Oregon is mentioned as an example of the general decline through the US. The article isn't really about Oregon specifically:
Consider Oregon. Had it merely kept pace with inflation, it would have
increased school spending by about 35 percent from 2013 to 2023. In
actuality, it raised spending by 80 percent. Over the same period, math
and reading performance tanked, with math posting a remarkable 16-point
decline—the equivalent of 1.5 grade levels. Oregon is spending much more
and achieving much less.
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.
My youngest child is just starting high school at the moment, and for the last several years much of math education seems to have been farmed out to really crappy software and short video clips running on chromebooks. She'd really be suffering without parental intervention.
>> 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.
Data's probably not out whether digital makes a difference. But it sure doesn't stop the spending and the resultant political gravy train for anyone involved. Common Core was another epic investment without returns, but that didn't matter either.
The tech world is often criticized for being trend obsessed but it seems to happen in education quite often too. My high school was built in the 1970s during the wall-less open learning community fad. That flopped hard and the school ended up with several different physical hacks for dividing up those spaces into something resembling a traditional classroom. The chemistry lab was the only room to get actual masonry walls. Most everywhere else had what were little more than oversize cubicle partitions, which meant noise from every class ended up leaking into every other class. It is baffling that anyone thought having a high school without walls was a good idea, but our high school was far from being the only one built that way during that time period.
Spending is the issue. That money is spent on something, and it isn't (all) teaching either.
The chart in the link below shows employee vs students headcounts over 6 years. Even though student rolls went down almost all employment in the school system went up. Do we really need a +22% increase in Student Support Services when there are fewer students? Even teachers (only?) went up by 2.8% according to this (and again, students went down)? And why would librarians of all positions seem to be the ones whose positions were cut?
Basically, 'education' is nothing more than a jobs program for the politically connected, as clearly the focus is not on kids. And education is safe, because it's hard to argue against it, even if you're not talking about actual teachers.
Honestly I would expect if funding were cut, and particularly the admin, support, 'paraprofessional', and other non-teaching staff were fired, you'd find those test scores approach the pre-pandemic levels.
Will that happen? Of course not. These are politically connected people after all. We should all be angry.
All the fiascos in education raise a simple question. Why are big changes not arrived at by first gaining experience with them in in some reduced scale, then spreading the improvements incrementally as they continue to be validated.
And why isn't this experimentation being done all the time, not randomly but competitively/cooperatively between school districts and individual schools? Each making small changes toward getting better results and sharing what they have learned. With most cross adoption happening naturally.
Creating and managing the context for the latter is what people with power should be doing. Not making top-down decisions devoid of the bottom-up wisdom and visible exemplars that big changes need to succeed.
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.
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)
Good grief! The bush admin tried to getting better scores by standard testing ... as a scheme in some ways by-pass local control by trading improvement for cash or removing cash.
Mixed results. There's whining about standard testing .. . There's whining without it too. But states brought that on themselves.
I raised two boys one a plain-joe kid, one with special needs. The older, regular kid got into and out of university in four years.
Seeing what I see now, and what I saw over those years:
- pay teachers more with commensurate increase in accountability. (You can't have only one.)
- focus on academics only. Too much resources are wasted in our American daydreaming that schools can be some kind of utopia superceding home, family. Regretably, if parents don't care, there's a tiny chance only the kid will change in school. Here i mean anything that detracts from language, math, science, arts, sports. Having different makes and models of kids at school? That's great; i like that. My kids have got to see our house isn't the only game in town.
- maybe eliminate all federal forms of funding by sending less money to the fed redistributed back later. Control and accountability has to be less complex with fewer regs from fewer places. Education is operationally local in the US and yet somehow the fed and national unions are big players too. We can't be serving two masters.
- withhold kids by class until they succeed. Kids must be held accountable too. If you can't deal with algebra I you are not doing algerbra II so you can suck at that too.
- contribute to kid's self esteem and confidence right: you're not graduating in this class, and I (as a teacher) will help you figure out a way forward by tackling what's in front of you. That's real success. That's real learning. That's better for kids.
- put principals and teachers top echelon. If they want/need admin staff, fine counter balanced by cost & success on accountability side. US schools like US medicine is phenomenal at having paper pushers suck up resources. Yah, I'm not a fan of this to put it politely.
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.
Someone should tell the Wisconsin Education Association Council that they don't exist. They were removed back when you were in school and clearly aren't around today.
> - 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.
Right. But I covered that re: holding kids accountable. I'm a father .. believe me when I tell you several times I had to have a come to Jesus talk with my kid; teachers and school were fine. It's not 100% on the teacher. If the kid refuses to grow up I think he/she shouldn't matriculate in that subject. That means the kid is chiefly held responsible. I'll be applauding not scolding the teacher.
Politics and ideologies aside, just trying to be rational....
Can someone better informed about these metrics (the NAEP specifically) comment: how exactly do we know that we're comparing the same thing each year? Is the NAEP based off answering the same questions every year? Because if it's just like "average exam result" - those can change a lot. And can in fact trend, meaning change in the same direction for several years (e.g. becoming harder, becoming easier)
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.
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.
Almost no education research questions the quality of the students ability to learn. Students with an ability to learn will do so regardless of the resources expended, the ones that don't won't. Trillions wasted over the decades due to a preference to ignore reality.
It's just that politics outweighs systems thinking.
Selling a narrative that money can fix, getting funds, and then allocating funds is comically easy and less risky than trying to fix something broken. You're capturing sentiment into political momentum, when you're the one who allocates money you are very, very popular and interesting and can make many things happen.
You can do all of this and move on independently of any results in the problem statements that may or may not have been written to begin with.
Contrast that with telling people hard truths like deified educators aren't effectual, or that per-capita pupil spending doesn't correlate with outcomes, or how parents and home culture are stronger effects than whether you offer rich IEPs or adopted Common Core - you can be tarred and feathered for rocking the boat before you get to make any change.
It's not that anyone thinks we should give up on the children, it's that we should probably give up on direct democracy in some areas, and at best, these spending splurges are incompetence and at worst, outright wealth transfers to the PMC and NGOs or fraud.
you’re measuring the wrong thing. Spending more on education if a child’s home life is garbage is a waste of time. That’s controversial because it doesn’t sound nice, but it’s a fact. The real problem is not at school and school can only help so much.
At a broad policy level, government should focus its effort in other areas of basic NEEDS first. Stable jobs for parents, housing and food needs met, etc. Being a successful student when your families basic needs are not met is an uphill battle.
Success of student should be evaluated as that above an individual baseline. The false assumption that every student is equally capable is insane. The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. Every time funding is increased but the scores never rise.
Because they're spending all their mental cycles thinking "how can I extract as much money from the system as possible". Like only asking students to attend when they'll be counted for funds allocation.
Not that I agree with GP, but the problem is that no one (in positions of power in the educational system) is thinking of the children (in SFW ways, given the recent release of the Epstein files)
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.
On top of teacher quality - we hire the cheapest, not the best - what students know when they enter school appears to be one of the better predictors of future behavior[1].
The quality of the teacher is less predictive than the quality of the student by far. A teachable student will be more successful with a mediocre teacher than a bad student with an excellent teacher.
Seems to me like bad and mediocre teachers can make students less teachable as they mentally check out of the education system.
I think there's room for improvement on both sides; supporting families and students to create space and safety for them to learn and to improve teaching quality with evidence based training.
The reasons are obvious but acknowledging them is taboo. It's much easier and politically convenient to blame everything on funding, despite the fact that some school districts have the budget of a small country.
Their class sizes are much higher - 40 kids for 1 teacher. But there is a lot more discipline, the teachers teach only a few classes, spending most of their time on curriculum preparation, and the children have 3 hours of vigorous exercise everyday.
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_...
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.
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.
- Apathy is rampant in most workforces, presumably also teachers.
- In unionized workplaces where greater performance != greater pay, and greater pay is guaranteed regardless... No surprise there wasn't better outcomes.
- Not sure if this site has such a bent, but to me if the funding was going to rise 80% (twice as fast as inflation), it would have been nice to also see what market forces could have done via a voucher system.
Teachers are only one factor (students themselves are the other), and neither MA nor WI are winning the cost disease war - both states have slid with the rest in the last decade since 2013.
We would need to compare private vs public schools but those could easily be more about the students than the teachers.
Has anyone looked at the teacher's math scores? I have read in the past about about problems with basic numeracy amongst educators being transmitted to students.
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.
OMG. It's the !?%!@# pandemic. All education statistics measuring across 2020 are horrifyingly polluted. Kids who stayed at home for a year are behind relative to the same cohorts before or since, AND YET WE KEEP FLOGGING THESE NUMBERS as if they're signal and not noise.
I've seen this on the front page of HN like three times now.
It says this but the numbers in the article actually show flatlining after 2013 with a huge drop off after 2020.
2022 8th grader cohort missed much of 6th and 7th grade. 2024 cohort missed 4th and 5th grade. These results are extremely in line with that effect, despite what people want to say about social media, teacher pay, etc.
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.
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.
In terms of the continuing "education depression" as discussed by this article, we still haven't gotten rid of "No child left behind". Of course kids are less educated than they used to be, you don't need to be educated to graduate.
Maine specifically is an important example. There has been no real change in education policy in the state, yet there is still significant reduction in outcomes.
The much maligned unscientific way of teaching reading was adopted in Caribou Maine far far far earlier than educational outcomes started dropping. The neighboring town did not adopt that way of teaching reading. They did not see different outcomes. IMO, the outcomes clearly follow the generation of kids growing up in a school system where you cannot be held back for not doing the work.
The entire time education outcomes have been going down, state highschool graduation rates have been going up. This is not because teachers like giving good grades to kids who don't learn things.
"No child left behind" is a disaster.
I know many people in the state who are looking to become teachers. Everybody always reminds them how terrible an idea that is for them in particular. Schools cannot hire people, because even with "Higher" salaries, the salaries are still bad. They have mostly been adjusted for inflation, so it seems like they have gone up a lot, but they have been adjusted from a point when they were already terrible and not a good salary.
Meanwhile, my mother is a 40 year teacher here. The rich neighborhood school she switched to pays her well, but provides zero institutional support. They did not allow her to purchase anything. No textbooks, no test generators, no enrichment videos, nothing. They don't support her at all.
She's one of the best educators I've ever known and every student she has taught agrees. She's so effective at being an educator that students who come from shitty families and cause disruption in other classes choose to spend time in her classes, and choose to spend time in her study hall to do their homework and become better students. This is true for thousands and thousands of students who went through her classes. She is the sole reason some northern maine kids know how to do math. She's a french teacher.
Not to make a broad generalization, but all spend is not equal. If schools redirect that spend into administrative salaries I would not expect to see any positive effect on scores.
Maybe the Oregon people spent the money on art and music and sports and weren't trying to optimize some third-party academic's budget-to-test-scores efficiency metric.
The cost to produce many things in American is too high given the relative strength of the US dollar. If our corporations need educated workers, they can just import them, like we import everything else. Why would US workers be any different than cars or widgets? They aren’t. The labor market is globalized too. Everything is precisely as the economics dictate. If our businesses couldn’t so easily import workers, we’d see massive improvements in NAEP. We act as if things are how they were. It’s all very tiresome.
This article is super weird because it's looking at an issue from orbit where the only things you can see are vague things like "funding" where the problem is on the ground and probably can't be solved by the levers available from orbit. The lesson of funding having arguably no effect on outcomes should either be that we genuinely don't know what improves outcomes or that we do but schools are lighting money on fire buying other things.
It means the problem is unfortunately local and you have to actually go to the schools and see what the issue is. Based on what my former HS spent money on I figure we will eventually find some commonalities:
* 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.
* Pointless building improvements that don't service education but instead service the prestige and egos of the administrators of the schools.
* Chronic long-term understaffing and light-speed "just get through it" lesson plans that makes teachers not give a shit, and powerless to do better even if they do.
I think "just blame the administrators" is too easy a cop-out because I've yet to meet one who isn't also underpaid and dying of stress. Although maybe I just don't have access to the real higher ups.
>> * 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.).
Oregon is mentioned as an example of the general decline through the US. The article isn't really about Oregon specifically:
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.My youngest child is just starting high school at the moment, and for the last several years much of math education seems to have been farmed out to really crappy software and short video clips running on chromebooks. She'd really be suffering without parental intervention.
>> 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.
Data's probably not out whether digital makes a difference. But it sure doesn't stop the spending and the resultant political gravy train for anyone involved. Common Core was another epic investment without returns, but that didn't matter either.
Sometimes it just takes a motivated teacher to do things differently: https://fivetwelvethirteen.substack.com/p/tech-free-january
The tech world is often criticized for being trend obsessed but it seems to happen in education quite often too. My high school was built in the 1970s during the wall-less open learning community fad. That flopped hard and the school ended up with several different physical hacks for dividing up those spaces into something resembling a traditional classroom. The chemistry lab was the only room to get actual masonry walls. Most everywhere else had what were little more than oversize cubicle partitions, which meant noise from every class ended up leaking into every other class. It is baffling that anyone thought having a high school without walls was a good idea, but our high school was far from being the only one built that way during that time period.
Colour me a curmudgeon too but a screen doesn’t need to be in front of a student all hours of the day to learn.
Yeah, the article links the source where every state can be viewed: https://edunomicslab.org/roi-over-time/
Spending is the issue. That money is spent on something, and it isn't (all) teaching either.
The chart in the link below shows employee vs students headcounts over 6 years. Even though student rolls went down almost all employment in the school system went up. Do we really need a +22% increase in Student Support Services when there are fewer students? Even teachers (only?) went up by 2.8% according to this (and again, students went down)? And why would librarians of all positions seem to be the ones whose positions were cut?
Basically, 'education' is nothing more than a jobs program for the politically connected, as clearly the focus is not on kids. And education is safe, because it's hard to argue against it, even if you're not talking about actual teachers.
Honestly I would expect if funding were cut, and particularly the admin, support, 'paraprofessional', and other non-teaching staff were fired, you'd find those test scores approach the pre-pandemic levels.
Will that happen? Of course not. These are politically connected people after all. We should all be angry.
https://x.com/johnfaig/status/2019108852365656477?s=20
All the fiascos in education raise a simple question. Why are big changes not arrived at by first gaining experience with them in in some reduced scale, then spreading the improvements incrementally as they continue to be validated.
And why isn't this experimentation being done all the time, not randomly but competitively/cooperatively between school districts and individual schools? Each making small changes toward getting better results and sharing what they have learned. With most cross adoption happening naturally.
Creating and managing the context for the latter is what people with power should be doing. Not making top-down decisions devoid of the bottom-up wisdom and visible exemplars that big changes need to succeed.
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.
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)
>> incompetence and principal agent problems you see in any organization
Principal agent problem is a huge part of it. How do you keep school leadership accountable and effective? It's super hard in any organization.
Good grief! The bush admin tried to getting better scores by standard testing ... as a scheme in some ways by-pass local control by trading improvement for cash or removing cash.
Mixed results. There's whining about standard testing .. . There's whining without it too. But states brought that on themselves.
I raised two boys one a plain-joe kid, one with special needs. The older, regular kid got into and out of university in four years.
Seeing what I see now, and what I saw over those years:
- pay teachers more with commensurate increase in accountability. (You can't have only one.)
- focus on academics only. Too much resources are wasted in our American daydreaming that schools can be some kind of utopia superceding home, family. Regretably, if parents don't care, there's a tiny chance only the kid will change in school. Here i mean anything that detracts from language, math, science, arts, sports. Having different makes and models of kids at school? That's great; i like that. My kids have got to see our house isn't the only game in town.
- maybe eliminate all federal forms of funding by sending less money to the fed redistributed back later. Control and accountability has to be less complex with fewer regs from fewer places. Education is operationally local in the US and yet somehow the fed and national unions are big players too. We can't be serving two masters.
- withhold kids by class until they succeed. Kids must be held accountable too. If you can't deal with algebra I you are not doing algerbra II so you can suck at that too.
- contribute to kid's self esteem and confidence right: you're not graduating in this class, and I (as a teacher) will help you figure out a way forward by tackling what's in front of you. That's real success. That's real learning. That's better for kids.
- put principals and teachers top echelon. If they want/need admin staff, fine counter balanced by cost & success on accountability side. US schools like US medicine is phenomenal at having paper pushers suck up resources. Yah, I'm not a fan of this to put it politely.
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.
Someone should tell the Wisconsin Education Association Council that they don't exist. They were removed back when you were in school and clearly aren't around today.
> - 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.
Right. But I covered that re: holding kids accountable. I'm a father .. believe me when I tell you several times I had to have a come to Jesus talk with my kid; teachers and school were fine. It's not 100% on the teacher. If the kid refuses to grow up I think he/she shouldn't matriculate in that subject. That means the kid is chiefly held responsible. I'll be applauding not scolding the teacher.
Politics and ideologies aside, just trying to be rational....
Can someone better informed about these metrics (the NAEP specifically) comment: how exactly do we know that we're comparing the same thing each year? Is the NAEP based off answering the same questions every year? Because if it's just like "average exam result" - those can change a lot. And can in fact trend, meaning change in the same direction for several years (e.g. becoming harder, becoming easier)
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.
What could possible explain this drop over the last ~10 years?
Unrelated: schools with effective phone bans are seeing improved grades and less absences.
Spending millions on tablets, chromebooks, promethium boards and otherwise does not improve learning. shocked
Why was the headline changed? The story isn't about Oregon.
Yup this needs an answer.
Where is the money going? Isn't the average teacher pay down?
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
Almost no education research questions the quality of the students ability to learn. Students with an ability to learn will do so regardless of the resources expended, the ones that don't won't. Trillions wasted over the decades due to a preference to ignore reality.
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 just that politics outweighs systems thinking.
Selling a narrative that money can fix, getting funds, and then allocating funds is comically easy and less risky than trying to fix something broken. You're capturing sentiment into political momentum, when you're the one who allocates money you are very, very popular and interesting and can make many things happen.
You can do all of this and move on independently of any results in the problem statements that may or may not have been written to begin with.
Contrast that with telling people hard truths like deified educators aren't effectual, or that per-capita pupil spending doesn't correlate with outcomes, or how parents and home culture are stronger effects than whether you offer rich IEPs or adopted Common Core - you can be tarred and feathered for rocking the boat before you get to make any change.
It's not that anyone thinks we should give up on the children, it's that we should probably give up on direct democracy in some areas, and at best, these spending splurges are incompetence and at worst, outright wealth transfers to the PMC and NGOs or fraud.
you’re measuring the wrong thing. Spending more on education if a child’s home life is garbage is a waste of time. That’s controversial because it doesn’t sound nice, but it’s a fact. The real problem is not at school and school can only help so much.
At a broad policy level, government should focus its effort in other areas of basic NEEDS first. Stable jobs for parents, housing and food needs met, etc. Being a successful student when your families basic needs are not met is an uphill battle.
Success of student should be evaluated as that above an individual baseline. The false assumption that every student is equally capable is insane. The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. Every time funding is increased but the scores never rise.
Because they're spending all their mental cycles thinking "how can I extract as much money from the system as possible". Like only asking students to attend when they'll be counted for funds allocation.
Not that I agree with GP, but the problem is that no one (in positions of power in the educational system) is thinking of the children (in SFW ways, given the recent release of the Epstein files)
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.
On top of teacher quality - we hire the cheapest, not the best - what students know when they enter school appears to be one of the better predictors of future behavior[1].
[1] https://www.brookings.edu/articles/why-common-core-failed/
The quality of the teacher is less predictive than the quality of the student by far. A teachable student will be more successful with a mediocre teacher than a bad student with an excellent teacher.
Seems to me like bad and mediocre teachers can make students less teachable as they mentally check out of the education system.
I think there's room for improvement on both sides; supporting families and students to create space and safety for them to learn and to improve teaching quality with evidence based training.
I don't believe you actually think this is true.
From my experience raising kids in public schools, adding money to a bad school only makes it worse.
The reasons are obvious but acknowledging them is taboo. It's much easier and politically convenient to blame everything on funding, despite the fact that some school districts have the budget of a small country.
Focusing solely on the school isn't going be the answer. Students spend more time not at school. That has an effect.
Maybe we should copy what China is doing?
Their class sizes are much higher - 40 kids for 1 teacher. But there is a lot more discipline, the teachers teach only a few classes, spending most of their time on curriculum preparation, and the children have 3 hours of vigorous exercise everyday.
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_...
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.
> 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.
Some thoughts:
- Apathy is rampant in most workforces, presumably also teachers.
- In unionized workplaces where greater performance != greater pay, and greater pay is guaranteed regardless... No surprise there wasn't better outcomes.
- Not sure if this site has such a bent, but to me if the funding was going to rise 80% (twice as fast as inflation), it would have been nice to also see what market forces could have done via a voucher system.
Edit:
It will be really interesting to compare oregon public outcomes to something like this school in Austin https://nypost.com/2026/01/30/business/new-65k-private-schoo...
News flash: being a slave to the teachers union don’t give you better teachers
News flash: Massachusetts and Wisconsin came in tied at #1 for student performance, and teacher union density is about 100% for both states.
Teachers are only one factor (students themselves are the other), and neither MA nor WI are winning the cost disease war - both states have slid with the rest in the last decade since 2013.
We would need to compare private vs public schools but those could easily be more about the students than the teachers.
Wisconsin has no collective bargaining for teachers and the unions can't require dues
Has anyone looked at the teacher's math scores? I have read in the past about about problems with basic numeracy amongst educators being transmitted to students.
>> (2008) Primary school teachers in England are often scared of basic numeracy and should be required to study English and maths at A-level, a report suggests. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/education/8162803.stm
>> This lack of confidence on the part of teachers can be transmitted to students and result in their own lack of mathematical confidence
https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ743586.pdf
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.
OMG. It's the !?%!@# pandemic. All education statistics measuring across 2020 are horrifyingly polluted. Kids who stayed at home for a year are behind relative to the same cohorts before or since, AND YET WE KEEP FLOGGING THESE NUMBERS as if they're signal and not noise.
I've seen this on the front page of HN like three times now.
The article says that scores have been sinking since 2013, many years before the pandemic.
It says this but the numbers in the article actually show flatlining after 2013 with a huge drop off after 2020.
2022 8th grader cohort missed much of 6th and 7th grade. 2024 cohort missed 4th and 5th grade. These results are extremely in line with that effect, despite what people want to say about social media, teacher pay, etc.
Most studies are showing children with neurological damage from continued exposure to covid outbreaks in schools multiple times a year.
Lockdowns did not last more than a few months for the vast majority of school districts in the US.
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.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/long-covid-is-har...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...
Title has been editorialized.
In terms of the continuing "education depression" as discussed by this article, we still haven't gotten rid of "No child left behind". Of course kids are less educated than they used to be, you don't need to be educated to graduate.
Maine specifically is an important example. There has been no real change in education policy in the state, yet there is still significant reduction in outcomes.
The much maligned unscientific way of teaching reading was adopted in Caribou Maine far far far earlier than educational outcomes started dropping. The neighboring town did not adopt that way of teaching reading. They did not see different outcomes. IMO, the outcomes clearly follow the generation of kids growing up in a school system where you cannot be held back for not doing the work.
The entire time education outcomes have been going down, state highschool graduation rates have been going up. This is not because teachers like giving good grades to kids who don't learn things.
"No child left behind" is a disaster.
I know many people in the state who are looking to become teachers. Everybody always reminds them how terrible an idea that is for them in particular. Schools cannot hire people, because even with "Higher" salaries, the salaries are still bad. They have mostly been adjusted for inflation, so it seems like they have gone up a lot, but they have been adjusted from a point when they were already terrible and not a good salary.
Meanwhile, my mother is a 40 year teacher here. The rich neighborhood school she switched to pays her well, but provides zero institutional support. They did not allow her to purchase anything. No textbooks, no test generators, no enrichment videos, nothing. They don't support her at all.
She's one of the best educators I've ever known and every student she has taught agrees. She's so effective at being an educator that students who come from shitty families and cause disruption in other classes choose to spend time in her classes, and choose to spend time in her study hall to do their homework and become better students. This is true for thousands and thousands of students who went through her classes. She is the sole reason some northern maine kids know how to do math. She's a french teacher.
Not to make a broad generalization, but all spend is not equal. If schools redirect that spend into administrative salaries I would not expect to see any positive effect on scores.
Maybe the Oregon people spent the money on art and music and sports and weren't trying to optimize some third-party academic's budget-to-test-scores efficiency metric.
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...
The cost to produce many things in American is too high given the relative strength of the US dollar. If our corporations need educated workers, they can just import them, like we import everything else. Why would US workers be any different than cars or widgets? They aren’t. The labor market is globalized too. Everything is precisely as the economics dictate. If our businesses couldn’t so easily import workers, we’d see massive improvements in NAEP. We act as if things are how they were. It’s all very tiresome.
This article is super weird because it's looking at an issue from orbit where the only things you can see are vague things like "funding" where the problem is on the ground and probably can't be solved by the levers available from orbit. The lesson of funding having arguably no effect on outcomes should either be that we genuinely don't know what improves outcomes or that we do but schools are lighting money on fire buying other things.
It means the problem is unfortunately local and you have to actually go to the schools and see what the issue is. Based on what my former HS spent money on I figure we will eventually find some commonalities:
* 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.
* Pointless building improvements that don't service education but instead service the prestige and egos of the administrators of the schools.
* Chronic long-term understaffing and light-speed "just get through it" lesson plans that makes teachers not give a shit, and powerless to do better even if they do.
I think "just blame the administrators" is too easy a cop-out because I've yet to meet one who isn't also underpaid and dying of stress. Although maybe I just don't have access to the real higher ups.
>> * 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.).
Reminder that correlation!= causation
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