What Elon Musk Is Missing About Education

Accountability and science-proven solutions can drive better results

[The Editors is called The Editors, plural, not The Editor, singular, for a reason. When I launched it, a shrewd friend advised, “it can’t just be you.” I’m delighted to start introducing some additional voices. Today’s comes from Sandy Kress, who was an adviser to President George W. Bush on education issues and before that was president of the school board in Dallas, Texas. —Ira Stoll]

8th-grade math scores on the Nation’s Report Card, or National Assessment of Educational Progress. “The improvement was due primarily to the emergence of accountability for results, and the decline, to its evisceration.”

Elon, I’m a big fan of yours.

You do your homework, and you use your brain and your research to improve the quality of life for everyone.

You’ve revolutionized the way we drive.

You’ve democratized the way we communicate.

You’re one of the true pioneers in exploring the frontier of research and innovation through the new world of AI.

You’re leading the way in space exploration.

And you’re pressing ahead in making our government more effective and efficient.

Yet, I saw in X recently a post in which you asserted that “American education has been broken for a quarter century.”

I couldn’t believe my eyes.

How could a person so bright and accomplished say something so palpably false and misleading?

On other occasions, you’ve advocated for more “local control” as a fix for this “quarter century” malady.

When it comes to education, the brilliant problem-solver I admire so much is off base. Maybe you’ve been too busy with all those other projects to research the history of education policy. Let me try to fill in the missing facts.

Truth is, a quarter century ago our education system was way more broken than it is today. Ten years ago it had improved so that, in many ways, it reached a pinnacle in our history.

In 1990, for example, 78% of black 8^th graders were below basic on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) in math, as were 66% of Hispanic 8^th graders and 40% of whites.

Yet, by 2013, there was so much progress that the percent of 8^th grade blacks who were below basic in 8^th grade math had fallen to 48. The comparable percent of Hispanics had dropped to 38, and for whites, 16!

In most states, where basic is considered tantamount to being on grade level, this means most 8^th graders were deemed ready in 2013 to begin to study high school math courses. In most states, including Texas, there had never been a time in our history when this was so.

Unfortunately, that progress did not continue.

The percent of 8^th grade blacks who are below basic in math on NAEP rose to 62 in 2022 from 48 in 2013; Hispanics, to 51 from 38; and whites, to 26 from 16.

Various international assessments also confirm this serious downward trend that began well before Covid-19.

While I haven’t the space here to cite data for all grades in math and reading, we should be clear that, even while acknowledging that math gains exceeded reading, students made significant progress over the first years of the past quarter century. In 4^th grade reading, for example, from 2000 to 2015, test scores for all students went to 223 from 213, a grade-level gain, only to lose 5 points by 2022.

(To combat this conclusion, some cite college entrance exam scores to “prove” things have gotten worse. False. Comparing apples to apples, with comparability in participation rates by race, class, and numbers, results have been as good or better in recent times, with the exception again of the last ten years.

Others argue 12^th grade “long-term-trend” NAEP has been flat. Yes, but it’s been flat for 50 years, suggesting that the “good old days” of our youth were no better than the recent quarter century.)

So, now that we’ve established that education from 2000-2013 was hardly broken, and, in many ways, was at new highs, let’s consider what caused the improvement.

It most certainly was not “local control.”

Local control was the governing principle of schools prior to the 1990s. Achievement then was significantly lower than it is today. And local control was also the fundamental idea behind the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) that replaced No Child Left Behind (NCLB) and led to plummeting results for the next decade.

So, what caused the dramatic improvement beginning in the late 1990s? And what caused the decline beginning in 2015?

The improvement was due primarily to the emergence of accountability for results, and the decline, to its evisceration.

Proof? The 74, a nonprofit education news website, has interactive charts that show the story. Chad Aldeman, a former Department of Education staffer, writes: “Obama’s relaxing of school and district accountability pressures helped set off a decline in student performance across the country….Holding school systems accountable for their lowest-performing students was working — until policymakers decided the pressure wasn’t worth it.”

Stanford’s Eric Hanushek and Margaret Raymond looked at state-level education accountability systems in a 2004 working paper for the National Bureau of Economic Research and found “a clear positive impact on student achievement.” The NBER Digest summed up the finding as, “When teachers and their schools are held accountable for the educational performance of their pupils and face consequences when the children do not measure up to goals, student grades in reading and mathematics do improve.”

A chapter by economists David Figlio and Susanna Loeb in a textbook about the Economics of Education reports, “the preponderance of evidence suggests positive effects of the accountability movement in the United States during the 1990s and early 2000s on student achievement, especially in math.”

A 2015 memo by Lanae Erickson and Stephenie Johnson of Third Way said, “the last 15 years of accountability have brought measurable gains for students across the board…if another government program was achieving these kinds of results, you would hardly expect to hear discussion of dismantling it.”

A 2010 study of the No Child Left Behind law by economists Thomas Dee and Brian Jacob, issued by the Brookings Institution, reported, “the weight of the evidence suggests that NCLB has had a positive effect on elementary student performance in mathematics.” Matt Barnum, now a reporter at the Wall Street Journal, has observed that the press, “where false balance and conflict often trump substance,” has done a poor job of informing the public of these results.

Yet, if we want excellence in education, we must go beyond accountability. Educational decisions must increasingly be made based on what research proves works. Education is the last major enterprise to operate largely with “by the seat of the pants” decision-making. This must change.

It’s possible to measure and test what works in education, just as in other fields. The Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences maintains a “What Works Clearinghouse” with a growing list of guides to proven practice on topics such as “effective fractions instruction” and “teaching secondary students to write effectively.”

TNTP, an organization that used to be The New Teachers Project, has been advocating for what it and others call “the science of reading,” which it calls “a body of evidence that tells us how students learn to read, and includes evidence supporting phonological and phonemic awareness, phonics and word recognition, fluency, vocabulary, content knowledge development, and comprehension.”

An economist at the University of Chicago, Michael Kremer, won a Nobel Prize in 2019 in part for “field experiments…for improving educational outcomes.”

Bottom line, Elon, let’s build an education system that’s truly excellent.

You’ve done it with cars. You’ve done it with space vehicles. You’ve done it with AI.

Imagine the possibilities if you cut out the sloganeering and now aim for similar results in education.

Put your mind to building a stronger, new-generation accountability system, one that solves many of the problems of the previous generation’s and works better still.

Consider how to assemble the best scientific research in education and transform how we educate with it. Then support an upgraded Institute of Education Sciences to make more, ever-better research available to improve teaching and learning.

The solution is not local control. It’s accountability and science-proven strategies and solutions, which will optimize local decisions.

Now, Elon, go be Elon Musk in education, and change the world where it matters most — for our kids!