Was the United States Once a Global Leader in Educational Metrics? Have We Fallen From Those Lofty Heights? No and No

A pervasive narrative in American discourse and media holds that the nation’s education system has suffered a catastrophic decline from a fabled “golden age.” This conventional wisdom suggests that American students once led the world in academic achievement but have since fallen behind due to failing schools and lowered standards. Both sides of that narrative are untrue - we never were a global leader in average educational outcomes, and we have not suffered any kind of a unique recent stumble that peer nations have not. The reality is an old one: our “average” students perform respectably compared to international peers; our top students are among the world’s very best; the curriculum taught today is significantly more advanced than in the past. The true crisis is not a general decline, but the ongoing, persistent, and specific failures of relatively small groups of disadvantaged students, who have been the policy obsession of the educational establishment for half a century. This inequality has been exacerbated by a global15ish-year downturn that has affected every nation, not just the U.S., but precisely because it’s global, talk of an American crisis is strange and unhelpful. Also, everyone knows that it’s the phones.

Preliminary: Pre-Compulsory K-12 and Pre-Rigorous Testing

A good deal of this debate depends on reference to an entirely vague “before,” ye olden days when things were good. This is particularly frustrating because the time horizons we’re dealing with here are actually quite brief from a historical standpoint: the last state to adopt a compulsory schooling law did so in 1918, and those laws were riddled with exemptions and often not enforced, such that a general expectation that kids below the age of 12 or so should definitely be going to school only really developed post-World War II. Meanwhile, the rise of rigorous educational assessments (as distinct from intelligence tests, which are older) is even more recent. Often, the 1960s are used as a benchmark for when reliable international comparisons started. That decade marked the establishment of permanent organizations dedicated to national and international measurement, fundamentally changing assessment’s role from merely classifying individuals to evaluating entire educational systems. The International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement was founded in 1958, while the first administration of the National Assessment of Educational Progress or NAEP took place in 1969, effectively bookending the decade. It’s not that much