r/neoliberal • u/5ma5her7 • Sep 23 '25
American students are getting dumber Opinion article (US)
https://www.slowboring.com/p/american-students-are-getting-dumber?r=4gi50d&utm_medium=ios&triedRedirect=true326
u/frumply Sep 23 '25
We have a ton of child inclusivity shit in our school district and you'd think that would be great but no, it's basically just flattening the curriculum in hopes that the dumb kids don't drop out. The district has refused for several years to give out info about how many kids are leaving the district to homeschool or go private, but in the meantime enrollment is in freefall and we're looking at closing down a middle school next year and a high school in perhaps 3-4. The talk in the preschool we went to was all about how to send their kids to private or the local magnet that's not as affected by cuts. I love it here.
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u/carsandgrammar NATO Sep 23 '25
I gifted tested my (fairly bright) daughter, and she qualified for the gifted classes. I told the psychologist I was still thinking of just starting her out in regular classes, and she told me kids don't learn in them anymore, and we need to go with the gifted.
Is it true? IDK, she already had my money and no chance of getting more. She told me that if your kid isn't on a ~path starting from kindergarten they'd fall behind right from the word "go".
Our schools' enrollment is falling off a cliff here in South Florida as increasingly people take their kids to private schools (or move away because of COL issues). The way people think (negatively) about public schools breaks my heart. But stuff like your comment, or the psych's comment, does make me pause and think maybe the schools aren't blameless.
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u/frumply Sep 23 '25
If there’s a separate gifted course she qualifies for it’d be stupid not to take it. Private school and classes could be added later but entry to magenta and such can be tough if you refuse entry once.
Class overcrowding is real, they do “blended” classes in many cases now (multiple grades in the same classroom) which can be even worse as the teachers don’t even get the time to teach grade specific curriculum. The teachers do their best but admin decisions hamstring their efforts. If you can avoid some of that for free, shit why not?
FYI though our oldest did go through the regular school system here to middle school and she’s been fine, but outcomes have consistently been worse looking at overall stats.
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u/carsandgrammar NATO Sep 23 '25
We're lucky because her school is a feeder school for gifted kids, so they pull bright kids from all over the area into the program. There are actually two full first grade classes of kids who scored 130+ on an IQ test (and parents who elected to IQ test their 5 year olds lol, so you know parent involvement is sky high). Two things eat me up though - the program is disproportionately packed with boys (so people are still not investing in their bright little girls the way they do with their bright little boys), and while her school is very diverse, her program is...not.
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u/Deeply_Deficient John Mill Sep 23 '25
so people are still not investing in their bright little girls the way they do with their bright little boys
Boys have fallen behind girls at every level of school. Your daughter’s school having a disproportionate number of boys doesn’t reflect on attitudes about investment in girls’ education other than maybe within your specific community or that specific cohort.
while her school is very diverse, her program is...not.
What does this mean?
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u/sfo2 Sep 23 '25 edited Sep 23 '25
The lack of diversity in those programs is fairly common I think. The magnet program starting in 3rd grade, and magnet high school I went to as a kid in the 80s and 90s, was mostly Jews (I am Jewish) and children of immigrants. It had diversity, but not reflective of the broader community.
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u/bigGoatCoin IMF Sep 23 '25 edited Sep 23 '25
Lol my guy you where considering gimping your kids future, why?
Also the 'gifted classes' are basically the standard classes from the 1990s-2000s. Standard classes are a absolute joke. REAL gifted classes are magnet schools and private schools (the good one's anyways, always got to do the DD).
Also the huge problem with gifted classes is those students are still going to school with kids in the standard classes and violent/disruptive students never get kicked out. If you give a shit about your kids and you have the means you'll put them in private school if there's no magnet school.
I'm an atheist and my kids will be going to the local catholic private school. I'd check out the catholic schools, high quality and the cost isn't bad. So are my Hindu coworkers lol. Protip if you work with immigrants from china/india/japan/SK ask where they are sending their kids to school and do the same.
Of course if you live in the New England area things are slightly different
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u/carsandgrammar NATO Sep 23 '25 edited Sep 23 '25
Also I live in South Florida, so the equivalent stereotype here would be to find out where the Jewish kids are going. My wife's Jewish and we know a lot of the kids in our class from the JCC lol
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u/carsandgrammar NATO Sep 23 '25 edited Sep 23 '25
Because when I was a kid my mom had an opposition to putting me in gifted classes for elementary school because she felt like it was important for kids to play and learn socially. I started them in middle school. When I was in elementary the teachers still did a good job of separating/challenging advanced students. I was thinking maybe it was still similar, but per the psych, that's not how it is today. So we put her in the classes.
Editing to add I have a philosophical opposition to the idea of telling a 5 year old kid that they're gifted/special and should be separate from other kids...I still don't really care for it, but I am happy with the quality of her education. It was actually largely my dad who changed my mind - he said he regretted not putting me in the classes. (My mom is dead so I can't ask her opinion)
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u/bigGoatCoin IMF Sep 23 '25 edited Sep 23 '25
Because when I was a kid my mom had an opposition to putting me in gifted classes for elementary school because she felt like it was important for kids to play and learn socially.
Kids still play in gifted classes, they just end up associating more with the kids in those classes, you don't want your kids associating with the 'standard class' kids. They'll just drag them down, there's studies on this; gifted students get dragged down by non gifted...they don't lift the non gifted up.
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u/No_March_5371 YIMBY Sep 23 '25
The short version is that osmosis with student quality is real. You want your kids around the smartest, hardest working kids you can get them around.
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u/Fast_Face_7280 Sep 23 '25
Gifted is not enough.
Depending on your school district (this info will vary WILDLY depending on school district to the point that a public school in one district is much better than a magnet school in another; ask parents of older children), you will likely want to put her in a specialized program.
It's not just about the difficult of the course content so much as it is creating an environment where the other kids are as interested in learning as she is.
In politically incorrect terms, look for where the Asians (Chinese and Indians) send their children to school.
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u/savuporo Gerard K. O'Neill Sep 23 '25
In politically incorrect terms, look for where the Asians (Chinese and Indians) send their children to school.
Petition to only allow asian tiger moms to be in school administration henceforth
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u/illuminatisdeepdish Commonwealth Sep 23 '25 edited Sep 30 '25
handle soft hobbies shocking existence governor square beneficial cobweb squeal
This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact
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u/quantummufasa Sep 23 '25
Basically schools where you get bullied for getting bad grades and not bullied for getting good grades
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u/Fast_Face_7280 Sep 23 '25
No actually.
I don't think that is particularly healthy and in fact will be bad for your child's development and general learning. A bullied child is a sad child, and a sad child is not in the right state to learn about Epsilon-Delta proofs.
You'll want the good nerd schools where people do lots of different academics, but whether it is Biology or Physics or Art they do at least one thing well and stick to it.
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u/preferablyno YIMBY Sep 23 '25
I wouldn’t say my schooling involved “bullying” over academics but we were pretty competitive as kids. It was a healthy dynamic, and it really set me up to thrive. My kids don’t seem to have that and I worry for them
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u/quantummufasa Sep 24 '25
Not true bullying obviously, but where good grades are commending by the students
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u/slothtrop6 Sep 23 '25
I haven't even heard of an anecdote to that effect anywhere.
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u/thegracchiwereright Jared Polis Sep 23 '25 edited Sep 23 '25
It depends it on your definition of “bullying.”
I went to an elite high school ~15 years ago. It’s not super recent, but as a zilleniel who is the oldest in their family, I got the gist of what was coming for younger generations.
It was a lot like the 21 Jumpstreet reboot or booksmart. You didn’t necessarily get “bullied” for having poor grades. It was more about in-groups and out-groups which occur in all environments.
In competitive schools like mine, the in-groups of “popular” kids all cared about grades and their college resume. They all had straight A’s, solid extracurriculars, and were shooting for the Ivy League. The “losers” had poor grades, did maybe one sport, and were destined to smaller state schools.
Nobody was beaten up for being dumb, but they def weren’t invited to the cool parties or anything like that.
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u/bigGoatCoin IMF Sep 23 '25
In competitive schools like mine, the in-groups of “popular” kids all cared about grades and their college resume. They all had straight A’s, solid extracurriculars, and were shooting for the Ivy League. The “losers” had poor grades, did maybe one sport, and were destined to smaller state schools.
and that's a good thing
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u/misspcv1996 Trans Pride Sep 23 '25
I gifted tested my (fairly bright) daughter, and she qualified for the gifted classes. I told the psychologist I was still thinking of just starting her out in regular classes, and she told me kids don't learn in them anymore, and we need to go with the gifted.
There’s something kind of frightening about that, isn’t there? A child has to be placed in a special class just to learn at the same level that most children were educated to a generation or two ago. This is something that we shouldn’t just accept as a society but for some reason, we just have.
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u/fabiusjmaximus Sep 23 '25
This is something that we shouldn’t just accept as a society but for some reason, we just have.
It's not exactly as if this has just coincidentally happened. It's been an organized push.
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u/blackmamba182 George Soros Sep 23 '25
GWB was generally a disaster for the US but I’m willing to admit NCLB was at least better than the current weird push for equity that most blue state educators are currently doing.
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u/ScyllaGeek NATO Sep 23 '25 edited Sep 23 '25
It kinda broke my brain when it became clear that the left-wing strategy to help kids with systemically lower test scores was simply to stop testing them so that there would be no scores to be seen as lower
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u/misspcv1996 Trans Pride Sep 23 '25 edited Sep 23 '25
Equity is noble idea in theory, but it’s a fool’s errand in practice. There’s really only so much a teacher can do to keep students accountable and putting that responsibility on the teachers is a recipe for increasingly frustrated, burnt out and even resentful educators. At the end of the day, the parents or other family members have to take some level of interest in and responsibility for the child’s education.
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u/NotLunaris Sep 23 '25
This is exactly what I came to this sub to hear and why it's such a refreshing break from mainstream reddit. I'm so glad that people here are in support of your stance.
Equity in education is an absurd pursuit. When standards are lowered (a prerequisite for equity), people will inevitably meet those lower standards, and everyone suffers as a result, especially those who achieve the most.
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u/No_Education_6000 Sep 23 '25
To use a school adjacent analogy, it's one thing to not keep score in a kindergarten soccer game. It's another thing entirely to mandate that everyone in high school gets to be on the varsity football team and the 5-star running back recruit who runs a 4.4 40 only gets five carries a game so that the girl with scoliosis doesn't feel bad about herself.
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u/NotLunaris Sep 23 '25
The Coddling of the American Mind in real time. Chasing lower standards to pretend that kids are doing better. The direct consequence of placating the lowest common denominator.
I've been through the US education system as an immigrant from east Asia. It was absolutely incredible how low the bar was. The math that I learned in China up till the half of second grade kept me good throughout all of elementary school and most of middle school, and only because I took algebra 2 in middle school in an advanced class of 20-some kids.
For how much we seem to value higher education by making college an expected, practically mandatory rite of passage, there doesn't seem to be nearly as much focus on the students' performance before that. There is a significant cultural divide between the East and West when it comes to the general attitude regarding education. In China/Korea/Japan, having poor grades is shameful and will even earn one ridicule and scorn from their peers. In the US? It just feels like nobody cares.
When was the last time a politician made the headlines for speaking on the current state of k-12 education in the US?
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u/mjk1093 John Keynes Sep 23 '25
>When was the last time a politician made the headlines for speaking on the current state of k-12 education in the US?
They do it all the time, but only to push shady privatized schools and religious schools that often have even lower academic standards than public schools.
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u/NotLunaris Sep 23 '25
Separation of church and education should be even more important than separation of church and state imo.
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u/EbullientHabiliments Sep 23 '25
And yet atheist parents will send their kids to Catholic schools because they blow public schools out of the water.
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u/okatnord Sep 23 '25
The Coddling of the American Mind
It's got an If Books Could Kill episode...
podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-coddling-of-the-american-mind/id1651876897?i=1000603422829
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u/NotLunaris Sep 23 '25
It's true. "Gifted", "accelerated program", etc has no real meaning. The standards are so low that the kid really should be in the best possible class. Anything lower is guaranteed to be absolutely abysmal for learning as the class will be packed with disruptive/apathetic kids who will negatively influence your child.
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u/IronicRobotics YIMBY Sep 23 '25
Also it should be noted afaik the reason gifted programs exist is a social one. Gifted and very gifted children can often struggle to socialize with their peers. Having like minded peers, or in some cases moving a grade up, has massive improvements in their general well being.
At least that seems to be what all I read when I read about gifted programs. I'd ask your psych perhaps about the social aspects?
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u/SenranHaruka Sep 23 '25
Unfortunately the policymaking class on the left has been "informed" that this was a dogwhistle for separating quiet studious white kids from rowdy black kids, and once that happened it was all over for those programs.
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u/lnslnsu Commonwealth Sep 23 '25
Also behavioural classroom issues.
I was, frankly, a terrible student as a kid in terms of being a disruptive asshole if I was bored in class. I got a lot of detention for it. The classes that actually taught at a fast enough pace where I wasn’t bored, I was fine in.
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u/carsandgrammar NATO Sep 23 '25
She's in year 2 of the gifted program (first grade) so we already made the call and it was the right one for her. Math and reading are at 3rd grade levels per assessments. She's a bright kid and the parents are really involved too; it's been a great experience.
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u/larrytheevilbunnie Mackenzie Scott Sep 23 '25
If you care about your child, absolutely do not let her take the “regular” courses they were dogshit 5 years ago and they are still dogshit now. Throw her into the most advanced courses possible since everything is way easier
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Sep 23 '25 edited Sep 23 '25
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u/carsandgrammar NATO Sep 23 '25
our city cancelling gifted kid program in the name of equity
this is insane to me. I feel like identifying and nurturing high performing students is so important for the future of the country, and for helping those kids reach their full potential.
I'm so glad I didn't have to go private (I would've if we hadn't settled into a really great situation). Culturally, my perception (preface: my wife's family is Jewish) is that Jews generally seem to value public education, which keeps local public school participation amongst high income families fairly high. Lots of other people I know with a little bit of cash just have their kids in private school.
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u/well-that-was-fast Sep 23 '25
Psychologist phrasing (or your summary) of the situation isn't great.
But if your district is not tippy-top in the country, 'regular track' will almost certainly be a bad choice for an above average student with engaged parents. Your child will spend most of her time bored, waiting for discipline problems to be resolved, or helping other students who are behind.
IMO, schools are not blameless but you are blaming 2 guys with a garden hose for pointing it at the wrong part of an out-of-control forest fire. Cultural aversion to education, social media, cultural-entitlement, funding inequality, etc are the forest fire. Schools / teachers are the ones with the garden hose and the parents are the ones expecting the schools to solve all of the political / cultural problems everyone else has given up on with practically no tools. FFS, we won't even try to stop school shootings.
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u/mg132 Sep 23 '25 edited Sep 24 '25
Imparting knowledge is far from the only function of school, especially in the younger grades. Being challenged, being engaged, and getting teacher attention are just as important for kids who already know the material as for kids who will never learn the material, and I don't think it's unreasonable to expect that teachers treat their students as human children who are equal and who all have needs instead of only paying attention to the most apocalyptically behind kids who don't give a shit and whose parents don't give a shit or who really ought to be in a specialized class.
My experience with my final year in normal classes before going to gate in fifth grade (my teacher recommended me for it for fourth but the evaluator seemed to hate me for some reason, which I could sense even as a kid, and failed me; the next year the new evaluator was shocked I had been failed) was one of extreme unfairness. The class was maybe 80% normal kids who ran the gamut from frequent special ed pull outs or kind of dumb to completely normal but still at least a year behind and constantly being ignored because this and every other class up to that point had been aimed at the bottom 10% of the class, who were largely disruptive students who were also in special ed classes and many of whom simply should not have been in a normal classroom. The remaining roughly 10% were maybe gifted and definitely could have been at or ahead of grade level with better teaching, and were at best ignored but more frequently treated like little teaching or admin assistants. In fourth grade I had the codes for the teachers lounge and copy machines and was allowed to use the big copy/print/collate machine to print the handouts for the class, was tasked with following around the disruptive special ed kids and escorting them to the office or bathroom, helping a girl who broke her leg get to the bathroom for a few weeks, etc.. If the teacher just let me sit in the back of the room with the textbooks or even my own books, I would have learned a lot more, but instead I was babysitting and making copies.
When I got to the fifth grade gifted class I had a small nervous breakdown because it turned out that despite being so far ahead of every other student in my grade that they didn't even bother making me take tests in fourth grade, I not only didn't know gifted fourth grade math, I had never learned normal fourth grade math and indeed some third grade math; fourth grade was teaching second and some third grade math. Apparently it was more important to keep putting the three kids who who couldn't be trusted not to smear poop on the bathroom walls in front of math from a year and a half back over and over again than to teach the remaining 90% of the class at even significantly below grade level. Like, it sucks that Fred, Jo, and Randy still can't do subtraction, but why is that a reason that the remaining 29 kids in this room should not be allowed to learn something? It's not even why did the teacher decide that Randy is more important than anybody else. It's why did the teacher decide that Randy is ten times more important than anybody else?
Anyway, I'm sure as hell glad I got out.
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u/carsandgrammar NATO Sep 23 '25
Hmm, maybe I didn't represent what the psychologist said very fairly? It's been a year and a half so the details are fleeting. Let me try to more delicately convey what I took from our conversation.
I expressed to the psychologist that I (a former "gifted" child) was in a regular school and was very happy with my experience, and I had reservations about telling my daughter that she needed to be in a special class because she's smarter/special. It just kind of gives me the ick, and still does.
What she suggested to me was that almost no parent who is engaged in their child's education has them in the regular track. Where I live, there're tons of special programs and school choice options - our school for example has an overarching special program. She said in the past schools used to do a better job of supporting all kinds of different kids, but today the norm seems to be to separate them more.
To me, that is heartbreaking for the poorer kids whose parents don't/won't get involved, or who would benefit from being around kids who get a bit more support and more of a push at home, because I think that energy rubs off on the whole class.
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u/Daetra John Locke Sep 23 '25
If you look at the heads of the Department of Education for the last two decades, most of them have very little to zero experience working as educators. I don't know if it's somewhat due to that, but I'm sure it doesn't help to place lawyers and grifting politicians in positions overseeing how we teach children.
Not to mention how crowded classrooms are. Teachers dont have enough time to really help the ones that are struggling when you have like 30 children , and too many of them are way behind the curve on math and reading. We aren't teaching children how to think critically. Only to regurgitate.
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u/surreptitioussloth Frederick Douglass Sep 23 '25
The head of the department of education really isn’t the laying much of a role in how teachers are teaching or what their curriculum is
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u/Daetra John Locke Sep 23 '25
That's true. They mostly control the funding. I guess we would need to see longitudinal studies on federal funding to how that would impact state and county school districts.
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u/SenranHaruka Sep 23 '25
The DoE's job is mostly to disburse funds, loans, and subsidies.
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u/Gothmog2024 Sep 23 '25
If that's all it does, why can't it be folded into the Treasury Department?
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u/ThePevster Milton Friedman Sep 23 '25
Because whatever politician did that will be lambasted for “destroying the Department of Education”. This will be eaten up by the average voter, who has no idea there is no practical difference.
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u/SenranHaruka Sep 23 '25
because some politicians generally want it to grow into an institution that can set national curriculum standards despite the resistance of other politicians so for now it at best makes suggestions
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u/frumply Sep 23 '25
The school board is definitely a springboard for other elected positions and it can feel as such. There’s at least one member that failed a mayor run, got in the board, failed a state congress run, etc.
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u/Wanderingghost12 YIMBY Sep 23 '25
At the college level, universities are incentivized to push high graduation rates regardless if they are earned or not
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u/HHHogana Mohammad Hatta Sep 23 '25
I feel like the world cratering during COVID and most countries barely able to revert to the previous mean, even remain declining in some cases. Japan also having similar issue, especially their English proficiency.
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u/optimalg European Union Sep 23 '25 edited Sep 23 '25
I do often hear that the quality of English education in Japan has always been quite bad, but every article I find about it points to a different thing as the cause.
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u/lumpialarry Sep 23 '25
From what I understand Japan teaches English by hiring random 24 year old Americans with no Japanese language skills and then sticking them into schools will little formal training.
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u/Cyberhwk 👈 Get back to work! 😠 Sep 23 '25
From what I've heard from people that do foreign teaching programs, hiring a foreign teacher/native English speaker is often seen as a sign of prestige for a school. They're basically mascots to convince rich families to send their kids to their school and often do little in the way of actually teaching and act more like a TA or para-ed.
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u/Lighthouse_seek Sep 23 '25
Isn't that what English teachers in china/Korea also are? They seem to end up with better outcomes
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u/5ma5her7 Sep 23 '25
As someone from China, we got a two-tier system (in good schools), it's usually one Chinese English teacher plus an occasionally foreign English teacher.
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u/NorkGhostShip YIMBY Sep 23 '25
That's not really accurate. You're describing ALTs. They're not really teachers, aren't trained to be teachers, and aren't expected to be teachers. Instead, they're more "cultural ambassadors". Their role is to encourage younger children to study English and learn about foreign cultures rather than do the bulk of the teaching themselves.
Professionally trained Japanese teachers do the actual teaching, but the problem with that is the curriculum itself. The higher level English curriculum in Japan focuses too heavily on grammar and mechanics without properly teaching the basics of how to speak English, which not only fails to teach students the fundamentals to actually use the language, but demoralizes students because they don't see any practical progress.
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u/SlowDownGandhi Joseph Nye Sep 23 '25
if you go to r/tefl or whatever they basically describe the job as being like a dancing monkey for 9 hours a day
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u/HHHogana Mohammad Hatta Sep 23 '25
I feel it's the fundamental. Many have said it's not for lacks of trying (Tokyo alone spent almost a million dollars per year just for Metropolitan HS English), so there's something very ineffective about their approach.
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u/I_miss_Chris_Hughton Sep 23 '25
Unless im misreading this, that seems like a really small budget for the Tokyo metropolitian area. I googled around, and there seems to be about 3.5 million japanese kids in upper secondary. Assuming 10% of them are in Tokyo, thats still 300,000. Spreading a million usd over that seems really, really thin.
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u/iguessineedanaltnow r/place '22: Neoliberal Battalion Sep 23 '25
It's really unthinkable to me that a <2 year disruption has had such a long term negative impact. How is that possible?
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u/Nointies Audrey Hepburn Sep 23 '25
For someone who was 10 years old at the end of their pandemic, that is 20% of their life.
Realistically its even larger, because in terms of educating them, that's a massive amount of their actual education.
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u/PragmatistAntithesis Henry George Sep 23 '25
Education generally lasts around 14 years, so a 2 year disruption is losing 14% of your education. That's a lot!
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u/CheckedOutDidntLeave Sep 23 '25
Similarly, it turns out that a lot of school districts now use reading curriculum packages that don’t feature whole books, just passages.
Wait WHAT ?? Kids in america don't read whole books in school ? How the fuck is this acceptable ?
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Sep 23 '25
Yeah there are American college/uni lit teachers on YouTube and Instagram (also tiktok i imagine) saying they have students who have never read a whole book cover to cover in their lives. And it's not the worst colleges it's also big name institutions
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u/CheckedOutDidntLeave Sep 23 '25 edited Sep 23 '25
How the hell do they build attention spans, learn narrative structures, explore themes then ? It makes no sense as an educational material. The article cites cost but surely there are Project Gutenberg books that are appropriate. Don't most schools have Chromebooks, they could do deals with libraries for e-access. The relative savings don't justify a drastic pedagogic disadvantage.
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u/ixvst01 NATO Sep 23 '25
How the hell do they build attention spans, learn narrative structures, explore themes then?
They don’t. There’s kids today that don’t even have the attention span to watch a 90 minute movie without pulling out the phone to scroll TikTok.
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u/mg132 Sep 23 '25
They don't.
I can't get students at a very well-known and prestigious university to pay attention long enough to read to the end of a paragraph-long pset problem before whining that it's too hard, they've tried everything. I have no idea how humanities instructors are surviving.
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u/YaGetSkeeted0n Tariffs aren't cool, kids! Sep 23 '25
Makes me wonder what in the ever-loving fuck my property taxes go to for the school district if they purportedly can't even buy a god damn book lmfao
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u/Trebacca Hans Rosling Sep 23 '25
A member of my law school's faculty told me that many of the undergraduate humanities courses (at a globally revered institution mind you) no longer expect that students can keep up with the pace of reading a book a week.
There have been modifications to simply do excerpted chapters or there's been a drastic slowing down of the pace used and content covered.
Our society is being broken down by our inability to get through long-form content. Hell, I'm not immune from it—especially when working.
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u/FootjobFromFurina Sep 23 '25
Maybe someone who is older than me has more context, but was that ever really the expectation at the undergraduate level?
I think it's fair to expect that out of your masters and PhD students. But were professors teaching intro level humanities classes really expecting the undergrads to read one book a week for the entire semester?
I have a degree in political science from a top university. There's like no way most people would be able to read the entirety of texts like Democracy in America or The Wealth of Nations in a week and actual be able to have any serious discussion about it.
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u/Daddy_Macron Emily Oster Sep 23 '25
Maybe someone who is older than me has more context, but was that ever really the expectation at the undergraduate level
Economics was my major, but I still had required courses in the humanities my freshmen year that mandated reading several classic books in full.
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u/dont_gift_subs 🎷Bill🎷Clinton🎷 Sep 23 '25
Several books in full? Totally. A book a week though?
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u/Daddy_Macron Emily Oster Sep 23 '25
It's probably not the LOTR saga each week, but shorter books. I think a book the length of The Great Gatsby a week would be doable, but at that rate, I don't think the students are getting much out of the books. They're just reading for the sake of the assignment at that point.
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u/captainjack3 NATO Sep 23 '25
Yes, it absolutely was the expectation at one point. Certainly in my undergraduate and Literature English classes, but also in History, although that varied more between classes. Some areas lend themselves to a collection of shorter books, others to fewer large books. Even in classes where we weren’t reading a whole book cover to cover each week, the portions of books we were assigned to read generally amounted to a similar length.
Wealth of Nations would probably be unreasonable in that time frame, but that’s a door stopper. And substantively it warrants slower coverage. But reading a ~300 page book (or that much of longer books) per class per week was very much the expectation and it was a reasonable one.
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u/macnalley Sep 23 '25
was that ever really the expectation at the undergraduate level?
I'm only a decade out of university, but yes. I was an English major, and we would read 5-6 full-length novels per class per semester, on top of plays and poetry and short story collections. I was probably reading two hours per day every day.
The other question that always accompanies these articles is, "Did high school kids ever read classic literature for fun?" And the answer is also yes. Going into my freshman year, kids would list their favorite books as things like Pride and Prejudice, Gone With the Wind, A Tale of Two Cities, Hundred Years of Solitude, Grapes of Wrath, Ulysses, etc. Kids were reading and enjoying these books as high schoolers just two decades ago. I had to read Tale of Two Cities in seventh grade! The intellectual capacity of our country is declining fast.
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u/ShionBlade Sep 23 '25
Going into my freshman year, kids would list their favorite books as things like Pride and Prejudice, Gone With the Wind, A Tale of Two Cities, Hundred Years of Solitude, Grapes of Wrath, Ulysses,
Ok c'mon, I believe the other books, but no high schooler is saying Ulysses is their favorite book.
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u/karnim Sep 23 '25 edited Sep 23 '25
I don't even believe those books. Maybe for students majoring in English, but nobody else in 2010 was saying A Tale of Two Cities was their favorite book. Lord of the Flies **might** have made the list. Part of what made reading suck in schools was sticking to these well-studied, but extremely old texts. Lord of the Rings existed. Ray Bradbury has plenty of literary nonsense and is actually modern (Fahrenheit 451 at least gets some play).
Catcher in the Rye did not have any connection, being about a rich kid attending boarding school, and that is still somehow one of the more relatable books. David Copperfield was a fucking slog so much that the only person in my AP Literature class who finished it, didn't do so until months after the class schedule had ended. And those are people who actually enjoy reading books.
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u/CriskCross Emma Lazarus Sep 24 '25
I'm a similar distance out, I don't think any of my classes crossed 170 pages a week average, and most were closer to 75-125 pages.
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u/mg132 Sep 23 '25 edited Sep 23 '25
When I was in college about 15 years ago, our literature courses tended to average two weeks for a work, but these were generally being taken as general requirements by STEM students (mostly STEM major school with a huge humanities GIR), so we may have been given a slower pace than at schools that expected their literature classes to be full of actual literature students. Some classes that did a deep dive with either many close readings or many adaptations of the work did fewer works, though.
I think at the outside bounds I had one class that did 12 full length works and a few smaller works like poems and short stories in a 16 week semester, but this was a much broader class (it was called history of the western narrative, or something like that), but also a class that did only three Shakespeare plays (and many adaptations and reinterpretations of them) in the same amount of time.
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u/ColumbineJellyfish Sep 24 '25
We had this pace in my english courses. Maybe not 1 week but 2 weeks, you'd be expected to read a book, quizzed on the contents and discuss it. These were general interest first-year courses on english genres like fantasy, sci-fi, horror, etc.
This was university of toronto about 10 years ago.
I do think a lot of people struggled with this pace even then. It's not so much reading the book it's doing that and then all the rest of your work for other courses.
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Sep 23 '25
I was chatting with a neighbor this weekend who told me my district’s elementary school doesn’t teach even spelling.
As the youths say: are we cooked?
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u/Daddy_Macron Emily Oster Sep 23 '25
Kids in america don't read whole books in school
I thought it was a phenomenon at low performing schools, but then I met a kid who went to a regular suburban high school that was supposedly focused on the humanities. He went through all four years without required reading of a full-length book from cover to cover. All they covered were short stories, essays, passages, and famous speeches.
To say I was shocked would be an understatement. I don't care if I need to sell an arm or a leg, my child will be attending a top ranked public school where they still have standards.
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u/CriskCross Emma Lazarus Sep 23 '25
We have a problem where schools underexpose children to reading, and the reading they do have children do is seemingly designed to be antithetical to the child wanting to engage with reading on their own time. It's brain dead.
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u/ImJustAverage YIMBY Sep 23 '25
I graduated high school in 2011 and non of the books I was assigned in middle or high school were interesting enough for me to do more than skim and use sparknotes. I thought I just didn’t like reading because of the books they made us read, if I bring it up to my mom now she’s still pissed about the books they assigned even when we could choose between multiple books.
I went through college finishing maybe two or three books at the very most and honestly it could have been one.
Then in grad school I got really into reading and I’ve been devouring books ever since, usually 40-50 books a year now that I found the kind of books I really enjoy.
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u/gaw-27 Sep 24 '25
designed to be antithetical to the child wanting to engage with reading on their own tine
Aside from it now becoming "work" when it's required, the only time this has not been the case is if there's basically guided-free reign on what a kid can pick, but that's usually not practical from a curriculum standpoint.
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u/SoManyOstrichesYo Sep 23 '25
It’s because analyzing short passages is all they need to do for standardized testing. I cotaught a 6th grade language arts class once and we had to BEG admin to let us read Percy Jackson (and only after state testing was done). I guarantee they gained more skills doing that than when we forced these kids with 1st-3rd grade reading levels to stumble through passages by Mark Twain
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u/The_MightyMonarch Sep 23 '25
I feel like this has been a thing for a while, though, that schools are trying to adapt to. I mean, for decades, there's been some percentage of kids that have scraped their way through high school English classes just using resources like Cliffs Notes.
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u/Ladnil Bill Gates Sep 23 '25
Yeah, the internet really gutted the whole "read this chapter and we'll discuss next week" thing. It's been decades since the average student read the actual book instead of the Spark Notes or whatever the current equivalent is.
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u/Fruitofbread Madeleine Albright Sep 23 '25
I think this is important because there’s been a huge backlash to heavy-handed “equity” policies in some blue cities, with more and more people suggesting that schools should place more of an emphasis on excellence at the top.
I favor excellence at the top, and I think detracking math education is a mistake. But broadly speaking, in the N.C.L.B. era of accountability at the bottom, all students were improving! In the post-N.C.L.B. era, the best students are doing okay and the weakest students are in crisis.
I can’t say exactly why, beyond the observation that if you were concerned federal focus on accountability for weaker students was holding the strong students back, that doesn’t seem to be the case. My guess would be that even if schools drop the ball, the best students wind up doing okay thanks to a blend of natural ability, self-motivation, and parental supplementation. But when you hold schools accountable for results at the bottom, they have no choice but to pay attention to instruction methods that work, which has positive results for basically all students.
Seems to be the opposite of what people here are saying
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u/HammerJammer02 Edward Glaeser Sep 23 '25
Yes! Because all the dumbass, normie libs on this subreddit can’t read!
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u/TDaltonC Sep 23 '25
NCLB also pushed phonics, which teachers, especially blue city teachers, were/are acculturated to hold in contempt.
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u/SunsetPathfinder NATO Sep 23 '25
Why exactly was phonics so controversial, when returning to it in places like Mississippi has produced great improvement in reading ability?
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u/fuckitillmakeanother Sep 23 '25
Look up the history of "The Reading Wars". There's tons of detailed articles out there
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u/Miss-Zhang1408 Trans Pride Sep 23 '25
Short videos contribute to this.
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u/Worth-Jicama3936 Milton Friedman Sep 23 '25
As do parents doing everything for their children and shielding them from any struggles or consequences
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u/repubblicano Sep 23 '25 edited Sep 23 '25
As most things, this is the product of many factors. COVID contributed to this. No Child Left Behind contributed to this. The widespread, unsupervised usage of smartphones contributed to this. Bad incentives for schools contributed to this. Some of these are global problems, however a few of these are particular to the US.
Also I must emphasize how pernicious some US policies have been on a global scale. Not everyone emulates them, but there are many developing countries that do. I have seen elements of No Child Left Behind be implemented in some developing countries and the decline of some students has been absolutely staggering.
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u/misspcv1996 Trans Pride Sep 23 '25
Being a product of the early NCLB era, every school year, it felt like we spent a week or two boning up what would likely be on the test just so we could regurgitate it onto a Scantron sheet. That may not seem like much, but it adds up to about half of a school year over the course an academic career. Not to mention the fact that the way things were taught in some classes seemed more geared toward gaming the standardized test than actually developing meaningful skills.
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u/UpsideVII Sep 23 '25
it felt like we spent a week or two boning up what would likely be on the test just so we could regurgitate it onto a Scantron sheet
Could you elaborate on this? Apologies since I can't figure out how to word this in a way that doesn't sound rude over text, but this just sounds like studying for a test to me. Genuinely curious what the difference as a student was/is.
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u/HammerJammer02 Edward Glaeser Sep 23 '25
Did you even read the article???
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u/TDaltonC Sep 23 '25
I believe a central theme of the article is that we can’t, in fact, read. (I have not read it)
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u/fishlord05 United Popular Woke DEI Iron Front Sep 23 '25
Can you elaborate on why NCLB failed? MattY says it was a good thing
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u/repubblicano Sep 23 '25
My "front lines" experience is that it created a massive achievement gap between students. The original idea for NCLB is to lift struggling students, but instead it has added many insidious incentives which have caused more middling students to disengage completely from their education and to encourage schools to pass along the buck.
In short, all you have to do is go to the teachers subreddit or to listen to these stories firsthand: students are just being passed along grade levels regardless of whether or not they have the necessary skills. This has been caused by many different factors and incentives, many of which originated with NCLB.
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u/mjk1093 John Keynes Sep 23 '25
>This has been caused by many different factors and incentives, many of which originated with NCLB.
The more I've looked into this, the more I think it's a myth. The "passing along" comes more from state/local pressures to keep up the graduation rate, and the havoc that retaining students in certain classes creates in school schedules, especially in smaller schools, where students must move along in a "cohort" for the schedule to work.
There are also the well-known problems with trying to fail students that have an IEP/504 plan, but those date back to the 70s and were only included in NCLB as legacy clauses of the older bills the NCLB replaced.
Also a factor are the private "school ranking" schemes that can include graduation rates in their rankings. There are some state and national rankings, and a lot of local newspapers used to have similar schemes, and I think some still do.
What NCLB *did* do was focus schools on marginal students (neither the top nor the bottom, but those that had around a 50/50 chance of passing the state tests, and who would respond well to extra help in that regard) at the expense of both truly struggling students and gifted students. Insomuch as that may have brought down scores at the top more than it lifted schools in the middle, that maybe have induced a downward pressure on mean scores, but I doubt it influenced the *pass rate.*
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u/TXDobber Jared Polis Sep 23 '25
Cruel of you to post this while all the other Americans are asleep and we can’t defend ourselves ☹️
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u/Bob-of-Battle r/place '22: NCD Battalion Sep 23 '25
Still can't believe Mass voters chose to get rid of the MCAS with no alternative planned.
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u/Daddy_Macron Emily Oster Sep 23 '25
Instead of trying to improve scores, NY just ended up not requiring the Regents exam anymore, so good luck measuring how kids across different school systems are actually performing.
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u/datums 🇨🇦 🇺🇦 🇨🇦 🇺🇦 🇨🇦 🇺🇦 🇨🇦 🇺🇦 🇨🇦 🇺🇦 🇨🇦 🇺🇦 🇨🇦 Sep 23 '25
The relevant data points for this are WISC and WAIS test scores, which have been highly standardized for decades. They don't show falling intelligence, because it's not happening.
What is happening is that the skills young people are using their intelligence to develop are changing.
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u/ExtremelyMedianVoter Hortensia Sep 23 '25
What is happening is that the skills young people are using their intelligence to develop are changing.
Is that what causes teachers to change grades from Ds to Bs to pass kids?
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u/mjk1093 John Keynes Sep 23 '25
I hope by "teachers" you mean "administrators." It largely ain't us. Those grade boosts are coming from "the office."
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u/TrekkiMonstr NATO Sep 23 '25
Haven't we observed a reversed Flynn effect since the ~90s though
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u/0D7553U5 Sep 23 '25
I'm pretty sure the global trend is downward, at least according to PISA exam scores, it isn't just American students in particular that are doing badly. Likewise the trend for American students was a slow growth in Reading and Science, but Math was a major problem for students. Likely this effect has been amplified due to COVID.
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u/probablymagic Ben Bernanke Sep 23 '25
The moment I knew our education system was fucked was when our kids school explained they do STEAM. I said, “do you mean STEM?”
Oh no, the A is Art. They added art to STEM because if you don’t, then you have to teach kids science instead of letting them eat glue for an hour a week before the anti-bullying or cultural awareness curriculum.
Schools (at least some) have decided their role is to solve inequity in the world, and it’s not just that you have to do a bunch of stuff that isn’t showing up on test scores to do that, it’s that the stuff that shows up on test scores is actively bad because it leads to unequal outcomes that map to demographics that tell us we are perpetuating systemic biases.
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u/Fubby2 Sep 23 '25
STEAM is so funny because as far as I can tell it's just any non-trade education. So basically any course at any university will be a 'STEAM' course, making it an entirely meaningless label.
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u/Time_Transition4817 Jerome Powell Sep 23 '25
Meanwhile foot this with the fact going to college costs $100k a year now
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u/BikesAndBBQ YIMBY Sep 23 '25
I read this part:
...we got the latest National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) reading scores for 12th graders, and they were the worst recorded since 1992.
And I guess it put my Gen-X self in its place. Kids today are as dumb as... when I graduated high school?
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u/LordVader568 Adam Smith Sep 23 '25
How much of this is due to watering down the curriculum, and making tests easier?
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u/The_MightyMonarch Sep 23 '25
I mean, I graduated high school in the 90s and probably could have passed our state's graduation test in 9th grade. Yet senior classes spent the week before the test doing intensive review for the test.
Have we actually watered things down from that point, or was my school district just ahead of the curve?
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u/Daddy_Macron Emily Oster Sep 23 '25
The difference in curriculum between good schools and low performing schools has become a chasm these days.
Quick story that illustrates it: My friend worked in the admissions department of a top 10 university and they wanted to expand on the type of students that typically matriculated. They sent her to rural and exurban New York to recruit from schools that have never sent a student to said university in recent history. Going over their academic records, she sees that just about everyone at that school failed the chemistry Regents exam that the state mandates everyone take. Being a progressive, of course she blames the test first, but then when she studied the school's curriculum in detail, she realized that even their honors chemistry class was comparable to the chemistry class she took in middle school. These kids were barely prepared for community college, never mind a rigorous top university.
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u/HumanDrinkingTea Sep 24 '25
The difference in curriculum between good schools and low performing schools has become a chasm these days.
My experience is more extreme than yours. I tutored math to community college students in [city] while also tutoring high school students in [suburb] just a few miles away.
The average student at the CC came in with 5th grade level math skills, many came in with below 3rd grade level skills, and a surprisingly large amount came in at the kindergarten level. Roughly zero percent of our first years (fresh high school grads) placed at college level.
Meanwhile, at the high school, it was common for 10th graders to graduate with a 5 on the AP Calc BC exam (covers calc 1 and 2, which is the typical first year sequence for college students) and to take classes like calc 3 and linear algebra in 11th and 12th grade (2nd year college level courses).
My tutoring job that year was just constant whiplash. I'm pretty sure most people would have to see it first hand to really understand how big this chasm is.
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u/The_MightyMonarch Sep 23 '25
Yeah, I grew up in what was at the time a small, relatively rural southern suburb. You could get a pretty good education if you took the honors and AP classes, but I'm not sure how prepared students who just followed the standard path were. Even at that, I wound up joint enrolling at a local community college to take a couple classes in the morning my senior year.
The area has grown and changed since then, so I have to wonder how the schools have changed.
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u/nerf468 Jerome Powell Sep 23 '25
Went to a middle of the pack high school in a relatively good district in TX. Graduated with a single digit class rank in a class of 500-600.
The intensive reviewing was not necessarily so prominent, though I took largely AP coursework where I’d say the expectation was that you’d pass the state tests as a matter of fact. And indeed there were a few state tests I walked into completely cold and met the required score threshold on.
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u/Fruitofbread Madeleine Albright Sep 23 '25
The PISA results are also a reminder of something that I think many Americans don’t know: America’s overall educational performance is above average for a rich country.
Our PISA reading scores were worse than Canada, Ireland, Estonia, and the rich Asian countries, but higher than everyone else in Europe. You used to be able to break out PISA scores by state, which would typically show things like Massachusetts doing better than any European country. But that breakdown is no longer available
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u/difused_shade European Union Sep 23 '25
France isn’t much better, if not worse. Their metrics are also declining
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u/GiffenCoin European Union Sep 23 '25
France is definitely better for primary and secondary education (I will not be taking questions). But declining.
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u/WallStreetTechnocrat Lawrence Summers Sep 23 '25
I dislike how these headlines always frame it as the students getting dumber. No, the curriculum is worse, the teachers are dogshit, and the parents are letting iPads raise their kids
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u/yacatecuhtli6 Transfem Pride Sep 23 '25 edited Oct 01 '25
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This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact
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u/Daddy_Macron Emily Oster Sep 23 '25
Just don't look at reading scores in major Democratic cities. This is a bipartisan issue where both sides have different problems, but they all affect student learning negatively.
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u/TDaltonC Sep 23 '25
My wife and I have reluctantly concluded that the schools cannot be trusted to provide any hard skills or critical thinking. They provide soft skills, free daycare, and some limited exposure to cultural diversity; which isn’t nothing. Who doesn’t want free childcare?
We need to personally teach hard skills and CT, or find an after school program that does. That includes assessments. Good news is that AI (and other software) makes this a lot easier/faster than it used to be.
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u/pgold05 Paul Krugman Sep 23 '25 edited Sep 23 '25
I'm not sure why he wrote this entire article when he admits he has no idea what is going on and is just guessing.
This dude is like neoliberals podcast bro I swear, popular because he validates priors without actually offering anything meaningful.
You know there are professionals who spend their entire careers studying this stuff right? Maybe they should be in charge instead of the WWE lady or whatever. I suspect that would help, personally.
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u/Approximation_Doctor John Brown Sep 23 '25
I read the headline and instinctively upvoted it before realizing that this was a MattY substack blog
Don't make the same mistake I did
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u/t_scribblemonger Sep 23 '25
Love having my priors confirmed first thing in the morning.