Plunging test scores are a slow-moving catastrophe

vincent-uden

This very much echoes the region of critical slowing down present in a dynamical system after its equilibrium states have disappeared due to a change in the system (a bifurcation).

ThrowawayR2

Archive link: https://archive.ph/n8Akh

ProjectArcturis

So many places to point our fingers: -Everyone has screens. -Education system broken. -Covid disruptions -Biological effects of Covid infections

K33P4D

Doesn't this just shift the average and calibrate a new set of expectations for the coming youth to placate themselves in an age of all or nothing AI?

JohnMakin

Whole word reading has been a disaster.

themgt

Seems highly plausible AI/robotics will lead a significant decline in public schooling in the near future. Kids honestly might learn better doing a few hours a day one-on-one with 2026 frontier AI than sitting in a classroom of 30 with a teacher. 2027, 2028, 2029? Modern public education itself is industrial revolution technology. Why would it be left as-is after the intelligence revolution?

niemandhier

While kids practice the skills of the 21st century, testing got stuck in the 19 hundreds. I see kids train edge AI models, built things using coding assistants and discuss post-modern philosophy. I see the same kids struggle to write structured interpretations of 1950s texts they have no emotional connection to. Kids are worse in orthography, handwriting, and reading stuffy texts from front to end, but they are so much better in a plethora of skills that did not exist 20 years ago.

cubefox

There is a very high correlation between national IQ and PISA scores. We know that IQ is declining across the world, and it is declining because fertility and IQ are negatively associated. It's likely that declining IQ is a nontrivial factor for why PISA scores are declining. It is unfortunately still taboo to talk about this. Which is bad, because we can't hope to do anything about it if we don't face the truth.

dumberquestions

The drop from 2018 to 2022 is as big as the one from 2022 to 2026, so it's not obvious whether AI had a role at all, although it's highly plausible. I suspect the bigger culprit is the optimized monetization of human attention, because pre-algorithmic social media doesn't seem to be as destructive. The fact that science wasn't as affected as math and reading (both of which rely more on attention/practice than rote memorization) somewhat supports this.

frankbreetz

I find this article to be more interesting: https://www.economist.com/international/2026/09/08/are-teena... Especially the part where it states that part of the issue is in 2000 when Finland had higher test scores then everyone it was attributed to play based learning and less testing. Everyone immediately jumped on this, because if you can have more fun and learn more, of course that is the way to go. This opinion still permeates both teachers and parents. I was of this opinion for a long time, as I went to a rigorous school, and would have enjoyed "play based learning". It turns out this may have been way off and difficult schools such as those in China and Singapore have the best results. In the Finland example they had only recently switched from more rigorous to more play based, so the rigorous schooling was still being shown in testing. I think we were all a bit bamboozled by this. Maybe it seemed too good to be true and we should have been more critical of the findings. But the play based learning opinion is still strong and we as a society need to move back to more rigor will make stronger students.

diego_moita

A very long time ago, in the 90s, we really thought that computers would make people smarter. We thought computers would sharpen people's analytical skills with logic and math, would provide them better tools to write and design things, would provide them information to help them get better answers. Back then, there was a famous snake-oil salesman that coined the expression "computers are bicycles for the mind". He proposed an analogy: when you compare the effort humans put into personal locomotion on foot with other animals you'll notice that they spend a lot of effort to yield very little movement. But then you put them in a bicycle and things change: humans can move a lot with very little effort. Computers would do the same: increase the mind's "productivity". Fast forward for today and we live in a world where everybody has a computer in their pockets. Ironically this change was pioneered by that very same snake-oil seller. And when I see the consequences of it, I say to myself: "boy, we were soooo wrong!". Law of unintended consequences? Or it is the fact that everyone is lazy and do want to remain dumb?

mkl95

It seems there is no working around learning to write and read properly. We've drifted away from this idea, which might lead to a "soft" dark age.

cs702

Isn't education the best antidote we have against misinformation, against ignorance, against hateful ideologies, against our least civilized impulses? Is it possible to have a civilization that works well, with institutions that work well, if the population is poorly educated? Sigh.

BobbyTables2

Gee, schools got rid of text books and ask only multiple choice questions on Math tests… They now also use AI to grade short essays. I’d have been more surprised if there wasn’t any impact on learning.

zkmon

It's a cycle. Affluence of food, goods and tech removes natural survival instincts due to lack of struggle and need. That would cause the affluence to go away, rekindling the survival instincts through struggle. The cycle repeats. Different geographies have different phase delays in this cycle. Sometimes the cycle is affected by artificial forces such as dominance of a nation and it's control over the global matters. But the cycle just pushes forward.

bentt

Where I live in the US there is a movement to A) Prohibit phones from being used in schools B) use textbooks again instead of digital texts C) use handwriting and notebooks instead of Chromebooks for in-class note taking. While this might help, and I agree with all these steps, I'm concerned that the root of the problem is simply that the online experience has rewired our kids. Not screens per se, but the feeling of a constantly moving social space which demands their attention.

proee

My electromagnetics professor started our class with a massive ambition that we would truly understand maxwells equations at a fundamental level by end of semester. Well our class started failing all his exams leading up to this pinnacle and he told us we were all a bunch of morons, basically the dumbest class he’s ever taught. I raised my hand and asked if we were still going to get to maxwells equations by end of semester and he stared back with eyes of pure distain. This was the year 2000.

VCFundedGenYer

Been saying this for a while. AI is melting away people's mental and cognitive abilities. Nobody wants to admit it though due to capitalism and VC drunkenness. This will reach critical mass in a few years.

VLM

There's a whopper in the middle of the article declaring an outcome "high test scores" is a cause, not a result, of a lack of a wide variety of social ills. The cause and effect ratio is obviously reversed. Its like claiming that playing the violin leads to wealth via some magical process, whereas the reality is only wealthy parents can afford to hire a classical violin tutor for their kid, so sure, the wealthiest neighborhoods have the kids who are the best violin players but it would be pretty clueless to describe violin playing as a vocational skill. Its a luxury skill for people who've already made it, like math is for about 99.9% of the population. Talking to my kid's friends indirectly and casually, as per above the deck is stacked against them resulting in lower scores in stuff that won't result in a job anyway, no amount of study will improve your DEI scores which are all that matter for hiring anyway, and the jobs you can get with high scores are the ones targeted for elimination via AI. Despite being pretty young they understand the scam that it doesn't matter if it works or not, the powers that be will ruin your career trying to replace you with AI. Much like outsourcing in their parents and grandparents generation, it literally doesn't matter if it works or not, you're still sitting in the same unemployment line if they make a profit or lose their shirts. They lost their shirts and will lose them again for AI, but that provides little sympathy for those sitting in the unemployment lines. "Line must go up" meme applies. There exist tests you can make kids take to determine their suitability for labor in the garment industry, fine motor skills, some visuospatial skills, etc. That number is useless because there are few jobs, negative industry growth, and we have a severe supply/demand mismatch already. Increasing "garment industry skill test results" led directly to happy outcomes around the 1850s industrial revolution and flat to negative outcomes in the modern era. So it is with math today. Worship of "line must go up" never made anyone happy or wealthy. The article somehow avoids all documentation and authorities and instead relies on popular memes and biased "common sense". Its not marked as an editorial, which seems odd.

srj

The period after leaded gasoline was eliminated and before modern tech may go down as the peak of human intellect. More specifically I wonder if the birth of social media in the form of short videos is the real culprit. Most other single causes don't line up even if I can believe they are a factor. It seems like we should be able to adapt, but the dopamine hit of short videos may prove as difficult to manage as healthy eating and exercise in terms of self-discipline.