Did The Class of '92 Destroy America

The Atlantic has published yet another tale of woe about The Terrible State Of Education, and in it staff writer Idrees Kahloon has played all the hits, yet somehow ignores the most obvious point to make.

Student achievement is down because test scores (an assumption that we absolutely won't examine)! Low expectations are ruining students! Those damned cell phones! Science of reading! Merit pay! School choice! Democrats are on the wrong side and everything might be their fault! And the economist-style assumption that test scores, like stock prices, must go ever upward (three guesses what Kahloon's actual area of reportage expertise is)!

It's a whole lot of baloney, and I would go ahead and address Kahloon's many ill-founded assumptions and assertions, but, you know (gestures in direction of five thousand and some posts on this blog) and I'd rather zero in on one particular set of sentences:

Test scores from NAEP, short for the National Assessment of Educational Progress, released this year show that 33 percent of eighth graders are reading at a level that is “below basic”—meaning that they struggle to follow the order of events in a passage or to even summarize its main idea. That is the highest share of students unable to meaningfully read since 1992.Among fourth graders, 40 percent are below basic in reading, the highest share since 2000.

And...?

I mean, this seems like a perfect chance to do a little research. After all, those low scoring children of 1992 and 2000 are now grown up. Class of 1992 would be about 45 now, and the sad non-readers of 2000 would be about 34. 

So we should be able to see the generational effects of these terrible awful no good very bad scores on the Big Standardized Test. There should be a story here-- "In 1992 the reading scores dipped to the lowest point ever, and so then the Terrible Thing happened." Maybe researchers should have gone out to check on the adult life outcomes of that low-scoring cohort, to see if they had low paying jobs or unhappy lives or unattractive children. If there are consequences to these low scores, then at least two cohorts and at most the whole country have been living with those consequences for decades, so it shouldn't be too hard to track down what they are, rather than simply calling for a panic. 

I don't mean to dismiss the possibility that these low-scoring readers did not in fact suffer consequences. Heck, both cohorts would have been old enough to vote in the 2016 and 2024 elections.

But if you are going to hang an entire panic attack on those low scores and write an entire article about how the current low scores are a sign of an epic crisis of failure in education, shouldn't you be able to finish the sentence "Because the NAEP reading scores have dipped so low, the nation will suffer as a consequence the following..." Particularly when we are absolutely in a position to study exactly what scores of this lowitude produce as a result.

Otherwise, your panic is manufactured baloney. Because the story here might be, "Back in 1992 we had the lowest NAEP reading scores ever and that was followed by life going on as before. Those low scores didn't signal a damned thing."

If you're going to call for panic, at least do some homework.