Scores decline again for 13-year-old students in reading and mathematics

My son and daughter both went to the same elementary school, but at different times. We chose this school in particular because was well-funded (for a public school anyway), had a good reputation, and was diverse. My daughter is now a teenager and is an A and B student. Zero problems academically, other than constantly forgetting to turn in already-completed assignments. Despite going to the same school and having the same teachers, parents, and home life, etc my son is really struggling, though. They&#x27;re both bright kids, but what changed for him?<p>Two things that I can see. One is that the COVID quarantine, while necessary for public safety, set most kids back developmentally at least a year, often two. It was far worse for younger kids than older kids because Kindergarten through 2nd grade are absolutely foundational points in their education. Kids who don&#x27;t get a solid grasp of reading, spelling, and arithmetic at this point sometimes never catch up to where they should be. Hopefully my son will.<p>The other is that around the time my son started at the school, they got rid of the special education (or whatever is the correct phrase) classrooms, laid off those teachers, and put the students in regular classes instead. This is going about as well as you&#x27;d think.<p>The kids with emotional issues do not get the special attention and resources that they need, and the rest of the class is severely disrupted to the point that almost no learning gets done. According to my wife who works at the school, his class this year had four special-needs students in it. My son says that these students were constantly disrupting the classroom. They bullied the other students, they verbally and physically fought with everyone (including teachers), they scream when they don&#x27;t get their way. The teacher is not allowed to send them to the office or another room. The whole class didn&#x27;t get recess for over half the year because the teacher couldn&#x27;t handle the kids outside. (One of them would just run right off the school grounds every time, apparently.)<p>The school used to have a strong positivity vibe and a zero-tolerance anti-bullying policy. Now, when an emotionally-troubled child draws blood on my child (which happened), the response from the faculty and staff is so silent it&#x27;s deafening.

I wouldn&#x27;t claim I know &quot;the reason&quot;, but it often feels like there&#x27;s just a lot less enthusiasm for education and learning in the US, across the whole society. My relatives have been screamed at every day for decades that teachers are clearly overpowered by their unions, or that they are trying to undermine your authority as a parent because your local school teaches basic biology, or that they&#x27;re pawns of the gay agenda and trying to turn your kids into trans or something, meanwhile actual small town school teachers are pretty fucking conservative, including being openly and vocally &quot;covid is a hoax&quot; in front of their whole class of first graders.<p>Everyone is convinced they are the smartest one in the room even though they haven&#x27;t read a book in a decade and their child can&#x27;t even do their basic times tables. Meanwhile teachers are finally giving up after what amounts to direct abuse for at least 4 decades, with stagnant pathetic wages, zero support from administration, absurd requirements placed on them by people with ulterior motives, now bullshit book bans, outright parent hostile actions, and nevermind the fact that in many places the &quot;requirements&quot; to be a teacher is have an occasional pulse.<p>Oh, and lets not talk about the abysmal state of education materials companies, which are hollowing out and rent seeking just like every other corp in the US, so it&#x27;s not like we are even giving our kids helpful tools.

I live in the UK, but a few kids in my family are around this age and we&#x27;ve had similar declines in test scores here too. I&#x27;ll comment on a few things I&#x27;ve notice - at least as someone from my working class background.<p>Covid lockdowns were brutal for kids of this age bracket.<p>Kids in my family were mostly just locked in doors watching Netflix and playing video games during lockdowns and did next to no physical activity, socialising, or anything mentally simulating.<p>A couple of kids in my family have also developed mental illnesses as a result of lockdowns – and I don&#x27;t use this word lightly.<p>For kids from my background school is really the only opportunity they get to experience normality. A space free from all the various social issues that plague families from this socioeconomic background.<p>To be more specific here, one kid ended up becoming extremely anti-social during the lockdowns since violence is normal and common within his household. The other has develop extreme social anxiety and depression and now refuses to attend school. I&#x27;m sure other kids have developed post-Covid anxiety, but those kids probably have parents that care enough about their children to ensure they attend school.<p>Obviously if they had better parents this stuff probably wouldn&#x27;t have happened, but school is so important for people of my background. It&#x27;s the only place in their life where order and discipline will be enforced. It&#x27;s also the only place they get to socialise with normal people who are not criminals or drug users. And the only place they&#x27;ll get to feel safe.<p>I have no idea how much of this decline in tests scores is related to the pandemic, but if other kids took the pandemic as bad the kids in my family then I&#x27;m not surprised by this at all.

I have a brother who&#x27;s 13 years old.<p>Before the pandemic, he was a pretty smart kid, around the top half of his class, with an interest in learning for the sake of learning itself. During the pandemic, classes happened online(microsoft teams) and almost all his friends were playing video games while teaching was ongoing and disconnecting if asked a question(Not chastising him here, I did this too at times ha!)<p>Back to school, he&#x27;s been struggling with simple algebra and geometry, which should have been clear(in a normal scenario) a year ago. The desire to learn, has been replaced with other more short-term pleasures like watching yt,gaming etc. School teachers are ill-equipped to address this but thats a tangent I&#x27;ll not go off right now.<p>My parents have hired a private tutor for math to help him address the struggles he&#x27;s facing right now, because the school sure as hell wont.

&quot;Percentage of students missing 5 or more days of school monthly has doubled since 2020&quot; seems like it might have some explanatory powers. How can you miss a quarter of the school days and keep up?

In our public school,the true tragedy is how the school union took advantage of Covid to push for teachers to have almost zero accountability or responsibility anymore.<p>Remote learning was an obvious disaster, but problems continued post-Covid. Some teachers stayed remote (!), requiring assistants in the classroom. Teachers rely on a host of shitty online platforms and expect the kids to figure out how to navigate all of them. Class is often little more than an email “read chapter 7 and do the problems”.<p>The icing on the cake was the grading system that gave kids a B for showing up.<p>Ourselves and many parents didn’t know how bad it was until standard testing came up and our kids were scoring in the single digits in percentile.<p>We have since moved to a private school for both. The first year was rough as they over came the Learning deficit and learned how to study again, but both are back as normal students with the kind of understanding in math, science, reading, etc they never would have gotten in public school.

&quot;Sold a Story&quot; paints a very compelling case for what went wrong with reading. I wouldn&#x27;t be shocked to see some bleed in of that across to math, as well. In particular, decoding a word phonetically is a very &quot;interact with the characters of the word&quot; activity that many students weren&#x27;t taught for many years. Literally teaching you to look around the word for context as a starting point for how to interact with a word. The same approach in math would reach similarly bad results, I&#x27;d wager.<p>Edit: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;features.apmreports.org&#x2F;sold-a-story&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;features.apmreports.org&#x2F;sold-a-story&#x2F;</a>, in case you don&#x27;t know what I&#x27;m referring to.

I recall reading&#x2F;seeing that a lot of standardized testing in the US is gamed by schools, which focus on “teaching the test”.<p>Could the decline in test scores be related to a shift im how schools approach these tests?

I have a 13 and a 15 year old, and my opinion is it&#x27;s the phones.

How much of this is continuous decline and how much is sudden post-Covid decline? From the graphs it looks like a pretty sudden decline, and therefore not a systemic issue.

I spent my summers at that age reading lots (probably a book per week) and spending 6 or more hours a day learning guitar and listening to the same handful of CD’s. If not doing those things I was out with my friends playing a sport in the street. I imagine if I was that age now I would be spending a huge amount of time on TikTok and the remainder on Netflix. I fall into the same traps as an adult with responsibilities despite wanting to spend more time reading, playing guitar, and hanging with my friends.

Yet another anecdote here but I have an 8 year old that had a &quot;covid kindergarten&quot; as her teachers call it.<p>She&#x27;s now about to finish 2nd grade and is doing a summer reading program with her school because she&#x27;s in the ~40% percent of her grade that are behind state standards. As her parent, I almost feel helpless here. I want her to enjoy reading. I try not to push her &quot;too&quot; hard at home to the point where it&#x27;s a constant fight.

At this rate, if two trains depart their depot at the same time, one leaving Wichita eastbound at 45 mph and the other departing St. Louis westbound at 58 mph, we may never know where they are going to meet, let alone how long it will take them to get there.

Teaching philosophy in the US is deeply flawed. Memorization has been deemphasized and &quot;understanding&quot; is being promoted. Ask the proponents of &quot;understanding&quot; and &quot;critical thinking&quot; based education to explain what the terms actually mean.<p>I have a simple definition of &quot;understanding&quot;.<p>Understanding is when you&#x27;ve developed an accurate, predictive, mental model for some topic.<p>It&#x27;s much easier to develop an accurate mental model when you memorize all the components of some topic.<p>I think memorization is deemphasized because memorization is painful and benefits from having an invested family that will encourage and even force the student to practice.

I&#x27;ve been a librarian for 20 years and have watched the decline of children&#x27;s literacy firsthand. Here&#x27;s my random thoughts:<p>1) No Child Left Behind really siloed the schools: Back in the early 2000s, partnering with schools for literacy was incredibly easy: teachers would walk kids over to the library and we&#x27;d work together to promote summer reading. Now talking to administration is like talking to a brick wall. Even if you make contact with a simpatico teacher, they are often forbidden to lose class hours to come over to the library.<p>2) The public schools in my area are physically crumbling, and there&#x27;s no feasible method to replace them. I currently live in a very rural area. My small county (15k residents) has 5 school districts that all need new facilities. These facilities cost between $40-65 million dollars. Even if the new buildings get funded&#x2F;constructed, enrollments are falling and it&#x27;s impossible to convince new teachers to come out to the boonies. A school district in the next county is importing teachers from the Philippines because there are no local teachers to hire.<p>3) There has been a change in parental behavior for the worse. Children are a lot less free-range than they were in the early 2000s, so every library visit has a parent tapping their foot waiting for their child to finish. Sports have become ascendant, even though no professional players in anything have ever come from here. When we have literacy events like Summer Reading, the parents want to know what the prizes are and if they&#x27;re good enough; if the prizes don&#x27;t meet their standards, the child doesn&#x27;t get to participate.

A common narrative is that a lot of kids were set back by the quality of remote or in person education due to a covid. Another common narrative is that these kids are screwed for life because of this setup back. I would just like to remind people Black Americans and poor whites often deal with lower quality of education compared to white and upperclass peers for their entire K-12 experience.

While the scores do appear to reflect a real decline (ie not just noise), we are talking about a 4 &amp; 7 point decline for reading and math respectively on a 500 point scale.<p>The reading scores in particular seem to reflect a fairly normal variance.<p>Take that into account before posting your hobby horse narrative as to why society is falling apart.

Related discussion on the NYT piece: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=36417375">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=36417375</a>

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.wsj.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;pandemic-learning-slide-continues-for-13-year-olds-making-full-recovery-unlikely-3fe4b085" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.wsj.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;pandemic-learning-slide-continu...</a><p>Looks like a lot of it can be attributed to covid.

There&#x27;s a problem. Don&#x27;t every ask why though. The only acceptable solution is to throw more money to institutional authorities claiming to represent the best interest of children. Looking any deeper or suggesting any other solution is not acceptable. Now move along.

It seems like we forgot the immense value of an ingrained culture of education, where practically all kids get some form of schooling. Where I live (Wales, UK), the government statistics on school attendance post-Covid are grim, if you are anything less than middle class.

I do not expect this trend to reverse, due to increases in carbon dioxide levels contributing to a decline in (the way we currently measure) intelligence, generation by generation.

gotta wonder how much mental decline due to covid exposure is contributing<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov&#x2F;pmc&#x2F;articles&#x2F;PMC8715665&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov&#x2F;pmc&#x2F;articles&#x2F;PMC8715665&#x2F;</a>

Huge mystery. Will never be solved.

How reliable is the data? Do the kids actually try on these tests?

And nobody mentions brain damage (proved) from Covid, from each infection. Sure, it&#x27;s because of Lockdowns, nobody ever saw that virus can infect some neurons.

Diet + Tech addiction. Where’s my Nobel prize?

I can’t wait for Ai to replace most teachers.

It’s ironic to have this on the HN home page as <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=36417252">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=36417252</a><p>Pretty sure cognitive reasoning is declining too. School choice is the way to go. This does two things (1) forces parents to at least be involved enough to make a decision and (2) incentivizes schools to improve<p>As a parent of quite a few kiddos, I’ve noticed a massive lack of involvement with most parents. It shows

IMHO, we should be able to train an AI to be a constant in-the-student&#x27;s-ear teacher. The AI should be able to learn about the student&#x27;s specific learning style and hence, the student and AI teach each other.<p>If every student is taught in the style that they learn the most efficiently with, could we expect performance to increase dramatically overall? Would it work to close the socio-economic performance gap among schools? How would the role of human teacher change?<p>I am sure there are people who&#x27;ve been focusing on this, it can&#x27;t be novel, would appreciate to know what&#x27;s being done in this realm.