"We're in the midst of an "education depression," an "era of shrinking outcomes and opportunity," writes Tim Daly.
From 1990 to 2013, students of all demographic groups made significant progress in reading and math skills, he writes. After 2013, achievement stagnated and then began to decline. Then, much of the earlier progress was lost during the pandemic.
High achievers in affluent, educated communities are doing OK, Daly writes. Low-performing students are doing worse.
In the backlash to the reform movement, "teachers unions and fed-up parents waged war on testing -- nearly succeeding in removing the federal requirement to assess students annually in math and reading," he writes. Schools changed tests, making it hard to compare trends.
High school graduation rates, which rose from 80 percent to 87 percent, seemed to signal good news. But, if schools "relax expectations and inflate grades -- which is exactly what researchers find they’ve been doing -- graduation rates will rise even if students are performing worse," Daly writes.
Our political leaders have offered no plan to turn around our declining schools, writes Kevin Huffman in the Washington Post. He is Tennessee’s former commissioner of education and the CEO of Accelerate, a national nonprofit that promotes strategies for improving student performance.
Neither presidential candidate has a plan to improve student learning or set measurable education goals, he writes.
President George W. Bush's 2002 No Child Left Behind Act, which mandated statewide standardized testing for grades three through eight, is now criticized, but it led to higher reading and math scores for almost all student groups, Huffman writes.
President Barack Obama funded academic interventions in his first term. However, "robust federal education policy raised concerns from the left and right for more local control, and in 2015, the Obama administration replaced NCLB with the Every Student Succeeds Act, limiting the federal government’s power to set nationwide standards for academic success."
That's left us with "massive learning gaps and no national plan for closing them," he writes.
Like Daly, Huffman wants to see a bipartisan education bill that sets national education goals, and funding for nonpartisan, evidence-based policies, such as "phonics-based learning" and "high-dosage tutoring."
Everything has been tried. It's the family and the kid.
You can't fix stupid. You must want to learn and achieve. Many kids are unteachable.
Education policy is where politicians go to kill their careers. The smart politicians stay far away from education because Americans politics refuses to deal honestly with any topic that falls along an S-curve.
Kevin Huffman is living in the past. No Child Left Behind was reviled because virtually every American school was considered in need of improvement by the time of President Obama's second term (when I was doing contract work for his administration), since we didn't approach the absurd 100 per cent proficiency goal that was required by the Bush Congress that passed that mistake; the Trump Republicans have a much better education policy platform, one that should begin to be enacted in 2025, regardless of who wins next week's elections.