Learning Loss Was a Problem Even Before the Pandemic - Matthew Yglesias

Matthew Yglesias — Read time: 5 minutes

It’s well known that US education has only partially recovered from the learning loss induced by the pandemic and associated school closures. Less well-known is that America’s students were losing ground even before Covid-19.

What went wrong? New research from Stanford economists points the finger squarely at the obscure Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), which passed in 2015 with little public debate by a huge bipartisan vote. The bill, as critics noted at the time, represented a major retreat from the ambitions of the previous effort at education reform: Another law known by its four-letter acronym, 2001’s No Child Left Behind Act.

NCLB broke with the tradition of decentralization in US education and required states to start regularly testing their students and demanding that schools either meet standards of performance or show that they were making progress. NCLB did not magically transform US the educational system. But student learning, at least as measured on the National Assessment of Education Progress, did slowly rise during the NCLB years.

Nonetheless, NCLB generated significant backlash from multiple directions.

On the one hand, teachers unions resented the effort to hold their members’ job performance to a higher standard. On the other hand, many upscale parents didn’t love the idea of schools refocusing attention from their kids to the neediest cases. On the left, there were demands for more focus on systemic social justice. On the right, there were demands for a renewed emphasis on privatization on vouchers. From all corners was the reality that NCLB simply cut against the traditional organization of American schooling.

So with ESSA, the federal government stepped back and devolved more authority to the states. As a result, as the research documents, many states moved to “retreat from the use of output-based policy toward teachers.”

What exactly is “output-based policy”? Roughly speaking, it means increasing the pay of teachers who do a measurably better job of teaching students. It stands in contrast to “input-based policy,” such as giving higher salaries for more years of experience or extra graduate degrees. Throughout the NCLB years, reform-oriented mayors and chancellors championed output-based policies — often with the support of the federal Department of Education, especially during Barack Obama’s first term — and it worked.

But teachers didn’t like it. ESSA “consistently gave development of teacher evaluations and teacher policy back to the states,” the paper notes, and they used it to shift away from output-based policies and toward input-based ones.

The researchers found that this hurt students, albeit modestly, reducing learning on average by about 0.2-0.025 standard deviations.

That’s not a huge amount. But the estimate is based on comparing those states which changed policy during the relatively narrow 2015-2019 window with the majority of states that did not. In other words, the retreat from education reform during this period was harmful but relatively small.

Then came Covid, which hurt students in the states that imposed prolonged school closures and set them back even in the states that didn’t.

Unfortunately, the backsliding on education reform has only continued. The big cohort of reform mayors is long gone, blue-state legislatures are backtracking on things like mayoral control of schools, and conservative states are going all-in on privatization.

It’s a shame, because in many respects the Obama-era reform push came under the worst possible circumstances. State budgets were ravaged by the Great Recession, and a sluggish economy made it hard for young people to secure good jobs. This meant the push for output-based assessments of teachers was about sticks more than carrots.

The strong labor market of recent years, when school districts are wrestling with teacher shortages rather than layoffs, creates a much more politically appealing opportunity for merit pay. Rather than threatening the worst-performing teachers with losing their jobs, a solid output-based policy could simply make sure to adequately reward the very best teachers.

For that to happen, however, there has to be a national consensus that school quality matters. Unfortunately, that consensus has unraveled — which is ironic in light of the greatly increased salience of racial equity over the past decade. It was Black and Hispanic students who lost the most from ESSA, and Black and Hispanic students who lost the most from Covid-era school closures.

Yet reform efforts have often been opposed in the name of anti-racism. Academics such as Ibram X. Kendi have argued that the academic achievement gap that NCLB aspired to close is itself a racist idea, founded on the observation that Black and Hispanic students score worse on tests of reading and math than do White and Asian ones. If the tests show a gap, according to Kendi, that must mean the tests are racist. Once that idea is out there, the idea of using tests to measure teacher effectiveness is hard to advocate for.

There is an older, wiser perspective on education reform: The tests were telling us about failures of the system, and with improved management schools could do a better job of teaching Black and Hispanic kids how to read and do math.

It’s certainly true in retrospect that NCLB was guilty of overpromising. The idea of completely eradicating achievement gaps was unrealistic given the different background conditions facing different kids. And labeling schools as “failing” for achieving less than 100% proficiency among their students was unduly harsh and promoted misunderstandings about the actual policy.

Still, the lesson from the last few decades of education reform is clear. When America really tries to improve educational outcomes, it can. But when the political will fades, or a pandemic comes, that progress can start to slip — and then collapse altogether. Given the current temper of national politics, it’s hard to imagine a return to the earnest bipartisanship of 20 years ago. But America’s students deserve it.