Why Has American Education Gotten So Much Worse? A Parent’s Take
My daughter came home last Thursday with a math worksheet printed on cardstock, which should have told me everything. It wasn’t a worksheet the way I remember worksheets. It was a “Number Talk” with thirty-two blank boxes. The boxes had labels: “Picture,” “Strategy Label,” “Mathematical Explanation.” There was a QR code in the corner that linked to a video of someone else doing the same problem. My daughter is in third grade. She put down her backpack, asked for apple slices, and then flipped the paper over, like maybe the real worksheet was on the back. It was not.
I sat down to help. I’m not a teacher, but I’m the person you call when you need to split a restaurant bill or untangle a confusing receipt. I know how numbers work. But this paper didn’t want a number. It wanted proof that the student has “flexible thinking.” There were sentence starters: “I used mental math to…” and “My strategy was different because…”
I asked my daughter what four times seven was. She knew right away. I asked her what the boxes wanted. She said, “I don’t know what they want.”
That phrase has stuck with me. I don’t think she’s alone in saying it.
When I was in third grade, my math homework was forty long-division problems, all in a row, no pictures, no QR codes, no sentence starters. It was boring, and it was clear. You couldn’t do long division by guessing what a box wanted. You had to sit there, make mistakes, erase, and eventually get the answer. Nobody asked me to draw my thinking. The only question was whether the answer was right. And that gave me a completely different experience of school: the experience of being alone with confusion for a few minutes, and surviving it.
I don’t think my daughter’s teachers are worse than the ones I had. If anything, they’re smarter and harder-working. They’re just teaching inside a machine that measures very small, visible outputs. Every lesson has a prompt. Every prompt has a response. Every response gets a gem, a star, or a grade posted online. And what has quietly disappeared is the space between the prompt and the response. The pause. The pause is where thinking happens, and there is no pause in much of American education anymore.
Last month I volunteered in her classroom. The lesson was about asking “thick questions” versus “thin questions.” The kids had been given strips of paper with questions already printed on them. Their job was to sort the strips into two piles and glue them down. A boy at the back raised his hand and asked whether “Is a hot dog a sandwich?” counted as thick or thin. The room instantly got loud. Half the kids said thick, half said thin, and everyone had an argument. The teacher let it go for about four minutes. It was the most awake the room had been all day. Then the timer went off and they went back to gluing.
That’s the problem in miniature. The kids’ natural curiosity was right there, and it didn’t fit the lesson. It couldn’t be glued to a strip, so it got put away.
A friend of mine who teaches fifth grade told me, “People think I’m not teaching because the kids can’t sit still or don’t have basics. But half my day is putting out fires. Kids come in crying because they got a 90 instead of a 100. They’re terrified of wrong answers even before they’ve read the question. Something has taught them that confusion looks like failure.”
I think the something is us. We’ve told kids, through every app and every data point, that learning is supposed to look like instant success. If it takes longer than two minutes, something must be wrong with you.
So this year, at home, I’ve started doing less. Not in an organized, conscious way—more like a slow surrender. I don’t rescue her from homework anymore. When she looks at a confusing worksheet and says, “I don’t know what they want,” I say, “I don’t either. Write the answer you think is right, and if it’s wrong tomorrow, that’s fine. Then you’ll know.” I don’t read the instructions five times. I don’t scan the QR code. It’s uncomfortable for both of us, but she’s starting to see that a wrong answer doesn’t sink the whole evening.
I also stopped setting a timer. It sounds small, but her homework app likes to put a little grey clock in the corner. Ten minutes for twenty problems. We don’t use the clock anymore. I tell her, “You have as long as you need.” She doesn’t believe me yet. But I keep saying it.
And I brought back reading at night. Not her “leveled reader” with the comprehension quiz waiting on a screen. I read a real chapter book, and she interrupts me constantly to ask questions. There’s nothing being measured in that exchange. It’s just a person telling a story to another person. I’m starting to think that matters more than every standard she’s supposed to meet.
When she announces, “I’m bored,” I don’t jump. I say, “Boredom is fine. Stay there.” Then I put my phone in the other room, and sometimes we just sit on the floor and nothing happens. The emptiness is uncomfortable. But it’s the same uncomfortable space those long-division problems used to give me. Eventually something appears, even if what appears is just us talking about the ceiling.
I don’t know if any of this fixes the bigger mess. I don’t know if she’ll score well on the tests that decide whether the school sees her as “on track.” There are still nights when she’s crying over a worksheet and I have no idea whether I’m making it worse. On those nights, I don’t have a strategy. I put the paper away, and I tell her about the time I cried over a math problem in my own kitchen when I was eleven. She laughs. She goes to bed. The paper is still sitting there, waiting.
Maybe that’s what I’ve actually learned: the gaps are too big and the days are too short, and the only thing I can keep doing is making sure my daughter has at least one place in her day where she isn’t being measured. Whether that’s enough, I’m still waiting to find out.
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