Opinion | Democrats Are Increasing Inequality

David Brooks has a point.  Accountability really did improve educational outcomes.  Establishing clear consequences for poor performance, by teachers and students, proved to be a powerful incentive to improve literacy and math competency.  Improvements in education opened doors for equal opportunities.  

Equity activism, under the guise of civil rights, have reversed gains in educational outcomes.  Choosing equity over equality is proving to be a destructive philosophy that causes harm to our children and our society, at large.  The results are clear even if the standards are politically manipulated to gloss over the problem.  

I admit I'm not a fan of David Brooks.  Far too often Brooks embraces the big city neoliberalism that sent the United States into decline.  But every now and then Brooks stumbles upon something that is refreshingly common sense.

S E E D E D   C O N T E N T

When Democrats are at their best, they are performing one job: reducing inequality and making American life more just. That's what Franklin Roosevelt did with the New Deal and Lyndon Johnson tried to do with the war on poverty. That's what Bill Clinton and Barack Obama did with their education reform policies. Both Clinton and Obama ran as education outsiders and change agents. In between those presidencies, Democrats worked with George W. Bush on the No Child Left Behind Act, which passed with a majority of 384-45 in the House and 91-8 in the Senate. No Child Left Behind was all about bringing accountability to America's schools.

Because of those reform efforts, student achievement test scores in reading, math and most other academic subjects shot upward between the mid-1990s and about 2013. In 1990 48 percent of America's eighth graders scored below basic competency in math. But by 2013 that was down to just 26 percent. 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 percent to 48 percent. Among Hispanic students, it fell from 66 percent to 38 percent.

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 percent to about 17 percent.

Then came the financial crisis in 2008. States and families had less to spend on education. That slowed the increase in student achievement scores, but it did not stop it. The turnaround came in about 2013. Ever since then, American student achievement scores have been falling. Scores for students at the top end of the performance distribution are merely stagnant. But the scores of students from less privileged backgrounds are collapsing. Outcomes are becoming more and more unequal, and the life opportunities for American young people are becoming more unequal, too.

What happened around 2013?

Two things. The first was screens. If you use screens to read articles and books, you are building mental muscles, but if you use screens to passively consume short videos, you're basically committing intellectual suicide.

As James Marriott argued in an essay that went viral several weeks ago, democracy and literacy rose together. The world of print is the world of logical, complex and rational ideas. An avid reader is absorbing disciplined habits of thought.

Because of smartphones, global literacy is in rapid decline. The share of American 18-year-olds who say they have difficulty thinking or concentrating has been rising since around 2013. The share of adults who lack basic literacy and numeracy skills is surging. I.Q. scores, which had been rising for a century, are falling in all but one category of the tests.

Smartphones are a global phenomenon, and sure enough, student achievement scores and general reasoning abilities are declining in many different nations around the world. But we shouldn't be fatalistic about phones. They clearly impede intellectual attainment, but what really matters is what individuals, families, schools and nations do in response to them. And in this regard, U.S. performance is particularly terrible.

As Nat Malkus of the American Enterprise Institute has demonstrated, the achievement gap in the United States for science and math is growing far faster "than in any country with comparable data." We have done almost nothing to protect our most vulnerable people from the scourge of the screens.

That's in part because of the second thing that happened around 2013: The American political center collapsed. Populist Republicans replaced Bush-style Republicans. The populists didn't like the way No Child Left Behind centralized power. Meanwhile, the Democratic Party shifted left. Progressive Democrats never liked the accountability regime in the first place, and since then, progressives have marginalized the moderate education reformers.

In 2015 Congress replaced No Child Left Behind with the Every Student Succeeds Act. The age of accountability was over; the age of equity was here. Under the Every Student Succeeds Act, states no longer had to produce rigorous report cards on how schools were doing. Most Democratic states watered down the accountability mechanisms. For example, California revised its rating system, and magically, nearly 80 percent of its schools were ranked as medium- or high-performing.

George W. Bush had earlier warned of the "soft bigotry of low expectations," but in the age of equity, schools moved to ease rigor and standards for poorer kids. Many schools stopped assigning whole books and started assigning short passages. What the education writer Tim Daly calls the education depression had begun.

Some people blame the Covid-19 pandemic for our catastrophically declining test scores. But the educational depression started before Covid and was only magnified by it. James H. Wyckoff of the University of Virginia estimates that about 47 percent of the decline in eighth grade math scores since the pandemic were "predicted" by trends that were already in place before the coronavirus hit.

You probably saw stories on the recent National Assessment of Educational Progress Report. The average 12th-grade reading scores are now lower than at any time since these reports began publishing 33 years ago. Once again, top performers merely stagnated, but scores from the lowest performers fell through the floor.

A few paragraphs ago I mentioned that during the accountability era, the number of Black students scoring below basic levels in math had fallen from 78 percent to 48 percent. Well, now that number is back up to 62 percent. My own conclusion is this: The equity approach is supposed to increase, well, equity. But by lowering accountability, rigor and standards, it produces more inequality.

We've now had 12 years of terrible education statistics. You would have thought this would spark a flurry of reform activity. And it has, but in only one type of people: Republicans. When it comes to education policy, Republicans are now kicking Democrats in the butt.

Schools in blue states like California, Oregon and Washington are languishing, but schools in red states like Mississippi, Alabama, Tennessee and Louisiana, traditional laggards, are suddenly doing remarkably well. Roughly 52 percent of Mississippi's Black fourth graders read at grade level, compared with only 28 percent in California. Louisiana is the only state where fourth-grade achievement levels have returned to prepandemic levels. An Urban Institute study adjusted for the demographics of the student bodies found that schools in Mississippi are educating their fourth graders more successfully in math and reading than schools in any other state. Other rising stars include Florida, Texas and Georgia.

Writing in Education Next, the scholars Michael Hartney and Paul E. Peterson report on an interesting turnaround. In 2019 deep blue states tended to have higher average reading scores for fourth graders than deep red states after adjusting for demographics. By 2024 that had flipped: "Red states rank highest, blue states lowest."

The so-called Southern Surge came about because the red states built around a reading curriculum based on science, not ideology. The schools provide clear accountability information to parents and give them more freedom to choose schools. They send coaches to low-performing classrooms. They use high-quality tutoring, and they don't promote students who can't read, reducing the bureaucratic strings that used to control behavior in the classroom. They also hold schools and parents accountable. In Mississippi, Alabama and Tennessee, a child who isn't reading at the end of third grade has to repeat it.

Where the hell are the Democrats? One gets the impression that many of them have spent the last decade deciding that social justice ideology is more important than reducing inequality. What was Joe Biden's big K-12 education idea? Zippo. In 2024 there was nothing but a howling void where Kamala Harris's education agenda should have been.

Fortunately, there are some bright spots.

A few days ago I was scrolling through my phone (yes, I have my own addictions) when I came across an astonishing video. Rahm Emanuel was speaking in Iowa and was asked about school reform. He proceeded to rip through a series of ambitious and credible ideas: Return K-8 to the fundamentals, like phonics, the way Mississippi is doing. Completely reinvent high schools, which haven't changed in a century. Put a special focus on keeping freshmen on track, because once they are juniors it's too expensive to try to get them on a better course. Create incentives for students who earn a B average to get books and transportation for free. Bring college into high school with dual credit programs so they can gain confidence and do advanced work. Make high school degrees contingent on students having a letter of acceptance from a college, the armed forces or a vocational training program so they have a plan for the day after.

In this video, I saw an impressive and even inspiring Democratic approach to improving student outcomes. It probably helps that Emanuel served in both the Clinton and Obama administrations, when the Democrats were a strong reform party. It probably helps that Emanuel was mayor of Chicago. Between 2009 and 2014, Chicago student learning improved from third grade to eighth grade at a faster rate than students in 96 percent of the school districts in the United States, according to a Stanford study. Between 2007 and 2019, Chicago's high school graduation rates went from around 60 percent to 82 percent.

We can't live in a country in which the party that dominates the rural areas has a proven educational agenda while the party that dominates the urban areas doesn't. The Democrats lost part of their soul when they lost touch with the working class; they'll lose whatever is left of it if they can't be a party that champions equal opportunity. We can't live in a country that is rapidly losing its basic intellectual abilities, where those who are least privileged get hammered the most.

David Brooks is an Opinion columnist for The Times, writing about political, social and cultural trends. @nytdavidbrooks