The 4 Crises of American Education

Serious people need to take this seriously

Admittedly, observers of American education are prone to alarmism. Because schools are so important, we always think some problem deserves the nation’s undivided attention. Student discipline is lacking, teacher effectiveness is suspect, buildings are dilapidated, grades are inflated.

But this moment feels different. This isn’t Chicken Little stuff. Our schools are facing four legitimate crises right now, any one of which would be reason for serious concern. But together they speak to something fundamental:

I don’t think we take schooling seriously enough any more.

1. Student Achievement

The first crisis is the most basic. Student learning in basic subjects is collapsing. For more than 30 years, America was focused, in a bipartisan way, on student achievement. Worrying results in the 1960s and 1970s catalyzed a movement in the 1980s and 1990s that culminated in efforts in the 2000s and early 2010s to raise expectations and deliver results. As a result learning increased. The achievement gap was shrinking. Graduation rates improved. College-going rates rose.

And then we did a U-turn. By the mid-2010s an unwise backlash to testing and accountability contributed to a national easing-up. We got distracted by other matters, too. Then misguided Covid closures. Then an anemic recovery to the closures.

It’s hard to overstate how dreadful student achievement results are right now. We just got the latest batch of scores from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (“the Nation’s Report Card”). They made clear that achievement is declining and that, in some cases, years and years of progress have been erased. In some grades and subjects, students are now learning the same or less than they did before the ed-reform movement. A big story is that America’s lowest-performing students are falling farther and farther behind.

In short, it’s hard to say we take schooling seriously when kids are learning less and less.

2. Chronic Absenteeism

Second, lots of kids just aren’t going to school. “Chronic absenteeism” is as confounding as it is maddening. I never imagined that I would have to argue that students need to show up for school—or that parents need to make their kids show up. But here we are.

A small subset of kids—often older students in lower-income areas—were always more likely to miss a disproportionate number of days of school. When I was the president of my state’s board of education, I saw that in some struggling high schools some students would miss 30, 50, even 100 days of school. Needless to say, it’s hard to learn very much when you seldom attend class.

But slowly, more and more kids started missing more and more days of school. Not just in struggling areas. Not just high schoolers. Covid made things much worst. Elements of our school system shuttered schools for way too long, implying that maybe school wasn’t all that important. That message seems to have been internalized, because still today, too few kids are showing up. We simply never bounced back. Rates of chronic absenteeism are still about 50% higher than pre-pandemic.

It’s hard to say we take schooling seriously when so many kids aren’t going to school.

3. Outsourcing Learning to AI

Third, I’m shocked—and disappointed—that educators have not done more to oppose the rampant use of AI among students. AI is so different than search engines or traditional online learning. Students increasingly use AI to do their thinking for them. AI is used to brainstorm ideas, to read and summarize texts, to write papers. These are the kinds of activities that are central to learning. You learn by brainstorming, reading, summarizing, and writing. Those activities change a student’s brain for the better.

It undermines schooling when we behave as though the very purposes of schooling aren’t all that important. We are knowingly, willingly allowing a generation of students to go through school while having AI do their work for them.

Consider: We now recognize the error of closing schools during Covid. A lot of people took from that experience that schooling wasn’t so important. We are now making the same kind of error. If we act as though it’s fine to have AI do your creating, reading, studying, and writing, lots of people are going to reason that it’s not all that important to go to school or do schoolwork.

It’s hard to say we take schooling seriously when so many kids aren’t engaging in the core of schoolwork.

4. Falling Regard

Lastly, the public’s opinion of schooling is worryingly low. Support for higher education has been falling for years. Most American’s just don’t think a college degree is very important anymore. If people no longer believe the highest levels of schooling matter that much, what does that say about the nation’s sense of schooling?

But to make matters worse, the public is also down on the state of America’s K-12 schools. Nevertheless, Americans generally don’t place schooling among the nation’s most important issues. One poll shows that only about 3% of Americans think education is the nation’s top issue.

It’s hard to say we take schooling seriously when so many Americans are unhappy about education, think schools are on the wrong track, and yet don’t rate education as a top issue.

A New Movement

These four crises are foundational to education. They aren’t necessarily splashy, but they are at the core of schooling. They won’t be solved by an op-ed, a high-profile firing, or a hard-hitting cable-news spot. This is a rebuild not a touch-up. We need a long-term effort to get serious anew about why we have schools and the results we expect.

We must remember that the heady days of education reform in the 1990s and 2000s didn’t spontaneously, unexpectedly materialize from the void. Those efforts were built on years and years of knowledge and agitation about the big challenges we faced

If we’re to start addressing today’s crises, we need a new movement of information, agitation, and policy advocacy. And that can’t start until enough people recognize that we just aren’t taking American schooling seriously enough.