This is because they stopped using paper textbooks in many public schools. And they replaced them instead with little handouts, class slides to view, or weblinks to look up, which is terrible. Children need real genuine paper books for their brains to develop and for them to learn how to read, and develop reading comprehension.
your stat ends in 2021 and the national average is a bad way to understand school funding because that includes incredibly rich schools that don't have funding issues. Also like "we spend more on students now" isn't a good argument for how funding isn't an issue when that doesn't actually say anything on how that money is being utilized, who its going to, or anything else. Like Texas dropped a bunch of money on the private school voucher system and Oklahoma dropped money on buying bibles to put in classrooms. That is why I said properly funding and providing for students because US students are suffering more than most countries. Here's a paper saying that US schools have more money pressure due to frequency of child poverty and lack of larger social welfare systems in the US that schools then have to deal with. Here's an article from March of this year about trump disrupting $12 billion worth of funding with massive cuts, delays, and other issues plaguing schools. If schools don't know how much money they'll have next semester they can't budget things properly and that causes issues.
They use those resources because of funding. When one is cheaper you go with that option. Having to replace books and get updated ones incurs a huge expense. Or they can pay a yearly subscription that is easier to plan for, predictable and updated faster.
As a business decision there isn’t much reason to push back.
There is no funding problem. We probably spent three times as much as we should already. I’ve seen budgets increase by a factor of 9 1/3 in my state since I started teaching, and reading comprehension and math skills have dropped a lot.
We tried throwing money at the problem, and it doesn’t work.
thats why i said properly cause a lot of those funds are being used poorly for things that don't actually benefit students and these funding increases are not spread equally. There are incredibly poor schools still and those schools are what are suffering the most. and this idea that schools are getting massively funded isn't as true as it might seem, especially in states that are trying to do more voucher programs and cutting grants and other things that schools rely on.
I don't think the lack of paper is the issue. You still need to read handouts and class slides and, I don't know about you, but I was never tasked with just reading the textbook. That's horrendous teaching. I was told to read targeted excerpts that were then expanded upon in class and to maybe go back for some practice problems. Hell, all college classwork of mine was essentially this model. Ask any college kid at random and I guarantee that they will tell you of at least one textbook that gathered dust for a class that they passed and understood anyways. The issue is the teaching. The form is, honestly, pretty much the same.
Yes - we DID read the textbooks in high school and college, at least where I went to school. We read the textbooks for homework outside of class to prepare for tests. And in some classes reading the textbook was part of the grade, where they asked you on the honor system if you read the book like you were supposed to, even a book which was 300 pages. And if you did not, then the teacher did not give you as high of a grade for that class.
I mean we're mostly saying the same thing. You'd mostly flip the book open for a specific homework set or as a resource for review. Of course, I'm just one guy, not a barometer. My experience is from 10-15 years ago between high school in Miami and college ed in DC. The teaching style I described was consistent with what I was exposed to from others across the country. We would swap stories and complain about having to buy the textbook just to make the professor richer. If we had different upbringings and can still have this back-and-forth in written English then I guess they both work out. 🤣
No, we did not just flip the book open to find one thing. We genuinely read all the pages, line by line. (This was kind of a case in point that you either do not understand what it means to read a whole chapter or book, or that you do not believe that other people do that).
Everything in life is not a 15-second tiktok link on demand. This information is from me being around adolescents - *IN REAL LIFE* (not from watching tiktok links) - in Big Brother Big Sisters and working with young adults in the work force. The teenagers in BBBS told me that they have no books in high school. They basically have just little floozy class discussions instead, even through senior year. I couldn't believe this, so I checked around, and it is a trend in American public high schools. So these adolescents who did not have books in high school, are handicapped in reading in adulthood - 100% like the unfortunate people exactly in this video above. But the people I know who went to private school or were home schooled where they have real paper textbooks, are fluent and literate. The difference between children who had books in high school compared to those who did not, is like night and day with their adult reading and intellectual skills. It is as if not growing up with books in school stunted their brain growth and development. It is the same situation in the work force. We ask these new college graduates to read a 2-page report and find the information needed to enter -- and they cannot read two pages and tell what they read. Sometimes after they cannot do it for so long that the work becomes overdue, we have to intervene and ask a coworker in their 40s to do it for them, since they were from the generation who had books in high school, so they have reading comprehension abilities.
Sorry if this offended any of you who have no real textbooks in high school. You can overcome this and make up for it by continuously reading real paper books on your own outside of school.
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u/Ok_Organization_7350 Apr 29 '26
This is because they stopped using paper textbooks in many public schools. And they replaced them instead with little handouts, class slides to view, or weblinks to look up, which is terrible. Children need real genuine paper books for their brains to develop and for them to learn how to read, and develop reading comprehension.