This is not surprising. It has been well known for a while that the amount of money given to the school systems has very little to do with students learning.

I think, in general, that the whole system is backwards and instead of giving money to school administrations to teach, we should be trying to figure out what are the obstacles to students learning.

Title has been editorialized.

In terms of the continuing "education depression" as discussed by this article, we still haven't gotten rid of "No child left behind". Of course kids are less educated than they used to be, you don't need to be educated to graduate.

Maine specifically is an important example. There has been no real change in education policy in the state, yet there is still significant reduction in outcomes.

The much maligned unscientific way of teaching reading was adopted in Caribou Maine far far far earlier than educational outcomes started dropping. The neighboring town did not adopt that way of teaching reading. They did not see different outcomes. IMO, the outcomes clearly follow the generation of kids growing up in a school system where you cannot be held back for not doing the work.

The entire time education outcomes have been going down, state highschool graduation rates have been going up. This is not because teachers like giving good grades to kids who don't learn things.

"No child left behind" is a disaster.

I know many people in the state who are looking to become teachers. Everybody always reminds them how terrible an idea that is for them in particular. Schools cannot hire people, because even with "Higher" salaries, the salaries are still bad. They have mostly been adjusted for inflation, so it seems like they have gone up a lot, but they have been adjusted from a point when they were already terrible and not a good salary.

Meanwhile, my mother is a 40 year teacher here. The rich neighborhood school she switched to pays her well, but provides zero institutional support. They did not allow her to purchase anything. No textbooks, no test generators, no enrichment videos, nothing. They don't support her at all.

She's one of the best educators I've ever known and every student she has taught agrees. She's so effective at being an educator that students who come from shitty families and cause disruption in other classes choose to spend time in her classes, and choose to spend time in her study hall to do their homework and become better students. This is true for thousands and thousands of students who went through her classes. She is the sole reason some northern maine kids know how to do math. She's a french teacher.

News flash: being a slave to the teachers union don’t give you better teachers

OMG. It's the !?%!@# pandemic. All education statistics measuring across 2020 are horrifyingly polluted. Kids who stayed at home for a year are behind relative to the same cohorts before or since, AND YET WE KEEP FLOGGING THESE NUMBERS as if they're signal and not noise.

I've seen this on the front page of HN like three times now.

  In the most expansive study of its kind, researchers have for the first time shown serious and prevalent symptoms of long COVID in kids and teens. The August study, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, is among the first large comprehensive studies of the disorder in this age group. The study, which followed 5367 children, found that 20% of kids (ages 6-11) and 14% of teens met researchers' threshold for long COVID.

  We know that COVID harms the brain. Neuroinflammation, brain shrinkage, disruption of the blood-brain barrier and more have been documented in adults, as have cognitive deficits. These deficits have been measured as equivalent to persistent decreased IQ scores, even for mild and resolved infections. Millions of people have, or have experienced, “brain fog.” What, then, do we guess a child’s COVID-induced “trouble with focusing or memory” might be?

  When you put together the estimate that 10 to 20 percent of infected kids may experience long-term symptoms, that many of the most common symptoms affect cognition, energy levels and behavior, and that children are being periodically reinfected, you have a scientific rationale to partly explain children’s widely reported behavioural and learning challenges.

Not to make a broad generalization, but all spend is not equal. If schools redirect that spend into administrative salaries I would not expect to see any positive effect on scores.

This article is super weird because it's looking at an issue from orbit where the only things you can see are vague things like "funding" where the problem is on the ground and probably can't be solved by the levers available from orbit. The lesson of funding having arguably no effect on outcomes should either be that we genuinely don't know what improves outcomes or that we do but schools are lighting money on fire buying other things.

It means the problem is unfortunately local and you have to actually go to the schools and see what the issue is. Based on what my former HS spent money on I figure we will eventually find some commonalities:

* New computer labs, laptops, digital textbooks, learning software licenses, smart boards, and other and other expensive crap that is at best neutral from a learning perspective.

* Pointless building improvements that don't service education but instead service the prestige and egos of the administrators of the schools.

* Chronic long-term understaffing and light-speed "just get through it" lesson plans that makes teachers not give a shit, and powerless to do better even if they do.

I think "just blame the administrators" is too easy a cop-out because I've yet to meet one who isn't also underpaid and dying of stress. Although maybe I just don't have access to the real higher ups.

The cost to produce many things in American is too high given the relative strength of the US dollar. If our corporations need educated workers, they can just import them, like we import everything else. Why would US workers be any different than cars or widgets? They aren’t. The labor market is globalized too. Everything is precisely as the economics dictate. If our businesses couldn’t so easily import workers, we’d see massive improvements in NAEP. We act as if things are how they were. It’s all very tiresome.

Reminder that correlation!= causation

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