Over the past half-century, conventional wisdom has been that America’s schools are in crisis (Hlavacik, 2016). The narrative is so pervasive, in fact, that we would be surprised if it didn’taffect people’s views. But we wanted to know whether that narrative reflects people’s actual experiences. Is the national-level rhetoric a lagging indicator of real problems on the ground? Or are the concerns of politicians and policy makers driving a national story that’s out of sync with local reality?
To at least partially answer this question, we traced how five major print news sources — The Boston Globe, Newsweek, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and USA Today— have spread the story that schools are failing across roughly three decades. Beginning in 1984, just after the publication of the A Nation at Riskreport sounded the alarm about public schools, we looked for different permutations of “failing schools” language all the way through the end of the Obama administration in 2017.
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Meanwhile, the taxpayer funded Wisconsin DPI continues its mulligan and rigor reduction journey.