>> much of math education seems to have been farmed out to really crappy software and short video clips running on chromebooks

Our local school committee is debating this currently. There was a book mentioned "Ditch That Textbook" about using EdTech to reimagine curriculums. I have a hard time imagining actual high quality math education not using a textbook, and I don't really see how crappy software (and I do not for a second doubt that most ed tech is crappy - almost all software is crappy really, it's a total tragedy and a separate discussion) can possibly do better.

Personally I'd like to see fewer Chromebooks and iPads and such in classrooms and more textbooks and notebooks. I'm open to being convinced I'm just a curmudgeon, but it'll take real results in schools to do so.

  >  I think that Oregon teacher salaries have gone up quite a bit more than the national average in the last 10 years, less so in the last couple.

Yeah, Covid is at the tail end of the time period but it would be an error to make assumptions about the rates of change being constant over these periods. We've all seen that El Nino graph that is used to misrepresent climate change by careful windowing...

But the article doesn't even cherry pick the window, but they do cherry pick the interpretation. How does anyone ignore the fact that from 2013 to 2020 is fairly flat in scores[0] and then sharply decreases after that. Similarly spending sharply increases.

It is so weird to do this because the main argument still exists when you account for Covid. It's the intellectual equivalent of taking a cookie, taking a shit on it, and then selling it for more because it has more chocolate. Who the fuck does that? It's manipulative and entirely unnecessary. From 2013 to 2020 scores are relatively flat and spending increases above inflation. It's still a lazy analysis since you don't analyze what the spending went to, but it's a million times better than pretending a shit cookie is made of chocolate.

But the title is also incredibly editorialized (against the guidelines[1]), but why are commenters not picking this apart? It's such an easy flaw to notice. This article contains zero evidence of their claims. You have to explain data, not just present it and conjecture.

[0] 2020 is as far down as 2015 was up. Normal variance?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> She'd really be suffering without parental intervention.

As someone who cares deeply about education, I just want to say it's awesome that you're taking an active role in your child's development.

Yeah, the article links the source where every state can be viewed: https://edunomicslab.org/roi-over-time/

I think there’s a lot of poor incentives at play here. Having to mash everything down into a handful of top line success metrics (annual test scores, attendance rate) is certainly one, alongside this obsession with one-size-fits-all age-cohort based schooling.

It is clear that public schooling in the US was originally designed to build obedient citizens and efficient factory workers. Horace Mann’s love of the Prussian model, the use of bells to condition timely synchronized movement between activities, the focus on testing and measurable output, etc… All other goals over the years were half-heartedly bolted on to that structure and it’s showing its age.

> - pay teachers more with commensurate increase in accountability. (You can't have only one.)

I would bet 90% of the problem is the attitude towards learning at home and among the peer group, who also get their attitudes from home. Doesn’t seem effective or fair to hold teachers accountable for that.

You talked about holding the kids accountable & the teachers accountable.

What can we do to hold the parents accountable?

I was in school in Wisconsin when they got rid of the teachers union; schooling improved drastically. We had a physics teacher who went years refusing to write AP level physics courses when it was a union job, but suddenly found the motivation once the union left. Most substantially, at the state level the governor passed course options, which allowed high school students to take courses at local universities or other schools if their school didn't offer higher level courses.

Obviously unions aren't designed to protect students, they represent workers, however their negative impact on the quality of schooling students get is often quite significant despite being overlooked.

If you make a change in only one school, you end up with selection effects where interested parents move their children into (or away from) catchment areas based on vibes.

Then you can't really measure outcomes, because the strongest predictor of student performance is parents interest and resources.

You also run into issues with teaching skills and standards, you need a high level of planning and adherence to the supplied plan in order to measure outcomes; otherwise it's just vibes based on individual teachers.

> Why are big changes not arrived at by first gaining experience with them in in some reduced scale

Because the results that come back are always politically inexpedient to agendas--generally for all sides.

Examples:

1) Charter schools: As soon as you force charter schools into an actual lottery which normalizes their student body relative to the public schools, their performance relative to the public schools craters. Quelle surprise: Expensive students are expensive and take up a disproportionate amount of your smaller budget. Quelle surprise deuxième: motivated parents means better student performance.

2) Low end performance: low performers actually make up some of the gap during the school year. This creates the obvious suggestion of year round school which runs into the fact that would require an immediate 25% pay raise to every teacher.

3) Raising the average/median: Even the Gates foundation documented the solution but stopped short of suggesting it--focus most of your resource on the lowest performers as they are the easiest to improve. I don't even have to suggest the firestorm that causes.

4) Proper student:teacher ratios: Again even the Gates Foundation (whom I loathe) documented it correctly--1 classroom with 2 credentialed teachers (randos aren't enough) per 15 students (middle and elementary was the focus--high school is a bit different). Every program that followed that formula had solid documentable success. Every single program that followed that formula got closed for being "too expensive".

I can go on and on. The problem is that the US education system is at a solid local minimum and getting out of it requires significant amounts of focused resource. And when you finally ask folks to start writing checks for your education system, you suddenly find out exactly how much folks want to improve education (aka nothing for teachers or students, but they'll happily fund that new stadium).

And, I would like to point out that it was school spending that went up by 45% more than inflation (which was 35% over the same period). In addition, teacher salaries didn't go up 45% relative to inflation. So, might I suggest that perhaps the problem is what we are spending the money on?

Yeah, maybe we should have given a control group of kids infinite doomscrolling before we gave it to all them.

What you want is done all the time.

What happens a lot:

1) Someone (a researcher, usually) comes in and tries some radical new program in some school.

2) (sometimes) It works! It works great, in fact.

3) This new system or approach or framework gets publicized. This may include dissemination through academic channels, but also (and especially if it's really going to take off) through a kind of reform-grifting network that turns the whole thing into a bunch of stuff that can be sold, for actual money (training, materials, consultants). Turns out being an education researcher pays dick-all, but selling a "system" pays real cash dollars—for many researchers, admin, and curriculum-design folks, getting a windfall from being part of one of these is their most promising path to "making it" before they're old.

4) Some districts adopt the new thing, often with initial pilot programs. Some spend a lot of money doing it.

5) Few of them spend much time considering whether there are material differences between their schools and the one(s) where the system was proven (the experimental program was proven in a troubled inner city school? Surely our middling suburban school can expect similar improvements!). Expertise of and authority granted to the person or persons implementing the system also isn't considered as a factor (one or both are usually lacking, compared with the case or cases on which the promise of the system is judged).

(My personal "here's what to do if you want to fix schools" is "fix our justice/corrections system, worker protections, healthcare, and our social safety net". I think the biggest improvements to our schools would be found there. It's all stuff outside schools. That's why we keep struggling to make headway by monkeying around with schools themselves. It's why more money for schools doesn't help much. That the US finds it basically impossible to do anything constructive about any of those problems is... a sign we can expect not to see any huge across-the-board positive changes in US public school performance any time soon, I reckon)

Meanwhile, within and among districts, individual schools do pilot new programs, et c. All this stuff happens. Does it always happen with everything that turns into a broader reform? No, not always. Is this kind of activity constant, and common, in schools? Absolutely. Frankly it happens way too much (because people are desperate and flailing around to find a path to improvement through school reform, but see above about why I think they are doomed to remain desperate). There's an absolute shitload of process and curriculum churn in schools.

Consider also that while all the above is going on, you have the usual incompetence and principal agent problems you see in any organization. Important tasks are handed to the person an assistant superintendent's having an affair with (god, so common) for whom they invented a paid position. Systems are picked apart and bits adopted piecemeal while ones admin find too uncomfortable or scary are dropped up-front without even trying them, while anyone used to analyzing systems like this can see that the parts their dropping support and are necessary for the success of the parts they're keeping, dooming the reform before it's even implemented. Empire-building happens. Things get hijacked for personal gain. Powerful folks' own inept efforts at breaking into the reform-grift industry get pushed on those under them, as they try to get their own success story to sell. Superintendents or principals fall for obvious bullshit at one of their drinking-and-driving retreats er I mean conferences, because frankly most of them are kinda dumb, and then a whole district gets to suffer for a couple years. Et cetera. Same crap you see in big corporations.

But! Despite all that, lots of people are out there running experiments and reform pilot programs just as you suggest, and for the right reasons, and sometimes even competently. It's just that as soon as it goes past that, it tends to get caught up in all the above. However, even the best-considered reforms that show promise in early experiments and trials are rarely broadly-applicable enough, and familiar enough, and simple enough, and easy enough, and effective enough, to survive that process of wider application without being destroyed. Plus (to repeat, and IMO) I just don't think there are many big wins to be had with educational reform on its own, without working on things outside schools that are resulting in lots of hard-to-educate-in-a-classroom kids.

Every now and then, though, you get a really solid improvement, like, "hey that Whole Language thing that sure seemed to a lot of us to be backwards-ass garbage that really looked like it was making kids worse readers, in-fact, whatever its proponents claimed? Yeah, turns out it is backwards-ass garbage, we can improve reading markedly by knocking that off". (see process and systemic pitfalls outlined above for how it ended up widely in-use in the first place)

Not everyone takes the same test. So you can repeat some questions on some tests year over year, or have some experimental questions that aren’t graded one year but used for establish norms for when it’s graded in future years.

Unrelated?

The thing that popped out to me playing around with that is that when you look at most of these things from the late '70s through now, many show some modest growth or flatness through the '90s, then grew a little more up through the 2010s or so, and have pulled back a little in the last few years to roughly 2008ish levels. This is for both math and reading and for both 9 year olds and 13 year olds.

Depending on what exactly you are looking at the places that it grew or was flat or declines change, but overall the big picture look gives me more "keep an eye on it" vibes than "we've got a crisis" vibes that some people seem to think are justified.

As a reminder to everyone, here's what the guidelines say[0]

  >  Otherwise please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize. 

I'm also a little surprised that more people aren't talking about it and that it hasn't been changed. There's definitely a culture shift happening in HN...

If you've never read the guidelines, now is a great time. Seriously, it isn't that long and captures why many of us come to HN over other sites.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Yup this needs an answer.

Administration.

Large institutions in the USA are grossly mismanaged and/or corrupt. Normalize the amount of public money pupils cost and it easily dwarfs most elite private schools. Multiply by class size and an elementary school class can cost $500k+. The teacher is not making $100k.

exactly

had that extra spending gone to pay math teachers the results might be different

Publishers?

Well if only we had such thoughtful minds in the education space. How did no one ever think of "why don't we just give up on the children"?

It's about cultural preference not ability. School does a positively terrible job of making it easy and comfortable for kids to learn their stuff, and the more recent "student-centered", "progressive" or "constructivist" approaches to learning actually make this a lot worse not better since they heavily imply (as a matter of practical implementation, if perhaps not always in theory) that the teacher shouldn't even act to provide helpful guidance and direction. Many school pupils do the short-term reasonable thing (as they see it) and just do not bother unless they're motivated by some sort of independent interest, or pushed by their household environment to be more successful (the "tiger parenting" approach).

I don't believe you actually think this is true.

No. Actually the elephant in the room is the dismal quality of most teachers. But teachers are kind of a sacred cow of discourse, and nobody can state the screaming obvious.

It's very possibly moreso a cultural issue. COVID caused continuing low attendance, there is currently an anti-education political trend, and AI advancements allow students to be lazy. If parents and peers don't value education, the students won't either.

Don't forget about the examination system grouping students by ability and filtering out the worst performers altogether. Of ≈17 million students who took the zhongkao and graduated junior high school after grade 9 in 2024, ≈10 million were admitted to a high school, ≈4 million to a vocational school and the remaining ≈3 million disappear from education statistics, presumably directly entering the workforce. http://www.moe.gov.cn/jyb_sjzl/sjzl_fztjgb/202506/t20250611_...

> But there is a lot more discipline

I think that would solve a huge number of issues. Teachers and admins seem to have no ability to kick repeated problem students out. My wife works as a para professional sub at our local elementary school. Twice this week a special needs girl was having a meltdown in a hallway and they essentially had to "quarantine" it until she calmed down. Students and teachers had to take other hallways to get where they needed to go. These children have educational needs that public schools cannot provide, but the burden largely falls onto them as an incredibly expensive (to the tax payer) babysitting service. Get them and the slowest students out of the general pipeline. They have been clogging it up and holding everyone back far too long.

And no. I don't have an adequate solution to handle the bottom X% of students who are beyond help from the general system. I just know the system can't function effectively with them in it. There are all sorts of other systemic issues I've seen through her experiences. But this is a major one which impacts all of the students. Classes cannot move at the pace of the slowest and / or most disruptive student. The slowest students need to be left behind for others to thrive. If they cannot reach the already low minimum standards, they cannot advance in grades. If they cannot behave to the low minimum expectations, their parents need to find other accommodations.

In elementary school and early high school I liked older teachers more than younger teachers (just on average, I had many great younger teachers as well). I think 40+ years ago teaching in an elementary school and certainly in a high school was seen as a 'dignified' profession, causing many intelligent people who could've worked for better pay in private industry to work there. Knew some families where all kids (and they had many) either became lawyers, engineers, doctors or teachers. Teacher was seen as an equal option.

I have a feeling many of my greatest teachers wouldn't take the same path today, a lot more burdens and enough other 'intellectual' jobs to go for.

My highschool calculus teacher bragged that she only had to take calculus 101 and 102 three times to pass. We definitely didn't learn calculus that year.

Of course teacher options are limited when the pay is the same as a walmart cashier.

News flash: Massachusetts and Wisconsin came in tied at #1 for student performance, and teacher union density is about 100% for both states.

The article says that scores have been sinking since 2013, many years before the pandemic.

Most schools across the US were available for in person teaching by April and June of 2020. By August of 2020 the vast majority of schools were opened back up.

https://ballotpedia.org/School_responses_to_the_coronavirus_...

The science for what's actually causing cognitive decline is linked more to the neurological damage from poor ventilation and lack of hygienic conditions in the schools causing kids to get sick multiple times a year, directly causing neurological damage.

  In the most expansive study of its kind, researchers have for the first time shown serious and prevalent symptoms of long COVID in kids and teens. The August study, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, is among the first large comprehensive studies of the disorder in this age group. The study, which followed 5367 children, found that 20% of kids (ages 6-11) and 14% of teens met researchers' threshold for long COVID.

  We know that COVID harms the brain. Neuroinflammation, brain shrinkage, disruption of the blood-brain barrier and more have been documented in adults, as have cognitive deficits. These deficits have been measured as equivalent to persistent decreased IQ scores, even for mild and resolved infections. Millions of people have, or have experienced, “brain fog.” What, then, do we guess a child’s COVID-induced “trouble with focusing or memory” might be?

  When you put together the estimate that 10 to 20 percent of infected kids may experience long-term symptoms, that many of the most common symptoms affect cognition, energy levels and behavior, and that children are being periodically reinfected, you have a scientific rationale to partly explain children’s widely reported behavioural and learning challenges.

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/article-abstract/28227...

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-025-96191-4

https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/71/wr/mm7131a3.htm?s_cid=mm...

https://theconversation.com/long-covid-puzzle-pieces-are-fal...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2024/07/23/covid-te...

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapediatrics/fullarticle/...

https://www-news--medical-net.cdn.ampproject.org/c/s/www.new...

>> * New computer labs, laptops, digital textbooks, learning software licenses, smart boards, and other and other expensive crap that is at best neutral from a learning perspective.

I think we should be actively removing these things from schools, but it's a tough fight as parents against an entire well-funded EdTech industry pushing these things with a firehose of VC money.

>> * Pointless building improvements that don't service education but instead service the prestige and egos of the administrators of the schools.

This makes me crazy. We have a very fancy, very large new school building my city which is LEED platinum certified. I can't possibly imagine that that certification level is cost effective. I'm sure we could have built a very good school with a healthy safe learning environment and environmentally conscious decisions for heating, cooling, power, etc. for significantly less if the city were willing to forego the press release headline. This is also a really hard problem that pits taxpayers against a well-funded industry full of lobbyists.

Both of these can be traced back to the principal agent problem, which really is blaming the administrators, because they're making decisions and then don't have to deal with the consequences (actually integrating and using EdTech in a classroom, paying more taxes for the same or worse education, etc.).

Admins, support staff, generally focusing on "access" instead of quality.

There's a belief that the bottom 10-20% is more important than the top 80% to bother spending on, which I think is reflected in the budgets.

https://www.commonsenseinstituteus.org/oregon/research/educa...