American schools are in a decade-long “learning recession,” a new report from the Educational Opportunity Project at Stanford shows.
But contrary to the narrative that attributes declines mainly to the pandemic and increased screen time, the report’s authors argue that a less-cited factor is also to blame: A major shift in federal education policy in the 2010s.
In 2013, years before the COVID pandemic, the reading and math scores of the country’s 3rd through 8th graders started to falter—falling in math, and then stagnating and declining in reading, according to the report’s analysis of district-level achievement data, representing about 35 million students nationwide.
Although scores have rebounded somewhat since COVID-era lows, especially in math, they’re still well below past peaks. In most districts nationwide, students are doing worse in math and reading than they were a decade ago, the “Education Scorecard” report shows.
“Our challenge didn’t start or end with the pandemic,” said Thomas Kane, the director of the Center for Education Policy Research at Harvard, and one of the report’s authors.
The report agrees that the rise of social media, growing absenteeism, and the variance in the amount of federal pandemic relief aid distributed to different districts have contributed to stagnant scores.
But the authors also argue that the loosening of federal accountability policy at the tail end of the No Child Left Behind era could have catalyzed achievement declines.
That controversial 2002 education law, signed by President George W. Bush, put in place strict interventions for schools that repeatedly failed to make academic progress, such as having to offer transportation to a better-performing school or undergoing a major restructuring.
The notion that muscular accountability was a key component of success has gained traction in education circles over the past year. In January, when the latest National Assessment of Educational Progress scores showed similar decade-long patterns, some advocates called for a return to the test-based accountability systems that some studies suggest drove NAEP gains in the early 2000s.
President Barack Obama’s administration began issuing waivers under the law in 2011 to lighten its touch.
“We know that on the way up, test-based accountability played a role,” Kane said. “It’s harder to determine if on the way down, [it] played a role.”
Still, the report’s authors write, that policy shift resulted in states identifying far fewer schools for improvement and aggressive turnaround interventions, a shift Kane equated to “turning off the smoke alarm.”
“Accountability systems will always be unpopular. It’s uncomfortable being held accountable for student results,” Kane said. “But I think that discomfort is a necessary ingredient of improvement.”
Fewer ‘coherent supports’ from states, some advocates say
When Anjanette McNeely returned to teaching in 2009, she worked at an elementary school in Utah that was “right on the cusp” of failing to meet “adequate yearly progress,” the law’s moniker for meeting annual testing targets, she said.
McNeely had started her career in the 1990s in the same school, one with a high percentage of students from low-income families. She left the classroom when her own children were young. When she came back, she said, “the differences in the support that the district was providing to that school was stark.”
Under pressure to meet achievement targets, the district had invested in stronger administrators, hired tutors, and brought in consultants, she said. “The focus was really on supporting teachers to get better academic outcomes, in a different way than it was before,” she said. “It taught me how to build interventions and collect data, and adjust my instruction.”
This, in theory, was how accountability policy was supposed to work—to push states and districts to invest the time and resources necessary for real academic improvement.
In practice, some aspects of NCLB proved problematic.
The intense focus on reading and math scores, some argued, encouraged “teaching to the test,” and crowded out time in the day for non-tested subjects like social studies and arts. The stigma associated with being labeled as needing improvement created a “fear-driven model,” said Juan D’Brot, the associate director of the Center for Assessment, which advises states and districts on testing systems.
NCLB set a famously ambitious—and by some accounts, impossible—goal: 100% of students would be proficient in reading and math by 2014. The Obama administration’s waivers meant many states began identifying far fewer schools that weren’t meeting the benchmarks, the report notes.
When Congress replaced NCLB with the Every Students Succeeds Act, in 2015, the system changed again. States developed their own accountability measures that combined test scores with other factors, like engagement and school climate, and the number of schools identified for improvement continued to stay below NCLB-era highs.
“This was an intentional choice that policymakers made, to have states focus on a smaller number of schools, and also provide states with a lot more flexibility on how they’re intervening in these schools,” said Nicholas Munyan-Penney, the P-12 policy assistant director at EdTrust, an advocacy and equity-focused organization that played a major role in advising lawmakers on NCLB.
“We’re seeing less specific, high-stakes interventions that really would potentially spur folks into action, and less coherent supports coming from states,” he said.
Under ESSA, districts with the lowest-performing schools are still required to develop plans to improve, and states monitor their progress. If they don’t improve after a set number of years, the state intervenes with its own plan.
But recent analyses, including some from the federal government, have found that these schools were often left without clear improvement strategies or funding to implement turnaround plans.
“We’re not very good at explicitly connecting information coming from the accountability system, whether from tests or other indicators … [to], what do we do with it in terms of our expectations for school improvement?” said D’Brot.
The accountability coalition ‘has evaporated’
Going forward, said Kane, states should take COVID-era achievement declines into account when identifying schools for improvement.
The Education Scorecard report outlines what it describes as a “U-shaped” recovery: The highest-income districts in the country have achieved more academic recovery, as have the lowest-income districts, which received the most pandemic relief aid. Middle-income districts have seen the least improvement, the authors write.
Schools need coherent strategies to improve literacy and math outcomes, Kane said, but a return to the federal accountability infrastructure of the past might be a hard sell.
“A lot of the accountability movement was built upon a center-right, center-left coalition. That coalition has evaporated, unfortunately,” he said. “We’re not going to rebuild that anytime soon at the national level, but hopefully some states will.”
President Donald Trump’s administration has encouraged states to apply for waivers from some of ESSA’s requirements, including those related to assessment and accountability.
Officials at the U.S. Department of Education have said any flexibility given to states in this arena is aimed at improving academic achievement. Some Democrats in Congress, though, worry that the waivers could allow states to circumvent ESSA’s focus of supporting historically marginalized student populations. (Schools are supposed to intervene when groups of students, like those on individualized education programs or those learning English, fall behind their peers.)
“We’re retreating to this slogan of ‘return everything to the states,’ ... but not all states are equally positioned; not all districts have strong leadership,” said Cheryl Oldham, the executive vice president of human capital at the Bipartisan Policy Center, and a former education official in George W. Bush’s administration.
“The people who are going to suffer as a result are the kids who can’t read and do math.”
