A decade-long slide in high school students’ performance in reading and math persisted during the COVID-19 pandemic, with 12th graders’ scores dropping to their lowest level in more than 20 years.
WASHINGTON (AP) — A decade-long slide in high schoolers’ reading and math performance persisted during the COVID-19 pandemic, with 12th graders’ scores dropping to their lowest level in more than 20 years, according to results released Tuesday from an exam known as the nation’s report card.
Eighth-grade students also lost significant ground in science skills, according to the results from the National Assessment of Education Progress.
The assessments were the first since the pandemic for eighth graders in science and 12th graders in reading and math. They reflect a downward drift across grade levels and subject areas in previous releases from NAEP, which is considered one of the best gauges of the academic progress of U.S. schools.
“Scores for our lowest-performing students are at historic lows,” said Matthew Soldner, the acting commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics. “These results should galvanize all of us to take concerted and focused action to accelerate student learning.”
While the pandemic had an outsize impact on student achievement, experts said falling scores are part of a longer arc in education that cannot be attributed solely to COVID-19, school closures and related issues such as heightened absenteeism. Educators said potential underlying factors include children’s increased screen time, shortened attention spans and a decline in reading longer-form writing both in and out of school.
The dip in reading scores appeared alongside a shift in how English and language arts are taught in schools, with an emphasis on short texts and book excerpts, said Carol Jago, associate director of the California Reading and Literature Project at UCLA. As a high school English teacher 20 years ago, Jago said it was common for her high school students to read 20 books over the course of a year. Now, some English classes are assigning just three books a year.
“To be a good reader, you have to have the stamina to stay on the page, even when the going gets tough,” Jago said. “You have to build those muscles, and we’re not building those muscles in kids.”
Education Secretary Linda McMahon said the scores show why the Trump administration wants to give states more control of education spending.
“Despite spending billions annually on numerous K-12 programs, the achievement gap is widening, and more high school seniors are performing below the basic benchmark in math and reading than ever before,” McMahon said.
House Democrats said the Trump administration’s efforts to dismantle the Education Department will only hurt students. The declines show a need for federal investment in academic recovery and educational equity, said Democratic Rep. Bobby Scott of Virginia, ranking member of the House Committee on Education and Workforce.
“Eliminating the very agency responsible for supporting public schools and enforcing civil rights protections of students will only deepen the achievement gaps identified by this assessment,” Scott said.
Fewer students show basic proficiency in math and reading
The test scores show more students are not reaching what would be considered “basic” achievement across subject areas, said Lesley Muldoon, executive director of the National Assessment Governing Board. While NAEP’s definition of “proficient” is a high bar, Muldoon said, it is not an unreasonable one, and it is based on what researchers believe students should be able to achieve by the end of high school.
“These students are taking their next steps in life with fewer skills and less knowledge in core academics than their predecessors a decade ago,” she said. “This is happening at a time when rapid advancements in technology and society demands more of future workers and citizens, not less.”
In reading, the average score in 2024 was the lowest score in the history of the assessment, which began in 1992. Thirty-two percent of high school seniors scored below “basic,” meaning they were not able to find details in a text to help them understand its meaning.
In math, the average score in 2024 was the lowest since 2005, when the assessment framework changed significantly. On the test, 45% of high school seniors scored below “basic” achievement, the highest percentage since 2005. Only 33% of high school seniors were considered academically prepared for college-level math courses, a decline from 37% in 2019.
The high school reading and math assessments, and the eighth grade science test, are given less frequently than the biannual fourth and eighth grade reading tests, which were last released earlier this year. The new scores reflect tests taken in schools around the country between January and March 2024.
Achievement gaps are widening
The gap between the highest- and lowest-performing students was its widest ever among eighth grade science students, reflecting growing inequality in the American school system. The achievement gap widened also in 12th grade math.
The scores also reflect the re-emergence of a gender gap in science, technology, engineering and math courses. In 2019, boys and girls scored virtually the same on the NAEP science assessment. But in 2024, girls saw a steeper decline in scores. A similar pattern occurred in state math assessments, according to an Associated Press analysis.
Schools had largely closed the gender gap in math and science, but it widened in the years following the pandemic as special programs to engage girls lapsed.
On a NAEP survey of students, a shrinking percentage of eighth grade students said they regularly took part in inquiry-based learning activities in the classroom. The pandemic disrupted schools’ ability to create those hands-on learning experiences for students, which are often critical to understanding scientific concepts and processes, said Christine Cunningham, senior vice president of STEM learning at the Museum of Science in Boston.
Still, she noted declines across subjects began well before schools closed in 2020.
“We don’t know exactly what the cause of it is, but it would be incomplete to assume that if we hadn’t had COVID, the score would not have gone down,” Cunningham said. “That’s not what the data showed even before the pandemic.” ___
Feathers reported from New York.
___
The Associated Press’ education coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.
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Comments
By tenarchits 2025-09-0922:5819 reply Most of the comments are focused on the supply of education. But I don't think the supply side is the problem, irrespective of teachers and high schools. There is more and cheaper education available than ever before. Nearly every highschooler has more access to learning that kings and emperors would have fought wars for less than 200 years ago. However,the United States, particularly in the last 50 years, seems to have fostered a culture averse to education. I believe the years long decline in test scores is a symptom of that cultural shift.
By etempleton 2025-09-1013:094 reply In the US there are a few obvious things, but everyone acts as if we are powerless to solve them:
1. Cell phones in classrooms.
I don’t know how or why they were ever allowed. They should have to be in a backpack or in a locker and off during class.
2. Not removing students with bad behavior from classrooms and schools.
The current thinking on how to handle a student who is seriously misbehaving and potentially violent is to remove all of the other students from the classroom versus just removing the problematic student in question. This is because there have been instances where a child has been physically removed and has gotten seriously injured. The thinking on expulsion is that it should essentially never happen because kids who get expelled have bad outcomes later in life. But the net effect is that one bad student can hold an entire classroom hostage and there is nothing the teacher can do. This is obviously detrimental to all of the kids who are compliant and behaving. It also causes burnout which leads me to the next major issue facing public schools.
3. Good teachers are quitting
It isn’t worth it to teach in America. You need a lot of expensive education. You get paid very little. You have no power to remove a student who are major disruptions and make it impossible to teach. And, in many districts, teachers are being accused of trying to indoctrinate children because we live in a politicized world.
4. Too many parents aren’t parenting
The number of kids who are not potty trained by kindergarten continues to rise. This is an issue of parents not wanting to do something that is hard and takes patience.
5. Lowering Standards
When faced with kids failing the solution should never be to lower long held standards. The kids are the same, they are just as capable, it is all of the above that is different.
Bonus. We feed kids junk in schools
This has been going on for decades. Why is it so hard to make fresh food for kids? It could probably cost about the same if done properly. The answer is it takes some effort and people have to think about it.
By whoiskevin 2025-09-1013:43 We want the kids unhealthy and stupid. At least that is what this country keeps voting for...as far back as 2017 they had to get rid of healthy food because...make things great.
https://www.npr.org/2017/05/01/526451207/trump-administratio...
Re point 2: In Germany, among other countries, you have social education workers (a college-educated job) in school for these situations. Such behavior has underlying causes, e.g. problems at home (fresh divorce, drugs, poverty-related stress) recent trauma (accidents, death of a loved one, abuse), mental illness (AHDS etc.). Treat the cause and the behavior changes.
By ToucanLoucan 2025-09-1013:25 Most schools here have those too. The problem is in the United States children are treated just a hair better than chattel slaves and their parents can basically do anything they want up to the line of actually killing them, and the state does very little.
And, even in the cases where the state should and could do something, the line for those services is incredibly long and the child will be properly fucked up by the time they get to the front.
By 1970-01-01 2025-09-1013:14 Point 5 has been a thing for a very long time with respect to sports. The kid is marked-up a few points on tests if they're the reason the basketball team is winning.
By ToucanLoucan 2025-09-1013:232 reply 1. Good luck. Have you ever tried to take an iPad kid's iPad? Be ready for the fight of your fucking life.
2 and 5 are handily down to No Child Left Behind which is frankly some of the worst legislation ever devised for education.
3 and 4: And these factors are only getting worse as worse and worse kids enter the school systems. Nobody wants to deal with them, including their parents.
Bonus: It's not hard, but we won't allocate the money. School lunch lady is a job considered a punch line because for some reason our culture thinks it's easy to serve food to several hundred people in 45 minutes when the people in question aren't old enough to buy cigarettes, but good fucking luck getting money and people allocated to actually do that.
By dbish 2025-09-1013:26 If you can't take a kid's iPad away the parents have made major mistakes and the only option is for the school to directly address this addiction head on.
By djeastm 2025-09-1013:49 >1. Good luck. Have you ever tried to take an iPad kid's iPad? Be ready for the fight of your fucking life.
If a parent has a child that is addicted to an iPad or any other device, the blame is squarely on the parent having let the child use the addictive device so much in the first place. If there needs to be a "detox" period for the child's addiction, so be it, but throwing up one's hands and giving up is parental negligence.
The problem with that “culture” explanation is that white kids in America do fine in international educational comparisons. In the 2018 PISA assessment, 15 year old white american students were near the top in reading (behind only Singapore and some Chinese SEZs) and in the top echelon in science (comparable to Japan). Their weakest performance was math, where they’re around the middle, behind the top asian countries but only modestly behind Finland: https://nces.ed.gov/surveys/pisa/pisa2018/pdf/PISA2018_compi....
Insofar as the US had a “culture averse to education,” surely that affects white americans as much as it affects anyone else. But, on average, they are not the ones who are behind their peers internationally.
Skin color isn't it, actually.
I knew (second hand) a teacher in a rural area of a low population state. All white kids, she'd have kindergartners cussing her out. Very little hope for any academic future for the other grades as things didn't get better with the older kids.
I knew a white kid who lived in a trailer park whose mom was upset he was getting tutoring after school for his dyslexia because she told him he'd never amount to anything.
My mixed race friend mentioned he was accused of "acting white" in school because he actually tried to get good grades.
What do all of those things have in common? Poverty, yes, but blended with hopelessness. The kids were surrounded by people who didn't have much, didn't think they'd get anywhere, and didn't believe the kids would ever have a chance at a better life.
That last part is what separates them from kids in third world countries who still manage to achieve academic success. Hope and optimism aren't guarantees; they aren't a replacement for social support. They are, however, a necessary ingredient for the intrinsic motivation necessary for personal growth.
I don't appreciate reading anecdata in response to cited findings. It cheapens the discussion. Now everyone is going to spend time writing knee-jerk responses to you.
At least the parent commenter had the grace to reply with another source instead of falling for it.
I disagree. Were this an academic symposium I would agree. But this is the internet where folks who know how to establish causality and understand research methods and proper citing are uncommon. Fortunately, I do appreciate the author's thought and contribtions to observation data, and, tongue in cheek, as a utility monster my appreciation more than negates your lack of appreciation.
By tbrownaw 2025-09-1013:04 > I don't appreciate reading anecdata in response to cited findings. It cheapens the discussion.
So does the linked PDF address this proposed "hopelessness" factor, or is it that once someone cites something the discussion becomes restricted to only things that have published study results?
Also, if someone were to cite https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.k5094 on the effectiveness of parachutes, are other commenters then forbidden from citing anecdata that disagree with the findings?
By ThunderSizzle 2025-09-1010:462 reply Whose to say "cited findings" have any more value than "anecdata".
The institutions that build these national and international statistics do so with bias and goals, or without complete data. For example, how can a bureau make a national statistics on crime accurate when cities intentional report crime incorrectly to look better in statistics.
To think "cited findings" is gospel truth is naive. I know it's highly desired here, but I stand by what I'm saying. Data is lovely, but garbage in, garbage out, and most national-level data is complete garbage with an agenda or bias or naivety.
Anecdotes are not a very useful tool in discussions about generalisations. They provide little evidence aside from saying that it's a category of event that can exist. No one at any point has said citations are gospel. Just that anecdotes aren't adding much to the discussion at hand. If you've got issues with the cited data, be precise instead of casting general aspersions on academia.
By ethbr1 2025-09-1012:02 Given that this is just a discussion between random strangers on an internet forum, I personally find both statistics and clear anecdotes, which GP provided, valuable in creating the richest perspective.
This isn't Proceedings of Hacker News or parliament: we're writing ephemeral internet words and trying to enrich each other.
By zdragnar 2025-09-1013:08 Cited data on broad human population shows correlation at best, not causation.
I posited a cause based on the lived experiences people shared with me.
You're free to disagree with my conclusion, or to suggest an alternative cause. None of the cited data has actually done either of those things.
By buellerbueller 2025-09-1012:59 Then argue the methodology and data; anecdotes are great tools for sharing narratives, but a narrative based on bad data doesn't help anyone achieve good outcomes.
The parent commenter’s “source” makes no claims about race related performance whatsoever - it measures by just about everything but that, and then sorts by country. So maybe this is one of those darned reflexive knee jerk responses.
Pages 16, 32, 50 and 62 have breakdowns of mean score by ethnicity actually.
Ethnicity is way too coarse-grained to answer questions about culture and family wealth/connections. That’s lumping together a kid from an old-money family in New Haven with a kid from a trailer park in Virginia.
By ethbr1 2025-09-1013:09 I'd say it's an incomplete measure, but it's far from useless given the US' continued statistically-significant disparities between ethnicity outcomes. The first step of solving a problem, etc. etc.
I do agree with the general sentiment though and think that too much research/news over the last couple decades has been exclusively ethnically segmented, given the economic segmentation that should always also be involved.
They're perpendicular questions and best triangulate the American experience in tandem.
E.g. what are outcomes for wealthy members of disadvantaged ethnicities? What are outcomes for poor members of advantaged ethnicities?
Those are interesting socioeconomic questions!
"Poverty blended with hopelessness" sounds about right. I'd like to emphasize that it's not just poverty, since there are plenty of recent immigrant families who live in poverty but the kids are at the top of their class. Unfortunately, though, there's a certain kind of degeneracy some families live in: the parents have largely failed in their every endeavor, and they'll become absolutely furious if they see the kids starting to rise above that, get their lives together, and accomplish things. If you live in communities like that, it's part of the deal: no one is allowed to escape, lest they make the rest of them look bad.
By philipallstar 2025-09-1011:332 reply It's not the poverty; it's the learned helplessness.
The causal direction from poverty to learned helplessness is pretty much established, though
By philipallstar 2025-09-1013:30 Learned helplessness is poverty+some other things, though. Otherwise no one in poverty would ever leave it. Just talking about causal direction elides reality.
By idiotsecant 2025-09-1012:48 Yes, those filthy poors are such moral degenerates, let them eat cake!
By bell-cot 2025-09-108:25 Sadly, there are a variety of such family, community, and social and peer group motivations and behaviors -
> Skin color isn't it, actually.
Is contradicted by this
> My mixed race friend mentioned he was accused of "acting white" in school because he actually tried to get good grades.
Unless you are taking skin colour very literally, which is obviously not it (someone's academic performance is not going to change if they get a heavy tan or use s kin whitening cream or take a drug that changes skin colour etc.).
I interpreted "white" to mean an ethnic identity, not a literal description.
Saying that skin colour is not important is racist? Or are you objecting to the idea that culture matters? Or are you saying that how people identify, and how society classifies them has no impact?
Really confused by what you are claiming is racist.
By tomrod 2025-09-1013:19 I find this sort of claim really common (the commenter you responded to).
Skin color is unfortunately correlated to socioeconomic outcomes in the United States. Once poverty is controlled for, at least in my analysis, most of this difference is ameliorated (though mild correlation persists).
Most people in this vein, at least in my experience, will describe after a long conversation that they think there can only be two sources of correlation - genetic ("nature", which I disagree is a primary cause of socioeconomic outcomes) and a weird subset of nurture that fails to take into account intergenerational impact (history), instead focusing solely on state (assertion of Markovian process to life).
In my view, nuture breaks out into those components -- history defines the resources you have access to in your broader community, and state defines your immediate challenges. It's hard to get resources to change your life if you have a bad state, but it is possible. Americans love an underdog story and the bad-state good-history fits it well. Bad-history leads to a lot of additional issues -- systemic type issues. Americans have seen this in both hostile urban planning to a full community and to hostile resource reallocation to rural areas (towns shutting down with no way to recover) in favor of suburbia. From my studies, I think Strongtown lands the description of the issues (Youtube channel).
I'm not epistemically arrogant enough to assume I am 100% right here -- much of this is from 20 years of research experience but there is always more to understand at a population level and how that relates to the individual level.
I am epistemically arrogant enough to require people to hold to their ideals -- if someone wants to ensure equality of opportunity, that has to both be for the state (Little Jimmy and Jane come from a poor family) as well as history (and none of Little Jane's community has been to college and nor do they understand the college application or financial assistance process; further, most are unbanked and most of the male population can't get gainful employment due prison sentences connected to overpolicing and/or desperation behaviors [a catch-22 for communities wanting to build a brighter future while also exercising punitive justice]).
Rural low population states actually have pretty good test scores: https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/profiles/stateprofile?sfj=...
By somenameforme 2025-09-105:262 reply That's an understatement. Sort that by at or above basic and the top 5 states in the US are: North Dakota, South Dakota, Minnesota, Utah, Wisconsin.
Even in those states you mention, the number of students managing basic proficiency in maths fell by over 10 percentage points in the past 10 years. You can use the year selection on the site to see the picture change over the years. Texas dropped by over 20 points.
By rayiner 2025-09-1011:34 Nationally, seems to be mostly demographic change plus covid. For white 13 year olds, NAEP reading and math scores dipped a point from 2012-2020. Then they dipped 5-6 points from 2020-2023: https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/highlights/ltt/2023/
By somenameforme 2025-09-107:471 reply Interesting! Yeah, this is a significant decline across the board. I'm curious what it is in the US in particular that's driving such sharp declines. Because many places in the world did things like shut down schools during COVID, have internet/social media, ongoing obesity epidemics, major immigration from low education sources, demographic/fertility issues, and so on. Yet somehow looking at the latest PISA (2022) [1], the US now sits between Malta and Slovakia in math. And if these scores are any indicator, we're probably looking at a further decline in the next PISA results, which should be released this year.
[1] - https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/pisa-scor...
By disgruntledphd2 2025-09-1012:16 > Because many places in the world did things like shut down schools during COVID
Most of the EU/lots of Europe focused on getting the kids back in school before the US did. I personally think that was the right trade-off, but obviously people differ.
By notmyjob 2025-09-1013:14 Pupil teacher ratios in rural states are insanely low. That would impact the below basic group presumably.
Edit: to say pupil teacher ratios are low, not high.
>"acting white"
Honestly this is one of the biggest bullshit I've ever heard. Assuming that this mentality is quite widespread(not necessarily universal) among non White, then any attempt to introduce affirmative action or other equalizer practice would be futile. That kind of mentality must be purged hard from yesterday.
By e40 2025-09-1011:57 Not t true. I don’t have the reference, but I read 10 or more years ago about an affluent community in the midwest whose black students greatly underperformed their white counterparts. The parents hired a black researcher and his final report said exactly that, that many black students didn’t want to appear white and also there were negative consequences for trying to do well. The parents thought it had to be racism and wouldn’t accept the results. The guy was a sociology professor at a college in CA.
For more annectdata, this same thing was happening at Berkeley High School around the same time. First hand knowledge from parents of students.
Teenage boys everywhere have a widespread bias against putting in the effort to get good grades.
They might call it "gay" or "sissy" or "acting white" or whatever, but the root cause is usually their perception of what masculinity should look like.
The men they look up to are anti-intellectual. This exists in all communities, race is not the main problem here.
Lack of role models, right? What men do they look up to?
I guess primary school teachers in the US are predominantly women as they are in most countries? So boys without intellectually inclined men at home or in their social circles do not have role models for educated masculinity.
I’m not sure if the gender of teachers is so much a factor as class identity.
Young French author Édouard Louis has written about his experience growing up in an extremely anti-intellectual working class milieu in France. It’s a country where school teachers are traditionally men, and discipline is stricter than in America or the Northern European countries. But that seems to go together with a class separation where the working class boys don’t see the male teachers as role models but more as representatives of the distant authority.
By ethbr1 2025-09-1013:24 The lack of US male teachers (as well as non-white teachers, especially at higher grade levels) is born out by the numbers: https://usafacts.org/articles/who-are-the-nations-teachers/
The share of male teachers has trended downward in the 80s and 90s (by ~ -1%/yr), then slowed in the 00s+ (to ~ -0.5%/yr), and now sits at 22.4%.
The share of white teachers sits at 80%+ for post-kindergarten grades.
So if teachers represent academic achievement, then there are certainly a lot of kids (especially male minorities) who don't see themselves in their teacher (ethnically and gender-wise).
By graemep 2025-09-1012:25 Both will play a role, and it will differ between societies.
Boys from more intellectually inclined backgrounds will have the role models outside school and that correlates with class (as do attitudes to authority, of course).
I'd like to see what a "full-spectrum crackdown" on anti-intellectualism in the US would look like, given that most of its population struggles to discern fact from fiction in the news cycle, healthcare and legal proceedings. The introduction of generative AI has only made that worse, pushing more distrust of any information that didn't come from a source counted among "one of us." Our problem stems from an intentionally poorly educated populace that still heavily relies on idolatry, allowing whatever demagogue with the means to rise and essentially manipulate the masses.
I'm pretty sure, at this point, this was intentional, individuals and orgs with the resources to create finely tuned systemic problems having been at it since the country's inception.
Banning TikTok could have been a great first step, but too may people were cooked by the algorithm to stop it.
By ethbr1 2025-09-1012:08 The irony is that TikTok et al. could also be the very solution GP wants, depending on algorithm.
Imagine kids glued to an app that shows them engaging and intellectually-positive content. (Which at that scale could actually be inferred)
Fast social isn't intrinsically evil: recommendation algorithms that maximize engagement at the expense of other social goods are. (Or even that operate blind to them)
By zdragnar 2025-09-1010:40 FWIW, my friend was accused of acting white probably around the year 2000 or so, well before anything algorithmic.
Not to say that tiktok is innocent, but it certainly isn't the root cause.
By sneak 2025-09-1011:20 Burning books and censoring media has rarely been a path to fostering intellectualism.
You call it an app ban, but really it’s just press censorship.
By eunos 2025-09-109:17 Media from mainstream to alternative march in tune with pro intellectualism messages. Any works of art that espouse anti intellectualism would be swiftly and immediately canceled (including its authors) without hesitation. Do this for a generation or two minimum.
By boppo1 2025-09-109:40 Get sydney sweeny to date alec radford, make sure there's lots of PDA.
By aredox 2025-09-109:44 More delusion you are a part of.
Building things requires a sustained effort and understanding. You and your fellow Amaricans are drifting further and further from it.
By lozenge 2025-09-109:07 How do you propose to do that?
By tomrod 2025-09-1012:57 How might we formalize these anecdotes and prove them out from a systemic issue?
I cannot think of any single ethnocultural group in the West that highly values education and, at the same time, has bad outcomes doing so. We have invested a lot of money and effort into our educational systems.
Even traditionally oppressed groups like the Jews or the Chinese (Chinese Exclusion Act anyone?) or descendants of Russian muzhiks or Indian untouchable castes do have good outcomes if they actually motivate their kids to learn.
The groups that are systematically out (in Czechia, the part of the Roma that lives in ghettos - contrary what people tend to think, a lot of the Roma marry into the wider society, mix with it and live quite comfortable self-sufficient lives) tend to be the ones that despise schooling, and it will take a century or so of concerted efforts to change the attitudes.
By graemep 2025-09-1011:44 Jews were motived to achieve because they were oppressed.
How do Indian low castes do compared to higher castes in the same country? They often continue to suffer from discrimination from higher castes in the west. I can believe they do better than some other groups, but how to they compare to higher caste Indians?
I do not buy this poverty argument for the simple and clear argument that not only were much of humanity’s knowledge developed by “poor” people by that standard, but also equally poor different racial groups perform very differently, your anecdotal stories notwithstanding.
And yes, skin color itself is irrelevant, it is simply a convenient identifier for underlying significant biological differences. There is absolutely zero reason one would rationally conclude that biological differences would somehow magically stop at the brain. And that goes without saying that it’s not even “just skin color”, since even the most naive child can identify the race of any person where the skin color has been changed with photoshop. Have you seen those images where whites/asians have been made black and vice versa, etc?
We really need to move past these infantile ideologies like that we are all the same. The smart people can clearly see that has always been a gaslighting lie.
> And yes, skin color itself is irrelevant, it is simply a convenient identifier for underlying significant biological differences
No, its a terrible identifier.
If you group people by genetic similarity (which is of dubious usefulness) you essentially end up with three different black African races, one Australian, Pacific and Native American, and one everyone else.
By nobody9999 2025-09-1012:481 reply >If you group people by genetic similarity (which is of dubious usefulness) you essentially end up with three different black African races, one Australian, Pacific and Native American, and one everyone else.
There's only one sentient primate race: Homo Sapiens.
There absolutely are genetic differences between groups that were geographically isolated from each other (as you note). However, when genetic variation is compared both between and within those groups, we see more variation within those once isolated groups than we do between those groups[0].
What's more, even within such groups genetic variation is only around 0.5-1.5%.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_genetics#Race_and_hum...
Edit: Cleaned up prose.
> Firstly, there's only one sentient primate race: Homo Sapiens.
Nope, species, not race - or arguable sub-species.
As your link says race is a social construct, so it is whatever society says it means. It means different things in different societies. This is something I experience personally so I am very aware of it: https://pietersz.co.uk/2023/08/racism-culture-different
> However, when genetic variation is compared both between and within those groups, we see more variation within those once isolated groups than we do between those groups
Which is why genetic similarity does not work well as a way defining race, and why the concept of race has no biological basis. This is covered by the wikipedia link in my previous comment too.
> What's more, even within such groups genetic variation is only around 0.5-1.5%.
Yes, but that is just normal for a species. We share a lot of DNA (98%?) with chimpanzees and something like 70% with fish! its not really meaningful. However, its not the main argument, because the variation within vs (lack of) between groups is really the killer argument.
By nobody9999 2025-09-1013:53 [delayed]
By DiogenesKynikos 2025-09-109:43 > it is simply a convenient identifier for underlying significant biological differences
It's actually not. Skin color does not correlate well with the genetic diversity among humans at all. It's just one particular trait that is very easy to identify by eye.
> There is absolutely zero reason one would rationally conclude that biological differences would somehow magically stop at the brain.
There is absolutely zero reason to rationally conclude that a random physical trait that happens to be easy to distinguish by eye correlates with brain function at all.
On the other hand, there are massive socioeconomic disparities that arise from the history of slavery, which easily explain both the disparities and the reasons why racists such as yourself want to boil things down to skin color.
By lr4444lr 2025-09-1011:24 All this demonstrates is that outcomes are not uniform, not that the culture explanation is necessarily wrong.
Schools in many urban districts where we see this same disparity control for teacher qualifications and per pupil student funding. In fact, various anti-poverty measures and intensive interventions on low performing schools even tip the scale in their favor on thr "supply" side.
Education isn't just something "delivered" like manufactured product; it is something that had to be properly received and used.
We have to start asking some better questions to uncover what's going on, and they will be a lot tougher to quantify.
By eunos 2025-09-108:33 >culture averse to education
Remind me when Vivek told his followers that American education need ti be more rigorous to compete with China and other Asian nations he got owned so hard, practically quiting from DOGE before it started.
By safety1st 2025-09-108:58 I don't think that disproves the culture argument. American culture is segmented. (Modern marketing and politics have leaned heavily into this segmentation by the way.) For example, if you grow up exposed to ghetto culture you will probably not value education. The PISA assessment doesn't tell us that white kids who grew up in the ghetto are magically competing with Singapore's best. And we know that the ghetto is less white than the rest of America. Ergo in aggregate, US whites outperform. There are of course a million exceptions to this i.e. grow up in a certain type of Asian immigrant household and you will probably do great on these tests and maybe learn piano, violin etc. as well.
Now whether ghetto culture or ghetto economics is the main contributor to poor academic performance... I will leave that finer point up for debate, but my point here is the US has big differences in educational outcomes based on NEIGHBORHOOD, if your neighborhood is high crime and the schools are broke, your educational outcomes tend to be bad.
If there is a culture related problem, I think it's that the people pushing this trashy culture, for example music that glorifies rape, drugs and gangs, code it as black culture and use that as a way to deflect criticism. You're a racist if you don't like hip hop! It would be an understatement to say that many black Americans want nothing to do with that lifestyle or image and have evolved well beyond it, yet it still gets called black culture. It is a cultural weakness that we don't see rape, drugs and gangs as bad stuff to promote and reward, full stop, and not a thing we should be educating the next generation with, regardless of the skin color of the performer, or its roots.
BTW for whatever it's worth I'm white and I grew up in the ghetto. My parents forced me to take a public bus for an hour each morning to a magnet school in the rich part of town. Years later I met up with my white childhood friend from down the road who had gone to our local high school. I had a bunch of academic achievements and a college scholarship, he had a gunshot wound in his stomach. He was a smart guy when I knew him but the ghetto had its own plans for him.
By only-one1701 2025-09-1011:31 That’s crazy man! Hey, I don’t suppose it was controlled for income as well as race, was it?
Culture argument can be argued effectively as follows:
If a cohort in Japan has a median score of X at median household income Y, the American cohort with same median score X has income closer to 1.25Y or 1.5Y.
Whether you want to define your American cohort based on geography or ethnicity doesn't really matter-the result will be preserved up to a point.
That’s just because Americans are richer across the Board than Japanese. But would we expect PISA scores to track absolute income across different developed countries? I don’t think that follows. For example, Sweden’s median household income (PPP) is 2.6x higher than Poland’s. But the two countries had very similar scores on the 2018 PISA: http://hechingerreport.org/what-2018-pisa-international-rank...
By diogenescynic 2025-09-104:112 reply I think one of the biggest factors comes down to single parent vs intact families.
Sweden has the highest proportion of single-parent households at 34% whereas Poland is near the bottom at 9% [1].
[1] https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-eurostat-news/-/e...
By 0xDEAFBEAD 2025-09-1012:59 One possible synthesis is that the high incomes in Sweden make up for the high number of single-parent households.
By tankenmate 2025-09-107:46 I'm interested; do you have any good stats for that?
By MacsHeadroom 2025-09-104:251 reply [flagged]
By kenjackson 2025-09-107:16 Id ask you for a citation, but I know it doesn’t exist.
By idiotsecant 2025-09-1012:47 Hmmm I wonder if something happened after 2018, it's on the tip of my tongue I just can't quite remember ..
By mschuster91 2025-09-106:58 > Insofar as the US had a “culture averse to education,” surely that affects white americans as much as it affects anyone else. But, on average, they are not the ones who are behind their peers internationally.
Education outcome massively depends on economic status of the parents. And that, no matter the country by the way, is very closely tied to immigration history and ethnicity.
When parents struggle to afford basic school supplies (to the tune that many teachers have to pay for their students' needs out of their own measly paychecks [1]), that's not exactly conductive to good learning outcomes. When parents don't have the time to sit down with their children and help them with learning because they have to work two jobs to make rent (remember, even two minimum wage jobs is not enough [2]), the kids are put further behind. And they certainly can't afford private after-school tutoring.
The last part is the environment itself - aka the quality of housing (mold, cockroaches and other health impacts) or when gangs lure in kids with the promise of striking it rich by dealing drugs or whatnot...
[1] https://edition.cnn.com/2023/09/02/business/teachers-back-to...
[2] https://www.housingfinance.com/news/rent-remains-unaffordabl...
By weitendorf 2025-09-103:245 reply The racial achievement gap is probably one of the most significant problems educators in the US think about. I think one of the biggest obstacles to improving it (not causing the problem, but making solutions difficult or ineffective) is that low-performing urban school districts tend to correlate strongly with strong teachers' unions and big, mismanaged school administrations where things are too bureaucratic and incompetent for anybody to be able to really effect significant change.
I'm not sure I support charter schools as a universal good, but they've actually proven to be pretty consistently effective at improving the educational attainment of low-income black/hispanic students [0-1]. When the local school system is a political quagmire and objectively failing in its mission to educate students, it's probably the only way out.
The meta-problem is that the people most actively involved in improving the racial educational achievement gap are precisely the type of people to reflexively dislike charter schools (because it's "right wing", although I see it more aligned with the centralization vs decentralization axis) and maybe even feel overtly threatened by them (because of their union job). Also, charter schools have to actually figure out how to get buy-in from low-income black and hispanic parents, figure out how to serve this community better, and can't hide behind the excuse of cyclical poverty + orwellian bureaucracy anymore.
I think a lot of educators really would rather work in a system where bad outcomes are guaranteed and thus not their fault, than one in which they actually have the ability to make more than just performative progress in serving the needs of their underprivileged student body.
[0] https://hechingerreport.org/proof-points-charter-schools-hav...
[1] https://www.kqed.org/news/11953408/charter-schools-show-gain...
Why do you assume racial achievement gaps indicate problems with schools? For example, Asian students perform much better than white students. We don’t say that indicates a problem with how schools educate white kids. Instead, most people see it as a predictable consequence of asian immigrants being filtered for higher education. By that same token, why would we treat Hispanic students having lower scores as indicative of a problem with the schools? The U.S. Hispanic population is subject to the same immigrant filtering effect, but in the opposite direction. Both immigrant groups largely arrived in the last 50 years. Why would we assume the effects of the initial filtering would disappear so quickly?
Here’s a modest proposal: American schools are actually quite good across the board.
By atwrk 2025-09-1013:34 Why do you assume racial achievement gaps indicate problems with schools?
GP didn't say that, but educators of course see schools as an important area to address the gap. The literature is pretty clear on this being a complex problems with schools being an important wedge to break the vicious circle.
By sapphicsnail 2025-09-105:20 I wouldn't trust any data about charter schools that came from the Hoover Institute. Plenty of red states with weak labor laws have awful educational systems.
At least near me the biggest problems facing the "urban" district compared to suburban ones is declining student populations as long time homeowners age in place and the maintenance costs of 100 year old buildings compared to 10-20 year old ones in the suburbs. Teachers tend to get paid the same or less in the city district and administration counts are higher but fairly close on a per student basis compared to the burbs.
This is before you get into the socioeconomic factors that make one student population more susceptible to starting and falling behind.
By bandofthehawk 2025-09-104:161 reply Wouldn't a declining student population mean more money per student? And it seems like it would often (but not always) be cheaper to maintain existing buildings vs building new ones? I'm also wondering how much of the new suburban buildings are financed with debt, and the costs just haven't really caught up to them yet.
By _fs 2025-09-104:30 A school's budget is tied directly to attendance. Less students = less budget.
By cyberax 2025-09-105:18 > At least near me the biggest problems facing the "urban" district compared to suburban ones is declining student populations as long time homeowners age in place and the maintenance costs of 100 year old buildings compared to 10-20 year old ones in the suburbs
The building maintenance is a red herring. I believe in my district, it's about 10% of the budget on average.
There is no shortage of young naive newly minted teachers who are eager to go into those low performing urban schools and help turn things around. But very few of them last more than a few years in those schools, they get badly burned by reality. The ones who last almost inevitably become callused and bitter, having lost all of the hope they had at the start. The biggest problem with those schools is the students themselves, and the families of those students. They're incredibly dysfunction and stymie all well intentioned efforts to help them.
Insofar as charter schools can help, it's because giving enough of a shit to apply for and go to one weeds out enough of the lost causes that would only disrupt everybody else. In fact, I think the best ways to improve those public schools is even simpler; make attendance optional. Families who give a shit will still attend, while all the trash will voluntarily stay home.
By ACCount37 2025-09-1011:09 Hell no. Making attendance optional sacrifices way too much.
It's like reducing incarceration rates by never jailing people for anything short of murder. Sure, it improves on that one metric. Obviously. But the adverse effects elsewhere make it a nonstarter.
If you could trust self-selection to only ever stop the "lost causes" from attending? The absolute worst, most disruptive, least likely to ever benefit from education students? Then maybe.
But in practice, for every student like this there would be ten more who would benefit from school education if they attended, but wouldn't attend if it was optional.
And for those missing students, the difference between getting the classes and being left to their own devices might be the difference between becoming functioning adults, low in income but stable, and being locked in a vicious cycle of poverty, substance abuse, violence and crime.
Which is bad for the students in question, and even worse for the society.
The only reason I became anything today is because my parents who were poor but cared very much were able to "opt out" of the shit-tier local public school that pandered to the kids who would rather not learn before it was too late for me.
Just a couple disruptive kids per class can ruin an entire generation of students for a grade level. And there were far more than just a couple. Not to mention kids who had no business being in those classes - when the class is half full of low-performers they drag the rest of the kids down with them as the environment completely changes.
The focus these public school districts have put on the low performing and low achievers at the expense of those there to learn is astounding and perhaps civilization-ending if it continues. More resources should be spent on those there to help themselves vs. trying to shovel ever-more resources at people that will never provide a return on that investment.
At this point the local district here spends magnitudes more on special education and catering to IEP students than they do any AP level classes or other high performer programs. In fact they continue to destroy any advanced track segmentation in the favor of equity, and the teachers union nearly killed public magnet schools off entirely recently. They will try again until they are successful.
It's an obviously bad strategy, and apparently results don't matter. Dragging everyone down is not a plan for success.
This is the single political hill I will die on. Removing the ability for poor but high functioning families to give their kids a chance to get out of their circumstances because it raises uncomfortable questions is downright evil.
Other western countries everyone loves to champion so much have this figured out. Student tracks are a good thing. Put high achievers on an advanced track earlier than later and get them out of the general population of students before it's too late for them.
And yes, it's obvious to anyone who's ever been to a decent number of different types of schools that the only thing that truly matters is the other students (read: parents) that go there. Anything else is a rounding error.
As bad as it was 30 years ago when I was going to school, it's infinitely worse now from watching nieces and nephews attending their local public schools. Until they were able to transfer out to magnets at least.
By Meekro 2025-09-105:15 There's one slow-motion conservative victory happening that's getting relatively little news coverage (and that's a good thing, lest there be more pushback): allowing more alternatives to public schools, funded by taxpayer dollars. Charter schools are the most obvious example, but I expect this to eventually be expanded further. If 10 homeschooler families want to get together and hire a professional teacher, there's no reason why the state shouldn't pay for it (provided the kids pass grade-level standardized tests).
Like you said, 99% of what makes a "good" school good is the quality of the other kids who go there. Since there's absolutely no political will for expelling the troublemakers (even in most conservative districts), the only remaining option is to build more lifeboats.
By lelanthran 2025-09-106:352 reply > the schools are able to kick out any underperforming students
Being able to kick out disruptive students has a pretty big influence on the remaining students.
How do you distinguish between underperforming-non-disruptive students and under-performing-disruptive students, especially as the almost all the disruptive students are going to be underperforming anyway.
By lupusreal 2025-09-1010:22 You make it sound difficult. It's not. Schools are filled with security cameras. When a student attacks another, expell him. And none of that "the victim tried to defend himself so we have to expelled him too, we don't care who started it" horse shit. The schools have cameras, use them.
By weitendorf 2025-09-103:312 reply I don't consider myself right wing, but I guess in this case I wouldn't care even if it were nominally right-wing, because it's more important to give students good educations than it is to perpetuate institutions (eg giant school systems with awful performance) that might ideologically better align with my beliefs but are clearly not working.
Also, while I don't think students should be pushed out of charter schools purely for bad performance (if they are putting in the effort), I do think that poor minority parents should have the right to send their kids to schools that don't force students to share classrooms with disruptive or way-behind-grade-level students. When educational outcomes under the local public school system are really bad I think school-choice just makes a lot of sense as a way of figuring out what policies are popular/effective/unpopular/harmful.
The implication seems to be that charter schools are superior, but does that jive with other countries' successes? A commonly given alternative explanation is that the public options in the US are deliberately sabotaged via budget restrictions, and then the resulting poor performance is used to justify further cuts—a similar dynamic has been fairly recently executed in Alberta with public health care.
There is very little correlation between per-capita student spending and student outcomes. We should fund our public schools adequately but no amount of funding can overcome a bad environment in a student's home or neighborhood.
By enjo 2025-09-104:20 And to be clear: we fund our schools at a higher rate than basically any other country in the world. We are fifth in the world in per-pupil student funding behind only Luxembourg, Norway, Austria, and South Korea.
https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/cmd/education-exp...
By kevinventullo 2025-09-104:011 reply I thought charter schools and public schools received the same $/student.
By rahimnathwani 2025-09-104:421 reply Charter schools generally receive less.
By rahimnathwani 2025-09-107:12 Here's just one:
Heape-Johnson, A., McGee, J. B., Wolf, P. J., May, J. F., & Maloney, L. D. (August 2023). Charter School Funding: Little Progress Towards Equity in the City. School Choice Demonstration Project.
In some states and cities the difference is more extreme than in others.
By cyberax 2025-09-105:25 Budgets are NOT a problem. Magnet schools in the US get the same or _less_ funding per capita than the average for the area.
E.g. Lowell Heights in SF gets less than the average funding, and Stuyvesant in NYC gets the average amount.
By weitendorf 2025-09-104:10 I think the specific form of "charter schools" we have are mainly a US invention, but a lot of countries (like the Netherlands, where it's more common than not) actually just let students use public funds to go to private schools, which would melt the heads of most people who oppose charter schools because it's "right wing".
Charter schools are I think a direct response to figuring out how to fix low performing, big school districts in the US. So while I have no idea if private or public schools do better in the Netherlands, I think we'd need to find something more like the Baltimore public school system in another country to make the right comparison.
> A commonly given alternative explanation is that the public options in the US are deliberately sabotaged via budget restrictions, and then the resulting poor performance is used to justify further cuts
I find this hard to address because it's not really a matter of policy but of ulterior motives or conspiracy. I personally have no secret plan to make public education even worse by posting about charter schools on hacker news. To me it's just about giving students the option to get educated by an independent institution rather than be forced to attend some of the worst public school systems in the country.
By TimorousBestie 2025-09-103:441 reply Perhaps you believe the “nominally right-wing” thing is merely academic. It is not.
https://freespeechproject.georgetown.edu/tracker-entries/neo...
By weitendorf 2025-09-103:553 reply Nazis drink water and post on internet communities too. And that's a homeschool network, not a charter school.
Honestly, this might be a good opportunity for you to think about why you find charter schools such a nonstarter JUST because they tend to have more support among those on the right (which I'm not) than those on the left. That's actually one of the big problems I was trying to point out: people have extremely strong opinions on educational policy because of these ideological left vs right things rather than on what students actually need!
By davorak 2025-09-107:47 > why you find charter schools such a nonstarter JUST because they tend to have more support among those on the right
So my general impression is that the republican party, nationally, note I am distinguishing the republican party form political right in the USA, has not been supportive of education in terms of financing or in promoting the necessary environment to ensure high quality and consistent education.
My general impression is that the republican party is for charter schools.
An argument that says trust/invest in the system promoted by the party that has been undermining/unsupportive of the current system does not invoke my trust/sympathy.
This is not a topic I have done rigorous investigations on, but what little I have done normally shows a lack of hard evidence and apples to apples between charter schools and traditional public schools.
By elktown 2025-09-105:52 People should study charter schools here in Sweden where it’s common. It’s such a corrupt profit motivated segregation mess, it should be avoided at all costs. It’s taken a very well functioning public school system that had a high lowest standard across the board and segregated them by cherry picking cheap to maintain students.
Then we also have the pure frauds, no education to the students until the finally gets shut down 5-10 years later when all inspections are done. etc etc.
Why on earth willingly let in the profit motive into this? It was introduced right wingers in Sweden too ofc, boat loads of profit to their supporters.
Now it’s also very hard to get rid of when state capacity has been reduced over the years.
By TimorousBestie 2025-09-104:26 > And that's a homeschool network, not a charter school.
They were registered as an online charter school, which is why the Ohio DOE got involved at all. They wouldn’t have investigated an individual homeschooler. (Many “homeschool networks” or the like do this because it makes it easier for their clientele to prove they’ve met the meager legal requirements of homeschooling. Justifies the price tag, yknow?)
> Honestly, this might be a good opportunity for you to think about why you find charter schools such a nonstarter JUST because they tend to have more support among those on the right (which I'm not) than those on the left
You’ve imagined a whole backstory and character arc for me, which is sadly more interesting than the truth. I think charter schools are repugnant because they operate under little to no oversight and, around these parts, have a reputation for abusing students (see reason one).
You seemed to imply earlier that the right wing connection was irrelevant or unimportant to the concept of a charter school. It isn’t, really. It’s an essential feature of the system, and why they’ve become so popular as of late after decades of failed leftist attempts at the same thing.
Please stop spreading misinformation. Public charter schools aren't allowed to kick out underperforming students.
They are allowed to screen prospective students up front. They also won't kick out under-performers for getting Ds. They will find a disciplinary reason to do so.
Every one of us could have been kicked out of school at one time or another if we had fallen under the microscope looking for an excuse.
No, that's also misinformation. Public charter schools in most states aren't allowed to screen prospective students up front. Any parents can enroll their children, and when a charter school is oversubscribed they use admission lotteries. And they follow the same disciplinary procedures as other public schools.
By lazyasciiart 2025-09-107:201 reply By reliabilityguy 2025-09-1012:27 I’ve read the NYT piece, and I am not sure how it disproves the statement made earlier.
I expected it to be an example of how the school changes their rules to target a student, but it was just a case of school that is very strict.
By TimorousBestie 2025-09-104:00 If you want to be exceedingly pedantic, a student at a typical charter school in the United States has much weaker due process guarantees than a student at a public school. The school administration at a charter school has much less government oversight by design, and in some states there is effectively none.
By lazyasciiart 2025-09-105:051 reply Please don’t spread misinformation. Charter school law varies by state and you should not make blanket statements about what they are allowed to do.
By 1123581321 2025-09-105:242 reply They appear to be essentially correct. There is little variance by state in how they accept students from the public. Were you thinking of a particular state? Here's information on the admission laws for each state from Wested. https://wested2024.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/wp-content/upl...
By lazyasciiart 2025-09-107:271 reply In zero states can you show up at a charter school and say “I live next door, I want to enrol” and be enrolled. That is an enormous difference from public schools that immediately eliminates the most disadvantaged students from the applicant pool.
Moreover, some charter schools require things like parental time volunteering, which eliminates more kids, or introductory essays - they don’t score the essays! They just require it to be done! By horrible coincidence this eliminates more cough lower performing children, who simply never submit a completed application for the lottery, so sad. This definitely happens in multiple states but here’s one specific example:
https://www.latimes.com/opinion/editorials/la-ed-charter-app...
By Chris2048 2025-09-1012:05 > By horrible coincidence this eliminates more cough lower performing children
If it's not scored it can't possibly eliminate low-performing children on that unconflated characteristic alone - a motivated underperformer will still get in.
It eliminates the unmotivated, which correlates obviously with underperforming. While it can be a vicious circle, I'd say no-motivation -> underperformance is of much greater relevance than underperformance -> no-motivation.
The obvious hint is how it tests the parents too. sure. maybe they are very motivated but just work so much they cannot volunteer or spare any time, but doesn't that also somewhat render their 'motivation' moot as well?
By TimorousBestie 2025-09-1012:16 Your link is about the mandated lottery system that applies when too many applicants submit applications to the same charter school, so it clearly doesn’t protect students whose parents were strongly advised not to apply.
By monero-xmr 2025-09-103:341 reply Why wouldn’t I want a school to be able to kick out bad kids? Violent and disruptive kids need to be warehoused away from actual future productive members of society, rather than forcing 90% of kids to have their education ruined by 10% of bad kids
Prepare to build a fuckton more prisons then. Most kids can get turned around from a bad path if they get the right support early on. I don't want to live in a world where we write off 7 year olds forever.
By somenameforme 2025-09-105:113 reply There was a famous study that tried to test this - the Perry Preschool Study. [1] Basically they enlisted a number of high risk children - black, low iq, low income children. Half were placed into a high quality specialized preschool program (that lasted two years for 2.5 hours a day) with small class sizes, half were not, and they followed what happened over the next 40 years. The results were definitely impactful, but not the sort of major turn around one might hope for.
So for instance 55% of the control group ended up being arrested 5+ times by age 40, while 'only' 36% of the experiment group did. I think the thing this demonstrates is that intervention can help, but is also insufficient alone. Students who are in a sufficiently high risk scenario need ongoing support and treatment that they're not going to receive at a normal public institution. And not only that but they will remain disproportionately disruptive to other student's educations at normal institutions, even with years of ongoing care.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HighScope (overview)
[1] - https://highscope.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/perry-presc... (detailed paper)
I'm surprised that 2.5 hours a day for 2 years was enough to make that big a difference on outcomes through age 40. Like... damn, that's a big effect!
By imtringued 2025-09-106:40 In Germany children only spend between 5.5 to 6 hours at school per day. You‘ve raised that amount to 8 hours now and the outcomes are not that much better since the number represents being arrested at least five times. If you get arrested four times, you would be considered a model student.
Imagine the moral dilemma of having to choose which kid goes in which group
By ACCount37 2025-09-1011:30 For the experiment, you don't want it to be a "moral dilemma" at all.
If the group-splitting decisions are made by humans, it inevitably introduces a systematic bias. That bias then will show up in the outcomes, and confound the very data you got out of your way to gather.
The easiest way to avoid that is to split the groups randomly.
By monero-xmr 2025-09-103:593 reply If anything we need to double the amount of money paid to build high-intensity “schools” for those kids, and then reduce the amount of money needed for the good kids, because honestly all of that money is wasted now on the bad ones. We should also imprison criminals but that goes without saying. If we don’t have enough prisons to house violent criminals then we simply need more prisons, or release them only into communities that vote for such a thing (maybe rich liberal communities only etc.)
By Nevermark 2025-09-106:33 > We should also imprison criminals but that goes without saying.
Obviously we need effective justice.
But since we are on the topic of ineffective schooling, there is an argument to be made that US prisons are more effective at punishment than rehabilitation. Which seems to please some people, but just adds another undertow to society.
A loss for criminal inmates, and everyone they impact, family or stranger, after they are released.
Education is worth looking at with respect to an entire culture, with many important contexts beyond/outside school. From before school age (huge), onward.
By ZeroGravitas 2025-09-107:07 There's a great early TED talk from a Lawyer trying to stop death row inmates being executed.
He realises that the simplest and easiest intervention is to stop the violent crime happening in the first place, and the cheapest and easiest way to do that is to intervene in the future murderers childhood. The specific example he gives is a client with a schizophrenic mother who needed more support.
By lupusreal 2025-09-1010:26 Instead of imprisoning all criminals we should be streamlining the process to execute murderers, drug dealers, etc.
OK, here's a question. Should every sportball team in the US be prohibited from being selective? Everyone, regardless of their capability, should be able to play on the same field. Including paraplegics because it's not their fault.
It's a lofty ideal, don't you think?
By abenga 2025-09-106:20 If playing sports was essential to living to everyone across the board, yeah, they would be prohibited from being selective.
By kristopolous 2025-09-1011:491 reply Wow it's almost like racism is systemic.
It's pretty wild how you can show lower achievement scores for any countries definition of "black" while changing who belongs in that group.
For instance, Italians were considered black in the early 1900s and wouldn't you know it, there was an achievement discrepancy for Italians so long as that definition held.
Or you can look at apartheid and post apartheid South Africa - when the political structure flipped, so did the academic scores of the groups.
The discrepancy follows the social category and power asymmetry and not the actual people. It's a social artifact, not some biologically inert trait.
That's not what the article is discussing (decline over time). We (all?) know white American have over average performance due to whatever reasons. The question is: Are they declining alongside the overall group. That might suggests that the reason(s) for this decline is cross-culture/ethnic/race.
> We (all?) know white American have over average performance due to whatever reasons.
[citation needed]
By worthless-trash 2025-09-109:47 (I'm not american) so I don't have a horse in this race.
These reports are becoming to find because measuring racial differences is considered racist, so you'd be asking for something that would not be acceptable in modern studies.
By aprilthird2021 2025-09-104:111 reply If you compare a country where most people are one ethnicity or where wealth and race are not as correlated as in the US, then it's a bit of an unfair comparison.
Does the comparison hold if you segment the white Americans, Chinese, Singaporeans, Japanese, etc. by economic class?
I think it’s the opposite—it is a fairer comparison. White Americans are a relatively homogenized population that reflect the entire spectrum of economic class, where immigration effects have been attenuated by time. Is it unfair to compare the median white american to the median Japanese, just because the U.S. also has a large Hispanic population that mostly descends from low-education post-1970 immigrants from impoverished Latin American countries?
By atwrk 2025-09-1013:38 West Virginia is a nice datapoint here: Almost completely white, but also poor. And one of the worst scores of all.
By pembrook 2025-09-107:42 Agreed, "culture" is a symptom, not a cause.
All humans are the same species, and in a vacuum, have no ideas or inherent behaviors beyond base instinct.
Culture is simply a byproduct of the environment around a segment of humans.
Hence, filtering by white kids in the US simply measures the result of higher average economic status (same as filtering by Asian kids).
American outcomes would look better if the populations they economically disenfranchised historically stayed in other countries like Europeans did with the colonial system (vs importing populations as slave labor domestically in the US). The economic class stratification that still lingers as a result of this in the US is such a unique factor as to make comparisons that don't take this into account worthless.
By Mountain_Skies 2025-09-103:051 reply Only if the US is a monoculture but we're a diverse multi-cultural society. Different cultural groups have different values and priorities.
By 6LLvveMx2koXfwn 2025-09-108:473 reply And different individuals within those cultural groups also have different values and priorities. A good education system supports everyone equally in achieving their goals.
By dbish 2025-09-1013:31 eh no. a good education system educates the populous. if a student's goals are to play sports and never learn to read, that is irrelevant, they are measured on the education aspect. if their goals are to become a professional streamer, or they value "fame" over anything else, also irrelevant.
we have and should set clear and high education goals. you can adjust teaching strategies towards those goals based on the student and aim to drive those goals even higher, and things like advanced classes are clear ways to do so.
By corimaith 2025-09-1011:57 Take that to its logical conclusion and we'd have individual, personalized tutors for each student. We don't have the resources for that, so some groups are going to get shafted. The question is which.
By bpt3 2025-09-109:59 And when those goals are orthogonal to educational achievement, then what?
The greatest predictor of academic success is the education level of a student's parents.
By pif 2025-09-1012:40 > 15 year old white american students
Which barbarian idiot included a question about skin colour in an otherwise-respectable test?
By liveoneggs 2025-09-101:555 reply My kids don't get textbooks in public school, are comingled with highly disruptive kids (except in the limited gifted classes) and the curriculum is accelerated way past where it was when I was younger.
So my anecdotal theory is that the (public) education system is optimized to the edges, abandoning the middle entirely, resulting in majority decline.
They do get computers with TONS of dumb-ass apps and zero reference materials.
My daughter had no textbook for Freshman physics, which is obviously the hardest class she is going to have in high school (or top 2). It was ridiculous. We wound up supplementing learning materials and paying a tutor, but it all felt like making up for piss-poor course structure. Her (very intelligent but distracted) teacher barely knew where to send me for supplemental materials. And this is in the "advanced" high school that is very hard to get into.
By liveoneggs 2025-09-102:341 reply How do they not know?! The parents at my school would gladly purchase materials for the classes if anyone bothered to ask for them.
By bpt3 2025-09-1011:46 Your average teacher is about as intelligent, motivated, and skilled as your average American.
How much initiative do you think a random office or retail worker would put into solving a problem they were presented with that they couldn't answer immediately and had no impact on their lives?
I’ve never heard anyone say freshman physics is the hardest class in high school!
Memorize 6 equations, 15 terms of art, and be competent at super simple algebraic expressions and you’re done. Physics in US high schools is taught long before calculus and usually before trig, which is dumb, but they compensate by making the calculation requirements something 6th graders routinely do.
AP Calculus is even easier assuming you’ve taken trig and calculus, but I realize many Americans don’t. But freshman physics is… I generally say a waste of time it’s so easy.
What did your daughter find challenging?
Most schools do biology > chemistry > physics, which is from funnest and easiest to most technical and hardest (plus digging in to the building blocks of the previous class). Physics first is very much throwing them in at the deep end of the pool when they have never taken a high school class at all. Frankly, I never got the details of the curriculum due to lack of printed materials. Parenting is not easy, and it's an art not a science. I got her a tutor instead of risking giving her the impression her grades were more important than her to me because I was pushing her too hard. Her tutor helped a lot and had plenty of materials to help out. So no, my kid's not dumb ;)
Physics also tends to expect some understanding of calculus... which tends to be a junior or senior level class. Having someone take a physics class when they're still struggling with single variable substitution in equations would be torturous to student and teacher alike.
By inemesitaffia 2025-09-106:361 reply There are calculus free science programs
By pests 2025-09-1013:25 My high school back in the early 00s had an algebra-based physics track and a calculus-based. We were a smaller school so they alternated every year. Take it junior / senior year depending on what version you wanted to take.
Science teacher here. Physics First is absolutely not throwing them into the deep end, and should not be the hardest class. Physics First generally means physics taught without calculus, and most of it is stuff that could have been taught to most eighth graders.
Not saying it won't be hard, but I don't want you to think it's some crazy torture. It should be no harder than doing Bio or Chem first, and for many kids it's easier. (Bio and Chem have way more memorization and vocabulary.)
By sgc 2025-09-103:26 I am sure you are right, my physics class was my hardest class in HS, but I took it my senior year. Regardless, her school is science and tech focused, and it was a hard class without materials to study for tests, and with minimal guidance.
By sandworm101 2025-09-103:41 Mandatory xkcd: https://m.xkcd.com/435/
By legacynl 2025-09-108:41 In the NL we start with a combined chemistry/physics class that's mostly physics, after the 2nd year you get physics, chemistry and biology as separate classes.
I don't think physics is hardest. On the contrary, physics is probably the best subject to start with, because everyone (even people who don't know about physics) have experienced physics. People intuitively understand that you go faster down a steep hill, than a gently sloped one.
By KPGv2 2025-09-103:30 > Most schools do biology > chemistry > physics
I'm only aware of schools providing these three courses as independent of each other. Which makes sense, since they are independent.
I took Chem as a sophomore, Physics as a freshman, AP Chem as a senior, and AP Physics as a senior. I didn't take a single bio course after 7th grade.
For what it's worth, both Calculus courses were harder IMO than any of the aforementioned.
> Most schools do biology > chemistry > physics, which is from funnest and easiest to most technical and hardest
More like from what women prefer to what men prefer, they probably do it since most teachers are women and prioritize what girls want. Physics is "hard" as in not soft, not "hard" as in not easy.
The reasonable order is the opposite, physics underpins chemistry and chemistry underpins biology.
There is a thing called pedagogy, and biology > chemistry > physics is a perfectly healthy order of discovery. I am not sure why there needs to be a battle of the sexes in the middle of this.
By Jensson 2025-09-1012:42 > I am not sure why there needs to be a battle of the sexes in the middle of this.
I am not sure either, but there is, and ignoring it means that school gets optimized for girls and seatbelts optimized for men. You have to bring that up to change it.
> So my anecdotal theory is that the (public) education system is optimized to the edges, abandoning the middle entirely...
Yep. Those edges are pushed by very vocal parents, usually backed by large communities and interest groups.
And the modern-day politics of American public schools (which generally have very low voter engagement) dictate that only the squeaky wheels get the grease.
By bpt3 2025-09-1011:50 My kids' schools are optimized for the lower edge, while providing some (but significantly less than the lower edge) additional support for the upper edge who almost exclusively come from upper income families who are assumed to be able to fend for themselves.
I want all people to live fulfilling lives and reach their potential, but we are pouring limited resources into a bottomless pit while intentionally de-emphasizing the fundamentals of education that worked well for decades (or longer), and any question of those methods receives an extremely hostile response.
It's no wonder that people are choosing to opt out in some form or another, or that the results are suboptimal.
By onetimeusename 2025-09-102:202 reply That's kind of what I think but feel free to poke holes. It seems like there are three tiers. There's a closed off top tier of kids who get into top ranked universities. They go to highly ranked schools like selective high schools with high Ivy placement ranks. Those schools have different materials and more opportunities than most. These high schools are geographically mostly on the coasts. It's a totally different culture too where there's this years long effort.
Then there's a middle tier, the majority of people, where they might end up at a university but it's not top rated. Increasingly it's not worth the money and simultaneously it seems like our country has become more credentialist about prestigious jobs. But a degree probably isn't necessary for most careers that don't have gatekeepers so for these people the education doesn't really have a big payoff and their education might get de-emphasized.
Then there's the bottom tier which is self explanatory.
By programjames 2025-09-108:371 reply In my experience, the "top tier of kids" is more cultural than school-specific. Even in schools like TJHST there's usually 10–30 students in the school that really care about achieving, while the other 90% don't put in much effort (beyond your typical public schooler). There are a few feeder (public) schools on the coasts, but most of the private schools differentiate by extracurriculars (fencing, rowing, horseback riding) rather than academic excellence.
By growingkittens 2025-09-1011:53 Accelerated tracks would produce the top tier, which begin in elementary school - so it's a matter of how much your parents invested in your education before school. Any child can technically enter the accelerated track at any grade. The later they join, the more untaught expectations there are. The other students went over these things already in previous accelerated classes. There's no on-ramp.
In the normal track, you don't eventually take calculus in math, learn much about labwork in science, or even learn how to write a research paper until the last year of classes at 18. (Source: class of 2005, USA)
By liveoneggs 2025-09-102:251 reply By hombre_fatal 2025-09-102:38 At least introduce the video with a blurb if you're just going to drop a link.
So my anecdotal theory is that the (public) education system is optimized to the edges, abandoning the middle entirely, resulting in majority decline.
Based on my anecdotal experience, this is the explanation that makes the most sense to me. I've been hearing constantly for at least a decade how atrocious American public education is, which I can't reconcile at all with my experience as a 2010 graduate of McLean High School. Either my experience was so far outside the national norm that I have no useful perspective on this issue, or the national discourse has been totally corrupted by vocal minorities and political agendas.
Personally, my teachers were consistently amazing and brilliant (RIP Mr. Bigger), curricula were rigorous, and I learned a ton that prepared me well for my life and career after high school. Every time I hear about some factoid or perspective that American schools supposedly don't teach because they're propaganda farms designed to churn out uncurious low-skill workers, I roll my eyes as I vividly recall how it was explicitly covered in my classes. It's possible my experience may have been more the exception than the rule, given that most of my classes were advanced/AP/post-AP, but I also had some of my favorite teachers in regular and honors classes and never felt like I was receiving insufficient value for my time. Maybe I just got incredibly lucky, but I really have nothing but good things to say, and can't relate at all to the picture of American public education that's been painted in the media and social media. Granted, a lot can change in 15 years, and my perspective is already going to be skewed by having attended a top-ranked school in a wealthy district.
On the flip side, my public elementary school experience was the polar opposite. In kindergarten I was tutoring third graders who needed help learning to read, but by second grade I'd been kicked out more or less for being bored with the level and pace of the course material. (Effectively. Specifically, the principal was going to move me to special ed unless my mom agreed to find a doctor willing to put me on Ritalin for my nonexistent ADHD. The 90s were wild.) So there's that. Luckily there are some great private schools in the area which my mom was able to make sacrifices to afford, but I can't help but wonder how many other kids weren't as lucky and had their whole life trajectories sabotaged from an early age. Granted, that particular principal was fired a few months after my de facto expulsion (for many very good reasons), so maybe this was all genuinely just an anomaly and very far outside the norm for completely different reasons than my high school experience.
By loudmax 2025-09-1013:36 I graduated from McLean High School in 1990. I had some fantastic teachers. McLean is absolutely an outlier.
McLean's formula for success is to be located in an upper-middle class district with parents who value education and are wealthy enough to provide a stable environment, but not so wealthy they must send their kids to a private school. This formula isn't something that can be easily replicated or scaled out nationwide.
The aspiration is to make excellent education available for all children, regardless of what school district their parents can afford to move into. This is a problem that looks easy on the surface, but it seems to be extremely difficult in practice. Education is a social benefit, and a lot of people seem to have rejected the notion that taxes should even pay for social benefits.
I think it’s so weird that your level of education in the US (and most of the world really) seems to depend on which specific school you went to.
The Netherlands has settled on three levels of schooling and within that level (according to capacity, and desire to learn) most of the schools show relatively little variation.
The same thing continues into university, with pretty much 99% of all the universities in the Netherlands being public.
You don’t select a university based on level of theoretical educational attainment, you select one by virtue of proximity, or which of them teaches the specific courses you are interested in.
Dutch PISA scores have fallen badly, though. We moved here from Ireland and the basisschools seem kinda mediocre compared to what we had in Ireland. My eldest certainly learned to read much better.
Schoelenopdekaart shows pretty wide variation in how many students go on to vwo etc.
By Aeolun 2025-09-1011:40 Fair, my experience is pretty much 25 years out of date. At the time it was pretty good.
By brettgriffin 2025-09-106:562 reply https://www.usnews.com/education/best-high-schools/virginia/...
#261 in National Rankings #8 in Virginia High Schools #11 in Washington, DC Metro Area High Schools #5 in Fairfax County Public Schools High Schools #302 in STEM High Schools
Are you seriously saying you can't reconcile how America has bad public schools after having gone to to a school ranked #261 in the country?
Can you, just for a moment, consider the situation here and try to reconcile this? It is important for me that you be able to do this.
No, I'm not saying that. I already addressed my high school's ranking, so I'm not sure what point you think you're making by harping on that.
My point is that US public education isn't universally bad, not that it's universally good.
By brettgriffin 2025-09-107:111 reply > I've been hearing constantly for at least a decade how atrocious American public education is, which I can't reconcile at all with my experience as a 2010 graduate of [top 10 HS in state].
> Either my experience was so far outside the national norm that I have no useful perspective on this issue, or the national discourse has been totally corrupted by vocal minorities and political agendas
> Every time I hear about some factoid or perspective that American schools supposedly don't teach because they're propaganda farms designed to churn out uncurious low-skill workers, I roll my eyes
> It's possible my experience may have been more the exception than the rule
> Maybe I just got incredibly lucky, but I really have nothing but good things to say, and can't relate at all to the picture of American public education that's been painted in the media and social media
Can you just clarify for me once more: what exactly can you not reconcile? Be very, very specific, please.
I'm not really sure what your problem is, but okay. My experience is a counterexample to the claim that American public education is bad. Maybe some public schools are bad, but not all. I chose to share a positive anecdote to balance out the negativity.
By brettgriffin 2025-09-107:312 reply No, you chose to share the experience of a top 10 high school in a state and then proceed to say you don't understand how other people can say any of the other 25,000 public high schools in the country are bad.
I don't have a problem. I went to a well ranked public high school and am grateful for that privilege. It isn't lost on me that many, many, others are less fortunate than I am. But to say you can't reconcile these things is, at worst, tone-deaf, and at best, incredibly ignorant.
By buu700 2025-09-107:38 No, I didn't proceed to say anything of the sort. You're attacking a straw man.
Even if you choose to believe there's some interpretation of my original phrasing that could mean what you're suggesting, I've now clarified several times that the idea you're making a fuss over does not reflect my sentiments.
By bell-cot 2025-09-109:00 > No, you chose to share the experience of a top 10 high school in a state and then proceed to say you don't understand how other people can say any of the other 25,000 public high schools in the country are bad.
While that might be your cultural understanding of, or personal reaction to, what he said - he actually did not say that.
If this subject is sensitive for you, or useful communication just isn't happening, then it might be better to drop it and move on.
By liveoneggs 2025-09-1011:43 You should spend some time considering how that school got such a ranking in the first place.
To expand on that a bit, based on my observations, I'd suggest the following conclusions:
1. Any reform effort needs to ensure that early education isn't overlooked. Elementary schools need capacity, processes, and expertise to appropriately deal with kids of all different knowledge/intelligence levels and backgrounds/skillsets in a personalized way, and they need oversight to ensure that lazy/incompetent/malicious teachers and administrators aren't making poor/abusive decisions that could have lifelong negative impacts on students.
2. AI will be a critical element of future reform. It's too incredibly useful of a learning and scaling tool to sleep on. Of course it's easy to misuse, but that's exactly why responsible use needs to be taught as part of research and fact-checking lessons. If they haven't already, schools need to start running small-scale experiments with incorporation of AI tools into curricula asap.
Imagine how much more you could have learned with a virtual TA in your pocket on call 24/7 for those 13 years, with human teachers in the loop to help guide any self-directed learning you might have chosen to undertake. That bright-eyed kid who never stops asking "why?" will finally have a conversational partner who never tires of answering. All the panic about hallucinations sounds like the same sensationalist takes I grew up hearing from adults about the internet and Wikipedia — a perfectly valid concern, but not sufficient to negate the value of the resource in competent hands.
By liveoneggs 2025-09-1011:371 reply I'd learn zero just like every other boy who would be 100000% distracted by technology and currently uses up tons of willpower every day to avoid playing games on their mandatory-issue-device.
By buu700 2025-09-1012:08 That's a good point. Personally, I'm not in favor of unfettered personal device access in schools. Back in my day, you used school computers on the (filtered) school network and cellphones remained off and out of sight during school hours. It was a pretty good system that moderated distractions and goofing off reasonably well. I'm not sure when or why that changed, but I don't think it was a positive change.
To your point, I would expect any sanctioned in-school student-facing AI usage to be through a school-provided platform on locked down school-owned hardware, in line with how computer/internet access already works (or how it worked 15 years ago). School-issued mobile devices with AI access could be a nice addition if they were locked down enough to sufficiently minimize distractions, but maybe sticking to laptops and desktops would work better in practice.
By ivape 2025-09-102:13 So, basically the general distribution strikes again? I guess the floor fell out, but what evidence do we have that the ceiling also went up? Could just be the same or lower when we normalize for grade inflation and requirement destruction.
> However,the United States, particularly in the last 50 years, seems to have fostered a culture averse to education.
I always find it interesting that the anti-schooling mentality is so prevalent here on HN, too. It’s most obvious in threads about cheating, where a popular topic of discussion is to defend cheating as a rational reaction because school doesn’t matter, a degree is “just a piece of paper”, and you’ll learn everything on the job anyway.
It also shows up in the tired argument that college is only really about networking, not learning.
I’ve had some on and off experience mentoring college students in the past. Those who adopt these mentalities often hit a wall partway through college or even at their first job when their baseline intelligence runs out and they realize they don’t have the necessary foundation because they’ve been blowing off coursework or even cheating their way through college for years.
I’m afraid that LLMs are only going to enable more of this behavior. It’s now easier to cheat and students are emboldened by the idea that they don’t need to learn things because they can always just ask ChatGPT.
By raincole 2025-09-1013:21 While HN users have various backgrounds, I suppose programmers make up quite a large proportion of this community.
Programmers are generally more anti-schooling, at least anti-college for a good reason. It's one of the high-paying jobs where a degree is optional in modern days. It's also one of the few fields where the best resources are not gatekept.
I noticed a weird disdain for education too.
I once posted in support of general education and it didn’t go so well.
I suppose the people on HN are a certain demographic.
By bpt3 2025-09-1010:12 I don't think it's a disdain for education, but a disdain for the educational system that currently exists in the US.
If you have kids and experience it first hand, it's extremely underwhelming. If you were an outlier in any way as a student (and I bet a majority of people here are), it's extremely underwhelming.
My wife and I have advanced degrees and place a very high value on education, and I have very little that's positive to say about the state of education in our very highly ranked public schools. They've completely lost the plot. But any criticism is presumed to be hostility to teachers (and their union) or flat out racism by a vocal and increasingly large segment of the population.
By non_aligned 2025-09-106:001 reply The difference is that you can, quite successfully, keep "cheating" with an LLM while at a job. And people do, not just in lower-importance roles, but at law offices, etc.
I work in tech and I see this more and more every day. By "cheating", I mean deciding that you don't want to do the thinking or even spot-check the result; you just ask an LLM to vibe-write a design doc, send it out, and have others point out issues if they care.
By halfmatthalfcat 2025-09-109:21 Your very last point though is where it all falls apart. If you have people who know what they're doing, co-mingled with "LLM cheaters", its very obvious they're cheating. Before long, they're found out and fired. It's not sustainable.
> There is more and cheaper education available than ever before.
The real issue isn’t the availability of learning materials, but the healthy pressure and right push from experienced teachers. People tend to overestimate how self-driven most students are. The truth is, most students aren’t naturally motivated to learn. They need society to give them a sense of purpose, and they need teachers to challenge them with problems that keep them just outside their comfort zone. Sadly, the U.S. school system provides neither. Take my kid as an example: even though he’s in a decent public school, he thinks his schoolwork is tough and the SAT is challenging. Yet the SAT wouldn't even measure up to the high-school graduation exam in my country, let alone the college entrance exam. In the end, it’s the broad middle of students who suffer from low standards. With the right motivation and push, they could learn so much more, but instead they end up wasting precious time in high school.
> The real issue isn’t the availability of learning materials
Well, some people claim in these comments that their children don't get textbooks. Not saying that you're wrong, but it's gonna take a lot of 'healthy pressure and right pushes' to account for the fact that they don't have educational material.
By bpt3 2025-09-1011:58 In my kids' schools, the textbooks haven't been removed due to cost, they have been replaced with even more expensive online material that no one properly consumes.
Educators have been brainwashed into believing "computers are the future!" and don't seem to be able to even contemplate that reading something on a screen is a poor substitute for physically interacting with something (a pen and paper, a book, or the actual thing being described in a video).
I regularly have to tell my kids to stop doing math and science problems on their computer and get out a pencil and paper to do the work so they can organize it and understand it. They argue at first because their teachers tell them not to (so they say), but stop when they actually see it working.
It’s culture led by phones and other screens. Most teens are addicted to the screens. The need them for school and for socialization with friends and they end up on TikTok or another network and zombie there for most of their best brain years. They lack the ability to focus necessary to learn because the brain is used to constant screen simulation. Letting your child be babysat by a screen is absolutely the worst thing you can do to ever raise an adult.
From my conversations with 20-year-ago school students, American schools are culture led by sports, and football most of all. No surprise many parents don't see a reason for their kids to excel in STEM.
By Aurornis 2025-09-103:50 Something that isn’t obvious to non-Americans or non-parents is just how diverse the US education system is. Even within a medium size city you’ll find multiple schools that might have completely different cultures.
Some schools are sports centric. Others have to work hard to get students interested in sports.
I think the implication that sports are bad is also misleading. Sports programs, when run well, can do a good job of getting kids into routines, out of trouble, and keeping them accountable to their peers for something. The TV and movie style sports culture where the football players aren’t expected to even attempt to pass their classes doesn’t actually exist in most schools.
By monkeyelite 2025-09-102:151 reply For this theory to hold up you would need to explain what changed as high schools in the US have loved sports since at least the 40s
By eli_gottlieb 2025-09-103:201 reply I doubt much changed. American STEM education has always been pretty mediocre. I've been hearing about my whole life.
Mediocre by what metric? American STEM education seems to objectively be doing pretty well in terms of Nobel prizes, scholarly journal articles, patents, technology product revenue, etc. Of course there's always room for improvement.
By bell-cot 2025-09-1010:21 Unfortunately, those metrics are very focused on the 0.1%, if not the 0.01%.
Like a sorting algorithm which is O(n) on nearly-sorted input - the utility is limited.
By cyberax 2025-09-105:46 About a half of Nobel Prizes in the US were awarded to immigrants or children of immigrants.
By aprilthird2021 2025-09-104:212 reply > American STEM education seems to objectively be doing pretty well in terms of Nobel prizes, scholarly journal articles, patents, technology product revenue, etc.
I hate to break it to you, but a lot of our most valuable research is produced by people who did their primary education outside the US. Just go to a STEM research lab at any US university connected to a Nobel prize or Fields medal in the last 10-20 years, and it will be almost completely made up of internationally educated students / professors / etc.
By RoyalSloth 2025-09-108:22 If someone is curious about this data, I made a little analysis a while ago - Nobel Prize in numbers: https://blog.royalsloth.eu/posts/nobel-prize-in-numbers/#sec...
By monkeyelite 2025-09-104:44 Yes, they are getting visas via academia employment.
By Fade_Dance 2025-09-102:34 This is true (and they do take a large amount of things like money and resources), but these cultural influences are also very loud. You will find that the majority of the kids in the cafeteria really don't give a crap about any of that, and that goes for the parents as well.
By apical_dendrite 2025-09-103:36 It really depends on the town, the school, and the social circle of the parents. If you live in a wealthy Boston suburb, academics are emphasized much more than sports, and expectations for students are very high. If you live in rural Appalachia, then football is king.
I hear what you are saying, but I feel like this is related more to both parents working or single parent households. The more time parents work, the harder it is to get ahead, the more screen time kids will get.
By emptyfile 2025-09-108:35 [dead]
By decimalenough 2025-09-101:405 reply I'm pretty sure the same argument was made for television, movies, radio and fiction books.
By throwaway31131 2025-09-101:581 reply That’s certainly true but at the same time, when I was a kid in the early 90s, we watched TV but cartoons ended (we did not have cable or a computer). I came home from school, ate a snack, watched TV for about an hour with a friend, cartoons were over and we went outside. With the internet and YouTube etc. you’re never “done”
By hombre_fatal 2025-09-102:501 reply I remember racing home from school to catch Gundam Wing and Dragonball Z. And then they were over until the next day.
yeah but you get home at 4, watch an hour of anime, it's 5pm, you do homework for half an hour, then you have dinner with family until about 7, then you have about an hour of getting ready for bed/chores and that gets you to 8pm. At most you have one more hour of studying. So 90 minutes of education-related stuff at home a day in your ideal past where kids "only" spent an hour on TV.
By brewdad 2025-09-103:55 Much like extending the workday past 10 hours there must be a point of diminishing/negative returns to expecting multiple hours of study per night. Also, those times you list seem indicative of elementary school kids. Most high schoolers are going to be up way past 9pm. Of course, they also probably aren't getting home before 6pm and don't have the luxury of an hour long family dinner every night either.
By dbish 2025-09-1013:16 yes, and none of those things are just available to you while you're also learning in the classroom. no school should allow phones in the classroom.
By Edman274 2025-09-102:13 That's true, the arguments were also made for television, movies, radio, and fiction books. However, during the times of movies, television, radio, and written books being introduced, the trend line of student performance seemed to be going upward. It now seems to be trending downward. It's harder to convincingly make the argument that cell phones are no worse than TVs when student performance was increasing during the TV era and is decreasing during the smartphone era. Even if the correlation is totally spurious, it's an uphill climb to ignore it.
By BobaFloutist 2025-09-102:361 reply Yeah, but were those coupled with an enormous, precipitous reversion in literacy rates?
By decimalenough 2025-09-107:581 reply So why are the drops happening in the US, but not Asia, which is equally smartphone addicted?
By raincole 2025-09-1013:43 > but not Asia
It's happening in many Asian countries too.
Korea: https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/pisa-2022-results-volum...
HK: https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/pisa-2022-results-volum...
By aprilthird2021 2025-09-104:26 And? Maybe those things had an impact also? And maybe this is the last straw our backs can bear?
Like if you take a bunch of steps running from a road to the edge of a cliff, only after the last one over the edge do you experience all the problems
By jajko 2025-09-109:14 Don't expect much when (from what I see) most adults are properly addicted to their screens. If parents are already not up to the bar kids will seldom be, leading by example and all that.
Now show me parents, hell even here on HN, who openly admit that they are addicted to the screens and various 'social' cancers and consider it something profoundly bad and damaging, and that they as parents should really do better and actually try. A rare sight, mostly its brushed off and some even brag how 'digital' and modern their kids are.
But its fine, we all know how these things really are. This is one area where even otherwise disadvantaged parents (ie due to their poor upbringing or ie coming from undeveloped places) can raise their kids to be well above sea of future desperate population with severe social anxieties and addictions (lets not forget addictions ball up since they change personality for the worse).
Think how much lack / minimization of those will give them various advantages in their adult lives, be it professional (focus on work, ability to better socialize and communicate in person) or personal (all kinds of relationships, and finding one's purpose and drive in life). I just mentioned basically whole core of adult existence, no small things by any means.
And its not that hard, we do it with our kids and often see it around us in their peers, just need to put a bit more effort and spend more time with them instead of doom scrolling or binge watching TV. Which are anyway good parenting advices, but one needs to start like that from beginning and lead by example.
That’s one hypothesis: American culture is degenerate.
I offer an alternative hypothesis: corporations influence policy.
Corporations would simply prefer to import skilled workers than to have to pay taxes to educate Americans. Evidence for my hypothesis can be found in Vivek et al’s endorsement of the lazy Americans hypothesis. It is a narrative the GOP gets from corporate donors and not from Joe Sixpack fox tv viewers who make up the base.
By tw04 2025-09-1012:11 In my community, it’s both. The referendum to continue funding the teachers who supported the advanced math and reading classes didn’t pass.
The referendum didn’t pass because a large swath of the community saw no value in having advanced math and reading classes. I have no doubt there was a lot of “I didn’t go to advanced classes and I turned out just fine, that’s a waste of money” thought process.
By wnc3141 2025-09-1011:57 I don't know about this. In my community atleast, most kids want to do the best they can in school and feel more pressure than ever for admission to top schools - who are more selective than ever. Particularly since competition for knowledge economy jobs is tighter than ever.
By heresie-dabord 2025-09-1011:13 > seems to have a culture averse to education
Nay, not "seems", but has indeed subverted education. Hofstadter's Pulitzer-winning book was published 62 years ago [0] and now, in 2025, even the highest office is unrecognisable.
[0] _ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-intellectualism_in_Americ...
By userbinator 2025-09-101:26 The decline in the last 20 years was more noticeable, and the last 10 far more noticeable.
By togetheragainor 2025-09-104:461 reply The cultural shift is secondary to the demographic shift. Young Americans have been squeezed at one end by mass immigration from countries with lower educational performance and literacy rates, higher crime rates, higher gang participation rates, etc., which accelerated to such an extreme that native English speakers are now a minority in our local school district. And they’re squeezed at the other end, forced to compete for college admissions, jobs, and housing against a hungry and ambitious global population vying for H-1Bs and student visas. We sold out the younger generation, our own children and grandchildren, and it wasn’t at all driven by political and corporate machinations. No, it was for some greater good, and if you dare question that you’re a fascist.
By myrmidon 2025-09-1012:23 > We sold out the younger generation [...] for some greater good, and if you dare question that you’re a fascist.
I think this is a very flawed argument. Immigration was tolerated/encouraged because it kept demographics stable, labor affordable and economic growth high.
Pretending now that the previous generations did this for some "greater good" or out of misguided kindness is disingenuous.
By faangguyindia 2025-09-102:382 reply not surprised you lose what you don't use, does modern world even require people using those reading and math skills anymore?
By dbish 2025-09-1013:16 yes, if you're in any job that interacts with a lot of people and is at least a little technical. writing for communication and math proficiency are both extremely important for being effective.
By consp 2025-09-105:23 Looking at the amount of contracts I have to read to even start software it should. Looking at how many people buy lottery tickets I guess the same for math.
By paulddraper 2025-09-101:163 reply > However,the United States, particularly in the last 50 years, seems to have fostered a culture averse to education.
!!
The rate of college graduates has increased nearby 50% over that timeframe.
A rather unexpected result for a cultural aversion to education.
By Mountain_Skies 2025-09-103:091 reply Do you believe the average degree awarded today requires as much rigor as the average degree awarded half a century ago?
By anonzzzies 2025-09-103:431 reply Not sure in the US but where I am from thats very much the case; they went to the paid per graduated student vs just student and students having loans vs state money (to study forever) and it turned the focus on churning out graduates from providing academic rigor. I saw the shift sharply studying and then teaching from late 90s to early 00s and as I see my nephews doing cs degrees now: it's really easy I would say, not the rigorous (not very practical outside academics) learnings I started with. Not sure if its good or bad, just an observation. We already had technical schools for exactly this purpose, but I guess the unis were running steep losses for the gov while not enough prominent research and related companies came out of them.
By consp 2025-09-105:19 Academia is now vocational training but done badly. You get the pretend of academia and a very expensive loan as a bonus.
By aprilthird2021 2025-09-104:281 reply If you read his whole comment it was about how education is "just a piece of paper you need to get a job". That mentality could totally lead to worse proficiency and more degrees awarded.
By consp 2025-09-105:21 If you punish teachers solely on passing percentage you get the same result. It might be the teacher is bad but if you teach a difficult course it might be the students.
By bigcat12345678 2025-09-101:22 [flagged]
By eli_gottlieb 2025-09-0923:073 reply "Culture" is downstream of incentives.
By programjames 2025-09-100:431 reply Particularly, the biggest incentives are test scores and passing rates, which incentivize attention only to the bottom 50% and 20% of students (respectively). This means:
- You do not diversify classrooms by academic ability---the high-performing students can be free tutors to the low-performing students.
- You inflate the GPAs and implement no-zero policies.
- You teach to the standardized tests, and don't worry about the material.
- You make lessons "fun and engaging" because you need the attention of the students least likely to give you their attention.
- You eliminate gifted or honors programs, because that's wasted money not improving your bottom line (bottom students).
By zozbot234 2025-09-103:13 Needless to say, these are not effective ways of teaching remedial and underperforming students.
Those pupils will generally need very structured lessons that directly provide clear information (often in a form that can easily stick in memory and be repeated, even word for word), and straightforward instructions that can immediately inform their practice no matter what their level. I.e. the exact opposite of a so-called "fun and engaging" approach. (Which of course ignores the fact that such students tend to derive the most fun and engagement from being taught in a clear and effective way!)
The underlying issue is that the "progressive" educational strategy taught in Ed Schools is very explicitly a "sink or swim" approach where the student is supposed to be teaching themselves and the teacher isn't doing any real work. The hidden attitude here, coming directly from the "Progressive" era of the late 19th and early 20th century, is that many students will indeed fail but this is not an issue because clearly they were not worthy of entering the educated class with the very best.
(Special Ed is the one remaining niche that still teaches more effective educational methods, but obviously not every remedial student is a Special Ed student, and we should not expect them to be.)
By soulofmischief 2025-09-0923:191 reply And constraints. To call this a cultural issue is insane. I have firsthand seen the structural problems with institutional education. My scholastic experience was hell and anti-intellectual from day one, and it was all institutional issues.
By potato3732842 2025-09-0923:252 reply And the institutions reflect culture.
The fact that these institutions can exist at the low-performing state they do is a direct reflection of the culture of the people who run them, send their kids to them, pay taxes to support them, etc.
The schools can only do what they do to the degree that people aren't willing to put up with it.
By trimethylpurine 2025-09-100:581 reply What could people unwilling do?
By onetokeoverthe 2025-09-101:46 [dead]
By soulofmischief 2025-09-0923:294 reply Institutions are supposed to protect culture, but they have failed due to the actions of a small elite class. It's like blaming a child for not having parents.
No, institutions reflect the culture of the broad population. It’s like blaming a community for having streets filled with litter.
By brewdad 2025-09-104:02 It's a litter filled community with limited trash service and no public receptacles.
By potato3732842 2025-09-100:401 reply Have they failed?
Or are they dutifully resisting cultural shift that threatens the "don't think critically, just go to work, pay your taxes, don't question the system, don't do drugs, go to college, get a job, lease a new car, buy a condo, cross your fingers that stonks go up enough for you to retire" late 20th early 21st century status quo "ideal citizen" and "ideal culture" that they were built to foster (and who are the kind of people who fill out the majority of the system)?
The way I see it peddling blue state bullshit and red state bullshit (depending on a given school district's location) is simply a common sense adaptation districts are making to garner support from local populations who were willing to support the system so long as it provided useful education at a non-insane cost but are more critical now that the deal is worse.
By trimethylpurine 2025-09-101:03 People choose based on grades, success stories, safety, and exclusivity, not political alignment. But public schools aren't competitive, so they don't have any incentive to offer any of those things. That makes them a useful and susceptible hot bed for the least desirable part of an education; politics.
By eli_gottlieb 2025-09-103:171 reply As a member of several of the {{{small, elite class[es]}}} you might be describing, which of us do you mean? Certainly those of us with a PhD don't want the schools to be shitty for our kids.
By soulofmischief 2025-09-106:331 reply I mean our politicians and the idiots they manufacture with idpol in order to maintain power at the cost of degrading our communities. So, probably not you.
For example, in my state, it is an annual tradition to slash the budget of schools and/or libraries and funnel the money toward political goals and police retirement funds.
I attended the best public school in the state at one point and literally watched the Governor text someone for 10 minutes and then fall asleep in the middle of a budget presentation specifically put together in order to convince him not to cut more funding the next year, as it would mean the school would have to begin taking federal money and compromising on its values.
I also attended the worst public school in my state, a harrowing and illuminating experience which I've spoken about here a few times before. [0]
I also had my collegiate education robbed from me by a vindictive teacher who illegally falsified my grade out of spite, and an administration who protected her. I was homeless since 16 was and attending high school on my own in a rural community with no economic opportunity.
Due to my circumstances, her falsified grade meant I had to rescind a full-ride scholarship which had been offered to me including boarding and a job, but on condition that my credits included that core class. I had no adults in my life to fight for me, and even though I met with my guidance counselor, the principal, several teachers and the school board, I was not helped and fell through the cracks, despite high standardized test scores and a high GPA.
Instead, I continued to be homeless from 18 to 21 and struggled very badly, starving and sick. I am now employed in my field of choice despite these circumstances, but I overall had a very traumatic experience with the public school system. The institution ultimately failed me, despite my intellect and perseverance.
So I share your concerns deeply! I want nothing of the sort to happen to my kids or anyone else's.
Your work looks very interesting, by the way, leafing through one of your papers.
By eli_gottlieb 2025-09-1013:29 Thanks for getting down to details where we can talk, as well as the look into my papers.
I gotta say: I had a pretty terrible public-school experience too, which I mostly don't talk about in adulthood. Policywise I'm more anti-anti-public schooling than in favor of the system as I went through it, because I've spent the past couple of years living in a state that allows quite a lot of local control, quite a lot of "school choice", and doesn't invest very much in taxes... and currently attempts to brag that slightly less than one third (yes, 1/3) of its kids score as proficient in reading and math[0]. The idea that basic literacy and numeracy qualify someone as belong to an "upper" or "elite" cohort drives me absolutely freaking nuts -- hence my not really supporting a "shut it all the fuck down for how bad it sucks" approach to public education.
[0] https://www.tn.gov/education/news/2025/1/29/nation-s-report-...
By mensetmanusman 2025-09-0923:51 [flagged]
By PartiallyTyped 2025-09-0923:012 reply Not just education but overall intellectualism. It’s a purely cultural issue that can be observed by looking at demographics.
> intellectualism
It's interesting to blame anti-intellectualism because Republicans are usually labeled with that.
But simultaneously it's Democrats that will dumb down classes to make sure even the worst performing student will pass. And this is also anti-intellectualism, but of a different sort.
The combination is failing our students, doesn't matter the political orientation.
I'm involved in education, I see this every day - I spoke with someone taking a class on how to reach students, and due to no-child-left-behind, this is actually a class on how racism holds back black students and what to do about it (answer: Make simpler, easier classes). It's completely silent on any other type of student.
By doritosfan84 2025-09-101:163 reply A Republican promoted and implemented No Child Left Behind though? Maybe I’m misunderstanding your point.
That republican had stated during his campaign that he wanted to end the department of education…
By bigstrat2003 2025-09-103:271 reply Which I agree we should do, carefully. The federal government has no constitutional authorization to create educational standards for the country. Therefore, let those standards be set by the states.
By aprilthird2021 2025-09-104:301 reply What country with enviable educational results operates this way? Genuinely curious
By jl6 2025-09-1011:58 Not sure where the UK stands on enviable results, but education is a devolved matter where the constituent countries can make independent decisions as opposed to there being a central government department that makes all decisions nationally.
By monkeyelite 2025-09-102:16 Ok but which side supports it. Do you agree it’s a bad policy?
My point is that Democrats are implementing it by making classes worse for everyone.
Republican states aren't doing that. It's not the concept of No Child Left Behind that is bad, it's the implementation (and it's used as a reason to worsen classes).
By Yossarrian22 2025-09-1013:00 Those states are declining too
By apical_dendrite 2025-09-103:511 reply What you're describing is a fad that has subsided a bit over the last few years. Cambridge MA stopped teaching 8th grade algebra because they didn't like the racial disparity between students in advanced vs non-advanced math. There was a significant backlash from parents, and now they're bringing back 8th grade algebra. The debate now seems to be much more about how to offer more advanced math than whether to offer it at all. A similar dynamic seems to be playing out in other towns as well.
By yellowpencil 2025-09-1012:25 A positive change for sure but what about the kids who were stunted developmentally during that time?
In a nearby elementary school they are now touting teaching kids “AI literacy”. At an age where they don’t even have enough of a world view to understand anything related to it. Such an asinine idea, and of course it will be at the expense of something non-trendy.
It seems like public education suffers from so much “idea cascade” now and jumps from one fad to the next. Educational paths are more and more left to chance than organized thought.
By PartiallyTyped 2025-09-106:001 reply I don’t understand why this became about politics, but I will bite.
Republicans want to dismantle department of education, have cut funding for education, food stamps, free meals, etc. they are by definition against education for the outgroup and “the poors”. So I think that label is apt.
On the other hand, Dem leadership is quite racist and has a saviour complex. They identified the right issue — children from impoverished areas that don’t see a future for themselves through education are underperforming — but instead of treating the problem they push stuff like no child left behind. In their defence though, republicans simply don’t allow any legislation that would improve education to go forward, mainly because they benefit from it.
By bluGill 2025-09-1012:53 > Republicans want to dismantle department of education, have cut funding for education, food stamps, free meals, etc.
> they are by definition against education for the outgroup and “the poors”
The second does not follow from the first in anyway. You can be against federal education and strongly for education. Just because you think a federal department of education is needed for good education doesn't mean it everyone thinks like you or that people who think differently automatically do not value the things you think having a federal department of education would help.
> Democrats that will dumb down classes to make sure even the worst performing student will pass
News to me.
By Aurornis 2025-09-104:05 Unfortunately it’s a real thing among leftists (not necessarily Democrats in general).
The belief is that any advanced classes increase the achievement gap. People who subscribe to this also believe that advanced placement testing is discrimination and must be eliminated. They want equity of outcome, so reducing the curriculum to a single class at a single level that everyone the same age takes is their preference.
It has been implemented in several places with predictable backlash.
By dlivingston 2025-09-103:43 See San Francisco's failed de-tracking experiment as Exhibit A.
Tell us more about the cultural issue that can be observed by looking at demographics. What specifically stands out to you?
By chithanh 2025-09-1010:41 One is the observation that first- and second-generation black immigrants have much higher share of college admissions than their share of the black population, despite similar socio-economic status to African Americans with longer family history in the US.
https://www.insidehighered.com/admissions/article/2017/10/09...
By PartiallyTyped 2025-09-105:55 Isn’t it obvious? Children of immigrants do way better. Children of Asian households do way better than other ethnicities, and children in impoverished areas do a lot worse.
All of this is cultural and anyone who thought I implied race — which looks like you did — is a moron and a racist.
IMHO this whole thing is environmental.
By Mallowram 2025-09-1013:18 [dead]
Just look at HN. Nominally an educated crowd, but talk about physics, and you immediately see terms like "ivory towers" or "return on investment", despite the fact that most on HN doesn't understand in fundamental science works.
A lot of the complaints here about physics have to do with focusing so heavily for decades on string theory (or M-theory) which hasn't produced much in the way of practical results. At some point we have to quit throwing good money after bad and redirect funding towards other lines of inquiry.
By nathan_compton 2025-09-1010:002 reply Yes, but this is cartoon shit. String theory was a major research program in theoretical physics for a few decades but theoretical physics involves quite a lot more than string theory and physics involves quite a lot more than theoretical physics and if you stacked up all the budgets you'd find that string theory is a minor footnote. And also, its been a few decades since people took it very seriously as a strong candidate for a TOE.
I really don't get it. As a total amount of any budget from any perspective, string theory has always been a blip whose cultural impact is much wider than its actual budgetary one. Like this critique about string theory is just a thing that people who are physics "enthusiasts" say and even to the extent that it is true, its really been more than a decade since it was a problem.
The problem is string theory was pushed by people who were really good at getting attention and so they appeared to be outsized. Eventually everyone realized they were never making good on their promises and it was time to quit given them money - but most people who are not physics insiders don't really understand the other parts and so the total budget was cut to punish string theory - but by more than just the string theory part.
There is a warning above about something, but I'm not sure exactly what.
By nathan_compton 2025-09-1013:32 I actually think that for the most part string theory and its detractors and its rise and fall have had little effect on total physics budgets in the last 30 years.
I will say that theoretical physics is in a hard spot, but the problem isn't string theory. It is that we are short experimental data because the domain of validity of our theories is currently somewhat larger (in most obvious ways, anyway) than the domains we can reach with experiment.
I don't think any amount of clever budget allocation is going to make progress in theoretical physics go faster, nor do I think we'd be in a different position if we had allocated the resources differently. Notably, LQG and similar approaches (of which there is hardly any shortage) have not made noticeable progress either.
My perspective is this: string theorists are cheap. We may as well have a few for some long shot research, and while we fund them they teach kids math and physics. Seems like a good trade.
By bxsioshc 2025-09-1012:31 [dead]
By OccamsMirror 2025-09-104:131 reply Is the purpose of life purely to seek a monetary return on investment?
Is the purpose of theoretical physics purely to seek mathematical innovations with no connection to objective reality?
By Yossarrian22 2025-09-1013:02 Define objective
By bxsioshc 2025-09-106:32 [dead]
There are _plenty_ of areas in physics where investment is paying off. Condensed matter physics, optics, material research and so on.
We mostly question the fundamental subatomic particle physics that is not producing any returns on the investment. E.g. the galvanic effect was discovered in 1780, and there were long-distance telegraph lines by 1845 - so 65 years.
The last major theoretical advance in particle physics was around 1965 (Higgs mechanism). That's already 60 years ago.
By nobody9999 2025-09-107:151 reply There's at least one actual physicist who will provide you with appropriate counterpoint. Here they are. And you're welcome.
a physicist responds: physics has done very little for like 70 years[0]
By nathan_compton 2025-09-1010:001 reply She is speaking about physics in a very narrow sense.
By nobody9999 2025-09-1011:38 >She is speaking about physics in a very narrow sense.
In what respect? Did you bother to actually watch the video or read a transcript or did you just watch the first minute and a half and assume that was the point? It wasn't. the ensuing thirty-two minutes serve to debunk the idea that there hasn't been progress in physics over the past seventy years.
Which GP claimed was the case. GP is wrong.
And she covers a wide array of physics areas -- she even mentions that she could have gone year by year starting in 1953 and cover at least one advancement per year, but she limited it to just her top ten which was pretty wide ranging.
By bxsioshc 2025-09-106:33 [dead]
By breakyerself 2025-09-1013:52 The US is practicing a mass production approach to education still. Drill students with excessive facts and expect them to remember it. 3 minute passing periods, 15 minutes for lunch, scolded for socializing. Etc. It's intensive and counter productive. Now there's an over reliance on tech that degrades rather than improves the experience. A link in Google classroom to an exercise that expires after a day, a PDF instead of a handout. Etc
By obscurette 2025-09-107:305 reply As someone old (60+) who was a teacher in school and thinking a lot about it:
- It's mostly a cultural shift in the western world – we don't value personal responsibility any more. When I was in school in seventies, it was my responsibility to study no matter what since grade 1. It didn't matter whether I liked a teacher, topic or whatever. It's not the case any more.
- Since nineties there has been a shift in educational sciences and practices from "old school" memorizing as "rote learning" and explicit instruction toward "critical thinking skills". Sounds nice for many, but in practice it doesn't work. Barb Oakley has a wonderful paper about it "The Memory Paradox: Why Our Brains Need Knowledge in an Age of AI"[1].
- Smartphones, social media etc certainly contribute and the rise of LLMs will make it even worse.
[1] - https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5250447
I've related this story here before. I was a first year in physics grad school, and my professor told me he heard rumours of students telling each other memorising formulae was a waste of time, and that as a physicist one should just be good at deriving results. The professor scoffed at that and sardonically surmised that may be the person who said that was intentionally trying to stiffle their competition in the class. Memorisation while limited in some ways is a part of the whole in addition to creative and critical thinking. Without facts and ideas in your mind, you have nothing to think criticall about.
I grew up being told by my peers in school that memorising things was a waste of time and critical thinking was all that mattered. Now I use Anki to literally memorize programming language syntax and ideas and facts that are relevant to my job (like data structures and algorithms). I wish I'd valued memorization when I was in school, because it's such a foundational thing to have knowledge upon which to build everything else.
I find that very interesting and also thought of using Anki for that but decided it wouldn't be useful for me now.
Could you give me an example and how it helped you? Thank you :)
By jeofken 2025-09-1010:16 - memorising names and birthdates of relevant people - private life and work life - anything I’m looking up more than ~5 times can go in Anki - spelling of words I often misspell (eg bureaucracy) - when reading anything technical I need for my work or study I have Anki open and type in what I learn in QnA format, and I will never forget it but have it easy within reach for an investment of only a few minutes per QnA over its (and my) life time - just for fun, the cantons of Switzerland, landskap of Sweden, provinces of Canada, and states and capitals of the USA - NATO phonetic alphabet which comes in useful more often that you’d think
Life-changingly useful program for every aspect of my life, when I can finish it every day
My top tips:
- put all decks in a master “daily” deck using the :: syntax in the deck names. Otherwise you feel “done” when having finished one deck, and feel like not starting the next. Have only one goal - finishing today’s Anki - for that master deck (and every other deck) go Study Options > Display Order > New/review order > Show after reviews. Otherwise it’s hard to ever catch up when slipping behind. With this setting, the system becomes somewhat self correcting
My only regret is not being able to pay more than $25 to the developers
By ahartmetz 2025-09-108:04 And creativity is often putting seemingly unrelated things together. If you don't have the required things floating around in your mind at the same time, it is not possible.
By imiric 2025-09-1010:24 The way of getting those facts and ideas into your head can be very different, though.
You can either mechanically memorize them, which is a boring and mindless activity, or you can be challenged, participate in discussions, projects, and activities that engage the parts of your brain involved with critical thinking.
Both will technically get you to pass a test, but the latter will be better for retaining information, while developing skills and neural pathways that make future learning easier.
The problem is that most academia is based on the memorization approach. Here are a bunch of ideas and facts we think are important; get them into your head, and regurgitate them back at us later. This is not a system that creates knowledgeable people. It doesn't inspire or reward curiosity, creativity, or critical thinking. It's an on-rails pipeline that can get you a piece of paper that says you've been through it, which is enough to make you a tax-paying citizen employed by companies who expect the bare minimum as well.
I get that the alternative approach is more difficult to scale, and requires a more nuanced, qualitative, and personal process. But that's how learning works. It's unique for everyone, and can't be specified as a fixed set of steps.
After all, what is the point of teaching people to be idea and fact storing machines, if machines can do a far better job at that than us? Everyone today can tell you a random fact about the world in an instant by looking it up in a computer. That's great, but we should be training and rewarding people for things computers can't do.
Personal responsibility, or lack thereof always seemed to me like one of these memes that are used to explain phenomena in a handwavy fashion.
Does anyone have any data points that could help me update my world model here?
I certainly feel personally responsible for things and so do many people that I know.
Additionally, it feels like people like to blame systemic issues on lack of personal responsibility in the general public, while ideally, elected officials should take personal responsibility for fixing the system.
By e40 2025-09-1012:06 No jard data, but from talking to teachers there was a shift sometime in the last few decades were parents got really aggressive towards teachers when they should have been aggressive towards their children. This idea that their kids were no longer accountable and that poor performance or discipline had to be the fault of the teachers.
Your first point is a favorite of a lot of people, but doesn’t make a lot of sense to me: how is your generation with the ostensibly correct culture producing a generation with the wrong culture?
Parents are apparently raising their children wrong en masse, so was the parents’ generation rotten too? Which raises questions about the character of the generation that raised the parents…
I think social norms in child rearing have changed drastically, though I think, at least in my neighborhood, they are swinging back.
Growing up in the 80s, I remember having a lot of free time and autonomy. I had soccer or baseballaybe twice a week and guitar lessons once a week, but the other days, I was doing what I wanted, I was expected to get my homework done, but once that was done,I was free to roam the neighborhood or my backyard.
This parenting mindset changed, by the late 80s early 90s and kids started getting more and more scheduled activities and less free time.
Even personally, 6 years ago my wife was very apprehensive about letting our oldest who was then 8, walk to his friend's house who was a 1/4 mile away in the neighborhood. Our youngest, who is 7, walks or bikes to his friend's house the same distance away. And we have other neighborhood kids that also go between people houses. That is the childhood I remember.
I don't think HW I got in elementary school necessarily helped me learn more, but the act of being given work with expectation that I would complete it on my own was a growth activity for me, and that is something that is starting to come back in elementary school, homework for the sake of learning how to do homework.
By Fraterkes 2025-09-1011:08 I think this just kinda sounds like a retroactive rationalization if I’m honest. Imagine if the order was reversed: if you had filled your childhood with mandatory activities and todays kids were mostly left to do what they want.
Wouldn’t you just say “When I was young we were forced to adhere to a tight schedule which taught us to be dependable. Todays kids are allowed to do what they want, which means they never learn any responsibility.”
Personal responsibility was on the rise until 2013, after which it started to decline?
By pcurve 2025-09-1013:18 It became politicized because politicians latched onto it as a way to cutback entitlement spending which is unfortunate.
By obscurette 2025-09-108:18 Every cultural/policy/etc change in society has huge delays. Especially in education - changes you implement have an impact 10+ years later. Culture, even if it's dying, dies slowly. Here in Estonia where I live at the moment educational systems is falling completely apart – overworked and bullied teachers escape from schools in unprecedented rate, there is 20% less teachers than there is a need etc. But Estonia is still in top of the PISA. Why? Because this culture of personal responsibility and valuing education is still alive in the generation of todays parents. But it's certainly dying here as well.
By boxed 2025-09-107:54 Similarly there's a bunch of talk of "source criticism" in Swedish schools, but when you look closer at what is actually taught it sounds more like conspiracy theory or dogma and never anything actually useful.
Imo source criticism is only a thing if you have a well grounded model of the universe. And if you DO have that, then source criticism just falls out naturally and you don't need to discuss that at all anyway.
