Reply to The decade-long "learning recession"

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]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.[/quote]

I think one of the problems is that there's many causes of this all happening at once and it's hard to figure out what to do with all of them.

You're right it's not just smart phones, but lots of elementary schoolers are spending too much time at home on screens, screens that are appreciable different than the TVs and family computers we had growing up. Edtech is ALSO a huge issue, as is the fact that we spend years building around ineffective approaches to reading. The pandemic (and the spike in truancy that followed after we normalized not going to school) is also a factor though obviously not the only one since the problem both predates and postdates it.

I have no idea what the solution is, but the number of problems is seemingly endless.[/quote]

I think you are wrong that the problems are "endless" or that the solution is unknowable.

Sure, some kids are getting lots of screen time at home, including on social media or apps like TikTok and Youtube with endless scroll and autoplay. That's an issue. But that's just some kids. And it's definitely also true that there have ALWAYS been parents making bad choices regarding screens or tech and their kids. Before social media and smart phones, it was video games and some kids being allowed to play repetitive, often violent, video games for hours on end. There are lots of bad parents.

But parenting is variable, and leads to variable results. Some kids don't have phones. They don't have access to TikTok. They don't get unlimited video games at home. But what this is showing is that *even these kids* are experiencing testing declines.

That indicates the problem is in schools, not in homes. If the problem is at home, you don't see trends that cross demographic and geographic divisions. That's what we see here.

Also, in terms of solutions, trying to change parenting is really hard. You can educate parents but you can't go and do it for them. There will always be parents making bad choices for their kids at home, you have to accept this.

But if we just look at Ed Tech in schools, how much time kids spend on devices in the classroom, and the replacement of physical learning media with devices and apps, this is remarkably easy to change. Just end the Ed Tech contracts, sell the devices, and go back to pencil and paper. The truth is that the Ed Tech revolution was greatly accelerated by Covid -- school rapidly adopted technology they'd been more slowly incorporating in order to pivot to "virtual school." That was a failed experiment and we can all see that now. So let's treat the current moment like a crisis just like we treated Covid like a crisis, and act with similar swiftness to undo this mistake. We don't even have to point fingers or lay blame, we can just recognize this didn't work and stop doing it.[/quote]

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