US HS students lose ground in math and reading, continuing yearslong decline

Re:US HS students lose ground in math and reading, continuin... by ToucanLoucan on Wednesday September 10, 2025 @09:23AM (#45197278)

1. Good luck. Have you ever tried to take an iPad kid's iPad? Be ready for the fight of your fucking life.

2 and 5 are handily down to No Child Left Behind which is frankly some of the worst legislation ever devised for education.

3 and 4: And these factors are only getting worse as worse and worse kids enter the school systems. Nobody wants to deal with them, including their parents.

Bonus: It's not hard, but we won't allocate the money. School lunch lady is a job considered a punch line because for some reason our culture thinks it's easy to serve food to several hundred people in 45 minutes when the people in question aren't old enough to buy cigarettes, but good fucking luck getting money and people allocated to actually do that.

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Re:US HS students lose ground in math and reading, continuin... by dbish on Wednesday September 10, 2025 @09:26AM (#45197319)

If you can't take a kid's iPad away the parents have made major mistakes and the only option is for the school to directly address this addiction head on.

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Re:US HS students lose ground in math and reading, continuin... by etempleton on Wednesday September 10, 2025 @10:21AM (#45198141)

I see it with a lot of parents that use iPads and other devices to pacify their kids. Yes, it is easy, but when they are so addicted to it that they can’t put it down it is a problem.

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Re:US HS students lose ground in math and reading, continuin... by djeastm on Wednesday September 10, 2025 @09:49AM (#45197674)

>1. Good luck. Have you ever tried to take an iPad kid's iPad? Be ready for the fight of your fucking life.

If a parent has a child that is addicted to an iPad or any other device, the blame is squarely on the parent having let the child use the addictive device so much in the first place. If there needs to be a "detox" period for the child's addiction, so be it, but throwing up one's hands and giving up is parental negligence.

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Re:US HS students lose ground in math and reading, continuin... by ToucanLoucan on Wednesday September 10, 2025 @09:58AM (#45197797)

Oh I completely agree. But it isn’t the parents problem, it’s the teachers, and the teacher is uniquely un-equipped and disempowered to deal with it. They have a room full of kids to attend to and one having a meltdown because they’ve lost their dopamine dispenser and have no emotional regulation capability ruins that entire class.

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Re:US HS students lose ground in math and reading, continuin... by djeastm on Wednesday September 10, 2025 @10:11AM (#45197985)

Fair enough, I misunderstood your point. It's so strange to me that teachers are having to deal with any of these behavioral issues. I seem to recall it being the domain of Assistant Principals and what we called "resource officers". Any disruption more than a childish comment meant a trip to the principals office escorted by an officer. That was it. Teaching could continue.

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Re:US HS students lose ground in math and reading, continuin... by etempleton on Wednesday September 10, 2025 @10:20AM (#45198112)

The issue is you can no longer physically remove a child. So getting them there is the problem if they are not going willingly and if they are a big enough problem they need to be removed it probably means they aren’t doing anything willingly.

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Re:US HS students lose ground in math and reading, continuin... by jjani on Wednesday September 10, 2025 @11:54AM (#45199566)

> The issue is you can no longer physically remove a child

What change has made this impossible?

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Re:US HS students lose ground in math and reading, continuin... by dartharva on Wednesday September 10, 2025 @01:20PM (#45200852)

Any person who has such an "iPad kid" has completely failed as a parent. That they can't have everything their way is literally the first moral value children are taught in functioning societies; if this basic need is not being met then we are truly living in a dystopia.

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Re:US HS students lose ground in math and reading, continuin... by linalgmixer on Thursday September 11, 2025 @05:11PM (#45216147)

Yes, it’s a fight sometimes. Do it anyway. When we give in to avoid a blow‑up, we teach “meltdown = win.” That’s not fair to the kid long‑term. Set the limit, prep the transition, follow through.

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