Actually, public education is getting better, not worse

Have America's public schools gotten worse over time?

Americans seem to think so.

Today's workers have to go to college, readers argue, because our increasingly broken public schools have ceded responsibility for educating them.

Data from the annual Phi Delta Kappa/Gallup poll, a survey about education, reflect similar views. Over the past four decades, respondents have become increasingly likely to say that today's students receive a "worse education" than they themselves did.

But it's not clear that any of this is true, at least at the national level.

Few consistent tools are available to measure the quality of U.S. education over time; the best we have is probably the National Assessment of Educational Progress test, first administered in 1971. And believe it or not, NAEP scores have been steadily improving, with most national measures now at or around all-time highs.

The biggest gains have generally gone to nonwhite students.

"Going back to at least 1880, the business community has never said a nice word about public schools. Every generation of graduates is supposedly stupider than the last," says David C. Berliner, a professor emeritus of education at Arizona State University. "The demonization of youth is a national pastime in the U.S."

Diane Ravitch, a research professor of education at New York University, argues that the schools themselves are also being demonized, thanks to clear-eyed ideology rather than rose-colored nostalgia.

"U.S. public education is the victim of a propaganda campaign to discredit it and promote privatization," she says. She traces this back to the 1983 "A Nation at Risk" report from President Ronald Reagan's education commission and argues that business leaders and politicians have increasingly used public schools since then as scapegoats for other societal ills.

I suspect other, less nefarious factors affect perceptions more. With college becoming the norm, the types of workers with no more than a high school diploma are more likely to be in the lower part of the talent distribution today than they were a generation ago.

Employers might conflate this shifting composition of high-school-educated workers with a diminishing quality of high school education itself.

The truth is, today's young people do need more, or at least different, kinds of training and education to succeed in the global marketplace for talent. And plenty of policy changes — like making the most challenging school districts more attractive places to work — could help improve outcomes for our most disadvantaged students.

But in the meantime, let's stop denying the measurable, if modest, progress that U.S. schools have made in the last half-century.

Catherine Rampell's email address is crampell@washpost.com.