The decade-long "learning recession"

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:It's not just smart phones and social media. A lot of these losses are happening among elementary age kids who don't have access to either. But the reliance on Ed Tech to teach math and reading is a big problem. Blaming screens at home doesn't make sense because kids have been watching screens at home for decades, that's not something that started in 2015.

What shifted for kids is they went from mostly using books, paper, and pencil in the classroom to using 1:1 devices and ed tech software. That's true for kids who were get zero screen time at home, and it's true for kids who get hours of screen time at home every day.

Go back to physical books, handwriting, and working out math problems with pencil and paper. Studies show that children retain information better and longer when they learn it from physical media instead of digitally.

Are the admins all getting mega kickbacks for signing on to all the ed-tech? Like are they all sleeping with their ed-tech sales reps or something?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:
Are the admins all getting mega kickbacks for signing on to all the ed-tech? Like are they all sleeping with their ed-tech sales reps or something?

People imagine that ed tech adoption is some nefarious, corrupt thing. Rather, there are a number of reasons admin are pressured to purchase and deploy computer-based learning platforms.

A number of states have learning standards that include computer-based work. In the same way that students need to know their multiplication facts by the end of 3rd grade, there will be similar standards for 21st century learning skills or something similar. Teachers who fail to teach these standards can have reduced evaluation scores.

Classrooms are also very diverse. I’ve taught in small, moderately selective private schools where two students in the room are scoring in single-digit percentiles on standardized tests and three students in the room are scoring in the 99th percentile. Computers make it easier to support lagging learner and to challenge fast learners without the teacher designing three separate lessons per day. We aren’t going to fix this issue until all schools have meaningful identification, support, and remediation for learning disabled students and have ability-tracked classes (currently too much of a risk for discrimination claims in the public school setting).

Finally, grading takes a lot of time. When teachers have student loads of up to 140 students, they don’t even have one minute per child per day to do grading. Automated learning activities provide fast, actionable feedback.

I am not saying that any of this makes ed tech great. Rather, it’s useful for parents to understand how we got here in education.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:
Are the admins all getting mega kickbacks for signing on to all the ed-tech? Like are they all sleeping with their ed-tech sales reps or something?

People imagine that ed tech adoption is some nefarious, corrupt thing. Rather, there are a number of reasons admin are pressured to purchase and deploy computer-based learning platforms.

A number of states have learning standards that include computer-based work. In the same way that students need to know their multiplication facts by the end of 3rd grade, there will be similar standards for 21st century learning skills or something similar. Teachers who fail to teach these standards can have reduced evaluation scores.

Classrooms are also very diverse. I’ve taught in small, moderately selective private schools where two students in the room are scoring in single-digit percentiles on standardized tests and three students in the room are scoring in the 99th percentile. Computers make it easier to support lagging learner and to challenge fast learners without the teacher designing three separate lessons per day. We aren’t going to fix this issue until all schools have meaningful identification, support, and remediation for learning disabled students and have ability-tracked classes (currently too much of a risk for discrimination claims in the public school setting).

Finally, grading takes a lot of time. When teachers have student loads of up to 140 students, they don’t even have one minute per child per day to do grading. Automated learning activities provide fast, actionable feedback.

I am not saying that any of this makes ed tech great. Rather, it’s useful for parents to understand how we got here in education.

Edtech exploded during the pandemic. Schools realized they could get away with it and just stuck with it. It is disgusting that teachers are showing kids videos every 20 minutes in kindergarten

[Anonymous]

They have to pretend and inflate the numbers to justify spending the budget on bull crap. If teachers don't then they are blamed. Standardized test scores are lower and lower year after year.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:This is really a school created problem.

When schools noticed that top students deeply understood math concepts, they changed the curriculum for everyone. They assumed that forcing all children to learn through abstract, big-picture thinking would automatically make them better at math. However, this ignored how math skills actually develop.

High-performing students often master the rules, formulas, and repetitive practice first, using that solid foundation to unlock deeper conceptual understanding later. By removing traditional math practice and drill-work from classrooms, schools left average and struggling students without the basic tools they need, ultimately making them worse at both the formulas and the concepts.

For example, students spend a massive amount of wasted time as teachers get them to draw out pictures and circles to understand multiplication, talk about it, and try to construct their own understanding and problem-solving methods. This visual drawing process takes so much more time than traditional math. Furthermore, when they manually count up all those drawings, they have no real way of confirming if the problem is correct because they have no automatic recall to verify it against.

If schools just had students memorize the multiplication tables first, and then did a couple of days' worth of conceptual understanding, the students would have it down quickly. Instead, math students now get no real procedural, repetitive practice, so they don't really develop conceptual knowledge either. They are just low in math all around.

Different curriculum works for different kids. Homeschool parents understand this. Some kids do very well with conceptual, abstract math and they don't need repetition. Other kids need traditional math with algorithms and multiplication tables. I think math is where ed tech makes the most sense. Put the top kids in something like AoPS and put the struggling kids in a program in a more traditional program.

This is not true. All kids need to nail down math facts. Some do it more quickly and instinctively than others, but the way they learn is not different.

Ed Tech does not help at all here.

It seems you're agreeing with PP - give the fast learners something that teaches the math facts quickly and briefly and review them in the context of challenging problems (which is what Beast Academy does) and give the normal kids something with regular facts practice well into upper elementary if necessary.

I do. I would prefer to send my kid to nature school with amazing teachers and no tech, but absent that option, I'd rather give the kids who are ahead something rigorous online like Beast Academy rather than make them sit and listen to the teacher teach to the lowest denominator how to add and subtract within 20 when they can already mentally add and subtract 4-digit numbers.

[Anonymous]

Maybe we reached peak society 10 years ago and the test socres are just indicating that.

[Anonymous]

For now teacher have to incessantly inflate the grades and I guess that proves that it is working ...as we really don't enforce for have consequences for cheating. When the whole system gets bankrupted by lawsuits and mismanagement a new school system will have to take it's place. Probably one that needs some good Ed tech. Then the tax dollar river goes flowing with billions again. The obscene amount of money that dominates education instead of people the whole thing is run on profiteering nonprofits. Teachers get blamed, hacked, or they fall in line and play the corruption game. Cover up the appalling negative data that reflects the true status of bs interventions and initiatives that cancels teachers in favor of tech.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:For now teacher have to incessantly inflate the grades and I guess that proves that it is working ...as we really don't enforce for have consequences for cheating. When the whole system gets bankrupted by lawsuits and mismanagement a new school system will have to take it's place. Probably one that needs some good Ed tech. Then the tax dollar river goes flowing with billions again. The obscene amount of money that dominates education instead of people the whole thing is run on profiteering nonprofits. Teachers get blamed, hacked, or they fall in line and play the corruption game. Cover up the appalling negative data that reflects the true status of bs interventions and initiatives that cancels teachers in favor of tech.

What?

[Anonymous]

Read it back slowly and keep in mind that big money and tech are hacking teachers on top of the last 2 decades that we were hacked by our own union, admin, and system in general. This is because reporting violent students is shunned and many teachers have PTSD from going in everyday and being blamed as a bad teacher because students want to hurt each other and admin doesn't want to hear it.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:This is really a school created problem.

When schools noticed that top students deeply understood math concepts, they changed the curriculum for everyone. They assumed that forcing all children to learn through abstract, big-picture thinking would automatically make them better at math. However, this ignored how math skills actually develop.

High-performing students often master the rules, formulas, and repetitive practice first, using that solid foundation to unlock deeper conceptual understanding later. By removing traditional math practice and drill-work from classrooms, schools left average and struggling students without the basic tools they need, ultimately making them worse at both the formulas and the concepts.

For example, students spend a massive amount of wasted time as teachers get them to draw out pictures and circles to understand multiplication, talk about it, and try to construct their own understanding and problem-solving methods. This visual drawing process takes so much more time than traditional math. Furthermore, when they manually count up all those drawings, they have no real way of confirming if the problem is correct because they have no automatic recall to verify it against.

If schools just had students memorize the multiplication tables first, and then did a couple of days' worth of conceptual understanding, the students would have it down quickly. Instead, math students now get no real procedural, repetitive practice, so they don't really develop conceptual knowledge either. They are just low in math all around.

Different curriculum works for different kids. Homeschool parents understand this. Some kids do very well with conceptual, abstract math and they don't need repetition. Other kids need traditional math with algorithms and multiplication tables. I think math is where ed tech makes the most sense. Put the top kids in something like AoPS and put the struggling kids in a program in a more traditional program.

This is not true. All kids need to nail down math facts. Some do it more quickly and instinctively than others, but the way they learn is not different.

Ed Tech does not help at all here.

It seems you're agreeing with PP - give the fast learners something that teaches the math facts quickly and briefly and review them in the context of challenging problems (which is what Beast Academy does) and give the normal kids something with regular facts practice well into upper elementary if necessary.

I do. I would prefer to send my kid to nature school with amazing teachers and no tech, but absent that option, I'd rather give the kids who are ahead something rigorous online like Beast Academy rather than make them sit and listen to the teacher teach to the lowest denominator how to add and subtract within 20 when they can already mentally add and subtract 4-digit numbers.

Part of the problem is that schools aren't using the ed tech appropriately. My kid was far ahead and allowed to spend most of math class using ed tech. We requested that he be allowed to use Beast Academy, and the school said "no." Dreambox, and later ST Math were the county "approved tools," so he was required to use them rather than use his own subscription for a program that actually is good.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:This is really a school created problem.

When schools noticed that top students deeply understood math concepts, they changed the curriculum for everyone. They assumed that forcing all children to learn through abstract, big-picture thinking would automatically make them better at math. However, this ignored how math skills actually develop.

High-performing students often master the rules, formulas, and repetitive practice first, using that solid foundation to unlock deeper conceptual understanding later. By removing traditional math practice and drill-work from classrooms, schools left average and struggling students without the basic tools they need, ultimately making them worse at both the formulas and the concepts.

For example, students spend a massive amount of wasted time as teachers get them to draw out pictures and circles to understand multiplication, talk about it, and try to construct their own understanding and problem-solving methods. This visual drawing process takes so much more time than traditional math. Furthermore, when they manually count up all those drawings, they have no real way of confirming if the problem is correct because they have no automatic recall to verify it against.

If schools just had students memorize the multiplication tables first, and then did a couple of days' worth of conceptual understanding, the students would have it down quickly. Instead, math students now get no real procedural, repetitive practice, so they don't really develop conceptual knowledge either. They are just low in math all around.

Different curriculum works for different kids. Homeschool parents understand this. Some kids do very well with conceptual, abstract math and they don't need repetition. Other kids need traditional math with algorithms and multiplication tables. I think math is where ed tech makes the most sense. Put the top kids in something like AoPS and put the struggling kids in a program in a more traditional program.

This is not true. All kids need to nail down math facts. Some do it more quickly and instinctively than others, but the way they learn is not different.

Ed Tech does not help at all here.

You are wrong. My youngest did not need help nailing down math facts beyond Beast Academy. She is the fastest kid in her class at school on math facts, and she's never done drills at home. The only math supplementing we've done is BA, and we do it at home, not at a center, and we are not math inclined ourselves - we just follow their script, and she knows all her math facts cold and can mentally add, subtract, multiply, and divide multi-digit numbers. We've never done flashcards, plaid math games (outside of BA), etc. This would not have worked for our other kids, but it's worked very well for her.

She has a good memory, it’s as simple as that. It’s also a good thing to have.

[Anonymous]

It is 100000% phones in school, social media, and AI use for everything.

"But but but not every kid has a smartphone!!!"

GMAFB, 90% of them still do. They use apps for hours that provide nothing more than 3 second clips for instant gratification. It trains kids' brains for years to receive instant gratification. They now have zero attention span. They can't read books. They can't watch movies. They can't even sit through a half hour TV show without being on their smartphone and because it requires paying attention for 30 minutes.

And now they all use Ai to do every single writing assignment.

And we aren't stupid. Websites like Wolfram have been around for years where kids plug in math problems and it shows all the steps for how to solve it. They can do that with Ai now too.

Just a complete dumbing down of society. College professors are now complaining their students quite literally can't even read anymore.

Ban ALL tech in the classroom. No phones on school grounds, period. Written essays by hand in class. Solve problems at the board. And make kids take oral exams.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:It's not just smart phones and social media. A lot of these losses are happening among elementary age kids who don't have access to either. But the reliance on Ed Tech to teach math and reading is a big problem. Blaming screens at home doesn't make sense because kids have been watching screens at home for decades, that's not something that started in 2015.

What shifted for kids is they went from mostly using books, paper, and pencil in the classroom to using 1:1 devices and ed tech software. That's true for kids who were get zero screen time at home, and it's true for kids who get hours of screen time at home every day.

Go back to physical books, handwriting, and working out math problems with pencil and paper. Studies show that children retain information better and longer when they learn it from physical media instead of digitally.

I am just so angry about this. I feel like my kids were the guinea pigs in this terrible experiment. They had 1-1 from 5th grade for my oldest / 2nd grade for my youngest, and at the time, no one in my parent group thought it was a negative. When my youngest was in 5th grade, I refused to sign the liability assumption for the tech because I didn't want him to have an iPad in the first place. He wasn't allowed to bring the iPad home - fine with me. Every.single.interaction I had with his teacher, she made it sound like I was disadvantaging him by not signing the form and allowing him to use the tech outside of school. And I was the only parent in the entire elementary school who refused. Now, there is more pushback from the parents, thankfully, but it doesn't change the fact that my rising college freshman who comes from "one of the best school districts in the country" was never taught how to work things out on paper.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Yep using an app to do math and having either multiple choice or getting the chance to do a lesson over and over, with the same questions, they eventually just remember the answer and pass the lesson. But they can't actually solve a problem on their own. I see what my kids are doing.

My kid does the same and it is maddening. Teacher great kahoot as a study guide and I’m like that is NOT helpful! Kid think he is doing what he is supposed to be doing because teacher said here is a kahoot.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:This is really a school created problem.

When schools noticed that top students deeply understood math concepts, they changed the curriculum for everyone. They assumed that forcing all children to learn through abstract, big-picture thinking would automatically make them better at math. However, this ignored how math skills actually develop.

High-performing students often master the rules, formulas, and repetitive practice first, using that solid foundation to unlock deeper conceptual understanding later. By removing traditional math practice and drill-work from classrooms, schools left average and struggling students without the basic tools they need, ultimately making them worse at both the formulas and the concepts.

For example, students spend a massive amount of wasted time as teachers get them to draw out pictures and circles to understand multiplication, talk about it, and try to construct their own understanding and problem-solving methods. This visual drawing process takes so much more time than traditional math. Furthermore, when they manually count up all those drawings, they have no real way of confirming if the problem is correct because they have no automatic recall to verify it against.

If schools just had students memorize the multiplication tables first, and then did a couple of days' worth of conceptual understanding, the students would have it down quickly. Instead, math students now get no real procedural, repetitive practice, so they don't really develop conceptual knowledge either. They are just low in math all around.

Different curriculum works for different kids. Homeschool parents understand this. Some kids do very well with conceptual, abstract math and they don't need repetition. Other kids need traditional math with algorithms and multiplication tables. I think math is where ed tech makes the most sense. Put the top kids in something like AoPS and put the struggling kids in a program in a more traditional program.

This is not true. All kids need to nail down math facts. Some do it more quickly and instinctively than others, but the way they learn is not different.

Ed Tech does not help at all here.

You are wrong. My youngest did not need help nailing down math facts beyond Beast Academy. She is the fastest kid in her class at school on math facts, and she's never done drills at home. The only math supplementing we've done is BA, and we do it at home, not at a center, and we are not math inclined ourselves - we just follow their script, and she knows all her math facts cold and can mentally add, subtract, multiply, and divide multi-digit numbers. We've never done flashcards, plaid math games (outside of BA), etc. This would not have worked for our other kids, but it's worked very well for her.

And this is the problem teachers face. Some kids in the classroom are like your daughter, and some are like your other kids. How do you teach them all at the same time? My older son loved Beast Academy. My younger son hated it. What do you do then?