US children fall further behind in reading

https://www.cnn.com/2025/01/29/us/education-standardized-test-scores/index.html

by belter • 1 year ago

47 79 1 year ago

The US Government dropped 190bil (with a B) on education to cope with learning loss from the pandemic, and we still slid. That's like a 20% increase in funding, and we still didn't get shit from it. Let this be a lesson to people who think the problem with our education system is a lack of funding: we throw good money after bad on a bloated administrative system instead of actually spending money on kids.

gumperbumper3• 1 year ago

Reading is like 5000 years old. It requires almost no resources to learn and do. I don’t think this is a spending problem.

ivell• 1 year ago

It could be a spending problem if we need to overcome cultural restraints. Poor communities often do not have encouragement towards reading and if the teachers are not sufficiently staffed or not skilled enough to inspire kids, I can see why kids are not interested in reading and learning.

tayo422• 1 year ago

Come on, this isn't true. Only the rich is old societies were educated and could read.

sonzohan3• 1 year ago

"The idea that learning to read is just like learning to speak is accepted by no responsible linguist, psychologist, or cognitive scientist in the research community"

The Reading Teacher 47, 1993-1994 https://archive.org/details/sim_reading-teacher_1993-1994_47...

dcsommer2• 1 year ago

What's to say it wouldn't have been even worse workout the money? I don't think you can draw that conclusion from just this data point.

That said, education certainly needs major reforms. I like how Sweden is going full Luddite for learning: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/sep/11/sweden-says-ba...

analogwzrd• 1 year ago

You'll never be able to run both scenarios side-by-side to compare - obviously. But for the people who say that the solution is to just spend more money, we've been doing that for quite awhile and nothing has seemed to improve.

A more interesting study would be to see how many of those dollars actually reach the student, or the teachers - as opposed to administrators or other positions that have less direct influence over the quality of education.

sonzohan3• 1 year ago

Teacher here working in public institutions. ESSER I, II, and III (the funding you speak of) remains a large chip on my shoulder.

The problem with education is a lack of funding. Many of the funds you speak of expired without use, and another 13-20 billion is set to expire this year.

What happened? Schools cut staff hard during the pandemic. At my particular school, faculty and staff were laid off in droves or accepted furloughs (20-60%) to keep their role at severely reduced pay. Among the fired were grant managers, the people who figure out how to use ESSER funds. When these huge windfalls (ESSER) came in, it also came with restrictions on how to use the funding. Unfortunately nobody at my school knew how to navigate the process anymore. The school tried to hire people back, but nobody applied because who wants to be underpaid working at a failing school that runs more rounds of layoffs than a major tech company?

It is now the end of ESSER. My school is $2 million in the hole, they are about to cut another 25% of staff (including me), and they spent only a tiny amount of the allocated funds because they fired their grant manager in 2021. My salary has already been cut $5,000. What little they figured out how to spend was used trying (and largely failing) to renovate our decaying and crumbling buildings. Those buildings have broken HVAC, networks, outdated teaching equipment, and burnt out projectors. Not exactly an inspiring teaching environment.

Around this time I was also involved in a startup providing online language and reading tools (Bamboo Learning). During ESSER we secured contracts with major school districts (Los Angeles, Rochester NY, Arizona, Texas). Something to the tune of 50,000-150,000 licenses. All of them trying to burn the ESSER funds. They couldn't figure out how to access the money and asked us to grant the licenses now and they'd pay us later. We couldn't afford that, and our investors wanted to see income before moving us into a Series B. We starved out in 2023 and closed before any of the districts figured out ESSER.

Admin is a common finger to point at, "we pay them too much money!", and yes I do not have positive opinions of any admin beyond my immediate dean. However the problem with ESSER isn't bloated admin, it's educators leaving enmass to work for literally anyone else.

Extremely bleak, yes, and it isn't set to get any better. However while the broad public argues over some nebulous problem, our schools will fail and close.

Either way, Im looking forward to February's "Who's Hiring" thread.

shortrounddev22• 1 year ago

The problem is not a lack of funding, it's misappropriation of funds. We spend more money on education than we do on the military, but not enough of it goes to teachers and students

dcsommer2• 1 year ago

Thank you for your educational service. I hope we can streamline money to teachers better as a country so we don't keep losing institutional knowledge and experience like yours.

gladiatr722• 1 year ago

this: https://features.apmreports.org/sold-a-story/

sitkack7• 1 year ago

rebuttal to this podcast series

The Misrepresentation of Marie Clay in “Sold a Story” https://readingrecovery.org/the-misrepresentation-of-marie-c...

I figured out why podcasts can be so damn irritating, they can be this patronizing, belabored setup to some ill thought out intellectual takedown you can't argue with in the same way you can with the written word.

Teach kids (and the teachers) the scientific method, apply it everywhere ruthlessly. If you are "teaching reading" but not measuring reading comprehension and adjusting your methods for that student, you aren't teaching reading.

Do science, demand that everyone does science. Stop using magic incantations.

taeric7• 1 year ago

My experience leans more to the Sold a Story line. Schools were quite active in not teaching phonics. To the point that I am meeting people with the absurd notion that "English is not a phonetic language."

It was frustrating to see the rubric used in some schools. My kids with amazing memory could ace some readings, but only because they memorized the story. To the point that some of the teachers were confused that my kid could fully read back some books to them with perfect recall, but seemed lost if given a new book.

I've been seeing this extend to math. We seem to not be teaching how to read equations. They are things to be computed. With the best many can do is to point to it and say "that is the equation."

gladiatr722• 1 year ago

The rebuttal was to the conversation about the purported efficacy of Reading Recovery (or lack thereof) reaching enough of a critical mass that policy makers started paying attention (in 2024) and threatening its publisher's revenue stream. (the final podcast episode aired in 2022)

Whether or not there is a depth of understanding about the Recovery method that was improperly communicated to teachers is irrelevant. Whatever the shortcomings of the podcast, it did showcase the explicit use of the 3-queuing pattern in live, pandemic-era, zoom classrooms.

It further explored the (very positive) results from parents (with enough resources) making end-runs around school policy and seeking out private, phonetic reading tutors.

There is research to be done (perhaps rediscovered) as to why this may be so; however, what is _known_ is that the skill level for US students has fallen dramatically. The tipping point occurred in the early 1990's which happens to align with the ascension of the 3-queuing, Reading Recovery curriculum within US elementary school systems.

If the site breaks following a deployment, the deployment gets rolled back. The retrospective happens _after_ customers are no longer cursing your name. Its more complicated with humans, but time spent blaming lock-downs or (as a recent academic article complained of) a mysterious reticence of college students to read entire books, doesn't help anyone.

Phonetic teaching methods were used for centuries to create the peak from which we've fallen.

In the mean time, while the magic is sorted into science, those incantations that worked reasonably well from the 17th through the end of the 20th century might just pull us out of the fire long enough to be able to accomplish the research you yearn for.

If there is research that desperately needs to be explored, right now, it should be within the realm of how to help people who were put through the Reading Recovery program and are suffering the results.

lysace4• 1 year ago

The article alludes to these causes:

- pandemic school closures

- youth mental health crisis

- high rates of chronic absenteeism

cf100clunk6• 1 year ago

Throw in some long term, multi-generational factors previously discussed at HN:

- widespread environmental exposure to lead

- gutting of public education funding during several presidencies

- cultural decline in prestige and respect towards the teaching profession

lysace4• 1 year ago

Lead exposure going up during the past 1-2 decades? This seems unlikely.

tootie3• 1 year ago

I have yet to see the finger pointed at the growing anti-education policies being pushed by the right but that seems like a worthy area of study. States that are now leaning on vouchers are starving public schools in favor of privates.

taeric7• 1 year ago

Going to be hard not to look long and hard at the school closures during the pandemic. Sucks, as it is also going to be hard to avoid the political hazard involved.

crazygringo2• 1 year ago

One factor behind decreasing US literacy rates and reading performance is the uptick of immigrants who don't speak English well.

While analyses of reading and literacy skills are generally intended to reflect how our educational system is doing.

So obviously, we need to control for immigration rates in these analyses. For assessment of our educational system, ideally we'd only be reporting for children and adults born in the US. (And then breaking out non-native speakers in their own categories to measure their ESL performance rates.)

Because a child (or adult) might have superb literacy in Spanish, but show up as illiterate in English. And these studies generally aren't accounting for that at all.

losvedir• 1 year ago

This is a good point, though at the time of my comment it's already attracted several "that's racist" type responses. I think generally you might be getting at Simpson's Paradox[0] where an aggregated trend is in one direction when all the relevant subgroups are in a different direction, and it's just that the makeup and proportions of those subgroups has changed.

My father in law is a guidance counselor in Florida. He told me about a school in the county that was ranked very poorly 10 years ago, but is now one of the top. I was curious how they did it, but it apparently had nothing to do with changes in curriculum, but the fact that somehow that area had become a destination for wealthy Chinese international students, and the student body had become dominated by them.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simpson's_paradox

nkrisc• 1 year ago

Sounds plausible, but what's the source of the claim?

ANewFormation• 1 year ago

This'll do it - https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/focus_on_naep/student_grou...

From 1998 to 2022 "English learners" (as its their term) tripled from 5% to 14%. They do offer accommodations, but are tested.

And fwiw I think they should be, just as are students with learning disabilities. It's because this is your student body, which will become the society of tomorrow. Knowing how that society might look, and in which direction it is trending, can inform decisions being made today to help shape a better society for everybody tomorrow.

trod12344• 1 year ago

This is just plainly and grossly misinformed.

Immigration rates, and their children come no where close to affecting regular educational metrics.

The reading comprehension is just that bad, and the people in the know understand why it is that way but bureaucracy props it up while everyone waits for Superman.

crazygringo2• 1 year ago

Something like 14.3% of the current US population is foreign-born, and we can assume that the proportion of school-age children is somewhere around that as well. About half are from Latin America.

That's absolutely going to affect regular education metrics.

And it's going to affect it increasingly, as the proportion of foreign-born has risen continuously from 4.7% in 1970 to 14.3% today.

There's nothing misinformed about any of this.

It's quite possible reading is getting worse among native speakers as well. Or not at all. My point is that you can't tell unless you separate out the two populations in the literacy statistics.

[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/09/27/key-findi...

hooverd• 1 year ago

Screw it, I'm blaming phones.

tootie3• 1 year ago

Surprisingly enough studies have never been able to reliably correlate phone or screen usage to declines in cognitive ability of well-being. Some weak effects appear and disappear in different studies but you'd think if the effect is this profound on society the results would jump out in studies. I can buy that it's a factor but there's more going on.

taeric7• 1 year ago

I blame voice acting in video games. :D

ramblenode• 1 year ago

The well-being literature does seem surprisingly fuzzy. I can only speculate what is going on there. A more robust finding seems to be grades:

"The effects of mobile phone use on academic performance: A meta-analysis" [0]

"Results indicate the summary effect of mobile phone use on student outcomes is r = −0.16 with 95% CI of −0.20 to −0.13."

[0] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03601...

CivBase2• 1 year ago

I doubt phones were resonsible for the initial drop from the pandemic, but I can easily accept that they play a huge role in our inability to return to pre-pandemic levels.

My wife is a teacher and phones are a constant problem but the administration refuses to do anything about them. It seems they recognize that some parents will freak out if they do not have access to their kids at all times and the admins are too spineless to take a stand against those few parents for the sake of everyone's education. It's absurd.

Several schools in my state (including one in the same school district as my wife) have been participating in an experimental phone ban for the last year and the results have been better than I could have expected. Grade levels and attendence are up by over 10%, fights are down significantly, and the overwhelming majority of parents are supportive. It's only a tiny few who object. But even with the numbers right in front of them, many admins are unwilling to adopt the bans in their schools. At this point it will probably take a mandate from the state government before they do the common sense thing.

cdme3• 1 year ago

Dissolving the department of education and pushing (a single) religion in schools will be sure to accelerate the decline.

MPSFounder• 1 year ago

Private schools can afford to tailor education for their students and train them for Ivy League access. The poor will suffer most from this, as is often the case. Lower income individuals will occupy their kids with tech, while the rich can afford private lessons (like Zuckerberg received). America is the land of opportunity, but this is bound to get worse with the current administration (they had Betsy Devos last time!)

cdme3• 1 year ago

America left the whole land of opportunity thing behind a while ago. It's more the land of struggle to get by and hope the rich don't trample you now.

Upward mobility is sold but rarely achievable.

Dig1t• 1 year ago

pushing (a single) religion in schools

What’s the source for this? I have never heard anything about this.

The Department of Education has a massive budget that has ballooned to $268B, much of which is wasted on administrative bloat. If education quality is declining and standards are dropping it seems right to reconsider the existence of the department.

cf100clunk6• 1 year ago

much of which is wasted on administrative bloat

What’s the source for this?

trod12344• 1 year ago

The decline was inevitable from the get go, centralized systems fall to ruin and when they are unable to self-regulate you need to dissolve and start fresh.

There are points of no return in systems, after which cascading problems prevent any future resolution.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3263007/

ulfw2• 1 year ago

Future voters. There is no democracy if people don't know who or what they are voting for. Ignorance isn't bliss when it comes to making a democratic choice.

Dalewyn3• 1 year ago

This oft repeated notion that any vote outside of The One True Approved School of Thought(tm) is "not democracy" is dangerous.

Regardless of the process, a voter's vote is a vote and the sum of the votes (including voters who do not vote, "I don't care." is a valid vote) is the democratic will of the people one way or another.

Also, if you truly do want to argue that voters should vote a certain way then you should plainly say so instead of being disingenuous.

ulfw2• 1 year ago

I didn't say that at all. But reading comprehension isn't your strong suit, so I won't bother trying to argue with you.

CivBase2• 1 year ago

In my experience, the biggest issue with US public schools is incompitent administrations. Those administrations ultimately report to school boards, whose members are selected via public election.

But how many people can name even a single person on their local school board? How many can account for what that person's platforms are regarding the school? How many can account for anything that person has done while on the board? Where would you even go to find out what your local school board is doing? How many of your school board members have observed the day-to-day goings on of your local schools?

The system seems fundamentally broken to me. It's no wonder school administrations are so incompitent - especially in larger districts.

WesleyLivesay• 1 year ago

I wonder if this is at least partially related to the move away from phonics over the last 20 years (which is now coming back): https://apnews.com/article/phonics-science-reading-c715dea43...

Looks like some states that re-emphasized phonics in a major way saw improvement, particularly in lower income brackets: https://apnews.com/article/reading-scores-phonics-mississipp...

dambi0• 1 year ago

The second article also mentions a whole raft of other measures alongside phonics that could have contributed to the success.

HDThoreaun3• 1 year ago

The US has been moving towards phonics recently if anything. Most of the country was always using phonics anyway.

SiempreViernes• 1 year ago

The fact they could move towards phonics just illustrates the point that previously they were some ways off from phonics.

The problem of phonics being ignored was widespread just three years ago https://www.apmreports.org/episode/2022/10/20/sold-a-story-e...

MrSkelter• 1 year ago

Large parts of the world don’t use a phonics system and for a long time it didn’t exist.

I am sure a properly performed study which accounted for the time spent on reading, as well as exposure to books, would demonstrate that phonics is no better than any other way of teaching reading.

My children live in a house of books, we have thousands. We read to them daily from soon after birth. They did not read early compared to their friends (though they did memorize some books which made it look as if they were reading pretty young). They didn’t start school until six and spent their early years in a bi-lingual Nordic school system before moving to the US and then Europe once again.

They now read at a very high level indeed, well above their peers. We made zero special effort. They just had access to books and libraries and live in an environment where everyone reads.

ApolloFortyNine• 1 year ago

and some were unable to identify that the word “industrious” means “to be hard working.”

Calling out just one question is pretty disingenuous I'm willing to admit, but this is giving me flashbacks to probably countless examples like this on reading tests I took.

I haven't seen the text this came from so maybe the context is obvious, or maybe it's listed first in every 8th grade English textbook, but I apparently didn't know what 'industrious' meant. And I read quite a bit.

oldandboring• 1 year ago

Personal anecdote. I have an elementary schooler and a middle schooler. Both of them score high on the standardized reading tests. Neither of them show much interest in actually reading books. The younger one will read graphic novels like "The Bad Guys" and the older one literally will not crack a book, says he hates it. I have friends whose kids are bookworms. Can't tell what to even expect anymore.

HDThoreaun3• 1 year ago

cliche but enjoying reading is literally just about finding a book you enjoy.

US children fall further behind in reading

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