Did you just read 5 words into the article and come to this conclusion? The article that the authors researched and told us it's been going on since before the pandemic?
Ah, their next article should be about the confidence of fools...
> But the national trend is very clear: America’s students are getting much worse at math. The decline started about a decade ago and sharply accelerated during the coronavirus pandemic.
So I, a "fool", read that and think: Hm... well if the article isn't giving numbers I'm going to take the "sharp acceleration" as a statement about magnitude and clearly infer that the pandemic is at fault.
Again, is the subject complicated? Sure. But education policy doesn't produce effects like this. It never has, probably never will, and the article even doesn't claim it does.
You know what does produce effects like this? Keeping 13-year-olds out of class for two years.
I mean, come on. I repeat: write it down, in 4 years we'll all be reading about the miracle of American education policy. And that will be wrong too.
You're hand wavy "it's the pandemic" neglects the other evidence provided in the article that happens to coincide with the pandemic such as the elimination of test scores as admissions criteria to many universities. And the article certainly doesn't blame it wholly on the pandemic, for example here are two theories it presents:
> How did this happen? One theory is that the attention-shredding influence of phones and social media is to blame. The dip in math scores coincides with the widespread adoption of smartphones; by 2015, nearly three-quarters of high-school-aged kids had access to one. A related possibility is that technology is making students complacent. Emelianenko told me that students “are just not engaged in math classes anymore”; they seem to believe that they don’t need to learn math, because they can use AI instead.
> Or maybe students have stopped achieving in math because schools have stopped demanding it of them. During the George W. Bush administration, federal policy emphasized accountability for public schools. Schools that saw poor performance on standardized tests received increased funding at first, but if scores still didn’t improve, they had their funding pulled. Research suggests that this helped improve math outcomes, particularly for poor Black students. After 2015, however, the federal government backed off from its accountability measures, which had faced bipartisan criticism. (Some teachers’ unions and progressive parents wanted less emphasis on standardized tests, and some conservative politicians wanted the federal government to remove itself from education policy.) Many schools across the country have shifted toward making math engaging for students at the expense of evidence-based teaching practices. And due to funding shortages or misguided efforts to improve equity, many students are held back from taking the hardest math courses.
> You're hand wavy "it's the pandemic" neglects the other evidence provided
There was no significant other evidence. And "hand wavy" is missing the point. There is a bleedingly obvious hypothesis for this effect with huge signal in all sorts of other areas of social policy. I mean, really? The pandemic is visible in every measurable segment of society but somehow not a major factor in education results?
In some sense, yes, Occam's Razor is a principle that embraces "hand wavy" understanding by demanding extraordinary evidence for extraordinary claims. And I think it's going to work very well here. Again, for the third time: write it down. In four years this will all bounce back.
What's happening here is actually a different logical fallacy entirely. HN commenters have a distinct ideological bent against new ("woke") ideas in education. And they're willing to ignore things like giant global pandemics to chase their preferred explanations.
Ah, their next article should be about the confidence of fools...