nerd

17 May 2026

Slashdot

Us Math/Reading Scores Continue 13-Year Decline. Researchers Blame Reduced Testing and Social Media

Test scores "are lower than they were a decade ago in school districts across the U.S.," reports Times magazine, citing new data released Wednesday by Stanford researchers. "Reading scores were down roughly 0.6 grades in 2025 compared to 2015, and math scores were down about 0.4 grades. This means that students were 60% of one school year behind where their peers were in reading a decade earlier and 40% of one school year behind in math." But Stanford's announcement notes that America's schools "were in a 'learning recession' for seven years before the COVID-19 pandemic, with student test scores in math and reading on a steady decline since 2013." This reversal ended two decades of progress, according to Sean Reardon, the Professor of Poverty and Inequality at Stanford Graduate School of Education, whose data forms the backbone of the new research... The study reframes the narrative of pandemic-era learning loss, arguing that the crisis of the last few years was an acceleration of a problem that was already underway. "The pandemic was the mudslide that followed seven years of erosion in student achievement," said Professor Tom Kane, faculty director of the Center for Education Policy Research at Harvard University, and a lead author of the report... The study found that the slowdown in learning coincided with two major shifts in American childhood and education policy: the widespread dismantling of test-based accountability systems that defined the No Child Left Behind era and the rise of social media use among young people. Reading scores, in particular, suffered consistently, with the average annual loss in the years just before the pandemic being just as large as the loss during it... Today, 8th-grade reading scores on national assessments are at their lowest point since 1990. Compounding the problem, chronic student absenteeism remains a major obstacle to improving learning. Though down from its pandemic peak, 23 percent of students were chronically absent in the 2024-25 school year, far above the pre-pandemic rate of 15 percent. More context from Time magazine: Reading scores were down roughly 0.6 grades in 2025 compared to 2015, and math scores were down about 0.4 grades. This means that students were 60% of one school year behind where their peers were in reading a decade earlier and 40% of one school year behind in math... "The decline started around the time that social media's use among teens was exploding, and this was also occurring in a number of other countries," says Thomas Kane, one of the authors of the Educational Scorecard report and a professor at Harvard University... [H]e maintains that it is at the core of the decline in reading achievement. He points out that social media use was shown to be heaviest among the lowest achieving students. "Some states and school districts are making progress," notes the Associated Press, "largely by shifting toward phonics-based instruction and providing extra support for struggling readers." And "The picture is also brighter in math. Almost every state in the analysis saw improvements in math test scores from 2022 to 2025."

Hacker News

EU weighs restricting use of US cloud platforms to process sensitive gov data

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17 May 2026 5:29pm GMT

Meta deletes popular 1M follower account after Kuwaiti request

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17 May 2026 5:10pm GMT

The occasional ECONNRESET

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17 May 2026 5:09pm GMT

Slashdot

How Owners of EVs from Bankrupt Fisker Saved Their Cars With an Open Source Nonprofit

An anonymous reader shared this report from Electrek: When Fisker Inc. filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in June 2024, it left roughly 11,000 Ocean SUV owners holding the keys to vehicles that cost them anywhere from $40,000 to $70,000 - and that were rapidly losing the software brains that made them work. No more over-the-air updates. No more connected services. No more warranty. The manufacturer was dead. What happened next is one of the most remarkable stories in the history of the electric vehicle industry. Instead of accepting that their cars would become rolling paperweights, Fisker Ocean owners organized, reverse-engineered their vehicles' proprietary software, hacked into CAN bus networks, built open-source tools on GitHub, and effectively stood up a volunteer-run open-sourced car company from the ashes of Fisker... Within months of the bankruptcy filing, thousands of Ocean owners formed the Fisker Owners Association (FOA) - a nonprofit that quickly grew to 4,000 members and began operating as something between a car club, a tech startup, and an independent automaker. The FOA hired independent tech experts who began reverse-engineering Fisker's proprietary software patches. Members taught each other how to flash firmware. They organized bulk purchases of replacement parts - negotiating the price of key fobs down from roughly $1,000 each to a fraction of that through coordinated group buys. They hosted free global key fob pairing events, saving each owner $100 to $250... What started as desperate troubleshooting has evolved into a genuine open-source ecosystem around the Fisker Ocean. On GitHub, a developer named MichaelOE reverse-engineered the API behind Fisker's official "My Fisker" mobile app and built a Home Assistant integration that exposes every cloud API value as a sensor - with all the app's buttons available as Home Assistant controls... [Community members have also been systematically mapping CAN bus files.] The article noes this "is not an isolated incident. Nikola also filed for bankruptcy, leaving its owners in a similar bind. Canoo and Arrival are headed for liquidation auctions..." Consumer advocates are now pushing for structural changes: mandatory software escrow funds that would keep vehicle software running even if the manufacturer disappears, open-source mandates in bankruptcy proceedings, and shared repair data requirements... European automakers, meanwhile, are moving in a different direction entirely - Volkswagen, BMW, Mercedes-Benz, and eight suppliers signed a memorandum in 2025 to develop a shared open-source automotive software platform.... The Fisker Owners Association has proven that a dedicated community can keep orphaned EVs on the road. But they shouldn't have had to... [O]wners shouldn't need to become hackers and parts brokers and quasi-manufacturers just to keep driving the cars they already paid for.

Sysadmin Creates 'ModuleJail' To Automatically Blacklist Unused Kernel Modules

Long-time Slashdot reader internet-redstar shares an interestging response to "the recent wave of Linux kernel privilege escalation vulnerabilities like 'Copy Fail' and 'Dirty Frag'": Belgian Linux sysadmin and Tesla Hacker "Jasper Nuyens" got tired of the idea of manually blacklisting dozens or even hundreds of obscure kernel modules across large fleets of Linux systems in the near future. So he wrote ModuleJail, a GPLv3 shell script that scans a running Linux system and automatically blacklists currently unused kernel modules, reducing kernel attack surface without requiring a reboot. The idea is simple: many modern Linux privilege escalation bugs target obscure or rarely used kernel functionality that is still enabled by default on servers that do not actually need it. ModuleJail works across major distributions including Debian, Ubuntu, RHEL, Fedora, AlmaLinux and Arch Linux, generating 1 modprobe blacklist rules file while preserving commonly-used modules. Nuyens argues that the increasing speed of AI-assisted vulnerability discovery will likely turn kernel hardening and attack surface reduction into a much bigger operational priority for sysadmins over the next few weeks and months.