The recent bipartisan consensus on declining test scores is concerning.
The basic story is that during the aughts, we had a bipartisan education reform consensus that was focused on improving school quality as an attainable and important driver of social and economic progress. This consensus wasn’t perfect — its problems included overpromising on addressing achievement gaps and overreliance on fiddling with teacher pay as One Weird Trick for fixing schools. The consensus also annoyed a lot of people, often for reasons that were not related to these flaws. But test scores were largely going up. The campaign to close achievement gaps failed not because low-income kids and racial minorities didn’t do better, but because everyonewas doing better, so gaps persisted.
But with ESSA, Congress stopped trying to set federal requirements that schools get better1, because the political energy around improving schools was evaporating. The left retreated into coalition solidarity with teachers unions, and the right refocused on vouchers and privatization. And it turns out that giving up and not trying doesn’t work very well.
