It isn't nearly impossible, it actually is impossible, to make valid comparisons, backed up by data properly interpreted. The population of students in the math, language, history and science classrooms today is very different from the population of students prior to the mid 1960s. Prior to the Great Society there was tracking in the public schools and bidirectional education. One direction was toward higher education, the other directly toward the workforce. So to make comparisons, we generally fall back on opinion, personal experiences, and anecdote. There are mounds of data post 1970, a paucity of easily compared data pre-1970. What the data shows is no change at all in math and reading for 17-year-olds between 1971 and today. . Why? Because by 1970 the Great Society had kicked in and has been with us ever since. Everyone is in the same classroom now. And every educator knows that educational achievement is strongly linked to socioeconomics, and that piling on more regulations and testing, and treating everyone the same as though the actually were, won't make better students the way good nutrition, good health, a stimulating home environment, and parents who appreciate the value of education will. What all data that's ever been collected shows as far as educational achievement goes is that the determining factor that overshadows everything else is socioeconomic status of the student and their family. You can throw, race, gender, and everything else out the window. Nothing matters but socioeconomics. Everything follows from there. Change socioeconomics and you change educational achievement. The two are linked like bread and butter. What today's charter schools and private schools do is de facto select on the basis of socioeconomics, and when you do that you achieve somewhat the same result as tracking used to achieve. It is tracking by the back door. My personal opinion is that with the exception of the Deep South, where only the white schools were good -- defects there had nothing to do with tracking -- the U.S. public education system was uniformly better prior to 1970 because of tracking and one other major factor: prior to the great society, if a child was doing poorly in school it was the parents fault if the child was young, and by Junior High it was the child's fault. Today both parents and students have been led to believe it is the teachers fault first, then the school system secondly. The harm this attitude has done to U.S. primary and secondary education is incalculable. In my opinion, we should go back to what worked better, keeping of course our integrated Southern Schools. That would mean going back to tracking, and from junior high on, putting the blame for poor performance on the student. For this to work well, it is also necessary that there are first rate vocational programs in all the Junior High and High Schools. Students doing poorly should never be expelled onto the streets. They must always be expelled into alternative programs. If that must include 24 hour supervision, than so be it. I could go on and on about other things that need revision or correction-- the loss or paring down of arts programs need to be reversed -- visual, music, dance, theater , etc.-- the need for foreign language and P.E. in grade schools needs to be recognized and acted upon, the overburdening of teachers with testing, paperwork, etc., must stop. But what, as far as I'm concerned, I have mention in the paragraphs above goes to the core issues.
Not bad, Pie. Probably the only place I would differ is the correlation to socio-economic status, not because there isn't a correlation but because there is a chicken and egg issue. The same family attitudes and culture that results in higher socio-economic status also translate into better educational achievement. You have to also acknowledge that the resources that formerly went to things like arts programs now are pissed away on non-english speaking students, complying with federal requirements, dealing with school security and discipline, etc. The budgets have not been cut. To the contrary they have increased massively. It's just the priorities that changed. Public high schools now have to have sports facilities that rival those professional teams have. Every district supports an army of highly paid administrators, facilitators, mediators, counselors, et al, none of whom contribute to actual teaching.