I love my wife. But for the life of me I cannot understand how she critiques my call for a new learning system while ignoring how bad the current public system is for most kids.
I’ve written about this predicament before. She, along with others, seem more interested in explaining why a new learning system won’t work than admitting how bad our schools currently are, especially when it comes to black, brown, and poor kids.
But here’s the deal – I’m going to win on this. The evidence continues to mount about how our public schools are struggling and, in many cases, failing mightily. Eventually, my wife along with others will move over to the camp where so many parents now find themselves in – looking for scalable, sustainable models of learning, whether it includes school or not, to make our kids, all of our kids, smarter and stronger when it comes to reading, writing, problem-solving, and character development skills.
Dissatisfaction leads to motivation, and we just aren’t dissatisfied enough – yet.
The latest evidence telling us how bad our current public school system is comes from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP – known as the nation’s report card.
According to The 74 online today,
“Eighth graders’ knowledge of both history and civics fell significantly between 2018 and 2022, according to the latest scores from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). Federal officials called the decline an ominous sign for America’s civic culture, with U.S. Education Secretary Miguel Cardona criticizing some states for ‘banning history books and censoring educators.’”
“Posted this morning, results from last year’s administration of the nationally representative test – sometimes referred to as the ‘Nation’s Report Card’ – showed history scores dropping by an average of five points on a 500-point scale. Average civics scores fell by two points on a 300-point scale, the first-ever decline in the 25-year history of the test. After modest increases over the last few decades, performance in both subjects has fallen back to levels measured in the 1990’s, when the subjects were first tested.”
“Taken together, the scores provide only the latest evidence of declining U.S. academic performance across a range of disciplines. Just last fall, the release of math and English scores showed sever damage inflicted during the pandemic, with years’ worth of academic growth similarly erased or massively reduced.”
It’s important for me to step in here to point out that most NAEP data, reading and math especially, has basically flat-lined over the past 40 years. I guess someone could argue we’ve seen incremental progress since the 1980’s, but a one- or two-point increase isn’t something to hang your hat on.
Back to the article:
“Equally noteworthy, [Peggy] Carr [commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics] observed, was a phenomenon that has been consistent across multiple rounds of NAEP stretching back over the better part of a decade: Scores for the most successful test takers (those at 90th percentile in U.S. history and both the 75th and 90th percentile in civics) are statistically unchanged since 2018, while relatively lower-performing student did significantly worse.”
“Those diverging trends were reflected in the numbers of participants scoring at NAEP’s different achievement thresholds. The percentage of eighth graders scoring below NAEP’s lowest benchmark of ‘basic’ in U.S. history (defined as only partial mastery of the requisite skills and knowledge in a given subject) grew from 29 percent in 2014 to an incredible 40 percent in 2022. In civics, the proportion of students scoring below the basic level rose to 31 percent from 27 percent in 2018.”
“By contrast, just 13 percent of test takers managed to score at or above NAEP’s ‘proficient’ benchmark in U.S. history (defined as being able to read, interpret, and draw conclusions from primary and secondary sources) – the lowest proportion of eighth-grade students reaching that level out of any subject tested by NAEP. Only about one-fifth of students met or exceeded the proficient level in civics, the second-lowest proportion for any subject.”
I’m not a big fan of the current U.S. Secretary of Education. The fact that Miguel Cardona is trying to explain this data away because some states are “banning books and censoring educators” is simply idiotic.
The reason why these scores are at an all-time low is because our kids can’t read, and the public school system has been doing a crappy job of teaching reading for some time now – not just since the pandemic.
So I’m just going to keep hanging around, writing my daily column, waiting for enough of you to say “Enough!” Then, once enough of you become dissatisfied with what we’re doing, or not doing, for our kids, I’ll be happy to explain how a new system of learning, including learning coaches, learning plans, and learning cohorts, can become scalable and sustainable. If you’ve been paying attention to what’s happening out there, then you know it’s already happening.
This morning I shared the NAEP news with my wife while she was fixing her coffee. After 40 years of being together, we both know how to politely recognize what the other is saying without necessarily getting too excited about it. That was the case this AM with the NAEP news, although admittedly Governor Greg Abbott’s comment about “illegals” being involved in the deadly shootings in Texas this past weekend might have caused her lack of response. Governor Abbott is one of the reasons my wife and I moved away from Texas in 2018.
As I headed out of the room, I said this – “You need to make sure to read my column today.”
Til tomorrow. SVB
A Better Path to Learning 
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