Acectdotally, most of my wife's friends are teachers, mostly for private schools but a couple for public too, between grades 4 and 11, none less than for 15 years. Across the board they report declines in math and reading and just about everything else. Curiously some of them teach foreigners, so this is not just a U.S. phenomena.

When asked why they universally point the finger at phones. This affirms my confirmation bias but seems plausible as well.

I'm skeptical of the tests core result that reading performance has dropped to 1970s levels among thirteen year olds. 13 year olds today almost exclusively communicate through text, whereas in the 70s it was quite plausible for a 13 year old to simply not spend time reading.

I think its worth questioning the test and whether there has been a shift in reading/math skills since the last iteration which de-emphasizes skills the test pushes. Mental math in particular is a skill which was borderline relevant with the advent of calculators and is highly questionable when everyone has a calculating machine in their pockets 24/7.

We should expect that we need to adjust our educational standards from time to time less we continue to teach alchemy, or meta-physics.

I'm sure there are many causes of this. After recently looking for a home, I have my own theory: schools in the U.S. are absolutely terrible.

When looking for a home in the NYC metro area (one of the wealthiest in the country), I was absolutely appalled at the quality of the schools in 90% of the places I looked. As an affluent person with the means to choose, I chose to look elsewhere. The experience got me thinking, however: 90% of people go to terrible schools because they don't have a choice.

Taxes are continually cut. Districts are gerrymandered so the most residents don't get an equal say. Interest groups take over local and state politics and de-prioritize investing in the future in the name of profits and short-term political gains. If nations grow great when people sew the seeds of trees in whose shade they will never sit, then we're in the clear-cutting stage of our society.

This study provides quantitative evidence that something is wrong with education, but there is qualitative evidence as well. The frequent politicization of events and susceptibility to fake news indicates a lack of critical thinking skills.

Are these results broken down by race? If not, we could be seeing static or even improving results, hidden by the shifting demographics of the USA.

When you examine Goodschools data for a given area, there is a very high correlation between the White/Asian student population and the overall performance of the school, including for Black/Hispanic children.

Additionally, how much have politics impacted results for the worst performing students? Anecdotally, its a lot harder to expel or discipline certain consistently disruptive students now.

It's curious that the planned 2016 tests were skipped just a few years after one of the biggest overhauls to the education system in recent history.

You can deep dive into the data here: https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/reading/nation/scores/?gra...

America typically spends up there in the top 10 of OECD countries in terms of dollars per capita on education.

Unfortunately it’s horribly spent. I wouldn’t mind testing a voucher program to see if that would add some innovation by letting parents choose how to spend the $13k allocated per their student. All spending instead is going to a snowballing administrative bureaucracy. Oh well.

In my country, it was in the news that this year's language test for teachers (really basic stuff) resulted in 100% of the candidates failing. How is that even possible?

This is a very complicated thing to try to unwind, but the expectation of an increase in scores seems to rely on faith in the exam itself, and that changes in how school is taught would necessarily lead to improvement in scores.

Obviously there are a billion other things that could affect these scores, such as electronics or the general societal and technological trend (and I am as guilty as anyone) towards shorter attention span, lack of delayed gratification, etc.

With the elimination of Gifted and Talented programs, expect the decline to sadly continue.

> National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP)

...in a 2019-2020 assessment compared with the previous test which was completed in 2012.

Reviewing 'Trend in NAEP long-term trend reading average scores for 9- and 13-year-old students', we see the score has fluctuated between 255 and 263 for fifty years.

What am I missing?

Why does the graph only show three data points? 1973, 2012, 2020?

No Child Left Behind passed in 2002. My understanding is that this mandated a lot more annual standardized testing that continues to this day.

Is the data from the NCLB tests consistent with the NAEP results?

Demographics are changing.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bell_Curve

Remote learning that was "online first" reflected the erroneous idea that most American homes have internet access. We taught in a county where 50% of families don't have internet, and 20% don't even have a land line in 2020-2021.

The decline in learning was astonishing. Many of these children simply did not do any reading at all for a whole year.

can't help but link this with discussion associated with this article that was on hacker news not so long ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27746982

This is not going to improve the stereotype about Americans being bad at mental maths.

Is it smartphones and social media?

Stupid people are having more kids?

It’s always the sample.

So how did the demographics of the USA changed since the 1970s?

I wonder if this has anything to do with the educational and social stunting caused by lockdowns.

[flagged]

It seems like young people (particularly the 15-20 year-old range) are so much smarter and better informed than decades ago or even just 10 years ago. The fear about the US falling behind seems unfounded. Then again, I have to remind myself that Reddit and NH is not reality...these sites are probably only representative of the top 20% or so of ability. The bottom 50% are either less active online or more inclined to major social networks.