[This has been submitted to several newspapers in SC without response so far.]

Ranking member of the US Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions, Bill Cassidy (R – LA) has issued a report announcing a reading crisis in America: “Two-thirds of America’s fourth and eighth graders are not proficient in reading.”

Here in SC, legislators are once considering new reading legislation, building on over a decade of reforms with Read to Succeed.

However, a report from the progressive NPE and an analysis from the conservative Education Next offer contrarian truths about public education and student achievement, neither of which is grounded in crisis rhetoric or blaming students, teachers, and schools for decades of political negligence.

First, based on NAEP data—similar to Cassidy’s report—Shakeel and Peterson in EdNext offer a much different view of student achievement in the US, notably about reading achievement:

Contrary to what you may have heard, average student achievement has been increasing for half a century. Across 7 million tests taken by U.S. students born between 1954 and 2007, …[r]eading scores have grown by 20 percent of a standard deviation during that time, nearly one year’s worth of learning.

When we examine differences by student race, ethnicity, and socioeconomic status, longstanding assumptions about educational inequality start to falter. Black, Hispanic, and Asian students are improving far more quickly than their white classmates in elementary, middle, and high school. In elementary school, for example, reading scores for white students have grown by 9 percent of a standard deviation each decade, compared to 28 percent for Asian students, 19 percent for Black students, and 13 percent for Hispanic students. Students from low socioeconomic backgrounds also are progressing more quickly than their more advantaged peers in elementary and middle school. And for the most part, growth rates have remained steady throughout the past five decades.

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Shakeel and Peterson’s analysis confirms a concern raised by scholars for decades after A Nation at Risk—the manufactured educational crisis perpetuated by the media, political leaders, and education publishers.

Keeping the US in perpetual crisis has resulted in over four decades of blaming students, teachers, and public schools as failures even though education policy and funding have been exclusively controlled by political leadership at the national and state levels.

That leads us to a state-by-state analysis from NPE that avoids blaming students, teachers, and schools by holding political leadership accountable for the following:

• Privatization Laws: the guardrails and limits on charter and voucher programs to ensure that taxpayers and students are protected from discrimination, corruption, and fraud.
• Homeschooling Laws: laws to ensure that instruction is provided safely and responsibly.
• Financial Support for Public Schools: sufficient and equitable funding of public schools.
• Freedom to Teach and Learn: whether state laws allow all students to feel safe and thrive at school and receive honest instruction free of political intrusion.

The top five states include North Dakota, Connecticut, Vermont, Illinois, and Nebraska with Arkansas, North Carolina, Utah, Arizona, and Florida sitting at the bottom.

SC ranks 39th, receiving a grade of F for failing to fully support public schools or our democracy. That political negligence has resulted in decades of unwarranted negative messages about our schools, teachers, and students.

These reports combined offer SC an opportunity to resist crisis rhetoric as well as rejecting the ineffective reform cycles since the 1980s.

The problems facing our students, teachers, and schools are social inequities such as poverty and racism, but we also have a history of political negligence in our state that has resulted in a national recognition of our Corridor of Shame.

We can and should do better for our students, schools, and state by recognizing that the real failure is not our schools but our political leadership and the lack of political will to fund and support education as a foundational part of our democracy.