Losing the Race to the Bottom

Among the academic hawks of higher education there is an acknowledgement that the battle for academic excellence at the undergraduate level was lost in the 1980s and by the end of the 1990s the battle was lost in the humanities graduate programs. The independent schools held on until the financial crisis of 2008, but since then the focus of the vast majority of these schools has shifted toward social and emotional learning, welcoming, belonging, and any number of variants of diversity, inclusion, and equity. Thirty years ago, homeschooling was touted by some as the savior of K-12 education. For a time, homeschooling students achieved remarkable things, some still do, but many programs have since been watered down academically. An anecdote will suffice to illustrate. A few years ago, a large homeschooling association decided to transition to a private, classical high school academy. Done properly, an education in the classics is rigorous, requiring many hours of reading, analysis, critical thinking, and writing. The school’s announcement for a head of school made it clear, however, that the expectation was that no more than thirty minutes total was to be assigned for homework each night, and that Thursdays were designated as no homework zones so that families might enjoy a movie and popcorn night together. What happened?



To answer this question, one must go back to the launch of Sputnik. This event convinced the powers that be of the deficiency of American education, particularly in math and the physical sciences. College-bound baby boomers were faced with enhanced workloads and elevated expectations, and given their large numbers, intense competition for admission to most colleges and universities. Add Vietnam to the mix and the numbers of students seeking college admission in the 1960s began a powerful multidecade upward trend. Integration, busing, academic erosion, and racially charged public city school environments fueled both white and middle-class black flight from cities, as well as the founding of many new private and independent schools. In terms of enrollment, both secondary schools and higher education experienced flush times through the 1990s. Administrations, faculty, physical plants, academic and non-academic programs all experienced a wave of expansion. Even with obscene tuition increases beginning in the middle of the 1980s and continuing to the present day, the colleges and independent schools thrived as the mythology of the value of the college degree was by then well established in the country.



Rumblings of discontent appeared during this era of unprecedented growth. Books and reports such as Why Johnny Can’t Read and A Nation at Risk sounded the alarm over declining literacy rates and SAT scores, respectively. Reformers of all stripes came forth with their solutions to the perceived crisis in education. The talented New York City public school teacher, John Gatto, argued for doing away with standardized testing in favor of assessments based upon the acquisition of real-life competencies. Back to the Basics type groups argued for a return to phonics and traditional math instruction. Whether or not a reformer favored testing as an assessment tool, what united them all was a belief that academic achievement was sliding or at least stagnating, and the data from a host of national assessments as well as declining graduation rates and literacy rates supported that view. The education establishment struck back and defended their approaches, none mor prominently than Linda Darling-Hammond, whose work emphasized the need for standardized teacher training and licensure, and the reforming of school bureaucracies so that they were no longer obstacles to reform. Her ideas were singled out for a powerful critique by the Abell Foundation in the late 1990s, which found no correlation between teacher licensure and student performance. Meanwhile, a host of other reform initiatives such as the Paideia Program, Outcome Based Education, and the like all had a day or two in the sun and then faded. By 2010, the education reformer Chester Finn announced the end of the education reform debate in the pages of National Affairs. Finn believed the outcome-based education movement failed to build the necessary support among teachers, administrators, parents, and bureaucrats to win the day. But there was something else working in the culture of America that undermined student academic achievement.



While the 1990s may be viewed by some as the glory years of independent education, there were clouds on the horizon. In 1996 Laurence Steinberg wrote Beyond the Classroom. Steinberg found that only ten percent of a high school student’s waking hours were devoted to academics: extracurriculars, socializing with friends, and part-time jobs accounted for the rest. Steinberg also found that adults, both parents and employers, complicit in the creation of a “teen culture” that was at best indifferent to academic achievement and at worst antagonistic toward it. The Brown Center Reports on American Education issued by the Brown Center on Educational Policy show this trend to be in full force in the last two decades. (Loveless, Brown Report 2001,16) In a review of a survey of international exchange students, a comfortable majority of those international students surveyed indicated that international students attained higher levels of academic achievement because they cared more about academic achievement, and they worked harder than their American peers. International students viewed their American counterparts as more concerned with athletic rather than academic success, and thus more likely to take fewer challenging classes and spend less time on schoolwork (Loveless, Brown Report 2002, 16-17). The recurring parental angst over homework confirms the impressions of these international students. Loveless noted that the anxiety regarding homework first appeared in the 1980s, even as many parents expressed a desire to see increasing amounts of homework. From the 1980s until the present, homework loads have remained a contentious issue in education, yet critics have presented little in the way of hard evidence that homework levels have increased (Loveless, Brown Report 2014, 17-20). Yet parents expressed little concern over their children participating in athletics and/or taking on part time jobs. Brown cites these activities throughout his work as significant distractions from academic endeavors for many students.



What is evident is that large numbers of parents are much more concerned with the “emotional well-being” of their children during their school years than with their children’s academic performance. A Gallup Poll in 1996 found that parents in America rated “social skills” and “well roundedness” far ahead of academic achievement. Indeed, the same poll found that academic excellence was not a “primary criterion” for parents when they selected a school for their child. The emphasis that parents and schools place upon the emotional well-being of students, a slippery concept, and the “relevance” of course content were based upon faulty assumptions and contained significant costs. The faulty assumptions linked student emotional well-being with higher academic achievement and course “relevance” with student engagement. A TIMSS study published in 2003 found little evidence for a correlation between the “relevance” of academic courses and an increase in student engagement. Most interesting, The Brown Center Report of 2006 found an inverse relationship between student confidence and enjoyment of school and student academic achievement. Those students who exhibited the highest sense of “well-being,” were not the highest achieving students (Loveless, 13-20). Nevertheless, independent schools embraced the misguided emphasis upon course relevancy and student “emotional well-being,” often under the guise of having welcoming environments of belonging, yet arguably such cultures are producing students who are not emotionally resilient, who underachieve in their academic work, and who are less able to deal effectively with challenges and set-backs—the very definition of the American “snowflake.” We are now into our second generation of teachers and administrators who have embraced these false perceptions, and colleges and universities have doubled down as well.



The dirty secret of undergraduate teaching is that it never had to be particularly good, noble, and singular exceptions noted, because college preparatory education prepared students to succeed in an environment where they were responsible for two-thirds of their learning. Folks over 55 may remember from their college days that they were expected to do two hours of reading and studying for every credit hour in a course. A student with a full load of five courses (back in the day) would spend twelve and a half hours a week in class, but were expected at a minimum to be reading, studying, researching, and writing for an additional twenty-five hours a week on their own. Those days are mostly gone. This is not to say that undergraduate teaching has undergone any real reforms; professors mostly profess rather than teach. Accreditation agencies have attempted to introduce some accountability for learning, but mostly this is self-reported by colleges and universities and does not necessarily have any direct connection to course objectives or aims, at least in my experience. What has changed over the decades is grade inflation. In 1960, only 18% of college seniors could boast of an “A” average. By 1988, the percentage increased to 31%. By 2009, 43% of college seniors had an “A” average (Rojstaczer and Healy, “Where A is Ordinary: The Evolution of American College and University Grading, 1940-2009.” Teachers College Record. (July 2012):1-23).


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What will provide further impetus to this trend is the demographic decline facing the country’s schools, colleges, and universities. The baby boom that fueled growing enrollments in the 1960s and 1970s is long past, and the short lived echo boom of the 1990s has now faded into memory. In just the last five years seventy-eight colleges have closed or merged with other institutions. Others such as Catholic University have dramatically pared down their programs and budgets. In the last twenty-five years 1,942 Catholic schools have closed their doors. In the last decade over 700 private schools have closed. Competition for incoming college freshmen has intensified. Ivy League schools are accepting larger numbers of freshman which is putting pressure on second-tier regional universities to meet enrollment goals. The once intense competition for seats in a college class is long gone. Gone too is the leverage that independent schools once had in setting high academic expectations for their students.

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Twelve years ago, a valued colleague, Steve Duchaney, predicted the disaster American education became. Musing about the fall of academic standards at the Catholic school where we taught, Steve opined, “The school does not need to have high standards anymore, it can continue lower its standards and try to increase enrollment. It just has to lose the race to the bottom.” A decade later Vince Stumpo, one of the good guys and a talented former head of school, surveying what had happened to independent schools quipped, “The war is over, and the good guys lost.” Things do cycle and one day there will be an authentic reform of secondary and higher education. Some green shoots are appearing in some of the public schools of the South (See Vince Bieleski, “Another Thing Folks Like About the South: Public Education’s Revival, (accessed May 7, 2025). The day of the much needed comprehensive reform of primary, secondary and higher education is still far off.