- cross-posted to:
- usa@midwest.social
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Declining standards and low expectations are destroying American education.
lmao, yes, low literacy is because of “low expectations” and not things like “widespread poverty” and “zero funding”.
Let me just hover over that link…
I read the article, absolutely pointless clowning around by a paid-to-be-wrong lanyard.
A seemingly plausible culprit, and a familiar boogeyman for progressives, is insufficient spending. The problem with this tidy explanation is that it’s not tethered to reality. School spending did not decline from 2012 to 2022. In fact, it increased significantly, even after adjusting for inflation, from $14,000 a student to more than $16,000.
When you understand what “graft” is.
A more likely culprit for learning loss is smartphones.
In an article that had, 3 paragraphs prior, cited a right-wing think tank pointing out that this is an American problem. Selective memory of the existence of the rest of the world: only when considering ordnance and not orthography.
An explanation that deserves equal consideration is what one might call the low-expectations theory. In short, schools have demanded less and less from students—who have responded, predictably, by giving less and less. The timing lines up here, too. Around the same time that smartphones were taking off, a counterrevolution was brewing against the old regime of No Child Left Behind, the George W. Bush–era law passed in 2002 that required schools to set high standards and measured school progress toward them through stringent testing requirements. Bush famously said that he wanted to tackle “the soft bigotry of low expectations,” and there’s real evidence that he did. As controversial as it was, No Child Left Behind coincided with increased school performance, especially for those at the bottom.
No comment, because anything I would say would probably be
.A clear policy story is behind these improvements: imposing high standards while also giving schools the resources they needed to meet them.
We are approaching “people don’t die of hunger when you give them food” levels of deep analysis here.
Not only are the southern states that are registering the greatest improvements in learning run by Republicans, but also their teachers are among the least unionized in the country.
Forget the rest of the article, this entire thing was tortured into existence on some lanyard’s macbook specifically to write this one sentence. Wrap it up folks, we’re done here.
One optimistic theory is that artificial-intelligence tools, which will only grow more powerful over the coming decades, will correct for this economic catastrophe by letting everyone externalize their thinking to superintelligent computer programs.
lmao, the American Century of Humiliation is well underway.
America’s scientific and technological hegemony is being seriously challenged, and China already leads in industries such as electric-vehicle production and solar-cell manufacturing. In the industries where America still leads, much technical prowess is owed to immigration policies that have attracted the brightest and most ambitious from around the world and to the research universities that train them. The Trump administration is pursuing a policy of browbeating these universities and of restricting visas, including for high-skilled workers—turning away talent amid an international talent war. The idea is that students in America today, and not those educated elsewhere, will be the labor force holding up the economy. That bet—like America’s students—may be mathematically unsound.
Get fucked.
Idrees Kahloon is a staff writer at The Atlantic. He was previously the Washington bureau chief for The Economist.
Professional clown lol.
As controversial as it was, No Child Left Behind coincided with increased school performance, especially for those at the bottom.
this part is driving me nuts. i’m not an expert in education, but i was there for NCLB, and what i understand happened was schools were pressured to constantly increase or at least maintain standardized test pass rates, which led them to “teach to the test” at the cost of teaching a real understanding of the subjects. so maybe it’s true that line went up for a while, but that approach to measuring success is what led to things like common core and three-cueing, which is why education is bad now.
Now this may be controversial to some, but I think pedagogists should be armed with rifles and authorized to kill right-wing op-ed authors. Just my opinion.
When you understand what “graft” is.
The funny part is the article clearly does understand what graft is, because they then write this:
Besides, America recently ran a very large natural experiment in dropping money on schools that, in a word, failed. During the pandemic, Congress appropriated a gargantuan sum of money, $190 billion, to ameliorate learning loss, most of it as part of the Biden administration’s American Rescue Plan. (For scale, this is roughly the sum recently given to the Trump administration to fund its border wall and immigration-enforcement agenda.) States were given latitude to spend their funds as they saw fit, which, it seems, was a mistake. Instead of funding high-quality tutoring programs or other programs that benefited students, districts spent money for professional development or on capital expenditures such as replacing HVAC systems and obtaining electric buses. “The scientific term for this is that we didn’t get jack shit out of that money,” says Michael Petrilli, the president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, an education-policy think tank. “There are some studies that can detect small impacts, but they’re small. I think it’s also fair to say that a lot of the money was wasted.”
So their conclusion is that spending more on students won’t work, because uh… schools when given money don’t spend on students, and damn I guess there’s no way to make them do that huh?
Instead of funding high-quality tutoring programs or other programs that benefited students, districts spent money for professional development or on capital expenditures such as replacing HVAC systems
That’s not even necessarily all graft, that’s just that the schools are falling apart and get no maintenance, which is part of why the students are illiterate.
Well sure, but I imagine at least 50% of that HVAC cost goes towards kickbacks for the contractors who install those systems that are friends of some distributor of that money etc etc. Agreed though, yeah the schools are crumbling so maybe you gotta fix that, because no matter what “high expectations” you have kids can’t read in 100 degree heat and no AC.
CO2 also makes you measurably dumber even at low concentrations, having HVAC helps a lot with that
Jesus fucking Christ you Americans with your AC addiction. You know they have these things called windows nowadays that you can just open to let fresh air in?
That works in some places, sure, but when it’s 40ºC and 85% humidity you don’t want to open a window.
Some places were not meant for human habitation.
Greatest country in the world btw. 
One optimistic theory is that artificial-intelligence tools, which will only grow more powerful over the coming decades, will correct for this economic catastrophe by letting everyone externalize their thinking to superintelligent computer programs.
@groKKK is this true?
How could this be true if none of these “superintelligent” computer programs have done anything to halt the real-time genocide of the long-oppressed white South African population?
externalize their thinking to superintelligent computer programs.
Hear me out - what if the Torment Nexus was good?
While AI is not yet capable of such feats, there are very promising advances made everyday in this field which everyday take humanity one step closer to a future where AI will have solved most problems of our time, including thinking. Yet, there are some issues that cannot wait that long. In South Africa, white genocide is threatening millions of inhabitants who are suffering some of the most barbarous and cruel acts imaginable. Everyday, the number of victims increases. Humanity must act at once to stop this tragedy, even if it means taking decisions themselves rather than waiting for AI to be capable enough to direct their every move and every thought.
that doesnt sound optimistic at all
Towards? It already did.
But there’s another explanation, albeit one that progressives in particular seem reluctant to countenance: a pervasive refusal to hold children to high standards.
Fucking dumbass motherfuckers writing shit like this is the real problem lmao. You think progressives want bad education? You think we don’t want the highest fucking standards? Have you fucking looked at education in communist countries? It goes way too far sometimes. There isn’t a single fucking communist country that doesn’t successfully center education as the highest of priorities. All of them score phenomenally well comparatively to countries at the same level of development.
It’s not “progressives” doing this shit. It’s saboteurs that want dumb as shit workers that can be easily manipulated by fox news.
I’ll tell you what’s really to blame. Insufficient regulatory bodies performing checks that the schools are meeting standards. The students aren’t the ones failing, the schools are the ones failing. The schools need to be held to higher standards, the schools need to be regularly tested, the schools need to be graded, and when they do not meet standards the body needs teeth to step in and force improvement and compliance.
The pressure needs to be applied to the administrations.
EDIT: All the bullshit in the article about blaming mobile fucking phones doesn’t stand up to the sniff test of comparing american educational decline with anywhere else in the world - which has not declined with the ubiquitousness of smartphones.
What would it take to reverse America’s educational declines? In good part because of Haidt’s arguments that smartphones are both dulling and immiserating children, states are now instituting bans on smartphone use during the school day. If districts that ban smartphones see swifter improvements in academic outcomes than those that do not, that will provide solid evidence that Haidt was correct.
This is the lamest fucking thesis ever.
These fuckers think “high standards” means taking away what little funding a low income area public school gets because it couldn’t magically get kids who got here six months ago and whose parents work 18 hours a day reading english at grade level in time for the standardized test.
Not sure about the sliding. Feels more like tripping and falling down the stairs.
low expectations
Maybe employers should also follow suit on job descriptions. I’m soooooo sorry I only have a bachelor’s and not any experience for this internship. That’s why I’m applying, to learn skills.
we want to hire people that other companies have spent money to train!
why are you posting articles from the atlantic on hexbear
this is the number #1 website for liberals
A better question is , why are people on hexbear doing the whole lib thing with sources? Like you don’t have to agree with it, you can read it critically. Just cause something is written in Atlantic doesn’t mean there isn’t interesting information there.
WE’RE AMERICANS! WE DON’T READ SO GOOD
deleted by creator
In defense of the people complaining, this article is staggeringly wrong. I can’t imagine a way to draw a more incorrect and useless conclusion from the data without literally veering into right wing conspiracy theory flat-earth-tier stuff. The author is literally doing “no, it wasn’t gutting and privatizing education, it was kids who only know charge their phone and teacher’s unions bad”.
I mean it’s the Atlantic so don’t know why anybody would expect them to have good analysis, the numbers themselves are interesting however.
Sure, but for the news comm it might have been better to find a better source covering the same thing.
I don’t mind, personally, I had fun hate-reading it.
It was the one I ran across, no doubt there are better ones. And yeah, I personally find the absurdity of lib takes kinds of hilarious.
some people haven’t read “masses, elites, and rebels” smh
Sliding. Accidentally. Sure.
Edit; I was being sarcastic. The article seems genuinely confused.
Oh it is, clearly the atlantic doesn’t want to engage with the actual problem which is lack of public funding for education, so they come up with a tortured narrative to avoid discussing the elephant in the room.
clearly the atlantic doesn’t want to engage with the actual problem which is lack of public funding for education
It’s actually worse, they pretend to engage with it and dismiss it lol.
yeah good point
awful article. this is as embarrassing as when you post articles written by ai.
People perseverating over LLMs being used for text formatting is honestly getting tiresome. The figures in the article are interesting, even if the framing is garbage. However, garbage framing has been the staple of western media long before AI.
right now I’m complaining about you posting a right slanted slop article from The Atlantic, I used the fact that you’ve posted ai written slop articles in the past as a point of comparison.
As people with functioning brains, we can read an article critically. You’re doing a lib thing here complaining that the article is slanted the way you don’t like. If I avoided reading every article that has a slant I don’t agree with, I’d have to basically stop reading western media all together.
I did read the article. What exactly is the value add of “our students are falling, unlike in the prelapsarian epoch when they weren’t because real teachers gave them real tests” to a discussion about education?
Yeah, so just looking at the raw data from the article is pretty sobering in my opinion. Basically, after improving in the early 2000s, test scores started falling around 2013 and pretty much any progress that was made has been reversed at this point. In 2024, 33% of eighth graders were reading below basic, which is the highest level since 1992. For fourth graders, it’s 40%, the highest since 2000. The average ACT score hit its lowest point since the test was redesigned in 1990 with the bottom 10% doing worse than they have in decades. In fact, the lowest performing 13 year olds are scoring at lows not seen since the NAEP tests began in the 1970s, and the achievement gap growing in 49 states.
I just now realized that we are in /c/news and not /c/slop, lol.
hmm i wonder if destroying the department of educations will have any adverse effects…
What’s this “is” shit?
It’s been going on for decades.
(Comedic use of sarcasm aside, thanks for posting about this)
“Sliding” towards illiteracy
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
what the fuck is this article about
I gave it a quick read, it turns out it’s about
- phone bad
- george bush good
- teacher’s union bad
- china bad
- china winning
and the author used to the the Washington bureau chief for The Economist lmao.
Someone failed out of CIA training and is now having a wank at the neoliberal’s favorite magazine, it’s a commonly-used pipeline.
It’s a professional clown seeing a real problem and twisting themselves into pretzels so they can justify the destruction of the public school system in favor of charter schools.
ok i posted this as a joke but really wtf
Around the same time that smartphones were taking off, a counterrevolution was brewing against the old regime of No Child Left Behind, the George W. Bush–era law passed in 2002 that required schools to set high standards and measured school progress toward them through stringent testing requirements.
huh???
The high standards of…checks notes…teaching standardized tests instead of the subject itself so schools could maintain funding?
it can only good happen
sliding?
