Why do educators believe that students are struggling more with basic developmental skills compared to five years ago, as reported in the Education Week survey?

I will speak for myself and my own observations as someone who has been teaching middle school students for 16 years:

Overexposure to interactive media.

Most of what my students struggle with these days, which my students in the past didn’t struggle with as much, can be attributed directly to technology. Specifically, they struggle with the predictable side effects of being instantly, effortlessly entertained by interactive screens throughout their lives. They are so used to being constantly entertained and having everything they need given to them instantly with little effort on their part that, when they encounter a situation where those things aren’t a given (quick, entertaining, effortless), they give up.

Compared to students in the past, today’s students seem to struggle a lot more with things like:

Paying attention to anything that isn’t interactive/flashy/loud/entertaining.

Remembering multi-step instructions.

Remembering oral directions.

Overcoming their natural apathetic tendencies in order to achieve a goal.

Delayed gratification.

Basically, for everyone one of these things a skill requires, you’re going to lose half of today’s students:

An attention span of more than ten minutes.

The ability to follow multi-step directions.

The ability to listen to directions.

Something that requires effort on the part of the student.

Something for which the reward won’t be instantly realized.

I am convinced that this is why there is a correlation between having a disorganized locker and being really into video games. Video games do the organizing for you. They make things easy. They are interactive and offer instant, relatively effortless gratification.

But keeping your locker organized, a basic skill for students, requires continual effort. It’s boring. There is no real reward for doing it. So why bother?

Since becoming a teacher, I’ve seen an increase in the number of students who:

have illegible handwriting.

have diagnosed ADHD. (It’s literally double the number of students now.)

have suspected ADHD.

cannot tie their own shoes.

have “executive functioning issues,” which includes things like organization.

cannot remember most things from day to day. Every day they walk into my classroom, it’s like the first time they’ve heard words like “noun” or “subject.”

show zero impulse control.

show zero effort or ambition to do anything that doesn’t offer immediate gratification.

give up before they really even try.

Honestly, it’s kind of sad. I feel bad for these kids.