This article tries to put the blame on laptops when the real culprit could simply be boiled down to a failure in classroom management and lack of enforcement against cell phones in class, whiny parents who rage when their children are told they can't be playing video games in class, and teachers who are using computer programs to teach the kids instead of actually teaching.

Ban phones from class. For real. Lock down websites that are irrelevant to the subjects being taught. These are all technically possible with the tools schools have. Even Youtube. If something is important enough to show the class, the teacher can show it on their larger screen.

Half these issues can be solved by teaching kids how to use technology meaningfully instead of using it as a babysitter.

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mynameisash 13 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

> Ban phones from class. For real. Lock down websites that are irrelevant to the subjects being taught. These are all technically possible with the tools schools have. Even Youtube. If something is important enough to show the class, the teacher can show it on their larger screen.

My kids have had Chromebooks for years at school, and their schools have had the devices pretty much fully unlocked. My eldest, who has struggled with ADHD and other mental health issues, was spending his entire day on YouTube and Discord. Accordingly, his grades were terrible. The school's IT said they don't lock it down because, more or less, "by this age, kids should be mature enough to make appropriate decisions about how to use technology." But they did concede that my son should have his account locked down.

Why on earth schools don't start from the perspective of whitelisting YouTube videos/channels, websites, etc., instead of allowing a wholly open web is mind-boggling to me.

I fully endorse making schools entirely phone-free. Get rid of Chromebooks altogether.

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japhyr 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> the real culprit could simply be boiled down to a failure in classroom management and lack of enforcement against cell phones in class

I was a middle school and high school math and science teacher from 1994 through 2019. I watched the advent of internet in schools, then desktop computers in classrooms, and finally smartphones in students' hands.

I've lived a life of watching teachers and schools get blamed for not dealing better with society's issues. "Just teach kids how to use technology", "just ban phones", and "lock down irrelevant websites" is a pretty big ask when the entire industry is focused on getting kids to use these devices, apps, and sites as much as they possibly can.

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telman17 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I can definitely see the push for using technology in schools - what you're saying makes sense.

It's not the individual teachers I blame. I come from a family of educators and a lot of the crappy enforcement falls to the district level, who just want to make the parents happy. There is literally no reason a child needs a cell phone in class. Computers are great. Lock them down. There is nothing unreasonable about this.

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xethos 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Are we sure it isn't the offensively-well-funded tech industry that's being referenced here?

	▲	salawat an hour ago \| parent [-]
		You're not suggesting the most overinflated asset class in the market might somehow be involved though predatory pushing of product into education to get em hooked while they're young are you?! /s

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iambateman 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

What would be better policy, in your opinion?

	▲	CJefferson an hour ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Having taught in schools for years? Treat companies that make addictive products the same way we treat drugs, alcohol and tobacco. Kids want them, particularly teenagers. We aren't perfect at stopping their access. But we can make a best attempt. It would be hard, and it would be 'anti-capitalism', but, I think we have done real long term damage to a generation, and I think in 20 years, like Tobacco, it I'll turn out the companies knew how much they were damaging children and covered it up.
	▲	assaddayinh 23 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Faraday cages built into school buildings.

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jimt1234 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Don't forget that teachers these days are also expected to be active shooter experts, ready to literally put their own lives on the line.

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mschuster91 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

And on top of that, in many countries (not just the US) teachers, school and the students themselves don't have anywhere near the financial resources that they need.

Schools are (literally) falling apart, here in Germany it became apparent during Covid that a ton of schools had windows that rotted so far they couldn't be opened, in the US there are states that introduced 4 day school weeks due to budget constraints [1], way too many school children live in utter poverty meaning they get their only warm meal at school [2], with that meal sometimes being of even lower quality than prison food to the tune it was a recurring joke in The Simpsons, class sizes are too huge, teaching material is outdated or censored to the point of being useless [3], students are too poor to afford basic supplies meaning teachers step in [4], teachers lack the time and budget to actually educate themselves and keep up with modern development, teachers lack the budget, room and/or political backing from their superiors to actually use what they learned in university or in after-graduation continuous training in practice, students lack the privacy at home (and often enough: a safe home or EVEN A HOME AT ALL [5]) to learn in peace and safety.

And on top of that comes the deluge of ChatGPT slop, sexual abuse both domestic and amongst students, bullying, domestic violence, "parents" using their kids as weapons to hurt their ex partners, stalking, gang violence, in Europe you got traumatized kids coming from war torn countries with zero support structure, in the US you got kids scared to hell and beyond about ICE.

Honestly, I'm not surprised that both students and teachers are checking out into the dream world of their phones.

We are failing our children, but hey, the stonk number goes brr!!! And taxes are lower!!!!!! (Education budgets is usually the first thing that gets slashed because it takes about 10-20 years to show a noticeable negative effect)

[1] https://www.nctq.org/research-insights/amid-budget-and-staff...

[2] https://thecounter.org/summer-hunger-new-york-city/

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_banning_in_the_United_Sta...

[4] https://19thnews.org/2025/08/teachers-spending-school-suppli...

[5] https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/education/2025/12/28/numb...

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MichaelRo 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I dunno, maybe it differs by country/location but my perception is that school was never capable to educate beyond some basic mediocrity level. Mostly it's an institution imposed by the state to process the children while parents are working. And the way to actually teach your kids something never really changed since the times of the elite few versus the mass of peasants: private tutoring.

Now it's true that with basic access to education for masses, a few more poor smart kids that would otherwise become fishmongers or something, now have the chance to raise above their starting condition. But the reality never changed and never will: the vast majority of people are not very bright. And making it easier for them to be dumb and get away with it doesn't help (smartphones and now AI).

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nativeit an hour ago | parent | next [-]

We could pay teachers even half of the median salary for HN users, and then see if outcomes improve?

	▲	gscott 37 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		It's more about passion then money.

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intended 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Schools can educate well beyond that level, provided they are resourced. Bloom’s 2 sigma problem comes to mind (1).

Education also ends up suffering because its seen as a support role, teachers are not valued, and “He who can, does; he who cannot, teaches".

Education is also political today. Science based education is an outright target. Increasing government spending to improve outcomes is also a contested issue, and in America this is met with arguments about bad teachers, unions, and privatization/vouchers.

There is much that can be done to improve educational outcomes, but like everything, it is contested.

(1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom%27s_2_sigma_problem

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mschuster91 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> But the reality never changed and never will: the vast majority of people are not very bright

Nature vs nurture, the old argument...

Of course, you got what one might flippantly call "the inbreds from Alabama", or those whose parents suffered from substance abuse or other issues (obviously, for the mother the risk is much higher, but also the father's health has a notable impact on sperm quality). These kids, particularly those suffering from FAS (fetal alcohol abuse)? As hard as it sounds, they often enough are headed for a life behind institutional bars. FAS is no joke, and so are many genetic defects. That's nature, no doubt - but still, we as a society should do our best to help these kids to grow to the best they reasonably can (and maybe, with gene therapy, we can even "fix" them).

But IMHO, these kids where "nature" dominates are a tiny minority - and nurture is the real problem we have to tackle as societies. We are not just failing the kids themselves by letting them grow up in poverty, we are failing our society. And instead of pseudo elite tech bro children and nepo babies collecting millions of dollars for the x-th dating app, NFT or whatever scam - I'd rather prefer to see people who actually lived a life beyond getting spoiled rotten to have a chance.

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somenameforme 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Places like China and Vietnam are the ones rocking the test scores. These places operate on a tiny fraction of the $ per student of most places in the world, even PPP adjusted. And I think China's increasingly absurd achievements [1] make it clear that this goes beyond the test.

I think the nurture argument can still apply there - Chinese parent is a meme all its own, and for a good reason. But this isn't something that can be achieved with money or digital tech. It's a combined mix of culture and parenting within that culture. Perhaps if the people so invested in trying to improve the education of children were, themselves, having more kids - we might not have such a problem.

[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47067496

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mschuster91 2 hours ago | parent [-]

> It's a combined mix of culture and parenting within that culture.

The problem is, that culture (and other more or less closely related Asian cultures) also produces an awful lot of psychologically awfully damaged adults - and many Asian countries are now facing the consequences of that, with hikikomori, women not finding suitable partners, rock bottom fertility rates and collapsing demographics.

And on top of that, you may get really obedient children, excelling at following what they know to do... but creativity? Thinking outside the box? Going against the script? Thrown into unfamiliar situations? Whoops.

It's getting better, slowly, no doubt, and we're seeing the results, but I'm not certain that progress comes fast enough to save some of the societies facing the demographic bomb the hardest (especially Japan, but China is also heading for serious issues). With China especially, it may also get interesting politically once a generation grows to adulthood that can see through the CCP propaganda.

> Perhaps if the people so invested in trying to improve the education of children were, themselves, having more kids - we might not have such a problem.

That assumes we have people actually interested in furthering the education of our children, and that is something I heavily doubt.

All we have here in the Western world is the contrary: we got austerity / trickle down finance ideologists that see education in general as a field ripe for savings on one side, then we got history revisionists actively trying to erase what children get taught about our past, and if all of that weren't bad enough we got the religious extremists trying to sell the gullible public that if you ban stuff like LGBT from even being mentioned in school books, children wouldn't turn out gay or trans - which is obviously bonkers.

	▲	ThrowawayR2 an hour ago \| parent [-]
		> "And on top of that, you may get really obedient children, excelling at following what they know to do... but creativity? Thinking outside the box? Going against the script? Thrown into unfamiliar situations? Whoops." Usual Western racism, reassuring themselves they're better than those "uncreative" Asians, even as Asia continues to eat away at the West's technology lead in a variety of sectors. One wonders if the Europeans ever told themselves that the backwards folk of the colonies could never catch up to the technological or scientific achievements of the continent's great centers of learning and industry.

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thegreatpeter 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

[flagged]

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glitchc 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Sure. Teachers would love to ban cellphones and punish kids who disobey. The problem is, the parents who sit on the school boards as trustees won't let them.

Adding parents to the school system has single-handedly destroyed the North American education system. Why is there no homework? Because parents complain that kids find it too hard or too much. Why is there no discipline? Because parents complain that discipline is making their kids miserable. Why is there so much emphasis on schools to teach practical skills? Because parents have abdicated their responsibility to teach these skills at home, where they belong.

Parents are no experts on education yet they get to decide what teachers do in the classrooms. The law of averages dictates that 50% were below average students themselves. Guess who sits on the school boards? It's not the over-achievers, those people are too busy being successful in their careers.

There's a global competition for talent and our children are falling behind. Now you know why.

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throwaway439080 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> Guess who sits on the school boards?

People who get elected to sit on the school boards? I think you're actually just complaining about democracy.

My local school district has banned phones during school time (enforced by an auto-locking pouch gadget that releases the phone when school ends), and parents overwhelmingly support it.

	▲	AngryData an hour ago \| parent \| next [-]
		In my experience school boards are anything but democratic. The only people that heartfully pursue those positions are the handful of assholes that shouldn't be in those positions for any reason. And their election is just a choose your flavor of asshole that can manage a half decent public persona and is sitting on excess capital to blow on marketing. Nobody knows who these people are, even in small towns with life long residency, half the people on the board nobody knows unless they are also on the school board and met them through it. Even if people cared about their board's membership, how do you realistically vet them all without having shit tons of free time to go personally meet them or follow them around?
	▲	bandrami 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		> I think you're actually just complaining about democracy Local participatory democracy is in fact pretty terrible: HOAs, school boards, neighborhood impact hearings where people complain that building apartments would let the poors move in and we can't have that.

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philistine an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

My province banned all electronic devices brought by the kids from all schools all at once. No one can complain, it's provincial law.

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bryanrasmussen 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

>whiny parents who rage when their children are told they can't be playing video games in class

you have stats on that? It seems like an outlier.

>teachers who are using computer programs to teach the kids instead of actually teaching.

before laptops there were bad teachers who used books to teach the kids instead of actually teaching - as in: "read chapter 7, there will be a test!"

if after laptops there is a worse result then it seems to argue that laptops in the hands of bad teachers are worse than books in the hands of bad teachers, at least.

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bubblewand 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> you have stats on that? It seems like an outlier

No stats, but it’s extremely real.

I know lots of teachers. Parents who flip shit if their kids can’t answer their texts while in class are common. Parents who call their kids in class just to chat are less common, but not as one-in-a-million as you’d think.

The attitude you (I’m assuming) and I were raised with, when it comes to school, is less universal than you perhaps believed. And I mean among adults.

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vjvjvjvjghv 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

">whiny parents who rage when their children are told they can't be playing video games in class you have stats on that? It seems like an outlier."

I know several teachers who retired because over the last decades student discipline has declined and teachers don't get support from either parents or principals. Basically teachers have no tools for discipling students while on the other hand parents demand all kinds of things from teachers but demand nothing from their kids. And principals almost always side with the parents against the teacher. It seems teaching has become an impossible task.

	▲	BLKNSLVR 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		This equates to the experience of the various teachers in my social orbit.

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freeopinion 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I think it might be more insightful to say "laptops in the hands of students are worse than books in the hands of bad teachers".

A bad teacher can say "read chapter 7, there will be a test!" and the student can ignore the book, or vandalize the book or whatever. But when the student has a computer with an internet connection, they can vandalize the computer, ignore the website, or jump on an unrelated website.

I'm tempted to think that the laptop makes the situation worse. Some student who might have read part of the chapter out of pure boredom during classtime is now driven by dopamine to jump on the distraction.

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lr4444lr 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Stats? Who do you think is buying the kids the phones and the data plans? Who is letting them take them to school in the first place?

The kids would be better off being told to read chapter 7 than play sensory overload edutainment tools that fragment their attention.

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jimmydddd 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

"--Whiny parents" is definitely a major thing and not an outlier. For an older guy like me, I was shocked by the stories I've heard recently. ---Coworker's son is acting out in class and not following any instructions. He calls the school and says the teacher is not challenging the son enough and is son is super special. ---Friend retired and took a job as an elementary school classroom aide. When she instructs a fourth grader to go to class, he punches her in the stomach several times. School administration tells her to keep quiet about it as they don't want to anger the parents. ---Parent of third grader informs school that her daughter should be allowed to dress and act like a lion and roam around the classroom.

	▲	seanmcdirmid an hour ago \| parent [-]
		> ---Parent of third grader informs school that her daughter should be allowed to dress and act like a lion and roam around the classroom. This specific meme has been floating around with the MAGA crowd for at least 4-5 years now. It’s not clear if it has any basis in reality, but it is one of those “I heard it on Facebook so it must be true” kind of things.

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telman17 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

No, thus why I said it could be boiled down to.

However as I say in another comment, most of my family are educators so these experiences represent what they've been dealing with for the past 20+ years.

> before laptops there were bad teachers who used books to teach the kids instead of actually teaching - as in: "read chapter 7, there will be a test!"

I think both could be true and I'm not excluding either. The issues I've heard almost always come down to entitled parents who don't want to raise their own kids but have the schools do it for them, then complain when their kid brings home a disciplinary document for not being able to follow simple conduct rules in class.

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beepbooptheory 2 hours ago | parent [-]

20+ years feels like a very long time for this to be the norm. Smartphone hegemony in general isn't that old.

	▲	TimorousBestie 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Close to twenty years. First iPhone was 2007, I got my first one in 2012 or so. Before smartphones, texting during class was very common when I was in high school. That’s more or less how I learned that 9/11 happened.

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linkregister 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

All it takes is one persistent parent who manages to get an administrator to reprimand a teacher for enforcing classroom rules. A teacher who deeply cares about teaching will need to support themselves at the end of the day.

	▲	freeopinion 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		This does not require a persistent parent. Administrators whose job it is to administer consequences for misbehavior already reprimand teachers for enforcing school rules. The turnover on new teachers is crazy bad. It's kind of like what you hear about Russia "recruiting" foreigners to die in Ukraine. Our school district recruits teachers from places like the Philippines and Singapore. Even with the promise of fat American wages and a ticket to the promised land, a huge number of even those teachers don't last two years.

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itishappy an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

No teacher (or parent) has ever managed to lock down a computer that was in my possession to a level where I wouldn't get distracted by it. You could shut the power off, and I'd still be poking around the hardware. I spent hundreds of hours programming my calculator instead of paying attention in class. Informative? Yes. Distracting to myself and those around me? You bet.

I completely agree with your phone take. There is no level of administrative control that can remove the distraction from the device.

Why would you think laptops are different?

	▲	Noumenon72 an hour ago \| parent [-]
		We could reduce it to the level of distraction of a notebook and pen. Grayscale would help.

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pertymcpert 5 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

There is a large body of research that shows it's not what you're saying it is FYI.

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jimbokun 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

This is an insane take.

We have overwhelming evidence on how addictive and distracting electronic devices are and zero evidence for wide spread use of electronic devices improving educational outcomes.

The experiments have been done and the results are in and computers in education are a failed experiment.

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remarkEon 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

You are sort of giving away the game here.

You are acknowledging that technology, specifically the smartphone, is bad for learning environments. This is a statement that extends beyond the classroom, because why would a smartphone be bad in the classroom for learning but not bad for learning when they're doing homework outside the classroom?

I'm old enough to have straddled the analog to digital transition. This likely results in a higher amount of internalized skepticism about technology than those who grew up as digital natives. With that out of the way, I think your lockdown plan is a bit misguided. We should not lockdown technology like this, we should ban it for learning. I know that may sound insane, but every interaction I have with younger people who grew up as digital natives shows they have a weaker and weaker grasp of everything from the underlying theory of whatever technical issue we are talking about to the basic ability to communicate their thoughts in writing. This is only going to get worse with AI.

There's a reality here in 5-10 years from now where there's a bunch of olds who know roughly how things work, and the following generation who has no clue and not only has no impetus to learn, but no ability. That's the difference between the prior "old man yells at cloud eras". At least in prior instances the follow-on generation could actually learn the job.

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synergy20 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

it's actually extremely hard to ban websites unless all students can only use chrome book, middle and high schoolers know how to install tor and free vpn to bypass all those domain blacklists in a few minutes with their laptop or phone.

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gruez 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Whitelist sites instead of blacklisting? I'm also not sure how kids are getting admin rights to install a VPN in the first place. For the overwhelming majority of cases a kiosk like experience should suffice, which should virtually eliminate any jailbreaks.

	▲	toast0 9 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		If you're using a whitelist approach, you may as well just turn off the internet. Maintaining a whitelist is almost hopeless. Turning off the internet isn't a bad idea, but it is a big change. Plus, if you're using the google docs ecosystem, I suspect it's hard to avoid kids chatting in shared text files, and eventually figuring out how to get spreadsheets to fetch webpages for you.
	▲	jonhohle an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Yeah, this never made sense to me and I’ve suggested it to the district, especially for lower grades. They will never block all of the websites they need to unless they block all of the websites. Allow teachers to unblock specific sites for the students they’re responsible for.

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DaveCharlieLen 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

And what CC item can you point to for that. Teachers often have to write the actual thing they are teaching as a CC item on the board. Want people to teach tech, go to meetings and make them.

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DenverR 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

real Free Laptops has never been tried.

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anon-3988 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

We should treat phones on kids the same we treat alchohol. "What the fuck, is that a phone? Give me that!" The only other solution involves evaporating our privacy. Fuk 'em kids. I guess they don't get to use phones, we survived, why can't they?

In fact, it is probably better for them to "struggle" and figure out by themselves how to find a way to circumvent it. Make them think instead of having thoughts feed into them.

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Fire-Dragon-DoL 3 hours ago | parent [-]

One small problem is that we used to have landlines to call friends (for chats or homeworks) and those are practically dead

	▲	jen20 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Perhaps in America. Woe betide anyone in the UK who used a landline phone to call their friend before 6pm when the evening rate kicked in.

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maerF0x0 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

If we're spouting off unsubstantiated claims. I'll add teachers unions and the mandatory spend of tax money on their near monopolies versus a voucher system that allows parents to choose the best education the money can buy. (To be clear I do think we should fund educating our children, I disagree with forcing the purchase to go to a specific solution / system)

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freeopinion 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

If you are looking for reform, consider rethinking how much "education" the public should fund. Should we keep paying to have every student sit through Algebra and Geometry if less than 15% of them can pass the proficiency test afterward? Can we require people to pass proficiency tests before we fund their education past the 6th grade? 8th grade? Can we require a student to be able to read at a 3rd grade level before we enroll them in dual enrollment English Literature?

I understand the arguments for an educated population being a public benefit worth paying for. But we are spending enormous funds to produce an uneducated population. Some states now offer two high school diplomas. The traditional diploma doesn't mean anything anymore so now they have a "Career and College Ready Diploma" that is supposed to mean something. Why do we pay to fund a diploma that is meaningless?

What if we fund unlimited tries at K-6, and we fund 7-9 then 10-12 for people who earn the privilege with good marks? Then we can talk about funding 13-16 for people who keep earning the privilege. People who don't earn the privilege to advance can retake classes. Or they can move on with life as an uneducated person. We just skip the pretense of secondary education for them. Private schools can take up the challenge if they want to take a swing at people who haven't earned public funding.

That all seems radical and harsh. I just put it out there to spur your thoughts on reform.

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vineyardmike 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I'm glad you recognize that you're participating in unsubstantiated claims, because that is most of the literature in support of vouchers.

Vouchers sound good if you don't think about it with any real veracity or intellectually serious rigor, but (in America) are basically a shitty partisan scam. They're basically universally used as a method to divert tax funds to schools that would otherwise be unfundable via taxes (eg. religious or discriminatory).

Why do we think parents are actually capable of choosing the "best" option, and why wouldn't 100% of parents choose that option? Parents are famously bad at making decisions, as illustrated by home schooling, religious dogmatism in private schools, parents trying to opt-out their students from scientific and health education, and the general history of parental intervention in public schools.

Why would some schools take $X per student and generate better outcomes than others? They won't and the secret is that private schools will charge more than the voucher price to produce better outcomes, but then you've essentially drained the funding of a public good to subsidize a private school that some students won't be able to attend.

As a thought experiment, can we use a voucher system to fund alternative fire or police departments? Can I apply my voucher to an FDA with a properly credentialed head? Or are schools the only "monopoly" run by the government we should break up.

	▲	freeopinion 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> Why do we think parents are actually capable of choosing the "best" option, and why wouldn't 100% of parents choose that option? It seems obvious that vouchers could be spent at schools that have entrance exams and don't let students in just because their parents choose the school.

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hansvm an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Ah, the teachers union, famous for the $30-$50/yr it costs the average tax payer. If we abolished the union and rolled back everything they fought for, we could almost pay for a $10B privacy suit after a year of saving.

The public school system mostly sucks in most states (pending any nonsense with ICE hopefully resolving itself eventually, if you have to send your kids to public school the Minneapolis suburbs are excellent), but private alternatives with similar costs per student also mostly aren't better. One sticks out in my mind from recent history (somewhere near Redwood City) with a habit of hiring subs all year to reduce costs, literally not teaching the kids anything, and firing teachers who tried to fail students. The effect is, somewhat predictably, even students who try don't learn anything, and the ones who don't try know that they can get away with anything that won't put them in prison.

Regarding a voucher system, I'm not sure I care one way or another (I care a little -- it'll mean more money going to con artists masquerading as schools without improving education for basically anyone), but it's just putting lipstick on a pig. If you have the means and ability then homeschool and hire PhDs and other professionals to fill in the gaps. If you don't, for the price we pay per student you're stuck with large classrooms or crappy EdTech (or both), and if you don't spend enough 1:1 time with your kids then even a good school won't matter anyway for most students.

Mind you, of all the things we could spend our tax dollars on, I'm strongly in favor of anything which would actually improve education. I'd happily sacrifice most everything else to 10x education spend if somebody came up with a good argument for why it would help. I just don't think vouchers will do the trick, especially if we're pointing to the teachers union as the particular efficiency they're using to drive cost effectiveness.

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beej71 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Even with vouchers, there are specific solutions and systems you're allowed to use.

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markdown 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The entire point is that parents make poor choices (phones in class, etc) and that's why an entire generation has been dumbed down.

Parents don't know best. Parents are the problem here.

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TimorousBestie 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Teachers’ unions are pretty inconsequential in much of the United States.

https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/states-with...

Also, https://teacherquality.nctq.org/contract-database/collective...