American Education’s New Foundations
The latest education headline from The New York Times is that “U.S. Test Scores Are in a ‘Generation-Long Decline’.” American students are doing worse on reading and mathematics standardized tests—and, indeed, worse on just about every educational measure. America’s schools are slipping from mediocrity to failure.
There’s no end of reasons. Education schools started pushing teachers to adopt counterproductive “skills-based” and “inquiry-based” forms of teaching, abandoning content knowledge with catastrophic results. They’ve also pushed a hyper-egalitarianism that abandons academic rigor, for fear that some identity group will be ‘disproportionately affected’ by educational standards. Radical politicization distorts instruction, including by visceral unwillingness to teach the core achievements of Western civilization and the American nation. The public schools have abandoned everyday discipline, much less removing disruptive students from school. First computers and now Artificial Intelligence are atrophying students abilities to think. The catastrophic decision to close schools in response to the COVID-19 pandemic compounded all these other problems. It’s not just one thing that’s gone wrong; it’s everything.
So there can’t be just one silver bullet to fix American K-12 education. But we can start with targeted reforms that can be the foundation for a generation of education reform.
The National Association of Scholars (NAS) and Freedom in Education (FiE) have completed The Four Foundations: America’s Model School Standards—model state PreK-12 academic content standards for English Language Arts (The Cather Standards), Mathematics (The Archimedes Standards), Social Studies (American Birthright), and Science (The Franklin Standards). These four content standards work together to provide model standards, depoliticized and framed around rigor and content knowledge, for the four core K-12 disciplines. With the Four Foundations, American public schools will have firm expectations for students to learn reading, writing, and arithmetic. They also will have firm expectations to learn about America’s literature, history, and government, and to learn about the world of science that is essential for America’s security in a world of great-power technological rivalry.
The Four Foundations provide a counter-model to the deleterious models that have framed American education instruction in the last generation: the Common Core, both for English Language Arts and Mathematics, the Next Generation Science Standards, and, for Social Studies, the C3 Framework.
State academic content standards aren’t curriculum. They’re state expectations, more or less powerful state by state, for public schools—they say what schools ought to teach, although they leave school districts and teachers free to determine how to teach. They also provide the foundation for state assessments—and since school districts want to perform well on state tests, a state content standard will provide gentle but firm pressure on each school district to adjust their teaching to fit the standards. State academic content standards also inform areas including licensure, professional training, and textbook selection. They’re the single most powerful element in modern American education.
NAS and FiE know that state academic content standards aren’t a cure-all. But they are the foundation stones for every other sort of academic reform. We’ve provided these model standards as a beginning for education reform. When and where they are adopted, it will require a further generation of hard work by education reformers to put them into effect, to align the other aspects of public K-12 American education with the new standards. And in a country of tens of thousands of school districts and millions of teachers, we can expect state academic content standards to modify what happens in the classroom, not transform it. The Four Foundations can be a powerful nudge toward improving education—but not a magic bullet.
The Four Foundations already have begun to affect American education. American Birthright was published first, and its already informed Oklahoma’s new social studies standards. The Franklin Standards have informed Oklahoma’s science standards and The Archimedes Standards have informed South Dakota’s mathematics standards. We have high hopes for The Cather Standards to inform state English Language Arts standards—but it’s only been published two months, so we’re going to give that a little bit of time.
Wherever state academic content standards have been informed by the Four Foundations, education administrators have adapted them to suit their states. That’s as it should be. NAS and FiE created the Four Foundations as a model, not a straitjacket—a first draft to be tailored. America is a loose-jointed country and we don’t want to impose one set of standards on all 50 states. We think the Four Foundations provide a good model, but that’s a model that ought to vary state by state.
State academic content standards and standardized tests are proxies for actual education in America’s complex and bureaucratic public education system. NAS and FiE know that state requirements aren’t the same thing as teaching and that good test scores aren’t the same thing as learning. We also know how tempting it is for teachers and administrators to ‘teach to the test’—and we don’t want our schools ‘teaching to the Four Foundations’ in a hollow way. The Four Foundations are meant to serve good teaching and real learning. We think that states and school districts that adopt the Four Foundations will improve their test scores—but that’s because we think they’ll be teaching better, period. And that’s what we want.
American education has been a morass, and our schools have been slipping ever deeper, unable to find a footing. The Four Foundations can provide a support in the swamp—and, eventually, we can build a way to dry land. With the Four Foundations, we can work toward better headlines from the New York Times. One day we will be able to read that “U.S. Test Scores are in a Generation-Long Ascent.’
