Predicting the Past

By Peter Berger

General Motors stock is selling for less than a cup of Starbucks coffee. Armed with that urgency, experts and policymakers are turning back the education clock to the 1970s, those golden years when self-esteem, the whole child, and our current state of academic bankruptcy were born.

We were almost headed in the right direction for about five minutes. The federal No Child Left Behind Act, with all its faults—and its faults are legion—properly refocused schools on academic content and fundamental skills like reading. Unfortunately, NCLB promptly plunged off the testing deep end, taking its credibility with it. Now, right on schedule, here comes the education pendulum, hurtling toward the other policy extreme.

Like former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani and his invocation of 9/11, education reformers exploit the refrain "21st century," as in "21st-century skills," "21st-century global competition," or "21st-century bridge to sell you." Not that there’s anything wrong with preparing kids for the 21st century. I stopped using parchment and quill pens in my classroom months ago. But garbing recycled bad ideas in the new century can’t help us, especially when our real problem is that most students haven’t mastered the skills that mattered in the last century, and that will continue to matter,...