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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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?
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.
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.
When you understand what “graft” is.
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.
No comment, because anything I would say would probably be
.
We are approaching “people don’t die of hunger when you give them food” levels of deep analysis here.
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.
lmao, the American Century of Humiliation is well underway.
Get fucked.
Professional clown lol.
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.
The funny part is the article clearly does understand what graft is, because they then write this:
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?
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.
An ever-growing list too
@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?
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.