Why US Education Has Gotten Worse: A Teacher’s Perspective on What’s Really Changed
This morning, I asked my sophomore English class to open their books to page 42. Three kids didn’t have books. Two were scrolling through their phones under the desk. One asked if we could “just do it online instead.” I stood there holding a dog-eared copy of Of Mice and Men and thought about how different this job feels than it did when I started in 2006.
Not because the kids are bad. They aren’t. But the system around them has quietly shifted, and the result is that school feels less like learning and more like a bureaucratic obstacle course. Parents feel it too. Teachers feel it. And the students—they feel it most of all, even if they can’t explain it.
The first change I noticed wasn’t dramatic. It was the steady creep of testing.
In my early years, I could spend two weeks on a novel and let discussions wander where they needed to go. Now, there’s a pacing guide. There’s a benchmark test every six weeks. There’s a data meeting to analyze the results of the benchmark, which takes time away from actually teaching. The state scores go up a little, and the district celebrates, but the kids don’t read any better. They just know how to take the test.
I remember a student—let’s call her Maya—who was brilliant at the kind of critical thinking you can’t bubble in on a scan sheet. We were talking about theme in Fahrenheit 451, and she connected it to the way her dad watched videos on his phone at dinner, no one saying a word. It was a sharp observation. I wanted to run with it. But we were three days behind the pacing guide, and if I didn’t get to the symbolism worksheet by Friday, the department chair would shoot me an email.
So I shut it down. “Interesting,” I said, “but let’s stay on track.” That moment has stuck with me for years. The truth is, education hasn’t gotten worse in one dramatic shift. It’s been worn down by a thousand small compromises like that one.
Then there’s the phone problem, which everyone talks about but no one actually knows what to do with. I used to teach in a school where the policy was: phones in a locked pouch on the wall. It worked, mostly. Kids found ways around it, but at least the default was “put it away.” Now I teach at a school that allows phones during class if they’re not “disruptive.” In practice, that means every time I explain something, a handful of kids are half-listening, thumb-scrolling through Instagram. Their brains are in a different country.
I don’t blame them. These devices are engineered to be more interesting than commas and iambic pentameter. I’d lose that fight every time. But the fragmentation—that’s new. Fifteen years ago, a kid who was bored might doodle in a notebook. Now they’re watching a video, texting a friend, and trying to read a paragraph at the same time. And they don’t even notice that they’re not paying attention.
The parent-teacher conferences have changed too.
A few weeks ago, a mother came in with her son’s progress report. He had a C in English. She pushed the paper across the desk and said, “He does the work. He just forgets to turn it in sometimes. Can you bump him up? He needs this for his GPA.”
I explained that the work, when he did turn it in, was often copied from an AI chatbot. That I’d had three conversations with him about it. That the issue wasn’t his ability—it was his follow-through.
She sighed. “I know. But the college application process is so competitive. He just needs a better grade. Isn’t there anything you can do?”
It’s a strange feeling, being on the other side of that. I’m not mad at her. She’s scared. She learned that school is a game and grades are the currency, and nothing else really counts. So she’s teaching her son the same lesson. The result is a generation of kids who will do the minimum to get the score but don’t know what it feels like to be genuinely curious.
I see it in their faces when I ask a question that doesn’t have a right answer. The discomfort is real. They’ve been trained to expect that every learning experience ends in a number. When I say, “I don’t know—what do you think?” they look at me like I’ve tricked them.
Now, it’s not all bleak. There are moments that remind me why I stay.
Last month, I had my juniors do something old school: read a poem out loud, line by line, and just talk about what the words meant to them. No worksheet. No quiz. Just an hour of conversation around a Mary Oliver poem. For the first forty minutes, it was pain—lots of silence, kids checking the clock. But then one student, a kid who’d been failing most of the year, said, “It sounds like she’s saying it’s okay to not know what you’re supposed to do.”
And the room shifted. They weren’t performing school anymore. They were actually thinking.
I’ve been thinking a lot about what really helps, because I don’t think any single person can fix the whole system. But there are small things that make a real difference.
At home, the most useful thing is reading together—but not in a forced, scheduled way. Not “now we will read for twenty minutes and discuss.” Just keep actual books around the house. Put a magazine on the coffee table. Let your kid see you reading for no other reason than that you want to. The kids who have watched their parents read for pleasure are the ones who don’t panic when they hit a long paragraph. It’s that simple and that hard.
When it comes to screens, the most effective parents I see don’t police content or set up elaborate app limits. They just make the phone leave the room during homework time. No big lecture, no negotiation—the phone charges in the kitchen, and the kid works at the table. The quiet removal of the distraction does what a hundred conversations can’t.
For teachers, I’ve learned to protect one day a week. On Wednesdays, there’s no pacing guide over my shoulder. We read, we write, we talk. It’s not a revolution, but it keeps that student like Maya from slipping away. It keeps me from shutting down the good moments.
And for parents, the single most helpful thing you can say to a teacher isn’t “can you change the grade?” It’s “what do you see?” Teachers know which kids are tired, which are afraid, which ones are bored senseless. That information is more useful than any test score, and it opens a conversation that might actually help the kid.
I don’t know if education is going to get better anytime soon. The testing isn’t going away. The phones aren’t going away. The fear that parents pass down to their kids isn’t going away. But the conversations can change. We can stop treating school as a race to a number and start asking what the kids actually need to be okay next year, and the year after that.
The day after that Mary Oliver class, the kid who made the observation came up to me in the hallway. He didn’t say anything profound. He just asked, “Can we do that again?”
That was enough.
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