America stopped caring how poor kids do in school

The bad new bipartisan consensus behind falling test scores

My local government here in DC celebrated the release of new national test score data in late January, with the District’s state superintendent of schools telling the Washington Post, “We’ve got momentum happening here in the District of Columbia, and we’re committed to building on that momentum and excited about all the work that we have yet to do.”

So what’s the good news?

DC saw a genuinely big improvement in our fourth-grade math scores, tying Delaware as the best improvement in the nation. The Post reports that “the District also made nominal gains, or stayed about the same, in reading for fourth- and eighth-graders.” And what’s crazy is that in the context of the latest National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) report, flat performance in reading is genuinely impressive. On average, nationwide, students got worse — especially the weakest students — not just compared to before the pandemic, but compared to two years ago.

While learning loss due to the disruptions of the pandemic is clearly a real thing and a big problem, it’s not the only problem we’re dealing with. Indeed, as this Education Week chart makes clear, all 2019 scores were at least a little bit lower than they were in 2013.

I don’t want to blame everything bad that’s happened in American education on the little-noted 2015 Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA). But I do think that ESSA is a notable reflection of the spirit of our times, and the spirit of our times is not good!

The basic story is that during the aughts, we had a bipartisan education reform consensus that was focused on improving school quality as an attainable and important driver of social and economic progress. This consensus wasn’t perfect — its problems included overpromising on addressing achievement gaps and overreliance on fiddling with teacher pay as One Weird Trick for fixing schools. The consensus also annoyed a lot of people, often for reasons that were not related to these flaws. But test scores were largely going up. The campaign to close achievement gaps failed not because low-income kids and racial minorities didn’t do better, but because everyone was doing better, so gaps persisted.

But with ESSA, Congress stopped trying to set federal requirements that schools get better¹, because the political energy around improving schools was evaporating. The left retreated into coalition solidarity with teachers unions, and the right refocused on vouchers and privatization. And it turns out that giving up and not trying doesn’t work very well.

The dumbing of America

Nat Malkus from the American Enterprise Institute observes that, to the extent they are available, test scores for American adults are also in decline.

In other words, the flagging performance of American students isn’t just about something that’s happening in schools; it’s about something that’s happening in our society at large. He glosses a few different theories, but I think it’s pretty obviously a combination of smartphones, social media, and short-form video. If you give people more stuff to do, they read less. Our son loves to read, but he obviously loves playing Fortnite and watching Minecraft streamers on YouTube even more. He reads a lot anyway because he loves it, because he was taught well at school, and because we make books available for him at home. But mostly he reads a lot because there are large swathes of time when gaming and watching videos are simply off-limits.

I struggle with this as an adult.