this post was submitted on 28 Jan 2026
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Manufacturing Consent
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Interesting source and I've worked with NCES data (before they were mostly fired last year) so I'm familiar with the findings. There's obviously tons of reasons, but the state by state difference is the more interesting aspect to me. Linguistic minorities being tested in English, for instance.
That said, as someone who studied this quite a bit in graduate school, I know a few big reasons. Economic disparity is one of the biggest, and that itself lends itself to all sorts of things like lower school quality, no breakfast, additional employment during teenage years, pollution, no parents to help with homework due to work, etc. My advisor was basically just running an experiment giving families basic income and the kids education shot up extremely fast.
But we also have anti-intellectual culture issues, racism in how we address bilingualism (including in CA where 1990s ppl voted to ban bilingual education in sheer ignorance) and so on. All this impacts reading comprehension, but not nearly as much as the economic factors for some reason.
Thank you for the detailed reply.
I would agree, anecdotally, from my time in social work. Kids that missed meals, kids that had parents not paying attention to them or not interacting at the end of the day (often because they're still at work, single parenting is hell), all little tiny factors that build up over years until you're not a few weeks behind, you're years behind your peers.
I've seen firsthand what happens to kids with decent brains when they're not utilized and raised in an anti-intellectual household. Lots of wasted potential, and unfortunately, they become a very easy-to-influence group.