Now here is a surprise: Paul Petersen, editor of the conservative journal Education Next and leader of Harvard’s Program on Education Policy and Governance, published an article with his postdoctoral student M. Danish Shakeel demonstrating the steady and impressive progress of American public schools over the past half century.

They write:

Contrary to what you may have heard, average student achievement has been increasing for half a century. Across 7 million tests taken by U.S. students born between 1954 and 2007, math scores have grown by 95 percent of a standard deviation, or nearly four years’ worth of learning. Reading scores have grown by 20 percent of a standard deviation per decade during that time, nearly one year’s worth of learning.

When we examine differences by student race, ethnicity, and socioeconomic status, longstanding assumptions about educational inequality start to falter. Black, Hispanic, and Asian students are improving far more quickly than their white classmates in elementary, middle, and high school. In elementary school, for example, reading scores for white students have grown by 9 percent of a standard deviation each decade, compared to 28 percent for Asian students, 19 percent for Black students, and 13 percent for Hispanic students. Students from low socioeconomic backgrounds also are progressing more quickly than their more advantaged peers in elementary and middle school. And for the most part, growth rates have remained steady throughout the past five decades.

Conventional wisdom downplays student progress and laments increasing achievement gaps between the have and have-nots. But as of 2017, steady growth was evident in reading and especially in math. While the seismic disruptions to young people’s development and education due to the Covid-19 pandemic have placed schools and communities in distress, the successes of the past may give educators confidence that today’s challenges can be overcome.

This article contradicts the foundation of the rightwing-conservative narrative that “our schools are failing,” which is the rationale for school choice and harsh treatment of teachers.

As Petersen and Shakeel show, the conventional wisdom among the “blow up public education” sect is wrong. Public schools are not failing. They are succeeding.

I made the same argument in my book Reign of Error. I showed that test scores and graduation rates for all groups are at an all-time high.

But more importantly, Paul Petersen made the same assertions in 1983, when he was the staff director for a Twentieth Century Fund commission on education. I was a member of the commission, as was Albert Shanker of the AFT, Dean Patricia A. Graham of the Harvard Graduate School of Education, and other luminaries.

The commission issued a report called “Making the Grade,” which lamented the woeful state of the schools. But our staff director Paul Petersen insisted that the commission was wrong in its dire conclusion and wrote a separate statement, expressing his dissent, in which he defended the schools.

I have served on many commissions and task forces but that was the only time that the staff director dissented from the group for whom he worked.

Paul Petersen was right in 1983.

He is right now.

Our public schools are not failing.

They have been a great success.

The attacks on them by Christian nationalists, billionaires, Catholic champions of vouchers, racists, extremists, and zealots for school choice is completely unjustified.

Their attack on the schools is an attack on our democracy.

It should end now.