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A seemingly plausible culprit, and a familiar boogeyman for progressives, is insufficient spending. The problem with this tidy explanation is that it’s not tethered to reality. School spending did not decline from 2012 to 2022. In fact, it increased significantly, even after adjusting for inflation, from $14,000 a student to more than $16,000.

When you understand what "graft" is.

A more likely culprit for learning loss is smartphones.

In an article that had, 3 paragraphs prior, cited a right-wing think tank pointing out that this is an American problem. Selective memory of the existence of the rest of the world: only when considering ordnance and not orthography.

An explanation that deserves equal consideration is what one might call the low-expectations theory. In short, schools have demanded less and less from students—who have responded, predictably, by giving less and less. The timing lines up here, too. Around the same time that smartphones were taking off, a counterrevolution was brewing against the old regime of No Child Left Behind, the George W. Bush–era law passed in 2002 that required schools to set high standards and measured school progress toward them through stringent testing requirements. Bush famously said that he wanted to tackle “the soft bigotry of low expectations,” and there’s real evidence that he did. As controversial as it was, No Child Left Behind coincided with increased school performance, especially for those at the bottom.

No comment, because anything I would say would probably be .

A clear policy story is behind these improvements: imposing high standards while also giving schools the resources they needed to meet them.

We are approaching "people don't die of hunger when you give them food" levels of deep analysis here.

Not only are the southern states that are registering the greatest improvements in learning run by Republicans, but also their teachers are among the least unionized in the country.

Forget the rest of the article, this entire thing was tortured into existence on some lanyard's macbook specifically to write this one sentence. Wrap it up folks, we're done here.

One optimistic theory is that artificial-intelligence tools, which will only grow more powerful over the coming decades, will correct for this economic catastrophe by letting everyone externalize their thinking to superintelligent computer programs.

lmao, the American Century of Humiliation is well underway.

America’s scientific and technological hegemony is being seriously challenged, and China already leads in industries such as electric-vehicle production and solar-cell manufacturing. In the industries where America still leads, much technical prowess is owed to immigration policies that have attracted the brightest and most ambitious from around the world and to the research universities that train them. The Trump administration is pursuing a policy of browbeating these universities and of restricting visas, including for high-skilled workers—turning away talent amid an international talent war. The idea is that students in America today, and not those educated elsewhere, will be the labor force holding up the economy. That bet—like America’s students—may be mathematically unsound.

Get fucked.

Idrees Kahloon is a staff writer at The Atlantic. He was previously the Washington bureau chief for The Economist.

Professional clown lol.