goes too. Whoever was in charge of that decision will then tend to leave their job and go work for the seller. Shocking.
But we know what works in teaching and it's direct instruction [2] but you don't sell tech platforms or iPads or laptops that way. As a result we now have a disturbing number of people who have never read a book and really can't read a book, going so far as the students of elite colleges [3].
Likewise, we see Education PhDs who won't make a name for themselves pushing ideas from the 1800s. They have to come up with new methods and this was kind of a disaster for literacy [4], which people are finally waking up to as we go back to the 1800s method of phonics eg [5].
But it's hard to succeed when half the country wants the entire system to fail.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZM05gRIROqQ
[2]: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8476697/
[3]: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2024/11/the-eli...
[4]: https://www.apmreports.org/episode/2019/08/22/whats-wrong-ho...
[5]: https://news.stanford.edu/stories/2026/02/science-of-reading...
[1] https://quoteinvestigator.com/2010/05/01/misbehave/#e6c0268a...
There's definitely loads of money in "education". But the actual teachers arent seeing it. No, its in "special interest programs", state/federal compliance, loads of tests, and ordained material from "preferred creators" (cough, pearson etm.)
We can pay teachers better, sure. But there's lots of areas to "pay better". Small classes. 12-17 students. Budget for class resources. No, teachers should NOT be responsible for work materials. Larger classes get aides as well.
Ive also seen what modern teaching is about. The teachers are handed absolutely shit material and required to teach that, with low/no deviation. Like, "New Math" https://www.understood.org/en/articles/9-new-math-problems-a... . None of these methods show WHY, only a rote procedure.
I thought about becoming a teacher. I already teach people (wide array of adults and under 18) in extracurricular groups. Ive seen what works well, and what doesnt. I can tell the 'energy' of a group, especially if theyre confused and angry about something, and how to solve it. But the pay is definitely laughable compared to IT, and the administration demands exacting rubrics put forth by companies who kicked back the state educators.
The responsibility is not worth their salaries or the anti-benefits and other costs.
I don't want to envision a future where most people besides a few elite have stopped reading and writing but maybe I'm just an old millennial and behind the times.
The reasons to doubt are perfectly known: meritocracy is on a decline in the Western world, there's an ever improving safety net for losers, there's a price to pay for forcing my child to study vs the child spending time with their friends who were left to roam free as their social life will suffer.
I probably met more people whose degrees played little to no role in their professional career than the other way around. I've met lots of people who could never realize their degree because of the hollowed down European industry. Engineers seem to suffer the most. It seems like the few ways where a degree can open the door to a better life must be in a field that provides very localized services s.a. medicine. All else is outsourced. Trades do better in this respect as a lot of them need to be local, but they too are being populated by foreign workers and competition is fierce.
I don't think that COVID or any other "force of nature" is to blame for the outcomes. When there's will, there's a way. It's just that fewer parents see academic achievements as worth pursuing for their children.
Sorry - that was reflexive: “… in the US”.
I don’t think there’s any great mystery here. Every few years, you guys elect a bunch of people for whom active sabotage of public education is a sine qua non to political gerrymandering strategies driven by the self-preservation instincts of lobbyists.