Freddy DeBoer challenges the oft-repeated claim that American schools are failing. We have heard the same lament since 1983, when the Reagan administration published a pamphlet titled “A Nation at Risk.” That publication, the work of the National Commission on Educational Excellence, proclaimed that America’s schools, once the envy of the world, were caught in “a rising tide of mediocrity.” The report gathered every possible negative statistic about public schools and turned them into a jeremiad.
Governors formed task forces and agreed that what the nation needed most was lots more testing, which eventually turned schools into a cash cow for the testing industry. Worse, it made test scores the goal of education, not a measure.
George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind law, passed in January 2002, made the pursuit of higher test scores a federal mandate, accompanied by harsh and punitive measures for schools that were unable to produce the ever higher test scores.
NCLB was followed by Obama’s equally punitive Race to the Top in 2010. Not only were schools targeted for not raising test scores, but individual teachers were singled out and punished. Schools were closed, teachers were fired, charter schools became a new panacea–which failed as panaceas tend to do.
The Bush brothers–President George W. and Florida Governor Jeb–claimed that accountability was the ultimate key to success.
But in the absence of dramatic test score gains, Jeb and other Republicans decided that vouchers were the ultimate panacea: no accountability, just choose any school you want, be it religious, private, online, or homeschooling. Quality no longer mattered. Accountability no longer mattered (except for the majority of students who continued to enroll in public schools and continued to take the standardized tests). Just choice.
Go back to the beginning: that infamous report called “A Nation at Risk.” One of the staff members who wrote the report was a young man named James Harvey. In 2023, on the 40th anniversary of the release of that influential report, James Harvey wrote an article declaring that the conclusions of the report were vastly overstated. He wrote an article in The Washington Post about “how we cooked the books.”
Freddy DeBoer probably didn’t read James Harvey’s brilliant and disturbing article. But he writes from the same perspective. Our public schools have been the target of a huge smear job. The smear was a fake. It was used to promote charter schools and vouchers. Many of our public schools are excellent. Some are in desperate need of desperate measures, like reduced class sizes, wraparound services for students and families. They are not worse than they used to be. Ninety percent of our population attended public schools. Their graduates created the most powerful nation in the world. Can we do better? Of course, especially for children with the greatest needs. Are public schools failing? No.
This is what DeBoer thinks:
The belief that American public schools are an international embarrassment, sites of endless failure, is one of the few things our polarized political system seems to agree on. After all, the transition from George W. Bush’s presidential education policy to that of Barack Obama was one of remarkable continuity, based on a shared premise: Our schools were in a broad state of emergency. Today, politicians of both parties still tell that story, as do op-ed pages and nonprofit organizations and bipartisan cable panels. The notion has hardened into an axiom, a claim so familiar that the people making it no longer feel obligated to back it up with evidence. But we don’t have to buy this narrative, and we shouldn’t — because the evidence tells us that the narrative just isn’t true.
The best way to consider a country’s educational performance is in relation to the performance of international peers, and the most authoritative international benchmark is the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development’s Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) exam, which tests 15-year-olds across 81 education systems. In the most recent results, from 2022, American students tested better in reading than 68 of the 80 other systems and well above the international average. In science, they bested 56 of 80. Math is our weakest subject, but even there we outscore 43 systems and tie with a dozen more, meaning that on our worst day we still do better than more than half the developed world. Our top performers look particularly good on the PISA; for example, 14 percent of American teenagers scored at the highest level in reading, double the OECD average.
Some critics note that our education system is expensive and say that we should demand better results for our money. But this demand implies that there’s a straightforward relationship between per-pupil spending and test scores; decades of evidence demonstrate that there is not. And the results show that we produce many sterling students for our money.GLOBE STAFF; ROB Z/ADOBE
Indeed, the students at the top of our system aren’t merely fine; they’re the best on earth. American teams have placed in the top three at the International Mathematical Olympiad every year for a decade and won or tied for first in 2015, 2016, 2018, 2019, and 2024. In 2025, all five members of the US physics team won gold at the International Physics Olympiad, making the United States the only country to sweep gold that year. Our chemistry, biology, informatics, linguistics, and other teams collect medals year after year. These are overwhelmingly public-school kids from ordinary suburban and urban districts, outcompeting the best academic talent the world can produce. You rarely read about them because their success doesn’t fit the declinist story.
But scores are dropping, aren’t they? Yes, and that’s exactly why international context matters. The 2022 PISA results showed an unprecedented worldwide collapse, with average scores across the OECD falling roughly 10 points in reading and 15 in math. When students in Germany, Norway, and New Zealand decline in lockstep with students in Arizona and Connecticut, the cause is plainly not American teachers, unions, or curricula. (My own guess is that the smartphone is to blame, but I can’t prove it.) Even as our raw scores fell, our international rank rose in all three subjects because our peers’ scores fell further. Again, when was the last time you heard that in our media?
None of this is to deny that some American schools are in crisis. But those failures aren’t spread evenly across our system; they’re concentrated in a small number of places suffering from poverty, structural racism, and institutional decline. The United States has the highest child-poverty rate in the OECD (roughly a quarter of our children live in poverty, versus less than 10 percent in top-scoring nations like Finland and Denmark) and our socioeconomic and demographic stratification is pronounced. As such, our aggregate scores on assessments like PISA are weighed down disproportionately by disadvantaged students.
In Detroit, which sits at the bottom of every large urban US district tested, two-thirds of students were chronically absent in a recent year, speaking to a lack of stability and resources at the family level. What teachers could succeed in those conditions? Cleveland, Baltimore, districts in the impoverished rural areas of West Virginia — they all tell a similar story. The American schools that struggle the worst share no common curriculum, union contract, or pedagogy. What they share is extreme poverty, segregation, and decades of disinvestment — in local labor markets, transportation, and health care.
Imagine swapping the students of Detroit with those of wealthy Bloomfield Hills next door, where the schools have excellent performance metrics. Does anyone believe the students from Detroit would suddenly excel?
Simply shoveling money at urban schools is not the answer. In fact, poorer, higher-minority schools in the United States receive significantly more per-pupil funding than richer and whiter schools. As it stands, the teachers in the Detroit public school system are asked to achieve similar results to the ones in the Bloomfield system, despite the vast disparities in living and learning environments of the students they teach.
I’m known to be very skeptical about the influence of schools and teachers on test scores, which tend to reflect the socioeconomic conditions of groups and the variation in talent levels between individuals. But you don’t have to share my views in that regard to acknowledge that our worst-performing schools face conditions that no amount of teaching quality can overcome. And consider a fact that’s almost never reported: America’s most disadvantaged students, those in the bottom international decile in socioeconomic status, rank sixth out of 64 comparable nations in math. In other words, even in the midst of all that poverty and dysfunction, our poorest kids outperform almost all of the world’s other poorest kids. The problem is not that our schools fail poor children at an unusual rate. It is that some of our communities are deprived to a scandalous degree.
In sum, our median student does just fine, our best students are the envy of the world, but our worst-performing students drag down our averages in a way that makes our overall performance look much worse than it is — and those extreme negative outliers are almost universally found in communities with intense socioeconomic challenges.
This resolves a puzzle that has baffled pollsters for 40 years. American parents consistently rate the nation’s schools quite poorly while giving their own children’s schools high marks. Average grades for the American school system writ large typically fall in the C or D range, but more than three-quarters of parents typically give their own kids’ schools an A or B. Often this is regarded as a kind of cognitive bias, of irrationality on the part of those parents; surely, they must be viewing their own schools with rose-colored glasses, or so the conventional wisdom has long held. In fact, that attitude makes perfect sense when you reflect on the quantitative reality I’ve described: Most American K-12 schools and students really are doing quite well, which is reflected in the high marks parents give to their own local schools, but like all of us, parents have heard the relentless doomsaying about the country’s schools. Parents judge their own schools from direct experience and the national system from what they see on television. That is, on the question they actually know something about, about which they have the best evidence, they’re quite positive, and they have every reason to be.
The myth of universal failure didn’t come out of nowhere, and for the record I don’t think it was born entirely in bad faith. Some of the people who spread it were no doubt animated by a real and decent impulse to improve the lives of American children, saw the awful conditions in our inner cities, and overextrapolated their impression of school failure. Others were likely so motivated to attack public schools for ideological reasons that they didn’t care much about misrepresenting the data. Whatever the motives, over time it became far too common for politicians, pundits, and members of the media to take data that showed a handful of distressed communities dragging down otherwise strong averages and present it as proof that American education was rotten from root to branch. An honest reading pointed toward investing in poor places and pursuing avenues for shared prosperity other than just schooling; the sensationalist reading pointed toward dismantling public schools. Many people chose the sensationalist one and repeated it until it became something “everybody knew.”
The stakes are significant. If the failures of American education really are systemwide, the response has to be wholesale reform — new national mandates and perhaps a federal takeover of local education policy; even more standardized testing; the criminalization of teacher unions; private school vouchers for all. But the reality is that our educational failure is concentrated, and it’s concentrated in predictable places, which means the remedy must be too: Serious investment for the communities where poverty has done its damage, not merely for the schools that sit inside them, along with an effort to build more pathways to middle class stability for those who are not academically motivated.
There is some evidence that such investment, for example in environmental cleanup or direct financial assistance for poorer families, can improve learning outcomes. There too, though, the evidence is contested and the effects unclear. But this investment offers obvious advantages: Even if bringing more money and development into poor communities does not close academic gaps, the direct economic advantages will endure.
These efforts are both harder and more expensive than yet another round of complaining about teachers and their unions, but they have the advantage of potentially solving real problems. If we have a moral duty to improve our schools, as the school reformers insist, then that begins with a moral duty to tell the truth.
