Education

Teachers across the country increasingly report that todays children struggle to focus, read, write, and perform grade appropriate math skills. Testing confirms this too. Additionally, parents and children alike are often difficult to hold accountable. These issues are compounded by long working hours for teachers (as they grade at home) and low pay. It is thus no wonder there is a general teacher shortage.

There are many contributing factors behind these trends: inadequate support for learning at home, overexposure to electronic devices, and institutional problems. When teacher pay is low, fewer people enter the profession, lowering average teacher quality (even though most teachers remain highly capable), which in turn worsens classroom conditions and worsens teacher burnout.

One possible reform is that grading scales ought to be more standardized across America, so that comparing GPAs between students in different states makes sense. Funding for education should also be more standardized, as currently richer areas receive better funding, which allocates better teachers, and thus richer students generally are able to do better in their GPA and SAT/AP/IB scores. In fact, higher SAT scores are directly correlated with family income, with SAT math (0.22) and verbal (0.18) having higher correlation than GPA or class rank (0.6-0.10) (Penn Wharton).

If we are to live in a genuinely free society, there should be no public schooling benefit to being born into a richer family. Thus, we must equalize educational attainment, at least at the state level. This means funding lower-socioeconomic areas to improve teaching, as well as incentivizing good teachers to teach at all levels of schools.

In addition, children of all ages, in general, should have as little screen time as possible. If there is to be screen time, then longer-form, less intense, or educational content is greatly preferred to things like scrolling platforms, of which the consequences we have only begun to see but do not look at all promising. (Going to add more to this one but requires more research)