Too much of this article 0n changes being observed in college students is anecdotal, but the story does refocus attention on how "reform" in K-12 schooling done in the name of opening opportunity for children often does the opposite because those reforms rarely focus on actually funding schools, ensuring that kids get enough to eat, that parents can earn living wages or that teachers have incentives to work in poor communities.
The "reforms" discussed here include the high-stakes testing data required by the No Child Left Behind Act. Little was changed to provide communities or schools the resources they needed to cherish and nurture children. Instead, schools were threatened with severe penalties if test scores didn't improve, so schools drilled down on test prep.
In many schools, this meant that no one could teach science or social studies or the arts until after the annual tests in reading and math each spring. Working in teacher education, we struggled to find schools teaching science so that our interns could observe and participate in the complicated work of setting up and mentoring children through experiments and complex observations. Districts mandated scripted curriculum and scripted practice tests. Final test prep exercises took away hours of instructional time every year and the testing itself would go on for days.
We all knew that while test scores may have gone up, few of the things being tested were about students learning more and being prepared with live complex and full adult lives.
And we all knew that the consequences were harshest for the low-income children that policy makers postured as helping. Science was still being taught in the wealthiest schools : one of our graduates with a science background was hired as a science specialist with funds raised by the PTA at their lucrative annual auction, while in other buildings in that same district (where parents couldn't donate weeks at their vacation homes or wine from their cellars for the auction), science kits intended to excite interest in science went unstocked and unused. We sent interns to that school with the wealthy PTA because otherwise, interns would never witness skilled science teaching, even while we knew that the message might also be that only high-income kids deserved to learn science.
Another school that we partnered with used some of their PTA fundraising money to hire a reading specialist to support the very few students keeping them from being the top-scoring school in the district. While that school hired extra staff to playfully compete with neighboring schools to win the test score game, other children in the district learning English in schools serving refugee families housed in apartments were tutored by hastily-trained aids with minimal background in language development.
Everyone in that district --and beyond – knew that annual reports of test scores had nothing to do with leveling the playing fields for children living in very different communities.
The pandemic of course made all of this worse. College faculty can also be nostalgic about the imaginary days where all students were as invested in learning as they were.
But the article makes clear that decades of "school reform" have done little to equalize schooling or to prepare all children to thrive as adults because classrooms are but one element in deeply unequal childhoods.
