Archived copies of the article:
I’m sure the systemic defunding and dismantling of the public education system across the United States at the hands of Republican lawmakers over the same timeframe has absolutely nothing to do with it.
Right? It always confounds and amazes me when people discount this simple fact.
Education has been fucked over so hard in this country, repeatedly. They want people dumb.
Blame it on the technology though, because admitting that Republicans plan are ALWAYS terrible for anyone below the 1%, without exception, somehow is impossible.
It’s almost like the people drawing these conclusions from incomplete data are… poorly educated?
Some one has PAID them to do this. They’re a tool used by the powerful (just like Ds), the mega-rich use BOTH parties, just like you would use a Phillips or a standard screwdriver.
Ds have been in power a huge amount of that time, depending on the time frame they’ve even had the majority of the time… and they took just as much of a part in the “dismantling the public education system”.
Look at the RESULTS instead of listening to what they SAY. They’ll say anything (they being all of them)
Yes, I know, bOtH pArTiEs and so forth, you got me, you win, etc.
It’s also happening in areas where education HASN’T been defended or dismantled. It’s happening in areas that aren’t Republican controlled too.
Fuck MAGA with a moldy pine tree but blaming this problem solely on them means it can’t be solved because whatever is happening isn’t being caused by them.
Which locations weren’t impacted by the first trump administration’s education department or no child left behind?
I never said it was solely on them, but saying that has no bearing on it is ridiculous as well.
We also had COVID which many/most schools had no fucking idea how to handle. There’s basically an entire year of wasted education there.
Remote learning is a completely different beast. And digital social interaction is completely different than being physically at school with friends. Social interactions are a large part of learning as well.
In this instance, I’d say it doesn’t.
The lockdown from COVID stunted a lot of development. Then the tablets and just that kids are always on a screen drive it home. That and kids and parents don’t care as much about failing grades, and the “no child left behind” has gotten about as corrupt and lazy as our government. Now it just means “your kids going to the next grade, regardless”
How does systemic defunding lead to schools buying up tablets and notebooks?
This seems more like straight up corruption to me, or dumb administrators believing the nonsense Google sells them about Chromebooks being better for learning or whatever
“The kids are so smart they figured out this computer stuff I could never” - 75 yo Deborah, School District Superintendent
No Deborah, the kids had a mandatory computer literacy class which helped them understand the fundamentals of computing.
Key word “had”
Back in the 00’s when I was secondary school. My friends and I, would turn off the firewall, and bypass the website restrictions. This is just so we could download and play runescape, but I also played the halo combat evovled demo. It was only my group of friends who figured out how. We never shared the simple method with anyone, because we didn’t want it getting patched.
We should be investing in teachers not technology.
Teachers are paid a pittance in the US. Shows our values as a society. They’re educating the next generations, but that doesn’t make number go up right this second, so they are compensated accordingly.
In California most of my teachers were making 6 figures in my rural town, the problem is that kids don’t care about learning, their parents especially do not care at all.
Removed by mod
It’s more than just lack of effort here though, it’s systematic pollution they are allowing into our food and water with abandon.
into education too, into everything they can actually
Yeah, the systemic tearing down of public education definitely had an effect as well.
Teachers are a cost-center
Technology is a profit-center
What are you, some kind of socialist? Your system will never work. We’ll all run out of money!
So who benefits from $30bn in spending on Laptops and Tablets? Oh Apple and Microsoft. Not students. Surprise surprise.
As with many of these articles there is a big caveat - Gen Z in the USA. It does not follow that this research applies across the world. It’d be interesting to see how other rich countries outcomes are different with their differing approaches to this. For example here in the UK I don’t believe there has been a wholesale move to laptops/tablets for every student in schools. Technology is certainly used but it’s not solely about students using laptops and tablets. Its things like smart wide boards, and the use of digital content to engage attention and so forth. Spending billions on laptops for all would be a scandal when school buildings need renewing for example.
I would hazard to suggest that the US education system is being corrupted in a similar way to other parts of the US state, with big expensive projects decided at state level by the Republicans and Democrats thanks to lobbying, benefiting big companies but not citizens. This is instead of money going to areas of proven benefit such as more teachers, school infrastructure renewal, or funding of homework clubs, after school activities, breakfast clubs or free school meals. Things proven to make a difference across the world but things that don’t benefit big US corporations.
And lets be honest, if you wanted to give every student a laptop you wouldn’t be going to Apple or Microsoft. You’d save money and go for generic hardware and a license free operating system like Linux. But that would be an anathema to both the Democrats and the Republicans, who have signed off huge spending on overpriced tech.
My kids are given Chromebooks. The schools are getting them registered with Google as early as possible.
So Google can begin tracking and advertising to them
This. And chromebooks are glorified tablets. Much less capable than a proper laptop, much less for a child to learn than a proper laptop. Google did MASSIVE pushing to get chromebooks into the classroom to get kids hooked on their platform as early as possible
The problem isn’t the technology, but the implementation.
The USA should have had a national digital textbook initiative, where free textbooks are developed and digitally distributed to all schools of every educational level. Each textbook can have modules and problem generators, designed to make it easy for teachers to assemble a custom curriculum for their class, to assign problems, and to quickly have generic quizzes graded.
The biggest problem with such a program would be things like essays, culture, and history, since many bad actors would want to press their beliefs onto students. Still, things like dates, locations, and people involved with events can be standardized. Maybe teachers can rate educational modules, to help keep bad material from being adopted by most teachers?
Each textbook can have modules and problem generators, designed to make it easy for teachers to assemble a custom curriculum for their class, to assign problems, and to quickly have generic quizzes graded.
Having worked for three separate companies trying to do just that, it’s not that the technology doesn’t exist. It’s that it’s too expensive for individuals to purchase and school districts had a hard time getting contracts approved due to NCLB and constant budget cuts. Strange though that a company like Google could ink a huge deal with an entire state even though none of the shit did anything it promised.
Google got exactly what they wanted out of it though. Get 'em young using and feeling comfortable with Google hardware and software, and trapped in the walled garden early. Most are not likely to change to another brand/OS later in life.
Oh trust me I know. They make big promises, and sell these devices dirt cheap to state education systems, and frame it as an altruistic, benevolent act. Meanwhile you can’t install any other software on them and it’s entirely locked into using google’s “education” software
Also where are the “think of the children” folks that are putting in the age verification laws. Shouldn’t they be concerned that a marketing agency built to profile individuals is privy to everything your kids do at school?
Privacy is too woke
The biggest problem to getting open source textbooks, is McGraw Hill and their ilk, the few companies that control the textbook Rackets.
I’m just not convinced that the technology isn’t part of the problem. All of these machines are designed to give a you an instant dopamine rush when you use them. I think they have a real and detrimental effect on attention span.
As someone in the classrooms (student teaching in fifth grade in Illinois), I don’t disagree that the tech provides this. However, I also see how it benefits the students with workflow and access to a diverse form on texts which is needed for a multitude of diverse learners whether they are multilingual, have a disability of some kind, are special education, or have IEPs or 504s.
The access to parents at home with instant ability to the same videos or resources as well as translation tools can mean more parental help for the kids.
What I see as the problem is that the way we measure students and their cognitive knowledge/capabilities hasn’t changed with how we teach. Everything is to the test and set up without any national standards. I see kids able to make some amazing inferences and see patterns with small prompting and the ability to deep think is there even with tech being a huge part of the classroom.
Public money gets funneled to the tech bros and the population gets dumber. It’s a conservative win-win.
And the begining of civil distruction
Kind of hard to take the article seriously when it ends with:
Join us at the Fortune Workplace Innovation Summit May 19–20, 2026, in Atlanta. The next era of workplace innovation is here—and the old playbook is being rewritten. At this exclusive, high-energy event, the world’s most innovative leaders will convene to explore how AI, humanity, and strategy converge to redefine, again, the future of work.
Corporate bullshit like that used to just be mildly amusing, now it’s actively enraging.
I completely blame ChromeOS.
Even on AD snafu’d windows, the first thing we all did was figure out how to bypass any block and do what we wanted to.
Kids are growing up not knowing there are things you can do aside from accessing the internet and loading crappy webpages.
I came here to say something similar. It’s not merely tech that’s to blame but the kind of tech we have today. Kids are being raised to be consumers of tech and tech services. They don’t have basic fundamentals that millenials had to learn to access porn on dialup.
Once you had the phone line to yourself it was easy, just dial out and open cracked limewire or bearshare, then simply click the first horny thing you see, like:
-br1tney_nud3s_14.4k friendly-.exe -filesize 66kb
I was the kid my friends’ dads would call to fix the PC (because SOMEHOW - “A hacker put a virus on there”), before their wives got back home. Made some nice extra cash!
There are even people writing ‘software’ who don’t know that.
I’m so fucking happy I’m not the only one who has noticed that.
jesus christ we’re so fucked.
Wait I don’t get it. How is this possible?
You know, it wasn’t always like this
Not very long ago, just before your time
Right before the towers fell, circa '99
This was catalogs, travel blogs, a chatroom or two
We set our sights and spent our nights waiting
For you, you, insatiable you
Mommy let you use her iPad, you were barely two
And it did all the things we designed it to do
Now, look at you, oh, ha, look at you
You, you, unstoppable, watchable
Your time is now, your inside’s out, honey, how you grew
And if we stick together, who knows what we’ll do?
It was always the plan
to put the world in your hand~ Bo Burnham
-
Correlation
-
Causation
Hey, Computer, what’s been happening to
- Average Class size
- Average teacher years of experience
- Average annual hours in school
Had it been?
- Up
- Down
- Down
But sure, also, they’ve replaced a stack of 5 lb textbooks nobody reads with a tablet computer nobody uses.
Don’t forget the negative effects of Social media on developing minds.
It reads like one of those boomer comics complaining about young people experiencing the consequences of boomer actions.
https://seatingchartmaker.app/articles/class-size-statistics/ USA seems stable for class size?
The typical class size in US public schools is 16-23 students. In the academic year 2020-2021, the mean class size was 18.3 students, a slight decrease from the 2017-2018 average of 19.6 students. These figures represent the mean across both primary and secondary education.
https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/education/class-size
In the United States, average class sizes vary widely, with national averages indicating 21.2 students in elementary schools and up to 26.8 in secondary schools.
COVID exacerbated the situation over the last five years.
The situation of class sizes decreasing? The article you gave is from 2021 so im guessing its just methodology of oecd vs nces? the closest citation to that claim is from a 2013 NCES source though.
-
Also the underfunding of teachers and overall mismanagement in persuit of profits.
Don’t forget that Google made big bucks on that deal.
Correction: They are still making big bucks on that deal.
Vendor lock in, and brand recognition is bigly important.
Selling Apples ?
As a Computer Scientist, I increasingly believe this tech might actually be poison for the human mind, and I’m not sure what to do about it.
I want to believe we can make it actually useful. But I don’t know if that’s possible or not.
I get your point bro, but it’s just half of the story. The real issue is not tech as a whole, but the conflict of interests of big evil corps. Tech is fantastic and can supercharge human learning, but the fact that most software is made with the sole purpose of maximizing engagement had led to those issues. The issue is the business model, not the tech itself
Lets be clear: the tech is fantastic, the application is not. We are handing children mind control feeds while they are still forming their identity. If we had these kids working in linux shells, learning the nitty gritty problem solving behind the tech, learning how to use it to build rather than shoehorning it into problems that absolutely dont need it then I think the story would be different
I think the problem with computers is when you make shit too easy.
Play a game. Tap on store. Tap on install. Play.
When I was growing up getting shit to run on my 286 was a challenge, Changing memory allocations, IRQ ports, a myriad of errors and work arounds, cfg files, memory editing, command lines, basic, and all that stuff meant you were forced to think.
The irony is script kiddies of the 90s would be viewed upon as hardcore hackers these days.
Indeed it warmed the cockles of my heart when my son got into Half Life and asked me to show him how to use the console.
I was like, awww you’ve taken your first step into a larger world.
lol, I mostly ditched textbooks in high school not to support technology, but because I was tired of carrying around huge books in my backpack, the bulk of which I wouldn’t even need on a daily basis. Lo and behold, even 14 years ago, I could find pdf versions of most of my textbooks, some of which were offered officially from the publisher for free via the school.
The problems are the enshittification of the internet, the attention economy and the superb lack of American educational system, not technology itself. Almost every university in the world is filled with the sounds of clacking keys from laptops, this isn’t 1984.
Technology is part of it. For example, handwriting notes is proven to be better for information retention compared to typing.
Comparing learning methods and then associating their benefits with the technology feels… fallacious.
For this reason I actually recommend a cheap Android tablet for digital note taking since it is well worth the price. I used to carry paper with me, but having the ability to quickly review notes across several classes (lectures and books) is a game changer. Need to know what was discussed last week? What you took on a topic? It’s very cumbersome with paper.
I feel like ‘technology’ is different when you actually own the tech you’re given. When you can do things with it. Not when it’s a digital casino in your pocket controlled by big corporations.
The text book industry inflated the cost of everything by making things huge, with mostly meaningless full color pictures everywhere. Go back 100 years and compare the size of a math book to present day. Math hasn’t changed a whole lot but the size and weight of the books certainly has.
I have a few college “textbooks” from the 1930’s. They’re small
I don’t think it’s necessarily the text books that are the issue but rather the physical act of writing your own notes.
I think it’s that now people type all their notes into a laptop rather than write it down.
Yeah, makes sense. I “solved” that issue by still doing handwritten notes but then scanning them and converting them to digital notes afterwards.
That being said, I grew up in the 90s so I was never deprived of the skill of handwriting as a kid. It wasn’t until apple made touchscreens popular that shit kinda went downhill
Did you not have a locker?
Not OP, but when I hear this argument, a lot of schools wouldn’t let you go to your locker between all classes. That, or your classes were so far apart, you didn’t have time to go even get to your locker between them. There were some days I could only get to my locker once.
Yeah. I had a locker next to the school’s music room in the farthest corner once. Fun year.
Well that’s why I ask, we had lockers, that were easy to access between classes with minimal planning. It just blows my mind how many people didn’t have a locker… My locker at work was even easy to access. I’m sorry y’all didn’t have a locker
Removed by mod
My high school didn’t have lockers. I assume mine isn’t the only one.
My highschool, which I graduated mid 2010s, didn’t have lockers.
We had gym lockers, which was just to put our stuff for that one gym period, it wasn’t “our own”.
So, no. Not all highschools have lockers.
My high school, among other interesting design decisions, didn’t have any lockers in the academic areas. So you had a locker that was way over by the gyms, or out by the shop classes, or if you were lucky in the cafeteria (because then you could at least stash your lunch in it).
The administration also seemed to be completely mystified as to why everyone carried around huge backpacks.
From the article: "While teachers may be intending for these tools to be strictly educational, students often have different ideas. According to a 2014 study, which surveyed and observed 3,000 university students, students engaged in off-task activities on their computers nearly two-thirds of the time.
Horvath blamed this tendency to get off-track as a key contributor to technology hindering learning. When one’s attention is interrupted, it takes time to refocus. Task-switching also is associated with weaker memory formation and greater rates of error. Grappling with a challenging singular subject matter is hard, Horvath said. For the best learning to happen, it’s supposed to be."
The technology encourages task switching, which is detrimental in situations where one is supposed to focus on a single challenging task in order to optimize learning. So in this case, I’d say it’s the technology itself that is unsuitable for the task at hand. Clacking keys is fine, I went to university in the late nineties and computers were already an important part of my education. But I didn’t have access to the internet on a powerful pocketable device during lectures. The computers were in the computer rooms.
Meanwhile we’re integrating AI into classrooms. Surely nothing bad will come from that.
