> The basic story is that during the aughts, we had a bipartisan education reform consensus that was focused on improving school quality as an attainable and important driver of social and economic progress.
No Child Left Behind? It created tremendous incentives to teach to the test, and in some cases where that wasn't enough, to cheat to the test.
I think the other side is equally likely (if not already happening) in that countries seeking 'excellence' succumb to the manager's fallacy of using metrics to reward and punish, at which point Goodhart's law kicks in like it did for no child left behind. Are chinese students cheating on their exams because its only the score that matters, for example?
The lowest denominator, lowering of standards, and grade inflation I believe are all symptoms of 'education' not being about learning and skill building, but about credentialization. If only the certificate matters anymore, then rest is just theatre.
That doesn't stand up to scrutiny, the US is famously politically and ideologically divided. I understand the impulse to say "no, you" but we can do better than that here.
Point taken about the snark, but ideological conformity is a growing pressure everywhere, and the fact that it has two poles in the US doesn't lessen the negative effects on education.
The cost of almost everything government related is going up because the amount of money going to pensions is reaching its peak (the rate of increase was quite high for the last 15 years, that rate is starting to taper off significantly, and will pretty much flat line in 15 more years).
When a huge portion of your education spending is going to pay people that aren't working - you either need to funnel more money into it or cut.
When the economy isn't great (for the ordinary person), the ordinary person is going to choose cuts - and then they'll align their thinking to justify their choice.
Education is largely funded at the local level through property taxes which are rarely (never?) progressive.
If given the choice, I'm sure a lot more people would vote to make the Bill Gateses of the world pay more for education. It's not an option, so they're choosing cuts instead.
If it was an option, I'm sure you'd see a lot more ordinary people suddenly caring about the education of the poor.
It outwardly manifests as hate, but most people don't think of themselves like that. People generally view themselves as the star of the story. We have subcultures that make people drift towards certain beliefs and outcomes, all the while with those people largely being unaware of their course. You are noticing that there is a dominant subculture that indoctrinates with hateful beliefs.
I think this sentiment gets at a more interesting idea, which is the increasing convergence/conflation of government and society in the minds of participants. That is to say, government is the primary, if not only avenue for voicing and acting on personal/cultural values.
So they became demons and proved the progressives correct. Or more realistically, they took the masks off.
I've seen this argument a few times and the utter lack of self-awareness behind it always amuses me. It's literally the logic of comic book supervillains. "They call me a racist, so I'll became the most racist racist of all time, that'll show them!"
Not a strawman. Your thesis is that progressives "went around demonising everyone and everything," that includes racism and racists. And progressive anti-racism is a common source of contention right-wingers have about progressives, so it is also clearly relevant to the context of your comment.
But feel free to substitute whatever progressive thing it is that progressives complain about that you prefer to wrap into the right-wing persecution complex, it's all the same.
How about this, in general terms: "They called me x so I became x" isn't a reaction which people who don't already possess x as a trait generally have, for some anti-progressive values of x that include but are not limited to "antisemitic," "racist," "sexist," "fascist," "homophobic" or "transphobic."
You're getting downvoted, but I think that's sort of the same effect that you're describing.
Demonizing (or behavior on that spectrum) isn't unique to any side. It draws one side together but repels rather than converts the other side. Not demonizing creates a lot of what is considered "PC speech".
Which demonizing quotes from progressives do you remember hearing/reading? Not any vague retellings of something someone else heard. You do recall how Springfield immigrants' pet eating was not real.
Downvoting is about strongly disagreeing with the parent's point. It is not demonizing.
Hell, I got downvoted for suggesting that hate was a motivator for a subset of people. I'm sadly confident in that assessment but such is life on teh interwebs.
There's very effective messaging that bends the perception of "progressive" values to be a literal attack on those who don't share those values. It's a strong disagreement and nothing more.
I would be classified as a progressive (but it's not my identity) -- I don't hate people "on the other side". I have not-positive feelings about them (puzzlement, frustration, sadness, and unfortunately, fear), but hate is not part of that equation.
One of the most frustrating things about this situation is that real dialog across the aisles is no longer possible. I could elucidate on why I think so but I don't need more angry downvotes today. Just note that the person you're commenting to will likely avoid sharing anything other than grievances.
A consequence of the end of the cold war and a belief among many that a few, exceptional individuals are responsible for the bulk of the ingenuity that powers economic growth.
So why educate poor kids? The exceptional will rise to the top regardless or emigrate to the US as long as we make it attractive to anyway. If all that matters is GDP and relative geopolitical strength of course.
"I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein's brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops." - Stephen Jay Gould
Developing talent is necessary, and many don't have the circumstances for their talent to be visible.
Maybe 100 years ago, or in remote villages in developing countries.
In America there's such an abundance of opportunity that talented people generally aren't going to be constrained by anything other than ambition. Certainly not by education.
Many of histories famous scholars had no formal education whatsoever, they were autodidactics.
That's an illustration of the worldview where you only care about the exceptional in action. There has to be an interest in having a healthy and enjoyable society among all ranks, and care about more than just cutting edge science and engineering.
> I don’t want to blame everything bad that’s happened in American education on the little-noted 2015 Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA).
Before that was No Child Left Behind, which due to perverse incentives resulted in us being taught at the speed of the slowest student. Wouldn't surprise me if this is their theory here too but most of the article is behind a paywall.
It's so obviously the phones. How is a child who grew up watching YouTube shorts supposed to sit through an entire novel without getting bored? They're used to quick and easy dopamine hits.
If you want literacy to come back, stop giving children YouTube shorts, TikTok, or Cocomelon.
At a certain age they will make that decision for themselves - you can't micromanage or monitor your kids' activities all the time. It's the same in every generation, it was TV at one point, then games, then youtube, then tiktok, and I'm sure the next generation in 10 years or so will scoff at whatever the younger generation does to get their distraction / dopamine hits.
That said, in the Netherlands there's been a ton of schools that have banned phones on the premises for various reasons. It's IMO ineffective as long as they also get laptops or tablets from the school, but it's a step in the right direction. There was just too much distraction and abuse; in a local example, there were anonymous "gossip" accounts on the various social media that would record and publish loads of random shit happening at school, often leading to cyberbullying and whatnot.
Is it about wealth or about innate talent or their family’s culture? I’m genuinely asking. I’ve seen poor kids do well in schools when their family cares about grades or when they’re just plain smart. The amount of money they had I don’t think held them back.
Maybe depends on how poor? My experience was even poor parents were able to care. But I think more extreme cases could be different - like if they’re both rarely at home and they don’t have others to help raise the kids, then I think the family culture doesn’t really exist.
Ahhh that's very interesting. I'm glad you've experienced that! I asked because I had mostly seen the latter, and in the few cases there were parents who had the capacity, they had been so soured by their own experiences in schools they didn't see the value in it for their children.
I hope one day we can solve the problems for both cases.
> all 2019 scores were at least a little bit lower than they were in 2013.
Do we know the degree to which test scores were high around that time due to schools doing a generally good job vs. gaming the system? NCLB created incentives to do the latter.
I'd like to read this, but it seems to be behind a paywall?
(There is a reasonable amount of the article before the paywall, and since the other comments here don't mention it, I am wondering whether they just thought the article was very short and then ended abruptly, lol)
America stopped caring about poor kids' education long before smartphones.
It goes back to at least the passage of Proposition 13 in California which gutted school funding from property taxes.
Even growing up in a middle class Midwestern suburb in the 90s, the increasingly elderly population who had no children in the public school system voted to lower their taxes rather than continue programs that they took for granted when their children were school age.
And this is nothing compared to what the poverty afflicted inner city and rural students have faced on top of the struggles in their community.
Smartphones have definitely made it worse, but we'd be deluding ourselves to think that much of the damage wasn't already done.
Prop 13 was passed on the back of California choosing to redistribute school funding away from local communities where the taxes were paid.
The result was predictable. Nobody wants to pay higher taxes that don't go to their kids or communities. They would rather opt. This is why most affluent school districts have complex parallel funding streams that don't go through the government.
More to the point, school costs are also out of control. Average tax spend on k-12 education in California is ~25k per student, or 750k for a 30 student class.
> Prop 13 was passed on the back of California choosing to redistribute school funding away from local communities where the taxes were paid.
> The result was predictable. Nobody wants to pay higher taxes that don't go to their kids or communities.
So the solution to school inequality should have been to enshrine both income inequality and real estate segregation in education funding policy?
> More to the point, school costs are also out of control. Average tax spend on k-12 education in California is ~25k per student, or 750k for a 30 student class.
It's closer to $20k (18th highest among US states)
"When differences in labor costs across states are accounted for, California drops to 34th."
So California has very high labor costs, driven up by the insane housing costs, which are yet again enshrined by the provisions of Proposition 13 (and its accompanying phenomenon of NIMBYism).
>So the solution to school inequality should have been to enshrine both income inequality and real estate segregation in education funding policy?
Enshrine is a strong word, but yes, I think it basically broke the incentive structure for supporting the system. Regarding housing costs, I think they have far more to do with NIMBY and construction hostile policy.
High property tax doesn't really help housing affordability. High tax means sale prices are somewhat lower, but Mortgages would stabilize at the same value (just with a higher proportion being tax) unless you actually add more units.
No Child Left Behind? It created tremendous incentives to teach to the test, and in some cases where that wasn't enough, to cheat to the test.