Lefties/Dems Need a Reality-Based Education Agenda

New (terrible!) test scores should be a wake up call on some of Democrats/progressives most cherished (repeated ad nauseam) talking points on K-12 education.

There’s so much depressing stuff going on that we’re all just disassociating/curled into the fetal position, and I think this is basically the right move, FWIW. THAT BEING SAID, the state of American education unfortunately really demands our attention right now, and not in a good way.

New NAEP scores are in showing how well American students can read and math. And it turns out, not too good! They emphatically are not “recovering from the pandemic,” ie historic learning losses. Test scores are on a downhill slalom since 2013 (when we gave up on caring about education). This particular round of test scores is especially painful because it shows students — especially on the lower end of the achievement spectrum — actually getting worse in the post-pandemic years.

Chalkbeat summarizes the results this way:

Lower-performing fourth and eighth graders posted the worst reading scores in over 30 years. In eighth grade math, the gap between the highest- and lowest-performing students was the widest in the test’s history.

This is REALLY, REALLY, REALLY bad, for a number of reasons. These terrible results come despite almost $200 billion being pumped into pandemic recovering in schools by the Biden administration. (My district was getting more than $10k ADDITIONAL per year, per student, and now are in some kind of fiscal crisis because they came dependent on this one-time cash infusion 🙃).

This data is particularly bad news for Democrats, not just politically, but existentially in my opinion. Their core ideas about education are not holding up real well to real world data or public opinion.

In fact, this data flies in the face of key Democratic/Progressive talking points on education, which appear to be bordering on flat-earth-level wrong. For example:

Claim #1: More money will fix everything!!!

Normie Democrats have been insisting that more money would fix everything in education since forever. If ONLY the MEAN Republicans would fully fund public education, everything would be amazing, but they DON’T because they’re BAD! But this new evidence completely contradicts that.

Tim Daly at The Education Daily has a great post about this (which is rage fueling me this morning). Daly called the result further evidence of an “Education Depression.” He holds up Oregon — which will fill in nicely as a stand in for blue states/progressive education dogma of late here. The state has become a black hole for money while student performance has fallen off a cliff, SMDH.

Meanwhile, lower-spending red states, Mississippi, being a notable example, have had some surprising wins (see “the Mississippi Miracle,” re: reading scores.) Contra Oregon — where all the well-off liberals were patting themselves on the back about their commitment to EQUITY(!!!!) while shuttering schools for an eternity — Louisiana and Mississippi actually slightly improved 4th grade reading scores during the pandemic.

Unfortunately, I don’t expect Democrats to shift their slogan/rallying cry — more money! — since Democrats seem to have taken a permanent divorce from reality (PLUS they seem to be out of substantive ideas and allergic to accountability in this arena) and driven entirely by labor considerations.

They have basically abandoned the moral high ground here to everyone but in their own minds. HOWEVER, the public is taking notice. The American public now trusts Republicans more on education, a complete reversal of the Democrats decades long advantage on this issue.

These kinds of enormous shifts are rare. Just in the last half decades there has been like a 20 point electoral shift here. And I think it’s been easy for some people who don’t have kids and have missed out on this horror show to kind of tune out. BUT the amount of real world harm, to children, to working parents, the stress, the future impacts, the ripple effects of all this is likely immeasurable.

Now again, those of us who were trying to raise this issue at the time and since then have had to deal with a lot of gaslighting. And that brings us to a second fashionable lefty/Dem education talking point, which again we can now see very clearly is flagrantly, definitely WRONG (unless maybe you are super rich).

CLAIM #2: What happens in schools DOES NOT matter

When Democrats weren’t saying MORE MONEY WILL FIX EVERYTHING in education over the last decade or so, they also had this irritating nihilistic streak. They be like: “chill out you UNCOOL MOMS, YOUR KID WILL BE FINE BECAUSE YOU’RE SO PRIVILEGED, ETC.” And also, “urban schools can’t succeed because POVERTY/SEGREGATION/CAPITALISM/WHATEVER EXISTS and that’s the real problem, maaaan!”

In this worldview, student outcomes were determined almost completely by socioeconomic factors. Poor kids in Cleveland COULDN’T learn despite the heroic efforts of their ALWAYS AWESOME NOTHING TO SEE HERE! teachers and administrators because they had stress in the household, not enough food etc. In this argument, parents’ educational attainment determines student achievement almost totally, and school is only a minor factor in student success anyway. IN FACT, the most annoying of these people would say — this would always be some obnoxious PhD holder — that school was actively BAD and that children would be better off playing in the woods and learning classical music by themselves (LOL, have you ever met a child?!).

We also saw this kind of thinking trotted out pretty frequently to defend extended pandemic era school closures. NOW TO BE FAIR, (this is a very yell-y post!, sorry!) we DO see in this data that top performing students (who are likely richer overall) performing better compared to the lower quartile. Maybe their rich parents enrolled them in private school so they did that instead of playing Fortnight all day for a year like their lower-income counterparts who didn’t have that option. STILL, we see in these latest test scores, their results are exactly not stellar either.

To me, what this data demonstrates — very clearly — is what we do in education matters, and it matters a lot. It’s clear in retrospect that closing schools for extended periods, switching from in-person to screen-based instruction, had an extremely negative effect on student performance. Something happened in 2013, we gave up on education reform, at least according to Jonathan Chait, (your milage may vary there but to me his point seems sorta spot on).

Of the two DUMB, WRONG theories of change in education, this nihilism around the effects of education bothers me more than anything. How can we even call ourselves progressive and at the same time argue that are largest social safety net program — public education — has a meaningless impact on people? Nothing makes sense anymore! Up is down! Sorry again to adopt a conservative term, but it’s like the perfect example, imo of a “luxury belief.” PhD-holders who say children don’t need basic reading instruction delivered in a third grade classroom.

Tim Daly wrote that there is a need for more accountability in education, which has been a dirty word, especially for teachers. And to be clear, I don’t blame individual teachers here. But we can’t go on this way. The lack of leadership, the lack of ability to acknowledge realities that are staring us in the face is not confidence inspiring. And I expect us to continue to hemorrhage support on this issue until we adopt a more reality-based understanding of this problem.