Steve McGuire Profile picture
Nov 16 8 tweets 2 min read Read on X
“Although it once seemed like a good idea to give every child his or her own device, it’s clear that those policies have been a failure.”

💯

School-issued laptops distract students at school and home, expose them to things they shouldn’t see, and hurt learning.

🧵 Image
Great column by @jean_twenge:

She observes that “the decline in test scores started well before the pandemic, around 2012. One obvious culprit is smartphones, which became popular just as test scores started to decline.”
But “phones are not the only electronic devices students use at school. These days, nearly every middle and high school student — and a good number in the elementary grades as well — brings a laptop or tablet to school and uses it at home for homework.”
“Many of these devices are provided by schools. You might think that these school-issued devices allow only a limited number of functions, like access to classroom Canvas pages and Google Docs. If you assumed that, you would be wrong.”
This is a major problem.

Kids are distracted by their laptops and seeing things they shouldn’t see.

A mother “asked school administrators to restrict her son’s use of the laptop” and “they resisted, saying the device was integral to the curriculum.” Image
These devices also have a negative impact at home where they continue to distract and disrupt: Image
And, of course, the distractions negatively impact learning: Image
@jean_twenge makes numerous recommendations.

Read the whole thing:
nytimes.com/2025/11/16/opi…

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More from @sfmcguire79

Nov 17
Harvard Professor Jill Lepore says she almost left the academy during the height of wokeness and that she’s ashamed she didn’t speak up.

She says it was “miserable,” and she’s not sure why she stayed. Image
She recalls declining to publish (at the time) an essay critical of #metoo because she was told it would ruin her life: Image
And she says a sign that things have changed would be whether people would say that what happened to Professor Ronald Sullivan was wrong: Image
Read 5 tweets
Nov 11
NEW: UC San Diego has released a new report documenting a “steep decline in the academic preparedness” of its freshmen.

The number of entering students needing remedial math has exploded from 1/100 to 1/8.

They’ve had to create a second remedial class covering elementary and middle school math skills in addition to the one covering gaps from high school.

🧵Image
The report also shows that nearly 1/5 students fail to meeting entry level writing requirements. Image
“This deterioration coincided with the COVID-19 pandemic and its effects on education, the elimination of standardized testing, grade inflation, and the expansion of admissions from under-resourced high schools.” Image
Read 15 tweets
Oct 30
These Harvard students…did not react well to the report on grade inflation:

“The whole entire day, I was crying. I skipped classes on Monday, and I was just sobbing in bed because I felt like I try so hard in my classes, and my grades aren’t even the best. It just felt soul-crushing.”

“What makes a Harvard student a Harvard student is their engagement in extracurriculars. Now we have to throw that all away and pursue just academics. I believe that attacks the very notion of what Harvard is.”

“I can’t reach my maximum level of enjoyment just learning the material because I’m so anxious about the midterm, so anxious about the papers, and because I know it’s so harshly graded. If that standard is raised even more, it’s unrealistic to assume that people will enjoy their classes.”Image
One more:

A student says harder grading “could take a serious toll on students’ mental health.”

“‘It makes me rethink my decision to come to the school,’ she said. ‘I killed myself all throughout high school to try and get into this school. I was looking forward to being fulfilled by my studies now, rather than being killed by them.’”
Read 5 tweets
Oct 27
Harvard reports that it is “failing to perform the key functions of grading.”

Its grading practices are “damaging the academic culture of the College.”

“Faculty newly arrived at Harvard are surprised at how leniently our courses are graded.”

Students say academics feel “fake.” Image
Grade inflation is out of control:

60% of grades are now A’s.

That’s risen from 26% just 20 years ago. Image
The median GPA at graduation has risen from 3.29 in 1985 to 3.83 last year. Image
Read 8 tweets
Aug 28
“They were cracking up not simply because grades had gotten so high but because they knew just how little students were doing to earn them.”

Harvard faculty recognize that grade inflation has become absurd: Image
“In 2011, 60 percent of all grades at Harvard were in the A range (up from 33 percent in 1985). By the 2020–21 academic year, that share had risen to 79 percent.”
“Outside observers might still think of grades as an objective assessment of a student’s work, and therefore a way to differentiate between levels of achievement. But many professors seem to conceive of them as an endlessly adaptable participation trophy.”
Read 9 tweets
Aug 13
“College teaching is politically one-sided to an extreme, and until professors change our ways, we won’t recover the trust of the public.”

“Take the teaching of racial bias and the criminal justice system.”

🧵 Image
“Michelle Alexander’s ‘The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness’ (2010) shows up in thousands of syllabi,” but the work of one of her leading critics “is paired with it less than 4% of the time.”

Other critics are taught even less.
“Who is generally taught with Ms. Alexander? Works that make hers look moderate. The top three titles are by Angela Davis, Ta-Nehisi Coates and Michel Foucault.”
Read 10 tweets

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