Skip to content

How are our 40-year-olds doing?

I would like to ask a question that is rarely asked: How are our 40-year-olds doing?

Here's the thing. We've been obsessing forever about how our kids are doing. Every generation is convinced that schools are failing our children and our kids are growing up unable to read, do math, or understand civics. It is a national crisis.

The reason we're able to obsess like this is because we can test our kids. Why? Because they're kids. And they're in school. If we tell them to take a test, they take it.

But adults? Forget it. They're not going to sit around taking reading or math tests just because someone wants them too. They've got better things to do.

So once again: How are our 40-year-olds doing? The answer is that we don't know and, really, no one cares.

But! We can infer a few things. If Johnny couldn't read in 1955, then 45-year-old John was probably a poor reader in 1995. If our nation's kids were at risk in 1983, then our nation's adults should be dullards today.

Is either of these things true? In general, do we think that the basic educational level of American adults has been collapsing for the past half century? I see no evidence for that, and I never really hear anyone complaining about it. It's only the kids they're worried about.

Bottom line: I suspect that panic and culture wars aside, today's kids are doing about as well as they did 20, 40, or 60 years ago. For my money, there's only one really big problem in American K-12 education:

We've made essentially no progress on the Black-white education gap over the past four decades. And guess what? That does make a difference in adulthood. If we're going to worry about our kids' education, this is what we should worry about.

19 thoughts on “How are our 40-year-olds doing?

  1. AbolishFederalIncomeTaxes

    The NEAP Reading test score is reported on a 0-500 scale. So the 26 point score gap is only 5.2% of the scale. I browsed the NEAP website and it's very hard to discern what the absolute scores mean. And they don't provide a lot of detail on their statistics such as, a 260 score on the reading test is what level of proficiency.

  2. royko

    So we have any idea what the cause of the rise from 1980-1988 was, or the less extreme decline from 1988-1992? Just having some idea of what can affect the gap might help us figure out how to solve it.

    1. Joseph Harbin

      The iPhone arrived 2007.

      KD: "The reason we're able to obsess like this is because we can test our kids. ... But adults? Forget it. They're not going to sit around taking reading or math tests just because someone wants them too."

      If you look at voting patterns, there's a huge Black-white gap and we're hardly making any progress. Blacks remain the smartest voters in the country.

    1. name99

      As opposed to? Non-American adults? American children? Animals?

      Most people are morons so your statement is essentially content-free.

  3. zoniedude

    I used to believe in academic test scores until I realized the whole point was to keep White Supremacy. Look into ANY test data and find the "item/test correlation" or similar value. It measures how much the overall test score correlates with answer that particular question correctly. The overall test score supposedly measures something like math knowledge or whatever. So the correlation tells you to what extent math knowledge correlates with answering a question on the test. I found that this correlation is almost always very low. The square of a correlation is the percent that the test core explains getting the question correct. That is very low.

  4. Citizen Lehew

    Honest question: Why don't we ever call it the "Black-Asian education gap"? Asians have dominated White test scores for a generation, yet they are always omitted from Kevin's (and everyone else's) graphs.

    Are we trying to solve a problem, or just reinforce our preferred narrative?

    1. Kevin Drum

      One reason, obviously, is that whites make up two-thirds of the population. However, another reason is that Asians aren't always included in the data, especially for series that go back several decades. There's nothing much that users of the data can do about that.

      1. Citizen Lehew

        Incidentally, I do think it would be an interesting experiment for a little while to exclusively refer to it as the "Black-Asian Education Gap". Given how intractable the problem has been for so long, it might allow us to take a break from our reflexive assumptions as to what's causing the problem, which could make space for completely new ideas that might make more headway.

        1. Citizen Lehew

          Or perhaps even better, exclusively refer to it as the "Hispanic-Asian Education Gap", and pour all resources into understanding and solving that disparity. I have to assume our advancements with one racial group disparity would apply to the others.

  5. different_name

    There has been one significant change to the US American educational experience since the 80s: the odds of someone shooting up a classroom. I do really wander what effect this has, both directly on educational achievement and more generally on mental health.

    We know a little about how "When threatened with nukes, hide under your desk" effected older generations [1] . I really wonder what much more directly-threatening drills do to even the kids who never experience a real terrorist attack on their school, let alone the ones who live through one. Or two [2].

    [1] https://www.thecut.com/article/how-the-threat-of-nuclear-war-shapes-kids-psyches.html

    [2] https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/multiple-school-shooting-survivors-msu-oxford-ptsd-234125856.html

  6. jdubs

    What percentage of black and white 17 year olds were tested in 2012?

    Has this percentage remained stable over the 30+ years that the gap has stagnated? Or has the percentage of kids being tested changed?

    Given that the dropout rate has fallen dramatically since the 1980s, i suspect that we arent really testing the same groups over time.

  7. pjcamp1905

    1955 + 45 = 2000, not 1995.

    I guess . . . what? Mid 1970's? Something bad going on in math class.

    I remember it being . . . . foggy. Especially the time my friend cracked up comparing the math teacher to a scrubbing bubble while I looked down on it from my full 15 foot height.

    That could explain a lot about our generation. That 70's Show? That was my friend Scott's basement whose father was a crazy libertarian who owned a small restaurant he plastered with Ayn Randish aphorisms, stopped paying taxes, and put all his money in Krugerrands.

    Mm. Good gummy.

Comments are closed.