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A version of this essay originally appeared on the Fordham Institute’s Flypaper blog.

The national conversation about education, to the extent that one is actually happening, tends to come in two dialects today. The first involves a lot of appropriate hand-wringing about the decline in student achievement that started about 10 or 12 years ago, before the pandemic sent it over a cliff. This has been particularly acute for the lowest-performing students, who are disproportionately poor, Black and Hispanic.

The more hopeful discussion is about Mississippi and some of its Southern peers, which have bucked these trends, or at least made more progress against the headwinds than the rest of the country. That has, in turn, spurred some excellent journalism about why California, New England and other states and regions have allowed themselves to fall so far behind.

But what’s hardly ever said in either of these conversations is that the declines since 2013 or so came on the heels of two decades of remarkable progress. Perhaps my fellow ed-policy wonks understand that, but I doubt the general public does. And we can’t say it often enough.

That’s for two key reasons. First, as Kant said, the actual proves the possible. It’s important to give people hope that we can turn around today’s challenging circumstances because we did it before, not so long ago. And second, some of the same policies and approaches that worked last time around might work again today. The conventional wisdom might be that education reform failed, but that is factually and historically incorrect.

Which is what made David Brooks’s recent New York Times column all the more praiseworthy. He noted that Republicans “are now kicking Democrats in the butt” on education policy — but more importantly, he reminded readers about the huge progress made during the reform era:

Student achievement test scores in reading, math and most other academic subjects shot upward between the mid-1990s and about 2013. In 1990, 48% of America’s eighth graders scored below basic competency in math. But by 2013, that was down to just 26%. The best part of this progress was that the scores of the most disadvantaged students shot up the most. Among Black students, the share of those scoring below basic in math fell from 78% to 48%. Among Hispanic students, it fell from 66% to 38%.

Student outcomes are rarely just about what happens in the schools. The policies of that so-called neoliberal era helped, too. Economic growth was strong; income inequality decreased. Between 1983 and 2010, the child poverty rate fell from 30% to about 17%.

Those are enormous gains, amounting to two to three grade levels of progress over the course of a generation or two of students. We would love to see that kind of progress today!

But to Brooks, I would say: It wasn’t just test scores. It was also educational attainment. The proportion of young people graduating from high school and completing two- and four-year college degrees also increased dramatically during this period. That’s true on average, but particularly for Black and Hispanic students.

That’s a lot of information to absorb, so let me highlight some of the best news depicted in these figures:

• The percentage of young Americans with no high school diploma dropped by more than half from the class of 1997 to the class of 2016 — from 14% to 5%.
• For Hispanic students, it dropped by a factor of three, from 37% to 12%.
• For young men, it dropped from 15% to 6%.
• The percentage of young Americans with a two-year degree or higher shot up from 37% (Class of 1997) to 51% (Class of 2016). A majority of young Americans now have a college degree of some sort.
• The percentage of young Black Americans with at least a two-year degree shot up from 27% to 42%; for young Hispanic Americans, it more than doubled, from 17% to 36%.
• The percentage of young women with at least a two-year degree rose from 41% to a remarkable 57%.

There’s a debate in academe about how much these attainment gains amount to real progress versus “degree inflation.” I’ve certainly been skeptical of some increases in the high school graduation rate, given all the games we’ve seen at the state and local levels, such as the adoption of dubious credit recovery programs, widespread grade inflation and the elimination of end-of-course and exit exams. It’s arguably never been easier to graduate from high school in America than it is today.

But that doesn’t mean all these improvements in the graduation rate are fake. Doug Harris at Tulane University dug into this a few years ago and concluded that most of the progress was real. It helps that student achievement and attainment were moving in the same direction.

Education reform shouldn’t get all the credit for this remarkable progress in achievement and attainment. As I wrote back in 2019 — and Brooks wrote last week — schools enjoyed strong tailwinds back then thanks to a booming economy, sharply declining child poverty rates and big increases in spending. All that mattered, too.

It’s also worth noting that college-going has declined significantly in the last few years, partly because of the pandemic and partly because of rising doubts about the value of higher education. That will surely translate into flatlining or even decreasing college attainment rates soon.

But here’s the bottom line: Young people made huge gains from the mid-1990s to the mid-2010s, when education reform was at its zenith. We need to celebrate that success more often. Most importantly, we need to get back to making that kind of progress again.

Fordham Institute research intern Jill Hoppe contributed to the data collection and analysis for this post.

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