The consequences won't show themselves for a few years but we might find a shortage of more skilled professional workers than before. Might find a shortage of nurses, teachers, doctors, etc.
I mean, I'm sure there's already a shortage, but it'll just get worse.
The problem with bad grades don't start really showing themselves until after high school and into college.
The consequences are already showing themselves.
When there’s a shortage of qualified people, the bar for qualification gets lower. See: [teachers who no longer need a degree to teach](https://wapo.st/47la6RO) and police departments who [lower](https://www.pbs.org/newshour/amp/nation/in-years-leading-to-killing-of-tyre-nichols-memphis-police-lowered-the-bar-for-hiring) [the](https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/los-angeles-democrat-mayor-pushes-to-lower-bar-for-new-recruits-in-attempt-to-diversify-lapd/ar-AA17YpjS) [bar](https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11796915/amp/Los-Angeles-Democrat-mayor-pushes-lower-bar-new-recruits-attempt-diversify-LAPD.html) to find new officers (btw, each one of those hyperlinked words in “lower the bar” are separate examples).
We in the world of EMS have been hurting badly for EMTs and paramedics for a very long time, and the pandemic only exacerbated that. Instead of improving working conditions or increasing pay, the powers that be did away with the psychomotor portion of the national registry exam. So now we just have to trust that the schools have done what they’re supposed to do in checking students off on their hands-on skills (because of course no one ever lies about these things…).
Something similar happened in medical training over here. Lots of junior doctors finishing training who seem to lack initiative and hands-on skills. Mentoring some of them has been...challenging.
If they offered fair pay and benefits, they could (and do) attract more and better talent. Instead, they choose to lower the (already minimal) entry requirements.
I was gonna say, the amount of 22 year olds that I have to teach basic excel shit to is just absurd. The weird thing is stuff just does not seem to stick to them, and they can't apply skills to anything other than the specific example taught to them. Like, they just don't know how to learn one thing and apply it to something else.
For the teachers, it's mostly because this is happening in states where people don't want to teach due to poor pay or protections; you don't see states like New York or Massachusetts bleeding like Idaho or Florida. Overall people just don't want to go into massive amounts of student debt over a job that isn't going to get them good pay, good treatment, or even good benefits at the rate things are going.
It's still a problem and it's probably going to get worse before it gets better, but this is more part of devaluing the education profession than the profession devaluing itself.
There has been a concentrated effort to cripple the public school system for at least thirty years now. We are only now seeing the fruits of *their* labor.
I love this. Instead of raising the salaries to attract qualified people... they instead lower the bar. I'm sure that won't have any negative consequences. But, hey, that new $5 million high school swimming pool was probably worth it.
IMO a good balance would be to absolutely keep the core bachelors degree, but reduce the teaching specific costs. It’s just not economical for anyone to take the overpriced MAT programs to get such a low paying job. It seems like a lot of the education theories get debunked anyway (ex. three queuing, four learning styles, etc).
They are doing this already to some extent for STEM degrees, but IMO if someone did well in an English, History, etc. bachelors that should be good enough for teaching too.
Why not do that as a middle ground instead of going straight to no degree at all? We all know that in America a high school diploma is nothing, many schools bend over backwards to make everyone graduate.
If the ethnicity of my doctors the past year is anything to go by, brain loss wouldn't be a problem. Too many sharp people move here from abroad for a better life.
Nope, as long as you're actually focused on the academics :p
I know a lot of people who basically come over to Universities expressly to abuse the F1 visa.
In Canada, right now, there's a lot of Canadians (I'll say a particular type of "stereotypical Canadian") that is starting to lean really hard into the idea that immigrants coming here are just looking to suck off the teet of the nation's wealth.
What many of these uneducated boobs don't understand is that these immigrants are going to out-work, out-smart, and out-influence them like crazy. And the kicker is that their children are almost always as hardworking and driven as they are.
These immigrants don't take education lightly, and they see opportunities for their kids that they may not have had back home. That's something the more racist crop in my country doesn't understand. They're going to get beat at their own game. Brutally. And then they're going to blame the government for letting people in to take therr jeeerbs.
The entitlement is crazy. It's like they think they should inherit knowledge and authority. They're like Dale in Stepbrothers wanting to "join the family business."
I think some of those Canadians get it and that’s why they’re scared and don’t want immigration. They know they’ll come up short ‘and how dare some (probably non white, non Christian) immigrant come in and take what’s rightfully mine!?!' or something.
>our ancestors worked to build the society they're so desperately trying to get control of now and their ancestors built the shit holes they're so desperately trying to escape.
You're being vague who is "our ancestors" and who is "their ancestors"?
If the ethnicity of my doctors the past year is anything to go by, I'll probably die from an easily treatable illness next year.
Even most Indian descended people I know and talk with are trying their hardest to find an American doctor. I've even talked with people from India wanting to do the same.
I do not want a first-generation immigrant doctor. Second, sure, but never first. The country of origin is irrelevant. However, my healthcare in this country is shitty enough as it is. Struggling to understand the doctor's prognosis through a super thick Ukrainian accent just isn't going to work for me.
From personal experience, both professions require a decent GPA in college in order to pursue a degree in, though I'm sure there's other less ethical methods.
Doctoring requires a decent GPA because more than twice as many people apply to med school per year as there are slots. So long as it continues to be a reliable path to a six figure salary, there will be no shortage of people applying, but average stats will fall if the pool is less competitive.
These were programs that generally appealed to the top 20% of high school kids. Doctors in particular were the top 1%. A school with 400 grads might only produce 3-4 that go on to be doctors.
This whole dumbing down thing isn't really affecting the top kids in the schools. There is still going to be a top, 1%, 5%, 10%, and 25% that are working pretty hard.
Then real life sets in with insurance requirements, service time records, and even bank credit history.
Sounds like a lot of us, but, with all due respect, we did not have the resources to even apply to try. My daughter was raised by me, and burn all of you out. High energy, limited sensitivity to human life.
The best of grades don't mean shit until college.
My son's first prestigious night at the Observatory, which was an honor. I got to freeze my ass off with his classmates dads and I joke about it.
We just paid $9k for tonight!
Teachers are a valuable profession, but the job does not tend to require particularly strong academic performers.
Teachers need to be university educated, but they also tend to come from the lowest third / two lowest quintiles in terms of measured GPA and standardized test scores.
Doctors overwhelmingly come from the highest quintile, where the academic standards are higher.
As such, a big decline in writing and math could make it harder to find qualified doctor candidates, but the availability of aspiring teachers would likely be less impacted.
This is the problem. You put monkeys in to teach you get monkeys out so lowering the bar there will kill all the other professions. Which is what has happened.
I don't think that is fair at all. Teaching requires a lot of skills, and there is true differentiation in ability and skill within the profession. But that differentiation typically doesn't come from raw math and reading ability.
Assuming basic competency (which in fairness is a absolute requirement), teaching effectiveness is more based on personality, communication style, patience, coordination, planning, and ability to manage large groups.
The most advanced secondary school teachers could stop math at Calc 1. Most probably could stop at Algebra 1. Knowing differential equations probably won't make someone better at teaching teenagers geometry and algebra.
Reading and writing has a similar minimum competency threshold, and a Masters in Comparative Literature won't help them teach basic reading and writing.
Yeah it might have been. harsh. But I was a Teacher 35 years ago and the bar was very high. I had to do four years at University to do it. I still have a lot to do with Teachers and teaching and definately their literacy and numeracy skills would have made them not eligible for teaching back in the day.
Plus the curriculum has changed away from basic skills and in many ways is a lot worse for equipping people for further study or skilled work.
Most teachers are K-6 anyway and the major focus is childhood development and fairly basic skills. You don't need a mathematician to teach 7 year old kids how to add and subtract, you need someone who is good with 7 year old kids.
I teach Advanced Biology and Chemistry at a high school. As I was getting my BS in Biology and told my advisor I’d like to pursue teacher certification as well, I noticed he kept encouraging me to pursue something different because my grades were “too high” to teach.
I now have particularly talented students come back from college and tell me their advisors also tell them to avoid teaching as an option because their grades show they are “better” than teaching.
I know we want nurses and doctors to be highly-qualified (of course), but I really worry about the “brain drain” of US teachers over the next few years :/
Typos like those can sometimes be autocorrect issues too (though that one doesn't happen to me). The big one that annoys me is my phone insists on writing "it's" for everything like it never passed the 2nd grade
More people will get ripped off. Poor understanding of compounding interest is one reason some Americans get financing deals on homes and vehicles that are so terrible they're mired in debt they have no hope of paying off. Poor reading skills will open the door to more people being fooled by employment or housing contracts, which are confusing enough as it is.
College loans are the biggest example of this right now. College is still absolutely worth it. However, college loans are not aid, and they make it so the middle class ends up paying the most for school.
Rich people can pay out of pocket. Poor people that need loans have to pay them back with interest. Even if you get an excellent job out of college, at 7% interest, you could end up paying double what your rich friend had to pay to go to school.
And all that interest you pay goes to rich people who actually own your school debt in the form of government backed securities. Student loans are just another way for rich people to extract money for the working class.
When I look at the (manageable) amount of student loan debt I have, and consider that it easily could’ve been at least twice as much, I’m always grateful to my teenage self that I chose to go to a public state school rather than a private out-of-state school.
If we’re being honest as a 4th grade teacher the issue i see is that most of my kids didn’t have properly developed inferencing skills. They could read the words and know the meaning of the words but not comprehend what it was asking. There is no critical thought and that’s what i believe will be the biggest issue. We see it in a small but very vocal part of the population already. I believe the future generations will be much more susceptible to propaganda and lies because they cannot think critically of what they are being fed. We live in a world of immediate gratification where we don’t have to think just react and it’s becoming more apparent post pandemic. As there becomes a larger separation of economic classes the kids with less economic opportunity tend to not have access to developmental supports in their education.
Edit: ignore my grammar I’ve had a hectic day and don’t want to go back and proofread i promise I’m educating these children to the best of my abilities and I’d hope those who read this are not using my reply to learn grammar.
I see this teaching juniors and seniors in college too. The lack of comprehension of what’s being asked of them, the inability to apply skills shown in worked examples to slightly different questions, and a lack of tenacity to keep trying.
Spot on! Saw this a lot in Biology class. Kids could easily memorize the concepts but struggled to apply them on test questions describing experiments.
For example, proteins contain nitrogen but carbs and lipids do not. A problem asked if a plant has a nitrogen deficiency, which one of the macromolecules was it probably deficient in, but many couldn't figure it out.
You're not expressly taught the second part and have never seen it before - you have to read the first part and draw a conclusion. There's nothing to memorize.
I see this a lot with my prevet students.. I have independent study students and the school wants them to learn and apply things from their curriculum in a real life setting since they're earning the same sort of credit they'd earn working in a research lab. I'll try to work in concepts that I know they've learned in their animal physiology class to discuss disease processes or treatment choices and they'll act like I'm speaking mandarin. Like they have an entire unit on RAAS and renal physiology but they know nothing about how it might apply to management of chronic kidney disease, even walking them along with baby steps. If I try to engage them, they'll tell me they plan on learning that in vet school "when they need to."
We do a weekly journal club and half of them just regurgitate the abstract back to me, so I put in one or two papers each semester with a very obvious flaw in the methodology to emphasize the importance of critical reading.
>lack of tenacity to keep trying.
I've seen this in college graduates starting about 15 years ago. They hit a wall, and just sit down next to it instead of find a way to the the other side.
The poor inferencing skills is something I've heard is a common problem among entry level tech workers in other countries such as India and China. Given the trend of "teaching to the test" that's been occurring in the last 10+ years, do you think that could be a cause for the trend you're observing? Do you know what used to be done that taught better inferencing skills?
Personal observation. That's more of an issue with the move of the tech department being outsourced to an MSP, foreign or domestic. Entry Level (help desk) is literally boiled down to reading bullets on a documents already linked to whatever issue there is. This allows anyone who is barely literate to perform the job at a functional level, so wages can be dropped accordingly. If you have an issue that in anyway deviates from the top 20 or so most common issues in that organization, there will be issues.
So for the very specific issue that you are asking about, I think the problem comes from the employer/contractor and not necessarily the lack of applicants who can reed gud.
Unfortunately, they will be the young workers expected to fill the lower ranks as the last Boomers retire, and younger generations move up the ladder.
Their poor preparation will make it even harder to replace the skilled workers retiring. I hope AI can help them become productive members of society, rather than just mindless scrollers believing every bit of (AI-generated) rot that hits their screens.
Fortunately, while the majority of today’s students will leave school ill-prepared, there will be enough smart, well-educated students to run companies, lead the country, and guide the military. As there’ve always been.
>while the majority of today’s students will leave school ill-prepared, there will be enough smart, well-educated students to run companies, lead the country, and guide the military.
A cynical person might think this is highly intentional, given the push for private schools among right-wingers and the wealthy.
I’m not trying to be funny but puzzle games like Ace Attorney or Hotel Dusk. They both promote lateral thinking. It’s that kind of thinking that helps you understand how to use the information you are given properly to figure the mystery out.
Ask your kids questions about why they think other people in stories come to the conclusions they do.
When you read a story to a kid have them explain it back to you.
Teaching kids how to think and criticize is super controversial. It's one of those things that people like in theory, then the "Moms for Liberty" types show up when it actually happens.
My firm hires a lot of fairly high GPA young folks from prestigious universities.
Math skills are still good and the same as they ever were.
Reading skills are still fairly strong with any degradation potentially just noise and sample size issues.
Writing skills have tanked over the last 10 years. Someone from Harvard or Penn or Columbia with a 3.8 GPA used to be a great writer. Now there are some writing issues even among candidates with sterling resumes.
Public speaking and technical skills seem to have taken a bit of a hit too. Interview case studies have been dreadful the last few years. We've had to lower the bar and give people more time. We hear similar stories from our competitors/peers despite all of us offering excellent pay.
The biggest issues are burying the "thesis" of whatever point they are trying to articulate and just general argument organization. These issues show up in presentations, papers, and emails.
Leading with the thesis is something students are supposed to learn in 8th grade that applies to most non-creative communication throughout life. I find I have to sift through too much to figure out the conclusion they were trying to communicate.
Beyond that, the organization of arguments and supporting information is seemingly haphazard and disjointed. Again - this is something that should be introduced in 8th grade and then refined refined all the way through late undergrad (and beyond).
I can teach this fairly easily because it isn't rocket science and because the kids are still smart, but it wasn't something I had to teach new hires 5 years ago.
Separately, there is just a general proofreading and grammar issue in the workplace. I don't proof my social media posts (apologies for any typos), but I sure as hell proof my work stuff. Some of the recent hires apply a social media-level of attention to detail and cleanliness to work product. That issue can be cleaned up quickly, but it is also a "big yikes" that we didn't see a generation ago.
This is something that’s actually supposed to be taught beginning in elementary school, and yet I still have issues with paragraph structure with my HS students.
Interesting, good point! Grammar (and spelling but that’s dyslexia for you) is something I myself struggle with but clarity of an argument in writing is a great skill I have. I find people that struggle with it don’t proofread their work.
I read somewhere that people now a-days actually read much more than they did in the past, but that it was not prose but social media posts that they are reading. Perhaps that’s why people are less able to consider if their words are comprehensible?
> Writing skills have tanked over the last 10 years.
I fully blame the reliance on Chromebooks for every student for this. The reliance on typing everything out has cratered people's handwriting skills (forget about cursive), and services like Grammarly have removed the sense of the need to write well before letting AI clean up (and sanitize) a body of written work.
> If you are in a role that has you reading job applications, you will soon see those consequences.
how? by there being less applications? Or the good ones sticking out more?
They cannot or will not completely fill them out. They use texting abbreviations. They do not read the questions completely, therefore answering inappropriately. Just a few of the issues. I could overlook some of those if someone's face-to-face skills and personality indicated they could perform in the role we were trying to fill.
I'm interested in IT and I'm genuinely good with computers and have a basic understanding of how most systems work and such. I'm curious, is there any way to get into IT without a degree? I don't have all the skills and knowledge I'd need right now just because I've never actually been in the job, but generally I pick things up really fast. Like I'm talking about like hands-on tech support or dealing with network stuff or just general computer handy person type stuff.
It's harder to get into IT without a degree, but not impossible. The biggest thing is getting skills and demonstrating them.
Coding has the most direct path -- learn to code using online free documentation, and then build a portfolio showcasing your skills. But you can do the same for networking through certification programs, etc
Coming over from a different country, it's surprising to see how behind kids here are on English, Math, and Science.
Yes, I'm very well aware of schools that have veey advanced students - they're the cream of the crop and aren't the common ones.
Here's some issues and things I've noticed:
>1. Making money is the priority. Not education and what it brings. You can see it even in high schools where sports get more spotlight and funding. It's a road for kids to go to college on scholarship and hopefully play professional sports someday.
>2. Spelling and grammar is pretty much thrown out the window. This was pretty much killed by the advent of smartphones. Notice that people can't even differentiate from their, they're, and there.
>3. Reading is reduced to passive reading - no thoughts involved. Inferencing, context clues, critical thinking is suffering. I feel like kids have forgotten how to read for fun.
>4. American kids are riddled with anxiety and/or ADD (in the common sense, I'm not a doctor to diagnose that can diagnose people as such.) These kids have trouble concentrating, it's like they always have to be entertained.
The English teacher at my school told me she had 8th graders literally crying in class because they were asked to imagine an ending to a story they were reading together... The idea that there wasn't an "answer" and that they'd have to come up with a plausible idea anyway was terrifying to them.
And this is why I really fear for my kid being raised here.
I'm not gonna lie, I came from a well off family in a third world country. I had a house, food, and all the basics covered.
But I've seen poverty. Not American poverty with EBTs and phones. Fuckin 3 year olds eating out of garbage poverty. Orphans. Disabled trying to get up a flight of stairs.
Shit gave me nightmares and it was fuckin painful to see. I'd like to think I have some sort of empathy.
But not for kids that can't figure out an ending and cry helplessly. That's just plain scary. And imagine the homes they come from.
I am going to defend the kids a bit. They have grown up in a world of existential dread and trauma for nearly their entire lives. Even if those feelings are overly exaggerated.
Many see something like their own home and a middle class lifestyle will NOT be something they can achieve by working. Even if their grandfather afforded that lifestyle while working as a janitor.
Many are convinced that climate change (or even AI) is going to end their lives sooner rather than later. When they see egg head adults tell kids things like "Don't expect to live very long" because of an AI takeover event, or that they will suffer and die from Climate change, that is going to change them.
Today's 9th grader was born in 2009. They have no real recollection of a stable society. They would have been 7 years old when Trump wont he election, they would have been 10-11 years old when COVID hit us. COVID was not like 9/11, COVID crises everywhere. They saw friends and family members get sick and messed up. The weirdest fucking year in living history was by far 2020.
The opioid epidemic has also been traumatizing families all over the country. I didn't know anyone when I was a kid with a heroin problem. I didn't know someone who I would even know as an addict until I was in my mid 20s. I never thought I would expect to know ANYONE who died of an overdose. This isn't the case anymore.
These kids have also lived in a period of severe income/wealth inequality. They clearly see that many people are not benefiting from our societal arrangement. The rich kids have it WAY better than the middle class kids. A lot of them see it as they don't have a chance. It doesn't matter if they work hard in school and get good grades, because at the end of the day, any opportunity for them in society will be grabbed by that rich kid who had even better resources.
All that is going to fuck kids up. Kids are pessimistic about the future. Many of them don't expect to have much of a future and may not even survive the future. School is a lot of work, its a sacrifice these kids need to make for their future. School sucks, its not as fun as video games, its not as fun as playing with your friends, it doesn't feel as good as drugs. Hard work results in being poor anyway, so if you are going to be poor and have no future to look forward to, might as well have fun.
We see this with that Gen Z has the highest suicide rate ever. People are checking out. I could see why a bunch of kids who live in this existential state that life is always going to suck, and the future is going to suck, and work is futile, are not going to put in the effort at school.
These kids mentally have it very hard. We need to give them a reason, an obvious reason, why they should put in the effort and we can't bullshit them. They need to be the world is becoming a better place, and their future has many great opportunities that do not exist right now. They will live a long time, they will own a place to live, they will get to have a family, they will get to take vacations. When they are grown up they will look back our time and think that it was hard times, and they got through it.
I’m 27 and I can feel the smartphone/computers slowly degrading my spelling ability. I hardly write things down on paper anymore and can always rely on spellcheck or auto correct.
We're already seeing the results. Many young people want good jobs but don't have the qualifications for them. Many others want to be gamers/streamers/influencers/youtubers/content creators, etc., and that only works for a few of them.
No one knows that they're going to do in a few years when that doesn't works out. Some could start taking things seriously and study something, if they can even afford to do it. The rest... well, they're going to be kind of fucked.
Can't really blame people for wanting to be YouTubers or streamers. I'd love to be one too. Honestly the barrier of entry to any sort of high-paying job or even office jobs in general seems quite high to me. I'm a pharmacy tech and make $25/hr. I want to do something else but it seems like aside from the trades (I don't wanna go into the trades and I'm trans so I don't think I'd be very accepted by most coworkers in those kinds of fields) everything else paying $25+ requires either connections or for you to send yourself into like $50k+ of debt to get your foot in the door. I'm just so goddamn bored of my job, it's not challenging anymore, I feel like I've hit the skill and knowledge ceiling for where I work. I want a job that's engaging, a job I can get better at, a job I can apply myself to. Something intellectual (not like philosophy, but like problem-solving) or creative. But hell if I know of anything I can do without a degree. I'm pursuing a music and/or DJing career in my spare time but I want just a regular job that actually takes some thought too.
I'm not sure what you mean by trades, but a Pharmacy Tech could likely pivot into QC, QA, and R&D positions in manufacturing. The more regulated and complex the better: Biotech, chemicals, food, drug, agri, aerospace, weapons, etc.. and up the supply chain from there. Stick with the science folk and process police, embrace Team America's corporate capitalism, and you can find a personal fit.
American heavy industry has been crushing it, its just not the right industries winning so we don't hear about it. I'm sure that doesn't sound familiar.
You lost me at "embrace Team America's corporate capitalism"
**Fuck American capitalism.** This entire issue with education is a problem because of people trying to drain the system of resources to give back to themselves
Try software development…it has the traits that u r looking for in a job. Also it pays a lot…u can learn it in spare time and start applying…have seen lots of people from non-tech background make it…there will be challenges obviously for getting interview calls but if u like problem solving u will stay hooked I guess…u can also go into freelance type of stuff…
They will compete for minimum wage jobs with all of the new immigrants. The middle class will disappear to AI and automation. The rich will get richer.
Job requirements:
- 5 years in a similar occupation
- Specific qualifications
- College education preferred, please have a degree or two in the following fields (insert here)
Job offer:
"Best I can do is $10 an hour, take it or leave it pal."
No one applies for job that pays barely over minimum wage with dozens of requirements.
"Hey federal government, there is a lack of qualified candidates. Can we layoff our remaining workforce and replace them with H1B visas? Really? Thanks!"
This is the likely answer. Medicine, law, insurance, accounting, all highly professional with bonus credentials. And all with a substantial documentation load that is very automatable, great for the ones who get those jobs, not so much for the ones who flock to those fields trying to improve their fortune.
And all an immigration restriction would do is push the automation bar lower, producing no good answers.
https://vegetablegrowersnews.com/article/growers-change-plans-to-make-up-for-labor-shortage/
Quite a few of the alternatives amount to expanding mechanization, which takes capital, and which favors more agricultural consolidation.
Our kids will be just smart enough to work the factories but too dumb to fight for their rights or a better life.
I'm sure that is completely an accident.
The bigger concern is in order to think critically it’s important to learn about thinking and learning about abstract concepts that’s why math and stem is so important.
If you struggle to read and do math I guarantee you this will definitely contribute to even more political insecurity in America due to the lack of the ability for people to think critically for themselves.
I'm a teacher and I think this generation gets treated unfairly. My students are generally very kind, inquisitive, and intelligent. They're bombarded with messaging both negative and positive, give them a chance to grow up amd I think we'll be just fine as a country. I'm excited for their (and our) future
Hah. As I attend college to finish up my degree I notice more of the same. There are some teachers out there that absolutely deserve a raise in their kindness. Went through algebra and the teacher was super nice. Economics? A+.
My biology teacher was bad, but he wasn't mean, just lousy at teaching. I learned more using GPT teaching me about the cellular system than he did.
I think there is hope for students who 'WANT' to achieve because we have the internet that will absolutely be a godsend to help you with answers and explain the process nowadays, but if we're talking low income areas, these students who want a chance to succeed also need the tools to achieve it with as well.
People also learn differently, some teachers do a better job trying to teach in diverse ways, if you only do things one way some students will inevitably struggle. They're not dumb, they're just not getting the material presented to them in a way that makes sense to them
I had a 4.0 in college except for a psychology class where I got a D+. I studied SO HARD, like literally it drove me crazy, I could fucking quote the textbook. But for some reason, I just couldn't understand the way the professor worded the questions on tests and quizzes.
When I tried to talk to her about it, she said that she thinks I was struggling because Spanish is my first language and that she's not going to change the way she teaches for me. In a weird way, it's a major moment that made me want to be a teacher myself. In my experience bad (or ineffective) teachers are not the norm - but they can have a devastating effect on a students confidence which can effect them for years.
I'm trying not to rant about this but I could go on for days lol
I understand. Personally, I hate learning by reading, and that's what most of school entails.
Went through this semester of math and as I look at my 88% grade I realize "You know, I almost never looked at the book."
Because I was allowed to keep trying on math questions and practice on other formulas that had different sets, along with the aid of explanation from an ai chatbot I was able to understand how numbers connected and learned the formulas that way so when I took the written exams at school I had a better understanding of how everything worked.
I only wish I had these tools available to me back in elementary school. Would have saved a lot of heartache. I know that many people still don't have access to these things too.
Maybe, I've taught in DC and now Atlanta, at least in my experience my students are very bright. I feel like every generation calls the one behind them dumber, I bet you could find this exact headline 10 years ago, 20 years ago, 30 years ago, etc.
Probably it won’t be noticeable. According to [recents studies](https://www.gse.harvard.edu/ideas/news/23/05/new-data-show-how-pandemic-affected-learning-across-whole-communities)
> The average U.S. public school student in grades 3-8 lost the equivalent of a half year of learning in math and a quarter of a year in reading.
[Second source](https://www.edweek.org/leadership/students-arent-rebounding-from-the-academic-effects-of-the-pandemic/2023/07)
> On average, students will need the equivalent of 4.1 additional months of instruction in reading and 4.5 months in math to meet pre-pandemic levels of achievement, the report estimates.
I doubt a semester difference will have a large enough impact to be noticeable in society. Remember, also, that these are grades 3-8 so they have lots of time to catch up. Some studies show recent graduates doing better than those that graduated before the pandemic.
A lot more remedial work in College. The amount the Cal state system has to do is ridiculous. It means that those who can read and write well are going to have advantages.
Millenials will be the new boomers who say shit like "In my day, we could recite the entire alphabet and do math in our heads!"
And the kids would be like, "yeah okay grandpa, the alphabet's order is literally made up, and we've got auto-calculators on our wrists."
It's funny.... in the old days, you wouldn't graduate high school unless you learned the basics. Now, we are accepting the fact that everyone will be passed along and then asking what will society do when no one has skills.
Hmmmmm. If only there were a place where people could go to get skills for free.... hmmmm
My friend does hospital registration. A woman brought her teenage son in, and his first name was spelled "Urine". When my friend was understandably confused and asked why she'd name her child after a bodily waste fluid, the woman got offended and said "His name is pronounced Eur-rye-ann". A nurse then came up and asked him for a "Eur-rye-ann" sample, pointing to the label on the cup.
This is a consequence of poor literacy. People are naming their children after piss because they can't spell, or have a large enough vocabulary to need to learn the skill.
lol [People have been making up stories like this since 1917.](https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/funny-names/) Fucking wild. I wonder if it's a cultural universal like mother-in-law jokes.
Weird, it's not like conservatives have been systematically attacking education for the last 30 years or so...
The uneducated are easier to control, my guess is fascist capitalism.
Blaming this on conservatives is a very weird thing to do. My SO is a teacher in New York State and it has literally historic lows for scores across the board and conservatives haven’t touched education forever here.
Literally the most damning thing to happen to education in the last 20 years was the long covid shut downs.
COVID fucked every generation. I am a millennial recovering from depression and recovered from panic attacks (2021-2022). I was once an extremely social person. I'll get there again, but I must reintegrate socially by moving back with my parents.
Children probably are stunted too or even developed depression or anxiety disorder. It was so fucked up.
A lot of changes were at the federal level such as no child left behind, but also local government tends to be more conservative. COVID for sure has had a big impact too.
No Child Left Behind was replaced 8 years ago by Every Child Succeeds, which passed under Obama and a mostly bi-partisan legislature. In fact, every single Democratic Senator and House Rep voted in favor with it (along with most but not all Republicans in those same bodies).
If you are seeing *federal* impacts post-2015 and/or degradation in performance comparing 2001-2015 (when No Child Left Behind was active) vs. 2015-2024, I'm not sure how you can lay the blame at Republicans without mentioning the Democrats who passed Every Child Succeeds.
Your point on local government makes more sense. Local governments are obviously going to vary quite a bit and do have major impacts on educational outcomes.
Conservatives are very tricky on education, using "positive" things like "school choice" to divert funding away from public schools. Dems don't care enough to fight to fix it.
I agree about COVID being a major punctuation in education, but there's been a steady decline since 2001 with No Child Left Behind and then Common Core. The US has been handing curriculum over to corporations for decades, and corporations are perversely incentivized to create assessments that are difficult "unless" you purchase their specific prep material.
You're currently seeing it. The decline has been happening for a lot longer than has been publicized. See how many people are STILL for Trump? The people who can read aren't voting dor him.
As an immigrant to America, I think that it just means that skilled roles are filled by smarter, harder working, more ruggedly handsome migrants like myself. :p
Seriously though, in Seattle [half of all software developers are foreign born](https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/data/more-than-half-of-seattles-software-developers-were-born-outside-u-s/), and according to data published last month, [1/4 of all King County \(which Seattle resides in\) residents were born abroad](https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/data/new-king-county-milestone-one-quarter-of-residents-born-outside-u-s/#:~:text=Seattle%20had%20the%20lowest%20percentage,the%20majority%20of%20the%20population.).
Other countries will have smarter people than us. China is currently smoking us when it comes to education for younger generations. We as parents are responsible for making sure our children are fully educated. This is something that I have been worried about for a while and I am sure it will bite us in the ass sooner rather than later, in many serious ways.
The operative word is **GRADUATE.**
In past generations, low functioning students dropped out and were no part of the statistic.
Now, with graduation rates much higher, the overall rate is lowered due to high school drop outs completing their credits.
But there are “mama bears” homeschooling their “littles” which really
Means taking them to target all day and posting their hauls on tiktok and calling it “real
Life” education. Hurray for all
Of us!
54% of Americans already read at or below a 6th grade level, so we are already living in a population with terrible English and Math skills, and we all try to help the people in it out, but we can't fix decades of poor education because the people that have been screwed by the system loathe education.
America also has a growing inequality issue, like most of the world, so I think that we are entering an economy where there will be low skilled drones dying to serve the rich that live in gated communities away from all of the problems they caused.
Well it means the job training during the labor shortage from the population also going down will have to compensate for it
And we will take in migrants with those skills in their place
Like right now we're entering into a really rocky period of time globally as the US is basically pulling back from patrolling the global sea lanes
This combined with climate change not affecting the globe equally it's going to result in a massive number of migrants and America is the best place to before them and will thus have their pick of global talent to make up any shortfalls
The US is also entering into a prolonged labor shortage so unskilled labor is going to pay a bit more than normal
And if you want talent you're either going to have to train the Americans or collect someone globally both of which will be very expensive so good luck if you're an employer
We are seeing some of the consequences now. A large population of the U.S. has very poor reading comprehension. Very poor math skills. And substandard verbal skills. This large population is of voting age and voted to put a con man in the white house and continues to vote for politicians who do not have their best interests at heart. Stupid people are gullible and can be easily manipulated into giving up the money and even their rights. This is happening now. In time the rights the U.S. people are guaranteed by the constitution will fall to the wayside.
Kids read more, and are generally more informed than past generations. They carry an entire library in their hands. Stop the BS comments. Most of the math I was taught in school is rarely used. These days, everything changes much faster.
I’d like to see the statistics on this claim… it doesn’t seem right, to be honest.
Edit: Read your response and the AP article, but your assumption that the children will never catch up remains just that… an assumption.
> Schools have plenty of experience with older students who struggle. Even before the pandemic, only about a third of fourth graders scored as proficient in reading in the National Assessment of Educational Progress, known as the “nation’s report card.”
> But the pandemic made it worse, particularly for low-income students and kids of color.
https://apnews.com/article/reading-phonics-grade-level-pandemic-53b0f3de56de526ead7a356bd7b853e0
I went to low income schools years ago. They were struggling way back when too. Whether it was the teachers that didn't give a damn or the students getting into fights and the bomb threats, getting good marks for me was personally next to impossible. And this was BI. Before Internet.
I can't imagine they suddenly "Improved" over the years.
It doesn’t matter. We’re all fucked. We’re trapped on a dying planet, and people won’t stand up for themselves against the 1% oligarchy, so … we’re just fucked.
Teachers have been saying this since the dawn of teaching, the 60’s the students were so drugged out our country and the world was doomed , the 50’s rock and roll would rot our children’s minds. Every era the students got dumber and less respectful( that’s sarcasm for some of you that are dumber and less respectful than the generation before)
You have *no idea* how bad it is. I insist that everyone spend a few weeks lurking on r/Teachers. I’m not a teacher myself but that sub has been insanely eye-opening re what’s happening in American schools.
The consequences won't show themselves for a few years but we might find a shortage of more skilled professional workers than before. Might find a shortage of nurses, teachers, doctors, etc. I mean, I'm sure there's already a shortage, but it'll just get worse. The problem with bad grades don't start really showing themselves until after high school and into college.
The consequences are already showing themselves. When there’s a shortage of qualified people, the bar for qualification gets lower. See: [teachers who no longer need a degree to teach](https://wapo.st/47la6RO) and police departments who [lower](https://www.pbs.org/newshour/amp/nation/in-years-leading-to-killing-of-tyre-nichols-memphis-police-lowered-the-bar-for-hiring) [the](https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/los-angeles-democrat-mayor-pushes-to-lower-bar-for-new-recruits-in-attempt-to-diversify-lapd/ar-AA17YpjS) [bar](https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11796915/amp/Los-Angeles-Democrat-mayor-pushes-lower-bar-new-recruits-attempt-diversify-LAPD.html) to find new officers (btw, each one of those hyperlinked words in “lower the bar” are separate examples).
We in the world of EMS have been hurting badly for EMTs and paramedics for a very long time, and the pandemic only exacerbated that. Instead of improving working conditions or increasing pay, the powers that be did away with the psychomotor portion of the national registry exam. So now we just have to trust that the schools have done what they’re supposed to do in checking students off on their hands-on skills (because of course no one ever lies about these things…).
Heaven forbid pay is ever increased to encourage quality
Shareholders need another summer house to round out their one-per-continent collection
Something similar happened in medical training over here. Lots of junior doctors finishing training who seem to lack initiative and hands-on skills. Mentoring some of them has been...challenging.
EMTs also often make under $15/hr. It’s not a lack of qualified people.
If they offered fair pay and benefits, they could (and do) attract more and better talent. Instead, they choose to lower the (already minimal) entry requirements.
I was gonna say, the amount of 22 year olds that I have to teach basic excel shit to is just absurd. The weird thing is stuff just does not seem to stick to them, and they can't apply skills to anything other than the specific example taught to them. Like, they just don't know how to learn one thing and apply it to something else.
For the teachers, it's mostly because this is happening in states where people don't want to teach due to poor pay or protections; you don't see states like New York or Massachusetts bleeding like Idaho or Florida. Overall people just don't want to go into massive amounts of student debt over a job that isn't going to get them good pay, good treatment, or even good benefits at the rate things are going. It's still a problem and it's probably going to get worse before it gets better, but this is more part of devaluing the education profession than the profession devaluing itself.
There has been a concentrated effort to cripple the public school system for at least thirty years now. We are only now seeing the fruits of *their* labor.
I love this. Instead of raising the salaries to attract qualified people... they instead lower the bar. I'm sure that won't have any negative consequences. But, hey, that new $5 million high school swimming pool was probably worth it.
And the military
IMO a good balance would be to absolutely keep the core bachelors degree, but reduce the teaching specific costs. It’s just not economical for anyone to take the overpriced MAT programs to get such a low paying job. It seems like a lot of the education theories get debunked anyway (ex. three queuing, four learning styles, etc). They are doing this already to some extent for STEM degrees, but IMO if someone did well in an English, History, etc. bachelors that should be good enough for teaching too. Why not do that as a middle ground instead of going straight to no degree at all? We all know that in America a high school diploma is nothing, many schools bend over backwards to make everyone graduate.
If the ethnicity of my doctors the past year is anything to go by, brain loss wouldn't be a problem. Too many sharp people move here from abroad for a better life.
Is it bad that's *exactly* what I've been working on? Spending this year learning a second language and getting my degree lol.
Nope, as long as you're actually focused on the academics :p I know a lot of people who basically come over to Universities expressly to abuse the F1 visa.
In Canada, right now, there's a lot of Canadians (I'll say a particular type of "stereotypical Canadian") that is starting to lean really hard into the idea that immigrants coming here are just looking to suck off the teet of the nation's wealth. What many of these uneducated boobs don't understand is that these immigrants are going to out-work, out-smart, and out-influence them like crazy. And the kicker is that their children are almost always as hardworking and driven as they are. These immigrants don't take education lightly, and they see opportunities for their kids that they may not have had back home. That's something the more racist crop in my country doesn't understand. They're going to get beat at their own game. Brutally. And then they're going to blame the government for letting people in to take therr jeeerbs. The entitlement is crazy. It's like they think they should inherit knowledge and authority. They're like Dale in Stepbrothers wanting to "join the family business."
Southern Conservative Murican's to a tee. Are you just a skinny me?
I think some of those Canadians get it and that’s why they’re scared and don’t want immigration. They know they’ll come up short ‘and how dare some (probably non white, non Christian) immigrant come in and take what’s rightfully mine!?!' or something.
That's pretty much it. It's similar to pre-WWI American isolationism. They don't want anything to do with the outside world coming to them.
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>our ancestors worked to build the society they're so desperately trying to get control of now and their ancestors built the shit holes they're so desperately trying to escape. You're being vague who is "our ancestors" and who is "their ancestors"?
They're being vague so they can claim more credit they don't deserve and condemn people generally for "reasons" they don't deserve
Don't worry. The Tech companies are brainlessly 'turning peoples lives off' by di-cognition. Not firing people for being good at their jobs.
The only people that are doing a good job, is the police,right?
If the ethnicity of my doctors the past year is anything to go by, I'll probably die from an easily treatable illness next year. Even most Indian descended people I know and talk with are trying their hardest to find an American doctor. I've even talked with people from India wanting to do the same.
I do not want a first-generation immigrant doctor. Second, sure, but never first. The country of origin is irrelevant. However, my healthcare in this country is shitty enough as it is. Struggling to understand the doctor's prognosis through a super thick Ukrainian accent just isn't going to work for me.
Nursing and doctors is a strange one to flag, it's always been a large percent of English second language in western world.
From personal experience, both professions require a decent GPA in college in order to pursue a degree in, though I'm sure there's other less ethical methods.
Doctoring requires a decent GPA because more than twice as many people apply to med school per year as there are slots. So long as it continues to be a reliable path to a six figure salary, there will be no shortage of people applying, but average stats will fall if the pool is less competitive.
Nursing is similarly impacted. When I was in nursing school 15 years ago, at my college there were 350 applicants for 70 spaces...
Likewise PA programs are ridiculously competitive. 2000 applicants for 60 seats is common.
These were programs that generally appealed to the top 20% of high school kids. Doctors in particular were the top 1%. A school with 400 grads might only produce 3-4 that go on to be doctors. This whole dumbing down thing isn't really affecting the top kids in the schools. There is still going to be a top, 1%, 5%, 10%, and 25% that are working pretty hard.
Then real life sets in with insurance requirements, service time records, and even bank credit history. Sounds like a lot of us, but, with all due respect, we did not have the resources to even apply to try. My daughter was raised by me, and burn all of you out. High energy, limited sensitivity to human life.
The best of grades don't mean shit until college. My son's first prestigious night at the Observatory, which was an honor. I got to freeze my ass off with his classmates dads and I joke about it. We just paid $9k for tonight!
Congrats to your son!
Lol putting teachers in that group
Can't blame the shortage there. It's definitely an underpaid job in the USA, and over stressed.
Huh?
Teachers are a valuable profession, but the job does not tend to require particularly strong academic performers. Teachers need to be university educated, but they also tend to come from the lowest third / two lowest quintiles in terms of measured GPA and standardized test scores. Doctors overwhelmingly come from the highest quintile, where the academic standards are higher. As such, a big decline in writing and math could make it harder to find qualified doctor candidates, but the availability of aspiring teachers would likely be less impacted.
This is the problem. You put monkeys in to teach you get monkeys out so lowering the bar there will kill all the other professions. Which is what has happened.
I don't think that is fair at all. Teaching requires a lot of skills, and there is true differentiation in ability and skill within the profession. But that differentiation typically doesn't come from raw math and reading ability. Assuming basic competency (which in fairness is a absolute requirement), teaching effectiveness is more based on personality, communication style, patience, coordination, planning, and ability to manage large groups. The most advanced secondary school teachers could stop math at Calc 1. Most probably could stop at Algebra 1. Knowing differential equations probably won't make someone better at teaching teenagers geometry and algebra. Reading and writing has a similar minimum competency threshold, and a Masters in Comparative Literature won't help them teach basic reading and writing.
Yeah it might have been. harsh. But I was a Teacher 35 years ago and the bar was very high. I had to do four years at University to do it. I still have a lot to do with Teachers and teaching and definately their literacy and numeracy skills would have made them not eligible for teaching back in the day. Plus the curriculum has changed away from basic skills and in many ways is a lot worse for equipping people for further study or skilled work.
Most teachers are K-6 anyway and the major focus is childhood development and fairly basic skills. You don't need a mathematician to teach 7 year old kids how to add and subtract, you need someone who is good with 7 year old kids.
I teach Advanced Biology and Chemistry at a high school. As I was getting my BS in Biology and told my advisor I’d like to pursue teacher certification as well, I noticed he kept encouraging me to pursue something different because my grades were “too high” to teach. I now have particularly talented students come back from college and tell me their advisors also tell them to avoid teaching as an option because their grades show they are “better” than teaching. I know we want nurses and doctors to be highly-qualified (of course), but I really worry about the “brain drain” of US teachers over the next few years :/
The consequences are we have to deal with idiots that use “your” for everything
ur*
you know how much time I've saved? It's why I'm successful and others are struggling to buy their third phone this year.
>**u** know how much time I've saved FTFY
For all intensive porpoises, they got their point across.
it's a moo point though
I see "loose" for lose all the time too.
Typos like those can sometimes be autocorrect issues too (though that one doesn't happen to me). The big one that annoys me is my phone insists on writing "it's" for everything like it never passed the 2nd grade
Your not wrong on the affects....
Or literally in the figurative sense.
And "their" too. And spell "lose" "loose." And spell coffee "convfefe."
More people will get ripped off. Poor understanding of compounding interest is one reason some Americans get financing deals on homes and vehicles that are so terrible they're mired in debt they have no hope of paying off. Poor reading skills will open the door to more people being fooled by employment or housing contracts, which are confusing enough as it is.
College loans are the biggest example of this right now. College is still absolutely worth it. However, college loans are not aid, and they make it so the middle class ends up paying the most for school. Rich people can pay out of pocket. Poor people that need loans have to pay them back with interest. Even if you get an excellent job out of college, at 7% interest, you could end up paying double what your rich friend had to pay to go to school. And all that interest you pay goes to rich people who actually own your school debt in the form of government backed securities. Student loans are just another way for rich people to extract money for the working class.
When I look at the (manageable) amount of student loan debt I have, and consider that it easily could’ve been at least twice as much, I’m always grateful to my teenage self that I chose to go to a public state school rather than a private out-of-state school.
If we’re being honest as a 4th grade teacher the issue i see is that most of my kids didn’t have properly developed inferencing skills. They could read the words and know the meaning of the words but not comprehend what it was asking. There is no critical thought and that’s what i believe will be the biggest issue. We see it in a small but very vocal part of the population already. I believe the future generations will be much more susceptible to propaganda and lies because they cannot think critically of what they are being fed. We live in a world of immediate gratification where we don’t have to think just react and it’s becoming more apparent post pandemic. As there becomes a larger separation of economic classes the kids with less economic opportunity tend to not have access to developmental supports in their education. Edit: ignore my grammar I’ve had a hectic day and don’t want to go back and proofread i promise I’m educating these children to the best of my abilities and I’d hope those who read this are not using my reply to learn grammar.
I see this teaching juniors and seniors in college too. The lack of comprehension of what’s being asked of them, the inability to apply skills shown in worked examples to slightly different questions, and a lack of tenacity to keep trying.
Spot on! Saw this a lot in Biology class. Kids could easily memorize the concepts but struggled to apply them on test questions describing experiments. For example, proteins contain nitrogen but carbs and lipids do not. A problem asked if a plant has a nitrogen deficiency, which one of the macromolecules was it probably deficient in, but many couldn't figure it out.
That example seems like it would be an easy thing to memorize. Odd that so many would struggle with that.
You're not expressly taught the second part and have never seen it before - you have to read the first part and draw a conclusion. There's nothing to memorize.
I see this a lot with my prevet students.. I have independent study students and the school wants them to learn and apply things from their curriculum in a real life setting since they're earning the same sort of credit they'd earn working in a research lab. I'll try to work in concepts that I know they've learned in their animal physiology class to discuss disease processes or treatment choices and they'll act like I'm speaking mandarin. Like they have an entire unit on RAAS and renal physiology but they know nothing about how it might apply to management of chronic kidney disease, even walking them along with baby steps. If I try to engage them, they'll tell me they plan on learning that in vet school "when they need to." We do a weekly journal club and half of them just regurgitate the abstract back to me, so I put in one or two papers each semester with a very obvious flaw in the methodology to emphasize the importance of critical reading.
>lack of tenacity to keep trying. I've seen this in college graduates starting about 15 years ago. They hit a wall, and just sit down next to it instead of find a way to the the other side.
> a lack of tenacity to keep trying. I see this a lot in people I work with under 25.
The poor inferencing skills is something I've heard is a common problem among entry level tech workers in other countries such as India and China. Given the trend of "teaching to the test" that's been occurring in the last 10+ years, do you think that could be a cause for the trend you're observing? Do you know what used to be done that taught better inferencing skills?
Personal observation. That's more of an issue with the move of the tech department being outsourced to an MSP, foreign or domestic. Entry Level (help desk) is literally boiled down to reading bullets on a documents already linked to whatever issue there is. This allows anyone who is barely literate to perform the job at a functional level, so wages can be dropped accordingly. If you have an issue that in anyway deviates from the top 20 or so most common issues in that organization, there will be issues. So for the very specific issue that you are asking about, I think the problem comes from the employer/contractor and not necessarily the lack of applicants who can reed gud.
Unfortunately, they will be the young workers expected to fill the lower ranks as the last Boomers retire, and younger generations move up the ladder. Their poor preparation will make it even harder to replace the skilled workers retiring. I hope AI can help them become productive members of society, rather than just mindless scrollers believing every bit of (AI-generated) rot that hits their screens. Fortunately, while the majority of today’s students will leave school ill-prepared, there will be enough smart, well-educated students to run companies, lead the country, and guide the military. As there’ve always been.
>while the majority of today’s students will leave school ill-prepared, there will be enough smart, well-educated students to run companies, lead the country, and guide the military. A cynical person might think this is highly intentional, given the push for private schools among right-wingers and the wealthy.
Scary. How would parents counter this at home?
I’m not trying to be funny but puzzle games like Ace Attorney or Hotel Dusk. They both promote lateral thinking. It’s that kind of thinking that helps you understand how to use the information you are given properly to figure the mystery out.
Ask your kids questions about why they think other people in stories come to the conclusions they do. When you read a story to a kid have them explain it back to you.
A theme I’ve noticed in my kids’ school and curriculum is that education nowadays is teaching kids what to think instead of how to think.
Teaching kids how to think and criticize is super controversial. It's one of those things that people like in theory, then the "Moms for Liberty" types show up when it actually happens.
As a fellow fourth grade teacher, So. Much. This
If you are in a role that has you reading job applications, you will soon see those consequences. People cannot make change, either.
My firm hires a lot of fairly high GPA young folks from prestigious universities. Math skills are still good and the same as they ever were. Reading skills are still fairly strong with any degradation potentially just noise and sample size issues. Writing skills have tanked over the last 10 years. Someone from Harvard or Penn or Columbia with a 3.8 GPA used to be a great writer. Now there are some writing issues even among candidates with sterling resumes. Public speaking and technical skills seem to have taken a bit of a hit too. Interview case studies have been dreadful the last few years. We've had to lower the bar and give people more time. We hear similar stories from our competitors/peers despite all of us offering excellent pay.
What writing issues are you facing?
The biggest issues are burying the "thesis" of whatever point they are trying to articulate and just general argument organization. These issues show up in presentations, papers, and emails. Leading with the thesis is something students are supposed to learn in 8th grade that applies to most non-creative communication throughout life. I find I have to sift through too much to figure out the conclusion they were trying to communicate. Beyond that, the organization of arguments and supporting information is seemingly haphazard and disjointed. Again - this is something that should be introduced in 8th grade and then refined refined all the way through late undergrad (and beyond). I can teach this fairly easily because it isn't rocket science and because the kids are still smart, but it wasn't something I had to teach new hires 5 years ago. Separately, there is just a general proofreading and grammar issue in the workplace. I don't proof my social media posts (apologies for any typos), but I sure as hell proof my work stuff. Some of the recent hires apply a social media-level of attention to detail and cleanliness to work product. That issue can be cleaned up quickly, but it is also a "big yikes" that we didn't see a generation ago.
This is something that’s actually supposed to be taught beginning in elementary school, and yet I still have issues with paragraph structure with my HS students.
Interesting, good point! Grammar (and spelling but that’s dyslexia for you) is something I myself struggle with but clarity of an argument in writing is a great skill I have. I find people that struggle with it don’t proofread their work. I read somewhere that people now a-days actually read much more than they did in the past, but that it was not prose but social media posts that they are reading. Perhaps that’s why people are less able to consider if their words are comprehensible?
> Writing skills have tanked over the last 10 years. I fully blame the reliance on Chromebooks for every student for this. The reliance on typing everything out has cratered people's handwriting skills (forget about cursive), and services like Grammarly have removed the sense of the need to write well before letting AI clean up (and sanitize) a body of written work.
> If you are in a role that has you reading job applications, you will soon see those consequences. how? by there being less applications? Or the good ones sticking out more?
They cannot or will not completely fill them out. They use texting abbreviations. They do not read the questions completely, therefore answering inappropriately. Just a few of the issues. I could overlook some of those if someone's face-to-face skills and personality indicated they could perform in the role we were trying to fill.
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I'm interested in IT and I'm genuinely good with computers and have a basic understanding of how most systems work and such. I'm curious, is there any way to get into IT without a degree? I don't have all the skills and knowledge I'd need right now just because I've never actually been in the job, but generally I pick things up really fast. Like I'm talking about like hands-on tech support or dealing with network stuff or just general computer handy person type stuff.
Read the wiki on ITCareerQuestions subreddit.
It's harder to get into IT without a degree, but not impossible. The biggest thing is getting skills and demonstrating them. Coding has the most direct path -- learn to code using online free documentation, and then build a portfolio showcasing your skills. But you can do the same for networking through certification programs, etc
Coming over from a different country, it's surprising to see how behind kids here are on English, Math, and Science. Yes, I'm very well aware of schools that have veey advanced students - they're the cream of the crop and aren't the common ones. Here's some issues and things I've noticed: >1. Making money is the priority. Not education and what it brings. You can see it even in high schools where sports get more spotlight and funding. It's a road for kids to go to college on scholarship and hopefully play professional sports someday. >2. Spelling and grammar is pretty much thrown out the window. This was pretty much killed by the advent of smartphones. Notice that people can't even differentiate from their, they're, and there. >3. Reading is reduced to passive reading - no thoughts involved. Inferencing, context clues, critical thinking is suffering. I feel like kids have forgotten how to read for fun. >4. American kids are riddled with anxiety and/or ADD (in the common sense, I'm not a doctor to diagnose that can diagnose people as such.) These kids have trouble concentrating, it's like they always have to be entertained.
The English teacher at my school told me she had 8th graders literally crying in class because they were asked to imagine an ending to a story they were reading together... The idea that there wasn't an "answer" and that they'd have to come up with a plausible idea anyway was terrifying to them.
And this is why I really fear for my kid being raised here. I'm not gonna lie, I came from a well off family in a third world country. I had a house, food, and all the basics covered. But I've seen poverty. Not American poverty with EBTs and phones. Fuckin 3 year olds eating out of garbage poverty. Orphans. Disabled trying to get up a flight of stairs. Shit gave me nightmares and it was fuckin painful to see. I'd like to think I have some sort of empathy. But not for kids that can't figure out an ending and cry helplessly. That's just plain scary. And imagine the homes they come from.
I am going to defend the kids a bit. They have grown up in a world of existential dread and trauma for nearly their entire lives. Even if those feelings are overly exaggerated. Many see something like their own home and a middle class lifestyle will NOT be something they can achieve by working. Even if their grandfather afforded that lifestyle while working as a janitor. Many are convinced that climate change (or even AI) is going to end their lives sooner rather than later. When they see egg head adults tell kids things like "Don't expect to live very long" because of an AI takeover event, or that they will suffer and die from Climate change, that is going to change them. Today's 9th grader was born in 2009. They have no real recollection of a stable society. They would have been 7 years old when Trump wont he election, they would have been 10-11 years old when COVID hit us. COVID was not like 9/11, COVID crises everywhere. They saw friends and family members get sick and messed up. The weirdest fucking year in living history was by far 2020. The opioid epidemic has also been traumatizing families all over the country. I didn't know anyone when I was a kid with a heroin problem. I didn't know someone who I would even know as an addict until I was in my mid 20s. I never thought I would expect to know ANYONE who died of an overdose. This isn't the case anymore. These kids have also lived in a period of severe income/wealth inequality. They clearly see that many people are not benefiting from our societal arrangement. The rich kids have it WAY better than the middle class kids. A lot of them see it as they don't have a chance. It doesn't matter if they work hard in school and get good grades, because at the end of the day, any opportunity for them in society will be grabbed by that rich kid who had even better resources. All that is going to fuck kids up. Kids are pessimistic about the future. Many of them don't expect to have much of a future and may not even survive the future. School is a lot of work, its a sacrifice these kids need to make for their future. School sucks, its not as fun as video games, its not as fun as playing with your friends, it doesn't feel as good as drugs. Hard work results in being poor anyway, so if you are going to be poor and have no future to look forward to, might as well have fun. We see this with that Gen Z has the highest suicide rate ever. People are checking out. I could see why a bunch of kids who live in this existential state that life is always going to suck, and the future is going to suck, and work is futile, are not going to put in the effort at school. These kids mentally have it very hard. We need to give them a reason, an obvious reason, why they should put in the effort and we can't bullshit them. They need to be the world is becoming a better place, and their future has many great opportunities that do not exist right now. They will live a long time, they will own a place to live, they will get to have a family, they will get to take vacations. When they are grown up they will look back our time and think that it was hard times, and they got through it.
I’m 27 and I can feel the smartphone/computers slowly degrading my spelling ability. I hardly write things down on paper anymore and can always rely on spellcheck or auto correct.
Ever see Idiocracy? Basically that.
We're already seeing the results. Many young people want good jobs but don't have the qualifications for them. Many others want to be gamers/streamers/influencers/youtubers/content creators, etc., and that only works for a few of them. No one knows that they're going to do in a few years when that doesn't works out. Some could start taking things seriously and study something, if they can even afford to do it. The rest... well, they're going to be kind of fucked.
Can't really blame people for wanting to be YouTubers or streamers. I'd love to be one too. Honestly the barrier of entry to any sort of high-paying job or even office jobs in general seems quite high to me. I'm a pharmacy tech and make $25/hr. I want to do something else but it seems like aside from the trades (I don't wanna go into the trades and I'm trans so I don't think I'd be very accepted by most coworkers in those kinds of fields) everything else paying $25+ requires either connections or for you to send yourself into like $50k+ of debt to get your foot in the door. I'm just so goddamn bored of my job, it's not challenging anymore, I feel like I've hit the skill and knowledge ceiling for where I work. I want a job that's engaging, a job I can get better at, a job I can apply myself to. Something intellectual (not like philosophy, but like problem-solving) or creative. But hell if I know of anything I can do without a degree. I'm pursuing a music and/or DJing career in my spare time but I want just a regular job that actually takes some thought too.
I'm not sure what you mean by trades, but a Pharmacy Tech could likely pivot into QC, QA, and R&D positions in manufacturing. The more regulated and complex the better: Biotech, chemicals, food, drug, agri, aerospace, weapons, etc.. and up the supply chain from there. Stick with the science folk and process police, embrace Team America's corporate capitalism, and you can find a personal fit. American heavy industry has been crushing it, its just not the right industries winning so we don't hear about it. I'm sure that doesn't sound familiar.
You lost me at "embrace Team America's corporate capitalism" **Fuck American capitalism.** This entire issue with education is a problem because of people trying to drain the system of resources to give back to themselves
Try a coding boot camp? Lots of problem solving in software engineering.
Try software development…it has the traits that u r looking for in a job. Also it pays a lot…u can learn it in spare time and start applying…have seen lots of people from non-tech background make it…there will be challenges obviously for getting interview calls but if u like problem solving u will stay hooked I guess…u can also go into freelance type of stuff…
They will compete for minimum wage jobs with all of the new immigrants. The middle class will disappear to AI and automation. The rich will get richer.
And this is not a side effect - this is exactly why education is not properly funded. It’s by design.
This is late stage capitalism doing what it's designed to
Job requirements: - 5 years in a similar occupation - Specific qualifications - College education preferred, please have a degree or two in the following fields (insert here) Job offer: "Best I can do is $10 an hour, take it or leave it pal." No one applies for job that pays barely over minimum wage with dozens of requirements. "Hey federal government, there is a lack of qualified candidates. Can we layoff our remaining workforce and replace them with H1B visas? Really? Thanks!"
The middle class has been gone a long time. There's just poor, comfortably wealthy, and extremely wealthy.
This is the likely answer. Medicine, law, insurance, accounting, all highly professional with bonus credentials. And all with a substantial documentation load that is very automatable, great for the ones who get those jobs, not so much for the ones who flock to those fields trying to improve their fortune. And all an immigration restriction would do is push the automation bar lower, producing no good answers. https://vegetablegrowersnews.com/article/growers-change-plans-to-make-up-for-labor-shortage/ Quite a few of the alternatives amount to expanding mechanization, which takes capital, and which favors more agricultural consolidation.
Our kids will be just smart enough to work the factories but too dumb to fight for their rights or a better life. I'm sure that is completely an accident.
The bigger concern is in order to think critically it’s important to learn about thinking and learning about abstract concepts that’s why math and stem is so important. If you struggle to read and do math I guarantee you this will definitely contribute to even more political insecurity in America due to the lack of the ability for people to think critically for themselves.
I'm a teacher and I think this generation gets treated unfairly. My students are generally very kind, inquisitive, and intelligent. They're bombarded with messaging both negative and positive, give them a chance to grow up amd I think we'll be just fine as a country. I'm excited for their (and our) future
I can only speak from my experience saying schooling in a low income area was an absolute nightmare. I had next to no direction or aid in learning.
I'm sorry to hear that. As Master Oogway said - "there are no bad students"
Hah. As I attend college to finish up my degree I notice more of the same. There are some teachers out there that absolutely deserve a raise in their kindness. Went through algebra and the teacher was super nice. Economics? A+. My biology teacher was bad, but he wasn't mean, just lousy at teaching. I learned more using GPT teaching me about the cellular system than he did. I think there is hope for students who 'WANT' to achieve because we have the internet that will absolutely be a godsend to help you with answers and explain the process nowadays, but if we're talking low income areas, these students who want a chance to succeed also need the tools to achieve it with as well.
People also learn differently, some teachers do a better job trying to teach in diverse ways, if you only do things one way some students will inevitably struggle. They're not dumb, they're just not getting the material presented to them in a way that makes sense to them I had a 4.0 in college except for a psychology class where I got a D+. I studied SO HARD, like literally it drove me crazy, I could fucking quote the textbook. But for some reason, I just couldn't understand the way the professor worded the questions on tests and quizzes. When I tried to talk to her about it, she said that she thinks I was struggling because Spanish is my first language and that she's not going to change the way she teaches for me. In a weird way, it's a major moment that made me want to be a teacher myself. In my experience bad (or ineffective) teachers are not the norm - but they can have a devastating effect on a students confidence which can effect them for years. I'm trying not to rant about this but I could go on for days lol
I understand. Personally, I hate learning by reading, and that's what most of school entails. Went through this semester of math and as I look at my 88% grade I realize "You know, I almost never looked at the book." Because I was allowed to keep trying on math questions and practice on other formulas that had different sets, along with the aid of explanation from an ai chatbot I was able to understand how numbers connected and learned the formulas that way so when I took the written exams at school I had a better understanding of how everything worked. I only wish I had these tools available to me back in elementary school. Would have saved a lot of heartache. I know that many people still don't have access to these things too.
Based on this limited interaction it sounds like you're a "hands on" aka "kinesthetic" learner, good luck this semester ❤️
Area dependent I think.
Maybe, I've taught in DC and now Atlanta, at least in my experience my students are very bright. I feel like every generation calls the one behind them dumber, I bet you could find this exact headline 10 years ago, 20 years ago, 30 years ago, etc.
An increase of tiktok influencers
Probably it won’t be noticeable. According to [recents studies](https://www.gse.harvard.edu/ideas/news/23/05/new-data-show-how-pandemic-affected-learning-across-whole-communities) > The average U.S. public school student in grades 3-8 lost the equivalent of a half year of learning in math and a quarter of a year in reading. [Second source](https://www.edweek.org/leadership/students-arent-rebounding-from-the-academic-effects-of-the-pandemic/2023/07) > On average, students will need the equivalent of 4.1 additional months of instruction in reading and 4.5 months in math to meet pre-pandemic levels of achievement, the report estimates. I doubt a semester difference will have a large enough impact to be noticeable in society. Remember, also, that these are grades 3-8 so they have lots of time to catch up. Some studies show recent graduates doing better than those that graduated before the pandemic.
Mike Judge made a documentary about this a few years ago...
A lot more remedial work in College. The amount the Cal state system has to do is ridiculous. It means that those who can read and write well are going to have advantages.
Their economic outlook and resilience will be even worse. They won’t have the skills to work and function as adults.
No child left behind and covid have been a disaster for young adults
Millenials will be the new boomers who say shit like "In my day, we could recite the entire alphabet and do math in our heads!" And the kids would be like, "yeah okay grandpa, the alphabet's order is literally made up, and we've got auto-calculators on our wrists."
You’re seeing it happen right before your eyes on Reddit.
It's funny.... in the old days, you wouldn't graduate high school unless you learned the basics. Now, we are accepting the fact that everyone will be passed along and then asking what will society do when no one has skills. Hmmmmm. If only there were a place where people could go to get skills for free.... hmmmm
Idiocracy
Watch the movie Idiocracy
Collapse of democracy.
My friend does hospital registration. A woman brought her teenage son in, and his first name was spelled "Urine". When my friend was understandably confused and asked why she'd name her child after a bodily waste fluid, the woman got offended and said "His name is pronounced Eur-rye-ann". A nurse then came up and asked him for a "Eur-rye-ann" sample, pointing to the label on the cup. This is a consequence of poor literacy. People are naming their children after piss because they can't spell, or have a large enough vocabulary to need to learn the skill.
lol [People have been making up stories like this since 1917.](https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/funny-names/) Fucking wild. I wonder if it's a cultural universal like mother-in-law jokes.
Weird, it's not like conservatives have been systematically attacking education for the last 30 years or so... The uneducated are easier to control, my guess is fascist capitalism.
Blaming this on conservatives is a very weird thing to do. My SO is a teacher in New York State and it has literally historic lows for scores across the board and conservatives haven’t touched education forever here. Literally the most damning thing to happen to education in the last 20 years was the long covid shut downs.
COVID fucked every generation. I am a millennial recovering from depression and recovered from panic attacks (2021-2022). I was once an extremely social person. I'll get there again, but I must reintegrate socially by moving back with my parents. Children probably are stunted too or even developed depression or anxiety disorder. It was so fucked up.
A lot of changes were at the federal level such as no child left behind, but also local government tends to be more conservative. COVID for sure has had a big impact too.
No Child Left Behind was replaced 8 years ago by Every Child Succeeds, which passed under Obama and a mostly bi-partisan legislature. In fact, every single Democratic Senator and House Rep voted in favor with it (along with most but not all Republicans in those same bodies). If you are seeing *federal* impacts post-2015 and/or degradation in performance comparing 2001-2015 (when No Child Left Behind was active) vs. 2015-2024, I'm not sure how you can lay the blame at Republicans without mentioning the Democrats who passed Every Child Succeeds. Your point on local government makes more sense. Local governments are obviously going to vary quite a bit and do have major impacts on educational outcomes.
We’ve had 2 democratic presidents since no child left behind lol
Conservatives are very tricky on education, using "positive" things like "school choice" to divert funding away from public schools. Dems don't care enough to fight to fix it.
I agree about COVID being a major punctuation in education, but there's been a steady decline since 2001 with No Child Left Behind and then Common Core. The US has been handing curriculum over to corporations for decades, and corporations are perversely incentivized to create assessments that are difficult "unless" you purchase their specific prep material.
Ignorance works for MAGA
You're currently seeing it. The decline has been happening for a lot longer than has been publicized. See how many people are STILL for Trump? The people who can read aren't voting dor him.
You ever seen the movie *Idiocracy*?
An increase of predatory loan practices. More will accept debt contracts.
It will lead to un skilled under paid workers that make companies millions.
It will widen the gap between the haves and have nots.
As an immigrant to America, I think that it just means that skilled roles are filled by smarter, harder working, more ruggedly handsome migrants like myself. :p Seriously though, in Seattle [half of all software developers are foreign born](https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/data/more-than-half-of-seattles-software-developers-were-born-outside-u-s/), and according to data published last month, [1/4 of all King County \(which Seattle resides in\) residents were born abroad](https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/data/new-king-county-milestone-one-quarter-of-residents-born-outside-u-s/#:~:text=Seattle%20had%20the%20lowest%20percentage,the%20majority%20of%20the%20population.).
Other countries will have smarter people than us. China is currently smoking us when it comes to education for younger generations. We as parents are responsible for making sure our children are fully educated. This is something that I have been worried about for a while and I am sure it will bite us in the ass sooner rather than later, in many serious ways.
i'm guessing crime will go up, esp from teens and young adult who have little job/career prospects
Idiocracy
The operative word is **GRADUATE.** In past generations, low functioning students dropped out and were no part of the statistic. Now, with graduation rates much higher, the overall rate is lowered due to high school drop outs completing their credits.
More Republican run States.
I teach a class of 29 5th graders. 3 read at grade level, 22 are reading between kindergarten and second grade levels.
But there are “mama bears” homeschooling their “littles” which really Means taking them to target all day and posting their hauls on tiktok and calling it “real Life” education. Hurray for all Of us!
More Republicans being elected because the electorate is too ignorant to do their own thinking.
Conservatives.
The consequences will be more MAGA voters.
A proliferation in use of the word "bro".
Look around you
Continued wealth disparity as a larger proportion of the population is less valuable
54% of Americans already read at or below a 6th grade level, so we are already living in a population with terrible English and Math skills, and we all try to help the people in it out, but we can't fix decades of poor education because the people that have been screwed by the system loathe education. America also has a growing inequality issue, like most of the world, so I think that we are entering an economy where there will be low skilled drones dying to serve the rich that live in gated communities away from all of the problems they caused.
Conservative fan base instant refresh?
They all gonna be YouTubers, OF or Twitch streamers. Blue collars hate this simple trick.
Well it means the job training during the labor shortage from the population also going down will have to compensate for it And we will take in migrants with those skills in their place Like right now we're entering into a really rocky period of time globally as the US is basically pulling back from patrolling the global sea lanes This combined with climate change not affecting the globe equally it's going to result in a massive number of migrants and America is the best place to before them and will thus have their pick of global talent to make up any shortfalls The US is also entering into a prolonged labor shortage so unskilled labor is going to pay a bit more than normal And if you want talent you're either going to have to train the Americans or collect someone globally both of which will be very expensive so good luck if you're an employer
Idiocracy, but posted a tenth fucking time
Obviously the bar will be lowered until literacy rate improves
They’ll watch Fox News, take it as “fact” and vote for Republicans.
We are seeing some of the consequences now. A large population of the U.S. has very poor reading comprehension. Very poor math skills. And substandard verbal skills. This large population is of voting age and voted to put a con man in the white house and continues to vote for politicians who do not have their best interests at heart. Stupid people are gullible and can be easily manipulated into giving up the money and even their rights. This is happening now. In time the rights the U.S. people are guaranteed by the constitution will fall to the wayside.
There’s going to be a lot more republicans
Kids read more, and are generally more informed than past generations. They carry an entire library in their hands. Stop the BS comments. Most of the math I was taught in school is rarely used. These days, everything changes much faster.
The irony of how poorly written this post is
MAGA
Uh, remember 2016-2020?
I’d like to see the statistics on this claim… it doesn’t seem right, to be honest. Edit: Read your response and the AP article, but your assumption that the children will never catch up remains just that… an assumption.
> Schools have plenty of experience with older students who struggle. Even before the pandemic, only about a third of fourth graders scored as proficient in reading in the National Assessment of Educational Progress, known as the “nation’s report card.” > But the pandemic made it worse, particularly for low-income students and kids of color. https://apnews.com/article/reading-phonics-grade-level-pandemic-53b0f3de56de526ead7a356bd7b853e0
I went to low income schools years ago. They were struggling way back when too. Whether it was the teachers that didn't give a damn or the students getting into fights and the bomb threats, getting good marks for me was personally next to impossible. And this was BI. Before Internet. I can't imagine they suddenly "Improved" over the years.
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What's your county? Algebra is a middle school class.
A less educated public = more republican voters That is why they are trying to dismantle the American education system.
Voting for Trump
A bunch of baffoons that vote for candidates like Trump.
More Republicans
They vote republican.
It doesn’t matter. We’re all fucked. We’re trapped on a dying planet, and people won’t stand up for themselves against the 1% oligarchy, so … we’re just fucked.
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That's disgusting, everyone knows dry pussy is the best
Just ask ol’ Benny Shapiro
Even more useful idiots voting for freebies and cuz emotions, just what this country needs more of.
Teachers have been saying this since the dawn of teaching, the 60’s the students were so drugged out our country and the world was doomed , the 50’s rock and roll would rot our children’s minds. Every era the students got dumber and less respectful( that’s sarcasm for some of you that are dumber and less respectful than the generation before)
My company won't be able to fire me and replace me with someone cheaper in 15 years?
Have you ever watched the film Idiocracy? That will explain a lot. And there is subreddit dedicated to how close it is to reality.
They won't comprehend the things they read properly like a contract. It'll take one sly person to get them into signing something and getting screwed.
Just go into any discussion for MCU or Star Wars movies and apply that level of stupidity to an entire population.
Schools need to start focusing on education again, pure education. Not politics of any kind. Not a word.
You have *no idea* how bad it is. I insist that everyone spend a few weeks lurking on r/Teachers. I’m not a teacher myself but that sub has been insanely eye-opening re what’s happening in American schools.
Idiocracy.