Comment by somenameforme
19 days ago
Education stuff is more of a political talking point than reality. In reality US education spending per student has continually increased and is always near the top of the world. As of 2019 we're 4th in the world for spending on elementary/secondary spending $15,500 per student contrasted against $11,300 for the OECD average. [1] Of course we are having increasingly poor educational outcomes in spite of spending more, more, and more. So if there is a causal relationship between the reversal of the Flynn Effect and poor educational outcomes, it would seem much more likely that the former is causing the latter.
And I'm certain one could trivially dig up data correlating the decline of IQ in New York to fluoridation. The Flynn Effect reversal began in the 90s, and New York began fluoridating their water in 1965, so there's an excellent age correlation there. But that correlation does not necessarily mean causation. What matters are more controlled studies determining definitively whether fluoride is intellectually harmful by using fluoride levels in urine to control for various confounding variables (people in the same regions getting fluoride from multiple sources, consuming more/less products with fluoride, etc). And we do have those studies, and the answer is yes it is.
That certainly doesn't mean it's the sole cause for the reversal of the Flynn Effect as its seen across the developed world, and many countries do not add fluoride to their water. But it is likely a contributing factor. In recent decades we have begun moving far faster than we're capable of evaluating the consequences of, and long-term consequences may well be stacking from multiple sources of mistakes.
[1] - https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/cmd/education-exp...
> Education stuff is more of a political talking point than reality. In reality US education spending per student has continually increased and is always near the top of the world.
This is disingenuous, and itself a political talking point.
> In reality US education spending per student has continually increased and is always near the top of the world.
It is much more nuanced than “money in equals IQ out”.
Where does the money end up? Not in classrooms, unfortunately.
What is the average ratio of teachers to students? Is this number going up, up, up?
Now do counselors, nurses, etc.
How much are teachers spending out of pocket for classroom supplies? Has this number gone down, down, down?
Yes, it does end up in classrooms. Feel free to look up the metrics you're talking about. Here [1], for instance, is the student to teacher ratio which has continued to decline dramatically over the years. And this difference becomes even more stark when contrasted against many of the countries, particularly in Asia, with substantially greater educational outcomes with far less in the way of every resource.
By "most" metrics the US should be having phenomenal educational outcomes. The one variable that's not controlled for is the quality of students. Also, I put "most" in quotes because it's a weasel word - to my knowledge we outperform on every single typical educational metric, except result.
[1] - https://usafacts.org/data/topics/people-society/education/k-...