American Schools Face Drastic Decreases in Academic Excellence. Why?

OPINION PIECE

Since the beginning of the 2020 nationwide lockdowns in response to the COVID-19 outbreak, a seemingly unending fall in academic excellence has been seen among American students. Illiteracy and innumeracy—or ignorance of mathematics—have seen a resurgence that no academic intellectuals have been able to respond to. Recently, in 2023, the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS)—which measures academic results in 4th and 8th graders—showed that both age demographics have seen a sharp decline in their academic performance. These declines have commonly been attributed to the COVID-19 lockdowns due to the declines occurring around the same time as schools switching to an entirely digital format. However, this excuse doesn’t account for many factors that truly contribute to this drop. For example, why haven’t similar declines been noticed in every country across the world?

While the COVID-19 pandemic undoubtedly impacted education at the time, it alone does not explain the continued drastic drop in academic performance half a decade later. In 2020, when schools first switched to virtual classes, it would be accurate to say that this digital switch severely impacted student performance. Being locked in their homes in a comfortable environment, with a computer screen in front of them all day, made it easier for students to distract themselves with YouTube, video games, and other online entertainment. A Brookings Institute report, How Does Virtual Learning Impact Students in Higher Education? by Stephanie Riegg Cellini, revealed that:

“Students in online courses generally get lower grades, are less likely to perform well in follow-on coursework, and are less likely to graduate than similar students taking in-person classes…. Looking at student outcomes in Spring 2020, Bird et al. find that the switch to online instruction resulted in an 8.5% reduction in course completion. They find that failures rose. They also confirm findings in the literature that negative impacts are more extreme among less-academically prepared students”.

This finding aligns with what we know about the psychology of children: most children aren’t naturally excited to work. They generally prefer having fun, whether playing outside, engaging with video games, or scrolling through TikTok or Instagram Reels. This is where the true problem arises—shortform content.

Shortform content, which was originally popularized by the now-defunct app Vine, is content that's concise and easy to consume, usually in a few seconds to a couple of minutes. It's designed to quickly grab the audience's attention and provide basic entertainment. Every vertical scrolling app uses this format—TikTok, Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts, Snapchat Spotlight, Facebook Video, X/Twitter Video, and even apps that have no business having such a feature, such as Amazon, which has a vertical scrolling tab labeled Amazon Inspire. These short-form content apps have exploded in popularity. To put it into perspective, TikTok has 2 billion users globally, and 170 million in America—that’s just over 1 in 2 people, more than 50% of the country. The other 50% likely use another one of the aforementioned short-form content apps. This is a huge issue among children, as short-form content overstimulates children from a very young age. Many parents unwittingly contribute to this by handing over their phones or tablets to keep their children occupied. This is poison for the mind of a child.

Shortform content is not only addictive, but it also acts as a constant dopamine stream, repeatedly offering a child video after video of memes or videos of random things like slime squishing, food chopping, Minecraft parkour, and countless other arbitrary, mind-numbing and overstimulating activities. This phenomenon has been coined as brainrot by Gen Z and Gen Alpha. And the moniker isn’t inaccurate. In the 2023 study The Effect of Short-Form Video Addiction on Undergraduates’ Academic Procrastination: A Moderated Mediation Model, headed by Jin Xie, obvious but also important results were found:

“Short-form video addiction not only directly impacted academic procrastination but also placed indirect effect on academic procrastination through attentional control. Furthermore, the mediating effect of attentional control was contingent upon individuals’ boredom proneness. Higher levels of boredom proneness weakened the impact of short-form video addiction on attentional control.

The findings expand our knowledge of the negative effects of short-form video addiction and the underlying mechanisms, providing implications for mitigating undergraduates’ academic procrastination.”

In layman’s terms, being addicted to short-form videos not only directly leads to putting off schoolwork, but it also affects students indirectly by messing with how well people can focus. Additionally, this focus issue depends on how easily someone gets bored. If someone gets bored easily, the addiction has an even bigger impact on their ability to focus. It’s clear that brainrot literally rots the brain.

So, combine an app that is not only more entertaining and exhilarating than real life but also causes procrastination and lessens one’s ability to focus, with the malleable, developing mind of a child who becomes accustomed to such overstimulation from youth—and you have a recipe for disaster. It’s no wonder children are working less, failing more, and cheating more to make their lives easier. While research into the effects of short-form content on children’s minds is ongoing, it’s clear that the negative consequences are significant. Unfortunately, these apps aren’t going anywhere—they are far too profitable to disappear.

This is why parents must step in. It’s their responsibility to limit their children’s exposure to short-form content if they want them to succeed academically. Without such intervention, grades will continue to drop, illiteracy and innumeracy will continue to rise, and academic excellence will decline to unimaginable depths.