> The best all-income schools are catholic schools, averaging at 1 grade level higher. Then private schools do even better

These are not equal comparisons. People who send their kids to a private school are choosing that, and thus care about the education their kids get. While Catholics are all income and choosing for religion reasons, generally catholic implies cultural care for education. Public schools take everyone including those who don't care about education.

In general public schools in the US are very good. However a small number in every school are kids that would be kicked out of private (including catholic) schools. There are also significant variation between schools with richer areas of a city doing better - despite often spending less on education.

> Charter schools have been the best bang for the buck.

That is a lot easier when you can require a transcript from the prospective student, review it, and say, "Uh, no thank you".

There's a private technical college near here that offers EMT and paramedic training. They "guarantee" "100% success in certification and registration" for their students.

How do they get there? They boot students out after they fail (<80%) their second test in the class.

I'm not necessarily opposed to such a policy. It is, however, intellectually dishonest of them to try to tout it as a better school for that reason. Charter schools are free to reject students who will bring their grade averages down.

Gifted programs dropped from ~72% of elementary schools to ~65% by 2013, and probably have continued declining. Given it takes 10+ years to educate a child, the school culture to change, and so on, we should expect to see quite a lag between policy and outcomes.

I’m originally from a US state that currently sits at a 40% literacy rate, but I’ve lived for the last decade in various European countries. I say this only because, even if still anecdotal, I feel like I have a decent basis for comparison. Certainly there are educational disparities from center to periphery and across income brackets everywhere, but I have never lived somewhere that the division was as stark as the US.

France — with all its problems — ensures the same incredibly high standard of curriculum across the country and perhaps most importantly it is actually expected that top university performers who will become researchers teach at high school in the periphery. It’s even a nation-wide competition by discipline (look up the “aggregation”) to obtain these highly sought positions. The idea is something like you teach high school outside Paris while preparing your doctorate and then either return triumphant to the big research institutes or continue teaching in the provinces. Something like this in the US would have immeasurable impact, since probably one of the biggest issues is just convincing well-educated people to teach in rural areas.

In 2013 social media was still a textual medium, right? There was Vine, but that died pretty quickly, from what I remember.

If social media and smartphones are the problem, I would have expected that results for English proficiency would be steady until the advent of TikTok, right?

Actually, it is a good point that this is a lagging indicator.

Agree, but I'm not sure how much worse this is today?

I avoided English Lit in college but thinking back to High School I recognize the "I don't know where he's getting this" reaction. I just rarely engaged with the so-called "classic" stuff we had to read, and like you say I had no trouble reading the words but struggled with deeper meanings or even just getting past the archaic language. And this was in the early 1980s, no chance it was influenced by social media or mobile phones or AI. My parents probably blamed television.

At least we now have AI, where a student could (if motivated) ask questions about the meaning of a passage and get back a synthesis of what other people have written about it. Back then I used Cliffs Notes to do that.

The quality of most text msgs is higher than what passes for “quality literature” in many lit classrooms.

Texting is unironically a better use of time than reading infinite jest, or gravities rainbow, etc.

But I mean, I remember hearing this back in the 80s, so in itself is not a great indicator unless we can see something that would point at why parents stopped caring as much.

Now, if someone came with a headline that said "Parents not involved in childrens education because they've been ragebaited into spending all their time yelling on social media" my biases would tend to lend me to believe it's true, even without sufficient evidence. There are other correlations, like cellphone ownership in the population.

Just having social media itself doesn't seem to be an exact fit, but that tells us nothing about the algorithms that social media was using at the time.