Still Left Behind: How America’s Schools Keep Failing Our Children
By Katharine B. Stevens | Meredith Tracy
REPORT
September 21, 2020
Key Points
Since President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the 1965 Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) into law, K–12 public schools have assumed an increasingly prominent role in American society, now constituting the nation’s core strategy for promoting social and economic mobility across generations.
Over the same period, the US has undertaken ever-intensifying school reform and steadily increased spending, in ongoing attempts to raise the chronically low achievement of the disadvantaged children targeted by the ESEA.
Yet more than one-third of lower-income eighth graders still fail to demonstrate even minimal competence in reading and math, and wide achievement gaps persist in every state.
Pursuing a broader range of strategies to advance child well-being may yield greater value than continued reform efforts and further increased spending on public schools.
Executive Summary
Over the five decades since the passage of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) in 1965, public schooling has assumed an increasingly prominent role in US domestic policy, now constituting the nation’s core strategy for promoting social and economic mobility across generations and a major proportion of human capital development spending. Yet, even as K–12 schools have become ever more central to US society, the nation has continued to grapple with persistently low achievement among disadvantaged children and large achievement gaps between more and less advantaged student subgroups.
This report explores one dimension of this pervasive problem, focusing especially on the period from 2003 to 2017 when the federal No Child Left Behind (NCLB) school reform law was in effect. The report examines eighth-grade achievement as the outcome of substantial time—usually nine years—spent in school, using data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), long viewed as an important barometer of student achievement across the nation and a key measure of school reform success.
The report focuses particularly on achievement gaps based on socioeconomic status, which have endured for decades. It describes the proportions of lower-income and higher-income eighth graders in each state and the District of Columbia who failed to demonstrate basic levels of reading and math competence in 2003 and 2017, the achievement gap between the two groups at both points in time, and changes in both performance and gaps over that period. The report documents the strikingly poor performance of lower-income children in 2017 and the wide achievement gaps that persisted in every state in 2017.
While improvement in children’s NAEP results over the NCLB period fell short of what reformers had hoped for, it is generally asserted that NCLB, together with prior reforms, raised achievement for disadvantaged children, particularly the lowest performing children and children of color. Yet media reports and commentary on NAEP trends have typically stressed a limited set of metrics, leaving important outcomes insufficiently examined.
First, a tendency to headline national averages has drawn attention away from large variation among states. Second, descriptions of student subgroup performance often emphasize differences in average NAEP scores, excluding crucial data on the actual performance levels that children have achieved. Third, reports on the percentages of students scoring at NAEP’s three achievement levels commonly lump all students together, obscuring large achievement gaps among student subgroups. Finally, state NAEP outcomes are almost always reported without the policy-relevant context of state-level per-student expenditures that those outcomes cost to produce.
This report aims to fill these gaps, revealing a more nuanced picture than typical accounts present. As often noted, the average national percentage of eighth graders identified as lower income who scored below NAEP’s lowest level of Basic on reading and math assessments declined from 2003 to 2017. But performance across states was highly uneven. Declines in most states were small, and achievement gaps between lower-income and higher-income eighth graders remained substantial.
Moreover, in almost all states, the group categorized as “lower income” included a much larger percentage of higher-income children in 2017 than in 2003. It is therefore not clear to what degree the gains of that group resulted from improved performance of children who were actually low income rather than changes in the group’s composition due to the addition of higher-income, higher-performing children to that group.
The report’s most important finding is that large proportions of lower-income eighth graders in 2017 still failed to demonstrate even minimum levels of competence in reading and math, as indicated by scoring below NAEP Basic. This was the case in every state—even those that appeared to have improved the most from 2003 to 2017. That is, more than 50 years after President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Elementary and Secondary School Act into law as a cornerstone of his War on Poverty legislation and close to 14 years since the nation’s most far-reaching school reform initiative was launched, the disadvantaged children long targeted by reforms and increased spending were still failing in large numbers.
Despite initial appearances, this report does not contradict accounts of notably improved school performance over the past decades. Rather, it directs attention to an under-examined aspect of public schooling: the persistently low achievement outcomes of lower-income students, often obscured by a prevailing focus on incremental improvements in average scores. The degree to which all children achieve at least basic levels of competence in reading and math over eight or nine years in school, as described in this report, warrants greater public and policy attention.
See Also
Video ~ September 28, 2020
Op-Ed ~ November 30, 2020
Event ~ October 29, 2020