When the Program for International Assessment (PISA) results were released in December 2019, many who saw the United States’ ranking continue to stagnate behind its global competitors conceded that the last 20 years and billions of dollars spent on education reform had done essentially nothing. But the rankings don’t tell the whole story. While American students remain roughly the same on aggregate, compared to their international counterparts, the top quarter of American students have been improving their performance on the exam since 2012, even as the bottom 10th percentile lost ground. In other words, something has happened: the achievement gap is widening, a consolidation that is beginning to mimic the increasing consolidation of wealth and opportunity in America.

This statistic is a product of the fact that education policy is not designed to elevate and educate every child. Since the 1990’s, quick and unsustainable schooling reforms have been prioritized that show a disregard for the wider economic realities in America. As schools and parents struggle to make ends meet, billions of dollars have enhanced opportunities for the best students at the cost of opportunities for struggling students. As a result, public education—historically an economic equalizer—has instead helped widen an educational divide that is beginning to mirror the nation’s economic divide.

Around the turn of the millennium, four major forces converged to shape how the school reform movement would widen inequality: standardized testing, gentrification, school choice, and household economic downturn.

Read the full article about education reform efforts and inequality by Michael A. Seelig at Stanford Social Innovation Review.