What were we doing right, education-wise, in the 80s and 90s?

[Anonymous]

1. phonics, none of this looking at the words and guessing what it meant crap

2. no mobile devices = a lot more parents reading to kids

3. no kids with behavioral issues or severe learning disabilities in mainstream classes

4. number 3 means that teachers had genuine expectations for all kids in a class

5. parents did not make excuses for their kids, if there was an issue then they addressed it or kicked the kid's ass themselves

That's it, folks. It's not rocket science.

[Anonymous]

No, it really comes down to the fact that there were far fewer kids. GenX is way smaller than the boomers. Just an easier system and better outcomes when less kids to deal with.

And life was in general much cheaper, so maybe both parents worked, but the second job was like a teacher and the breadwinner was always home for dinner.

Probably the end of holding kids back and mainstreaming has made elementary harder, but kids are differentiated by middle and high school in most places so that isn't that different.

[Anonymous]

Lots of reasons, many of which have been mentioned so I won’t repeat, but also I think that teaching has really become devalued as a profession especially as salaries have stagnated. As in, teachers could make $40k 30 years ago and that's an attractive field to go into. You're going to attract a lot of people. But teachers making $40k now, with masters requirements and recertification requirements every five years and paying for your own fingerprinting and a total lack of job security and teaching is not an attractive field anymore.

With a decline in highly qualified people seeking teaching positions you get organizations like TFA (1989) spitting out Ivy grads looking to boost a resume who work as a teacher for two years before moving. on. It takes about 3 years to become a good teacher. And these people are leaving after 2, causing more harm than they are helping. You've got a rotating door of poor to mediocre teachers with terrible classroom management working in some of the neediest schools in the country and you think you're going to get parent and community support when you can't even hire real, certified teachers to educate the children? For your $40k, in your city where few teachers can actually afford to live?

I wonder if they broke down the educational outcomes of students in America by economic class if we'd see a different story - if the students who come from middle or upper class homes in the suburbs (where they don't have absurdly low teacher salaries and TFA teachers) would score better than children from 1978-1987. How would the kids of Westchester compare to NYC? How would New Canaan compare to Bridgeport? Etc.

[Anonymous]

No electronics.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:There’s nothing magical about that timeframe. Literacy increased over the years, as it should have, with increasing standards of living. The question is why was there a downturn in both literacy and numeracy after that.

OP here. Yeah, I get why literacy continued to improve over the years - just wondering what happened on the opposite end.

The internet and reality tv. There wasn’t TV (or whatever) 24hrs a day. You had to actually read, we saw our parents read, we saw people on the bus and train reading, now all you see is a head down and on a phone, doesn’t matter if they are reading the WSJ or playing Minecraft.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:1. phonics, none of this looking at the words and guessing what it meant crap

2. no mobile devices = a lot more parents reading to kids

3. no kids with behavioral issues or severe learning disabilities in mainstream classes

4. number 3 means that teachers had genuine expectations for all kids in a class

5. parents did not make excuses for their kids, if there was an issue then they addressed it or kicked the kid's ass themselves

That's it, folks. It's not rocket science.

Pretty much this.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:1. phonics, none of this looking at the words and guessing what it meant crap

2. no mobile devices = a lot more parents reading to kids

3. no kids with behavioral issues or severe learning disabilities in mainstream classes

4. number 3 means that teachers had genuine expectations for all kids in a class

5. parents did not make excuses for their kids, if there was an issue then they addressed it or kicked the kid's ass themselves

That's it, folks. It's not rocket science.

Yes! I graduated from high school in 1992.

I have no memory of parents complaining.

I have no memory whatsoever of our teachers begging us to get work in. If we didn’t have the assignment finished on the day it was due, they just entered a zero and went on with their day. No rant about it. No pleading. No mention of it at all. A deadline was a deadline. Bummer. That just doesn’t happen today.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:There’s nothing magical about that timeframe. Literacy increased over the years, as it should have, with increasing standards of living. The question is why was there a downturn in both literacy and numeracy after that.

OP here. Yeah, I get why literacy continued to improve over the years - just wondering what happened on the opposite end.

The internet and reality tv. There wasn’t TV (or whatever) 24hrs a day. You had to actually read, we saw our parents read, we saw people on the bus and train reading, now all you see is a head down and on a phone, doesn’t matter if they are reading the WSJ or playing Minecraft.

Sure but that didn’t start to become a thing until 2010-2011-2012 ish.

[Anonymous]

The Flynn effect showed that US IQs (and IQs in other countries) rose every year until the 1980s.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:1. phonics, none of this looking at the words and guessing what it meant crap

2. no mobile devices = a lot more parents reading to kids

3. no kids with behavioral issues or severe learning disabilities in mainstream classes

4. number 3 means that teachers had genuine expectations for all kids in a class

5. parents did not make excuses for their kids, if there was an issue then they addressed it or kicked the kid's ass themselves

That's it, folks. It's not rocket science.

100% this.

[Anonymous]

I'm an 86 baby and I saw the shift to testing. There was little to no testing when I was in elementary and middle school. But by high school, my teachers spent MONTHS teaching towards the yearly tests. I remember being in AP Calc and then having to focus on basic geometry or long division for stupid tests. It was demoralizing. Plus, the state tests never factored into your grades. So you have college applications and high schools only caring about your grades and then there's this bogus state test.

Also, I think there was a big shift into not valuing teachers or paying them highly. Nurses are paid much higher and thus get smarter students. I knew so many friends in college who nearly dropped out but were able to change to an Education major and easily make A's. And then later on, these teachers only worked a few years before becoming SAHMs. Whereas growing up my teachers truly loved teaching and saw it as a passion.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I'm an 86 baby and I saw the shift to testing. There was little to no testing when I was in elementary and middle school. But by high school, my teachers spent MONTHS teaching towards the yearly tests. I remember being in AP Calc and then having to focus on basic geometry or long division for stupid tests. It was demoralizing. Plus, the state tests never factored into your grades. So you have college applications and high schools only caring about your grades and then there's this bogus state test.

Also, I think there was a big shift into not valuing teachers or paying them highly. Nurses are paid much higher and thus get smarter students. I knew so many friends in college who nearly dropped out but were able to change to an Education major and easily make A's. And then later on, these teachers only worked a few years before becoming SAHMs. Whereas growing up my teachers truly loved teaching and saw it as a passion.

Well that, and it used to be that women could really only go into teaching or nursing so you got a lot of REALLY intelligent people who became teachers because they wanted to go to college and have a career but there weren’t many other options. Now that women can go into whatever field they want, most of the best and brightest have no interest in going into teaching. Not that I blame them. You can make so much more money doing other things and get way more respect and not have to deal with all the BS.

[Anonymous]

I can’t believe so few of you have brought up the massive shift to standardized testing. I’m a millennial and children take way more standardized tests than I ever did, and I grew up in an affluent town with fantastic public schools.
That, coupled with GOP initiatives to cut school funding and teacher pay.

[Anonymous]

Several good points already. I’d like to add that kids did more self-learning. Letting kids have the chance to be bored, not scheduling every minute of the lives with structured activities helped a lot. I think it helped keep anxiety down. I also think people realized that a lot of learning happened outside of school. School also taught kids more about interacting with each other because kids were allowed to resolve more themselves.

Things weren’t perfect back then, but we threw out a lot of what was good.

Also, I think today there is too much coddling of poor or immigrant kids. By that I mean, there’s built in assumption that they can’t before they’ve been a chance to try. Clearly supports are needed but the kids suffer from lowered expectations for too long. I came from a working class, multi-racial, urban community next to “the projects” with many households speaking English plus a second language. I can’t imagine getting out of that situation And having the ability to succeed in college with our current education system.

We were also blessed to be allowed to fail and learn from mistakes. Too many kids suffer from a fear of failure.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:1. phonics, none of this looking at the words and guessing what it meant crap

2. no mobile devices = a lot more parents reading to kids

3. no kids with behavioral issues or severe learning disabilities in mainstream classes

4. number 3 means that teachers had genuine expectations for all kids in a class

5. parents did not make excuses for their kids, if there was an issue then they addressed it or kicked the kid's ass themselves

That's it, folks. It's not rocket science.

You're talking about the height of the whole language movement time wise.

There is way more phonics instruction in schools now than there was in the 80's and 90's.