Why Is American Student Achievement Down? “It’s Not Trump or the Pandemic”

MICHEL MARTIN: Thanks Bianna. Andrew Rice, thank you so much for talking with us.

ANDREW RICE: Thank you.

MARTIN: You opened your piece with some of the latest findings for the National Assessment of Educational Progress. This is considered kind of the gold standard, figuring out, you know, how kids are doing academically. And these results showed – this is over the past year – and it showed that 40% of fourth graders and a third of eighth graders scored below basic in reading. And on the most recent 12th grade math assessment, about three quarters of high school seniors could not correctly add the cost of six lunch items and calculate a 20% tip. And I was just wondering, since you write about a lot of things, what made you take a look at this?

RICE: I mean, it’s – I think really it began with a, you know, personal question that I had, which is, you know, I have a son who’s in eighth grade. He’s 13 years old. He spent the pandemic about 18 months almost during the pandemic you know, in and out of school. His education was quite disrupted during that time period. And so afterwards, I always kind of wondered what, what would the long-term educational consequences of this be? There weren’t a lot of precedents for it in the academic literature. And so you know, I just kept reading these articles that described these really sobering, you know, maybe even catastrophic sounding declines in education now – or in educational achievement. I discovered that in fact the story was a lot more complicated than I imagined when I started out. That really, people were studying these declines, and they are really drastic. And they were, they did really accelerate during the pandemic, but they began before the pandemic. And they’ve continued in many way– in, in many categories after the pandemic, which, you know, makes it obvious that there’s something else deeper going on here.

MARTIN: One of the most alarming findings in your piece is the reversal of decades of progress. In 2015, this is according to your piece, in 2015, fourth graders performed a full grade level above their counterparts in 2000. Yet almost a decade later, those students were re registering all time lows in reading in high school. So, what happened here?

RICE: There are a couple different theories about what happened and why, but the best, the best clue that we have is timing. The, you know, the downturn started in about the middle of the last decade. And then that leads us – us being the people who are, I think, you know, educational scholars who, who I talk to, I guess – you know, leads them to a couple different potential theories. One of them, a real obvious and maybe intuitive one to, to most people or most parents of a teenager like me, is screens. A lot of people just think that, well, you know, the, you know, the iPad was invented or, or introduced the public in 2010, and those kids, you know, hit the education system around 2015, and that’s when test scores started to go down. So maybe that’s just a simple answer. 

But as I noted in the story, there’s a lot to suggest that there’s something deeper going on. Something else about the system itself, because you know, the declines are not evenly distributed. They’re distributed unevenly to kids who were scoring the lowest. So the kids who were, the kids who were scoring the lowest for a long time were making up ground and gaining ground. (09:58): And essentially you know, the way the academics that I talked to described it as, like, think of it as a, as a fan for a long time, the fan was kind of getting, getting closer together. What’s happened now is the fan is spreading back out. And all of these gaps, especially the achievement gaps between white students and black students, especially, have started to widen. The achievement gap, the math achievement gap between – gender gap between between girls and boys has started to widen again. All of these sort of old you know, longstanding inequities have, have reasserted themselves. So because it’s unevenly distributed, we have to start asking questions about what the schools are doing and what they’re doing differently. And that’s what my story really tried to go deep, deep into.

MARTIN: Some of these anecdotes that you, that you describe in your piece are really a bummer. I mean, just some, just tell me a couple of stories that some of the educators told you about what they’re seeing in the classroom.

RICE: One of the things I thought was, was sort of the, the scariest as a parent is the talking with folks about the way that grading standards have slackened. A lot of teachers told me that there’s just been a softening of expectations and they just don’t teach– they don’t expect children at all sorts of different levels to be able to perform in the same way that they used to. And the reason that’s scary to me as a, as a parent of a, of a teenager is that, you know, grades are one of the two or three pieces of metrics that you can use as an outsider to try to gauge how your, how your child is doing test scores are another.

But, one of the things I heard was, you know, this phenomenon of, what they call B-flation, which is you know, basically you know, kids are just getting Bs for doing less work than they used to. Similarly, just hear stories about teachers who say that they can’t ask children to read books on grade level, that they should be able to read at their grade level anymore. Hearing stories about a teacher in a school for gifted students, actually – and in a magnet school in New Jersey –she says that, you know, she used to ask them to take 15 minutes to read a short story. Now it takes 40 minutes, maybe even close to a whole period. We’re hearing these reports from people inside the building. These are not, you know, interest groups that are trying to advocate a political agenda. These are actually people who are practitioners who are, who are raising the alarm and saying, something’s wrong here.

MARTIN: The other thing that you point out in the piece that I think a lot of people will be interested in is that the steepest academic declines are not happening in traditionally underfunded, or…we’ll say conservative regions that have not traditionally invested in education equally, especially for groups that have been historically marginalized, right? 

RICE: I mean, and, and it’s true, we’re talking really about southern states here. Mississippi is one, Louisiana is another. These are states that are not – to put it, to put it mildly, do, do not have a good civil rights record. But the NAEP scores, the National assessment scores, show that today an economically disadvantaged fourth grader in Mississippi scores better than the economically disadvantaged fourth grader in Massachusetts or New Jersey, traditionally high performing states.

MARTIN: Exactly. Places that, places that publicly pride themselves on valuing education, spend a lot of money on education, and historically, at least publicly, value equity. You focus on a place that you know well, where you live, which is Montclair, New Jersey, which spends a little more than $27,000 per pupil, per year. Right? Achievement has dropped by a grade level in reading and by half a grade in math since 2013. What made you take a look at that? Was that kind of the logical extension of, huh, like, I wonder what’s happening in my own backyard?

RICE: One of the things that really inspired me to do it, is that there was a, you know, we, as you alluded to a second ago, our district spends, you know, in the 95th percentile in the, in the country per pupil on education. And yet we have not made much of any progress closing the achievement gap. The achievement gap in our town, which is actually pretty racially diverse, has gotten wider since the pandemic, especially in math. 

And meanwhile, we just found out, you know, over the summer that we have a gigantic budget deficit that we didn’t know about. So, in fact, even as we’re, even as we’re not getting results, we’ve also been spending much more money than we budgeted for education. And consequently, the whole community is having this very difficult conversation about whether we’re getting the results that we’re paying for from, from the system, and whether the sys– whether we’ve allowed the system to atrophy. And whether we’ve perhaps prioritized things in our spending that don’t necessarily go towards learning and go towards closing achievement gaps, and go towards preparing students to really thrive in college and in the rest of their lives.

MARTIN: You quote a superintendent who says, “our budget reflects our priorities. I don’t know how much of a priority teaching and learning has honestly been.” So what has the money been going to?

RICE: Districts are spending more money on ancillary things that they didn’t in years past, than they ever have been before. If you talk with teachers they’ll often, they’ll often tell you that the schools and teachers themselves are being asked to do more than they have ever done before. There’s an article that’s just out in the New York Times about how classifications for special education and anxiety diagnoses and depression diagnoses have really just gone through the roof in a lot of schools. And so that means schools are hiring counselors. That means that a lot of, a lot more kids have IEPs and other forms of special education classifications, which mean having to hire more teachers, more personnel to address those deficits.

Again, it’s not a monocausal situation, but it all starts to add up. And what you end up getting is a, is a situation in which we have ever inflating costs for public education. And crucially, I think important to note, under Republican governor Chris Christie in the middle of the last decade, the state also put in a cap on how much municipalities can raise their property taxes, which finance schools of 2%. So, you know, you can do the math. Inflation is going up faster than 2% in everything, buses, personnel, every aspect of, of education. And the school districts, at least here in New Jersey, and this is not uncommon throughout the country, have a hard cap of how much they can raise money, and it means that they end up having to always be doing more with less.

MARTIN: Okay. But how does this explain the fact that some of these southern states that traditionally have not invested as heavily in public education, their kids seem to be doing better?

RICE: There are a couple different theories. One of the, so one has to do with curriculum and continuing teaching of phonics and so on. Others have to do with teacher training. 

But a really big one that I address at length in the story is this idea that the more conservative states never have, never really backed away from a system of, of, you know, what was called accountability for schools, largely based on test scores, although not exclusively based on test scores. But, you know, there’s a long period of time when Republicans and Democrats alike had a sense that they would create high, set high standards for schools and hold them to those high standards, rewarding them when they, when they met them, or exceeded them.

And there were incentives that were there – and disincentives that were that set up around these, around these accountability benchmarks. And so and so the southern states, by and large, have kind of stuck with that. A lot of the liberal northeastern states, especially since the pandemic, have moved away from using test scores in that way. Lots of complicated reasons for that. But, you know, a big one is, you know, a federal law signed by Barack Obama in 2015 that really delegated a lot of authority to the states. 2015, if you remember from what we just talked about, you know, we talk about the mystery of this inflection point where things started to go down.

What happens to, you know, the, the, the people who believe in, you know, what I call the, the declining standards hypothesis point to the signing of this law in 2015, as the kind of turning point in which educational achievements started to go in the wrong direction. And so, if you wanna, if you wanna really, if you wanna think about, you know, what might be going wrong or what we might be able to fix, that might be a good place to start, I think a lot of the people in this educational reform movement would say.

MARTIN: People forget just how heated these arguments were over, you know, in George W. Bush’s administration, his kind of No Child Left Behind initiative. And a lot of people kind of in the educational policy world, teachers unions were sort of furious about it. They thought, this is, you know, teaching to the test, you’re gonna drive all the joy and passion out of teaching and the creativity. It’s all about, it’s gonna be all about the test. But sort of now looking at it, I, do you think that there’s been any kind of a change of heart?

RICE: You know, I mean, I think everything that you said about sucking joy out of the classroom and teaching to the test and incentivizing cheating and so on, these are all real things and, and real downsides to the No Child Left Behind regimen. So, I’m not in any way sort of romanticizing, you know, what there was before, but as always, with any kind of policy change there are unintended consequences. You know what one indivi– one education policy specialist told me, you know, in the course of doing this, that, you know, in 2015 when Obama signed the law reforming No Child Left Behind, he said, you know, there’s a, there’s an widespread anticipation that we’re moving to something better. And it turned out we’re moving to something much worse.

MARTIN: One of the things you say in your piece, which is also surprising to me, is you reference work by an Ohio State University Professor Vladimir Kogan, showing that school boards are often elected by quote, “mostly childless, overwhelmingly white upper-income voters,” unquote, creating what he calls a “democratic deficit.” So how, how is that possible? 

RICE: I think a lot of people vote for school boards based on, you know, based on their taxes, based on you know, there’s, in any community, I think you know, the number of parents in any given community is not necessarily going to be a majority, just by the nature of demographics. You know, you have a lot of people whose children have not entered the system yet. You have a lot of people who don’t have children. And oftentimes parents have no idea that there’s anything wrong. So, you know, now for instance, in my community in Montclair, there are people starting, you know public advocacy groups. There are people – there are WhatsApp groups that are, you know, getting together to talk about all these issues, print up yard signs, you know, try to get people to the polls for this referendum where we’re voting on potential tax increase in a week from now. But, you know, I would say, you know, just candidly, I think the percentage of those people, those same people who were paying attention six months ago, nine months ago, a year ago, to what was going on in the schools was quite small. And so, and so I think that, you know, these are, these are things you have to spend, make a lot of effort to pay attention to. You know, I know from having tried to make some effort to pay attention to them that the systems are not easy. You know, it’s not easy to go to a four hour school board meeting on a weeknight if you’re a working parent. And so anyway, the point is that we get the system that we get in part because the system is set up to make us, to make us disinvested in it.

MARTIN: Andrew Rice, thanks so much for talking with us.

RICE: Thanks a lot.