The National Assessment of Educational Progress published its test results last week. The entire nation bombed. Every region, red states and blue, poor and rich, black, white, and brown — it’s a full-blown disaster.
The failure of our education system in the COVID era isn’t exactly news. During Zoom school, parents everywhere experienced firsthand the mediocrity of American education and its bizarre preoccupation with leftist social theory. But the data are nonetheless staggering.
A few highlights from the report:
- These are the largest declines in math for fourth and eighth graders ever recorded.
- Nearly 40% of all eighth graders failed to grasp basic math concepts.
- Only 26% of eighth graders were proficient in math.
- Only 36% of fourth graders were proficient in math.
- 37% of fourth graders performed below “basic” in reading.
You can’t walk down the street in America today without tripping over a platitude about the preciousness of our children. Our children are our most valuable resource. Our children are the future.
And yet, when they needed adults most, we cowered. We allowed fear to cloud our reason. We did not live up to our soaring platitudes.
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The implications of the NAEP results are terrible to consider. What does it mean, exactly, for an entire generation of students to be significantly less educated than generations past? How will it affect our future economy? How will it affect our global competitiveness as totalitarian China ascends?
Whatever one thinks of the state of American democracy, it is all that stands in the way of Xi Jinping. If democracy depends upon an educated citizenry, and if our children really are the future of our country, then the NAEP results are predictive of a profound democratic degradation.
This catastrophe will undulate and billow for decades. It is like a nuclear explosion, only slower.
Incredibly, defenders of the education establishment have been quick to downplay the significance of COVID-related learning loss. In fact, they don’t seem to believe that a problem even exists.
“There’s no such thing as learning loss,” Los Angeles teachers union leader Cecily Myart-Cruz said. ”It’s OK that our babies may not have learned all their times tables. They learned resilience.”
Not to be outdone, National Education Association director Becky Pringle said she won’t even use the term “learning loss” because, in her view, “students are always learning.”
That’s the head of the largest and most powerful labor union in the United States using the reasoning skills of a toddler. It is indeed a pleasant thought, and true enough, that children are always learning. But are they learning anything that prepares them for the future?
These ridiculous defenses of failure would be hilarious if the circumstances weren’t so grave. Even the Daily Beast, which is perhaps the most loyal purveyor of the mainstream liberal narrative, is calling for teachers union scalps.
And yet instead of taking this crisis seriously, many in the establishment think they can just throw money at the problem to make it go away. A highly circulated study from researchers Kenneth Shores and Matthew Steinberg, for example, estimates that $700 billion in government spending is needed to make up for COVID-related learning loss —a truly ludicrous amount that only a fool would entrust to such a mismanaged public institution.
The idea of making up for learning losses of this magnitude by writing large checks is delusional happy talk. Any teacher will tell you that there aren’t enough instruction hours in a day to maintain even the current level of underachievement. With more and more resources and time spent on social-emotional learning — which is the unquestioned top priority of our education complex, as even a cursory glance at a state education website will demonstrate — fundamentals such as reading and writing were already facing a squeeze. The uptick in psychological disorders among our youth, particularly among young girls, further compounds the problem.
The problem isn’t funding. Even with the millions of dollars state public education systems receive every year, what we are doing is not working. The system has flatlined.
What makes this failure so much worse is the fact that academic decline during the pandemic was not inevitable. It was, in fact, possible to offer quality education during the pandemic. And we have proof.
If the 1.6 million students currently enrolled in Catholic schools counted as their own state, it would rank first in student achievement during the pandemic, and it wouldn’t be close. Kathleen Porter-Magee, who is superintendent of Partnership Schools, a management company that runs 11 Catholic schools in New York and Cleveland, wrote a recent op-ed in the Wall Street Journal that explains why Catholic schools have been able to serve students of all walks so well.
To begin, Catholic schools “followed the science” authentically when it came to closures and reopenings. They were among the first to close when COVID hit and among the first to reopen once it was established that children were at very low risk from the virus. Public schools, on the other hand, were at the mercy of anti-science hysterics from teachers unions, government officials, and blue-state parents, and their students suffered greatly.
But Catholic school students thrived. Their fourth-grade students performed at a grade level 1.5 years ahead of their public school counterparts. And their 8th graders performed a full two grade levels ahead of public school students in reading.
Perhaps no one benefited more from Catholic school enrollment than minority students. Black students in Catholic schools tested a full grade year ahead of black students in public schools, and Hispanic students performed better than their public school counterparts in every category. K-8th grade Catholic schools are the only private schools in the country that serve the urban poor at scale, and they delivered for these communities when times were toughest.
Even more impressive is the fact that Catholic schools were able to lead the nation in student achievement at a fraction of the cost. The average annual tuition for Catholic schools is $5,300, which is $6,700 less than the national average of funding the public education system pours into each student.
There is a blueprint available for educational excellence in this era. We can only pray that public school leaders have the wisdom to set down their manifestos and take notice.
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Peter Laffin is a writer in New England. Follow him on Twitter at @Laffin_Out_Loud.
