Opinion | The Education Crisis Neither Candidate Will Address

It has been four and a half years since public schools across the country closed their doors to in-person learning. There is evidence that this generation of K-12 students has not — and may never — fully recover academically.

Test scores on core subjects are lower than they have been in decades, and the achievement gap between rich and poor students has widened even further. When I interview teachers, they tell me that some of their students are behaviorally and socially stunted in ways that aren’t always captured by statistics.

Americans are not happy about the state of education. Though satisfaction with the quality of education has recovered a bit from its record lows in 2023, Americans’ overall sentiment toward K-12 public schools is still “underwater,” according to Gallup.

I was really hoping that in an election year, the serious problems facing K-12 education — which are not limited to Covid learning loss — might merit attention from Donald Trump and Kamala Harris. And yet, neither candidate has really addressed primary education. The entire topic of education barely came up in this year’s presidential debates, beyond a few brief mentions of student loans and school shootings.

Trump’s concept of a plan for education is about banning critical race theory and abolishing the Department of Education. He’s focused on inflaming culture war issues, not on building fundamentals. “Harris and Democrats have talked as much, if not more, about early childhood education and child care than they have about K-12 policies,” according to NPR. While I agree with the Democratic Party platform that “free, universal preschool for 4-year olds” would be really nice to have, budgets are finite and I wish Democratic politicians would focus more energy on the K-12 system that already exists and is in need of funding and imaginative and effective policy.

The Scope of the K-12 Education Crisis

The downward trend for America’s schools started about a decade ago, so the pandemic destabilized an already weakened structure. Then the Covid shutdowns were like “this comet that hit our education system,” said Michael Petrilli, the president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute. Instead of being honest about the scope of the problems kids are facing, he said, “I think it’s clear that most of our schools have decided that that’s just the way it’s going to be, that this generation of kids is not going to catch up.”

The most recent test results from National Assessment of Educational Progress — which my colleague Dana Goldstein calls “the gold-standard federal exam" — show that reading and math scores for fourth and eighth graders are at their lowest levels in decades. While test results cratered after 2020, “the downward trends reported” in 2023 “began years before the health crisis, raising questions about a decade of disappointing results for American students,” Goldstein wrote.

Things are continuing in the wrong direction. A study from the Northwest Evaluation Association, the organization that conducts MAP testing, which measures academic growth in a variety of subjects from K-12, showed that “the gap between pre-Covid and Covid test score averages widened in 2023-24 in nearly all grades, by an average of 36 percent in reading and 18 percent in math.” The association estimates that “the average student will need the equivalent of 4.8 additional months of schooling to catch up in reading and 4.3 months in math.”

It’s not just test scores that are a problem. Chronic absenteeism among students has “‘exploded’ almost everywhere,” The Times reported. Teachers are also missing a lot more school, and there is a shortage of substitutes. Relatedly, the pipeline for teachers is drying up. Enrollment in public schools is dropping and schools are closing as a result. Part of this is demographic — the birthrate is falling — but public schools are also losing students to charter and private schools. It’s hard not to recognize a picture of American education in decline.

Because of the decentralized structure of the American education system, much of the control over schools lies with states and local communities. Yet additional funding to help schools during the pandemic came from the federal government. States received $190 billion in pandemic aid through the Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief (ESSER) program, and the money had to be allocated by last month. A few “funds were distributed through the same formula as federal Title I education funding, which allocates more resources to districts with a high proportion of low-income families than to wealthier districts,” according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

The money was given largely without restrictions, except that 20 percent of the last installment was supposed to be dedicated to addressing learning loss. But “the allowable activities” to address that learning loss “were extremely broad and inclusive. Without a clear purpose or goal, districts could — and did — spend their money in wildly different ways,” Chad Aldeman pointed out in The 74. “There was little tracking of how, exactly, the federal dollars were spent,” my colleague Sarah Mervosh wrote, so it’s very difficult to know what academic interventions worked better than others.

Instead of addressing the decline in academic achievement by figuring out what is working to help get kids back to grade level, some states are lowering the bar. As Linda Jacobson reported, also in The 74, Wisconsin, Oklahoma, Alaska and New York have all made adjustments to what qualifies as a passing score or recalibrated their proficiency levels so that more children appear to be meeting basic standards. This kind of obfuscation does not fix what Covid broke.

What Should the Candidates Propose?

I asked a handful of academics who study education what kinds of plans they hoped to hear from a new administration. A majority of them mentioned a need for more federal enforcement of state accountability for student outcomes. They specifically cited the shortcomings of the 2015 Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), which gave a lot more power to the states and walked back some of the reforms of No Child Left Behind (N.C.L.B.), which was passed in 2002. ESSA was a bipartisan attempt, led by President Barack Obama, to improve on N.C.L.B. by giving states more flexibility and allowing the federal government less control. They emphasized that N.C.L.B. was not a perfect law, but they thought that ESSA went too far in the other direction.

“The federal government gave states more control over ‘differentiated’ and flexible accountability systems. That devolution seems to have resulted in a kind of cosmetic ‘accountability theater’ in many states,” said Thomas Dee, a professor at Stanford’s Graduate School of Education. Lowering proficiency levels is a prime example of this kind of theater.

That doesn’t necessarily mean that more federal oversight to ensure better outcomes should look exactly like No Child Left Behind, said Dan Goldhaber, vice president of the American Institutes for Research. N.C.L.B. focused on schools’ raw test scores rather than their test score growth over time, which “often sent the wrong message about which schools were doing well,” Goldhaber said.

Those suggestions are probably too in the weeds for either Harris or Trump to squeeze into a sound bite before Election Day. So Dee said he’d like to hear the candidates focus on singular issues like chronic absenteeism, which isn’t going away and is where attention might actually help shape policy.

I would personally like to see a federal push for more easily understandable data from states — both on school performance and our kids’ performance. There is a disconnect between grades, which have been inflated, and student knowledge. The Associated Press’s Annie Ma reported on a 2023 Gallup survey that showed that “88 percent of parents say their child is on grade level in reading, and 89 percent of parents believe their child is on grade level in math. But in a federal survey, school officials said half of all U.S. students started last school year behind grade level in at least one subject.”

Tim Daly, the chief executive of EdNavigator and the author of a newsletter on education, would also like to see better data coming from states. “When I looked at higher levels of teacher absenteeism — which Illinois reports at the school level — I found that the data are very sketchy. Many of the figures were implausible or the districts outright refused to confirm them. If this is true of teacher absenteeism, is it true of other things? Probably? I feel like this is indicative of our bigger pandemic recovery problem. We’re stuck.”

Without data, we can’t understand the scope of our problems. And without a sense of urgency from either candidate for education reform on a national level, our children will not get the help they need. I don’t think it’s acceptable to just give up on the kids who had the misfortune of being school-age during 2020-2022. There’s a month left before the election and the candidates still have time to say something — anything — about how they’re going to help.

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