My kid attends a regular ole school in the Los Angeles Unified School District [LAUSD]. You may know it as the district where the head of the teachers’ union said, “There is no such thing as learning loss“. And that learning loss is a fake crisis marketed by shadowy purveyors of clinical and classroom assessments.
In LAUSD (and across the whole state?), seemingly every class is an endless parade of teachers saying, “Just do the test corrections, and then I’ll raise your grade.” It’s a complete joke.
The problem is that the incentive structure is all messed up…
- Teachers want their students to have good grades so that the teacher will look good to the school ->
- Schools want their teachers’ students to have good grades so that the school will look good to the school district ->
- The school district wants its schools to have good grades so that the district will look good to the state ->
- And the state wants its school districts to have good grades so that the state will look good compared to other states.
The article below is a pretty good roundup of how we got to this point.
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If you, like me, are a middle-aged parent, you may remember that adults complained that education was crumbling when you were a kid, too, and you turned out fine anyway. You may be proud of your public school and have the magnetic car decal to prove it. You may think that, whatever the headlines say, your child is progressing well enough toward literacy and numeracy. You may be deluded.
“I don’t think parents know that their kids are behind,” says Chad Aldeman, a former Obama-administration education official who has analyzed declines in student achievement. Annual standardized-test results often arrive after the school year is over and can be hard to interpret. Teacher feedback is subjective. And a report card can offer false comfort if grading standards have gotten easier; some education-policy wonks speak of “B-flation.”
While test scores can be made to mean too much, and no one likes seeing a process as magical as a child’s intellectual development reduced to a number, the hard data does tell us something we can’t otherwise know.
“There’s just been a tremendous amount of obfuscation,” says Thomas Kane, a Harvard University professor who is the co-leader of a project called the Education Recovery Scorecard. The willful ignorance starts at the top with Donald Trump, who fired the head of the Department of Education’s data division and much of its staff earlier this year, and flows down through the state governments to the district level. Kane’s project has tried to reckon the lost ground.
Using a database of test results for some 35 million students in elementary and middle school, compiled with researchers at Stanford University, his group found that, on average, students are about a half a grade level behind their pre-pandemic counterparts in both math and reading. That top-line figure is troubling enough, since learning is cumulative and it’s hard for kids to catch up, but the averages mask what experts call a “fanning” effect — a widening disparity between the scores of high-performing and low-performing students.
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Something disastrous happened here, and academics are nearly united in the opinion that the problem is not simply a product of the pandemic. The declines started before 2020 and have continued since. COVID was an accelerant, but it seems education is suffering from something deeper and more ineradicable than a disease.
Adults with the best view inside the system — teachers and administrators — will tell you it starts at the beginning. Kindergartners are performing worse on assessments that measure their ability to perform simple cognitive tasks, like identifying a trait that lions and tigers share from a list. A former first-grade teacher says a substantial number of children who went through kindergarten on Zoom showed up in her classroom without the ability to visually process text, let alone read it.
In middle school, a math teacher in the affluent suburb of Bethesda, Maryland, says some of his regular students cannot calculate perfect squares in their heads; some English-language learners in his summer-school class were still doing math with their fingers. At a STEM-focused magnet high school in New Jersey, an English teacher says her students used to take 20 minutes to read short stories in class; now the task consumes nearly a whole period. Harvard has introduced a remedial algebra course to address learning gaps in its incoming first-year students — and if they can’t do math, what does that mean for the rest?
“I’ve got kids who don’t know what the word seldom means or appoint or sanctuary,” says a veteran Bay Area high-school history teacher. “The pandemic didn’t do shit. It just stripped bare for suburban parents the reality of what was happening.”
America’s atomized school system, with its emphasis on local control, assures that every district is unhappy in its own way.
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There are education researchers on the left who insist that the “Mississippi miracle,” as it has been called, must be an illusion or the product of test-score trickery. (One data point the skeptics cite: If you look at Mississippi’s eighth-graders, their performance falls back to earth.)
At an October debate, New Jersey’s next governor, Mikie Sherrill — a Montclair parent — attacked her Republican opponent for “citing places like Louisiana and Mississippi, I think, some of the worst schools in the entire nation.”
She said, “If that’s where he wants to drive us to, I think voters should be aware.”
In many liberal communities, talking of test scores — or even using the word achievement — has come to sound right-coded.
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