11–20 of 59 posts
If you want literacy to come back, stop giving children YouTube shorts, TikTok, or Cocomelon.
It goes back to at least the passage of Proposition 13 in California which gutted school funding from property taxes.
Even growing up in a middle class Midwestern suburb in the 90s, the increasingly elderly population who had no children in the public school system voted to lower their taxes rather than continue programs that they took for granted when their children were school age.
And this is nothing compared to what the poverty afflicted inner city and rural students have faced on top of the struggles in their community.
Smartphones have definitely made it worse, but we'd be deluding ourselves to think that much of the damage wasn't already done.
> The basic story is that during the aughts, we had a bipartisan education reform consensus that was focused on improving school quality as an attainable and important driver of social and economic progress. No Child Left Behind? It created tremendous incentives to teach to the test, and in some cases where that wasn't enough, to cheat to the test.
That's a not just a problem in education. Lowest denominator thinking is endemic throughout America.
Don’t be surprised if countries that seek excellence, like China, eventually have economic growth that outpaces America for this reason alone.
America stopped caring about poor kids' education long before smartphones. It goes back to at least the passage of Proposition 13 in California which gutted school funding from property taxes. Even growing up in a middle class Midwestern suburb in the 90s, the increasingly elderly population who had no children in the public school system voted to lower their taxes rather than continue programs that they took for gra…
This is missing the forest for the trees. The cost of almost everything government related is going up because the amount of money going to pensions is reaching its peak (the rate of increase was quite high for the last 15 years, that rate is starting to taper off significantly, and will pretty much flat line in 15 more years). When a huge portion of your education spending is going to pay people that aren't working…
This is missing the forest for the trees. The cost of almost everything government related is going up because the amount of money going to pensions is reaching its peak (the rate of increase was quite high for the last 15 years, that rate is starting to taper off significantly, and will pretty much flat line in 15 more years). When a huge portion of your education spending is going to pay people that aren't working…
https://archive.is/3SkYb