(The Lion) — Public schools have fallen so far even left-leaning commentators in some of the so-called “best” school districts admit the problem goes beyond partisan bickering.
“Something disastrous happened here, and academics are nearly united in the opinion that the problem is not simply a product of the (COVID-19) pandemic,” concludes Andrew Rice, features writer at New York magazine.
“The declines started before 2020 and have continued since. COVID was an accelerant, but it seems education is suffering from something deeper and more ineradicable than a disease.”
Rice shares multiple statistics of declining academic performance across elementary and middle school students, including a Stanford University study finding “on average, students are about a half a grade level behind their pre-pandemic counterparts in both math and reading.”
“That top-line figure is troubling enough, since learning is cumulative and it’s hard for kids to catch up, but the averages mask what experts call a ‘fanning’ effect – a widening disparity between the scores of high-performing and low-performing students,” he writes.
How COVID-19 showed ‘reality’ of public school’s failure
Parents had long been told the key to improving public education involved higher funding rates, according to Rice.
“Schools didn’t need more incentives to teach children, the progressives argued. They needed more money.”
Then the pandemic occurred in 2020, triggering stimulus bills “that directed nearly $190 billion in aid to public schools, the largest education-spending intervention in history,” Rice recalls.
“I expected the district to use our cut of the money to address the emergency: mobilizing an army of tutors, working after school and during the summer, to compensate for the months lost to the lockdown. But the MASH unit never arrived.”
Instead, the Montclair district in New Jersey – where Rice’s son now attends middle school – lavished most of the funds upon non-instructional expenses.
“Of the nearly $8 million it received, Montclair used $2 million to buy Chromebooks for all its students and allocated similar amounts for building upgrades and professional services, including architects’ fees related to long-postponed HVAC renovations and ‘culturally responsive training’ for teachers and administrators,” Rice laments.
“It appears to have spent relatively little of the aid on instruction.”
Montclair is not unique in this regard, causing Rice to call the federal aid’s educational impact “disappointing relative to its size.”
“Many district superintendents used aid to plug budget holes or went on hiring sprees, creating permanent roles with temporary funds. The number of public-school employees nationwide currently sits at an all-time high, even as enrollment has fallen along with birth rates. Most of the growth has been in ancillary roles: special-education paraprofessionals, instructional coordinators, guidance counselors, administrators. About the only staff category that is decreasing: librarians.”
Public-school proponents defend such staffing increases, arguing it’s “a reflection not of bloat but rather the ever-expanding list of things schools are expected to deliver in addition to education,” Rice writes.
He quotes Sarah Mulhern Gross, a longtime high-school English instructor: “There is only so much teachers can do. We’re not parents, we’re not therapists, we’re not doctors, but those are the roles we are taking on.”
However, these additional roles fail to counter the steep academic declines noted by other commentators besides Rice.
“Schools are no longer expected only to educate children, but to provide the basic care once expected of the family,” wrote Meg Scalia Bryce, a mom serving on the board of the Virginia-based School Board Member Alliance nonprofit.
“Outsourcing our children’s health care to public schools – that is, to the government – ought to be an unwelcome development because it degrades the role of the family in society and represents government overreach.”
Meanwhile, the latest National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) scores show “a bleak picture” of fewer than 40% of 12th graders, 8th graders and 4th graders attaining proficiency in reading and math, Bryce argues.
Such ongoing developments only highlight the shortfalls within public education present even before 2020, according to Rice – quoting “a veteran Bay Area high-school history teacher” who argued, “The pandemic … just stripped bare for suburban parents the reality of what was happening.”
Exploring possible reasons for the decline
Rice’s article explores two possible reasons for the decline in academic performance – the first involving technology.
“Test scores started to fall when the children born during the first year of the iPad, 2010, started to enter the school system, and, to some, that points to a simple explanation: It’s the screens,” Rice writes.
“As intuitive as that answer may seem, it cannot account for why girls have again fallen so far behind boys in math, for instance.”
While all students now have universal access to devices, educational regressions are “unevenly distributed,” causing former public-school teacher Carol Jago to conclude “screens are an excuse” instead of the root cause, according to Rice.
Another explanation involves the “Declining Standards Hypothesis,” which Rice describes as the declining emphasis on standardized testing.
“Advocates of the Declining Standards Hypothesis can point to many indicators of softening expectations,” he writes, pointing to states such as New York, Massachusetts, Oregon and New Jersey lowering proficiency standards.
“Critics of these programs say they have long reinforced in-school segregation, offering students unequal opportunities. But instead of providing everyone who wants access to accelerated classes the support required to succeed, some districts have found it easier to do away with them entirely.”
The result has been an academic race to the bottom, Rice concludes, with “many districts … putting in a floor on scores to make it easier for students to pull up an F.”
“The rationale linking all these policies is that supposedly uniform standards are applied unevenly against those who are already disadvantaged, often with devastating life consequences,” he notes. “Still, it is not hard to understand why even some Democratic officeholders in San Francisco erupted in ridicule when its school board recently proposed a ‘grading for equity’ plan that made a score as low as 41 percent a C.”
‘So much less than we expected’
Rice refuses to commit to any one explanation, but notes everyone in public education can agree the system is bracing for economic shortfalls.
“Montclair’s schools budget had increased by more than 50 percent, to nearly $200 million annually, over the prior decade, but it was still nowhere close to delivering achievement for all,” he recalls. “That was bad enough. Then we discovered the district was broke.”
The new superintendent, Ruth Turner, called a town-hall meeting to discuss the budget this summer, where Rice “along with a few dozen other citizens … listened, dumbfounded, as she announced we were running out of cash.”
“It was no secret that the district had a budget problem,” he explains. “But what was once a concern was now a crisis: Turner said the district’s business administrator, who had just resigned, left behind around $12 million in unpaid bills. (Some of them, Turner later told me, were found jammed in desk drawers.)”
Again, Rice discovered his experience reflected those of other parents nationwide.
“As I talked with people all over the country about the state of schools, I discovered there are a lot of communities like Montclair, other places where parents had high expectations for public education that their districts were disappointing,” he concludes.
“I thought about all the little issues Montclair had been agonizing over these past few years. There were protests about cutting down a few old-growth trees to make way for our new artificial-turf baseball field. There was a campaign for equity for the high-school robotics team, which is now funded like an athletics program. There was an argument over whether to retain an inclusive calendar that adjourns for holidays including Diwali and Lunar New Year, interrupting instruction and pushing the school year late into June. Meanwhile, we had lost track of the big thing. …
“We had asked our schools to do so much. And we ended up with so much less than we expected.”