Jennifer Berkshire, independent education journalist and podcaster, reminds us that we’ve heard this sad story before.
The kids are dumb and getting dumber. They can’t add or read the books they are no longer assigned, rousing themselves from their stupid stupors only to demand extra time on tests or another (now meaningless) A. The schools are collapsing, thanks to weakened standards and something called “cargo cult equity.” Just how bad is it out there? Today’s kids are the equivalent of the subprime mortgage-backed securities that blew up the economy in the lead up to the Great Recession. (Yes, somebody actually made this argument).
I could keep going, but you get where this is heading. Also, we are only a few days into the new year and I am already exhausted. The point, reader, is that we find ourselves in the throes of a full-blown public education panic. But why now? And why does this one feel different? I kick off 2026 with a look at a story that is all but guaranteed to keep telling itself in the months ahead.
America’s oldest pastime
If you’re new to the great American pastime of bemoaning the state of the nation’s schools then perhaps you’re unaware that we’ve been doing this since at least the ‘70’s. By which I mean the 1870’s. If the railroad collapse that triggered the Panic of 1873 feels startlingly familiar in our own bubbly AI economy, so too will feel the ensuing laments about the schools. They were too expensive. They used to teach reading well, but no longer. They had too many administrators. And if you’ve been following the ‘women ruin everything’ discourse, this was also the time when teaching became a female-documented occupation. Related? You tell me. Over the past 250 years, complaints “that the public schools of today are inferior to those of a generation or two ago” have resurfaced as reliably as measles or whooping cough.
Nobody knows anything
“I Don’t Know What to Think About America’s Declining Test Scores and Neither Should You” was the title of a great post last year by teacher and writer Michael Pershan. Digging into the surging remedial math program at University of California San Diego that fueled roughly one billion hot takes, Pershan patiently pointed out the contradictory nature of the data regarding student achievement in California. Even as student math skills were supposedly declining, state test scores were increasing. Or take Los Angeles, one of the few bright spots in the post-pandemic recovery landscape. During the last golden age of education reform, roughly 15 minutes ago, the progress of LA’s students would have merited its own fawning press treatment. No longer. Today, the story is decline and failure, and while this is a global phenomenon that includes adults, why let a little complexity get in the way of a hot take? The emergence of our ‘hot take’ economy, by the way, in which content entrepreneurs are handsomely rewarded for their “obtuse penchant for moral and ideological incuriousity” (and pay no price for 1) being wrong or 2) contradicting themselves) is a major driver of our current round of public education panic.