The bottom line is that student achievement has been declining for over a decade. Meanwhile, Dan Goldhaber, director of the Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research at American Institutes for Research, noted, “The distance between the highest/lowest performing students is a chasm & achievement gaps are at historic highs . . . These results are a five-alarm fire for our education system, not just another data point or a temporary COVID effect.”
Now, I’m not diving into the weeds of state-to-state comparisons or the like. For one thing, there are others in the EdNext family (Marty West, Checker Finn) far better equipped to do so. For another, there are a lot of possible explanations for this lost academic decade. It’s pretty clear cell phones and social media have exacted a real cost. Pandemic-related disruptions cast a huge shadow. But I want to touch on something else: how, over the past decade or two, those who lead and train educators got fixated on quasi-mystical fever dreams. This had dire consequences on the things that schools can and should do well.
Back in 1993, the late, great Harvard sociologist Nathan Glazer, author of The Limits of Social Policy, sought to explain the precipitous decline of New York City in the 1970s and 1980s. He observed:
New York stopped trying to do well the kinds of things a city can do, and started trying to do the kinds of things a city cannot do. The things a city can do include keeping its streets and bridges in repair, building new facilities to accommodate new needs and a shifting population, picking up the garbage, and policing the public environment. Among the things it can’t do are redistributing income on a large scale and solving the social and personal problems of people who, for whatever reason, are engaged in self-destructive behavior.
The TL;DR summary: City leaders had decided their jobs just weren’t big or meaningful enough.
It strikes me that this captures much of the past decade-plus in education. In that time, a whole swath of intellectuals, advocates, and funders concluded that things like orderly classrooms, academic rigor, outcome accountability, gifted education, and even numeracy were overrated. Educators were subjected to constant treatises, lectures, and trainings that explained such concerns were outdated and oppressive. As someone who’s long been involved in school leadership training, dating back to well before I penned Cage-Busting Leadership, I watched this play out from the front row.
The measure of a school leader gradually became a willingness to parrot the tenets of social justice. Professional developers urged teachers to deconstruct privilege, be on the lookout for microaggressions, and do their best to combat climate change. The grandiose ambitions and amorphous directives came at the expense of more prosaic concerns. After all, time devoted to gender unicorns or interrogating privilege is time not spent on science or math. And the associated doctrines undermine academic pursuits.