Are children learning? Politicians don't seem to care

Republicans have gone all in on school choice, giving parents the ability to buy the schooling they prefer for their children. Democrats support whatever the teachers' unions want. But neither party has an education policy centered on student achievement, writes Dana Goldstein in the New York Times.

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Politicians may argue about library books, locker rooms and privilege walks, but not about tackling the lowest reading scores in decades or how to recover from the pandemic, she writes.

“Right now, there are no education goals for the country,” said Arne Duncan, who served as President Barack Obama’s first secretary of education after running Chicago’s public school system. “There are no metrics to measure goals, there are no strategies to achieve those goals and there is no public transparency.”

“There is no talk of achievement gaps, and little talk even of upward mobility or opportunity,” said Michael Petrilli, the president of the Fordham Institute and a former education official under President George W. Bush.

"Far from the spotlight of national politics," Goldstein reports on a racially and economically diverse Louisiana school that's adopted a knowledge-rich curriculum. Fifth-grade teacher Lauren Cascio reviewed vocabulary words -- heretic, rational, skepticism, heliocentric -- for a discussion on the Renaissance, the Scientific Revolution and the Reformation.

Over the course of an hour, 10- and 11-year-olds broke into groups to discuss why Leonardo da Vinci was interested in human anatomy. They wrote about how the ideas of Copernicus and Galileo differed from those of the ancient Greeks.

Students used books, pencils and highlighters, not computers or tablets.

"One positive development of the past decade has been a shift toward a research-backed focus on structured phonics in the early grades — to successful effect," writes Goldstein. Now attention is shifting toward research showing that good readers "need a strong vocabulary and knowledge about the world" in order to understand what they decode.

In the quest to boost reading scores in the accountability era, schools often minimized time for social studies and science, the courses that boost vocabulary, knowledge and reading comprehension, Barbara Davidson of the Knowledge Matters Campaign tells Goldstein. That pendulum is swinging back.

Education reformers need to focus more on what happens in the classroom, less on policy, argues Robert Pondiscio. "Help teachers teach better" by giving them high-quality training, high-quality curricula and streamlined, doable-by-a-human-being workloads.