My wife and I were talking about something similar today (though we aren't teachers) as I had heard about doom spending for younger generations (like my youngest daughter). She thinks nothing of dropping $200 a fortnight on her eye lashes.
I'm not sure what the economic future is like, with that type of spending behaviour. I even remarked that I didn't think kids have a lot of resilience too!
My guess us this has arisen because many kids get bombarded with media telling them what they should buy and there's never really a break.
Thanks for sharing this and i agree - it seems it's a harbinger of poor outcomes in our future economy generally and their finances personally. Do you and other network coordinators have a hypothesis on why the current cohort is tracking so poorly?
I'm not an expert on doom spending obviously. From what I've read, teens have always been susceptible to peer pressure and have had poorer financial literacy etc. It's part of being a teen. But the doom spending trend is more about trying to control something in a more out of control world and getting that instant gratification hit. So yes, it's partly a resilience and coping issue. People used to become alcoholics. Now they buy eye lashes.
As for the others - this is just pure speculation. Resilience is both a genetic and environmental issue. You can have a medical diagnosis that affects your resilience. But because it also lays blame partly on parents in terms of how they role model resilience, it's controversial.
The COVID issues are because kids in that cohort missed out on months of education in the early years. Attendance matters. Teachers gave them access to that education the best they could given the circumstances, but a lot of parents didn't stay on top their children and follow through on the work. It was treated like an extended holiday and this is now the consequence.
As for STEM and intellectual curiosity decline, they both require passion. If you're not immersed in that at an early age then you'll show less interest. So again more on the environmental/parental side. In primary school you'll be lucky to do a 1 to 1.5 hours of science a week, with the teacher's attention divided between 25-30 students. Compare that to a parent who does 1 on 1 making mixtures with their toddler in the kitchen. If a student hasn't really found that STEM passion by Year 7 then they likely won't.
I'm fairly confident that every generation has said that the "youth of today" are doomed.
I have also heard teachers complain about students my entire life without ever taking any responsibility for their performance as teachers --it's always society's fault, the parents' fault, the administrators' fault, the legislators' fault.
From my perspective it makes me question whether we have the right people teaching. If teachers don't really believe they can educate and prepare students for life in their 5 days a week of contact time, maybe they're not the right people for the role. I certainly wouldn't be able to get away with that in my role. I would be expected to propose and implement workarounds, a way forward, and test and measure the outcomes. I would be expected to be continuously improving my work, finding the people to help me with a way forward, and to take the initiative to find a way to make things work.
So what are you suggesting to remedy this? What is your approach?
We have a 20 year data set so we're comparing the 2023 cohorts to the 2003 cohorts, as well as all those in between. These are long term trends. Not the 'youth of today' are doomed nonsense.
As for teachers' influences on children they're often overstated. A primary teacher has about 6000 hours of contact time with a class in a year. That time is divided by 25 to 30 students. 1 on 1 time with a student per week is measured in minutes, not hours. Then the next year it will be a different set of students for that teacher. By the time they get to high school, whole class time with a teacher can be as low as 500 to 600 hours per year, again divided by 25-30 students for teachers with 150-250 students in their classes.
Whereas a parent's influence is measured in the tens of thousands of hours for almost two decades, depending on how involved that parent is in a child's life and their education. The impact of a bad parent far exceeds the impact of even the worst teacher.
As for how you fix these things, we do things like mindfulness training for students. But every minute you add in the school day to do this is a minute you take away from something else. Covid affected students were getting extra support but that's now mostly ended.
Ultimately, these interventions cost time, resources and money. And I'd argue that society and governments as a whole just aren't that interested.
I agree with your first paragraph but you don't need to put the boot into teachers.
They have to cope with a massively changing environment due to political meddling and also parents today are awful - would you put yourself in the position to teach today?
Student numbers will fall thanks to low burth rates and reduced international students who are seeking better lives - inflation will persist and poor graduate outcomes will only get worse.
Intelligence levels will drop off dramatically within a decade as teacher qualities goes from woeful to abhorrent (mediocre would be a strong upgrade). Young adults will lead the rapid decline of society and Boomers/ Gen X will do nothing about it as they try to hold on to all they've built - in the end, they will have nothing.
AI will take over all service functions as well as most jobs. Jobs will be extremely mundane. WFH will be the only method to keep people employed, rope NEETs in and conceal the extent of societies decline - the broken social contract.
People who are already in the 20-40 age bracket will be worse off than their parents/ slightly older peers. And people coming into this age bracket over the next 10-30 years will fair poorly.
The next century will show marked global decline and be another stain in human history that the people of the future will study. Most people are too blind/ ignorant to see history is repeating itself.
For one thing, current day Australia doesn't care/need the vast majority of students to study STEM or even go to university.
Immigration policies make it so it's only worth investing in the cream of the crop. There's no point spending 70-100k per year training someone for 3 years if I can get someone more competent right now from Philippines/Malaysia/etc...
It's basically a school/university thing that puts such an emphasis on ATAR because they make money out of it. In reality supply/demand would suggest the majority of students skip uni at this point.
Im pretty confident you dont get to say that 13 year olds, or primary school aged kids would have trouble starting businesses.
There is a lot of learning and growing in that time between primary school and adulthood.
We dont let 1-13 year olds drive or do other things, but they get there at older ages.
You are making a lot of life assumptions based on children.
And even if they cant open businesses in 10 -15 years time, its likely because the parents had to move way out due to the housing crisis that older generations helped cause. So maybe they will readjust how things are done instead of fitting your mold of how they are meant to do things.
Maybe try not to put them in boxes or little compartments where you think they are sitting for the rest of their lives.
13 year old me did not define my entire life nor will it for any of them.
Im in a mix about teachers. Partly I think they are awful for posts like this and go into the aussie teachers sub and its full of ill will against the kids and parents, then self praise for the teachers being so awesome and hardworking.
Then there are a lot who are doing a great job and are caring and try to teach and make positive impacts without this judgement and they are the wonderful ones.
>A decrease in independent learning. Basically, any task that is outside the mandatory subjects, that involves mental exertion and requires less teacher handholding e.g. signing up for public speaking competitions. Perhaps it will result in a lower drive to do self-training later in life?
Just sounds like adults today.... if we don't have to do it, why would we?
Some interesting comments, but I don't think you can take too much from this, because.....teenagers.
The Covid Generation being behind is something to watch definitely though.
>For example, a decade from now you may end up seeing a year or two with lower ATARs overall as a result.
Clearly you weren't very interested in STEM either if you don't understand the difference between a mark and a rank?
Also, how am I the first person to notice this?
Career teachers moonlighting as analysts pretending they understand correlation and causation, or that long term trends can so flippantly be measured by observations shared in a casual conversation between peers. The same sort are the ones upvoting this garbage.
You're talking from a student perspective and what the student gets to see. We can compare the raw data that generates ATAR rankings for every single year, so we can compare different year cohorts to each other to see long term trends.
Well I have to be careful there for obvious reasons. Something broad data won't fully reveal but teachers with more than 10 years+ experience will attest, there has been a very real and large drop off in most students' abilities to concentrate on even simple tasks. I'm talking about cognitive overloading, executive functioning and working memory. We have seen a big uptick in diagnoses but the controversial aspect is that it's getting worse even in undiagnosed students and schools can't really fix it . Obviously screen time gets a lot of the blame but it may turn out to even be something else that is impacting brain development in early childhood. I've read research in that area in regards to brain rewiring. It may even be the result of chemical processes or genetic degradation.
Interesting post, would love to hear the controversial one! But I can comment on STEM and being close to this field, there is this idea that there are 1000s of high paying STEM jobs out there, there isn't really when you compare to sheer number of people per each job applying...The whole thing is part of the australian model of bringing in people, make it seem like we need people into the country for roles we dont have local talent for, its pure BS. There are loads of tech people on uber runs and amazon deliveries. AI is going to make it way harder...since AI is a brilliant coder, especially the really new stuff coming out.
School in Australia sucks - the curriculum is too easy, the testing regime is vapid and there is no incentive for good students to excel.
I prefer the American system where test scores are published for all students to see and you are streamed from early on into the slow, medium, fast, extra fast class. That has been shown to result in better performance in gifted children.
> A decrease in independent learning. Basically, any task that is outside the mandatory subjects, that involves mental exertion and requires less teacher handholding e.g. signing up for public speaking competitions. Perhaps it will result in a lower drive to do self-training later in life?
That seems pretty normal to me, only the really top achievers were ever the ones doing all the academic extracurriculars when I was in school. Sounds like your "school network" isn't as broad as you think and is coming back to the mean in terms of student performance.
Has there been a consistent number of extracurriculars offered in those schools over the timeframe? It's anecdotal, but it seems like kids are doing a more extra curriculars then they did 20 years ago. It seems like there is a lot more after school sport, private music lessons, employment etc. Perhaps it's just less being done through the schools?
>The COVID generation. Students who were in pre-school and kindergarten during Covid are demonstrating a dip below their peers in academic results. It’s still early but I suspect that will carry through into high school. For example, a decade from now you may end up seeing a year or two with lower ATARs overall as a result.
That's not how ATAR works. It's not a score out of 100, it's a *rank* out of 100 within your year level.
An ATAR of 80 means you ranked within the top 20% of your year level.
That's how ATAR works for students and what the student gets to see. We get the raw data for every year cohort that makes up ATAR and can compare how the entire cohort performances shift over time.
Sure but that's not what you said though. Your statement that we may see a year or two of students with lower ATARs is incorrect. The ATAR is a ranking, and because of that we will not see a difference in the ATARs between the year levels.
I was trying not to get too technical and it was late when I wrote it. We can compare every single percentile rank to any equivalent year in the data set and work out what their adjusted percentile rank would be. So if you want to get technical, it's their APR that drops. But nobody really knows what that means.
Regarding the COVID generation, I think my kids were the lucky cohort. They weren't in upper primary yet, so they didn't miss out too much 'learning' and they were independent enough to do be able to do some work on their own. They weren't in prep, year 1, so they didn't miss those foundational 'classroom behaviour' years and they had slightly more of an education than just being baby sat. I'm not surprised by your findings.
I'm curious what you think about funding? Over the last 25 years, funding in schools has increased quite a bit including programs like the BER, NSSCF, etc and results are worsening. If more funding is required, what else is needed to see additional funding result in better results?
Regarding STEM, more than 50% students in university stem courses are international. 90% for postgraduate
[удалено]
Anti-intellectual households typically lead to anti-intellectual children.
My wife and I were talking about something similar today (though we aren't teachers) as I had heard about doom spending for younger generations (like my youngest daughter). She thinks nothing of dropping $200 a fortnight on her eye lashes. I'm not sure what the economic future is like, with that type of spending behaviour. I even remarked that I didn't think kids have a lot of resilience too! My guess us this has arisen because many kids get bombarded with media telling them what they should buy and there's never really a break. Thanks for sharing this and i agree - it seems it's a harbinger of poor outcomes in our future economy generally and their finances personally. Do you and other network coordinators have a hypothesis on why the current cohort is tracking so poorly?
I'm not an expert on doom spending obviously. From what I've read, teens have always been susceptible to peer pressure and have had poorer financial literacy etc. It's part of being a teen. But the doom spending trend is more about trying to control something in a more out of control world and getting that instant gratification hit. So yes, it's partly a resilience and coping issue. People used to become alcoholics. Now they buy eye lashes. As for the others - this is just pure speculation. Resilience is both a genetic and environmental issue. You can have a medical diagnosis that affects your resilience. But because it also lays blame partly on parents in terms of how they role model resilience, it's controversial. The COVID issues are because kids in that cohort missed out on months of education in the early years. Attendance matters. Teachers gave them access to that education the best they could given the circumstances, but a lot of parents didn't stay on top their children and follow through on the work. It was treated like an extended holiday and this is now the consequence. As for STEM and intellectual curiosity decline, they both require passion. If you're not immersed in that at an early age then you'll show less interest. So again more on the environmental/parental side. In primary school you'll be lucky to do a 1 to 1.5 hours of science a week, with the teacher's attention divided between 25-30 students. Compare that to a parent who does 1 on 1 making mixtures with their toddler in the kitchen. If a student hasn't really found that STEM passion by Year 7 then they likely won't.
One thing I noticed about kids with varying amount of doom spending is peer pressure and parental guidance.
I'm fairly confident that every generation has said that the "youth of today" are doomed. I have also heard teachers complain about students my entire life without ever taking any responsibility for their performance as teachers --it's always society's fault, the parents' fault, the administrators' fault, the legislators' fault. From my perspective it makes me question whether we have the right people teaching. If teachers don't really believe they can educate and prepare students for life in their 5 days a week of contact time, maybe they're not the right people for the role. I certainly wouldn't be able to get away with that in my role. I would be expected to propose and implement workarounds, a way forward, and test and measure the outcomes. I would be expected to be continuously improving my work, finding the people to help me with a way forward, and to take the initiative to find a way to make things work. So what are you suggesting to remedy this? What is your approach?
We have a 20 year data set so we're comparing the 2023 cohorts to the 2003 cohorts, as well as all those in between. These are long term trends. Not the 'youth of today' are doomed nonsense. As for teachers' influences on children they're often overstated. A primary teacher has about 6000 hours of contact time with a class in a year. That time is divided by 25 to 30 students. 1 on 1 time with a student per week is measured in minutes, not hours. Then the next year it will be a different set of students for that teacher. By the time they get to high school, whole class time with a teacher can be as low as 500 to 600 hours per year, again divided by 25-30 students for teachers with 150-250 students in their classes. Whereas a parent's influence is measured in the tens of thousands of hours for almost two decades, depending on how involved that parent is in a child's life and their education. The impact of a bad parent far exceeds the impact of even the worst teacher. As for how you fix these things, we do things like mindfulness training for students. But every minute you add in the school day to do this is a minute you take away from something else. Covid affected students were getting extra support but that's now mostly ended. Ultimately, these interventions cost time, resources and money. And I'd argue that society and governments as a whole just aren't that interested.
I agree with your first paragraph but you don't need to put the boot into teachers. They have to cope with a massively changing environment due to political meddling and also parents today are awful - would you put yourself in the position to teach today?
Student numbers will fall thanks to low burth rates and reduced international students who are seeking better lives - inflation will persist and poor graduate outcomes will only get worse. Intelligence levels will drop off dramatically within a decade as teacher qualities goes from woeful to abhorrent (mediocre would be a strong upgrade). Young adults will lead the rapid decline of society and Boomers/ Gen X will do nothing about it as they try to hold on to all they've built - in the end, they will have nothing. AI will take over all service functions as well as most jobs. Jobs will be extremely mundane. WFH will be the only method to keep people employed, rope NEETs in and conceal the extent of societies decline - the broken social contract. People who are already in the 20-40 age bracket will be worse off than their parents/ slightly older peers. And people coming into this age bracket over the next 10-30 years will fair poorly. The next century will show marked global decline and be another stain in human history that the people of the future will study. Most people are too blind/ ignorant to see history is repeating itself.
For one thing, current day Australia doesn't care/need the vast majority of students to study STEM or even go to university. Immigration policies make it so it's only worth investing in the cream of the crop. There's no point spending 70-100k per year training someone for 3 years if I can get someone more competent right now from Philippines/Malaysia/etc... It's basically a school/university thing that puts such an emphasis on ATAR because they make money out of it. In reality supply/demand would suggest the majority of students skip uni at this point.
Im pretty confident you dont get to say that 13 year olds, or primary school aged kids would have trouble starting businesses. There is a lot of learning and growing in that time between primary school and adulthood. We dont let 1-13 year olds drive or do other things, but they get there at older ages. You are making a lot of life assumptions based on children. And even if they cant open businesses in 10 -15 years time, its likely because the parents had to move way out due to the housing crisis that older generations helped cause. So maybe they will readjust how things are done instead of fitting your mold of how they are meant to do things. Maybe try not to put them in boxes or little compartments where you think they are sitting for the rest of their lives. 13 year old me did not define my entire life nor will it for any of them. Im in a mix about teachers. Partly I think they are awful for posts like this and go into the aussie teachers sub and its full of ill will against the kids and parents, then self praise for the teachers being so awesome and hardworking. Then there are a lot who are doing a great job and are caring and try to teach and make positive impacts without this judgement and they are the wonderful ones.
We're comparing 2003 13 years old to 2023 13 years old. It's a generation issue, not an age issue.
>A decrease in independent learning. Basically, any task that is outside the mandatory subjects, that involves mental exertion and requires less teacher handholding e.g. signing up for public speaking competitions. Perhaps it will result in a lower drive to do self-training later in life? Just sounds like adults today.... if we don't have to do it, why would we? Some interesting comments, but I don't think you can take too much from this, because.....teenagers. The Covid Generation being behind is something to watch definitely though.
This is from a 20 year data set. Yes, teenagers are teenagers. This is something else though.
>For example, a decade from now you may end up seeing a year or two with lower ATARs overall as a result. Clearly you weren't very interested in STEM either if you don't understand the difference between a mark and a rank? Also, how am I the first person to notice this?
Career teachers moonlighting as analysts pretending they understand correlation and causation, or that long term trends can so flippantly be measured by observations shared in a casual conversation between peers. The same sort are the ones upvoting this garbage.
But their position and experience give their INFORMED analysis gravitas! /S
You're talking from a student perspective and what the student gets to see. We can compare the raw data that generates ATAR rankings for every single year, so we can compare different year cohorts to each other to see long term trends.
Yeah bit odd coming from a teacher whose job is presumably to be familiar with the ATAR system
We can get the PG-13 shit in the newspapers, give us the controversial shit!
Well I have to be careful there for obvious reasons. Something broad data won't fully reveal but teachers with more than 10 years+ experience will attest, there has been a very real and large drop off in most students' abilities to concentrate on even simple tasks. I'm talking about cognitive overloading, executive functioning and working memory. We have seen a big uptick in diagnoses but the controversial aspect is that it's getting worse even in undiagnosed students and schools can't really fix it . Obviously screen time gets a lot of the blame but it may turn out to even be something else that is impacting brain development in early childhood. I've read research in that area in regards to brain rewiring. It may even be the result of chemical processes or genetic degradation.
Interesting post, would love to hear the controversial one! But I can comment on STEM and being close to this field, there is this idea that there are 1000s of high paying STEM jobs out there, there isn't really when you compare to sheer number of people per each job applying...The whole thing is part of the australian model of bringing in people, make it seem like we need people into the country for roles we dont have local talent for, its pure BS. There are loads of tech people on uber runs and amazon deliveries. AI is going to make it way harder...since AI is a brilliant coder, especially the really new stuff coming out.
School in Australia sucks - the curriculum is too easy, the testing regime is vapid and there is no incentive for good students to excel. I prefer the American system where test scores are published for all students to see and you are streamed from early on into the slow, medium, fast, extra fast class. That has been shown to result in better performance in gifted children.
I am pro-streaming for high school but a lot of people are against it.
> A decrease in independent learning. Basically, any task that is outside the mandatory subjects, that involves mental exertion and requires less teacher handholding e.g. signing up for public speaking competitions. Perhaps it will result in a lower drive to do self-training later in life? That seems pretty normal to me, only the really top achievers were ever the ones doing all the academic extracurriculars when I was in school. Sounds like your "school network" isn't as broad as you think and is coming back to the mean in terms of student performance.
We measure these numbers year on year across dozens of schools. There's been a 20 year drop off in academic extracurriculars.
Has there been a consistent number of extracurriculars offered in those schools over the timeframe? It's anecdotal, but it seems like kids are doing a more extra curriculars then they did 20 years ago. It seems like there is a lot more after school sport, private music lessons, employment etc. Perhaps it's just less being done through the schools?
>The COVID generation. Students who were in pre-school and kindergarten during Covid are demonstrating a dip below their peers in academic results. It’s still early but I suspect that will carry through into high school. For example, a decade from now you may end up seeing a year or two with lower ATARs overall as a result. That's not how ATAR works. It's not a score out of 100, it's a *rank* out of 100 within your year level. An ATAR of 80 means you ranked within the top 20% of your year level.
That's how ATAR works for students and what the student gets to see. We get the raw data for every year cohort that makes up ATAR and can compare how the entire cohort performances shift over time.
Sure but that's not what you said though. Your statement that we may see a year or two of students with lower ATARs is incorrect. The ATAR is a ranking, and because of that we will not see a difference in the ATARs between the year levels.
I was trying not to get too technical and it was late when I wrote it. We can compare every single percentile rank to any equivalent year in the data set and work out what their adjusted percentile rank would be. So if you want to get technical, it's their APR that drops. But nobody really knows what that means.
Regarding the COVID generation, I think my kids were the lucky cohort. They weren't in upper primary yet, so they didn't miss out too much 'learning' and they were independent enough to do be able to do some work on their own. They weren't in prep, year 1, so they didn't miss those foundational 'classroom behaviour' years and they had slightly more of an education than just being baby sat. I'm not surprised by your findings. I'm curious what you think about funding? Over the last 25 years, funding in schools has increased quite a bit including programs like the BER, NSSCF, etc and results are worsening. If more funding is required, what else is needed to see additional funding result in better results?