How a Stacked Supreme Court Killed School Desegregation

The Washington Post published an opinion piece the other day by Michelle Adams, who has published a new book on the segregation-friendly role played by the 5-4 decision of the Supreme Court 50 years ago in Milliken v. Bradley. 

Even as we consider today the role that presidents play in shaping American social policy (see Trump's role in killing Roe v. Wade), I am eager to read the Adams book and find out how Professor Adams portrayed the role of another racist president, Richard Nixon, in crushing school desegregation.   

Nixon's role was crucial, as demonstrated by Gerald Grant's research from the early 2000s.  In 2010, I reviewed Grant's book, Hope and Despair in the American City: Why There Are No Bad Schools in Raleigh.

Below is the relevant section of that essay review that reminds us again of the power of the American Presidency to shape American life:

We should never underestimate the power of the presidents. Grant’s book should be required reading for present and potential school board members, as well as for any history or policy course on American education, if for no other reason than the recounting of how Nixon and his White House cabal of Haldeman, Ehrlichman, and Mitchell instituted a segregationist and anti-busing litmus test for any judge to be considered for appointment to the Federal bench, including the U. S. Supreme Court. 

For Nixon and his aides, their litmus test would be applied, of course, before any potential judge ever faced the lights of a Senate confirmation hearing. To get to the hearing, in fact, potential judges had to be on the side of segregated schools and segregated public housing. Grant shares transcripts from the Nixon’s White House taping system to show Nixon's active complicity in killing busing within or across districts for the purpose of school integration:

Nixon was making sure the he would not have to ask any nominee about his stand on busing, while directing Mitchell and key aides to apply that test to any potential appointment they brought to the president's desk. Because of the possible retirement of a second justice, Mitchell suggested to Nixon that he might make a "double play."

Nixon: Well, even then I don'twant a liberal.

Mitchell: Oh no, no.Nixon: I don't want a liberal.

Mitchell: Absolutely not.

Nixon: I just feel so strongly about that, I mean, when I think what the busing decisions have done to the South, and what it could do with de facto busing [in the North]. 

Mitchell: I agree.

Before Mitchell left the White House that day, Nixon underlined his instructions once again: 

I want you to have a specific talk with whatever man you consider. And I have to have an absolute commitment from him on busing and integration. I really have to. Go out and tell 'em that we totally respect his right to do otherwise, but if he believes otherwise, I don't want to appoint him to the Court.

Nixon got the Court he wanted. The four justices he appointed—replacing liberal judges of the Warren Court, including Chief Justice Earl Warren himself, along with Abe Fortas, Hugo Black, and John Marshall Harlan—radically changed the direction of the U. S. Supreme Court and provided the majority to stop desegregation at the city line in the North. The Warren Court had ordered desegregation of city and suburbs in Charlotte in 1968, but Nixon's Court refused to do so in 1974 in Detroit with its majority decision [in Milliken v. Bradley] (pp. 151-152).

The 5-4 decision to strike down Detroit's inter-district desegregation plan helped to seal the fate of urban desegregation efforts nationwide, while demonstrating a willingness by the new Nixon Court majority to flex its judicial muscle for the cause of segregation. By the middle of the next decade, the traceable resegregation of American schools had begun in earnest, and for the past twenty years [now fifty], that pace has only quickened.

Joe Biden's Lies and Unacknowledged Contribution to Resegregation

Joe Biden has said that "there are a lot of people who would say it [busing] hasn’t been the best remedy to integrate schools."  The people who say that, of course, are, like Joe Biden, opposed to busing, for whatever reason.  In the end, the reason does not matter because the documented racist result is the same, regardless of intent or motivation.

Whether Joe and the "lot of people" are correct in their claim that busing is an ineffective way to desegregate schools remains debatable, but the issue of busing presents us with at least one incontrovertible truth: those who have opposed busing have made significant contributions to the resegregation of schools.  That would include Joe Biden and anyone else whose intentions could be suspect or as pure as the driven snow.  The manifestations of racism are determined by policy talk and implementation, not by intentions.  We all know what the road to hell is paved with.

Richard Nixon, who was president when Joe Biden got started on the national political stage, knew that opposition to busing was an effective way to appeal to racists, both Southern and Northern, who were enraged by Lyndon Johnson's Great Society initiatives.  Anti-busing was an important piece of Nixon's "Southern Strategy," with Nixon going so far as to instruct his Attorney General, John Mitchell, to send him only Supreme Court candidates who were opposed to school busing.

Nixon got his conservative majority on the Court, which immediately went to work in 1974 dismantling, by a 5-4 vote, a busing plan in Detroit (Milliken v. Bradley) that was based on one in Charlotte, NC (Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education) that had been tested and found constitutional by the Supreme Court just a couple of years before.

First elected to the U. S. Senate in 1972, Joe Biden was watching all this unfold and making his own political calculations at the time.  Even if his heart might have been somewhere else, in the end Biden's words and deeds followed Richard Nixon and the racism he inspired:

Joe Biden, the youthful and telegenic senator from Delaware, also played an important role in this history. According to historian Matthew F. Delmont in his indispensable book "Why Busing Failed," Biden labeled busing a "bankrupt concept" that defied "common sense" and would go on to sponsor anti-busing amendments in the Senate. Biden faced the dilemma of Northern liberals of the era who generally supported national civil rights legislation, yet found themselves on unstable ground when these issues struck closer to home. Biden chose, like many of his political contemporaries, to be on the wrong side of history. In 1974, the year after Biden came to the Senate, the Supreme Court -- in Milliken v. Bradley -- struck down a busing plan in Detroit, saying it was "wholly impermissible" to bus white children who lived in the suburbs into inner-city schools to integrate schools. 

As a result of the Milliken decision, the white rush to the suburbs picked up steam, and school desegregation efforts in subsequent years were further neutralized by court decisions and legislative efforts, like the stringent Senate bill introduced in 1975 by Jesse Helms and supported by Joe Biden.

The chart below is an update from data gathered by Gary Orfield.

In a detailed analysis of busing's effectiveness (spoiler alert--it works), Nikole Hannah-Jones shows that Biden lied about his role in the anti-busing wave of the 70s and 80s:

After Mr. Nixon’s win in 1968, white Democrats were trying to hold on to their white voters. Mr. Biden favored busing for integration when he ran for election in 1972, but changed his mind seemingly because of a Delaware school desegregation case that was working its way through the courts. In his autobiography, Mr. Biden recalled his confrontation with a crowd of white constituents teetering on the brink of violence over the issue. 

Mr. Biden flipped. Between 1975 and 1982, he teamed up with ardent segregationists in Congress, including Mr. Eastland, to support no fewer than five antibusing measures. Despite Mr. Biden’s recent claims that he only opposed busing ordered by the Department of Education, the bills tried to curtail the ability of federal courts to order busing and even to limit busing in places where courts had already ordered it.

 Lying is a big issue, but the bigger issue here is Biden's ignorance or disregard for the devastating effects that the demise of busing has had in terms of efforts to achieve integrated schools.  Biden's decades of opposition to busing helped to lead us to where we are today, with the resegregation of urban schools, in particular, now almost complete.  

Even during the 8 years of Obama-Biden, they did nothing to stop or slow this resegregation trend in the years just before Trump.  In fact, their support for the even-more-intensely segregated charter schools skyrocketed during the Obama years and led to the further debasement of public education. After looking like a fool at the recent debate and spending a few days on defense, now Joe has moved to a cautious offensive position, declaring just today that "I don't have to atone."   Maybe not, Joe, but you do have to acknowledge reality.  Or maybe not.

Charters Drive School Resegregation, Duke Study Finds

We have known for almost a decade that charter schools are more segregated (follow the links in this commentary) than the public schools they are replacing, and we have known much longer that diverse, inclusive classrooms are the most cost effective and just way to improve academic performance for all students.

We now have evidence that charter schools have become more segregated over the past 15 years, as all minority or all white charter schools have proliferated.  In North Carolina, for instance, white charters now resemble the white academies that sprang up in the wake of the 1964 Civl Rights Act, just as all black charters have become as common as they were during Jim Crow.

There is a big difference, however, between the black charters of today and black public schools of the 1950s and 1960s.  Even during Jim Crow, many black schools had black, caring, and professionally-trained teachers who understood the contexts of poverty and racism from which their students came.

With a primary concern for the whole child, those all-black schools were not laser focused on turning children into miniature Amazon workers, who are subjected to behavioral sterilization while producing test scores that build and protect charter school brands.

Another difference: today's black segregated charters are often staffed with white beginners with little, if any, professional preparation and with even less understanding of the challenges that disadvantaged children bring to school. These beginners represent the Amazon worker paradigm brought to tax-funded discriminatory schools. 

Below is part of a WaPo article that reports on a new Duke study that brings the resegregated charter school phenomenon up to date:

. . . .Setting aside the drama between charters and teachers unions, or complaints that charter schools lead to the privatization of public education, there has been the persistent critique that charters increase inequality by plucking advantaged students out of traditional public schools.

The most recent cautionary tale comes from North Carolina, where professors at Duke have traced a troubling trend of resegregation since the first charters opened in 1997. They contend that North Carolina’s charter schools have become a way for white parents to secede from the public school system, as they once did to escape racial integration orders.

"They appear pretty clearly to be a way for white students to get out of more racially integrated schools,” said economics professor Helen Ladd, one of the authors of the draft report released Monday.

Charter schools in North Carolina tend to be either overwhelmingly black or overwhelmingly white—in contrast to traditional public schools, which are more evenly mixed. Compare these charts from the report:

The bottom chart shows students that attend North Carolina’s regular public schools. There is a healthy variety of schools with different racial makeups. Only about 30 percent of students attend schools that are highly segregated, meaning schools that are more than 80 percent or less than 20 percent white.

The top chart shows students at North Carolina’s charter schools. More than two thirds attend schools that are highly segregated. You can see on the chart because the histogram has two humps, one at each racial extreme.

The charts also show how racial makeups have shifted over time. By 2014, a fifth of charter schools were overwhelmingly — more than 90 percent — white. In 1998, less than 10 percent of charters were that way.

Parental preferences are part of the problem. The charter school admissions process is itself race-blind: Schools that are too popular conduct lotteries between their applicants. But if a school isn’t white enough, white parents simply won’t apply.

In previous research, Ladd discovered that white North Carolina parents prefer schools that are less than 20 percent black. This makes it hard to have racially balanced charter schools in a state where more than a quarter of schoolchildren are black.

“Even though black parents might prefer racially balanced schools, the fact that white parents prefer schools with far lower proportions of black students sets up a tipping point,” the authors write. “Once a school becomes ‘too black,’ it becomes almost all black as white parents avoid it.”

Looking at students in grades 4-8, the researchers found that the regular public school population in North Carolina has become less white over the past 15 years (from 64.1 percent white to 53 percent white), while the charter school population has grown more white (from 58.5 percent white to 62.2 percent white).

Not only that, but the kids choosing charter schools these days also seem to be more able. The researchers examined how students had been scoring on standardized tests before they entered charter school. It used to be that kids with below average test scores applied to charter schools. But in recent years, the kids going into charter schools tend to have above-average test scores.

The researchers argue that this changing mix of students explains much of the test score gains among North Carolina’s charter schools. By their calculations, the schools haven’t gotten that much better at teaching students — but they have gotten better at attracting more able students.

In 2010, North Carolina received a $400 million Race to the Top grant from the Obama administration. As part of its application, it promised to eliminated the cap on charter schools, which had been stuck at 100. Now there has been a flood of charter schools seeking to open in North Carolina, and the researchers warn that the segregation problem might only get worse.

One problem is that disadvantaged students have less of a chance to attend a charter school. First, they or their parents have to be plugged in enough to know which are the good charter schools and motivated enough to apply. Then, they need to have the resources to actually attend the charter, because unlike regular public schools, charter schools in North Carolina do not have to offer transportation or lunch to students. For poor students who rely on school buses and free meal programs, the costs associated with attending a charter school may discourage them from the opportunity.

By contrast, affluent families might not think twice about driving their children to attend the high-achieving charter across town instead of a low-achieving neighborhood school. In this manner, even charter schools without explicit fees or admissions requirements may tilt toward inequality.

Ladd said that she would like to see charter schools be required to provide services on a par with what public schools offer. This would be a step toward making them more accessible. The board that oversees charter schools might also be more careful about approving new ones. Schools that plan to open in white or affluent neighborhoods are unlikely to attract anyone but white and affluent students. . . .

School Choice allows segregation to come full circle

“As a result, advantaged, mostly white parents are pushed to make choices that they think protect their privilege. These factors perpetuate the cycle of social reproduction and resegregation, wherein schools enrolling the most students from affluent white families are automatically considered “better”—and therefore attract more students from advantaged backgrounds.” — Allison Roda and Amy Stuart Wells

Washington Post just ran a piece entitled "White parents in North Carolina are using charter schools to secede from the education system," and it's exactly what we'd expect it to be.

Saw the link to the article on Dr. James Avington Miller Jr.'s Facebook page. Miller, of The War Report on Public Education radio show fame, had the following salient comment posted with the link: "BACK TO THE FUTURE------BACK WHERE IT STARTED"

I left the following commentary on Washington Post:

School Choice was coined by the segregationists, borrowed by the Broad/Gates/Walton Triumvirate, and now gleefully being reclaimed by the segregationists. Not just Southerners either, mind you. Check out Los Angeles "boutique charters" like Citizens of the World (CWC), Larchmont, and Metro. They cater to so-called liberal parents looking for "alternatives." What that really means is alternatives to having brown and poor children in their schools... well with the exception of those whose parents are self colonized and adept at respectability politics. Those are the parents of color that the Mike McGalliards of the charter project would boast are "so articulate" (read white-acting). The concept of school choice is racist and classist at its very core.

Jim Crow Rides Again

From Aljazeera America:

by Daniel Denvir @danieldenvir

The Supreme Court ruled 60 years ago this May 17 in Brown v. Board of Education that “segregation of white and Negro children in the public schools of a State solely on the basis of race, pursuant to state laws permitting or requiring such segregation,” is unconstitutional.

The ruling abolished the explicitly mandated segregation made infamous in the Deep South. But political reaction and larger structural shifts, such as white suburbanization, quickly overwhelmed tentative progress. Today, segregation — both racial and economic — remains the core organizational feature of American public education. In 1980, the typical black student attended a school where 36 percent of students were white. Today, the average black student attends a school where only 29 percent are. Many black and Latino students attend schools where nearly every other student is nonwhite — including in supposed liberal bastions such as New York and Chicago.

Indeed, New York state’s public schools are the most segregated in the nation, according to a March report from the Civil Rights Project at the University of California, Los Angeles. In New York City, 19 of 32 community school districts are less than 10 percent white. That includes all of the Bronx, two-thirds of Brooklyn and half of Manhattan.

This is no time for an anniversary celebration.

“Black children are more racially and socioeconomically isolated today than at any time” since data became available in 1970, Richard Rothstein, a research associate at the Economic Policy Institute, wrote in a recent report.

What’s more, schools attended primarily by nonwhite and poor children are often woefully underfunded.

Take Philadelphia, where, as a reporter for the Philadelphia City Paper, I cover a largely poor and nonwhite school district that, after years of underfunding, is going through a spectacular collapse in the wake of budget cuts implemented by Republican Gov. Tom Corbett.

Many high schools here are more than 90 percent black. Among the many things city schools lack are sufficient nurses, counselors, music and art teachers and libraries. Things are rather different a few miles over the city line at Lower Merion High School in Ardmore, a leafy suburban town with a median household income of nearly $69,000. There, the funding is stellar. The student body: 8 percent black.

Separate continues to mean unequal: Pennsylvania schools that need the most are getting the least.

While the School District of Philadelphia has a “target” class size of between 30 and 33, Lower Merion has an average class of 21, not to mention a black box theater and a greenhouse for environmental and horticultural studies. Lower Merion students receive nearly twice the per-pupil funding as those in Philadelphia’s public schools.

It’s important to note that inequality also affects whiter districts that serve students who are poor and working class, or hail from a middle class that has over recent years become, thanks to growing inequality, downwardly mobile. Federal and state courts and government gave up not only on black children, but on integration and equality for all — and they began to do so soon after Brown.

Today’s version of segregation is enforced not through ‘whites only’ signage or a governor blocking the schoolhouse door but through disparate property-tax bases. 

Nathaniel Steward on May 21, 1954, at the St.-Dominique school in Washington, where the Brown v. Board of Education decision outlawing segregation in state schools was applied for the first time.

 Staff / AFP / Getty Images

In 1973, the Supreme Court ruled 5–4 in San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriguez that there was no fundamental right to education and that the courts could not guarantee poor students in a heavily Hispanic district — or anywhere — equally funded schools.  

In 1974, the court narrowly overturned a district court judge’s intercounty busing plan in Milliken v. Bradley: The existence of largely white suburban school districts and “predominantly Negro school population in Detroit” were, according to Justice Potter Stewart's concurring opinion, “caused by unknown and perhaps unknowable factors such as in-migration, birth rates, economic changes or cumulative acts of private racial fears” — and thus not subject to corrective judicial action.

Thurgood Marshall, who argued Brown for the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, went on to serve as the nation’s first black Supreme Court justice. He issued a sharp dissent in both cases, protesting in Milliken that it was “the duty of the State to eliminate root and branch all vestiges of racial discrimination and to achieve the greatest possible degree of actual desegregation.”

But in Milliken, the court espoused a sleight-of-hand philosophy: Race blindness replaced Brown’s principle of racial justice. That philosophy controls American politics and jurisprudence today. Chief Justice John Roberts adeptly summarized the idea in 2007, when the court struck down integration programs in schools in Seattle and Louisville, Kentucky.

“The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race,” he wrote.

Today’s version of segregation is enforced not through “whites only” signage or a governor blocking the schoolhouse door, but through disparate property-tax bases. Wealthy homeowners fund their own affluent school districts while poor homeowners try, and fail, to fund schools for poor children with the greatest needs. That’s why advocates are now focused on addressing the divided neighborhoods at the root of the education divide, fighting to bring economic and racial diversity to affluent suburbs that fortify the walls of the ghetto by prohibiting affordable housing.

New Jersey has become a laboratory. In 1975, the state Supreme Court handed down the historic Mount Laurel decision that (along with later court decisions) mandated that affordable housing be built in the township of Mount Laurel and in municipalities statewide. Research conducted by Princeton sociologist Douglas S. Massey and colleagues found that the low-income tenants who live in Mount Laurel thanks to the ruling have had their lives and educations transformed for the better, while affluent locals have suffered no ill effect.

A self-described reform movement, which calls for expanded charter schools and evaluating teacher effectiveness based on test scores, now dominates American public-education policy debates. It has largely abandoned the civil rights movement’s dream of integrated schools and instead blames public management and teachers’ unions for poor students’ troubles. Notably, the Civil Rights Project study found that 73 percent of New York City charters are “apartheid schools,” with less than 1 percent white enrollment.

“Today, 95 percent of education reform is about trying to make high-poverty schools work,” Century Foundation senior fellow Richard Kahlenberg told The Washington Post in 2010, discussing a study finding that low-income students in Montgomery County, Maryland, benefited from attending high-income schools. “This research suggests there is a much more effective way to help close the achievement gap. And that is to give low-income students a chance to attend middle-class schools.”

Integration is a powerful tool for school reform, and it has the virtue of finally achieving social justice.

Daniel Denvir is a reporter at the Philadelphia City Paper and a contributor to The Guardian, Salon, and The New Republic.

The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera America's editorial policy.

Resegregation of American Schools by Race and Economics, Thanks to Obama Justice Department

Wake County Resegregationists' New Strategy: Charter Schools

It took a concerted effort by Wake County citizens to reclaim their school board after it was hijacked by anti-diversity candidates with money from the Koch Bros.  Some of that history can be found here (reverse chronological order), and it speaks to the determination of local citizens who remained insistent on protecting one of the great school experiments in socioeconomic diversity.

Even though Dems have reclaimed a majority of seats on the Board and significant portions of the diversity program have been preserved, the new resegregation threat now comes from the State level, which is in the grips of the same Tea Party extremists that turned things upside down in Wake County just five years ago.  There is much to do in North Carolina for sanity to be restored at the state and local levels.

From NewsObserver.com:

We could know in the next eight days whether there could be many as 12 additional charter schools opening in Wake County in the next two years.

As noted in today’s article, the State Board of Education will vote Thursday on giving final approval to 26 charter schools that want to open this fall. That group includes four schools in Wake County.

Next Monday on Jan. 13, the state Office of Charter Schools will recommend which of the 71 charter schools that have applied to open in 2015 should go forward for further review. That group hoping to move forward with the new Charter Schools Advisory Board includes eight applicants from Wake County.

With 15 charter schools now open in Wake, there could wind up being as many as 27 in 2015.

The 12 new potential Wake charters can be divided into basically two groups. One type is geared more toward college-prep and higher performing students. The other is geared more toward students who have academic challenges.

For the Wake schools that want to open this year, Cardinal Charter Academy, Envision Science Academy and Wake Forest Charter Academy would appear to be more geared toward average to above-average students. The fourth Wake applicant seeking final approval, Dynamic Community Charter School, would be focused on children with learning and developmental disabilities.

Approval this week would allow the four schools to ramp up recruitment efforts for students, no small concern considering that the Wake County school system will begin the magnet school application process later this month.

The 2015 applicants have got a lot farther to go.

Cardinal Charter Academy of Knightdale, Cardinal Charter Academy at North Raleigh,James Madison Academy and Kaleidoscope Art and Technology High School are more college prep in theme.

Capital City Charter High School, Central Wake Charter High School, PAVE Southeast Raleigh Charter School and Wisdom Academy are geared toward at-risk students.

“It’s the kind of charter we’d like to see more of in North Carolina,” said J.B. Buxton, chairman of the board of PAVE and the education adviser to former Democratic Gov. Mike Easley.

It’s a position that puts Buxton at odds with some fellow Democrats, such as Yevonne Brannon, of Public Schools First NC.

“Why should we set up a charter school in Southeast Raleigh?” Brannon said. “We should be providing more resources to the schools that are already there.”

Read more here: http://www.newsobserver.com/2014/01/06/3509067/looking-at-the-potential-expansion.html#storylink=cpy

Shelby County Accepts Hard Cash to Settle Civil Rights Lawsuit Brought Against Municipalities

Last year when Shelby County saw the lucrative Gates plan for turning over Memphis City schools to corporations melting away, the County filed a lawsuit against five suburban municipalities that were threatening to form their own school systems to avoid the Gates consolidation.  The ostensible basis for the lawsuit was that the five new leafy suburban districts would exacerbate segregation in the remaining county schools.

When the pending lawsuit failed to block the formation of the new school districts, thanks to neo-segregationists at the state level, the County essentially blackmailed the new munis into paying a fee to settle the lawsuit.  Now everyone has the money needed to guarantee a clear moral conscience, and children in Memphis are confined and segregated in corporate charter chain gangs to be culturally and behaviorally sterilized.  Perfect.

. . . .The agreement says the county commission will not sue the municipalities for any equal protection issues. In return, the municipalities have agreed to pay the Shelby County school board a percentage of state funding over 12 years to help fund staff retirement benefits.

Arlington, one of the first communities to agree to settlement costs, will pay $333,333 a year, or nearly $4 million over 12 years. . . .

Has Corporate Education "Reform" Earned Another 25 Years to Complete the Resegregation and Privatization Agendas? Part I

With a series of conservative SCOTUS decisions beginning with the Nixon Court, and with a particular hostility by the Reaganites toward the equity and equality agenda that grew from the War on Poverty in 1960s, the resegregation of public schools

Original chart by Orfield & Lee, 2006

took hold in earnest in 1988, and it has continued unabated since then (click chart to enlarge).  It is not surprising, then, that the most recent NAEP 2013 summary report does not include the achievement gap numbers from years prior to 1990, when the achievement gaps between whites and minorities from 1971 (when NAEP began) to 1988 were dramatically shrinking at the same time that school segregation was shrinking.  

No one, particularly Arne Duncan or Bill Gates, wants to think about the resegregation of schools that is further incentivized by their corporate education charter school policies.  

The correlations between resegregation rates and NAEP achievement gaps are particularly easy to see when we look at the long term shifts in the test score gaps between whites and minorities.  The charts below are from a 2012 NAEP Trends Report, which show gaps for 13 and 17 year olds in Reading. The same pattern holds for Math as well and for 4th graders.  

What are the advantages of beginning achievement gap comparisons from 1990 to 2013, rather than when NAEP began in 1971?  I think you have already figured out the answer, but that's where Part II will begin.  We will then look more closely at what the NCLB Era of turmoil, testing, and punishment have produced in terms of the Nation's Report Card.

Oh, by the way, someone tell Washington Post reporter, Lyndsey Layton, that the NAEP did not begin testing 20 years ago.