I've been keeping up with what's going on in education because ~children are the future~ and holy shit, we're in deep trouble. The system is currently being assaulted from multiple angles, and while COVID is a major factor in its dysfunction, it's really more of an accelerant for trends that have been ongoing for years. Here's a completely unscientific and non-comprehensive breakdown of why our future generations are going to be non-functional:

The Society

We all know how little trust US culture has in education, so no point in spilling more pixels on it

[longpost][effort] The US education system is on the brink of total collapse and we're all completely screwed.

2 years ago....

The Parents

This section is going to be mostly anecdotal because crawling through parenting publications makes my eyes bleed, but I've been watching this shit go on for years so whatever. Even beyond factors like SES and family structure (for the sake of brevity I won't get into factors largely beyond parents' control), there's a vast body of evidence pointing to the fact that how parents parent has a large effect on what their children turn into. Research consistently demonstrates that children of parents with authoritative parenting styles have the best outcomes, including in academic achievement, while children of parents with permissive and neglectful parenting styles consistently underperform. It is perhaps these parents that demonstrate the  involvement and high expectations in their children's education that are also linked to success.

Ok here's where it gets anecdotal. In my completely unscientific observation, parenting trends have shifted to become extremely permissive (see: attachment parenting which gets completely fucking bonkers once you scratch past the surface). Although it's good that it's no longer acceptable to beat children, it seems to have become normal for parents to attempt to shy away from even mild forms of discipline and thus fail to correct problematic behaviors. Without authoritative (even authoritarian would be better) parents providing their children with structure through a system that mixes reward to enforce good behavior and punishment to extinguish bad behavior, they'll be ill-equipped for the classroom.

But there's something even more pernicious happening than granola parenting- parents are exposing their children to long periods of screen time from a very early age. This poses a serious, serious problem; in early childhood, people's brains rapidly adapt to the environment they're being brought up into -- for example, aboriginal australians develop very strong spatial cognition to survive terrain with few landmarks. Parents who give their children regular access to youtube kids and tiktok are literally, unironically giving their brains permission to permanently adapt to a world of rapidly-changing, oversaturated, narrative-free stimuli. Even the most structured parenting can't overcome that.

The School Boards

School board positions across the country are typically filled with elected or politician-appointed members that pander to what voters or politicians want in order to obtain and keep their jobs. Despite the fact that BOE appointees don't have to have any understanding of how education works, they hold immense power over the school districts they oversee. Like publicly-traded companies, school boards show their stakeholders (voters) that they're successful through quantitative metrics like operation costs and graduation rates, which, like publicly-traded companies, often leads them to do things to boost these short-term metrics at the expense of meaningful long-term goals. Examples of common and extremely destructive policies commonly put into place to cook the books are 'avoid Fs at all costs' (i.e. shuffling kids along until they graduate barely literate), 'avoid suspensions or expulsions at all costs' (more warm bodies = more funding), and 'create an inclusive environment' (i.e. eliminate SPED resources to save money).

Of course, they are also increasingly expected to achieve ideological wins that at best do nothing to improve education quality. With education having become ground zero for COVID and culture wars, the true value of schooling to many voters and BOEs across the country (a low-cost babysitting service that hands out good grades and diplomas and doesn't teach anything that challenges what area parents are trying to indoctrinate their kids into) has been laid bare.

The Administrators

Over the past couple decades, the education system has shifted into a 'the customer is always right' service model. As with school boards, admins are concerned with boosting their quant metrics so that their schools appear to be 'good'. Their preoccupation with numbers like graduation rates, in addition to their fear of angry parents, has made behaviors like grade inflation, shuffling unprepared kids through the system instead of holding them back until they learn the material (which makes catching up increasingly harder to the point where we end up with high schoolers (and college students) who are functionally illiterate) and refusing to discipline disruptive students (who hinder learning outcomes for the rest of the class).

Like fresh-faced middle-managers, school administrators are often on the look-out for feel-good trends they can adopt (or pay lip-service to) to demonstrate to parents and teachers that their schools are on the bleeding edge of developments in education theory -- but without making tough, expensive, or unpopular changes that might actually improve student outcomes. In fact, the ways in which these concepts are implemented tend to conveniently cut costs (e.g. special ed staff) or improve metrics (e.g. disciplinary actions) while passing additional burden onto the teachers and tanking education quality for students. A historical example that is now deeply-entrenched within education systems internationally is mainstreaming, which likely harms student performance. A more recent example is restorative justice; extremely hard to implement correctly in the classroom, these programs often amount to admins allowing students to engage in disruptive or even violent behavior consequence-free, with nary a hint of 'restoration' or 'justice' involved.

The burden of executing administrative and school board vision lies almost entirely on the backs of teachers. Faced with feral kids who are often so far behind that they're literally incapable of understanding class material, a directive to prevent kids from failing at all costs, and job creep, the role of the teacher shifts from teaching to meeting the ever-changing whims of parents and superiors. But at least administrators force them to suffer through team building exercise-tier bullshit generously invest in their future through professional development!

The Teachers

Faced with disrespectful and even hostile parents, unsupportive admins, stingy and politically-motivated school boards, and hellraising students, teaching is no longer a viable career path. Contrary to the common wisdom that 'those who can't do, teach', a high proportion of teachers -- particularly highly-needed specialists -- enter the field from other backgrounds because they want to help our youngest citizens thrive. If teachers can no longer teach, the profession is treated with disrespect, and licensing requirements (particularly for those much-needed specialists) are extremely time-consuming and costly...who's going to want to be a teacher?

You may have noticed that most of the links in this longpost are pre-pandemic. Even back then, attrition rates and teacher shortages were so high that schools in some areas were hiring teachers from the Philippines to fill in the gaps. With COVID and culture war bullshit to contend with, teachers are now starting to quit and retire en masse, and teaching program enrollment has declined to the point where those positions can't conceivably be filled.

The kids

They're reportedly quite often little shits who are incapable of engaging in activities that require critical thinking, creative thinking, or attention, but given how much adults are failing them, who's to blame?

Predictions for the future

The deterioration of the public education system (+ parenting) is quite possibly one of the biggest risks to the future of the country. Some predictions for the next decade and beyond:

• Upward class mobility will be next to impossible for US natives: Children who aren't placed in high-quality private schools won't have the skills necessary to obtain a college degree. The secondary education system may be faced with relaxing its standards to shuffle people through (which has been happening, albeit at a much slower pace than K-12), thus further devaluing US bachelor's degrees and leading companies that can afford to be discriminating to require more proof of skill (i.e. low- and unpaid internships) before investing in young workers.
• More immigration will be necessary to maintain economic output in key sectors: Because we won't produce enough skilled workers ourselves, we'll need to import more skilled workers from developing countries to work in sectors that require both a degree and talent.
• Young adults won't be able to engage in critical thinking or reading: This is already a problem that the country faces due to poor-quality parenting and poor liberal arts education, but it'll intensify, which has implications not only for how they think about politics but things like susceptibility to scams.
• Young adults won't be equipped with the ability to engage in long-term planning: The aforementioned poor-quality parenting and poor liberal arts education will leave young adults unequipped with long-term planning skills and the ability to delay gratification, leading to an increasing adoption of exploitative gig work and financial illiteracy. This is already happening among zoomers
• A vicious gutting cycle: As is the case with other social programs, the deterioration of the public education system will provide conservatives with justification to further destroy the system because why invest in it if it's not working? This is likely part of the strategy for some of the recent state attempts to relax qualification standards.

https://www.reddit.com/r/stupidpol/comments/vwt1na/longposteffort

_the_us_education_system_is_on_the/?rdt=64852

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