I have many, many frustrations when it comes to arguing about education, but perhaps the biggest one lies in how much time people spend referring to some sort of mythical past in which we “did things the right way,” in which “the education system worked,” before “the schools stopped teaching.” It’s a relentless tic, in this discursive space, and a deeply destructive one; by the standards of the very people who make such waves to the past, those halcyon days are mythical. They never existed. Anywhere. But I think the issue is broader and deeper than that: it’s not just that there was a time when we did school better than we’re doing it now, but that we never before really attempted to meet the educational standards reformers push now. The notion that the academic life of school and then college and a professional class life can be universalized is profoundly new, and the idea that schooling can close socioeconomic and racial gaps is too.

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As I’ve said, poor educational averages in this country are mostly a distributional issue: the median American student does alright, and our top-tier students are the envy of the world, but our numbers are dragged down by truly terribly-performing bottom percentiles that drive policy and politics to a remarkable degree. Those kids on the bottom matter, but their awful outcomes are amortized across public understanding of American schools in a way that just does not fit the reality. Now, on top of that, we have a broad developed-world slowdown in test scores, largely and erroneously associated with the pandemic. This slowdown really started around 2010 or 2012 and has been steeper in other rich countries like Germany, France, the Netherlands, and Finland, but for petty political reasons is often discussed as being an American problem. See that linked post for details. We’ve never done good in international comparisons, but this is a product of particularly awful bottom 25%/20%/10% performance, and in a context where rich countries have been seeing declines in test scores, we’re not doing particularly poorly at all. These are not the narratives you’ll find in the US media.

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The specific framing of schools as instruments of racial and socioeconomic equity is almost entirely a product of the post-Brown, post-Great Society period and thus roughly 60 to 70 years old, a blink in the history of formal education. The Civil Rights Movement, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, the subsequent decades of desegregation litigation, A Nation at Risk, and the eventual codification of this logic in No Child Left Behind in 2002 and its successors created a framework in which closing demographic achievement gaps became the central metric by which schools were judged. This goal is of course among the most noble in all of human culture. The trouble is that, as I and others have argued, education can’t close that gaps. Seeing schooling as a tool of equality was a genuine revolution in how Americans thought about the purpose of education, but it was layered on top of institutions that were never built for that purpose, staffed by professionals not trained for it, and asked to compensate for inequalities generated by housing policy, labor markets, healthcare access, and generational wealth gaps that schools have no power to touch. The ambition was noble! The theory of change was, to put it gently… optimistic.

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Why is our educational discourse forever caught in a crisis narrative, if there is no crisis? Part of the reason is that we opened schools up to everybody, not just the academically inclined, and the inevitable result has been that our outcomes look much worse. You can see this very clearly in shifting attitudes towards college; for most of the past one hundred and twenty-five or so years, higher education was assumed without controversy to be appropriate only for those who were from the white male landed elite and had ambitions to be leaders of men, and/or those with special academic talent. The modern egalitarian attitude towards college would have appeared very foreign. (And, indeed, the idea that college was primarily vocational - a means to get a good job - would have seemed strange at elite institutions like those in the Ivy League, for much of their history, as their students were already economic winners who did not need such vocational help.) But of course, as you expand access beyond the most academically inclined, the median performer naturally looks worse. Which is why admissions selectivity is inversely correlated with dropout rates and why the cost of remediation skyrocketed as more and more people started to attend college.

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The other core reason everyone always thinks our school system is in a state of crisis is because we have built policy in such a way that we have no clear mechanism for improving people’s incomes and employment numbers other than sending them to college, but not everyone is equally academically gifted, so we’ve been pushing tons of people into college who are simply not prepared for that level of work, leading to two bad outcomes: one, the college dropout problem, and two, a widespread perception that college standards are dropping. Everybody thinks our schools are in crisis all the time because they’re being forced to do something they were never meant to do, which is to make everyone college-ready, and they’re being forced to do that because we have seen jobs that provide a living wage without a college diploma evaporate. All of this education discourse (all of it, all of it, all of it) is downstream of the reality of the neoliberal turn, globalization, and deindustrialization. We decided that we didn’t want jobs that don’t require a college degree anymore, many people are not academically equipped to get a college degree, and so we manufactured this “crisis.”