[japhyr]

> the real culprit could simply be boiled down to a failure in classroom management and lack of enforcement against cell phones in class

I was a middle school and high school math and science teacher from 1994 through 2019. I watched the advent of internet in schools, then desktop computers in classrooms, and finally smartphones in students' hands.

I've lived a life of watching teachers and schools get blamed for not dealing better with society's issues. "Just teach kids how to use technology", "just ban phones", and "lock down irrelevant websites" is a pretty big ask when the entire industry is focused on getting kids to use these devices, apps, and sites as much as they possibly can.

[telman17]

I can definitely see the push for using technology in schools - what you're saying makes sense.

It's not the individual teachers I blame. I come from a family of educators and a lot of the crappy enforcement falls to the district level, who just want to make the parents happy. There is literally no reason a child needs a cell phone in class. Computers are great. Lock them down. There is nothing unreasonable about this.

[xethos]

Are we sure it isn't the offensively-well-funded tech industry that's being referenced here?

[salawat]

You're not suggesting the most overinflated asset class in the market might somehow be involved though predatory pushing of product into education to get em hooked while they're young are you?!

/s

[carabiner]

Tech industry composed of many of the smartest people in the world with the most money, and the backing of the current US presidency vs. average middle America school district. Hmm.

[eudamoniac]

I'm not that old. "Just ban phones" worked perfectly fine when I was in high school in 2010. "Just ban cigarettes" also worked, and no one was smoking in the classroom. It's not a hard problem; the administration just refuses to solve it.

[Teever]

How do you expect anyone to take what you just wrote seriously when there's such a blatantly obvious difference in the detectability of the use of these two different products?

[pas]

what do you mean? if some kid doesn't want to pay attention they can draw doodles, daydream, read a book under the table, talk to other students, and finally ... be on their phone. we did all of these! (played snake on a 3310.)

up to a point the teacher's job is to notice these, and motivate the student to pay attention (report cards, detention, extra homework), or ask for them to be removed from class if they are disruptive, if necessary permanently.

[eudamoniac]

The two products of phones in 2026 and phones in 2010? In 2010 they were smaller.

[array_key_first]

It's just not relevant. When I was in highschool some teachers had a thingy on the wall where you would hang up your cell phone in a pouch. If it wasn't there, you better have a good explanation, or you'll be counted absent.

The solutions are simple and effectively free. That's not the issue. The issue is nobody wants to do the solutions. Schools don't, parents don't, kids don't. Everyone is just lying to themselves.

You can't on one hand claim to care about kids and then on the other dismiss obvious tactics like banning cell phones.

[iambateman]

What would be better policy, in your opinion?

[CJefferson]

Having taught in schools for years? Treat companies that make addictive products the same way we treat drugs, alcohol and tobacco. Kids want them, particularly teenagers. We aren't perfect at stopping their access. But we can make a best attempt.

It would be hard, and it would be 'anti-capitalism', but, I think we have done real long term damage to a generation, and I think in 20 years, like Tobacco, it I'll turn out the companies knew how much they were damaging children and covered it up.

[ch4s3]

It's not anti-capitalism to not spend public money on nonsense that doesn't further the goals of education, no is it anti-capitalism to control the learning environment in schools. What we have is a collective action problem.

[deaux]

> It would be hard, and it would be 'anti-capitalism'

These things are opposites - the former is a downside, the latter an upside.

[assaddayinh]

Faraday cages built into school buildings.

[red-iron-pine]

there will be one school shooting and no one would be able to call 911 and then there will be a public outcry.

the big tech companies making these phones and apps will amplify that outcry hard, and the phones will be let back in. the addiction will continue.

[deaux]

> I've lived a life of watching teachers and schools get blamed for not dealing better with society's issues. "Just teach kids how to use technology", "just ban phones", and "lock down irrelevant websites" is a pretty big ask when the entire industry is focused on getting kids to use these devices, apps, and sites as much as they possibly can.

Hey, you only have a >$13 _trillion_ dollar modern tobacco industry behemoth up against you, including 90% of this very message board. Just, you know, stand up to it, duh.

The $13 trillion is only Meta/Apple/Google/Microsoft, so it doesn't even include all the gambling, crypto, gacha games and so on whose sole aim is to enslave the kids you're teaching.

Good luck!

[jimt1234]

Don't forget that teachers these days are also expected to be active shooter experts, ready to literally put their own lives on the line.

[mschuster91]

And on top of that, in many countries (not just the US) teachers, school and the students themselves don't have anywhere near the financial resources that they need.

Schools are (literally) falling apart, here in Germany it became apparent during Covid that a ton of schools had windows that rotted so far they couldn't be opened, in the US there are states that introduced 4 day school weeks due to budget constraints [1], way too many school children live in utter poverty meaning they get their only warm meal at school [2], with that meal sometimes being of even lower quality than prison food to the tune it was a recurring joke in The Simpsons, class sizes are too huge, teaching material is outdated or censored to the point of being useless [3], students are too poor to afford basic supplies meaning teachers step in [4], teachers lack the time and budget to actually educate themselves and keep up with modern development, teachers lack the budget, room and/or political backing from their superiors to actually use what they learned in university or in after-graduation continuous training in practice, students lack the privacy at home (and often enough: a safe home or EVEN A HOME AT ALL [5]) to learn in peace and safety.

And on top of that comes the deluge of ChatGPT slop, sexual abuse both domestic and amongst students, bullying, domestic violence, "parents" using their kids as weapons to hurt their ex partners, stalking, gang violence, in Europe you got traumatized kids coming from war torn countries with zero support structure, in the US you got kids scared to hell and beyond about ICE.

Honestly, I'm not surprised that both students and teachers are checking out into the dream world of their phones.

We are failing our children, but hey, the stonk number goes brr!!! And taxes are lower!!!!!! (Education budgets is usually the first thing that gets slashed because it takes about 10-20 years to show a noticeable negative effect)

[1] https://www.nctq.org/research-insights/amid-budget-and-staff...

[2] https://thecounter.org/summer-hunger-new-york-city/

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_banning_in_the_United_Sta...

[4] https://19thnews.org/2025/08/teachers-spending-school-suppli...

[5] https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/education/2025/12/28/numb...

[honr]

I went to school in a poor country, and live in the US. The education budget was very low when / where I grew up, and it is pretty hefty where my kids go to school. I occasionally visit their school and volunteer to help. That has given me a good frame for comparison.

The quality of education my kids are getting is pure trash compared to what I receieved.

The problem is not the budget. It is the lack of real teachers, as well as a perpetually experimental curriculum. The "modern" methods that I have seen their teachers practice (which confuse the teachers, too, by the way; the teachers all have said that), are very visibly wrong. So wrong that even I can see all sorts of flaws, despite not having any background in education science. The curriculum is predictably set for failure.

I strongly believe technology, and AI in particular, can be a major enabler in improving education. However, for early education (first 5-6 grades), I think absolute lack of technology (except maybe a big e-ink class whiteboard, or some such) would be far more beneficial. Kids can learn to type very quickly when needed (ideally 6th / 7th grade). They can't learn thinking-while-writing, as quickly. They have to slowly build up that mental muscle. Let them have a few years of building structure and core understanding, then get exposed to tools for doing things faster.

[dataflow]

> The problem is not the budget. It is the lack of real teachers, as well as a perpetually experimental curriculum.

Taking this at face value: how are you teasing apart "lack of real teachers" from the budget? You don't think you'd get real teachers if there was a higher budget to pay them well?

> The quality of education my kids are getting is pure trash compared to what I received.

How are you doing this comparison? Have you adjusted for cost of living and the alternative opportunities available to good teachers and such? I ask because usually people compare absolute amounts of money, which distorts the picture.

[adrian_b]

You say that in USA there are no good teachers because any that are good will find better-paying professions?

This sounds plausible. Like the previous poster, I have grown in an Eastern European country where everybody was extremely poor by today's standards. Education was not perfect and there were many mediocre teachers and even bad teachers.

However, there were also a great number of very good teachers, so there were good chances that you would happen to have at least a few good teachers. There were also many opportunities for the best students to learn beyond the normal curriculum, either by self-study in good free libraries or by attending special extra-curricular classes held by the best teachers for various sciences.

I have a lot of friends who have migrated to USA many decades ago. All of them complain about how bad is the education that their children are receiving, in comparison with what we had when we were young, which matches what the previous poster was saying.

While in the schools that I attended as a young child the teachers would have been considered very poor in comparison with any US teacher of today, in comparison with most other professions available at that time they had decent salaries, so indeed there were not many non-illegal alternatives that would have been a better career choice.

[dataflow]

> You say that in USA there are no good teachers

No, that is not remotely what I'm saying. It's both entirely factually false and also a ridiculous extrapolation to make to a country of hundreds of millions of people.

> because any that are good will find better-paying professions?

What I am saying is that to the extent the parent may have encountered bad teachers (taking what they said at face value, whether it's accurate or not), this could be a big part of the explanation. i.e. I find it dubious that the budget would be unrelated to whatever they believe the teacher quality is. That's all I'm saying.

[mlrtime]

>You don't think you'd get real teachers if there was a higher budget to pay them well?

No, this has been proven many times that money is not a leading factor: Just one : https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED418160

The only clear indication of student performance is parent participation and involvement.

[dataflow]

> No, this has been proven many times that money is not a leading factor: Just one : https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED418160 The only clear indication of student performance is parent participation and involvement.

No, we're talking about teacher quality, not student performance. Obviously they are not the same thing. You even listed some factors that affect them differently.

[BobaFloutist]

Which is often downstream of zip code.

[tremon]

> You don't think you'd get real teachers if there was a higher budget to pay them well?

Budget goes beyond teacher salary. It's also for giving teachers the tools they need, giving students the support they need, and schools the building maintenance that it needs. Good teachers can't teach and good children can't learn if they don't have the material, nor can they function well if their primary needs aren't met (well-fed, healthy, comfortable).

[MichaelRo]

I dunno, maybe it differs by country/location but my perception is that school was never capable to educate beyond some basic mediocrity level. Mostly it's an institution imposed by the state to process the children while parents are working. And the way to actually teach your kids something never really changed since the times of the elite few versus the mass of peasants: private tutoring.

Now it's true that with basic access to education for masses, a few more poor smart kids that would otherwise become fishmongers or something, now have the chance to raise above their starting condition. But the reality never changed and never will: the vast majority of people are not very bright. And making it easier for them to be dumb and get away with it doesn't help (smartphones and now AI).

[intended]

Schools can educate well beyond that level, provided they are resourced. Bloom’s 2 sigma problem comes to mind (1).

Education also ends up suffering because its seen as a support role, teachers are not valued, and “He who can, does; he who cannot, teaches".

Education is also political today. Science based education is an outright target. Increasing government spending to improve outcomes is also a contested issue, and in America this is met with arguments about bad teachers, unions, and privatization/vouchers.

There is much that can be done to improve educational outcomes, but like everything, it is contested.

(1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom%27s_2_sigma_problem

[spwa4]

This is true, but only in the way that no manager, private or government will ever fix. What happened to give good teachers in the 1980s (who kept working afterwards) is ... a large economic crash.

Which created a relatively large supply of people from capable, respected positions, in the hard/positivist sciences who suddenly lost their job. They always had the ability to displace teachers, but never wanted to. Then, suddenly, they had a strong incentive.

Managers, or government committees, to point out what they mostly were, were utterly baffled at this happening. They had spent decades making the demands to become a teacher easier, because they were in the situation we have now: they couldn't find people willing to work for the wage, for the (lack of) respect/status. They didn't change the wage, because status: they will never accept that teachers have a status above theirs. But suddenly, that didn't stop a lot of capable people from becoming teachers.

So this cohort of fired people blew through the requirements, fixed the shortage and even displaced quite a bit of teachers. Some never left. Some are still there. They were also used to getting respect in their jobs, and so they demanded that from government, from kids and parents (with the good ... and the bad that that brought, for example giving teachers the right to exclude troublemakers from education). They built a power base and lifted education, including increasing the demands on new teachers.

This in turn resulted in an enormous cohort of relatively well-educated people coming out of schools.

But the economy came back. A lot of these teachers left and of course the unions and government changed the rules so they themselves would be secure against a repeat of this. Displacing teachers, should anybody again suddenly want to, is a lot harder now (ironically unions thought the government would stand by them, but now the government is in constant saving mode, so they want to replace existing teachers by the cheapest labor they can find and so they're killing off those rules).

But the economy came back. To have capable teachers, schools would now have to outbid the private sector again. Which means government committees would have to vote their own status, their own pay, down. The way FANG managers have been forced to do: they'd have to accept that at least some of the people under them have more status, and more money, than they do. Needless to say, governments utterly refused this, because when such trivialities as the future of society conflict with their own money, their own status, the vote always goes the same way ... and here we are.

It's again not that well-educated people have disappeared, in fact there's more than ever before, it's that they, like in the 60s and 70s, will not accept the deal the government is offering, and the government doesn't want to offer even that deal.

But this all started happening 30 years ago and really pushed through 15 or so years ago. A whole generation has been educated already by teachers that just don't measure up to the teachers that came before. This new generation ... doesn't measure up and of course finds this situation very unfair, they never had a chance, and it really isn't their fault. Government explicitly chose to create this situation. Or to put it very bluntly: there are suddenly a great deal of young MAGAs, growing every year. The same goes for Europe too, especially since most countries have now decided they'll just outright stop education in a bunch of fields, killing off and defunding university department after department (so much cheaper to have Turkey, or China, or ... educate doctors and engineers), which then of course meant that most or all people in high positions are not locals, which means the path to high status that education used to be is a lot narrower now.

... and then Trump did the same in America. And yes, where Europe did it slowly, limiting damage, Trump decided to take a chainsaw (or what he actually used, as it turns out: a really bad LLM) to the US equivalent.

It always come back to the same argument: being inclusive, respectful, having authority, friendly, ... all of this matters. But having teachers capable in the hard sciences, is table stakes, and that is expensive. If you have a disrespectful teacher that has an excellent grasp of the subject, kids get educated. If you have a teacher that is inclusive, respectful, has authority, the friendliest person you've ever met, but limited grasp of the subject, kids don't get an education. NOT the other way around. You HAVE to start with teachers with excellent education and today that means you pay for it. But government refuses.

And yes, that's not much of a problem for the wealthy, who are educated and just educate their own kids, if need be, they do it themselves. Or they get tutors that they pay well. The rich are not the problem here. You will not fix this situation by sabotaging the rich's efforts to educate their kids. It's that government has decided they can spend just a little bit more money now if they close off the path that education provides. And the cohort of people that already got educated so much worse than people 10 years older ... they want revenge and so this is exactly what they want government to do.

Any study on education will always say that educating someone is comparable to a process of diffusion. The kids top out at the level of their teachers, no matter the process. Humans learn 99.99999% or more through imitation, so the subject grasp of the teacher is effectively the limit for the kids. At that level learning slows to a crawl at best. Imitation is the cheap, fast way humans learn (for obvious reasons if you've done even a little bit of machine learning. Think of how much information a teacher giving you the answer to a problem gives, and then about how much information an experiment gives)

It is of course true that students can exceed the teachers. But that is a very slow, very expensive process that takes years to learn even relatively simple things. And that requires providing resources directly to the students.

Resources matter ... but not laptops. I mean, by all means give teachers the resources they require. But first you must enforce a quality level in the teachers. That's table stakes and nothing will help until that's in place.

[intended]

In the American historical example shared, education got lucky because of economic downturns.

If education is not valued by a nation, then this is not a surprising outcome. Do note, Americans as a whole tend to be extremely sensitive about critical discussions on the “way things are” in America. It’s a trait that results in a sort of “nothing can change” point of view, and hostility when it’s pointed out that other countries do better.

America has so far been able to attract that talent to their economy, but given the instability in place currently, that engine is reversing.

This means that investments in education are going to be needed. Right now teachers make their own print outs, teaching material, and the education system is generally underfunded.

Stating that it’s not a resource allocation problem, when resource allocation is what is required to attract talent, is inaccurate. Many people would prefer to work for meaning and to teach, even if they have talent and can be paid better. Given a livable wage, the super ambitious types will do the risky entrepreneurial things they should be doing. Others will be happy to teach.

Some of the smartest people I met in America chose to teach. America can change things, and it can enjoy the benefits.

[tonyedgecombe]

>I dunno, maybe it differs by country/location but my perception is that school was never capable to educate beyond some basic mediocrity level.

You just need to look at educational league tables between countries to see there is a spectrum of results and some places are much better than others.

Personally I think the problems are rooted in inequality. If the elite all send their children to private schools then why would they care about the poor state of public schools. The country that regularly comes out at the top of the league table for educational attainment has almost no private schools.

[Tanjreeve]

There are a few people with a powerful platform in terms of money and influence for whom it would be much simpler if the majority of people were not capable of pointing out BS or seeing how they're getting screwed. Purely coincidentally I'm sure the loudest media voices constantly declare various versions of how we should throw in the towel on educating the majority of people while also funding initiatives to enshittify public education and it would be better for most people to go into the trades and not worry their little heads about how the wider world works.

Meanwhile those people's own children are getting educated at schools with no technology allowed and are not going into trades. So it seems it's both possible to educate people given enough effort and a lot of people are capable of tertiary+ education given the right intellectual capital.

[nativeit]

We could pay teachers even half of the median salary for HN users, and then see if outcomes improve?

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

And when the outcomes don't improve because money isn't magical, we could double the salaries again! And again!

Seriously, how do you think that will work? Are you suggesting that the teachers could improve outcomes now, but are holding out as some sort of negotiation leverage? Or that there's some secret corps of millions of super-teachers who could educate the nation's children, but who would rather be network technicians and underwater welders because they need that half-median software income?

[OkayPhysicist]

> Or that there's some secret corps of millions of super-teachers who could educate the nation's children, but who would rather be network technicians and underwater welders because they need that half-median software income?

That basically is the suggestion. The world is not an RPG, where being good at one thing necessitates you being bad at everything else. On the contrary, aptitude in one task is pretty well correlated with being good at any task. When we talk about intellectual tasks, we call this IQ, when we talk about physical feats we call this athleticism, and when we talk about social maneuvering, we call it charisma. And all three of those are positively correlated.

With that in mind, it's not at all unreasonable to believe that somebody who would make a great teacher (or at least a substantially better than average teacher) might have other aptitudes that we choose to reward more, even if they'd be relatively much better at teaching. Right now, you'd have to take a ~$50,000 pay cut to choose to be the highest paid teacher in the median California school district compared to being a median Californian software developer.

It's like any other job. If I'm offering $80,000 a year for software developers in CA, I might find a few talented people overlooked by the rest of the job market, or someone exceptionally stoked to work at my particular company, but I'm far more likely to end up with someone well below mediocrity.

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

>That basically is the suggestion. The world is not an RPG, where being good at one thing necessitates you being bad at everything else. On the contrary, aptitude in one task is pretty well correlated with being good at any task.

We need, for a nation the size of the United States, millions of teachers. Quite literally. The process that somehow selects not one good (or more literally, very few, just so the pedants don't complain) teacher now, but will select mostly/all good teachers if we were to implement it is 15% raises across the board? 40%? Never mind that doing that could only possibly attract something like 5-10% of personnel change... and I'm supposed to believe this is about increasing the quality of education instead of pandering to a voting bloc that will help you to enact your non-education agenda? No thanks.

>With that in mind, it's not at all unreasonable to believe that somebody who would make a great teacher

Blah blah blah, I've already moved past that. No need to try to make the sale here.

[mlrtime]

Nope, it's been tried before and it had 0 affect on student outcomes. I'm not saying that teachers don't "deserve" more, but it is not going to help students one bit.

[gscott]

It's more about passion then money.

[mietek]

Why don't you try paying your bills with passion and report back.

[japhyr]

As someone who earned "passion" money for a long time before ever earning anything remotely close to tech-adjacent money, passion does not pay bills anywhere near as well as money does. And struggling to pay bills, such as paying someone to fix a leaking roof, is not an enjoyable life for very long.

[red-iron-pine]

passion makes sense when people can afford the rent

[mschuster91]

> But the reality never changed and never will: the vast majority of people are not very bright

Nature vs nurture, the old argument...

Of course, you got what one might flippantly call "the inbreds from Alabama", or those whose parents suffered from substance abuse or other issues (obviously, for the mother the risk is much higher, but also the father's health has a notable impact on sperm quality). These kids, particularly those suffering from FAS (fetal alcohol abuse)? As hard as it sounds, they often enough are headed for a life behind institutional bars. FAS is no joke, and so are many genetic defects. That's nature, no doubt - but still, we as a society should do our best to help these kids to grow to the best they reasonably can (and maybe, with gene therapy, we can even "fix" them).

But IMHO, these kids where "nature" dominates are a tiny minority - and nurture is the real problem we have to tackle as societies. We are not just failing the kids themselves by letting them grow up in poverty, we are failing our society. And instead of pseudo elite tech bro children and nepo babies collecting millions of dollars for the x-th dating app, NFT or whatever scam - I'd rather prefer to see people who actually lived a life beyond getting spoiled rotten to have a chance.

[somenameforme]

Places like China and Vietnam are the ones rocking the test scores. These places operate on a tiny fraction of the $ per student of most places in the world, even PPP adjusted. And I think China's increasingly absurd achievements [1] make it clear that this goes beyond the test.

I think the nurture argument can still apply there - Chinese parent is a meme all its own, and for a good reason. But this isn't something that can be achieved with money or digital tech. It's a combined mix of culture and parenting within that culture. Perhaps if the people so invested in trying to improve the education of children were, themselves, having more kids - we might not have such a problem.

[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47067496

[mschuster91]

> It's a combined mix of culture and parenting within that culture.

The problem is, that culture (and other more or less closely related Asian cultures) also produces an awful lot of psychologically awfully damaged adults - and many Asian countries are now facing the consequences of that, with hikikomori, women not finding suitable partners, rock bottom fertility rates and collapsing demographics.

And on top of that, you may get really obedient children, excelling at following what they know to do... but creativity? Thinking outside the box? Going against the script? Thrown into unfamiliar situations? Whoops.

It's getting better, slowly, no doubt, and we're seeing the results, but I'm not certain that progress comes fast enough to save some of the societies facing the demographic bomb the hardest (especially Japan, but China is also heading for serious issues). With China especially, it may also get interesting politically once a generation grows to adulthood that can see through the CCP propaganda.

> Perhaps if the people so invested in trying to improve the education of children were, themselves, having more kids - we might not have such a problem.

That assumes we have people actually interested in furthering the education of our children, and that is something I heavily doubt.

All we have here in the Western world is the contrary: we got austerity / trickle down finance ideologists that see education in general as a field ripe for savings on one side, then we got history revisionists actively trying to erase what children get taught about our past, and if all of that weren't bad enough we got the religious extremists trying to sell the gullible public that if you ban stuff like LGBT from even being mentioned in school books, children wouldn't turn out gay or trans - which is obviously bonkers.

[ThrowawayR2]

> "And on top of that, you may get really obedient children, excelling at following what they know to do... but creativity? Thinking outside the box? Going against the script? Thrown into unfamiliar situations? Whoops."

Usual Western racism, reassuring themselves they're better than those "uncreative" Asians, even as Asia continues to eat away at the West's technology lead in a variety of sectors.

One wonders if the Europeans ever told themselves that the backwards folk of the colonies could never catch up to the technological or scientific achievements of the continent's great centers of learning and industry.

[imtringued]

China has a mathematical surplus of men. I'm not sure I can trust the rest of your comment considering that you're acting as if the one child policy didn't exist.