Why Has US Education Gotten So Much Worse? A Parent and Teacher’s View
“Okay, just sound it out.”
Max was stuck on the word “consequence” in a paragraph about water pollution. His pencil was hovering over the blank, but his eyes had glazed over. He didn’t look like he was trying to figure anything out. He looked like he was waiting for a rescue.
“I don’t know it,” he said.
“You do. Break it apart. Con-…”
He sighed, dropped the pencil, and leaned back in his chair. “Just tell me. It’s faster.”
I know this kid. He’s nine. He can build a complex Lego castle without looking at the instructions. He remembers every detail of a baseball game from last spring. He memorized the entire periodic table song for fun, even if he couldn’t pronounce half the elements. But put him in front of a printed paragraph, in a formal exercise, and the brain just switches off. He wants the answer, not the process. He wants the finish line, but he doesn’t want to run the race.
This isn’t laziness. I’ve seen lazy. This is a learned behavior. In the last few years, education has become so heavily weighted toward performance—specifically, getting the right answer on a standardized test—that the messy middle part of learning has been stripped out. We’ve trained a generation of kids to believe that struggle is a bug in the system, not a feature. They’ve figured out that if they just wait long enough, someone—teacher, parent, iPad—will hand over the answer. So why strain?
I had a parent-teacher conference a few months ago. A middle-school teacher told us about a student who scored a 52% on a science quiz. The parents had sent in a formal complaint. They weren’t upset that their child didn’t know the material. They were upset that the score was low. The teacher looked exhausted as she explained that she went back and re-read the test to them, showed them exactly which concepts the kid hadn’t grasped. But the parents weren’t interested in the concepts. They wanted the red number to go up.
I’ve felt that pressure too, both as a parent and in the classroom. It’s the pressure to sacrifice depth for a quick result. The system has inadvertently turned teachers into score-reporters and parents into consumers of grades. The minute we value the grade over the understanding, the classroom shifts shape. Teachers have less time to go on tangents, less autonomy to let a lesson derail into genuine curiosity, because they have to cover X, Y, and Z before the spring test. The pedagogy has narrowed. In an effort to measure everything, we’ve taken the magic out of the room.
There’s also the elephant in the living room, and it buzzes and glows. Last week, Max had a homework question about the Civil War. He picked up my phone and asked, “Can I just google this?”
“What does the textbook say?”
“It’s really long and boring. Just let me google it.”
There is a profound difference between searching for a fact and understanding a narrative. When he googles something, he gets a snippet. A conclusion without a journey. Deep reading takes time. It requires sitting in discomfort, holding multiple ideas in your head, and synthesizing them. The internet has branded this process as inefficient. We’ve optimized our children’s attention spans right out of existence. We hand them screens to keep them quiet in restaurants, in waiting rooms, in the car. Then we send them to a classroom and expect them to sit with a paper book and think deeply? The classroom isn’t just fighting inequality or funding gaps anymore. It’s fighting a constant feed of stimulus. And it’s losing.
So, a few weeks ago, we tried something. Not a dramatic overhaul, but a structural adjustment. We banned the phone during homework time. I physically placed it in a kitchen drawer, the way you might hide a bottle of wine from a guest who stays too long. When Max asked me for the meaning of a word, I started making him guess. I let him be wrong. I consciously stopped correcting him instantly.
“That’s a great guess. Why did you think that?”
“Because it sounds like… ‘secret’.”
“Okay. Let’s read the sentence around it to see if that fits.”
We sat there for three minutes longer than he wanted to. He was fidgety, chewing on his sleeve, staring at the ceiling. But eventually, he connected that consequence meant result because the sentence didn’t make sense any other way. It felt small. It felt painfully slow. But the satisfaction in his voice when he said, “Oh! It’s the effect of it!” was far more authentic than the lazy “okay, thanks” he’d give if I just typed the definition into the search bar.
I’ve also had to dial back the pressure I put on him. I can’t change the state test, but I can stop asking “How did you do on the quiz?” first. I try to ask “What did you find interesting?” or “What made you want to stop reading?” It took a few weeks, but he’s starting to give real answers instead of grade reports. The other day, he told me about a picture book his class read about the Dust Bowl. He wasn’t trying to sound smart. He was just telling me about the dust getting into people’s teeth, because he knew I cared about the story, not the data on the top of his worksheet.
We have not fixed U.S. education. That’s a monstrous, systemic thing tangled up with budgets, policy, and administrative bloat. The loss of recess, the over-testing, the bizarrely transactional relationship between parents and schools—it’s all compounding. It’s been slipping for a while, even before I had kids. But I think the core issue, the human one, is that we’ve separated the act of learning from the joy of thinking. We’ve told kids their value is a percentile score. No wonder they don’t want to struggle. No wonder they’d rather have a bite-sized, black-and-white answer delivered instantly.
We’re a few weeks into this new routine. I’m not going to say Max loves homework now. He still puts his head on the desk sometimes. We still have nights where we both get frustrated. Some evenings, I catch myself almost telling him the answer just to move the evening along, to get to bath time, to get to bed. But I’ve realized that a kid sitting in silence, chewing on a pencil, thinking, is actually learning. The system might be moving away from that kind of stillness, but from my side of the table, I can at least create a tiny bubble where struggle is allowed to happen. I don’t know if that bubble is big enough to change the school board’s mind. But it’s big enough for one kid’s brain. For now, that’s what we’re working with. The rest is still up in the air.
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