Don't Be An Education Eeyore
Don't Be An Education Eeyore
Things Are (Mostly) Getting Better in Education
Andy Rotherham had a piece last week pushing back against “the constant, and weirdly fashionable, bellyaching” about efforts to improve education.
Andy focuses on the very real progress we’ve made over the long term in improving student outcomes, reducing achievement gaps, and expanding public school choice options to families. His piece takes the long view, but I’ve been thinking about this recently in the context of our immediate situation.
It’s easy to focus on what’s going wrong, what might go wrong in the near future, and what can be improved—I’m guilty of these things myself!—but we’re here in April of 2024, and it’s also worth pausing to reflect on some of the upward trends in K-12 education. Part of this is just a bounceback from the extremely low lows of COVID-19, but it’s still worth acknowledging some good things:
School spending is at all-time highs, and the latest data don’t even fully account for the largest one-time infusion of federal dollars.
As a result of increased spending, school staffing levels are also at all-time highs.
Parents have a lot more choice over their child’s schooling, including charters, private options including micro-schools, and cross-district transfers.
Student attendance is improving. Don’t go popping the champagne here, but attendance rates were better in 2023 than they were in 2022 and I suspect they’re somewhat better again this year.
After hitting all-time highs in the fall of 2022, teacher turnover fell in 2023 closer to pre-pandemic levels.
Average teacher salaries did not keep up with inflation for much of 2021 and 2002, but they more than surpassed it in 2023.
Teacher health care costs are no longer eating up a rising share of teacher compensation. The slowdown on the healthcare side is allowing districts to invest that money elsewhere.
You may not know it from the headlines, but the teacher pipeline is showing signs of expanding and diversifying.
Student achievement is up. This is the big one, and it may feel hard to believe after the last four years. But the Education Recovery Scorecard found that students in 2022-23, “learned 117 percent in math and 108 percent in reading of what they would typically have learned in a pre-pandemic school year.” These gains were not nearly large enough to erase all the pandemic-era learning losses, but they were large in historical terms.1
If you look at this list and say it’s not enough, well, I agree. But that’s all the more reason to keep working on improvements.
This project was led by a team of distinguished researchers including Sean Reardon from Stanford and Harvard’s Tom Kane. They compiled state test scores for 30 states and then normalized and standardized them against the national NAEP exam. It’s not a full national sample, and it required more statistical adjustments than the raw NAEP results, but this is a high-quality team using a methodology that’s been validated for years now.
Re: Point 9. "Student achievement is up...These gains were not nearly large enough to erase all the pandemic-era learning losses, but they were large in historical terms." Back in 2020, I drew on ACT's research ("Catching Up to College and Career Readiness") and other sources to describe, using Jefferson County (CO) Public Schools as a quantitative example, concluded that, "before the pandemic arrived, the overwhelming weight of evidence supported the conclusion that, absent extraordinary efforts, it is very difficult for most students to catch up academically once they have fallen behind. For any district, board, or union leader to claim otherwise is grossly misleading.
Now Covid-9 learning losses have made this frightening and depressing situation much worse.
As a result, there are growing doubts that our students will graduate with the depth and breadth of knowledge and skills the nation needs to power economic growth and reduce inequality in the rapidly evolving twenty-first-century digital economy." (https://fordhaminstitute.org/national/commentary/will-students-recover-their-covid-19-learning-losses).
That remains as true today as when I wrote those words 3.5 years ago. The ugly truth that nobody in K12 wants to admit, is that most of the kids who were behind at the start of COVID, and/or who suffered substantial learning losses during the pandemic, will ever catch up to proficiency by the time they graduate. Few districts (much less teachers unions) are willing and able to make the substantial changes that would require. And our economy, national security, society, and politics will pay a frightful future price for that.