I completely reject these policy statements based on the data laid out.
Standardized education is failing and doesn't fit the modern world. We need radically individualized education. By 2050 no student in the school system should speak the same language. There is no "correct" way to learn. We need, now more than ever, diversity of thought.
I agree with you in principle to an extent, but many would argue that standardized cookie-cutter education produced what gains we had and education policies which tried to accommodate diversity of thought are responsible for the declines due to lack of rigor and any real standards. "Reading by vibes" [1] directly led to declines in literacy, and there are attempts in math to accommodate different styles of thinking which may be undermining rigor there as well.
I suspect teachers are caught in a catch-22 of only being able to teach what's on the curriculum and nothing else, so they have no room for flexibility to engage students, while also being under pressure to produce high grades; but when the curriculum is garbage and the students aren't interested...grading standards tend to be what's compromised. The schools and parents are happy their kid has A's, teachers get to keep their jobs, and students may graduate highschool without having ever read a book cover to cover. [2]
Even if that’s a metaphor for hyper-personalized education, my point still stands.
Society and the labor market benefits from everyone meeting a baseline level of education across certain areas.
Ideally, everyone that graduates high school can read and write English at a HS level, perform basic algebra, understand percentages and interest rates, etc. For the purposes of school, there’s no need for “diversity of thought” in the school system - we aren’t even delivering on the basics these days.
The Mississippi Miracle seems to have happened by a reversion to proven standards and actually holding kids to them before letting them pass to the next grade.
And before you raise the standard objection, racial minorities showed even greater improvement than whute kids.
We have seen the "YYY Miracle" before. Invariably it winds up that someone is cooking the books (getting low performing kids to quit school, giving out the tests, etc.) and a bunch of people wind up going to jail.
Export it how far? Arkansas, Florida, and Louisiana are also seeing improvements by imitating Mississippi's approach. Turns out shitcanning social promotion, vibes-based learning, and all the experimental stuff in favor of pedagogical approaches that worked for decades, and providing support for teachers in implementing these approaches, actually kinda helps.
If old teaching styles / standardized testing / standardized schooling represent this moribund, stagnant thing that haven't changed at all and haven't kept pace over the past century, why wouldn't you expect measured learning performance to hold steady as well instead of declining? The students basically have the same brains that they've always had. There isn't as much lead in the water as there used to be, in the atmosphere as there used to be, and parents take prenatal vitamins. They're starting from the same raw stuff that they've always been starting from, if not better. So why would they be getting worse? Children one generation ago didn't need individualized curricula and testing to achieve the performance that they got. Why does the current generation need that, and by what mechanism would that improve their performance?
The way of teaching and testing has changed so much in just the 25 years since I’ve been in school it’s almost not recognizable for some subjects. At least for the public schools my friends and family’s kids attend.
The standards have also plummeted overall, along with expectations. This also seems to translate into parenting and home life as well for many. A neglectful parent likely is far more impactful on performance these days since the kid isn’t out roaming the neighborhood getting into trouble and learning how to get out of it - they are sitting in front of a screen of some sort simply consuming.
It certainly is not an unbiased opinion but I am totally unsurprised at the reduction in academic performance. The writing has been on the wall for an extremely long time. You can only reduce standards and game the numbers for so long before the real world impact is impossible to hide.
I don't know if you've seen curriculums recently but they are totally about individualized education. Between IEPs and 504s, accommodations are made for nearly anything now. Students are put all into one large class, no more AP, Advanced, Standard because this caused hurt feelings for kids that could not make the advanced class. Students are pooled and the rationale is the more advanced students will help the less advanced students (!).
What this means in the classroom is teachers can not go as fast, advanced students get bored, every person has their own INDIVIDUALIZED test (3 instead of 4 questions, no write in questions, landscape instead of portrait, etc). This drives teachers absolutely insane and they cannot teach at any efficient level. Grading is so bad, teachers structure their course to have less exams because grading ten different quizzes and exams cannot be optimized.
A lot of this is parents disbelief that their little Johnny is not the next einstein so they torment teachers via policy hacks to give their children advantages. Admin doesn't care because they'll just fire "low performers" lol.
There is the above problem, and then there are the revisionist math ideas that common core and friends produce better outcomes instead of "rote" math. Well, math has been taught via rote for decades, possibly centuries, and people under that scheme learned math in a way that they became draughtsman and scientists, so maybe there is some proof in the pudding. My friends who did common core are barely math literate, can't calculate a tip even if you give them the hack: move decimal left by one place and times by two.
Before you come at me for being ableist, remember that this means even with these accommodations people are doing worse.
Also, no phonics?! Wtf?
People <25 in normal jobs (retail) cannot do simple fractions of 1/2 and 1/4.
Something is wrong. I'm not saying these guys are right but don't blame standardized education which was systematized in the 70s-90s just yet. I would posit that hostile admins/policy, dumb revisionist ideas that have no basis in history, and NO NATIONAL CURRICULUM. Why we do not have a national curriculum seems crazy to me, but there must be some reason. Surely we can agree on that at least.
I agree with you that right now is the best time for individual augmentation for education, and we should wield that power for good. But I do think it can be in service of a system.
EDIT: just realized this is a blog post length, sorry. It is one of my pet issues, n=3, mom works with people at deli that cannot do fractions (they get fired, up to 20 so far), teacher friend 15y in history has to make custom exams, and publisher friend who sees young writers (<25, n=??) can't sound out words.
A national curriculum is a deeply suspicious idea. The US has an insane range of socioeconomic, and thus educational, environments, ranging from high-performing states like Massachusetts, to deeply alarmingly under-performing states like West Virginia. Any standard that could be established would at best suffer from being either unreachable with the resources available on the low end, or a pointless bureaucratic headache for states that would completely eclipse it.
At worst, it would become a cudgel to be used by federal governments sympathetic to the over-represented and under-educated states against the ones that actually provide value to the nation and an education to their residents.
It is entirely possible that we cannot do it with the current setup. Resourcing of public schools is largely shit across the various states, I went to NJ public schools which are consistently second or third in the nation. I live in Philadelphia whose public schools are notoriously bad.
The rise of charters has probably hurt areas with marginal public schooling, but it does give parents an option.
I don't think there's anything suspicious or sinister about it, considering how administrations appear to be running absolutely out of control in schools now which seems pretty bad. You are likely right about the federal govt getting this wrong and screwing up the current good thing which is public schools in areas that work :D.
I would counter with things like, calculus is not a regional bias. If we expect to compete internationally we have to raise the bar up, not create a generation of people who can't do fractions. I'll def have to think about how the fed would misuse this. Thanks for the insight.
My bias:
I am a product of DoDDS schools, which is as close to a national curriculum as we've ever had and the numbers seem to be off the charts: https://archive.is/OpZnr
For me, my parents are both from poor backgrounds. My dad joined the Marines and apparently got me access to the best academy in the USA, the DoDDS System. I am the only person in my family to ever make more than 100k or have degrees.
There's also the little unspoken part of this article that if your kid misbehaves bad enough it becomes your parent's problem via their commanding officer.
It is entirely possible I'm some kind of outlier. (I doubt it.)
I doubt there are any states that don't currently have fractions in their curricula. The problem isn't standards, it's that large swathes of the country simply don't care about educating their children, as indicated at a societal level by where tax revenue goes, and at the individual level by parental involvement in children's education.
How to solve that short of charging people with neglect, I've got no idea.
I didn't learn phonics in school, while my only 2-year younger sibling did (not sure why, maybe related to the school being super low income?) yet I always had a much higher grade reading level. Obviously that's just one point of anecdata, but I don't think phonics is a very big influence on literacy, and why would it be? pronunciation is one tiny part of reading. I think the sheer amount of time spent online is probably the biggest culprit.
Phonics gives you the raw material with how to understand language, including English with all its problems. Similar to how numbers work, you understand that a combination of symbols seen in different contexts contains "a sound". It is a system used to teach nearly all languages with a phonetic alphabet around the world. It is a system that transcends borders, and is useful around the world to teach similar languages.
This is a bottom up vs top down approach. The claim is that whole word reading gets you reading faster and so it has a knock on effect. Phonics was completely removed from curriculums under "Whole Word" and "Balanced Literacy" movements(!?). The claim being that phonics is meaningless because it's technical and "people care about story telling!" and more. Note, these are not my opinions I am restating recent "discoveries".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucy_Calkins
This rhymes with how people thought common core math was better because it didn't contain all of that annoying practice. Now that kids cannot interpret similar words at all (ex: house, boat, houseboat, boathouse), now they're bringing phonics as "science of reading".
My point of all this, is why do we keep throwing out DECADES of work for fringe theories justified by kooks in an attempt to min max a KPI? It all implies that high level skills are not built from fundamentals but instead osmosed, as if you either get it or you don't which seems to be how these models view high skills. Seems crazy to me!
Standardized education is failing and doesn't fit the modern world. We need radically individualized education. By 2050 no student in the school system should speak the same language. There is no "correct" way to learn. We need, now more than ever, diversity of thought.