The Jefferson County Public Schools in Kentucky this month announced a surprising unintended consequence of a new statewide cellphone ban. In many of the district’s schools, the number of books checked out in the first few weeks of class had skyrocketed compared with last year, before the ban was instituted. (View Highlight)
Results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP (considered the gold standard of educational assessments) “showed that about a third of the 12th-graders who were tested last year did not have basic reading skills,” according to my newsroom colleague Dana Goldstein. Some of these students have comprehension levels so low they may not be able to decipher the meaning of a political speech (View Highlight)
looking at the results over time, the “pivotal year really looks to be 2013.” There was some stagnation in test scores before that, but “once you get to that 2013 you start to see steady decline in math and reading.” That long predates Covid school closures, which is what so many public officials point to as the moment when school performance fell off the cliff. (View Highlight)
there have been studies showing that devices in classrooms aren’t distracting just for their users — their peers in proximity are also distracted and may do worse on tests. (View Highlight)
when you drill down into the 12th grade NAEP reading scores, the top 25 percent is doing about as well as they have since the 1990s. The story here is that the bottom 25 percent has fallen more precipitously. (View Highlight)
This school year does feel like a turning point in terms of a bipartisan, widespread acknowledgment that screens in schools, not just cellphones, were a natural experiment that went completely off the rails. (View Highlight)
It turns out that when kids aren’t allowed to doom scroll, take rude pictures of each other or rot their brains on TikTok during lunch hour or in study hall, they get bored enough to go to the library and check out books. (View Highlight)