Yes? You mention it too - parents glued to their phones, part of the problem. Kids seeing their parents reading a book vs being glued to their phones really isn't the same thing, far from it. They can come and see pages of printed text in a book, vs some endless tiktok/instagram feeds of shallow video entertainment. Guess which they will stay around and stare endlessly without even blinking.

Screens and especially active content are incredibly addictive and small kids have no way of being rational and throttle their use. If they see the same behavior in their parents that's it.

Its not about having stay-at-home parent, but about spending the time with kids to be 100% physically there for them and them only, no running screen of any type anywhere in sight. Lets be honest, this is a rather rare sight.

People always want to blame the new thing in culture. Some collective sin if only we had better self control. Every generation has one.

Usually it’s just institutional failure at multiple levels and a whole bunch of people who don’t care about the institution’s output sufficiently.

Every time I read about new education stories they’re busy trying to solve wider social issues instead of being the best place to get an education. Just like how libraries turned into homeless shelters instead of being a place for the community to learn and read.

Wait, you’re literally on your phone while your kids entertain you…?

Get off the phone! I see so many parents are restaurants, both glued to their phones while their kid is bored our on their tablet.

People like that guy like to jerk off to their thoughts and think they alone know the issue, and that it’s because people are lazy!!

Reality check, income inequality makes it so that parents have to slave away to earn the bar minimum to survive, participate in the gig economy, and then deal with tax cuts that give the richest of the rich even more money, while suffocating social services in their neighborhoods.

This is end stage capitalism, squeeze the rubes for every cent they have and damn their kids

They do a pretty poor job at babysitting too. They do very little to create a calm and disciplined environment.

> Schools have very little to do with teaching, and really are just about baby sitting and trying to correct social issues.

Is that wrong? The government takes away your kid for 12 years, every weekday all day, they might as well solve social issues in the country even if that means, say, kids are 1 year behind Asian kids, or their parents 30 years ago. If they figure out how to solve personal issues, that's even better.

I think there is a logical fallacy here. People assume that the only purpose of school is education. The more the education the better, even if that means deepening social issues, or making kids unhappy (BTW being a kid is like ~20% of someones life, not insignificant in itself). I think they assume it just because 'school' is called 'school', but I don't think the name of an object should determine its purpose.

- - -

When I look at the social issues in my country, I think the school system would be a very natural place to start to solve them (and arguably the current school system just worsens them). Even at the cost of "fall in reading and math scores".

> more School Bullshit System as a Service

I fully hear you on this. I miss the days where a simple phone call or email communication would occur when needed. Now it's a deluge of daily updates via 2 separate 'apps' for 2 different schools, and a requirement to login to 'app' or website to read the 'email' that they've sent out. Nevermind contacting someone that isn't directly associated with your child at the school -- Guess that's all need to know basis.

I hate it.

Hard to conclude much from this, given New Jersey is consistently rated one of the top 2 states in the nation for K-12 education.

The lesson may even be the opposite: "If your school's biggest problem is 'too much money', outcomes will be pretty good."

> The money was spent on more MacBooks, more iPads, more buildings, more smart TVs, more consultants, more School Bullshit System as a Service, more scoreboards, more $50,000 signs in front of schools.

> “social justice”

So they spend all their effort on social justice, but spend none of their money on it? You should move to the South, you can pick a charter/magnate/whatever school with no special education and no busses. Keeps out the pesky blacks and retarded.

Somewhat of a pain though since my son has autism and services are pretty shit compared to where I lived in NJ

Which county in New Jersey?

In what state are public high schools allowed to "how to pray"? It sounds like her new high school isn't that good. I have a daughter at a good public high school in California in a quite liberal area. There was none of what you mentioned. One day of reviewing the syllabi and rules and quizzes in most subjects starting less than a week later.

>Things like no bullying, inclusiveness, fire safety, bring your own water bottle, how to pray

When great controversy surrounds the curriculum, the safest thing to teach is nothing at all.

Either this is a bizarre backwards school, or your niece is exaggerating for effect.

> kids in the US are doing active shooter drills and staring at the Ten Commandments. USA! USA! USA!

Not a thing at public schools (despite some attempts to force it)

Between this and the prayer comment, I suspect this comment is either exaggerated or mixed with internet anecdotes rather than actual experience.

I went to public high school in the 70s. The honors chemistry class spent an entire semester on what a molar mass was.

Among other things an entire day on active shooter drills?

Is it possible your niece was joking?

Would you be open to identifying the state where this school is?

[flagged]

I don't like the comparisons to other schools or cultures where memorization is the priority.

What kids do with what they learn in school matter more than whether or not they memorized a calc function.

Besides, who cares if you know cal functions in a post-phone, post-AI world. You look that shit up now.

At a certain level “homeschool” is going to be more effective. Ive seen parents get together with 3-6 similar aged students, and then do a combination of hiring a teacher/tutor for them and splitting duting to making it tenable.

Check the private schools a few more times - some offer quite competitive financial aid packages that even people who feel they’re “high wage” can take advantage of.

Are your kids old enough to run amok at home instead of going to school? Would the police arrest you if you left them home alone instead of sending them to school?

do you live in Canada or is this happening elsewhere?

My friend has kids, 8 and 10, who run around outside and play with neighborhood kids as well as read books. They are very active in their kids lives and constantly bring them to events and other social gatherings. This keeps them active physically and socially making things like screen time seem boring.

The shitty parents are the ones who let meta and the like hack them to the point where their children are just following by example - if you stare at the screen all day, so will they.

Of course kids are reading less. When I was growing, there was frequently not much else to do. Reading was replaced by movies and shows on demand and wont come back no matter what educators or parents do.

It is cheaper, easily available and more fun.

Sure kids also use social networks. But the role reading had was mostly taken over by Netflix, youtube, disney and such.

Add a couple thoughts to that general idea:

- There's also a reward issue, in that reading, especially long form is "soft punished." It's not directly punished, yet there's very little reward, mostly a lot of struggle, not much of the candy feedback of TV, movies, and video games. It requires personal imagination and visualization of often difficult concepts rather than simply taking what someone else has "imagined correctly" for you. If you've never seen the Lord of the Rings movies, imaging what Frodo, Aragorn, and the rest are actually doing, where they're going, and the struggling through Tolkien's complicated prose is quite challenging. And socially, there's also significant peer pressure issues involved, that evoke “epidemic” or “contagion” comparisons. Once large numbers of peers discount reading, then the population on average starts receiving negative feedback. Notably, if peers are high achievers, then students who interact with these peers may also adopt those habits. [1]

[1] https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/jameskim/files/jep-peer_in...

- Part that's less nefarious, like a teen highlights about the difficulties of reading in this paper [2] (pg 34.) "You can’t ask a book to explain what it means right now. I go to people because of their interactive nature."

[2] https://alair.ala.org/server/api/core/bitstreams/0051cf84-91...

- The social media companies and the world wide web culture in general have also implemented a form of reading detriment. There's little reward to blogging, writing, or reading long form writing. Incendiary writing and rage-farming was long ago found to be an extremely effective tactic compared to informative discussion. And a lot of the time, almost all you can look forward to with your informative post is your contribution being aggressively scraped, while being compensated nothing, and then churned out to make someone else money.

- There's actually a few positive though, apparently teen and juvenile literature is actually increasing in sales somewhat from [2] compared with adult literature sales. Young adult books have been the fastest-growing category over the last 5 years, with print unit sales jumping by 48.2% since 2018. 35.03 million print copies of young adult (YA) books are sold each year as of 2022. [3]

[3] https://wordsrated.com/young-adult-book-sales/#:~:text=Compa...

- You may be slightly down biasing how much people read Lord of the Rings. The Hobbit edition from 2007 has 76,000 ratings and 12,000 reviews on Amazon. [4]

[4] https://www.amazon.com/Hobbit-J-R-R-Tolkien/dp/0618968636/re...

The core problem is actually very simple. Education studies do not measure what they claim to measure. When they say, "education outcomes improve when..." they usually mean the pass rate, i.e. they only measured a signal among the bottom 20% of students. When they say, "test scores improve when..." they are, at best, measuring up to the 90th percentile. When they say, "the white/black attainment gap," or "socioeconomic disadvantages," they're usually just fishing for funding money, and their study will not actually attempt to measure either of those things. From a review of the literature on No Child Left Behind (NCLB) in 2015:

> Only one study specifically examined the achievement gap for students from low socioeconomic backgrounds (Hampton & Gruenert, 2008) despite NCLB’s stated commitment to improving education for children from low-income families. African American students were often mentioned in studies of general student achievement but none of the reviewed studies focused specifically on the effects of NCLB for this subgroup. Again, this is a curious gap in the research considering the law’s emphasis on narrowing the Black-White achievement gap. Other groups of students underrepresented in the research on NCLB include gifted students, students with vision impairments, and English proficient minority students.

("A Review of the Empirical Literature on No Child Left Behind From 2001 to 2010", Husband & Hunt, 2015)

Everything you see going wrong is downstream of this. Yes, harmful ideologies have done a lot of damage to the education system, but it could easily survive this we had actual signifiers of success.

Where my wife works the average salary is over 100K per year, so not bad for 9 months of work. This is in California where the test scores are some of the worst in the nation. I would not lean too hard at political party affiliation, California politics is heavily influenced by Teachers Unions, and yet we score near the bottom of the entire US.

> Curricula is set by politics and ideology, not established science.

This is part of it. A friend is a teacher and is now in an admin position where he manages teachers. His big gripe is the higher ups have no formal system - every time a new person comes in they bring with them their system and politics, burning down the previous efforts while doing little to nothing for students. Then they leave for greener pastures and the next ideologue comes along with their matches.

Parents need to take responsibility for outcomes. Education happens as much at home as it does in school. You need engaged teachers AND parents.

Teacher salaries need to keep up. The problem is teacher salaries aren’t a state or a national setup. They depend on the school district you’re in. If you’re in a high income district where higher taxes are afforded. Teacher salaries are good. But then these places also have VERY engaged parents - which makes the scores much better.

If you want rural and inner city scores to improve it will need real funding - 1. For teachers to want to move to small town USA and teach there, 2. Or for them to risk life and limb going to inner cities and 3. Having an extremely high teacher to student ratio - probably 5-10 per teacher to compensate for lack of engagement at home.

> There's also the intentional and systematic disassembling of our education system by the federal government

Where is your evidence of this? Schools are one of the most locally controlled institutions of our government.

Chicago public school teachers salaries will reach over $110,000 by 2029 or earlier. Just going by the track record, this will not result in a better quality of education.

> systematic disassembling of our education system by the federal government

So you support shutting down the federal Dept. of Education? Or is the answer more centralized control of education?

You are hilarious.

Schools are dominated by leftwing CRT ideology. It's the rare exception when there is real pushback against dinosaurs or evolution. I very much doubt that you are as angry about Islamic pushback against sex topics in school.

The reward structures, the dumbing down of courses, removing accelerated courses, passing everyone, the move against merit, the removal of structure, discipline, and punishment for bad behavior all come from liberal ideas on teaching.

Anyone who demands standards, values merit, values hard work with high expectations is labeled a fascist, colonizer, or some other pejorative. "Ways of knowing" is an idea that permeates modern teaching where we can't judge or grade anyone for what they know or don't know because different people just "know" differently. Grades are racist. Expectations are racist. Math is racist.

I was thinking about that recently. I don’t anyone ever pulling out a Game Boy in elementary or middle school in the 90s, even though many of us had them at home.

It’s not that we all got a lecture about no video games in school. It just very self-evidently wasn’t a place you would play video games. It would be like getting a pizza delivered to you at the doctor’s office. Just absurd.

I remember a kid with a Game Gear on the elementary school bus and even that being, well, unusual enough I remember it. Kind of similar to how kids will always remember seeing someone’s family pet run on the bus, because it blows their minds that it can even happen.

I think it’s more a matter of both extremes.

I’ve seen stay at home parents who put their kids in daycare so they can spend the day shopping and effectively have someone else raise their kids. Their kids end up largely just being status symbols. I’ve also seen parents that go everywhere with their kids, schedule every moment of their day and won’t even let them stand at the school bus stop by themselves. The parents build their entire lives around their kids and live vicariously through them.

IMO, kids need a proper balance and I don’t think a lot of them are getting that.

The generation raised by iPads are in HS now and American IQ tests scores are in decline, especially in the last 10-15 years.

Go to any park/playground sometime and observe the benches.

Go to any sports field/venue and observe the bleachers.

What you find may astound you, even if the percentage isn't literally 50%+.

Not only that, but it's a dead end for societal policy. Even if a person actually believed parents deserve the most blame for kids' educational outcomes, that person should recognize there's no real way to influence this (short of dystopic levels of forcing kids into foster care). They would then find the second most blame-worthy cause to fix.