The Spark

the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist

“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx

Education System Flunks Again

Feb 3, 2025

The headlines read: “Nearly 5 years after schools closed, the nation gets a new report card.” And test scores in math and reading are getting worse.

The report from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, sometimes called the “Nation’s Report Card,” is based on a standardized test of student learning which is given every two years to a broad sample of students in 4th and 8th grades. From 2024, it concluded: Nationally, students are still behind where they were since before the pandemic.

Michigan’s scores reflect what national results show—Michigan students are also struggling. Detroit is even FURTHER behind—it’s at the bottom compared to other large cities.

This report goes through page after page of statistics. But if you stop wading through all the numbers and percentages, its findings reveal NOTHING NEW: children in poorer areas have lower test scores than children in more privileged areas. And such disparities in test scores among different groups of children existed LONG BEFORE the pandemic—going back multiple decades—as long as standardized tests have been administered. And the main dividing line between who is “high performing” versus “low performing” is social class.

Tests can be a measurement of the degree to which children have had access to the knowledge—the math, the vocabulary, the language, the science that allows them to be efficient at test-taking. They are a measure, of sorts, of what children have learned. And it’s children who come from privileged backgrounds who have had access to higher quality education.

But when you live in a system that systematically and consciously deprives the vast majority of children of these learning experiences—and in 2024, calls them “low performing;” or 60 years ago, labeled them as below average in IQ with the tests administered then; or 100 years ago, labeled children of the working class and poor as “feeble-minded;” the only thing that has changed is which test and which label.

What hasn’t changed is the fact that this class system of capitalism CAUSES POVERTY.

For it’s a racist class system that was built on the institution of slavery and subsequently continues to relegate the black population to be bottom of the socioeconomic ladder. It’s a system that impoverishes whole communities, whether urban or rural, when it closes factories and mines that gut the economies of whole regions. And then there is the domino effect of public schools and libraries being closed, making access to education more difficult for the children of the working class.

It’s a system that has ALWAYS had a class system of education, whereby the schools in wealthier communities have more funding, and therefore more resources. A system that has been in the process of dismantling public education for decades, and now is ramping up further attacks by threatening Executive Orders to funnel public dollars to private, for-profit schools and threatening school districts with financial disinvestments if they dare teach real history and science.

It’s this system that should have a report card of F minus.