What People Want From Our Schools Has Never Been Accomplished, Anywhere, Ever

educating an entire society into prosperity is a radical modern fantasy, not "getting things back to normal"

and they all went to CalTech and developed a killer pitchdeck

I have many, many frustrations when it comes to arguing about education, but perhaps the biggest one lies in how much time people spend referring to some sort of mythical past in which we “did things the right way,” in which “the education system worked,” before “the schools stopped teaching.” It’s a relentless tic, in this discursive space, and a deeply destructive one; by the standards of the very people who make such waves to the past, those halcyon days are mythical. They never existed. Anywhere. But I think the issue is broader and deeper than that: it’s not just that there was a time when we did school better than we’re doing it now, but that we never before really attempted to meet the educational standards reformers push now. The notion that the academic life of school and then college and a professional class life can be universalized is profoundly new, and the idea that schooling can close socioeconomic and racial gaps is too.

There are a lot of different expressions of the declinist attitude, though most of them are vague. A common one, and the easiest to squash, is the idea that the United States used to be a leader in international educational comparisons and now is not. This myth flows from the mouths of politicians like, well, like all sorts of other myths from the mouths of politicians. But it’s easily disproven - the history of American performance in educational comparisons with other developed nations is almost universally uninspiring, no matter the era. There are reasons to doubt some of the international results (Chinese-style manipulation, I suspect, is not just a Chinese phenomenon) but overall the reality is clear: we can’t get back to number one because we were never there, not even close. I don’t, however, think that this is really cause for commotion, given the particular composition of the American educational performance distribution, which is not the same as that of any other OECD country.

As I’ve said, poor educational averages in this country are mostly a distributional issue: the median American student does alright, and our top-tier students are the envy of the world, but our numbers are dragged down by truly terribly-performing bottom percentiles that drive policy and politics to a remarkable degree. Those kids on the bottom matter, but their awful outcomes are amortized across public understanding of American schools in a way that just does not fit the reality. Now, on top of that, we have a broad developed-world slowdown in test scores, largely and erroneously associated with the pandemic. This slowdown really started around 2010 or 2012 and has been steeper in other rich countries like Germany, France, the Netherlands, and Finland, but for petty political reasons is often discussed as being an American problem. See that linked post for details. We’ve never done good in international comparisons, but this is a product of particularly awful bottom 25%/20%/10% performance, and in a context where rich countries have been seeing declines in test scores, we’re not doing particularly poorly at all. These are not the narratives you’ll find in the US media.

If I’m right and claims about an American educational “crisis” are wrong, why is it that there’s so much constant crisis talk? Why can I pull headline after headline about American educational failure from any year in at least the last 35 years? Three primary reasons: one, we introduced tons of people into schooling that were once systematically excluded from schools, and this unsurprisingly resulted in many more marginal students; two, we defined both educational and socioeconomic goals that have never been achieved anywhere; and three, because the neoliberal era and the age of globalization had devastating effects on the wages and employment of workers without educational credentials, putting immense and artificial pressure on an educational system that was never designed to be the primary means through which Americans find jobs.

Equality in Education and Education with the Intent of Achieving Equality Are Very New

For most of recorded history, formal education was explicitly understood to be the province of a select minority, and no serious thinker questioned this assumption. In ancient Athens (the civilization Western culture has so often claimed as the origin of its intellectual tradition) schooling was available only to free male citizens of means. Even Plato, who thought more systematically about education than perhaps anyone in the ancient world, built his entire educational philosophy around the premise that different people were suited for different roles and that rigorous intellectual training was appropriate only for the few who would become philosopher-kings. The medieval university system that emerged in Europe from the 11th century onward was designed for an extremely narrow clerical and administrative elite; literacy itself was a specialized professional skill rather than a baseline expectation for ordinary people. As late as the 19th century, when mass public schooling was beginning to take shape in Europe and America, the explicit and stated goal of elementary education was functional literacy and basic numeracy (enough to be a productive worker and citizen) while anything beyond that was understood to be for a different kind of person entirely. This “tracking” was not incidental; it was the point.

The modern assumption that all children should be educated to the same standard, and evaluated against the same benchmarks, is a remarkably recent invention and was explicitly contested even as it emerged. When Horace Mann campaigned for common schools in America in the 1840s, he was arguing for universal basic schooling, not universal college preparation; the idea that every child should be readied for higher education would have struck him as absurd. By the turn of the 20th century, John Dewey was justifying his support for free publicly-financed schooling by arguing that every child had the ability to succeed in academics. (A chapter of my first book, The Cult of Smart, is dedicated to the creation of the educational blank-slate mindset, and as I say there, Dewey was both a hero and a villain in the history of public school.) Still, the assumption that the goal for all students is to excel in a curriculum that goes far beyond basic literacy and numeracy remained very foreign for a long time. The comprehensive high school model that became dominant in mid-century America was explicitly built on tracking: vocational, general, and academic pathways that sorted students by presumed ability, and directed them toward different futures, were ubiquitous. Whatever one thinks of the values embedded in that system, it reflected a broad consensus, held by educators and policymakers across the ideological spectrum, that not all students were headed to the same destination and that pretending otherwise would serve no one well.

If the idea that all students are capable of completing the same curriculum (equality in education) is quite new, the notion that schools can economic and social close gaps rooted in race and class, or even bear primary responsibility for doing so (equality from education) is newer still - and would have been not merely unfamiliar but essentially incoherent to most educational thinkers before the mid-20th century. For most of the history of mass public schooling in America, the system was explicitly designed to reflect and reproduce social hierarchy, not disrupt it. The common school movement of the 19th century aimed at civic assimilation and basic functional literacy, not equality of outcome. And when serious thinkers did engage with the relationship between schooling and social class, the dominant view was roughly the opposite of the modern one: influential education theorists like Edward Thorndike and his contemporaries believed that educational attainment tracked social position because ability was distributed unequally, and that the school’s job was to identify and sort that ability, not to compensate for circumstances. The idea that poverty was an injustice that the school system had the capacity to solve and was obligated to solve, meanwhile, would have seemed bizarre.

The specific framing of schools as instruments of racial and socioeconomic equity is almost entirely a product of the post-Brown, post-Great Society period and thus roughly 60 to 70 years old, a blink in the history of formal education. The Civil Rights Movement, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, the subsequent decades of desegregation litigation, A Nation at Risk, and the eventual codification of this logic in No Child Left Behind in 2002 and its successors created a framework in which closing demographic achievement gaps became the central metric by which schools were judged. This goal is of course among the most noble in all of human culture. The trouble is that, as I and others have argued, education can’t close that gaps. Seeing schooling as a tool of equality was a genuine revolution in how Americans thought about the purpose of education, but it was layered on top of institutions that were never built for that purpose, staffed by professionals not trained for it, and asked to compensate for inequalities generated by housing policy, labor markets, healthcare access, and generational wealth gaps that schools have no power to touch. The ambition was noble! The theory of change was, to put it gently… optimistic.

And there’s a particularly tricky dynamic that our educational system, schools, and teachers have been dealing with ever since: the goal of educating everyone and the goal of creating equality in and through the classroom are directly at odds with each other.

When You Start to Educate Everybody, You See More Failure

Why is our educational discourse forever caught in a crisis narrative, if there is no crisis? Part of the reason is that we opened schools up to everybody, not just the academically inclined, and the inevitable result has been that our outcomes look much worse. You can see this very clearly in shifting attitudes towards college; for most of the past one hundred and twenty-five or so years, higher education was assumed without controversy to be appropriate only for those who were from the white male landed elite and had ambitions to be leaders of men, and/or those with special academic talent. The modern egalitarian attitude towards college would have appeared very foreign. (And, indeed, the idea that college was primarily vocational - a means to get a good job - would have seemed strange at elite institutions like those in the Ivy League, for much of their history, as their students were already economic winners who did not need such vocational help.) But of course, as you expand access beyond the most academically inclined, the median performer naturally looks worse. Which is why admissions selectivity is inversely correlated with dropout rates and why the cost of remediation skyrocketed as more and more people started to attend college.

via Mark Krantowitz at The College Investor

Expanded access to education in general is an absolute good, of course. But if you know anything about my obsession with selection bias, you can predict the outcome: when you expand access from a population that excludes more students to one that excludes fewer, you’re very likely to see declining performance. Throughout the history of education, higher performers have been more likely to already been in formal education than poorer performers. Charter schools go to remarkable lengths to exclude poorly-performing students for a reason, the same reason that people in the private school world are often deeply ambivalent about private school vouchers: an actual open-door policy at any school will inevitable depress performance, because opening your doors invites in the less talented students and educational metrics are dominantly determined by student inputs rather than school-side or teacher-side variables. You let in more kids from a more-restrictive baseline and you’re going to get worse averages! Here’s a graph that I’ve shared before that elegantly demonstrates how participation is negatively associated with outcomes.

As you can see, state average SAT scores are negatively correlated with the portion of students who are taking the test. (Data.) Why would that be? Because in the states where the test is taken least often, whether because they’re states with overall less academically-capable students or because they’re big ACT states or a combination of the two, in the lowest-participation states, only the most academically inclined take the test. If you live in a state like South Dakota, where almost none of the eligible high school students take the SAT, you’re only taking the test if you think it’s really going to advantage you in the college application process. Meanwhile, in states like Massachusetts or Connecticut where the overall metrics are very good and taking the test is normalized, you’re getting a lot more less-talented students taking the test. Because there are all manner of structural ways in which the more talented are more likely to participate in various educational endeavors, expanding the portion of students being educated will almost always reduce average performance on various indicators.

Another perfect example is the story of French conscription. Late twentieth-century France, like many of its European neighbors, faced a persistent problem with unemployment among young people. Lawmakers hit on a promising policy change: abolishing compulsory military service for men. At the time, French men were obligated to serve a term in the armed forces. (Such a policy is still in effect in South Korea and Israel.) As is common with any military draft, those who excelled academically had already been able to reliably obtain an exemption to pursue university studies, but those without demonstrable academic ability had no such escape. The thinking among French officials was straightforward: release these young men from their military obligations and they would then spend their early 20s in higher education, improving their odds in the labor market. Because the policy change was tied to a specific birth cohort, it produced both a sharp jump in university enrollment and a textbook natural experiment, with a clean cutpoint separating those French men subject to the old rules from those who were not. An entire generation of men who would otherwise have been in uniform suddenly found themselves free to enroll in college.

Yet despite a measurable rise in total years of schooling across the population, the policy proved inert where it mattered most, as neither wages nor the unemployment rate among the affected French men meaningfully improved. Strikingly, the new policy barely moved the needle on college completion rates either. Young men were entering universities in greater numbers, yes, but they weren’t finishing. Conscription, it turned out, had functioned as an informal filter, keeping the least academically prepared students away from higher education. But dismantling that filter did nothing to change what those students were capable of once inside the classroom. The cohorts freed from service simply weren’t well positioned to thrive academically in the first place. Aptitude, in the end, overwhelmed policy design. Even at enormous scale, even in one of the world’s richest and most institutionally sophisticated nations, expanding access to higher education for a population that had previously been screened out produced essentially nothing in either educational or economic terms.

Though the effect was broader and more diffuse, in may ways this dynamic is exactly what happened in the United States and the developed world writ large in the past 75 years: we brought more and more students into the formal school system, then onto the “college track” and into college. And as that has happened, as more and more students have been pulled into the educational data, we have unsurprisingly seen worsening performance. You can imagine how this has changed our overall perceptions of the health of our system: the median American is probably doing meaningfully better than those of previous eras in terms of overall academic aptitude. But the median American in formal schooling has gotten worse. Any notion that we are dealing with an educational crisis, from a historical perspective, that does not take this dynamic into consideration is badly flawed.

The Collapse of the Labor Market for Uneducated Workers Created the Educational Crisis Narrative

The other core reason everyone always thinks our school system is in a state of crisis is because we have built policy in such a way that we have no clear mechanism for improving people’s incomes and employment numbers other than sending them to college, but not everyone is equally academically gifted, so we’ve been pushing tons of people into college who are simply not prepared for that level of work, leading to two bad outcomes: one, the college dropout problem, and two, a widespread perception that college standards are dropping. Everybody thinks our schools are in crisis all the time because they’re being forced to do something they were never meant to do, which is to make everyone college-ready, and they’re being forced to do that because we have seen jobs that provide a living wage without a college diploma evaporate. All of this education discourse (all of it, all of it, all of it) is downstream of the reality of the neoliberal turn, globalization, and deindustrialization. We decided that we didn’t want jobs that don’t require a college degree anymore, many people are not academically equipped to get a college degree, and so we manufactured this “crisis.”

Here you can see the influence of scientific and technological development in the 20th century, a part of the “magic century” the world experienced from 1870ish to 1970ish. As you can see, at the turn of the 20th century one out of three employed Americans was working in agriculture. Then that share of the labor force decline precipitously. Why? Because of the mechanization of farming equipment and vehicles, because of dramatic leaps in fertilizer quality, because of the rise of the modern science of horticulture…. Producing food is about as elementary a thing as human societies do, and so it’s unsurprising that in an unprecedented period of technological, infrastructural, and scientific growth, agriculture was the site of a particularly extraordinary amount of development. And in addition to producing more food and more profitable food (though not better food nutritionally), all of this progress dramatically reduced the amount of farm labor that was needed. Farms still employ people, but the incredible reduction in the number of people needed to produce X amount of food has had considerable labor-market consequences. All of this is progress, obviously. But you do need jobs for people to do in order to live, and farmwork was once something you could do without any formal education. Now, it isn’t a major part of the labor force at all.

And here we have the next part. Manufacturing employment peaked in the American midcentury, during the remarkable expansion of productivity and growth that followed the second world war. Going to work at the factory at the edge of town was a mass phenomenon for several decades, not just a Bruce Springsteen cliché. Not coincidentally, union membership also peaked in the post-WWII era; all kinds of jobs can be unionized, but manufacturing and industry are uniquely well-suited to the kinds of appeals that labor unions make to workers. Unionized workers made more money and enjoyed better workplace protections, and most of these jobs only required a high school education or had no educational requirements at all. Post World War II, workers poured into factories and foundries and industrial worksites of all kinds in search of stable jobs, decent pay, real benefits, and unions that could represent their interests.

But, well, the other part of the Bruce Springsteen cliché is that the factory at the edge of town closed down. The neoliberal globalization movement (from Bretton Woods to the GATT to NAFTA to the WTO etc) dismantled barriers to American corporations sending jobs to Mexica or China or Vietnam or other places with cheaper labor, while automation erased some types of employment altogether. Contrary to mythology, the United States still does a lot of manufacturing. But we don’t employ a lot of people in manufacturing anymore. And so there you have another leg of the stool knocked out from under the worker without a college degree. Agriculture couldn’t absorb the uneducated American 20-something after the beginning of the 20th century; now manufacturing couldn’t either. The jobs that had once formed the backbone of working-class economic life, jobs you could walk into with a strong back and a willingness to show up, were gone, shipped overseas or handed off to machines. What remained was a labor market increasingly sorted into two tiers, a professional class requiring credentials and a low-wage service sector that couldn’t support a family. The middle, where a person of ordinary academic ability could earn a decent living through physical or semi-skilled work, had been hollowed out.

And this is precisely where the school system enters the picture - not as the cause of any of this, but as the solution designated for the problem by generations of politicians and policymakers, liberal and conservative, from Reagan to Obama. Having made a series of deliberate economic policy choices that destroyed the viable labor market for people without college degrees, we then turned to our educators and demanded that they fix it. Make everyone college-ready! Ensure that every child, regardless of aptitude, temperament, or circumstance, can compete in a credential-dependent economy! Our schools and teachers didn’t create the conditions that made a high school diploma economically worthless; policymakers, trade negotiators, and corporate lobbyists did that. But our teachers and schools and districts are the ones held accountable for the aftermath. Every moral panic about dropout rates, every hand-wringing report about falling standards, every political speech demanding “market-based education reform” is, at its root, an exercise in displacement, a way of talking about the consequences of neoliberalism without ever naming the cause. We offshored the jobs that didn’t require a degree, and then declared a crisis in the institutions that were never designed to give everyone a degree in the first place.

I have often referred to the old saying about the man who only has a hammer and thus sees a world full of nails, in this context. The neoliberal turn resulted in a brutally anti-union environment, helping destroy the traditional driver of middle-class prosperity, and brought about policies that enabled the shipping of jobs that didn’t require a college degree off to Mexico and China and Vietnam. And when the elites at the top of the system looked around for a new source of jobs and wage growth, they found college. So pushing everybody into the college pipeline became the thing to do, and the next thing you know it’s a bipartisan consensus and both Democrats and Republicans are clamoring for it, and suddenly we’ve got a perceived educational crisis on our hands - never mind that our schooling problems don’t start in school and college education can’t actually sustain an entire labor force in an advanced economy.

We Don’t Know If What We’re Trying is Possible

The United States has embarked on a project that is historically unprecedented: the attempt to make every student “college-ready” and to build a labor market that presumes universal higher education. The degree to which “college for all” is an explicit demand can be lawyered forever; if you’d like to say “No one actually wants college for all,” go ahead. The simple reality is that making all students college ready has long been a thinktank demand, a politician promise, and a goal of charter school networks; whether you want to call it a strawman or not, the idea that the entire labor market is going to flow through schooling, that we’re going to educate our citizenry into employability, is a central reality of modern American economics and politics. In The Cult of Smart I quoted (I believe) every president from Carter through Obama as endorsing education as the path to prosperity. And in the neoliberal era, where so much of the labor market for uneducated citizens has been dismantled, nobody has a very good idea of how people reach the good life without education. So we’re trying to educate everybody. Simple!

I need people to understand this: no society in history has ever achieved such a thing, not even the most aggressively meritocratic or education-obsessed ones. There are countries with better aggregate education data than ours (although there’s always caveats and context) and there’s countries with a higher percentage of adults with college degrees (although in some countries college-level work is similar to the high school-level work that American students do). There are no countries that have built an economy where every worker actually possesses the kind of skills that most are thinking of when they think of a college education, and there are no societies in history where education has been the dominant creator of jobs and financial opportunity in the way implied by the rhetoric we routinely hear from politicians. The idea that we can take a population of tens of millions of young people, with all the diversity of ability, interest, and circumstance that entails, and funnel them into a single academic track is a radical social experiment, and the fact that there’s still so much constant angst about education suggests that it’s not going well. Pretending that we’re just trying to get education “back to normal” is a way of laundering a wildly ambitious scheme into inevitability, as if the failure to achieve this impossible standard is a deviation rather than the natural outcome of the attempt.

To imagine that we are simply replicating the supposed good old days by demanding college readiness for all is to ignore the fact that no country’s default has ever looked like this. And the constant escalation of crisis rhetoric has consequences. By treating universal college readiness as the baseline, we set ourselves up for perpetual crisis, because the system cannot deliver what it promises. Students who do not thrive in academic environments are cast as failures, even though they may possess skills and talents that societies have historically valued in other ways. Employers, meanwhile, inflate credential requirements not because the work demands it, but because the education arms race has made degrees into proxies for discipline and compliance. The result is a labor market that is both exclusionary and brittle, built on the false premise that education can be the sole engine of economic life. To insist that this is “normal” is to deny history, and to guarantee disappointment.

If you want to go ahead and grind whatever your particular axe about education happens to be, knock yourself out. But please, stop saying things like “I just want us to get back to a world where kids were graduating high school with basic skills!” Because the world you’re referring to never existed.