We were told that the cratering test scores for students were the result of the catastrophic decision to close schools during the pandemic and keep them closed for more than a year in some cases.
Now, an important study published on Wednesday by a group of respected social scientists has discovered the decline began long before the 2020-21 school closures. The Education Scorecard is a data project led by scholars at Dartmouth, Harvard, and Stanford. The original goal of the collaboration was to assess how quickly schools could bounce back from the pandemic closures.
Rolled out in 2022, the scholars quickly saw that looking only at the pandemic was giving them an incomplete picture of the academic decline. They began to look backward and found that the decline actually began in 2013, when accountability standards mandated in the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) law were abandoned. Social media use among younger children also became an issue in schools, and the two issues together were cited as possible major causes of the decline.
It's actually worse. The NCLB accountability concentrated on helping the underachievers. These are the students who are the most difficult to teach.
The improvement in test scores for these students was remarkable. Thomas Kane, a professor of economics at Harvard and one of the Scorecard’s creators, said that the collaborators took a longer perspective on student achievement to illustrate not merely the enormity of the loss caused by school closures during the pandemic, but also the impressive progress that preceded it.
Results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress [NEAP] (a federal exam often referred to as the Nation’s Report Card) show that fourth- and eighth-graders steadily grew more proficient in core academic subjects from 1990 through 2015, absorbing the equivalent of two grade levels in math knowledge during that time. Kane said it was all the more frustrating to see those gains, which he stacked against the most important public policy successes of the last half-century, substantially unwound over the last decade.
“If you had told me in 1990 that we would see that kind of rise in fourth- and eighth-grade math, I’d have said you were crazy,” Kane reflected. “And yet it happened, and nobody celebrated.”
The post-pandemic era has seen a number of experts explore the beginnings of the K–12 downturn, which first became evident through NAEP data near the end of the Obama presidency. Those investigations have repeatedly established that learning losses started well before 2020, while shining less light on possible explanations. Morgan Polikoff, a professor of education at the University of Southern California, said the Scorecard was laudable in its ambition to “tell the whole story,” even in the absence of dispositive proof.
“This paper is, by far, the most comprehensive effort to explore the two main hypotheses for what’s gone wrong in education over the last decade-plus,” Polikoff said.
The end of accountability occurred in 2011, when the Obama administration began issuing waivers to states so they could avoid penalties for failing to meet the conditions of the decade-old NCLB. The NCLB "mandated that 100 percent of K–12 pupils attain proficiency in math and reading by the end of the 2013–14 school year," according to The 74.
While student performance in both subjects had moved steadily upward for years, no state could meet that timeline; NCLB’s ever-rising standards meant that roughly half of American schools fell short of their academic goals by 2011. In a bargain struck with Obama’s Department of Education, states could seek relief from federal accountability requirements if they agreed to adopt new academic standards, overhaul their teacher evaluation systems, and meet a few other requirements. In all, over 40 states had applied for and received the waivers.
The last thing that teachers' unions were interested in was meeting the sky-high standards set by NCLB. Instead, the states eased off on the pressure to improve schools, and student performance went down the toilet.
As the Scorecard authors document, education leaders used their newly earned flexibility to ease off their scrutiny of the lowest-performing schools in their states; by 2014, under 10 percent of schools were flagged for missing learning benchmarks, a massive decline from just a few years earlier.
The "Lowest Common Denominator," remember?
In consequence, not only were fewer teachers, principals and superintendents explicitly prodded to boost student learning — under NCLB, schools faced an escalating set of sanctions, including the prospect of permanent closure, for persistent ineffectiveness — public awareness of academic underperformance also fell dramatically.
After almost two decades of spectacular improvements under the NCLB protocols, the educational establishment decided it was just too hard to meet the act's standards. They gave up. They surrendered to mediocrity, and children, through no fault of their own, are paying the consequences.
"Through an archival search of major news outlets, the Scorecard researchers discovered that the annual number of media references to federal accountability categories and penalties fell by 97 percent after 2017," says The 74. By that time, NCLB had been replaced entirely by the Every Student Succeeds Act, further cratering expectations for states.
The impact of constant social media use also played a large role in the decline, although not enough research has been done to quantify it.
“The waivers, and then ESSA [Every Student Succeeds Act], fundamentally changed the level of pressure and scrutiny on a big chunk of schools — in particular, these middle-to-high-performing schools that clearly know they’re not going to be at the bottom of the distribution," says Polikoff.
The decline in test scores was a choice made by the educational establishment, which didn't want excellence in students' education but simply results good enough to keep the federal government off its back.
