Long-Term Bad News. Not What I Need Today
July 31, 2026
Another dinobaby post. No AI unless it is an image. This dinobaby is not Grandma Moses, just Grandpa Arnold.
As a dinobaby, I try my best to avoid bad news. I have enough about which to worry. When one is 82, I like to look for the bright spots, the upside, the happy places. Today (July 24, 2026) my trusty newsfeed set up delivered a couple of gems to me. Because I am old and mostly addled, I link factoids. I look for patterns into which to fit some of the crazy data flowing through my hopelessly old-fashioned computer set up. (Who says four megabytes of RAM is not enough?)
The first item was “Meet Carnegie Mellon Computer Science PhD Yang Zhilin, Who Left US to Build Chinese AI Model Shaking Silicon Valley.” The write up explained:
Carnegie Mellon University computer science Ph.D. Yang Zhilin left the U.S. to build Moonshot AI in China, whose new open-weight Kimi K3 model is sending shockwaves through Silicon Valley. Moonshot AI unveiled Kimi K3 late last week, a 2.8 trillion-parameter open-weight large language model designed for complex reasoning, software coding and analyzing long documents. It said it will release the model weights on July 27, allowing developers to download, fine-tune and build on it. Its coding and AI agent capabilities rival leading models from U.S. companies including OpenAI and Anthropic while operating at substantially lower cost, marking another milestone for China’s AI industry…
Pittsburgh is a wonderful city. CMU is a good school. What’s not to like? The steel mill miasma is gone. There’s even a hockey team.
Thanks, Midjourney. Good enough.
The write up said:
Yang’s success has also fueled debate in the U.S. over retaining top AI talent. Prominent investor Vinod Khosla argued that restrictive immigration policies were driving talented researchers away.
Maybe? One of Zhilin’s CMU professors is quoted as saying:
Yang’s decision had little to do with U.S. immigration challenges. While acknowledging that the immigration process can be intimidating and “uncertain,” he said Yang had always intended to return to China and build his own startup.
My take is that Zhilin wanted the information, but he is Chinese. One of my Chinese friends told me, “No matter where you go in the world, you are always Chinese.”
The second item was “Every State Ranked by Its Math and Reading Test Scores, from Worst to Best.” I have learned to provide exact change when paying for a product at a convenience store. Why? Young cashiers cannot make change. At one store, the check out person did not know what a $2 bill was and had to call the manager. The busy manager required about five minutes to appear at the check out lane and say, “Yep, that’s a $2 bill.”
Working through the list from the top state Massachusetts to the lowest ranking state New Mexico (have you ever been to Grants, New Mexico? If not, when you arrive, take it from me: Pay using exact change if you use cash.) I fiddled around with the data and noted that the difference in “scores” between the top ranked state and the lowest ranked state was 56 points for math and 23 points for eighth graders. I know zero about education, but I know that Chinese students perform at a higher level. For example, one of my contacts told me that the different is the equivalent of three or four grade levels. The issue was so significant that this person sent his son to China in the summer to study math. For Eastern European students in the same age group, one of my contacts told me, “We have our daughter attend math tutoring online with a Ph.D. in Kiev.”
Observations, of course, are warranted:
- A mastery of reading, writing, and arithmetic seems important in today’s world even if the media explain that AI will replace humans at work.
- Individuals who are not anchored in fundamental knowledge tools like reading comprehension, mathematics, and written communications may have a major problem recognizing certain types of communications and verifying the information in them.
- Certain individuals who are fortunate enough to have access to additional educational resources will demonstrate higher performance on certain types of evaluations. The question is, “Does a country have enough intelligent young people?”
Net net: Bureaucracy is not education. An iPad is not education. A mobile phone is not education. And what is taking place in American schools, if these data are semi accurate and reproducible, is not education. I am glad I am a dinobaby who can make change.
Stephen E Arnold, July 31, 2026
Reverse AI Fibonacci: The Spiral of Stupid
July 21, 2026
Another dinobaby post. No AI unless it is an image. This dinobaby is not Grandma Moses, just Grandpa Arnold.
I read an interesting article in the online publication Tech Radar. Its title? “‘Quality Decays Exponentially Following AI Arrival’: Research Shows Experts and Contributors Leaving Online Communities Amidst Silent Knowledge Reset.” I am not going to illustrate my view point with one of those MBA hockey stick diagrams. Nope, I am going with the Fibonacci sequence or what I call the Spiral of Stupid. First, though, let’s look at what the write up says.
Here we have a professor explaining the Fibonacci inversion; that is, start with a large value IQ and decrement according the the algorithm. The result is that the person relying on social media ends up an intellectual zero. Hey, don’t like my blunt statement? Just go to a local store and pay in cash. Watch the expression on the face of the young person at the smart cash register. Better yet, ask a college student what Fibonacci is. Thanks, MidJourney. I like the teacher’s shirt. Very TikTok.
I noted this passage:
AI, which arguably bridges the gap between most entry-level and mid-range coders and some of the best in the business, might actually be accelerating the latter’s exit from online communities, as they feel their efforts are no longer as valued as they once were. Stack Overflow has seen a nearly 76% decline in monthly questions posted since ChatGPT’s advent in 2022, indicating that both new and existing users are abandoning the site.
One lousy online community, and the sky is falling. The article doesn’t share my larger concern about the impact of AI on education, authentic discourse, and respect for intellectual property’s knowledge value.
The write up adds:
… researchers indicate it could spill over into other areas such as classrooms, offices, and other research communities, where low-effort answers are harder to discern from those of subject-matter experts thanks to ever-evolving, retrained AI models.
Indicate? I think one might want to use a more pointed work. How about “demonstrate” or “make evident” or “know.” But that’s too direct. One would not want to raise broader intellectual issues about smart software, would one?Here’s
I circled this statement in the article:
“If everybody can create a good quality response or output using AI, some people may think, ‘Why should I make an effort to share my expertise and participate?”, publisher of the study Dr Kenny Ching explained. Ching termed this ‘signal compression’ as expert and non-expert solutions became harder to separate, even as it became less rewarding to be a subject-matter expert on topics that AI could also easily weigh in on.
Okay, very delicate. I am a dinobaby, and I am clumsy too. Therefore, I shall offer several observations:
- AI is a short cut to appearing smarter than one actually is.
- Use of AI eliminates the need to do the grunt work that allows a person to internalize certain information and knowledge patterns, and learn to use the recognition of these patterns in fresh, and hopefully for some, interesting and novel ways to create “new” information.
- AI is supposed to be the next big thing. What’s it delivered? Crazy behavior from large companies that should know about measured decision making and prudent governance of their institutions. Students who cannot read but who can watch TikTok-type videos for extended periods of time. Researchers who fake data to get grants or click along the tenure track. Smart weapons that are mostly accurate. Mostly. Just don’t ask too many questions, please.
Net net: This is not just a Stack Overflow problem. This is THE problem for any knowledge value activity.
Stephen E Arnold, July 21, 2026
Bet You Did Not Know This: College Students Cannot Read at Grade Level
July 16, 2026
Current college students are reading at elementary school levels says Futurism in the article, “College Students Are Testing At The Level of 10-Year-Olds.”? ? According to a recent study conducted by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development that surveyed adult skills from thirty-eight high income countries (most of them in the west) a portion of students in college are performing at extremely low levels. Their abilities would be alarming if these kids were in middle school.
Here are some of the numbers:
“The survey, first spotted by the Economist, tested around 160,000 people of all ages, across all 38 member states. It found that across all OECD member countries, a full 8 percent of college students are reading at the level of a ten-year-old, if not worse. While countries like Germany and France rang in at under 5 percent, countries like Poland, Israel, and the United States blew the curve at 21, 20, and 14 percent, respectively.”
They get worse with math:
“The numbers aren’t much better when it comes to math. Across OECD countries, 9 percent of college students do math at or below a ten-year-old level. In Italy, the US, and Slovakia, that figure jumps to over 15 percent — only outdone by Israel, where roughly 21 percent of college students were underachieving at the same low benchmark.”
Why are kids not doing so hot? There are multiple explanations, including pandemic-era learning gaps, declining college admissions so they lower the standards, and lower funding for public education. The results also coincide with LLMs being used by students to cheat. If technology is removed from schools, it would offer a significant boost.
Technology literacy is important, but when screens become ingrained in kids from birth maybe it’s time to try a more luddite approach. These poor kids can’t make changes either, just like their adult counterparts.
Whitney Grace, July 16, 2026
Live for Your Brain and Work Longer
June 29, 2026
Your hope for retirement is delayed with this paper released by the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER): “Does Employment Slow Cognitive Decline? Evidence From Labor Market Shocks.” The study shows that the longer adults work into their golden years the less likely they are to develop and show cognitive decline. Here’s the abstract:
“With large gains in life expectancy, the population share of disability due to cognitive decline and dementia has substantially increased. Many older adults in the United States leave the workforce well before age 65. Correlational evidence suggests that leaving the workforce before retirement age could accelerate the pace of cognitive decline. We offer causal evidence, using HRS data for the United States, exploiting plausibly exogenous shifts in labor demand in local labor markets as a Bartik instrument for employment variation across these markets. We find substantial declines over time in cognitive scores stemming from negative labor demand shocks. These findings are concentrated among men aged 51 to 64, whose employment decisions and outcomes may be more sensitive to local labor market conditions than are these decisions or outcomes for women or for older men. Our evidence extends past work focusing narrowly on the retirement age window and provides further support to the notion that working to older ages may delay age-related cognitive decline.”
This is horrible news for people wanting to retire early and enjoy their latter years. From another standpoint it sounds like the NBER is trying to rationalize not hiring younger people because of the proven incompetencies related to attention spans, cognitive development, and casual adulting. Is this a way to prevent social security payouts and people going on Medicare?
Or maybe it’s a genuine concern about human cognitive decline and is encouraging people to do what’s best for themselves to keep their brains healthy.
The idea seems to mesh nicely with the mantras of the tech bros. Humanoids must work longer and harder. Only the Top 10 percent will succeed. The top of the Top 10 percent will be able to fix up the problems of the humanoids who are not sufficiently intelligent to run modern social constructs. Citizen, obey.
Whitney Grace, June 29, 2026
Google: Need a Job. You Are Trainable for Manual Labor
June 24, 2026
Career coaches are recommending to young people to consider a skilled trade instead of the typical four year college degree. Why? The skilled tradespeople of the world are disappearing. There are also people who earned a bachelor’s degree, but they can’t find a job, so they’re learning a trade instead. Google has jumped onto the skilled trade bandwagon says Construction Dive in the article: “Google Pledges $50M For Skilled Trades Training.” The write up asserts:
Google isn’t the only company investing money in skilled laborers. Meta and Monday are doing similar investments. With the $50 million, Google plans to support fourteen labor unions and reach 300,000 workers across twenty states. The plan is to better educate new workers and level up training/outreach. Unlike its counterparts who want the new wave of workers to construct data centers, Google simply wants people interested in trades and will support them “no matter where they want to work.”
Here’s how Google plans to work with the trades:
“TradesFutures, an organization created by North America’s Building Trades Unions, will increase union construction career access by scaling placement for apprenticeship readiness and registered apprenticeship programs. Google previously had invested in the electrical training Alliance — an organization created by the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers and the National Electrical Contractors Association — intending to train 100,000 electrical workers and 30,000 new apprentices in the U.S. Now, etA will aid local training programs by bringing resources to infrastructure hubs in a mobile training center pilot. Meanwhile, the United Association’s International Training Fund, in partnership with the Mechanical Contractors Association of America, will develop a five-year roadmap for scaling the plumbing, heating, ventilation, air conditioning and refrigeration sectors. That will help give workers skills necessary for the construction and maintenance of infrastructure for data center builds. Finally, the International Training Institute for the Sheet Metal and Air Conditioning Industry, backed by the Sheet Metal, Air, Rail, and Transportation Workers and Sheet Metal and Air Conditioning Contractors, will modernize its coursework and apprentice support and implement new AI tools.”
Skilled trade workers are an important part of any Googley economy. I wonder if Google knows that some of its employees as well as assorted art history majors will be lining up to be trained. Training works if the person being trained tunes in.
Whitney Grace, June 24, 2026
Another Annoying Alarm Goes Off: Big AIT Tech is Deskilling Experts
June 23, 2026
Another dinobaby post. No AI unless it is an image. This dinobaby is not Grandma Moses, just Grandpa Arnold.
I think I have pounded on the AI alarm button previously. Here i go again: Pound, pound, pound. I read “Is AI Ruining Our Skills? Early Results Are In. And They Are Not Good.” Is this a study about doom scrolling GenAI kids? Is this a study about hormone infused 14 year olds? Is this a study about a bored 20 something working at Dairy Queen? Nope. Nope. And nope.
I wanted the colonoscopy cartoon but guard rails are there to protect me. Thanks, MidJourney. Barely good enough.
The write up is about doctors and engineers. The Nature article says:
Seventy per cent of nurses and 77% of physicians, for example, are worried about losing their skills because of over-reliance on AI systems, according to a survey of US health-care workers published earlier this month. Their fear might be justified. Evidence suggests that AI-driven ‘deskilling’ is starting to happen in medicine, computer science and other fields. Researchers are now discussing how to preserve important human expertise in the age of AI.
People, even smart adults, love convenience. Why walk? Drive. Why hit the farmer’s market? Go to TraderJoe’s. Why read a dull PDF about a new process? Let ChatGPT present “facts” in McDonald’s chicken nuggets of information. It is 2026. Go fast. Accelerate. Do what makes one feel groovy.
The write up uses a fun colonoscopy data set. I learned but did not experience:
Once physicians began using it [an AI tool], their performance dropped significantly whenever the system was unavailable. During the three-month period before the AI tool was introduced, the specialists found at least one adenoma during 28.4% of colonoscopies. During the three-month period after the tool was introduced, the adenoma detection rate for colonoscopies performed without AI assistance decreased to 22.4%.
Great. Just miss that precursor to colon cancer or overlook the cancer itself.
The BAIT (big AI tech) folks say that using AI makes a person smarter. Yeah, maybe in a marketing meeting. But when doing the colonoscopy thing, AI makes some smart people lazy and/or dumb.
Several observations are warranted:
- Learning, even for smart people, is hard work. People love short cuts. Short cuts in learning mean an individual is working to make oneself less smart.
- AI companies are in “if we build it, people will come.” That may be true. But if what’s delivered is intellectual heroin, is this great idea an appropriate one for society? Of course not. The goal is money and to be a winner or a monopoly or all three.
- Are studies of the negative effect of AI going to prove that AI is a great step forward? Maybe? Maybe not?
Net net: The new fire seems to burn expertise. But I am a dinobaby, and I work the dumb way. What do I know? I struggle to order a vanilla cone at the local ice cream shop. The service professional has the scoop in one hand and a mobile phone in the other.
Stephen E Arnold, June 23, 2026
Employment News: Jobs Are Scarce for Some
June 15, 2026
The economic crash of 2010 was horrible for recent grads searching for work, but it might be arguable worse in 2026 says Dr. Randal S. Olson in his blog post: “New U.S. College Grads Now Have Higher Unemployment Than The Average Worker.”
According to the article, new college graduates face the highest unemployment in the workforce and it is the widest gap on record.? ? The reversal of this started in 2019 before ChatGPT and the pandemic.? ? For decades, a college degree gave someone an advantage in the job market, but not anymore.? ? That changed:
“In February 2019 the gap crossed zero, and the 12-month average has stayed positive every month since. That timing rules out both of the easy explanations. The flip predates the generative-AI boom by years, and COVID by a year. This was a slow structural drift, not a sudden shock. The Cleveland Fed traces the erosion back further still. The job-finding advantage of young grads has been fading since around 2000, and their edge over high-school workers closed around 2019. The pandemic did not cause it either, and the 2020 spike is the clearest evidence. When unemployment exploded that year, both lines shot up together, so the gap held roughly steady through 2020 and 2021. The penalty was already there. The lockdowns just buried it under a bigger number.”
Why is this happening? Economists can’t pin it down on one source.? ? Remote jobs are one reason. Companies don’t want to hire inexperienced workers as remote workers, when in the past these positions were on site and new hires could be mentored on the job.? ? Another issue is that AI is replacing low-entry jobs:
“Stanford researchers see AI’s fingerprints anyway. Their study found that early-career workers ages 22 to 25 in the most AI-exposed jobs saw employment fall about 16% since late 2022, a drop that survived even after they stripped out remote-friendly roles. Both can be true. Either way, the entry-level rungs are the ones being pulled out, and tech is the sharpest edge.”
Experience is the main defining factor here. Companies ant experienced workers who they can trust to get the job done, with or without education. Also the latest generation of new grads are from Gen Z and are facing the same criticisms that Millennials did. It’s a vicious cycle. Maybe try a trade instead of a computer science degree? Some of the big AI tech outfits (what we call BAITers at Arnold IT and Beyond Search) are suggesting special funds will be available to train people to be plumbers, iron workers, and possibly long-haul truckers. This type of work may not be idea for a person majoring in Restoration Drama or Early American History, however.
Whitney Grace, June 15, 2026
Learning Is Hard. AI Is Easy. 6-7, Folks
June 11, 2026
AI is prone to hallucination which is another term for taking digital drugs. AI is a prediction system, happily regurgitating what has been converted to vectors. If the algorithms are not smart enough, whiz kids will write software wrappers to fix up problems that arise. Sort of.
In today’s zip-zip world what is a college student supposed to do? Read books? Use an old-fashioned card catalog? Let AI do the work and hit the local pub?
Aaron Tay wrote “AI Academic Search And The Missing Middle Of Literature Discovery.” Librarians are unimpressed with AI search and rightly so, because it removed the sources from the search. Here’s what Tay found in his own query:
“In my own testing particularly for difficult queries, the difference is often visible in the first screen of results: the better AI search tools place relevant work high in the ranking, while conventional databases often require more query reformulation and screening before comparable papers appear. For example, I recently ran a study on reproducibility, running the same query five times across multiple AI search engines. It was not even meant to compare AI search engines relevancy but even with a broad query that had 200+ possible relevant results, only Undermind maintained high precision down to rank 50.
He added:
Other respected AI search tools could barely manage this for the top 10 to 20, showing the variance in performance. For “hard queries” the difference was even more stark between AI search tools and conventional databases.”
Tay also summarizes more of his findings:
“Freshman undergraduate work: mid-to-high precision, recall does not need to be high. Almost any database with the right coverage will do.
Evidence synthesis: high recall is non-negotiable, and you accept whatever precision you can get. Multiple sources, documented strategies, traditional databases plus maybe AI tools as supplements.
Narrative reviews: moderate recall for the time spent, high early precision, and strong top-ranked relevance. This is where the better AI search tools sit, and it is the use case where librarian voices are thinnest.”
In other words, perhaps there is something missing AI-infused search? I wonder if the old-fashioned methods will return to favor for students who want to learn? AI strikes me as a complementary tool to standard information literacy.
His findings verify that a mixture of the old and the new is the royal road to information literacy. That’s easy to say. Even some “smart” students struggle to read. Or, as GenZ says, “Learning is high key stressing.” Okay.
Whitney Grace, June 11, 2026
The New Dark Ages: A Recent Example
May 29, 2026
Another dinobaby post. No AI unless it is an image. This dinobaby is not Grandma Moses, just Grandpa Arnold.
We are now entering the new Dark Ages. I see more posts about stupidism. Authors range from teachers in grade school, middle school, and high school. There are posts by recent college graduates about the impact of AI on college students. College professors grumble about students while some of that cohort use AI to crank out junk research. ArXiv has bluntly said that its editorial process will ban those who submit AI research slop. I like to toss in reminders that the former head of the Harvard ethic department resigned over allegations of recycling other people’s work. Several years ago the president of Stanford University resigned. Yep, intellectual short cuts. But that’s just a function of de-emphasis on reading, writing, and arithmetic and the 24×7 distraction datasphere. How can anyone think with the vivid “noise” pulsing through simple activities like walking. Who walks without a mobile device, a smart watch, ear buds, smart glasses, and a tracking beacon OR one of these gizmos. The Dark Ages thrive on stupidism.
Thanks, Midjourney. Art from your life experience I assume.
The other driver of the Dark Ages is ill-considered decisions. There are others, but I want to highlight one small example. The loss of a small firm’s data, reports, and models seems trivial. You can read the case example in “Disney Erased FiveThirtyEight.” Yep, the mouse is eager to contribute to stupidism.
The write up says:
It’s common to read things like: “what happens on the Internet stays on the Internet”, the notion being that you can never escape your digital past. But this isn’t really true. A Pew study of a random sample of Internet links conducted in October 2023 found significant “link rot”: almost 40 percent of links that had been active 10 years earlier were broken. And that’s probably an underestimate: the study was based on the Common Crawl web archive (the same one that AI labs use to train their models), which is quite comprehensive but probably contains some bias toward more prominent sites. Another study by ahrefs found a two-thirds attrition rate for web links after 11 years.
Online information is not a library filled with non-digital information objects. Sure, the mythical wonders of the library of Alexandria burned, but copies of some of the information persisted. Knowledge regained some traction, and the voids are unknown. But knowledge survived. As the quote makes clear, some information in digital form just goes away. A government agency takes down public information about MIC or LOCAs. A big company decides to get out of a business and tells the system administrator to take down some content. A careless programmer allows an AI agent to nuke a database. A less careless bad actor penetrates a systems created by a careless developer and vaporizes data. Fungible information artefacts can persist. The digital stuff just goes away.
The write up reports:
ABC finally fully shut down FiveThirtyEight in March 2025, 11 years after its debut at Disney. Eleven years is a long time in the media business, and the site covered one of the most tumultuous periods in American political history with its unique blend of analytics, brutal honesty and irreverence. It would be nice if that work could be preserved for the public record. I don’t know what plans Disney has for FiveThirtyEight, if any. But I did approach Disney a year or two ago, through my agent, about acquiring the remaining IP. I’m probably the logical high bidder, though the value is rapidly depreciating as what’s left of the site falls into disrepair. At a minimum, we’d restore the archive, with prominent links to Silver Bulletin. We were told to basically get lost: ABC was annoyed with my critical public comments about their management of FiveThirtyEight. It apparently wasn’t a long conversation, so I don’t have a lot more color to report than that.
I urge you to read the full essay. I do want to focus on my thesis of the new Dark Ages.
First, this case example exists within the stupidism datasphere; that is, business decisions, the application of math to certain topics, and the push for maximum returns (psychological, market share, monetary) results in the decision to delete information or remove it from access.
Second, the impact of stupidism is that it diffuses like spilling royal blue ink on a white sheet. The impacts goes in multiple dimensions and ruins things one assumed would be okay. Hey, it’s just a tiny spill. Sometimes not.
Third, as stupidism becomes institutionalized, working out of the Dark Ages takes time. The problem is that time today has been compressed. Centuries ago humanity had, well, centuries. Today, humanity may have less time. When there is zero way to see what has preceded and been verified multiple times, folks are flying bling and don’t know.
I like phrases like the Jazz Age. I wish I could think of a snappy way of saying, “Yep, it is the Age of stupidism.” I can’t. I will stick with new Dark Ages and stupidism.
Stephen E Arnold, May 29, 2026
Stupidization: A Long-Term Trend in US Education
May 22, 2026
Another dinobaby post. No AI unless it is an image. This dinobaby is not Grandma Moses, just Grandpa Arnold.
I read “‘Learning Recession’ in US Schools Predates Pandemic: Report.” Usually I skip school-related articles. I am a dinobaby, and I am not sure I can remember my grade school teachers’ names or where my grade school is located. But this write up had a snappy phrase: Learning recession. I interpreted the two words in my lingo. I think “stupidization” better expresses the state of American grade, high, and college educational entities.
Thanks, Midjourney. Good enough.
This write up is more educated than I, so we have a “learning recession.” It sounds okay, but it does not communicate the issues in the US educational social construct. The write up states:
A new analysis of student test scores reveals that American schools were in a “learning recession” for seven years before the COVID-19 pandemic, with student test scores in math and reading on a steady decline since 2013…. The study reframes the narrative of pandemic-era learning loss, arguing that the crisis of the last few years was an acceleration of a problem that was already underway.
Okay, Covid, you did not cause stupidization. What did? What made “educated” people think that a computer in a middle school would improve a student’s ability to read, write, and do arithmetic? Why did people believe that a student would learn watching a lousy video delivered with amateur sound and poor lighting make clear how the Appalachian Mountains were formed?
The write up reports:
This long-term decline challenges the notion that a return to 2019 performance levels is the ultimate goal, as the data suggests those levels were already part of a downward trend. Today, eighth-grade reading scores on national assessments are at their lowest point since 1990. Compounding the problem, chronic student absenteeism remains a major obstacle to improving learning. Though down from its pandemic peak, 23% of students were chronically absent in the 2024–25 school year, far above the pre-pandemic rate of 15%.
The write up trots out the notion that the better education is enjoyed by those with the most money. Those without these resources and those in the big, plump middle of the bell curve are the folks who cannot make change, navigate a city without a mobile phone map, and read cursive.
Even the one bright spot comes with a caveat:
Nonetheless, the researchers caution that this is far from conclusive evidence that simply adopting “Science of Reading” policies will lead to improvements in reading skills. “There’s no silver bullet,” noted Reardon. “We need more research to understand what specific teacher training, coaching, and reading instruction practices are most effective, and for whom, and under what conditions. And we need the same for math.” The researchers also identified 108 “Districts on the Rise,” school systems of all income levels that are outpacing their peers. “Our hope is that people will learn from these states and districts and use them as models for improving our schools,” Reardon said.
I like my term stupidization. I know you are going to be thrilled with my personal observations:
- Learning requires the parentheses of a stable family and friends who want to learn and contribute to the community.
- Distractions make it very difficult to complete a task to the best of the student’s ability. The harder the task, the greater the need for a distraction free environment.
- School curricula should be anchored in the basics, not trends.
When an educational system cannot produce individuals who cannot read, make change, and engage in life-long learning — it is back to basics time. It is not time to buy every student a Mac Neo.
Net net: Skip jargon like learning recession and use plain, direct words like stupidization. That’s a small step forward in my opinion. Also, knock off the Covid thing. It’s getting long in the tooth.
Stephen E Arnold, May 18, 2026
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