The Remarkable Educational Gains of the Reform Era

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 our lowest-performing students, who are disproportionately poor, Black, and Hispanic.