Progressive Pedagogy Produces Regressive Academic Outcomes for Kids

The report cards are in! Ohio’s K-12 public schools just got their grades and the results are… more of the same. The top districts remain on top and those at the bottom mostly continue to wallow there, failing to educate far too many of their students and misusing far too much taxpayer funding.

This month also saw the release of the international assessment of student achievement (PISA), which showed continued weak performance by U.S. students, with reading scores at their lowest levels since 2000. Perversely, the U.S. actually increased its standing against other developed nations, but only because others declined more than we did.

Sadly, our greatest global competitor — China — topped the list in science and math and came in second only to Singapore in reading. Among the more than 90 countries participating in the assessment, the U.S. ranked 24th in math, 12th in science, and 10th in reading.

We spend more per student than almost all other nations, only to achieve worse outcomes than our major economic and geopolitical rivals. There’s a lesson here: despite higher spending every year, our kids are learning less and less. And AI is neither to blame nor a substitute.

Fortunately, this is one of the few problems that are almost entirely within our control to solve, if only we have the political will to do so. While recent history is discouraging, there are pockets of success, and entire states have reversed decades of failure, particularly in reading. The Mississippi miracle may be the best example.

Ohio still has a chance to join that success.

Solving a problem starts with accurately identifying it. The number one role of K-12 schooling is to produce literate, numerate, and knowledgeable graduates. Different factions can dress up or excuse the results any way they choose but the evidence is unambiguous that far too many schools fail at that task.

Humans haven’t changed how we learn during the decades of educational decline. Instead, by continuously changing pedagogy and priorities according to progressive whims, we’ve diminished actual educational progress.

We learn by exposure to new concepts, followed by application, success or failure, progress or correction, then repetition until proficiency and mastery. These steps take time. There are no shortcuts. There are no excuses. Race, sex, national origin, or any other favored classifications are fundamentally irrelevant to that process.

The ship of learning is already sinking, and identity-based sorting adds only rocks rather than repairs.

Every child can learn. Some will learn more than others. The limiting factor isn’t money, it’s time — focused time — which is exactly where education policies, school boards, and teacher training have gone furthest off the rails.

Schools have only 12 short years to convey the foundational skills and knowledge acquired from all of human history. (It’s actually only six years, since each school year in the U.S. is only half as many days as a calendar year.) Every minute of classroom time not focused on the actual process of acquiring that knowledge is a minute lost.

Policymakers have added thousands of pages of administrative obligations. School boards have indulged small but vocal activists as well as capitulated to unsustainable union demands. And colleges that prepare teachers have emphasized “social justice” over subject matter and pedagogical expertise. All of these distractions reduce both the time and effectiveness of teaching and learning. The results speak for themselves. And — ironically — there’s no justice in ignorance.

The solution is simple in concept yet difficult in practice. It will take voter choices to select leaders with the political will to do less, not more.

Recognizing that time, not money, is the limiting factor, schools must narrow their focus and curricular choices until they can consistently produce objectively literate, numerate, and knowledgeable graduates. And objective assessment is the key.

I noted in a recent column that the dean of the college of education at Cambridge University wrote a book in which she argues “that the empirical knowledge central to Western Civilization and that built the modern world must give way to the ‘poems, stories, and case studies’ from the Global South.”

It is utter nonsense, of course, but her absurd view is not at all unique to what was once one of the world’s most prestigious institutions of higher learning. The rejection of objective fact is central to the decline of educational outcomes across the Western world. Grade inflation, social promotion, permissive discipline, and cultural excuse-making are all products of teacher training that prioritizes “equity” over evidence.

Two plus two equals four regardless of where you’re from and students who can’t do the math on tests need the lessons that come from failure.

These schooling shortfalls have another source, too. One of the most enduring effects of pandemic school closures is the increase in chronic truancy at 25% statewide and 53% in Columbus City Schools. Schools can’t teach absent students. Truancy must again have serious consequences.

As the use of AI makes cheating on tests and assignments easier than ever, routine assessment of student knowledge and skills should generally be demonstrated in person, device-free.

If local school boards are incapable of making the tough decisions to achieve those outcomes, the state must do it for them.

Ohio schools just got their report cards. In November, voters get to decide who’ll be responsible for fixing the failures. Amy Acton is offering another — more expensive — semester of the same lesson plan that produced those results. Vivek Ramaswamy is offering a harder class. Ohio’s kids can’t afford for us to take the easy one.