Comment by toomuchtodo
20 days ago
Most parents either are not interested or don’t have the time and resources to provide the at home educational support kids need. Teachers cannot do everything, and they are already stretched thin and underpaid (~1600 school districts across 24 states in the US are on 4 day weeks to attempt to retain teachers). Admins want to maintain the status quo as long as possible; they appeal to parents at the cost of teachers and are in no position to obtain more funding. Therefore, we continue to stumble towards educational system failure.
The domestic educational pipeline to college, broadly speaking, is in poor shape.
https://www.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/parents-under-pressu... ("When stress is severe or prolonged, it can have a deleterious effect; 41% of parents say that most days they are so stressed they cannot function and 48% say that most days their stress is completely overwhelming compared to other adults (20% and 26%, respectively)."
>Most parents either are not interested or don’t have the time and resources to provide the at home educational support kids need. Teachers cannot do everything, and they are already stretched thin and underpaid (~1600 school districts across 24 states in the US are on 4 day weeks to attempt to retain teachers).
My central question is what are other countries doing that we aren't? Because other countries aren't seeing such a dire and systematic drop in student's academic ability. Germany being the most notable for how it directs its resources, even though its a fairly rigid in many respects.
I don't get the sense that parents in Europe are overwhelmingly more involved in the schools either, but I have limited purview into that specifically, having only had the pleasure of meeting europeans of different backgrounds (UK, Sweden, Germany most specifically) via work, its a limited subset of understanding, however most of the folks I've worked with who grew up in any of these European countries really seemed to believe in hands off parenting even more so, and experienced it often in kind.
I have one theory, which is that education is highly politicized in the US in a way that perhaps its not in other western countries. This has been happening since the 1960s but it really accelerated in the last 30 years or so.
You're assuming a difference between the U.S. and Europe that's not there. Looking at the 2018 PISA scores, for example, U.S. 15-year-olds do fine in reading: https://nces.ed.gov/surveys/pisa/pisa2018/pdf/PISA2018_compi.... Slightly ahead of Norway, Germany, Denmark, and New Zealand.
The U.S. does much worse in math, but I don't know why any of the explanations being discussed here (parental involvement, etc.) would result in good reading scores but bad math scores.
I think a far more relevant set of statistics would be post graduate outcomes for students, such as university achievement (including graduation rates)[0]
[0]: https://www.ijbmcnet.com/images/Vol3No3/2.pdf
2 replies →
As a country -
We spend 50% more on education than our peer countries, and our outcomes are worse.
We spend twice per person on healthcare as our peers, and our health outcomes are worse.
We cannot build anything (roads, houses, etc) at anywhere near the cost or quality of our peers.
We spend, in addition to our tax revenue, an additional 40% that we borrow, and we will soon be paying over half of our tax revenue just for the interest on our growing debt.
We are not pleasant to be around
We are fat, stupid, broke, and churlish. Not very good marriage material.
These are all issues with varying degrees of seemingly personal interjections or non related pieces of information that don’t address nor seemingly relate in any meaningful way about what I’m asking.
If I take this at face value, you believe the US education is failing only because Americans are fat, stupid, and broke and simultaneously spend too much on education for worse outcomes, which contradicts being broke.
Yet there could be no other, more specific reasons such as leveraging education and specifically school boards for partisan purposes? A practice of which that has only increased in frequency over the last 30 years?
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They often pay teachers really well and they give them a lot of autonomy. In contrast, the US pays teachers really poorly and gives them little autonomy. They also give kids better food, better classrooms, more access to supplies, and more opportunities for enrichment so there is something to reach for.
So if you want to replicate the european system you have to treat education like it's more than just a daycare, and you have to make teaching a prestigious professional job instead of babysitting with math. And you have to pay for it.
I think the primary difference is other countries track their students. Not just in separate classrooms, not a self-selected honours programme, but actually different high schools for people who score higher on the entrance exams.
There are different kinds of autonomy. In every European country I am familiar with there's a fairly rigid curriculum (national or otherwise) that needs to be followed, but there's often a lot of autonomy about how individual lessons are delivered. I think in the US, you might argue that the opposite situation exists.
What makes you think that other countries aren't seeing the same decline? In France, as far as I can tell, the situation is similar.
For instance, I've seen a lot of interviews like this https://youtu.be/7Pl4rvZ9amc?si=RMm8B1BmSSdNt0vq
My brother, who is a high school teacher in Canada tells me similar stories from his first-hand experience.
>Teachers cannot do everything, and they are already stretched thin and underpaid
One could make the argument that they can't even do anything. They exist at this point mostly because if they didn't, we'd have packs of naked feral 10 year olds roaming the streets and butchering any human they found for cannibalism. Have you ever seen a reddit thread where someone randomly thanks the gods because the kids finally school age and they can stop spending $40,000/year (or more) on daycare?
But, I think, in the coming decades all these problems will evaporate like some nightmare that fades away upon waking... public schools will continue to close at ever-increasing rates as our population rapidly ages.
If you ask peolle whether they're stressed of course they say they are. But they are objectively living in less stressful times than parents in the years in which young men were sent off to die in the trenches, but their younger siblings and young children still got better educations than kids are getting today. So maybe self-reported parental stress isn't actually the issue. Maybe we need to accept the issue is low standards at every level of education and teachers being unwilling to teach basic grammar, spelling, arithmetic, etc. because they are seen as "old fashioned"?
If the standards are high, and cohorts can't meet them because they are setup to fail, what will we do then? If we already don't have sufficient resources for folks to meet the bar at scale, there will be nothing for those who need help over the hurdle (remedial help), correct? It's not the fault of the fish when you ask it to climb a tree and it can't. Unreasonable expectations, and all that.
I am fairly confident nothing is going to change (we are not going to suddenly enable parents more time to be involved parents [1], fund K-12 at appropriate levels (federal gov destroying education funding systems [2], etc) and the winning move is to convince young people to not have kids versus telling parents and students they aren't trying hard enough while we give them scant resources and support, based on all available information. Shades of the US parent version of the Kobayashi Maru or War Games ("The only winning move is not to play.").
If you think the problem is teachers or parents in a vacuum, you have not consumed enough data. These are systems problems.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/03/06/opinion/worki...
[2] https://usafacts.org/answers/what-percentage-of-public-schoo...
The people who lived through those times in the trenches tend to pass down their stress to their children if it's not adequately addressed first. Then they get told that because they have it better than their parents, their stress is irrelevant and they need to forge on regardless.
I think this is a multifaceted problem more complicated than just runaway stress, the state of education, or addictive technology. All of these systems feed back into each other to create a perfect storm.