Title: How are America’s public schools really doing? - The Washington Post
Headings: How are America’s public schools really doing?
How are America’s public schools really doing?
By Jack Schneider

Content: Yet it is also notoriously difficult to answer. With nearly 100,000 schools spread across roughly 13,000 districts, the scale of the enterprise is beyond what any set of individuals can see and experience. Advertisement
Despite this challenge, one answer has emerged over the past 40 years: American schools are failing. Beginning with the “ Back to Basics ” movement of the 1970s and reaching a fever pitch with the 1983 publication of “ A Nation at Risk ,” rhetoric about public school performance grew progressively more negative until it hit its stride during the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) era. Today, pessimistic policy talk is now so standard as to constitute a form of truth. The crisis in public education is seemingly self-evident. Yet the emergence of this popular belief may illustrate the triumph of rhetoric rather than an actual shift in school quality. Consider, for instance, the steep decline of confidence in America’s public schools between the mid-1970s and the early 1980s, when very little substantive change actually took place inside classrooms. In 1975, 62 percent of respondents to a Gallup poll indicated that they had a “great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in America’s public schools.