The Education Mess in America

50 years ago public education in America was in crisis. Functional literacy was on the decline, standardized test scores were falling, drop-out rates rising. Public support for public education was at a low point. Private alternatives were proliferating, and the homeschool movement was organizing.

Then, in the 1990s, things started to turn around. As is often the case, one of the first shots fired came from Massachusetts. In 1993, the state implemented a rigorous standardized testing program, called MCAS, that allowed parents and educators to compare students, schools, and districts. 

Bulletin: A town’s MCAS scores became a factor in determining its real estate values! Parents were suddenly motivated…and kids weren’t far behind.

Not unexpectedly, test scores skyrocketed! Public education was back. Not unexpectedly, special interest groups howled and 30 years later, the battle rages on. In November (2024), MA voters will be asked to eliminate MCAS as a requirement for high school graduation; the outcome is anyone’s guess.

Then in 2020, along came COVID! Education everywhere suffered and MA MCAS scores were not exempt. But as the pandemic subsided, the cognoscente trusted that scores would rebound, that annual progress would revert to mean; many expected that pandemic losses would be erased over time.

Very unexpectedly, that has not happened. MCAS scores have not made up for lost ground, they did not revert to mean, they did not even stabilize. They have continued to fall.

This article is not just about education! It’s about how society responds to a collective crisis, how it analyzes problems and how it dreams up solutions. 

Educational achievement does not occur in a classroom or in a school or in a state. Educational achievement happens in each student, individually. Of course, it’s possible to measure an artificial cross section of those students’ skill levels, e.g. by subjecting them to population-wide standardized testing; but if you don’t like the results, these test scores tell you precisely nothing about how to make impactful changes.  

It's no wonder then that the MA educational establishment is proposing a revolutionary approach to the problem: “More of the same!” Just do more of what we’ve been doing; things will get better. Trust us!

Is there a single person alive who thinks this makes sense? Didn’t someone tell me once that doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results was the definition of insanity? And yet it’s the establishment’s consensus recommendation: longer school days, longer school years, shorter vacations, fewer electives, etc. More of the same is our knee-jerk reaction to every crisis.

Education does not happen collectively; it happens individually. One student might benefit from a longer school day and her performance might improve; another student might become bored, depressed, apathetic and see his performance plummet. Most students would be unaffected – more miserable, but otherwise unaffected.

Whatever the impact of this ‘carpet bombing’ strategy on standardized test scores, we would learn nothing about what’s happening at the level of the individual student. If our goal is to educate young people up to a reasonable percentage of their potential, we need to look at many variables more important than test scores:

How has the educational process impacted the student’s self-confidence and self-worth? Their problem solving skills? Their native curiosity? Their creativity? Have they learned to work on their own and to work in teams? Have they learned to cope with stress? To overcome obstacles? Most importantly, have they ‘learned to learn’ and have they come to love learning for its own sake?

Do I sound New Age? Maybe! I do know this: in the coming years, the ability to acquire new skills, absorb new information, and solve new problems will be the mark of an educated person, not their SAT scores - to like to learn and to be good at it, not an ivy-league diploma.

Now, if you are among those folks willing to sacrifice academic achievement in the service of various social objectives, you have by now no doubt concluded that I am on your side. You could not be more wrong! I believe that the social aspects of learning will facilitate the academic and that academic achievement, the mastery of subjects and skills, will help us realize our social goals. They are not at cross purposes; they go hand-in-hand. 

None of this has much to do with population-wide test scores, but if a student focused strategy is working, its success will ultimately show up in those scores. But that is a knock-on benefit; it can’t be the primary objective!

Kids are like quanta. Bombarding them with information (aka energy) does nothing; but just the right amount of energy delivered at just the right wavelength can bring about a quantum leap!

So where does this leave us in our current educational crisis? Rather than a more of the same one-size-fits-all approach, we need to recognize that education takes place one student at a time. A society is not educated; its members are!

Educators need to develop a PEP – “Personal Education Plan” for each student. That plan must attend to all aspects of education for all students, but in different proportions for different students, depending on their needs at particular points in their educational careers. 

Now I understand that we are ‘resource constrained’; a 1 to 1 teacher-student ratio is not in the cards. But longer school hours won’t come without a cost either…and the return on such an investment will be nil (or net negative). Better to take whatever we’re prepared to spend on more-of-the-same and invest it instead in programs and resources that would bring us closer to the realization of a PEP strategy for all students.

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