Screens. Its screens. Dont give them a device. Give them a book and have the teacher teach them how to read. Slow them down and remove distractions.
I love mobile tech. I’ve been using it for years, I’ve advocated for its use, recommended it to others, helped many set it up. And as much as I really HATE to say it, I was wrong.
To be fair- the problem isn’t the tech, the problem is the applications- social media ‘scrolling’ apps and short form video to be specific. But these days those apps are basically impossible to separate from phones and iPads.
And when the asshole algorithm based attention seekers (Meta, TikTok, Google, etc) came around, I and those like me had given them all a direct mainline IV into peoples eyeballs. We had good intentions- we never wanted mobile tech to become this. We never saw it coming. But we should have.
Unfortunately @[email protected], at this point I think your answer is the only one we’ve got left. I’ve seen what passes for ‘kid friendly’ on an iPad- bright colors, happy music, think CocoMelon in an app. It pushes every dopamine button in a young brain. Or worse, short form videos- we let our kids spend 6 hours a day watching 30 second videos, and then wonder why they can’t focus in class for more than 45 seconds. Yeah there’s no porn, but it might as well be digital crack cocaine for the brain.
So yeah, at this point I think for our own good we need to roll this back like a failed update. Go back to dead-tree books and textbooks, or at the very least, downgrade to E-Ink or monochrome LCD so the screen is less engaging than the real world, not more.
Finally, and most importantly, we need to re-evaluate our relationship with boredom. Boredom sucks, but it also leads to inspiration and creativity. Scrolling apps essentially eliminate boredom, because however much time you have to kill, there’s always more content to fill it. And I think that’s a bad thing- we need a little boredom.
Same thing. Before my sister had kids i thoght it’s important that children learn their way around computers and while just giving them an ipad isn’t ideal, it certainly isn’t that bad.
But i thimk every sane person who has ever seen an ipad kid, ralises that they are truly cooked beyond repair. When my nephew was like 5, there was a christmas party abd there were 3 kids aged 3-6. I put my phone on the table and went to do something. There is nothing going on, except that it ahowed the time and maybe MAYBE a notification. These kids sat around my phone like the monkeys around the obelisk in 2001. I told them to not touch it and tried to explain that to them, it’s nothing but a watch, and they have seen a watch. It did not matter at all. Their eyes were widened by the shiny object and they could’t not touch it. I told them to keep their hands off, and they said they PROMISE not to touch it. And their hands immediately started to move on their own, slowly aproching that forbidden object. They did not care about christmas anymore or gifts or relatives, they juat sat there and waited for the time to change. Back then, they didn’t even know what is even on that thing, but they knew that grown ups are constantly glued to it.
The other thing that i witnessed once was in a store, it was pretty busy and there was this kid in the middle of an isle, maybe 6-8 years old. He was sitting in a shopping cart, playing fortnite. He did not care at all that he was in the way. He got bumped into several times by annoyed customers. He never looked up, even once. I was pretty annoyed too, but at the parents, i felt pretty bad for the guy. So i went to grab the cart and pushed him to the side. That kid never looked up, did not care that he juat got pushed around, did not care that i was a complete stranger.
Last but not least, my girlfriend’s daughter is now 8 years old. She’s addicted to reading, super intelligent child. She hardly ever used a phone, and doesn’t really watch tv. (Not because she doesn’t want to, it’s just a house rule.) Her grandmother is one of the biggest pieces of shits i have ever seen. I despise that lady with every fiber of my being. She tries so hard to break these children. She promised to gift that 8 year old a phone, multiple times. As a parent, you are then the asshole who have to explain your child that they absolutely do not get a phone. And that boomer cunt says shit like: oh it’s fine, she’ll get a new phone so she can have the old one. Then she can whatsapp people and use instagram and tiktok. Like what the fuck, are you crazy? So long story short, she still things that 8 year old, higly intelligent kid needs a phone, and it’s getting on everyone’s nerves, so the compromise was that she got a “play phone” a real ass phone with nothing on. Not even a cgarge. It’s just a blank piece of glass and plastic to play with. Seeing her walking around with that thing and “taking selfies” and “using social media” is such a dystopian thing. Even that blank thing causes so much friction, it’s insane. It became her emotional support object, abd she sometimes gets in trouble because she doesn’t put it away on the table and shit. And it also got smashed to bits the first day she got it, because… Children and glass.
Tl;dr I’m now a phone bad boomer abd i’ll die on that hill
Here’s the thing- kids should ‘know their way around computers’. But an iPad DOESN’T do that.
I think you might appreciate this blog post: Kids can’t use computers… and this is why it should worry you IMHO this is worth the time to read it.
Consider the tech that was available in the 2000s and early 2010s. There was a lot of innovation, but if you wanted to make it work you had to figure it out. For example- okay you bought a computer, want Internet? You have to find and hire an ISP, make sure your computer has an Ethernet port (adding one if it doesn’t), and hook it up. Want to use two computers at once? You need a router, it’s on you to select, purchase, and configure this thing. Want to get email on your PalmPilot? You gotta figure out your POP3/IMAP and SMTP server settings. Computer not working? Better look up error codes or reinstall Windows.
The result was that ‘digital natives’ who truly understood general purpose computers not just on a superficial operator level but on a technician level.
Then we decided to make it simple. Want a computer? Plug it in, it Just Works. Want to get online? Go down to the Apple store and plunk down $400 you’ve got an iPad and you’re online.
Result is the ‘digital natives’ are just skilled operators, and haven’t the slightest clue what’s going on.
Now for what they know, they ARE good with it. I was once in a car with such a kid, and there was some strange scene playing out on the sidewalk with an obviously drunk guy. Kid videoed this on the iphone. I joked that when we get home we should get some music and make a meme video. Kid goes head down, 45 seconds later comes up and shows me it’s been edited into a publish-ready video with a title and background music. But ask that kid where to find a filesystem and you’d probably get an answer like ‘in the drawer under my teacher’s desk’.My point is- I don’t think a kid should have an ipad, I think they should have an experience like early 2000s-2010s kids had. No plug and play devices. Instead things that if they want to make it work they have to figure it out themself.
Maybe the answer is some kind of raspberry pi based system but give it to them as a bag of parts and they have to assemble it themself into some kind of cyberdeck type setup, load an OS onto it (for this they get a blank laptop with an OS install stick, they have to install it themself to make it work enough to flash the Pi SD card).Maybe if Linux phones start to be a thing, the answer becomes give the kid the phone but with the memory wiped so they have to image it themself in order to make it work…
Or just give the kid a flip phone (feature phone, not foldable smartphone)- it can text and communicate and call 911 and that’s all you NEED.
MIL sounds insufferable and toxic AF-- even if you are a batshit crazy Luddite (although the Luddites may not have been so crazy, but I digress…) Even if you are a nut, it’s still your fucking kid, not hers. And that means she has no right to make parenting decisions.
You ever read Fahrenheit 451? This reminds me of the guy’s wife Mildred, who’s obsessing over the stupid brain dead TV drama and she wants to replace all 4 walls of a room with TVs to watch the show in surround. And the highlight of her character’s experience is when she goes interactive and they’re asking her if their party should be in the pink room or the blue room. Meanwhile she can’t possibly understand why her husband doesn’t care about any of this.
Your MIL sounds like Mildred.
Besides flaws in supposed more modern methods of teaching (personally I fucking hate rote memorization, it is boring), too many distractions aka entertainment options more than ever. Especially on mobile devices.
And then you have the looming gap between the haves and the have-nots, and the have-nots are being taken advantage of by not opposing the system that’s oppressing them, such as deliberately making them unlearned.
Only fanatical bookworms do visit book fairs and defend public libraries from being dismantled.
Yeah the rote memorization and ‘teach the test’ has to go. Roll curriculum back to what it was pre No Child Left Behind. Especially the brain dead policy of never holding kids back a grade no matter what. It’s just rubber stamping the kid for next year and eventually they get so far behind they’ve got no chance.
What about the other 12 states?
I like to think that Oregon isn’t included because it shifts the curve too aggressively. To the left.
Oregon aggressively adopted the whole word identification thing instead of phonics. Our kid was behind because of it. The district only noticed when they went back to phonics. The state wont be behind for long, but holy shit it fucked over so many kid’s futures.
Also in Europe. It’s obviously related to unrestricted internet use and smart phone proliferation.
For the first time in a long time, we’re having generations that are dumber than their parents.
They think they are smarter though. Beacause Tiktok told them so.
The inconvenient truth for us old shits is that the parents are at fault mostly. Mostly we were powerless to stop it of course, but also many of us used our own money and our own will to buy our kids those devices and then let them use them freely.
The US is working its way toward illiteracy. Republicans need this to install a permanent set of oligarchs in the government.
Damnit NYT, states have an abbreviation standard!
Journalists have always used the old postal abbreviations. It’s part of the Associated Press style.
The NYT has its own style guide that doesn’t always match the AP.
The problem is for a lot of those I’m just guessing what they’re supposed to be.
Which ones have you guessing? It feels a little insane to read compared to the standard 2 letter abbreviation, but they’re all pretty clear to me.
What’s Ga. Va. and Gt.
Georgia, Virginia, and Vt. is Vermont.
Yes but people are now too stupid to know them.
If I could read, I would have taken this personally.
Yes but the average NYT reader doesn’t know them.
Something to do with DC being the third lowest on this graph
Yay Mississippi, I guess?
Wtf is going on in Vermont in particular?
Vermont is poor and mostly rural. It has seen poor economic growth the last decade and residents have been leaving the state in droves. It was gutted by the rising of AirBNB rentals and then the pandemic.
Most of the economy is just rich people going there to vacation, who have drastically shot up the cost of living, prices out the locals, just like Colorado and other outdoor recreation areas. A lot of the local places were also bought up my Vale, etc.
A big part of the issue is a lot of states abandoning “phonic” based teaching for “whole language”. In phonics the focus is on teaching how letters come together to form the sound of a word, while whole language is based on just memorizing the pronunciation of words. kids being taught how to sound out words will take longer to get to a point of being able to read out short simple text, but whole language can get them reading simple stuff with all the words they’ve already been taught very quickly.
The problem is that when you move past simple stuff only using words they’ve memorized, a kid taught to sound out words will be able to figure out words they haven’t seen before, meaning that they can start to learn new words passively just by reading more complex books. The whole language taught kids need to learn every new word by instruction or by just guessing based on context, making it much harder and slower. It gets frustrating quickly and kids taught this way rarely develop a real interest in reading due to that difficulty.
They’re not even taught how to use context or subtext to understand a word they don’t know. It would actually be more helpful if they did instead of just letting them go ahead and invent an entire new meaning for words they don’t know.
That is actually incorrect. You’re describing the entire point of Whole Language learning.
They are to learn a number of words, and then use their collection of words to deduce other words.
The problem is they don’t necessarily deduce correctly. Who is to say you deduced them correctly?
Also people are lazy. They would rather just leave the blanks than fill it in.
Cool that explains why I’m arguing over the literal definition of words and the context they are used in with 20 somethings constantly.
Wtf this sounds crazy, what asshole implemented this change?
Marie Clay and Lucy Calkins
And then when Bush Jr implemented “No Child Left Behind,” schools had to use certain research-backed curricula if they wanted to keep their funding. So they trusted that the “research” about whole-language reading curricula was true. It took decades to see that it wasn’t the teachers’ implementation that was flawed, it was bad research. The approved curriculum reinforced bad reading practices.
In other words, grifters. As is tradition in America, apparently.
A big part of the issue is a lot of states abandoning “phonic” based teaching for “whole language”.
I don’t think this is accurate for explaining 2015 versus 2025. Phonics was discouraged from maybe 2000 to 2020, and education has moved back towards phonics in the last few years. Most major school systems in the US put more emphasis on phonics now than they did 10 years ago.
An impact on early education stunting people’s reading capabilities wouldn’t show up for about 10~20 years… so… between 2015 and now is where the impact would be most obvious.
There are of course other factors, such as the cost cutting and underpaying of teachers leading to shortages and larger class sizes, but the introduction of whole language absolutely lines up with the dramatic spike seen recently in functionally illiterate young adults/teens, if you account for the fact that the effects wouldn’t be fully manifested until people taught it in kindergarten reached a point where they’re expected to be functionally literate teens and young adults.
The data comes from tests given to students in grades 3-8, so changes in pedagogy should trickle through completely within 8 years or so.
And my point is that anti-phonics advocates started actually phasing out phonics in the 90’s and 2000’s, so that the teachers between 2007 and 2015 (those critical 8 years of instruction for students taking the test in 2015) were probably the most anti-phonics cohort of the historical data.
From that history, I would assume that the 8-13 year olds in 2025 had more formal phonics instruction than the 2015 cohort.
Yes, but the changes will take a few years to truly show. Because young kids won’t really start to struggle until they start getting into the more advanced stuff years later. A change back to phonics a few years ago likely wouldn’t have made a noticeable difference yet, because the kids who learned phonics won’t be old enough to be reading the more advanced stuff yet.
Sure. The underlying study looks at 3rd through 8th grade, so we’re talking about critical literacy education happening between 0-8 years before the testing date.
But phonics fell out of favor by the early 2000’s as many teachers, school districts, and state boards created curricula around whole word recognition and three cueing. Pro-phonics backlash happened around then, too, so plenty of kids were getting side instruction from parents and after school tutoring, if their parents were more involved. But test scores peaking in 2015 doesn’t quite fit the timeline of the anti-phonics movement peaking in the early to late 2000’s. So the 2015 test takers got the most anti-phonics education, perhaps more anti-phonics than 2025 test takers.
Plus, if we’re gonna talk about parental involvement and after school tutoring, one interesting thing about the 2015-2025 drop is that it’s happening across all income levels and most pronounced at middle income levels, where I’d imagine there is a lot of parental and after school support.
The data is interesting, and I suspect there are multiple causes adding up.
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I would like to know what’s the influence of first generation immigration in these charts, because the states are kind of shit at reporting that.
My kids speak Spanish. They can read in both Spanish and English, but they learned Spanish first, so it took them a while to catch up in English. Many of their classmates come from Spanish speaking families, English is their second language, and they have a bit more of trouble. The issue here is that state level standardized testing doesn’t seem to care about Spanish at all, so you may find a bunch of very smart kids who score below average just because they speak more than one language, which is frankly insane.
Something like 22% of the US speaks something other than English at home. I wonder how this plays a role. I have no data beyond this, but it’s just something I’ve wondered about.
My kids district is a diverse one, I think white is just barely the majority, and it’s a real smattering of all sorts otherwise. There are a lot of kids who come from parents who clearly speak no English. And so when test results come out, they don’t look great for the school, but it’s kinda like no shit, we have kids learning English for the first time, of course they won’t test well.
So for this reason, I see how my kids are doing, I read with them, I do math with them, and if things seem good then they seem good, and I’m not personally going to stress over test score trends schoolwide, and certainly not statewide or nationally.
It would be interesting to see how multiple language statistics have changed. With any luck, maybe the numbers have increased.
MAGA!
The uneducated don’t ask questions or suspect they’re being taken advantage of. This is by design.
I’m dumb and poorly educated, but i still don’t like dumpy mcshitpants.
The thing about being stupid, is that you don’t know you’re stupid.
Real stupid people are proud and arrogant of their ignorance.
Ps: reading this draft again, it seems like a no real Scotsman fallacy. But I’ll post this anyways just because
Skill issue, not dumb enough
New Mexico didn’t even need to defend their position, but they did anyway. True goat right there
They saw W. Virginia making a break for it.
Fun fact on why Missisipi, of all the places, improved: they introduced a law that a child cannot be promoted to next year if they do not pass reading proficiency test.
Who knew the shame of repeating a year can be motivator enough for kids and parents.
it’s more than that: they’ve been hiring literacy coaches to sit in on and improve literacy classes across the state and rating schools while double-counting the performance of the bottom 25%. plus lots of testing
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/10/podcasts/the-daily/mississippi-schools-test-scores.html
To point the problem more clearly.
If student Numbskull repeats the grade. That means the their low scores affect you in Year 1 and Year 2. That’s funding directly affecting you, your compensation, your ability to remain employed for you, the teacher, and all of the admin staff.
It’s much better (for you) to push them along and make them someone else’s problem.
It’s like the Peter Principal in action.
They don’t take the test until grade 4, so repeating grade 3 does not impact funding being student population.
It also looks like the bar started very, very low.
Decades of studies have shown that retention, repeating grades, is not beneficial for any stakeholder.
Well schools have been forcing teachers to pass failing students for at least a decade now, and look at how that’s going.
I never said there’s not a problem, just saying that’s not the answer. Like, factually.
Except the one right here in front of your eyes
Which one is that? I don’t see it.
Clearly
Well, hey. Thanks for the trump-level clarity.
-upset with no evidence
-didn’t provide evidence to their own claim that disputed an interpretation of source material nor offer an alternate explanation
An internet tale as old as shit posting
Does stakeholder here mean shareholder? As in, it’s not good for the capitalists to ensure that students are forced to actually learn things?
Flippant anti-capitalism aside, I’m skeptical of your claim, but I would love to see a source if you have one to share.
There have been studies done since before I became a teacher. And now that I’m retired, I’m talking about decades of research:
Jimerson looked at 20 studies published between 1990 and 1999, and concluded that they “fail to demonstrate that grade retention provides greater benefits to students with academic or adjustment difficulties than does promotion to the next grade.” In many studies, students who were retained had worse academic achievement and social-emotional outcomes than students who were not.
Another research review from Jimerson and his colleagues, this one published in 2002, found that grade retention was also linked strongly to dropping out of high school. -source
The source also brings up the racist underpinnings that too often support holding kids back. I said before, but just to reiterate, there is a problem that needs to be addressed, but retention is demonstrably not the answer.
None of these studies account for mental disabilities that impact learning. There are so many people who were kids in the timeframes of those studies who are getting ADHD, ASD, dyslexia, dyscalculia, dysgraphia, dyspraxia, and other diagnoses more recently that would completely change the outcomes of the studies.
There are numerous students who need accommodations that schools aren’t trained for, don’t have the money for, or have staff that don’t believe any accommodations should exist. The very active public attack on schools that’s been happening (funding cuts including funding specifically for disabled students, terrorizing teachers and students, etc) is exacerbating the issue.
The solution is to get the government to actually support students instead of funnelling money to the rich and trying to keep the masses dumb and compliant.
Thanks for responding. Yeah that makes sense.
“Stakeholder” is simply anyone who will be effected by “x”. whether “x” is a policy change, or something as simple as choosing a new brand of peanut butter for your family.
“Who are the people who will be effected by this?”
In Project Management you’re taught that one of the first things you do when implementing a change or starting a new project, etc… Is to Identify the stakeholders.
I’m sure there’s a more concise definition, but I just woke up.
My state repealed a law a few years ago that required holding kids back who failed the 3rd grade test.
They’re soon going to learn Goodhart’s Law if they don’t already.
Thank you for this. I’ve been saying basically the same thing for years. Didn’t know there was a term for it.
NJ again lowkey goated
Damn, New Mexico is really eating shit huh? Wonder why it’s so bad there specifically.
NM is one of the poorest states in the country. With no real major cities, there’s a lack of opportunity. Also, the eastern counties are as red as rural Texas.
Look at those deltas, though… Vermont, Nebraska, Maine, Delaware. The declines are massive
They are all states with poor economies.
Any one with career opportunities leaves.
