3mo ago

‘These results are sobering’: US high-school seniors’ reading and math scores plummet

www.theguardian.com ‘These results are sobering’: US high school seniors’ reading and math scores plummet

Educators worry about absenteeism and smartphones as NAEP report shows scores at lowest levels in two decades

The average reading and math scores of American high school seniors fell to their lowest levels in two decades in 2024, according to new national data released last week.
The results, from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), found that, on average, reading scores for 12th graders were 10 points lower in 2024 than they were in 1992, when the test was first administered, and that math scores fell to their lowest levels since 2005, when the math assessment began.
The test, administered by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), which is part of the US Department of Education, assessed roughly 19,300 12th-graders in math, 24,300 in reading and 23,000 eighth-graders in science between January and March of last year.

U.S. News @beehaw.org

‘These results are sobering’: US high-school seniors’ reading and math scores plummet

www.theguardian.com /education/2025/sep/20/high-school-students-scores

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On top of what other commenters have already said, this will get worse as schools are continuously defunded in the US.
- A country that cares about their future will invest in their children. It's another version of planting a tree that you won't enjoy the shade of.
  
  The ROI of investing in education in GDP, particularly early childhood education, is huge. Anywhere from 400%-1200% over 18 years.
  So it’s clear that conservatives hate children even more than they love money.
  
  I have very little faith in this country caring about the future.
- Gotta feed the war machine with the children of the poor and uneducated

Hey, guess what was going on four years ago?
covid
the conclusion of 4 years of crippling mismanagement of the US educational system by the first stint orangeboi had in office
- And LLMs hitting the scene!
  
  lol fuck, you’re right
- And the worse mismanagement now that Cheeto boy is in there for the second time, don't forgot that one, next results will be even worse
  
  They didn’t know what they were doing the first time, most people didn’t actually think he’d win in the first place, so they didn’t have any plans ready to go.
  This time, they began with a playbook that they started writing way back in 2019. And they published it on the open internet for everyone to fucking see. And now they’re following it to the fucking letter. You’re not allowed to be surprised by this.
  Genuinely, if anyone is somehow even the slightest bit surprised by any of this: fuck you, from the bottom of my heart.
  
  You thought Betsy DeVos was bad? Just you wait!

IIRC, COVID-19 policy and remote schooling policy was found to be pretty harmful for student performance. We lost some educational time because our schools weren't operating as effectively. I remember discussion at the time that this would have some amount of lasting negative impact. It also hurt other countries. I don't know how much of this is due to that, but we expected a fall.
kagis
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10266495/
Some snippets:
A Policy Analysis for California Education report found that by the time students completed interim winter assessments in the 2020–21 school year, they had experienced a learning lag of approximately 2.6 months in English language arts (ELA) and 2.5 months in math (Pier et al., 2021). Moreover, economically disadvantaged students, English learners, and students of color experienced a more significant learning lag than students not in these groups (Goldhaber et al., 2022, Pier et al., 2021).
Engzell et al. analyzed performance in reading and comprehension of factual and literary subjects among 350,000 primary school students in national exams before and after an 8-week lockdown during the COVID-19 pandemic (Engzell et al., 2020). The results revealed a post-pandemic decrease in reading performance of more than 3 % compared with pre-pandemic test results (Engzell et al., 2020). Similar unfavorable results were reported by Rose et al.’s study in England during the spring and summer of 2020 (Rose et al., 2021), which followed 6000 pupils for two years and evaluated learning performance using National Foundation for Educational Research standardized tests. The results revealed significantly lower reading performance in 2020 compared with a 2017 sample, with 5.2 % of students scoring two marks fewer. Moreover, reading assessments revealed a 7-month progress delay in 2020, compared with a 2019 sample (Rose et al., 2021).
- Kane noted that academic declines are appearing in other countries as well, which suggests a broader global trend that could be linked to increased screen use.
  From the article as well. So the pandemic definitely didn't help, but they also don't feel it is only because of that. The article also mentions that the decline started since before the pandemic as well.
- Coupled with the fact that we know covid result in at least a moderate rate of medium and long term mental impairment..
  Cooked. Entirely cooked.
- Based on the teachers I've talked to education stopped completely during Covid.
  
  Kids would mute the classes and watch Netflix. It was a complete joke.
  Self paced online classes are also really popular now. You can Google the answers and use LLMs to write your essays, which aren’t typically graded anyway.

I expect this to get exponentially worse with AI; on the one hand, because it will be used by pupils without understanding, and on the other, by the elites/"job creators" who can use it to access skill without having to pay for it anymore.
- Dipshit morons running the world probably isn't a great motivator for kids taking school seriously either
- I have been using, exploring, and researching generative AI and big data / machine learning for like 6 or 7 years now, and all I can say is that generative AI is not at all ready to take most jobs, mostly because the error rates are extremely high for businesses that really can't tolerate even one mistake, like fast food ordering systems. The liability is going to be insane once a chat bot recommends that someone at the drive-thru order a bleach and mcflurry special, and the high-as-balls teenager working the machine just does what the computer tells them to do.
  The issue at hand imo is that C-suites and VPs and shareholders have all been marketed to — it's obvious to anyone who has worked with it in any real amounts of time that this shit ain't ready, but, the brass all sure believe that it's ready, and they're gonna try. Once the funding floor falls out (in, say, an inevitable recession that comes once foreign countries' central banks pull their investments in US savings bonds) and these mega model companies start charging what their tech actually costs, people are gonna be the cheaper option real fast.
  Personally, I think that any established professional will be fine. If you are already good at programming, you will probably keep doing programming from here. If you're good at art or design and have work from the past 10 years, you will probably be fine.
  Who I mourn for are the kids who are just now coming up. There will be absolutely no cheap opportunities for young and hungry but inexperienced young adults — that space of 'good enough' can and will be filled with generative AI. :/ I have no idea what the solution there is besides a campaign towards mentoring youths and giving them opportunities explicitly.
  
  I'm seeing AI being tried to be used for coding industrial systems. Think like molten lava pouring steel in a mill or foundry setting, incredibly dangerous machinery that can kill you in an instant.
  I guess it all gets reviewed and refined and tested before shipping the system but what do I know, I'm just a technician.
  I'm still just like... Why

All according to the child rapist meat puppet and Thiel’s plan to eradicate schooling all together.
Ignorance is bliss.

All to plan, but damn how do parents let the children grow up illiterate?
- Work 12 hours per day then go home and try to teach.
- Either too tired from working some soul sucking job or were dumb enough to be suckered into some anti intellectual brigading and think educations is the devil anyway, either way people like this make convenient fodder for the rich to throw into shit jobs for shit pay that no one really wants, and they will need more such people cause with Trump doing the whole anti immigration thing they can't just bring in workers legally or illegaly from poor nations to do these hard jobs anymore so will need to create homegrown poor uneducated under class to pray upon
- because the kids can still read & write better than they can..
- Many of them don’t see the value in an education. Look at “unschooling” etc.

I think it's probably because a lot of students don't see the reward in actually learning stuff anymore.

People are very much feeling this. I talk to lots of people and many (aged 24) say that they feel like they wasted a lot of their time striving for good grades and education while they could have actually enjoyed their lifes, meet friends, enter relationships and have fun. They focused on education because they felt certain that it would lead to a good, well-paying job later in life, which would make it all have been worth it.
Now this is becoming untrue, and people realize they've studied/learned for many years, only to be unemployed because the labor market is increasingly lowering demand.

Good news for older generations in the workforce. Bad news for humanity.

Lol. So, uh, guys... about that voting age thingy... hows that coming along for ya?

Considering the potency of smartphones causing ADD, the results are hardly surprising.
There's are reasons schools around the world are starting to ban these things.

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