Unearthing the long-term seeds of decline: how the nation can get a better report card next time

A colleague once told me that the great hidden advantage of teaching as a career is this: teachers invariably have the most entertaining stories at dinner parties. While this is certainly true, I think it’s important to keep classroom stories to dinner parties, or perhaps the department break room. This is why I’ve tended to steer clear of K-12 education on this blog, despite the fact that education is the urban prosperity topic about which I have the closest insights. 

But at the same time, if you want to talk about long-term prosperity, there is no topic more important than education. The fact that I now devote most of my career energy to a high school is no random coincidence, and some months I find I can’t just stay silent about national and state education news. This past September has been one of those months. The bulk of this post will focus on education topics, though I plan to end with some insights I’ve unearthed related to housing.

“A Nation’s Report Card”

On September 1, the National Center for Education Statistics put out a press release that was nothing if not sobering. On a robust test known as the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) average mathematics scores of US nine-year-olds declined by seven points between 2020 and 2022. In reading, average scores declined by five points. Meanwhile, in mathematics students at the 10th and 25th percentiles scored 12 points and 11 points worse respectively than in 2020, a truly appalling result. Overall, according to NCES Associate Commissioner Daniel McGrath, “Students in 2022 are performing at a level last seen two decades ago.” 

You can check out a cleverly designed NCES data reporting webpage yourself here, and geek out on tabs that allow you to easily see NAEP information organized by gender, race, city versus suburban, and other metrics. I recommend a look, even though the results paint a two year achievement picture that is very bleak.

A (very general) distance learning anecdote

Perhaps the truly alarming bleakness in the recent data picture derives from a straightforward source. During the first year of the COVID pandemic, distance learning sucked. This topic has been covered ad nauseam in the media, and the new NAEP data certainly feeds that narrative. But I have a suspicion that it’s not so simple. I wonder whether the failures of distance learning had their roots in trends that have been building up for a decade or more.

I will return to this idea, but first I have a brief and rather general anecdote to share, because I feel so certain in my heart that my (at the time) middle school students were unusually successful during their distance learning year. I am convinced that my students’ success stemmed from my nearest colleagues and me bucking diffuse social pressure to go ridiculously easy on them. To the best of our ability we collectively insisted on having students stay on camera, did our best to hold them accountable to reduced but still specific academic targets, and had an administrator who tacitly encouraged us in doing the right thing. 

Contrast this to the environment I saw walking downstairs during breaks, watching my son stare into black screens in his own Zoom classrooms. This latter experience was I think much more the norm nationally. Why were so few teachers able to deliver on the relatively high quality distance learning experience my immediate colleagues and I were able to pull off? I am not fully sure, but what I am certain of is that it’s not some kind of personal or collective professional failure within teaching. Teachers are like any other professionals. We respond to incentives and to the culture around us. And there are cross cutting headwinds within that culture that have been building throughout the decade or so of my career in the classroom. As I said, more on this later. But first I want to frame the core thing I have to say with some good news.

Learning from improvement during the Clinton and Bush era

As is implied by the whole focus of this blog, I am committed to understanding what creates success and progress. So it seems to me essential to point out that the recent dip in learning comes on the heels of a very specific period of improvement. If you didn’t do it already, click on the NAEP data here (then come back to Prospericity). The improvement trend is immediately easy to see. Remarkable achievement gains took place between the early 1990s and approximately the time of the great recession in 2007, in other words during the fifteen or so years immediately before I entered teaching. After this period, gains leveled off.

What happened during the period of improvement? This is of course a tricky question, but as a starting point for simply documenting the improvement I would point readers to two articles by Michael J. Petrilli, President of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, in Education Next. See here for a piece by Petrilli on how “left behind kids” improved in the 1990s and early 2000s, and here for a piece on how middle class kids did not make improvements that were as great during the same period. 

Did reductions in child poverty drive 1990s and 2000s education gains?

A third piece by Petrilli asks the important question of whether improvements in education in the 1990s and 2000s may have related not to changes within the education space per se, but to an exogenous reduction in child poverty. I was pleased to see this piece, as it related to another by David Leonhardt that appeared on the same subject in the New York Times just this September. See here for a truly fascinating (and rather heartening) take on how the child poverty rate went down from 28 percent in the early 1990s to 11 percent in 2019. It’s amazing that this good news story has gone mostly unnoticed, including by me during a long moment in the late 90s and early 2000s when I was working full time on urban economic policy issues. It’s a story that deserves more attention, and I hope to return to it in another post.

Getting back to the topic at hand, it seems logical that reductions in child poverty may have generated education gains for the lowest performing students. But there may also be other key factors. The 1990s and early 2000s were a period of intense education reform. The No Child Left Behind Act passed in 2001, and more broadly this period saw a new focus on standards, vastly increased standardized testing, a flourishing of charter schools, and the introduction of a regime of heavy-handed teacher accountability. Finally, according to this interesting article, the period saw the initiation of movement toward what was termed “school restructuring,” in which teachers had more input in school management. This last is also something to which I hope to come back in a future post.

Seeds of decline planted gradually?

With this historical context in place, I finally get to come to my main argument. I’m doing some educated speculation here, and each of the items bulleted below could be its own topic for a thesis or academic study.  But the answer to the question I just posed in the subheading about whether the seeds for recent decline were planted gradually seems to me very clearly “yes.” Here are four things to consider.

• Teacher disrespect from the right. As noted above, No Child Left Behind, and the school reform movement, and the whole constellation of related policy initiatives associated with the fifteen or so years of school improvement in the 1990s and 2000s probably had positive effects on education outcomes not simply attributable to exogenous reductions in child poverty. But from within, it felt for most teachers like there was something unduly heavy handed and punitive about the new education policy regime. Recognition of teachers’ outsized effects on education outcomes (see this RAND study) oddly did not bring a new respect for the teaching profession. Instead, the recognition brought a very old kind of doubling down on attempts at discipline and control, a drive to root out “bad” teachers rather than to uphold and properly remunerate excellent or even average ones. This kind of management strategy can bring short-term gains, but is corrosive and unsustainable in the long haul. The burnout expressed in the faces of the women (and it’s telling that it’s all women except for one guy) on the photo accompanying this September 9 Washington Post opinion article by Ayinde Rudolph tells, as they say, a thousand words.

• School segregation, and more teacher disrespect from the left. Since entering the belly of the proverbial education beast I’ve noticed with renewed force what I knew already. Segregation exists at every level of the school system-within schools, between schools, within districts, between districts, within regions, between regions, within states, between states. And while there has been a huge and accelerating push for anti-racism and equity over the past decade, much of this has focused on the perceived failings and biases of teachers. It’s just a different attempt at discipline and control of the teaching profession, except this time from the political left. Meanwhile, amidst all the hot discussion about anti-racism, the structural sources of inequality are left largely unaddressed and untouched. See this impressive New Yorker podcast from early this month on structural segregation within a single Brooklyn school building for a flavor of what I am trying to say. 

• A massive uncontrolled experiment with reduced suspensions. There are almost certainly many positive aspects to the truly drastic reduction in suspensions and expulsions within California and nationally over the past decade. See this article to get a sense for the huge scale of the sea change (suspensions for willful defiance in California dropped from 335,079 in 2012 to 55,808 in 2018). But practically all coverage of this trend is from the very narrowest kind of equity lens. A broader equity lens would be around whether changes in discipline policy have actually induced better academic outcomes for the Black and Latino males who are disproportionately suspended. But the problem is, if you look at the NAEP data, these better outcomes just haven’t emerged. In other words we have seen a truly massive shift in school policy, but the groups of students who were previously affected by high suspension rates are not doing appreciably better in school. What’s going on with this? Also, why has there been so little willingness to even raise the issue of how these changes might have impacted teachers’ work lives? Researchers and policymakers need to be brave enough to address these questions, and not treat discipline policy in a box separate from the rest of education policy.

• Challenges in the rollout of common core math. Another huge change I have witnessed over the past decade or so of my career has circled around the rollout of “common core” standards. In mathematics, the K-12 field I know best, the changes have been profound. As a teacher I have willingly surfed the waves of curriculum movements and tried to uphold the best elements of the shifts (and there are many good elements). But if the new NAEP data isn’t giving math education researchers (and policymakers) pause, it certainly ought to. Gains in math during the 1990s and 2000s, prior to the advent of common core, were even higher than in reading. What was right about the curriculum at the time? And, while I hope this is not the case, is there something off about the new math curriculum that might be connected to more recent flat or negative outcomes? I am genuinely not sure. But if the answer is yes, we need to be brave and address the problems. There is an almost theological cast to debates about math education (on both sides) that worries me. This is similar to the moralistic cast of debates (or non-debates) about school suspensions. We cannot allow mathematics to go any further down the rabbit hole of the culture wars than we already have.

And now for something completely different: The closet of questionable takes

This month I am introducing a new feature to these posts, which I am calling the “closet of questionable takes.” These are news takes related in some way to urban prosperity that I find either funny or annoying or just off. Here is one for this September just passed:

A questionable take for Septmember: In this generally very admirable New Yorker podcast related to President Biden’s student loan debt relief plan, at just after 9:00, New Yorker Staff writer Andrew Marantz states the following. 

 “The counter argument that makes the most sense to me is that this isn’t getting to the root of the problem. That, you wash away this debt, and the higher education system in this country is still an unsustainable bubble. I think that’s largely true, but I also think that doesn’t necessarily excuse not solving the low hanging fruit. Right, so, the medical system in this country is also a total mess, but I still think you should give people health care. Politics is about solving one problem at a time.” 

New Yorker Staff Writer Andrew Marantz

To which I say, BS. The higher education system is in an unsustainable bubble, as Marantz so diplomatically puts it, precisely because colleges and universities feed on easy-to-get federally subsidized student loans that all too often entrap borrowers. With a few rare exceptions like Purdue University in Indiana, schools have little incentive to streamline programs and control costs.

Whatever the merits of student loan debt cancellation, and I tend to think there are real merits, politicians should not be allowed to give the higher education trust a pass, much less the health care industrial complex. Building strong institutions is just as important as providing people with financial support, something FDR understood but modern progressives forget. The fact that a preponderance of doctors and college professors vote Democrat does not take the critical but overpriced and overprotected institutions they work within off the hook.

Two Quick But Important Housing News Items

I gleaned two interesting items from this month’s news that relate to housing. The first concerns a new California bill, AB 2097, that allows developers to provide fewer parking spaces next to new buildings. On this segment of KCRW’s Greater LA podcast, host Steve Chiotakis speaks with Assemblywoman Laura Friedman, the bill’s author. Friedman feels, reasonably enough it seems to me, that her measure will be a boon for affordable housing developers and people who want to create in-law units, fourplexes, and the like on their properties. Hurrah for Friedman’s advocacy of AB 2097!

Another item that got me thinking was this Sightline Institute piece related to local electoral systems and housing production. The article cites an academic study by Notre Dame housing economist Evan Mast, who looked at cities that switched from “at large” to geographically defined single member council districts. Within cities that made such a switch, housing production declined by a remarkable 20 percent.

If you think about it, this finding makes complete sense. Geographically defined single member seats can amplify the power of motivated development opponents to bully local council members. The Sightline article also cites this piece by political scientists Michael Hankinson and Asya Magazinnik, which comes to similar conclusions. These authors, in a somewhat amusingly academic political science kind of way, make a similar argument. From their summary comes the following jewel: “together, our findings present a fundamental trade-off: at large representation may facilitate the production of goods with diffuse benefits and concentrated costs, but it does so by forcing less politically powerful constituencies to bear the brunt of those costs.”  In other words, poor communities too often end up with public goods like, say, water treatment plants, in their backyards. Which is of course a very real concern. But I would also tend to point out that housing does not have to present communities with “concentrated costs.” There are many examples of excellent rental, high-density, and affordable housing designs. And maybe, to return to the “trade off” of such concern to the professors, having a water treatment plan in your backyard is better than not having a backyard, or a home, at all.