Throwing money at the education system has not raised student achievement, and the looming rise of artificial intelligence won’t help students who can’t read and write well enough to manage it. In a world where knowledge is the key to future success, students today suffer from what experts call “hasty reading.”
“If you’re raising kids and they’re going to public schools, you might want to move to Mississippi for high-quality public education,” says investigative journalist Peter Schweizer. “There is lots of chaos going on in the American education system today, and we’re going to explain why Mississippi is kicking butt.”
In what has been called the “Mississippi Miracle,” the state has rapidly improved its K-12 student performance in ten years through statewide policy, curriculum, and teaching changes. Once considered worst in the nation, today Mississippi ranks ninth in fourth-grade literacy, a key metric for student preparedness in later schooling.
They did it by raising standards, not lowering them, and by shifting the focus of reading instruction to phonics, vocabulary improvement, and measuring reading comprehension. And de-emphasizing technology.
According to a new report, other states suffered learning losses, lower scores, and learning loss caused by the pandemic and lost school days.
“Most troubling is the decline in the very skills that matter most in the AI age: evaluating information, making connections across multiple sources, and thinking critically about what we read,” says Schweizer on the most recent episode of The Drill Down podcast. “The report is basically saying kids are getting dumber.”
“They call this trend, which they noticed, ‘hasty reading,’” says co-host Eric Eggers. “It’s a trend where students read quickly, but inaccurately. And it has doubled. Nearly ten percent of kids now read quickly but inaccurately, twice as much as just seven years ago.”
The problem is happening internationally as well. The latest report from the Program for International Student Assessment measures the skills of fifteen-year-olds around the world.
“Between 2018 and 2025, reading performance fell in some three quarters of the countries,” says Schweizer. “Scores fell by the equivalent of three quarters of a year of learning. and those U.S. students also trailed China, Singapore, Japan, South Korea, the United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia.”
Eggers notes that countries that have not reduced discipline and standards, such as China, Taiwan, and South Korea, have not experienced these learning declines.
The problem is not school funding. American schools have been flooded with money and technology, including Chromebook computers and digital learning platforms.
“I don’t think that is the case nearly as much in China and in Europe, partly because it costs a lot of money to do that,” Schweizer says.
“Are they just plugging into AI and going on autopilot or are they actually learning how to think critically?” he asks. “If they’re not, the ramifications for our country are absolutely enormous, in terms of people being able to fill jobs.”
“We keep debating AI and worry if it is going to destroy the world, but it may dumb us down so much that it can win without a fight,” says Schweizer, who has three children of his own in middle school now.
Technology in the classroom lowers the burden on teachers, Eggers points out, but takes away the interactivity between the students and the teacher that sparks learning.
Another survey report came out this week from the Thomas Fordham Institute that makes this criticism more strongly against cellphones. Called “High Tech, Low Standards: High School in the Age of Distraction,” the report found technology running rampant in our schools, but not for productive things.
“The findings say 76 percent of respondents personally engage in at least one form of illicit technology use on a daily basis in high school,” Eggers reports. “These are students scrolling social media, messaging friends, shopping, or gambling online. This is what they’re doing at school,” he adds.
Nearly half of students surveyed admitted to using AI to solve math problems. Thirty-six percent used AI to summarize books they were supposed to have read, twenty-nine percent used it to write first drafts of compositions, and twenty-six percent for help during quizzes and tests.
While these technologies are positioned as helping the student, “it is really designed to help the teacher. The teacher can basically plug in and check out,” says Schweizer. “They can say, ‘All of you watch the video, which will teach you how to do your math assignment,’ while they can sit at their desk, probably on their phone looking at their social media feed,” Schweizer says. “That’s worse than having the teacher doing it on the board where it’s interactive and students can ask questions, and the teacher can determine whether the students are getting it or not.”
“I have heard reports of substitute teachers Facetiming friends in the classroom while kids are doing other stuff,” adds Eggers.
Lastly, the hosts discuss a new report by the Government Accounting Office (GAO), which reveals problems with the classroom themselves.
“GAO says that some of these schools are in such rough shape that nearly one in five districts canceled school in at least one of its schools last year due to issues with facilities,” says Eggers. “Things like plumbing emergencies or extreme classroom temperatures… In one of the classrooms, some flooding caused a little waterfall, and the teacher said it was too distracting.”
“The point is that two million students lost an estimated three and a half million days of learning just last year as a result,” Eggers adds. “America’s schools are not in the greatest shape.”
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