Scott Alexander

Scott writes, but these are American scores only.

The pre-COVID decline in American scores was marginal at best, and the Financial Times cited sources across all OECD nations.

The best way I could think of to test this was to look at PISA scores filtered by the question, does one of your parents have an immigrant background?

I hoped that this would filter out most of the ethnically diverse test takers in non-US countries, allowing an apples-to-apples comparison.

Here's a spreadsheet where Scott writes, here all is all test takers and nat is those with two native-born parents.

Five out of six of the 2012 to 2018 scores decline remains in the latter group.

I'm not showing the 2018 to 2022 score decline because most of that is COVID learning loss, but I analysed it separately and found similar results.

You can check out this spreadsheet in the post.

This doesn't really look demographic shift related.

I can't prove it, because it could be demographic shift among third generation plus immigrants.

But most PISA countries don't have enough third generation plus immigrants to shift trend lines on their own.

These findings don't 100% prove that something bad is going on, but they're consistent with it.

I'm more convinced by the widespread negative reports from teachers.

People dismiss these by claiming that there is some generic bias to think that the youth used to be better in the good old days.

But I hear stories like these from teachers who have been in the field for 30 or 40 years, never said anything like this between 1980 and 2010, but now suddenly think there's a crisis.

One of them is my mother, who taught high school until her retirement in the late 2010s.

This recent essay, linked here by blogger Hilarious Bookbinder, is representative of the voluminous genre.

I'm Gen X. I was pretty young when I earned my PhD, so I've been a professor for a long time, over 30 years.

If you're not in academia, or it's been a while since you were in college, you might not know this.

The students are not what they used to be.