It seems to be reversing, at least among affluent kids. "Sold a story" had a huge impact on the educational establishment. My local district reintroduced phonics for the 2023-2024 school year, and reintroduced it in kindergarten. By the end of kindergarten, every single one of my kid's classmates could read. This class is today's 2nd graders; they are avid readers today, I'll usually run into one of them walking with a book in front of their face at aftercare. They're too young to show up in the test scores, though, because these kids won't have their first round of standardized testing for another 2 years.
Schools and parents are also banning cell phones and cutting down on computer use, which should help with the distraction angle.
The socioeconomic divide mentioned in the article is still worrisome, though. I doubt that kids in the bottom 30% of America have the same experience. And simultaneously, the middle class has largely stopped having kids, which means there's a top 20% and a bottom 30% and pretty much nothing in between. If this continues for another couple generations, we're potentially faced with an America of an educated nobility and illiterate peasantry, and the future may look very Medieval indeed.
>>>If this continues for another couple generations, we're potentially faced with an America of an educated nobility and illiterate peasantry, and the future may look very Medieval indeed.
It sort of is already. The segregation of Americans by school district based on what their property taxes are already accomplishes this. Observe the standards to which schools that are wealthier (because of better taxes) vs schools in areas with lower taxes. The parents of the kids in the former are expected to play a more imperative role, the kids are challenged a LOT more. My fourth grader was expected to do at least 3 detailed book reports, each book at least 200 pages per book, including learning to present her findings in a timed manner. They were graded informally on a detailed rubric. They advance kids to higher math grades based on the child’s skill level. So there are 4th graders doing 5th and some exceptional ones 6th grade math.
This contrasts with another school district we were in earlier. Very loving teachers. But they had no space to challenge the kids. Because the teachers had to own the responsibility of getting each kid across the finish line for the grade.
Texas has "Robinhood" rules where property taxes from affluent areas are taken away and given to lower income areas throughout the state, so that the schools have more similar budgets regardless of income level in the area.
They still have drastically different quality of schools and student experiences though, because the kids are coming from very different home environments, parental expectations, cultural norms, etc.
California does too. Parents get around it in all sorts of ways. Donating (and having your employer donate) to a 501(c)3 PTA that then directly funds many of the enrichment activities at the school. Parent volunteers for things like robotics classes. In-kind donations: my kid's teacher let slip that they were running out of paper, my kid shows up to class the next day with 2 reams. After-school enrichment through things like Kumon or RSM. Home tutoring. Study sessions after school.
I'm not sure it'd be desirable (let alone legal) to prevent that, though. The point is to raise up the kids that are doing poorly, not to make the kids doing well also do poorly.
I don't think that "home tutoring" or Kumon is "getting around" property tax redistribution. That's just raising your kid by investing your time and money, which is what parents have done since time immemorial.
I’ve heard teachers often dislike the term good or bad school district. And rightly so. The home environment that kids come from can vary. This makes a “great schools” score (or something equivalent) not a marker of the level of effort the teachers put in but rather a marker for parents to find “better peer groups” and “like minded pta”. Note I’m consciously avoiding the discussion of race here. Because in most suburban cases the good/bad doesn’t depend on race but more on income. This will obviously change if you look at urban districts.
I think the parents never really claimed or cared whether it's the marker of the level of effort the teachers put in, but they care whether it's the marker of "better peer groups". From the parents perspective, you care about outcomes, and the particular experience your kid will have.
Having had direct experience with a system like that, my anecdotal experience was that the affluent school still has more than enough money (anecdotal), while the poorer surrounding school districts were critically underfunded (not quite as anecdotal, newspaper stories from the time, etc).
That's not to say that the program wasn't helping, but the mere existence of such a program isn't enough to equalize that variable. Of course the points you bring up are important factors in education as well.
How does that work if average is $15k per kid? In the class of 20 kids it's 300k per year.
It's hard to imagine it's not enough to fund decent education. Google tells me it's closer to 20k in California. That is crazy amount of money.
We were a small affluent school district and the receiving school districts were much, much larger.
I'm not sure if the exact figures, but part of the issue is that it was a low tax jurisdiction in general, and presumably the program was implemented to patch the system and bring it up to par, which it only partly did. If the transfers were implemented on top of a system that wasn't already at crisis levels, no doubt net outcome would improve in kind.
In NJ it goes further and the poorest towns have much better funded schools than average. Been that way for decades. Zuckerberg even gave us an extra $100 million just for fun. None of it has affected the disparity in outcomes.
Also, I attended a university in Newark NJ. Our city campus was adjacent to a Newark public high school. If you walked on the nearby sidewalk, you had to watch out for items being thrown out of the upper story high school class rooms, such as chairs and even desks. So I assume the teachers at that school had their hands full.
A friend's son just started as a teacher in a middle school in a low income district in NJ. On back to school night, for one of his classes, not one parent showed up. So, yeah, the outcomes are dependent on more than money.
I think that the amount of money spent per pupil is not a critical factor. It does help I’m sure to a certain point, but the issue with the educational system is not about money. For example, Many inner city schools spend far more money per pupil than suburban schools and yet these inner city school systems have terrible results.
The real issue is what you addressed with the introduction of phonics, which addresses the instruction and the material and how it’s taught. These are improvements that would be felt across all socioeconomic levels and schools across geographic areas. Another critical factor is parents and how they support their children and the time that parents have to support their children. Lower socioeconomic level families do not have time and do not have money to support children academically as they are working multiple low income jobs while trying to survive and pay rent and eat.
This isn't only reflected in educational standards. I've seen a ton more restrictions in traffic and speed limits in more affluent areas, and higher/less blatant enforcement in poorer areas, even when the poorer areas are more populated with children.
If you read the article, you'll know that the affluent kids never saw a decrease in performance begin with. The top 10% performed just as well as always.
The enemy of reading nowadays is not phonics alternatives, it is the excessive use of screens that kills focus and the desire to learn anything that doesn't move.
Is it actually? That's a very common bugaboo, but I'm not convinced that screen time use is really the main culprit, and I think it's self-evident that it won't have as big an effect as not knowing how to read. The article seemed to suggest as much as well:
> But the smartphone thesis has a few weak spots. It’s not just middle schoolers and high schoolers whose performance is declining; it’s also kids in elementary school. Phone use has certainly increased among young children, but not to the ubiquitous proportions of adolescents. And even though smartphone use is almost universal, the learning losses have not been. High-achieving kids are doing roughly as well as they always have, while those at the bottom are seeing rapid losses.
My kids are allowed to have screen time, but with limits. Most of their friends have similar arrangements. It doesn't seem to stop them from enjoying reading. When you're limited to an hour of screen time a day, there's still 23 hours to do other stuff.
> It doesn't seem to stop them from enjoying reading.
A confounding variable is how reading enjoyment is built and sustained across achievement levels. Presumably your kids and their friends are already high achievers, and as you said, nothing is stopping them from enjoying reading. I think that is great, and again, presumably in these households reading is encouraged as a fulfilling pastime.
The question is to what degree lower performers both come to enjoy and choose to engage in reading. If a household doesn't often engage in reading, or it isn't encouraged, or there is little parental support for a laggard reader, it stands to reason that "those at the bottom are seeing rapid losses."
Yes. It's usually more fun to do things that you're good at. Reading and academic performance generally has a snowball effect: if you're good at it, you want to do it more, which makes you even better at it, and so on.
My point is that if you're looking for an ultimate cause for why this snowball never gets started, I'd look at the very beginning, when kids don't learn the fundamentals needed to make that first leap into reading. Without phonics they don't have the tools needed to sound out unfamiliar words, without this, they really are just guessing all through the rest of their education. And without competence, reading isn't fun, so why would they do it for fun?
I'd actually go further and say that the causality between screen time and lack of reading goes the other way. The reason that today's social media industry looks the way it does, with lots of short videos, is because its primary audience can't read. There were plenty of text-based social media sites that catered to Millennials in the early 00s; one is literally named "Reddit". But images and videos started dominating around 2013 because the kids entering prime social media demographics couldn't read. It's a case of the market pulling the product out: text based social media is a niche product today, with Instagram dominating over Facebook, YouTube over Google+, and Reddit and Twitter/X moving to videos, because its primary market can't deal with text.
Maybe it’s because their parents are spending more time on screens (… and probably working due to the stagnation of wage vs. prices) instead of reading to/teaching their kids
The author completely forgot that tablets exist, so their credibility is quite thin.
And this article isn't about you. It's about average people, not 1% elites like you. Average people don't have "1 hr a day of screen time", they have 4hrs or more.
I think it's counterproductive to provide Chromebooks and iPads to students, but the "excessive use of screens" in my experience is by and large a parenting issue. And it's not just about boundaries around devices, like time limits or app restrictions. It's about setting the right example and providing an environment where reading a book is as stimulating and desirable and encouraged as playing a game every once in a while on an iPad.
It's telling that the second part of your sentence applies equally well to adults as children. And children cannot be held accountable for poor habits that are largely a consequence of their environment.
The core issue is that it's nearly illegal to discipline students now. There's a socioeconomic divide because child behavior is unfortunately negatively correlated to socioeconomics. Thus poor schools suffer more from the lack of ability for teachers to remove disruptive students.
Yes some excellent teachers are sometimes able to deal with it, most cannot.
In the upper income public school my mom teaches at here in the Bay, the "problem kids" are overwhelmingly classified as low-med severity special ed for that reason - it solves the disruption problem while reducing the need to deal with Karens
Interestingly, in my mom's experience, kids from immigrant backgrounds (working class or undocumented Latinos bussed in and Asian Americans from all economic strata) never get in trouble. It's only the "American" parents that try to overstep on educators toes for "disciplining" kids.
maybe it’s not about race. Maybe it’s because the parents of the kids that are bussed-in are less confident to push back out of fear that their kids would lose the privilege of being bussed-in to the “better” school?
The part of Santa Clara County I'm talking about used to be lower middle class until the mid-2010s.
The Latiné and Asian kids aren't "bussed". Meanwhile, a large portion of African American kids are though. White Americans who aren't 1-2 gen and the African Americans tend to have parents that push back on educators (as did the small amount of 2nd gen and older Asian Americans and Latiné American households - hence why I said "American").
California is not like the rest of the US. The racial dynamics are different, and immigrant families from poorer backgrounds are fine paying extremely high premiums or even rent out a garage to live within in order to send their kids to top school districts. "American" families don't do that.
On top of that, utilizing public services is viewed negatively in the American naturalization process, as it can be contested that an applicant is at risk of becoming a "public charge".
Additionally, the moment a neighborhood becomes too "Asian" or "Latino" in the Bay, all the White and Black families who can afford to end up leaving, and those who remain complain about us "changing the character" of our neighborhoods or "being too competitive".
The Western US (Dallas westwards) has an entirely different racial and ethnic dynamic from the rest of the US.
Interesting how the racial demographics are much less diverse compared to large East Coast cities. For example, there are far fewer African-Americans (5%) percentage wise in San Francisco versus a city like Atlanta (46%) or Philadelphia (40%). In most of these cities, moving out of the neighborhoods where Asians live would actually place you in the worst school districts. The worst schools tend to be in mostly black and latin neighborhoods.
Racial diversity is orthogonal to ethnic diversity. It shouldn't be code for "Black".
For example, continuing with your Atlanta example, the city of Atlanta is 84% white and black, and those White and Black Americans in ATL are overwhelmingly of southern origin in the US.
Meanwhile, an Asian American from Jiangxi is extremely different from someone from the Mekong Delta who is extremely different from someone from Jeolla in South Korea. The only similarly they have is looking kind of similar.
Same for Latiné communities as well.
East Coast cities have more "White" and "Black" people, but not as many Asians or Latiné.
Also, you have to remember the history of the Western US - much of the US west of Dallas wasn't part of the US until the 1840s, and remained a frontier backwater until WW2, so a number of Asian and Latiné ethnic groups had a longer history here than a lot of ethnic groups that are now pivotal in the US.
I think the drop is an almost worldwide thing and not correlated very much to disciplining. Disciplining varies, the screens and the slop are universal.
For the purposes of determining the effect of screen time on education, we would need to compare the performance of Chinese or Indian students over time along with a measurable increase of the use of screens and compare that to say American students. Simply comparing American students to Chinese or Indian students is not sufficient.
> the second part of your sentence applies equally well to adults as children
You're right, and we see this everywhere. But at least adults already learned how to read, so this is not something that will stop their development during their critical formative years.
I've got a zfold and it's the best ebook reader I've ever had. Currently have 500 papers and 30 books on it. Being able to screen read anything is also a plus for light reading like war and peace.
I mean I'm sure you disable most pop-ups and notifications on your phone too. The problem is most people don't and every type of distraction is vying for their attention every moment they are on that screen.
I would argue the problem is multi-faceted, and screens are a convenient boogeyman which is a relatively easy thing to point to.
The harder problems are that both parents need jobs to make ends meet, meaning actual time with their children are both lower quality and less impactful due to lower energy and less time. Children are given devices to play with because the parents are exhausted and don't have the energy to fully engage with young children that are full of energy.
Education itself is also chronically underfunded, especially teacher salaries. Whereas before teacher salaries would pay something resembling a living wage, these days the cost of living has exploded and teachers are generally just simply left behind as an afterthought in public budgets.
So you have cohort after cohort of children with less quality education time with their parents being funneled into underpaid teachers who are expected to teach a class of 20-40 kids how to read, with poor support systems in place for everything from kids with behavior issues to even potty training in grade school.
As a society, we aren't valuing education - neither from the home side, to the workplace accommodation side, to the actual classroom. Until we all collectively agree that this is something worth investing in and we need to spend the time, money and energy to do it correctly, it won't get better.
Screens are a symptom but taking them away completely is just treating the symptoms instead of the underlying disease.
First, salaries for teachers must be compensated for the fact that teachers get three months off for summer amongst many other holidays that other workers do not get. Also, teachers get regular salary increases and have generous pension plans. I know several teachers personally that retired after working for 30 years and now have pensions paying 75% of their last highest salary for the rest of their lives, including survivor benefits.
Second. Screen Time causes many issues in schools. Not the least of which is the distraction they causes children in the classroom and between classes. Another issue with screens and schools is the cost of these screens and these Chromebook and all the IT and infrastructure that’s required in order to basically just read some material. Prior to chrome books you simply had books and the books lasted for decades, potentially with no further expenses required. The whole educational system is an absolute mess with tons of waste and inefficient processes. Adding technology in Chromebook on top of it all was not helpful.
I mean the thing with parents both needing likely stressful jobs just to make ends meet doesn't just stop at education, it also impacts fertility. We won't even have kids to educate if something doesn't change. It shouldn't require two people working full time to be able to afford a home and have kids, and we need to push against the various forces that have driven us to that.
Are they? Supposedly screens kill focus and yet private school children are using screens and they aren't defocused. At best you could argue that the effect is that screens affect focus so little that if you're able to pay $500/month you can completely obviate the effects.
How do you know they aren't defocused, relative to other comparable private schools? Anyway, when people say screens affect focus, they don't mean that it's an inherent property of LCD displays. They mean the things people do on screens—youtube, games, social media—are a potent distraction. It's metonymy.
They didn't say "affect focus". They said "kill focus". If the answer is "a 99.99th percentile child will test at the 99.98th percentile" then we can go ahead and say that, but clearly the effect size is not large or else it would have shown up. If screens had a significant effect on focus, then we should see it in these children. If they have an effect, clearly the effect is weak and either easily dealt with by good pedagogy or it does not exist.
We're sitting here postulating massive effects and then we don't see massive effects. The effects, if they exist, must be incredibly small in order for these kids to be testing at the high levels they are.
I say this as a parent who has kept his daughter from screens and probably will. This stuff always comes up "Oh it absolutely kills focus" "Well, then why doesn't it for these kids?" "Actually, by kill focus I meant that it has a mild negative effect on focus which is not detectible and easily overcome by good teaching even if it were detectible which it isn't and also I didn't mean that screens kill focus. I meant that social media etc. on devices with screens do that" "Okay, so teaching with screens is fine" "oh no, screens absolutely kill focus"
If the effect size is large (ie the screens are substantially damaging) we’d expect to simply directly observe something but these kids test near the top. You only need that kind of comparison if the effect is not acute.
Not sure what you’re saying here. I think you’re saying you can just observe the top performers and measure whether the top performers use screen time frequently outside of school. Not sure this works as it’s probable that the top performers are gonna be the same in both situations.
However, my concern was with the use of screens IN schools as part of the curriculum and as a replacement of textbooks and other sources.
Alpha School students learn their lessons almost exclusively from a screen during the intensive 3 h first section of day. If screens were debilitating these children would not show high percentile MAP scores. The children do. Therefore screens cannot be debilitating.
At worst they can have a negative long term effect or a mild deleterious effect. But they do not have an acute deleterious effect.
OK, but would these children have done better without using the screens? That is the question not whether students can possibly do well with screens. For example, what if the students at the top are less impacted by using screens and would’ve done just as well with books. And at the same time, some of the students in the middle would’ve done better when using books. The analysis you suggest would not catch that.
Indeed, that's a question you have which I understand you may be eager to find answers to, but I am primarily focused on the original statement of
> ...the excessive use of screens that kills focus and the desire to learn anything that doesn't move
Screens killing focus is clearly not backed by evidence. There may be other evidence that shows that when stratifying by percentile achievement, screen use places students at a percentile below where they would be otherwise. But it is clearly false that the use of screens kills focus and the desire to learn anything that doesn't move.
Killing focus is an absolute term. You don't have to compare against someone else to determine if focus was killed. If the kids have focus at the end, then it is not killed. And at best it could be slightly reduced.
e.g. If you have the hypothesis that mangoes are acutely toxic and kill people you don't have to sample a lot of people. You are claiming a strong effect size. If even 5 people eat mangoes and don't die then the answer is that they are not acutely toxic.
>It seems to be reversing, at least among affluent kids.
Is there proof the affluent ever were suffering? From the article we're discussing:
>Across grades and subjects, the NAEP results show that the top tenth of students are doing roughly as well as they always have, whereas those at the bottom are doing worse.
The low-income story gets most of the airtime because most people are not interested in reading about how rich people are struggling, but there was also a significant decline in affluent districts as well. See eg. this Boston Globe article about how even the top districts in the state (which itself is historically the top in the country) are using poor instructional methods:
I grew up near most of these districts, and and my mom taught in one of them. I was shocked at how low MCAS Reading scores have fallen. I was the first class to take them; it's not a hard test, and it's reportedly gotten even easier in the 30 years since I took it. And yet 30% of students in affluent districts can't pass them.
Also we encountered this personally when hiring a babysitter for our kids. She was a college junior, grew up in an adjacent city with $2.5M average house prices, was otherwise great with the kids. She struggled to get through The Lorax - my kindergartner could read it better than her.
I'm still not sure that article supports that rich people are struggling. My take away is that the core point of the article is the achievement gap between rich and poor students, especially in affluent schools. It kind of drives home that the rich kids aren't struggling, really.
>Although the kids who are lagging come from all backgrounds, they are disproportionately Black or Latino, live in a low-income household, are not native English speakers, or have a disability.
The "Income and Disability Achievement Gaps" graphs seems to show a higher percentage of non-income disadvantage / disabled students are meeting or exceeding expectations in the wealthy districts than statewide.
Perhaps the socioeconomic divide won't be as big of an issue as you think. If you haven't heard of the Mississippi Miracle [1], it's worth learning about.
The bigger issue is convincing education departments that phonics are the more successful way to learn reading.
If this continues for another couple generations, we're potentially faced with an America of an educated nobility and illiterate peasantry, and the future may look very Medieval indeed.
When you look at the conservative attack on public education, the prison industrial complex, et al., it really seems that this is the intention.
The article, and presumably this discussion, is specifically about a recent decline, e.g. the largely public school system doing a worse job than it used to. It should obviously be worth thinking about the reasons, including things like the attacks on schools.
Schools and parents are also banning cell phones and cutting down on computer use, which should help with the distraction angle.
The socioeconomic divide mentioned in the article is still worrisome, though. I doubt that kids in the bottom 30% of America have the same experience. And simultaneously, the middle class has largely stopped having kids, which means there's a top 20% and a bottom 30% and pretty much nothing in between. If this continues for another couple generations, we're potentially faced with an America of an educated nobility and illiterate peasantry, and the future may look very Medieval indeed.