Paul Thomas taught in South Carolina public high schools for many years, then became a professor of education at Furman University. He is an articulate critic of the decades-old “crisis in education.”
If you are confused by the different fonts, please open the link to read the original article.
People try to put us d-down (Talkin’ ’bout my generation)
Just because we get around (Talkin’ ’bout my generation)
Things they do look awful c-c-cold (Talkin’ ’bout my generation)
I hope I die before I get old (Talkin’ ’bout my generation)
“My Generation,” The Who
Born in 1961, I am a young boomer, but a boomer none the less.
I began teaching high school English in the ominous year of 1984, my first students having been born at the end of the same decade as I had, the 1960s.
That means across my career as an educator, I have taught most living generations, including my own. My grandchildren as Generation Alpha.
It does seem valid to note that humans experience generational shifts that can be identified in fair ways, especially in ways that may help those of us who teach better serve our students.
Those characteristics, however, are not universally defining and the cut off dates we decide are more blur than fact.
Being at the end of the boomer generation makes me often quite similar to Gen X folk I meet, including the first wave of students I taught high school.
What seems less valid, is the historical and current urge older generations have to negatively characterize younger generations, often through never-ending cycles of crying “Crisis!,” especially about education (notably reading and math).
The US has been riding a high tide of crisis rhetoric about reading—both that students can’t read and the students don’t read—for about a decade now.
It seems this cycle of crisis has reached a new stage according to The New York Times:
A report on the new data describes a decade-long “learning recession.”…
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 decade analyze attempts to compare, even with the caveat above, learning using test data that itself has shifted several times and ways even in a relatively brief decade window.
As I have noted about reading proficiency, the US has no standard definition of “reading proficiency” or “grade-level reading,” but instead, we have NAEP achievement levels (that are confusing and misleading) drawn from random sampling about every two years along with annual (except for the Covid blip) testing at the state level, where every state establishes its own cut scores for proficiency (with most state proficiency level overlapping with NAEP “basic”).
Analyses such as these also suffer from compelling but questionable metrics such as days, months, or years of learning. What metric researchers choose and then how data is displayed significantly impacts how the conclusions are interpreted.
Unfortunately, most analyses of education are designed to create the appearance of crisis.
While this rhetorical shift to “learning recession” is yet another oversell that likely will do more harm than good, the immediate responses should prompt even greater skepticism:
Tweet by David Frum, May 13, 2026:
Seven months ago, the David Frum Show hosted former Education Secretary Margaret Spellings for a discussion of why US K-12 scores are declining. Her answer: the decline in testing and accountability since 2015.
Resurrecting former Secretary of Education Spellings deserves a reminder about her misinformation and misunderstanding concerning tests data, which she used to falsely claim success for NCLB (the testing and accountability she is sad to see gone, although that claim isn’t true either):
During President George W. Bush’s tenure, NCLB was a corner stone of his agenda, and when then-Secretary Spellings announced that test scores were proving NCLB a success, Gerald Bracey and Stephen Krashen exposed one of two possible problems with the data.
Spellings either did not understand basic statistics or was misleading for political gain. Krashen detailed the deception or ineptitude by showing that the gain Spellings noted did occur from 1999 to 2005, a change of seven points. But he also revealed that the scores rose as follows: 1999 = 212; 2000 = 213; 2002 = 219; 2003 = 218 ; 2005 = 219. The jump Spellings used to promote NCLB and Reading First occurred from 2000 to 2002, before the implementation of Reading First. Krashen notes even more problems with claiming success for NCLB and Reading First, including:
“Bracey (2006) also notes that it is very unlikely that many Reading First children were included in the NAEP assessments in 2004 (and even 2005). NAEP is given to nine year olds, but RF is directed at grade three and lower. Many RF programs did not begin until late in 2003; in fact, Bracey notes that the application package for RF was not available until April, 2002.”
This recent claim from Spellings, then, must be taken with a gigantic grain of salt because most politicians see education crisis as an opportunity to score political points, not as a way to better serve students.
That we are really about to have testing and accountability nostalgia sold to us is almost laughable—if it weren’t so insidious.
Reasonable people have noted that our testing obsession has resulted in deforming what and how students read, more passages to answer question and less whole book reading.
But research being ignored, makes the opposite and evidence-based argument from Spellings’s self-serving observation:
Almost 63% of the variance in test performance was explained by social capital family income variables that influence the development of background knowledge. Background knowledge is a known predictor of standardized test results. Family income variables are immutable by schools. Only public policies, outside the control of school personnel, can influence family income….
Policy makers and education leaders should rethink the current reliance on standardized test results as the deciding factor to make decisions about student achievement, teacher quality, school effectiveness, and school leader quality. In effect, policies that use standardized test results to evaluate, reward, and sanction students and school personnel are doing nothing more than rewarding schools that serve advantaged students and punishing schools that serve disadvantaged students.
Crisis rhetoric has never and will never serve even good intentions well in terms of seeking better ways to serve the needs of all students, regardless of the generational differences.
But let’s also resist this new push to go back (?) to the good ol’ days of testing and accountability NCLB-style.
Let’s instead recycle an old (and silly then) chestnut from the Reagan era.
When it comes to crisis rhetoric as well as testing and accountability in education reform, just say no.
See Also
The Reading Crisis Paradox: On Moral Crisis and Thought-Terminating Clichés
How to Manufacture Crisis with Line Charts: NAEP Reading Edition
Recommended: Reading educational research: How to avoid getting statistically snookered, Gerald Bracey (2006)
“Kids Today”: Perpetually Dumb and Lazy as a Box of Rocks
Reading Crisis 1961: Tomorrow’s Illiterates
1959: “yet students enter college badly lacking in these fundamental skills”
Reading Full Books in Secondary English Language Arts Classrooms
Diane Ravitch's blog 