Has America given up on children's learning?

Boston Globe

10-05-2025

He has begun a bevy of investigations into how schools handle race and transgender issues, and has demanded that the curriculum be 'patriotic' -- a priority he does not have the power to enact, since curriculum is set by states and school districts.
None of it adds up to an agenda on learning.
Democrats, for their part, often find themselves standing up for a status quo that seems to satisfy no one. Governors and congressional leaders are defending the Department of Education as Trump has threatened to abolish it. Liberal groups are suing to block funding cuts. But none of that amounts to an agenda on learning, either.
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All of this is true despite the fact that reading scores are the lowest they have been in decades, after a pandemic that devastated children by shuttering their schools and sending them deeper into the realm of screens and social media.
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'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.'
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Many Americans will recall that on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, President George W. Bush was in a second grade classroom in Florida as children read a story called 'The Pet Goat.'
What they may not remember is why Bush was there that morning. The president was promoting No Child Left Behind, which he was struggling to get through Congress. It would eventually pass with bipartisan support, instituting a national program of annual standardized testing in reading and math.
While Obama critiqued how No Child Left Behind was carried out, he agreed with its core vision and advanced it. States were prodded to adopt the Common Core, a set of shared curriculum standards, which brought changes like more thesis-driven writing assignments and a greater emphasis on conceptual understanding in math.
In those years, Washington sought to hold educators accountable for raising students' scores on tests linked to the new standards. Schools could be labeled 'failing.' Teachers with low evaluation scores could even lose their tenure protections.
It worked, at least for a time. Achievement in reading and math increased, especially among the lowest-performing students. But tying punishments to test scores led to a predictable outcome: a curriculum that, in too many schools, centered on test prep. And with principals focused intently on raising scores in reading and math, they whittled away time for social studies and science.
All of this contributed to a potent anti-education-reform movement, led by teachers and parents. On the right, there was resistance to any kind of federal mandate over local schools. On the left, a vocal group of parents began to refuse standardized tests.
The politics of top-down school accountability had become untenable. In 2015, Obama signed the Every Student Succeeds Act, largely unraveling his own education agenda. Bipartisan school reform was dead.
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Since then, Republicans have embraced a free market vision of parental rights, in which as many tax dollars as possible are freed to help parents pay for private school tuition, homeschooling and for-profit virtual schooling. That movement accelerated during the COVID-19 pandemic, when conservative parents organized to resist school closures, mask mandates and progressive ideas about race and gender in the curriculum.
Meanwhile, Democrats drew closer to their traditional allies, the teachers unions. During the 1990s and early 2000s, the party had engaged in an internal debate on whether to expand the number of public charter schools, an idea that Obama supported. Many charters were built around the conviction that poor children deserve an academically rigorous education -- but they largely were not unionized. President Joe Biden, a staunch labor ally, marginalized the charter school sector, despite the fact that it has created thousands of quality public schools.
In one classroom in Louisiana, you can see several ideas that have emerged far from the spotlight of national politics.
One recent afternoon at Highland Elementary School, where 70% of students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch, a group of fifth graders sat, rapt, as their teacher, Lauren Cascio, introduced a key insight: that the Renaissance, the Scientific Revolution and the Reformation all occurred during the same period of human history.
Cascio reviewed vocabulary words that students would need: heretic, rational, skepticism, heliocentric. Then, 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.
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Unlike in many elementary school classrooms, the students did not have computers or tablets on their desks. They had open books, which they were avidly marking up with highlighters and pencils.
The work in Louisiana has been celebrated by the Knowledge Matters Campaign, an effort led by Barbara Davidson, a policy advocate and veteran of the Department of Education under Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush.
Davidson has worked to amplify the ideas of a loosely organized network of educators, curriculum-writers, parents and local policymakers who are rejecting ideological approaches to education, and instead, are focused on how to maximize learning.
It starts with reading. 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. But now, some of the attention has shifted to additional aspects of literacy instruction that are backed by cognitive science, and crucial for turning beginning readers into proficient ones; namely, the finding that to become a good reader, children need a strong vocabulary and knowledge about the world. The subjects that best build vocabulary and knowledge are social studies and science -- the exact subjects that the Bush-Obama reforms often stripped from the school day.
But students face an additional challenge that didn't exist during the education battles of the 2000s: ubiquitous screens. Children cannot learn to focus their attention on books or anything else if they are constantly distracted by addictive technology. The push to ban phones in schools transcends partisanship, and parent activism has helped a dozen states ban or limit cellphones in schools. Still, many educators say that screens remain a problem.
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Some teachers are moving in-class reading and writing back to paper. Among them is Jon Gold, a middle school history teacher in Providence, Rhode Island, who frequently writes on how to enrich the curriculum and use technology in smarter ways. He now requires his students to close their laptops and read on paper. 'Their reading comprehension is stronger,' he said.
The country is deeply polarized. But a survey of some of the most exciting work happening in schools shows that educators and parents have the ability to embrace new ideas and come together around the goal of giving the next generation a quality education. It could even be the beginning of a political platform.
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