Students today

From the end of the Civil War until the 1980's the US led the world in educational achievement. At that point things began to change and over the past almost 40 years the US has been in a downward trend when measuring education. Much has been done to turn around the trend but without much success. Two recent changes, one called No Child Left Behind and a second called Common Core have both failed and teachers say failed dramatically. In recent years the emphasis has moved toward teaching the whole child and this was tried in the 50's and failed. Progressive minded educators focused more on a student's emotional, physical and mental development, at the expense of such basic skills and reading, writing and math. Sound familiar. Once again those who fail to learn from history tend to repeat. The average class size in 1950 was 37 and today it is 24 but today it is more diverse. Diversity in respect to race helps students to do better but in respect to economics student do worse. Students coming from single parent homes do worse. Kids from single-parent families are more likely to face emotional and behavioral health challenges, like aggression or engaging in high risk behaviors. Many of the attempts to improve school performance have failed because of the race issue. Experts do not want to appear to blame minority students and they don't have to because the problem is not race it is economics.