American Education is Not Working

The structure of education is rotten to the core

Photo by Peter Herrmann on Unsplash

You don’t have to be a genius to know that the American education system as we know it is in a bad, bad place. Just two weeks ago, we received further confirmation of this dismal reality when the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP)—often called the “Nation’s Report Card”—released their first post-pandemic report. The findings were worse than anyone could have expected.

According to the report, only 26 percent of eighth graders were proficient in math, down from 34 percent in 2019, the last time the test was administered. Only 31 percent of eighth graders are reading proficiently. The numbers are similar for fourth graders in both subjects. Nearly every state experienced similar declines, including states like Florida and Georgia, who reopened schools earlier than most other states during the initial Covid surges. The takeaway of the authors of the New York Times article I linked above is that this is the latest evidence that the pandemic-induced lockdowns greatly decreased the learning that was going on in most American schools.

That’s certainly true, though it’s hard to parse whether the extended school closures were the only factor in reducing student achievement on these tests. As mentioned, states who remained closed longer fared similarly to states who opened back up quicker. I don’t have the relevant knowledge to adjudicate the policy, but I will note that in informal polling I’ve taken of my own students, there was not much learning going on during Zoom school. My students—even the high-achieving and well-behaved ones—spent more time on their phones watching TikTok than doing math problems. It’s no wonder that math scores in particular fell so precipitously this year.

But the pandemic merely exacerbated existing trend lines. Even before Covid forced many school districts to shut down for over a year, only one in three fourth and eighth graders were proficient in reading. And as mentioned above, about the same percentage—34 percent—of eighth graders were proficient in math in 2019. That year was no outlier, as the article notes—“overall student progress in reading has stalled in the last decade, with the highest performers stagnating and the lowest-achieving students falling further behind.” In a previous newsletter, I offered one explanation for the low reading scores, which is that school districts teach reading the wrong way. And while I still agree with myself (no surprise there), this does not explain why math scores are so low.

Rather, I think the only explanation that really holds any water is that the entire education system is filled with institutional rot. The United States has been stagnating or declining in test scores for decades now, and yet we seem surprised every time the top line numbers are released. One site notes that “the data shows that there has been virtually no gain in the reading skills of children of all three selected age groups [fourth, eighth, and twelfth graders] over the past 40 years.” I mean, just look at this graph:

The graph shows that average reading scores on the NAEP have been well below the proficient level since 1971. That can’t be explained by one or two factors which, if tweaked, would revolutionize American education and bring those reading scores up to more acceptable levels. Rather, it shows that we need to radically rethink the way we educate American children.

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I found this wonderful essay from the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE) written all the way back in 1993 that explores the history of American educational reform and the results from those efforts. It’s a little dated and somewhat dry for the general reader, but if you’re at all interested in education history and reform, do check it out in its entirety. The author explains just how bad American education has always been at teaching children the things that they are supposed to teach. In 1998, “Just five percent of 17-year-old high school students…could read well enough to understand and use information found in technical materials, literary essays, historical documents, and college-level texts.” Moreover, “only six percent of 11th graders in 1986 could solve multi-step math problems and use basic algebra. Sixty percent did not know why The Federalist was written, 75 percent didn’t know when Lincoln was president, and one in five knew what Reconstruction was.”

These numbers remind me of those TikTok videos in which a person walks around Times Square and interviews people to ask them basic questions about the United States, very simple math questions, and others. The responses to those questions make you question if any of those people actually stepped foot in a school building in their lives. (If you want a laugh, check out this video: When asked what the capital of the U.S. is, one girl says, “Wait, the U.S. has a capital?” You can’t make this stuff up.)

“Okay,” you might say, “but I don’t know the answers to some of these questions, and I’m doing fine. You’ll never need to know what Reconstruction is in your day-to-day life. Plus, you can Google all of these answers.” The latter part is certainly true—I know some of you Googled at least one of those questions—but you never know when historical knowledge will help you navigate the difference between real and fake social media posts or news stories with dubious sourcing.

Even if you never have to know the answer to any of these questions, it doesn’t mask the fact that schools are supposed to be teaching them, and that means students are supposed to be learning them. You have to know how to solve basic algebraic equations in order to pass Geometry, if for no other reason. A friend of mine is teaching high school Geometry in the same district as I teach middle-school English. He told me recently that he had to ditch the curriculum he was given because it was far too advanced for his students—many of whom had little to no knowledge of basic Algebra. Another friend who teaches gym at the same high school had to explain to a ninth-grader what “diagonal” means so that he could properly serve in ping-pong. That sounds made-up, but I swear it’s true. Kids don’t know the basic building blocks of whatever it is that they are supposed to be learning. This has trickle effects in college, where you’d expect most students to have a basic grasp of important knowledge. One Reagan administration official, however, when discussing the sad fact that many colleges had to invest in remedial programs to instruct students in rudimentary math and English, said, “surely college ought to transport one’s intellect well beyond factual knowledge and cultural literacy. But it’s hard to add a second story to a house that lacks a solid foundation.”

I have acutely felt the truth of that quote in my own teaching. I’m currently teaching two poems at once, and students have to be able to analyze sound devices like assonance, consonance, alliteration, and repetition. Just a brief refresher: Alliteration is the repetition of two or more consonant sounds at the beginning of words, like “Bob’s Burgers” or “Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers.” Yet I had to first pause to explain what a consonant was to my students—one of whom said “I’ve never heard that term in my life before.” This is almost entirely not believable, since the first thing you learn after your ABCs is the difference between vowels and consonants. You can see how difficult it is to try to get kids to read grade-level text and analyze it on a deeper level when they can’t even tell you whether “B” is a consonant or a vowel.

The author of that FEE essay I mentioned lists several potential institutional reasons why public education in America is so bad. First, I should warn readers that the guy comes from a free-market oriented background, and many of his potential solutions are based on this idea. So if you don’t like free markets, you probably will disagree with his diagnosis of the problem. He suggests that schools have too-rigid personnel rules and restrictions (principals can’t easily fire bad teachers); teachers are hired as civil servants, rather than as members of professional firms that lend their expertise to a specific school; public schools have monopolies over education, other than some private, charter, and religious schools that don’t enroll nearly as many students; and decision-making is centralized at the state or national level, rather than delegated to individual schools or districts.

Moreover, he mentions how politics get in the way of major school reform efforts. “When every call for fundamental change in American education is rebutted not by arguments about student achievement but by arguments focusing on race, class, social mixing, and other social concerns, it is difficult to imagine real progress.” Without going down the rabbit hole too much, I will just say this: If American schools can be transformed such that all students achieve at much higher rates, then all students—including racial and ethnic minorities—will benefit.

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Normally, I am not one to call for wholesale change. I like things to be tinkered with incrementally because history is replete with people taking things too far when they are fed up with the status quo. However, our educational system is so bad that I don’t think this cautious approach will do enough to fix it. I mentioned the word “rot” a few times earlier. I’m imagining our educational system as a house. Some rot can be treated and removed from a home without needing to replace the entire structure. However, the house of education is rotten to the core. Nothing will be able to dramatically improve American children’s scores on those vital tests unless the entire house is pulled down and replaced with something different. I share the conclusion with the FEE author: “Political, business, and education leaders continue to talk about ‘reforming’ the current public education system. They should, instead, be discussing how to replace it.”

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