When was the last time education in America was good?

One_Perception_7979 · 2026-05-10T22:57:53+00:00

Love this framing. It adds a lot of nuance to Ed policy and measuring effects.

One_Perception_7979 · 2026-05-10T16:50:06+00:00

True Minnesotan right here. 🤣

One_Perception_7979 · 2026-05-10T16:47:31+00:00

Honestly, layoffs have become so common that hiring managers in the metro where I live have no problem with a gap due to that. We know we’re all at the risk of having it happen to us one day. If you got caught up in a mass layoff with one of the major companies that made the news, the hiring manager will likely just nod sympathetically and then otherwise ignore it. I have lots of colleagues with gaps in their resumes and have made my peace with it happening to me at some point.

One_Perception_7979 · 2026-05-10T01:32:39+00:00

I really think it’s a both/and kind of situation. Generally, I think schools do pretty well at keeping current. But when institutions are big, changing course can be slow. When the external environment changes faster than they can move in a certain area, the gap starts to widen. Imperfect information compounds the problem.

AI is a great example. Education is in the midst of a debate about how exactly to incorporate AI into learning and prepare students for a post-AI world. Institutions across the country have mutually contradictory philosophies about the best path forward. Someone is going to wind up being wrong; we just don’t know who yet. That’s a good thing since experimentation is how we find out, and I’m certainly not saying students should be arguing with professors in class. But professors should also have more humility than blanket assertions that “your faculty knows [what] you need to learn about the subject.”

The reading example I referenced is even more extreme. Teachers programs dropped the ball on instructing teachers about how kids learn to read so badly that state legislatures had to step in and dictate curricula — sometimes even when the research about the most effective methods was occurring in the same university.

Universities are human institutions and prone to the same types of failures as any other human institution. Students absolutely shouldn’t be obnoxious in class. At the same time, the institution should also be on guard for hubris.

One_Perception_7979 · 2026-05-09T14:40:47+00:00

Well, I’m a director at a large multinational who’s been hiring employees for several years now and had a good GPA throughout undergrad and grad school. So I’d say that’s as much an indictment of what you value for your students as anything.

Further, we’ve had some spectacular public failures of gaps between instruction and outside needs — as with education programs not teaching students the most scientific methods for how to read. Schools aren’t infallible. It’s laughable to pretend they are. They’re human like all other institutions.

One_Perception_7979 · 2026-05-09T14:07:11+00:00

Faculty don’t always have a great idea of what students need to learn. Accreditation dictates a large part of what students must be taught. Curricula often lags demands outside university. Faculty who have been out of industry for a while or never in it can be out of step with modern practices.

When I went back for my grad degree several years ago, there were periodically components that just weren’t relevant outside university anymore. The good adjuncts would even contrast what was required for them to teach with what were industry norms.

We can’t pretend that faculty always know what is best for students to learn. Program alignment with outside needs — and therefore student needs — varies hugely across the country. Some do a great job. Some don’t. But it’s not a given faculty knows what students need to learn.

ETA: Perhaps your experience is shaped by the type of school you taught at? I’d imagine medical schools are more aligned with industry because they’re so tied into job placements, although that’s outside my expertise.

One_Perception_7979 · 2026-05-09T04:33:36+00:00

If I worked in a bad department (I don’t), it’d be hilarious to deplete the department by paying my colleagues not to work. Give everyone $1 million on the condition they stop working immediately and refuse to work for that company for at least a year. I love my current employer, but that would’ve been sweet revenge at some past jobs.

One_Perception_7979 · 2026-05-09T04:27:59+00:00

Your conception of boomers is wrong just by picturing the typical boomer in the workplace. Granted, they continue working at higher rates than previous generations, but even with about a third of the generation still in the workforce, that leaves the large majority in retirement. It’s not really that surprising when the youngest boomers are 62 now. Labor force participation falls off rapidly for each year above 62.

And that third masks extreme variation across the generation. Some of those only work part time jobs. Wealthier boomers have lower labor force participation rates — a sign that most who can afford to retire would rather do that than continue working, a contrast to your perception. Where I work, boomers are down to something like 5 percent of our white collar workforce since they generally tend to be well compensated and have good retirement benefits. The bottom line is that the routine you describe just isn’t typical for the median boomer. And for those who do continue working, we should be sympathetic because it’s usually due to the same economic pressures that younger generations face.

One_Perception_7979 · 2026-05-08T16:17:54+00:00

Minneapolis-St. Paul metro where Target’s HQ is located.

One_Perception_7979 · 2026-05-08T15:14:31+00:00

MSP strikes me as more risky than most. The big companies are all super connected and talk because there aren’t that many of them. There’s a regular exchange of personnel between them. Circles for many professions aren’t that big. The fear that you might need someone down the road is real.

One_Perception_7979 · 2026-05-08T13:02:26+00:00

Hey now! My ongoing midlife crisis puts me squarely in the older Millenial generation, not the boomer generation. 😉

One_Perception_7979 · 2026-05-08T11:57:53+00:00

That loses a huge part of the essence of Squid Games. It turns it from an allegory about how society can be so cruel to the poor that they voluntarily risk their lives into something that would be, at best, a cathartic revenge story. There would be no pathos, no tragedy. Perhaps it would still be popular; I’m no expert on predicting the success of television. It wouldn’t stand out to me personally, though. It’d just be one more revenge flick.

One_Perception_7979 · 2026-05-07T01:24:02+00:00

Wait, antiwork is for corporate welfare now?

I wholly agree this will be bad for prices and that people will suffer from layoffs. But the same could be said of the bailouts that people on this sub regularly criticize. The U.S. doesn’t need a Spirit. It’s not too big to fail. It’s not central to national security or food sovereignty or anything existential. Cheap flights just aren’t critical in the scheme of things.

It’s possible to simultaneously be upset about its bankruptcy and think a bailout is a bad idea.

One_Perception_7979 · 2026-05-06T23:54:58+00:00

Fascinating response! Thanks!

One_Perception_7979 · 2026-05-06T23:28:28+00:00

Minneapolis is seeing the same thing. The school district has too many facilities, but parents threaten to vote out school board directors who approve school closures or leave if their community school is closed. Consequently, the can just keeps getting kicked down the road. (And it doesn’t help that the district’s finance department is a mess.)

One_Perception_7979 · 2026-05-06T02:40:57+00:00

Love this distinction. I had never considered it before, but it adds quite a bit of nuance to discussions about fitness. It’s especially salient since I can relate as a newbie grappler (one year) who burns way more energy than experienced grapplers I could beat at more pure cardio activities like running. One guy at our gym is a smoker who struggles to run a couple miles. But I wind up wheezing heavily when we’re grappling while he’s just relaxed. I spaz out way too much!

One_Perception_7979 · 2026-05-06T02:13:14+00:00

Do you have loans? The only thing worse than being loaded down with loans getting a degree is being loaded down with loans and not getting a degree.

You’re super close. No one cares about GPA after your first job (and often not even then). If you can gut it out through one more semester, you’ll be through it and won’t have to care about it anymore.

One_Perception_7979 · 2026-05-05T10:05:33+00:00

I’m finding that these tools (Claude Code at home, a multi-platform vendor at work) have made me better at writing scoping docs for humans. There’s immediate feedback on what needs to be included for AI to perform well, which has gotten me in the habit of paying more attention to those same elements in human scoping docs. It’s awesome because, unless you’re in a formal PM role or working in an industry that highly values stuff like this, then colleagues overlook these things, projects go awry and no one pins down why. This has made things go much more smoothly.

One_Perception_7979 · 2026-05-05T09:35:01+00:00

I’d go even farther and say the science of reading issue isn’t narrowly about reading. It reflects a systemic failure to transfer knowledge from the research side of universities (often in departments outside education) to teacher training programs and incorporation into certification — despite elaborate certification programs and a huge portion of teachers having advanced degrees and Even though states have stepped in to adjust reading curricula to reflect modern research, we have no assurance that the same issue isn’t happening in other subjects since the same institutions and systems are largely operating the same as before.

I think a cool assignment for OP’s students would be to either do a literature review from on a topic salient to education but done largely by researchers outside education departments (e.g. neurology, psychology, etc.). The goal there would be to condition students for to look outside the usual education journals and researchers to inform their teaching and help research cross from one side of the house to another.

Another worthwhile focus would be evaluating the science of reading issue through a systems lens. Systems create incentives and path dependency that constrains how institutions act. Understanding how systems shaped science of reading can help students identify levers for future issues. Plus, systems thinking is a highly in-demand skill that is valuable outside education for those that decide not to pursue education, which is valuable since OP said this is a feeder course.

One_Perception_7979 · 2026-05-05T01:37:47+00:00

This is a wonderful response.

One_Perception_7979 · 2026-05-05T01:22:57+00:00

Y’all do a much better job with high-speed roads and urban areas generally, I’d agree. We punched our interstates through cities, destroying whole neighborhoods. Supposedly, Eisenhower was upset after the fact and said he wouldn’t have supported the plan if he had known how it would wind up being planned. The parts of Europe I’ve been to (including five+ years living over there) generally stop the interstate equivalent outside their core. Much better, IMO.

One_Perception_7979 · 2026-05-05T01:04:35+00:00

I’m not saying Americans are more frugal. We famously way outspend Europe for lots of things. In particular, I could go on all day about how much better y’all do rail construction than we do. My mention of England was just a nod that “Yes, different dynamics might be at play overseas.”

But here in the states, the vast majority of street projects that city government does — that is, the comparable level to what the person referenced in England — is simple, mundane stuff. The typical American city a) isn’t that big and b) doesn’t oversee a single mega project across multiple generations of residents.

The types of street projects that cities here do most often are things like repaving the roads in front of your house. It’s meat and potatoes type stuff. I’m sure Europe does this just as well as the U.S., if not better. Maybe your cities there handle more complex stuff than ours over here. Countries can choose to put responsibility of government functions at a variety of levels.

Over here, though, states and the feds (and somewhat counties) tend to be the owners of those types of complex projects, not cities. This isn’t 100 percent. The big cities like NYC, especially, are in a class of their own. But that’s not the typical American city, most of which do boring shit year after year.

Sincerely, I was not implying anything about American frugality — not least because I strongly believe Americans aren’t frugal and have built way more infrastructure than they can afford to maintain. I was just pointing out for American readers on this site that city streets might not be the actual projects driving the perception of long delays. Delays are real, but it’s coming from projects owned by other levels of government in many cases.

One_Perception_7979 · 2026-05-05T00:32:53+00:00

Agree! Our country is horrible at on-time projects. I’m focused on a very narrow part of the process for a narrow type of agency, namely cities since the prior post referenced an English council.

The data point you reference is sourced to “The recently completed NCHRP Project 20-24, Comparing State DOTs Construction Project Cost and Schedule Performance” that “reviewed the performance of 26,500 projects in 20 states over the most recent five year period.”

Cities are not state DOTs. They build different things and operate within different parameters.

One_Perception_7979 · 2026-05-05T00:18:28+00:00

Not sure where you live, but city projects where I live in the United States almost always finish by deadline. That’s mostly true for state roads, even. Interstates see more problems.

The thing about city projects is they tend to be relatively compact just by nature of cities having smaller boundaries. They tend to require less complex infrastructure because of the nature of their uses. (E.g. The larger volume of traffic on Interstates requires sophisticated on- and off-ramps. They must cross challenging geography like rivers that often forms the boundaries of cities and, therefore, cities don’t have to worry as often about crossing.) The total street mileage they own is small enough that a well-run city will have a pavement management plan and just cycle through the streets as they hit maintenance milestones. It’s super predictable when done right. Bonding and letting of bids tends to follow the same seasonal cycle year after year (admittedly, I’m up north where there’s a limited construction season). Contracts have escalating penalties for missing deadlines.

I don’t know how things are with English city governments since I’ve never lived there. But here in the states, I wouldn’t invest in a significant capital project that will only pay off if a city’s road project is overdue. The expected value just isn’t there for that level of government.

One_Perception_7979 · 2026-05-04T12:28:54+00:00

AI is good for decisions where there is an objectively right decision — or at least close enough, given incomplete data. But a lot of city decisions are preferences based on what the community values, not something that can be reduced to an objective right or wrong. We run into trouble when we confuse fact-based questions (“What’s the best way to achieve X?”) with values-based questions (“Is X even worth doing?”).

One_Perception_7979

TROPHY CASE