The New York Times published an article yesterday about the fall and stagnation of scores in reading and math in the U.S. it was written by Claire Cain Miller, Francesca Paris and Sarah Mervosh. The declines are no longer the fault of the pandemic. They cut across income, racial, and geographic divides.

The link above goes to s gift article, so please open and review the graphs and finish the article.

The authors attribute the stagnation to two likely phenomena: 1) easing the testing-and-accountability pressure of the NCLB-Race to the Top era; and 2) the ubiquity of Ed-tech in the schools.

I reject the claim that scores have stagnated because of the easing of NCLB-RTTT pressures. Sure, they increased pressure on students, teachers, and principals, but their negative effects undermined the quality of education. Picking the right bubble on a standardized test became the goal of education.

Campbell’s Law says that when a measure becomes the goal, it loses its value as a measure.

Social scientist Donald Campbell wrote that “the more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor.”

Another way of putting it: “the more important a metric is in social decision making, the more likely it is to be manipulated.”

Lest we forget: NCLB brought us cheating on an industrial scale. Rigging the system to improve scores. Narrowing the curriculum, with schools making time for test prep by dropping the arts, recess, physical education, and allotting less time for subjects that were not tested, such as civics, history, foreign languages, and science. Fewer teachers assigned whole books, but instead focused on short passages, the kind that appear on standardized tests.

The tests themselves are flawed. The scoring is flawed. The underlying assumption that every question has a right answer and only one right answer is bad teaching.

I have written long essays and chapters in books about how standardized testing is toxic to the principles of good education. Guessing “the right answer” does not promote critical thinking, which might lead a student to pick a different answer or two right answers. As I have written elsewhere, asking the right question matters more than guessing the right answer.

Testing experts like Daniel Koretz have demonstrated their limitations. Todd Farley, in “Making the Grades,” showed how shabbily the tests are scored.

As the Times‘ article points out, other countries have experienced the same score decline and stagnation, even without NCLB and RTTT.

For God’s sake and for our children’s sake, let us not return to the horrid era of test and punish. Let it go. Students may get bigger test scores under pressure, but they may be less interested in learning.

Many European nations have concluded, as I showed in several articles posted here last week, that Ed-tech in the classroom has dampened students’ attention, persistence, and interest in learning. Sweden and Norway are pulling the plugs. Norway never fell for the tech revolution. See the Sweden article here. See the Norway post here.

If the testing industry and the heroes of yesteryear’s failed reforms want another go at killing love of learning, the parents of America will have to organize and stop them with massive opt outs. Again.

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The Times’ story begins like this;

Something troubling is happening in U.S. education.

Almost everywhere in America, students are performing worse than their peers were 10 years ago, according to new, district-level test score data released Wednesday by the Educational Opportunity Project at Stanford.

Compared with a decade earlier, reading scores were down last year in 83 percent of school districts where data was available. Math scores were down in 70 percent. The declines have affected both rich and poor districts, and crossed racial and geographic divides….

The new data provides the first national comparison of school districts through 2025, and offers a detailed picture of how individual school districts have performed over time. It underscores that many districts have experienced a long-term slump in student achievement, not just a blip during the pandemic.

From 2017 to 2019, students lost as much ground in reading as they did during the pandemic, and reading scores continued to fall at a similar rate through 2024.

Immediately after the pandemic, there was hope that students would recover quickly. The new data shows that scores inched upward in reading last year, and have climbed more steadily in math since 2022. But it has been nowhere near enough to make up for lost ground, researchers said….

The biggest losses have been among the lowest-achieving students….

Education experts say there is no single reason for the declines. But the timing provides some clues.

Students’ test scores had been increasing since 1990 — then abruptly stopped in the mid-2010s. That coincided with two events: an easing of federal school accountability under No Child Left Behind, which was replaced in 2015, and the rise of smartphones, social media and personalized school laptops.

The pandemic then accelerated learning declines, especially for the poorest students. Some pandemic effects have lingered. Student absenteeism, for example, remains higher than prepandemic.

In one in three school districts in the United States, students are reading a full grade level lower than they were in 2015…

Some experts believe that the end of No Child Left Behind, the contentious school accountability law signed by President George W. Bush in 2002, explains some of the recent test score declines.

The law set a goal that all students would be proficient in reading and math, and schools that did not show progress could face penalties. It coincided with a period of rising test scores, especially in math, though reading scores improved more modestly. Low-performing students saw the biggest gains.

The law, though, was deeply unpopular with many educators and parents. Critics said it put an outsize focus on testing, pushing schools to teach to the test and spend less time on other important subjects, like the arts or social studies. In 2015, Congress replaced it, and many states dialed back on requirements. 

Like many who have studied the law, Brian A. Jacob, professor of education policy at the University of Michigan, showed that it increased test scores but had problematic elements.

“It was not a cure-all, but I think it really did improve student achievement,” he said. “There’s evidence that school accountability does change behaviors of teachers and administrators and probably parents and students.”

Beyond the policy specifics, its passage reflected a nationwide, bipartisan push to improve education, some experts said, that the country seems to have lost in its absence.

Yet some other countries have seen similar declines in scores, suggesting additional factors may be at play.

Something happened globally around the same time: the proliferation of devices, at home and in school.

Nearly half of American teenagers now say they are online “almost constantly,” compared with just under a quarter who said that a decade ago, according to Pew Research Center. Virtually all schools give children laptops or tablets in class, as early as kindergarten.

Few rigorous studies have teased out the role of devices in academic outcomes. Yet educators say there’s no question that swiping has decreased students’ focus and persistence, and time on devices has displaced time spent reading or studying. Far more teenagers — nearly one in three — now say they “never or hardly ever” read for fun.

In turn, schools expect less from students, assigning fewer whole books and simplifying the curriculum, said Carol Jago, associate director of the California Reading and Literature Project at the University of California, Los Angeles.

“There’s no other way, except volume, in order to become a really proficient, fluent, avid reader,” she said.

Radnor Township, an affluent district outside Philadelphia, is one of the highest scoring in Pennsylvania. Teachers still expect students to read full books, including novels like “To Kill a Mockingbird.” The vast majority of students are proficient readers. Still, fewer score at an advanced level on state tests — under 40 percent last year, down from 51 percent in 2015.