Frightened and revolted by the current state of American politics and the extreme rudeness and cruelty that has overtaken our culture?
Terrified by increasingly problematic international situations and growing speculation that the United States is a powerful nation in decline?
Add to your worry list the dismal report card of American education.
Let’s look at what is going on—or isn’t going on—in classrooms all across our country. It is not a pretty picture.
There has been a great deal of research and even more speculation into how the COVID pandemic and subsequent school closures affected students at all levels. The general consensus is that, not surprisingly, the pandemic has negatively impacted student performance by isolating students, exacerbating existing economic and social differences, and accelerating the transition to digital learning, which was not available to many students. Use of digital devices and social media are more at play than ever.
While COVID accelerated the decline in American student performance, the backslide was already underway. What is being called the “learning recession” began years before anyone had heard of COVID. According to the latest Education Scorecard, a data-driven joint project of Stanford and Harvard Universities, American students were making steady if not stellar progress in math and reading scores between 1990 and 2013. It has been a steady and brutal slide downward since.
The nation’s report card, NAEP, released earlier this month, reported the ongoing and alarming decline in both math and science for 8th graders, while barely 1/3 of high school seniors are ready for college level math, and 2/3s lack reading proficiency. International comparisons find American students nowhere in the top 10, with wide disparities among demographic groups and our 50 states.
Closer to home, in North Carolina, educational performance appears to be a mixed bag. High school graduation rates are rising and hit nearly 88-percent on the latest report card, but reading and math scores remain below those in 2019 before the pandemic. Just over half of our students, 55-percent, hit grade-level proficiency, but that leaves millions who did not with considerable demographic and regional disparities.
And, here at home in Cumberland County, our own students come in below the state averages in both graduation rates and grade level proficiency, at 86-percent and almost 51 percent, respectively. The number of low-performing schools increased from 15 to 27 out of a total of 88 schools, including 2 public charter schools.
It is easy and tempting to complain that our schools at all levels must do better and to blame the educators who teach our children and “the school system” for what we might label as failure. But education is a complex and deeply human process that requires both professionals and families and which must be supported by both encouragement and cold hard cash.
North Carolina public schools are generally ranked in the low 20s out of 51 ranked systems, although the ranking rises if our state’s higher education institutions are included in the measurements. State spending on public schools in a state with booming tech and pharmaceutical sectors and with new residents from other states flowing in, is generally ranked somewhere between 48th and 50th.
What is happening in North Carolina’s schools is shameful, not because educators and students are not trying, but because the General Assembly has held public education to a starvation diet for a decade and a half and has added insult to injury by siphoning off billions—yes, with a B— that should go to public education and gifting them to private, largely unregulated schools.
Money is not everything, of course, but it is also true that we get what we pay for.