Educational Reform in an Era of Disinformation
David C. Berliner
Arizona State University
Citation:
Berliner, D. C. (1993, February 2).
Educational reform in an era of disinformation,
Education Policy Analysis Archives,
1(2). Retrieved [date] from
http://epaa.asu.edu/epaa/v1n2.html/.
Abstract
Data which suggest the failure of America's schools to educate its
youth well do not survive careful scrutiny. School reforms
based on these questionable data are wrongheaded and potentially
distructive of quality education. Reforms of the kind proposed
by those who have started from an assumption that America's schools
have failed will exacerbate the differences between the "have" and
the "have-not" school districts.
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It is not difficult to understand why so many people are
concerned about schooling and youth. One only has to read newspaper
headlines and summaries to learn why people think so poorly of the
system that attends to the care of the next generation. For
example, these stories were culled from the media:
- In a typical year during the 1980s, minors aged fourteen to
nineteen accounted for 43.4 % of all criminal offenders; 54% of all
murder cases in the nation involved jobless youth.
- High school girls turn to prostitution for entertainment,
curiosity, and as a source of revenue--police report their rate up
262%.
- At a public junior high school a gang of six students had extorted
$2,500 from about 120 classmates.
- A fourteen year-old student who was repeatedly tormented and
beaten by school toughs hangs himself.
- Forty-four high school students go wilding, raid five shops for
merchandise.
- Teen tortured by two school gang members, cigarettes used to burn
his hands and back.
- Kids report feeling refreshed after beating up another child.
- Because they didn't like a lecture on how they might lead a better
life, eight junior high toughs demanded an apology from their
teacher. He refused, so they hit him, kicked him, threw his papers
all around, and fought with ten other teachers as well. Finally the
teacher knelt before the youths and apologized to avoid further
confusion.
- Ten percent of the nation's public middle schools request police
guards for their graduation ceremonies.
Other similar stories exist, but these are enough to make
clear the awful, brutal world of youth and the failure of public
schooling. This is an old story by now in the United States; but
what you may not have anticipated as you read these clippings is
that all of them are from the Japanese press describing incidents
in Japanese schools.
- In a typical year during the 1980s, minors aged fourteen to
nineteen accounted for 43.4 % of all criminal offenders; 54% of all
murder cases in the nation involved jobless youth. (Youth Crime up
100% over 1976, Japan Times, 8/23/87).
- High school girls turn to prostitution for entertainment,
curiosity, and as a source of revenue--police report their rate up
262%. ("Number of minors taken into custody for prostitution
increases dramatically," Japan Times, 1/30/86).
- At a public junior high school a gang of six students had extorted
$2,500 from about 120 classmates. (Schoolland, Shoguns Ghost: The
Dark Side of Japanese Education, 1990, p.121).
- A fourteen year-old student who was repeatedly tormented and
beaten by school toughs hangs himself. (Schoolland, Shoguns Ghost:
The Dark Side of JApanese Education, 1990, p.121).
- Forty-four high school students go wilding, raid five shops for
merchandise. (Schoolland, Shoguns Ghost: The Dark Side of JApanese
Education, 1990, p.122).
- Teen tortured by two school gang members, cigarettes used to burn
his hands and back. ("Tokyo police report case of bullying," Japan
Times, 11/20/85).
- Kids report feeling refreshed after beating up another child.
(Stanglin, D. "Japan's Blackboard Jungle," Newsweek, 7/1/85).
- Because they didn't like a lecture on how they might lead a better
life, eight junior high toughs demanded an apology from their
teacher. He refused, so they hit him, kicked him, threw his papers
all around, and fought with ten other teachers as well. Finally the
teacher knelt before the youths and apologized to avoid further
confusion. ("8 junior high thugs attack 10 teachers," Japan Times,
3/26/86; "8 angry students hurt 10 teachers," Daily Yomiuri,
3/2/86).
- Ten percent of the nation's public middle schools request police
guards for their graduation ceremonies. (Schoolland, Shoguns Ghost:
The Dark Side of Japanese Education, 1990, p.179).
The evidence is quite clear that the Japanese public school system
is a brutal and an enormous failure by most of the standards we as
a nation have for schooling, save one, achievement in mathematics
and science.
The Japanese system is one in which:
- Crude forms of cheating at the college level are rampant because
there usually is no penalty for it.
- Parents pay teachers "thank you" money for giving good grades and
letters of recommendation to their children.
- A teacher was taunted by his colleagues for being too soft on
students, so when a student on a field trip used a hair dryer-- an
act forbidden by the school--that teacher beat and kicked the
student to death. At the trial the defense was that everyone at the
school expected this teacher to use corporal punishment. This
seemed perfectly reasonable to the judge, who was quite lenient in
sentencing.
I became concerned about the possibility of erroneous information
being disseminated by officials of our government when this same
Japanese system of education was scrutinized by a team of visiting
Americans, whose views were reported in the Japan Times under the
headline: "U. S. Educators Marvel at Japan's Schools" (October 26,
1985). The then United States Assistant Secretary of Education,
Chester Finn, a member of the study tour, said of the Japanese:
They've demonstrated that you can have a coherent curriculum, high
standards, good discipline, parental support, a professional
teaching force and a well-run school. They have shown that the
average student can learn a whole lot more.
(Washington Post, October 19, 1985)
Herbert Walberg, a distinguished educational researcher, was on
the visiting panel and concurred with Dr. Finn that much in the
Japanese system could help to solve the problems of education in
the United States. He said:
I think it's portable. Gumption and willpower, that's the key.
(Washington Post, October 19, 1985)
Knowing something about the Japanese system, I asked
myself: Do we have the gumption and will power to resist turning
our schools into institutions where 26,000 junior high school
students and 4,000 elementary school students refuse to go to
school at all because they are tormented by teachers and bullied by
students, and where 47,000 others miss at least fifty days of
schooling per year because of the abuse they must face at school
(Chicago Tribune, November 24,1985)? Where the number of pleats
allowed in a girl's skirt is specified? Where students with curly
hair are required to carry certificates attesting that their hair
is not permed? Where some of the teachers at a middle school kicked
and beat the students regularly, in full view of other teachers,
finally killing one student by bashing in his skull and were then
supported by all the other teachers who threatened the students to
make them remain silent? Where a Tokyo mother questioned the school
system for allowing teachers to beat, kick, and drag her son around
the school yard frequently over a three year period, at times
hammering his head against a goal post, and once throwing him in a
garbage dump and jumping on him, because the student in question
once skipped Sunday soccer practice to go fishing with a friend
(see Schoolland, 1990, for additional documentation of this
fundamentally cruel and clearly un-American system. Many of the
news reports cited in this paper are from his book on Japanese
education).
I am pleased that there are no student offenses in
the United States for which such cruelty on the part of teachers
would be tolerated. But in Japan, over-regulation and harsh
treatment of students are common. We certainly need "willpower and
gumption" alright, but it is to resist a system that is at odds
with our culture's humane and enlightened views of childhood and
schooling. We certainly need that gumption and willpower to resist
importing a system that has been recognized as a failure in Japan,
according to their own prime minister and his council of advisors,
who have said:
"Bullying, suicides among school children, dropping out from
school, increasing delinquency, violence both at home and at
school, heated entrance exam races, over-emphasis on scholastic
ratings, and torture of children by some teachers are the result of
the pathological mechanisms that have become established in Japan's
educational system" (Japan Times, April 24, 1986).
I have a hundred criticisms of our school system and my list
grows daily. I hope that we can improve our system, since public
education in a vibrant, dynamic democracy should never be
considered finished. But the reforms should be based on facts
about the system and input from its practitioners. Reforms proposed
by politicians, business leaders or other citizens should not be
undertaken without reliable evidence or credible stories of
experience to back them up. I was concerned that if so much
nonsense could be spoken and written in the United States about the
glories of the Japanese educational system, perhaps information
being disseminated about the American system was also false. I
began, therefore, to examine the validity of the criticisms made
about our educational system. My findings are instructive.
Let us look, therefore, at some of the commonly repeated
charges made against the American public school system. But this
time, instead of simply agreeing with them, because they appeal to
our suspicions and fears, let us ask whether any credible data
exist to make us question their validity. Perhaps the charges will
turn out to be only partially true. Perhaps our public education is
failing certain students and their families, but not others, and
perhaps it is not even failing most of the students in the public
schools. Perhaps Americans have been lied to, because when nations
have economic difficulties or go through social change, their
leaders look for scapegoats, and the American school system is a
handy one. Perhaps we are changing into a plutocracy, where a
wealthy elite chooses not to use the public schools, and
participates in undermining confidence in that system so as to
promote the conception of schooling as a commodity, to be bought
like medicine, to be regarded as a privilege rather than a right of
every American. Perhaps we are in a peculiarly American cycle,
where every generation or so we like to play "kick-the-teacher." We
will look again at the reasons underlying the charges made, but for
now, let us look more closely at the charges themselves.
Charge: Today's youth are not as smart as students used to be.
I have heard versions of this charge repeated by politicians,news
commentators, editorial writers, deans of colleges of education,
and my neighbors, friends, and relatives. A related charge is that
today's youth can not think as well as they used to. We can start
examining this claim with cross-sectional data about intelligence
test performance.
Intelligence test scores in the United States are up, according to
psychologist J. R. Flynn, reporting in the prestigious and
rigorously peer-reviewed journal Psychological Bulletin (1987). In
fact, the scores are not just up, they are up dramatically, as
Table 1 reveals.
Table 1.
Wechsler Stanford-Binet IQ for White Americans Ages 2-75 Years,
Used in Standardization Samples for Norming the Tests (After Flynn,
1987, p. 177, Table 7).
| Year | 1932 |
1947-48 | 1953-54 | 1964-65 | 1971-72 | 1972 |
1978 | | Ave IQ | 100 |
106 | 108 | 109 | 110 | 114 | 115 |
Since 1932 the mean IQ of white Americans aged 2 to 75 has
risen about .3 points per year. Today's students actually average
about 14 IQ points higher than their grandparents did, and average
about 7 points higher than their parents did on the
well-established Wechsler or Stanford-Binet Intelligence Tests.
That is, as a group, today's school age youth are scoring nearly
one standard deviation higher than the group from which have
emerged the recent leaders of government and industry. The data
reveal, for example, that the number of students expected to have
IQs of 130 or more--a typical cut off point for giftedness--is now
about seven times greater than it was for the generation that is
now retiring from their leadership positions throughout the nation,
and complaining about the poor performance of todayUs youth. In
fact, the number of students above 145 IQ points is now about
eighteen times greater than it was two generations ago. Moreover,
and perhaps more important, the increase in IQ throughout the
industrialized world appears not to be in informational areas
alone, as measured by the vocabulary or mathematics sections of the
intelligence test. Rather, the changes in performance have been
most pronounced in the decontextualized, abstract, problem-solving
areas of the tests, the parts that are purer measures of general
intelligence. Flynn concluded that he was not sure what the
intelligence tests really measure, but since 1950 IQ gains on those
tests, in industrialized nations, reflect a "massive" increase in
abstract problem solving ability. But he would not speculate on
what might have produced such an effect. Was it public health?
Increased schooling? Better schooling? Changes in the gene pool
within industrialized nations? Why would measured IQ in the United
States increase so much since the 1930s?
Torsten Husen, the distinguished Swedish educational researcher,
and member of the National Academy of Education, working with Dutch
researcher Albert Tuijnman (1991), helped to answer that question.
They were persuaded by Flynn's data to reexamine the files of a
study conducted in Malmo, Sweden, a ten-year longitudinal study of
intelligence, from childhood to adulthood, among 671 Swedish young
men. Using contemporary statistical techniques, unavailable at the
time of the original study, they checked whether changes in IQ had
occurred, and if so, what might explain them. Their conclusion was
unequivocal. After the variations of home background and childhood
IQ are removed, schooling was seen to have a direct and substantial
effect on adult IQ. The authors concluded that
....schools not only confer knowledge and instrumental
qualifications but also train and develop students' intellectual
capacity. The results [of this study] provide support for the
thesis...that IQ as measured by group intelligence tests is not
stable but changes significantly...[and] that the amount and
quality of schooling experiences to which children are exposed are
implicated in the observed changes in measured IQ.... [Apparently]
schooling co-varies with and produces positive changes in adult IQ.
(Husen and Tuijnman, 1991, p. 22)
One further study in this area is of interest. Two
Israeli researchers (Cahen and Cohen, 1989) asked a simple but
well-known question in the prestigious journal Child Development:
Which comes first, the chicken or the egg? In this case, referring
to the connections between IQ test performance and school
achievement as one gets older, they asked: As you grow from year to
year, does intelligence, as measured by an intelligence test,
determine school achievement, or does school achievement determine
intelligence? That is, do you have to be intelligent to profit from
schooling, as is generally believed, or do you have to profit from
schooling to become intelligent, as measured by an intelligence
test? From a large data set they tried to determine the direction
of the relationships. They were firm in their conclusion. School
achievement was the primary factor associated with changes in
intelligence test performance. Intelligence did not appear to be
the causal factor in growth in school achievement. A coherent set
of similar findings are analyzed by the respected psychologist
Stephen Ceci of Cornell (1991), in the rigorously reviewed journal
Developmental Psychology. In his review we find convincing evidence
that the skills measured on intelligence tests and the processes
underlying intelligence test performance are taught and learned in
school. Estimates of the magnitude of this influence range as high
as six IQ points lost per year of schooling missed. It has become
clear that the more schooling you acquire, the smarter you will
appear on the tests. The corollary is one that our democracy is
having difficulty facing, namely, that higher social-class standing
will make a child intelligent, at least as measured by tests of
intelligence. Higher social-class standing allows parents to
buy high quality day care, preschool, and K-12 schooling; permits
the purchase of instructional toys, encyclopedias and computers;
and ensures first-rate health care. As the number of children in
poverty grows, and two million more were added to the list this
past decade (National Commission on Children, 1991), the continuous
rise in intelligence test scores in this country is likely to stop
and the cause for that will not be found in schools, but in a
society that is witnessing a reduction in the standard of living
for eighty percent of its people (Reich, 1991). The blame for the
decline, however, is likely to be placed on the schools.
Let us summarize what we have learned from these studies
of intelligence. First, average intelligence, particularly
decontextualized, abstract problem-solving, of the kind measured in
some IQ tests, has risen dramatically over a generation. Second, a
good candidate for the explanation of such large effects is the
increase in educational opportunity provided over this time period.
And third, there is now reason to believe that it is in large part
educational opportunity that causes successful intelligence test
performance, rather than intelligence as measured by performance on
intelligence tests, being the cause of school success. Perhaps our
children are not less able then their parents, but instead quite a
bit more able. Perhaps, also, our educational systems are not worse
than they used to be, but better than they have ever been. What
else might account for the fact that in 1978 90,000 high school
students took Advanced Placement (AP) tests for college credit,
while in 1990 that number had increased 255 percent to 324,000
students, who took a total of 481,000 different AP tests
(Educational Testing Service, 1991)? Although the mean score
dropped over this period only eleven one-hundreths of a point, the
number of Asians taking the AP tests tripled, the percentage of
African-Americans taking the examinations doubled, and the
percentage of Hispanics quadrupled. Something in the schools must
be working correctly.
Let us now go on to look at our students' performance on other
aptitude tests over the time period during which they were
allegedly losing some of their smartness. We can begin with the
test that has often made the headlines throughout our nation.
Charge: The Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) has shown a marked
decrease in mean score over the last twenty-five years, indicating
the failure of our schools and our teachers to do their jobs.
This misleading statement is so often repeated that it is
hard to correct. But let us try to get it straight. To be sure, since
1965 there has been a steady decline in the average SAT score for
our nation's youth. The decline however, has been only 3.3 percent
of the raw score total, about five fewer items answered correctly
over twenty-five years. The explanation for this loss is simple and
should fill educators with great pride, not shame. Why? Because
much greater numbers of students in the bottom sixty percent of
their class have been taking the test since the 1960s (Carson,
Huelskamp, Woodall, 1991). As educational opportunities and
higher education became available to rural Americans and to members
of traditionally under-represented minorities, more of these
students started taking the SAT. Since they were more frequently
from impoverished communities and from schools that offer a poorer
academic curriculum and fewer advanced course offerings, it is not
surprising that they tended to attain lower scores than advantaged,
suburban, middle-class white students. This is why the mean number
of items correct is less than it was, and most of that drop
occurred between 1965 and 1975, not since. As an educator I am
filled with pride that we have played a major role in the
achievement of two of America's most prized goals of the 1960s--a
higher high-school graduation rate, particularly for minority
children, and increased access to higher education for everyone. We
accomplished this with only a loss of correct responses to about
five of the items used in computing the SAT scores. A remarkable
achievement, I think, particularly when you look at other data.
For example, one fact that is rarely acknowledged when
the media interview those who see the sky falling and the
nation endangered because of the decrease in SAT scores is rather
startling, as Table 2 reveals.
Table 2.Total SAT Subpopulation Scores.
| Ethnic Group | | Year | White |
Black | Asian | American
Indian |
Mexican
American | Puerto
Rican
| | 1976 | 944 |
686 | 932 | 808 |
781 | 765 | | 1990 | 933 | 737 |
938 | 825 | 809 | 764 | |
(From data supplied by the Educational Testing Service and the
National Center for Educational Statistics. Please note: the data
in Table 2 in versions of this article seen before August 11, 1994,
were in error. I thank Andrew J. Coulson for pointing out the
erroneous data.) |
From 1976 to 1990 the mean SAT scores of African-
American, Asian-American, Native-American, Mexican-American and
Puerto Rican high school students have gone up (Carson, Huelskamp,
and Woodall, 1991). A government-funded report by the scientists of
the Sandia National Laboratories makes the important observation
that every one of the minority sub-groups for whom there are data has
increased its average score on the SAT over the time period although
the U.S. mean dropped. The most likely cause of this increase in
measured achievement is the improvement in their education.
Finally, I call your attention to Table 3.
|
Table 3.Total SAT Scores of Students Who Were Like the
1975 SAT Test Takers. |
|
| Year | 1975 | 1980 | 1985 |
1990 |
| | All Test Takers |
903 | 890 | 906 | 896 |
Students Who Match
1975 Test Takers | 900 |
915 | 950 | 960 |
(Adapted from Carson, Huelskamp and Woodall, 1991, p.47)
|
Here we see in the upper row the SAT performance of all test
takers between 1975 and 1990. As I noted, it is unusually stable
over this time period. But more important is the second row of
Table 3. This is the performance of students from 1975 to 1990 who
match those who took the test in 1975 in terms of demographic
variables such as rank in high school class and gender.
When we follow their performance over the years, we find something
to fill the heart of every educator with pride. We see an increase
of about one-third of a standard deviation in SAT performance. This
is an effect size of considerable magnitude among these advantaged,
primarily white youth, who were supposedly achieving less because
they suffered from harmful desegregation policies including forced
busing, low standards of performance, poor teachers, no homework,
too much television, low morals, and a host of other plagues that
uninformed critics of education believe are affecting the
performance of students today.
What makes this group of college-bound high-achievers so
much better than their 1975 peers? Is it cleaner air or water?
Improved diet or exercise? I believe a good candidate for the
credit is the continuous improvement of the schools they attend.
What adds more to my pride is that Educational Testing Service, the
developers of the test items for the SAT, has admitted that the SAT
today is more difficult than it was in 1975 (Carson, Huelskamp, and
Woodall, 1991).
What have we learned about our students from these data
sets? Three things stand out. First, the supposedly great loss in
America's intellectual capital, as measured by the average score on
the SAT examination, is trivial, particularly since the average
scores of every minority group have been going up for fifteen
years, and even the traditional college bound students (those white
middle-class students more likely to have taken the examination in
1975) are doing dramatically better today. Second, more American
students are graduating from high school and thinking about
college. That is why the mean SAT score did fall somewhat. Third,
the data we have from this well-accepted indictor of educational
achievement will not support the accusation that, overall, we have
a failing school system and inadequate teachers. The public and
many educators bought this spurious charge, and they should not do
so any longer.
Charge: The performance of American students on
standardized achievement tests reveals gross
inadequacies. Despite our best efforts and extra
expenditures, test scores for many schools stay below
the nation's average.
Let us examine this canard by first looking at the data
collected by the National Assessment of Educational Progress
(NAEP). These are data that should convince anyone that, at a
minimum, the sky is not falling. The NAEP tests are given to a
national sample of 9-, 13-, and 17-year olds in the subject matters
of mathematics, science, reading, writing, geography, and computer
skills. The analysis of these data by the scientists of the Sandia
National Laboratories (Carson, Huelskamp, and Woodall, 1991)
suggests that since the 1970s modest gains, at best, have been the
rule. But what is more important, they state unequivocally that
"the national data on student performance does not indicate a
decline in any area. "And they underlined the 'any' in their
report. Their conclusion was that "students today appear to be as
well educated as previously educated students" (p. 12).
This particular set of standardized tests, purporting to be
the nation's report card, says only that our students are
performing the same over time. But there are other data in which we
can take greater pride. Let us examine the standardized tests that
states and school districts buy, adjust their curriculum to, and
whose results are reported to the public in local newspapers every
year.
According to one of the nation's most respected figures in
educational measurement, Robert Linn, and his colleagues Graue and
Sanders (1990), when you investigate the norming procedures used
with the most commonly purchased standardized tests, you find that
it takes a higher score now to hit the fiftieth percentile rank
than it did in previous decades. For example, on average, students
in the 1980s scored higher on the California Achievement Test (CAT)
than they did in the 1970s. Similarly, on the venerable Iowa Test
of Basic Skills (ITBS), at the time of the last norming of the
test, the test developer said "Composite achievement in 1984-85 was
at an all-time high in nearly all test areas." The same trend was
found in the renorming of the Stanford Achievement Test (SAT), the
Metropolitan Achievement Test (MAT) and the Comprehensive Tests of
Basic Skills (CTBS). The data in Tables 4 and 5 show the growth
between the norming samples used the last time a test was normed
and the most recent time the test was normed. The results are
unambiguous: In both reading and mathematics we find meaningful
annual gains in percentile ranks from one representative norming
sample to the next.
|
Table 4.
Yearly Increase in Percentile Rank for a Reading Test Score at the
Median in the Last Norm Group Compared to the Most Recent Norm
Group (After Linn, Graue and Sanders, 1990, p. 12) |
| | Grade | | Test | 1 |
2 | 3 |
4 | 5 |
6 | 7 |
8 | |
|
CAT | 4.0 |
2.0 | 1.7 |
1.6 | 2.0 |
1.6 | 2.3 |
1.6 |
CTBS | 1.2 |
1.7 | 0.3 |
1.3 | 0.8 |
1.3 | 1.0 |
0.8 |
ITBS | 1.3 |
1.7 | 1.6 |
1.7 | 1.6 |
1.7 | 1.6 |
1.4 |
MAT | 2.9 |
0.7 | 1.9 |
0.7 | 1.0 |
0.9 | 1.3 |
1.0 |
SRA | -0.5 |
0.2 | 0.2 |
-0.2 | 0.3 |
-0.5 | -0.3 |
-0.7 |
STAN | 2.8 |
1.0 | 1.5 |
0.5 | 0.5 |
0.5 | 0.5 |
0.2 |
NAEP | - |
- | 0.3 |
- | - |
- | 0.0 |
- |
Ave Yr Gain | 1.95 |
1.22 | 1.07 |
0.93 | 1.03 |
0.92 | 0.91 |
0.72 |
Ave Gain
for 7 yrs | 13.7 |
8.5 | 7.5 |
6.5 | 7.2 |
6.4 | 6.4 |
5.0 |
| |
Overall yearly gain = 1.09 percentile ranks.
Typical gain in percentiles for median student
from the last norming to the present
norming = 7.63 |
|
Table 5.
Yearly Increase in Percentile Rank for a Math Test Score at the
Median in the Last Norm Group Compared to the Most Recent Norm
Group (After Linn, Graue and Sanders, 1990, p.
12) |
| | Grade | | Test | 1 |
2 | 3 |
4 | 5 |
6 | 7 |
8 | |
|
CAT | 2.3 |
2.0 | 1.9 |
1.6 | 1.9 |
1.9 | 2.1 |
2.6 |
CTBS | 3.0 |
3.7 | 2.2 |
2.4 | 2.8 |
2.8 | 2.5 |
1.8 |
ITBS | 0.4 |
0.7 | 0.7 |
1.3 | 1.1 |
1.1 | 1.4 |
1.4 |
MAT | 1.7 |
1.3 | 2.1 |
1.0 | 1.6 |
1.4 | 0.3 |
0.7 |
SRA | 1.7 |
0.5 | -1.0 |
-0.3 | 0.5 |
0.0 | 0.2 |
0.0 |
STAN | 3.8 |
2.5 | 2.2 |
2.0 | 2.0 |
1.8 | 1.5 |
1.8 |
NAEP | - |
- | 0.5 |
- | - |
- | 0.6 |
- |
Ave Yr Gain | 2.15 |
1.78 | 1.23 |
1.32 | 1.65 |
1.50 | 1.23 |
1.38 |
Ave Gain
for 7 yrs | 15.1 |
12.5 | 8.6 |
9.2 | 11.6 |
10.5 | 8.6 |
9.7 |
| |
Overall yearly gain = 1.53 percentile ranks.
Typical gain in percentiles for median student
from the last norming to the present
norming = 10.7
|
Major standardized tests are renormed, on the average,
approximately every seven years. A reasonable estimate according to
Professor Linn (personal communication) is that, over one
generation, norms have been redone around three times. That means
that today's youth is scoring about one standard deviation higher
than their parents did when they took the test. We can estimate
that around eighty-five percent of today's public school students
score higher on standardized tests of achievement than their
average parent did. But the high-jump bar keeps getting higher, and
it takes a higher jump today than it did around 1965 to hit the
fiftieth percentile.
While on the subject of standardized test performance, we
should also examine the social studies survey developed by Drs.
Diane Ravitch and Chester Finn. Dr. Ravitch is currently Assistant
Secretary of Education and Director of the Office of Educational
Research and Improvement. Dr. Finn held those jobs during the
Reagan administration and now continues to be an advisor to the
Secretary of Education and others who believe, as he does, that
public schools and the teachers that staff them are failures.
In 1987 Drs. Ravitch and Finn released the gloomy book "What
Our 17-Year-Olds Know." Their answer was that seventeen-year-olds
know embarrassingly and shockingly little! Their conclusions were
part of a barrage of similar arguments made to the American people
by E. D. Hirsch in his book "Cultural Literacy" (1987), Alan Bloom
in his book "The Closing of the American Mind" (1987), and William
Bennett in his report "To Reclaim a Legacy" (1984). The popular
press, of course, promoted the claim that today's children knew
less than they ever did and, therefore, that we were surely a
nation at risk. The authors and the editorial writers throughout
the land seemed to see nothing but doom for America if we didn't
return to our old ways, to our halcyon days as a nation and as a
people.
Dale Whittington (1991), writing in a prestigious and
rigorously peer reviewed journal has thoroughly examined the claim
by Ravitch and Finn that the seventeen-year-olds of the 1980s knew
less than their parents, grandparents, or great grandparents. She
sought out the social studies and history tests administered from
1915 until recently, and equated them as best one can using
post-hoc procedures. She compared content covered, difficulty,
scoring procedures, types of students taking the exams, and so
forth. She was able to compare student performance across time on
some topical areas and some eras, such as the Civil War or the
colonial period. A quick summary of her research is that students
have never known as much social studies material as the test
developers wanted them to know. Every generation of adults has a
tendency to find the next generation wanting. This social phenomena
has been recorded for about 2,500 years, since Socrates condemned
the youth of Athens for their impertinence and ignorance. Ravitch
and Finn are in this grand tradition, disappointed that the next
generation does not know what they do.
Whittington was also able to find forty-three items on the
Ravitch and Finn test that corresponded to items given in other
tests at other times. So the validity of their claim of a decline
in historical knowledge could be checked. On that set of items,
today's students were less knowledgeable on about one-third of the
items. They scored about the same on about one-third of those
items. And they scored better than past generations on about
one-third of the items. When compared to historical records, the
data in Ravitch and Finn's study do not support their charge that
today's seventeen-year-olds know less than they ever did.
Whittington correctly points out that one of the reasons for
the conclusions drawn by Ravitch and Finn was that they designed a
norm-referenced test, where each item was to have a difficulty
level of about .50. Such tests, by design, will have a mean of
approximately fifty percent. If you then use that test in a
criterion-referenced manner, indicating arbitrarily that a passing
grade is sixty percent, you have ensured that the vast majority of
your students have failed the test. Such flawed logic was used by
Drs. Ravitch and Finn, and the press dutifully reported on the
decline in American student culture, values, knowledge, morals, and
everything else except their weight.
Whittington concluded that
"...the perception of decline in the 'results' of American
education is open to question. Indeed, given the reduced drop-out
rate and less elitist composition of the 17-year-old student body
today, one could argue that students today know more American
history than did their age peers of the past.
"Advocates for reform of education and excellence in public
schooling should refrain from harkening to a halcyon past (or
allowing the perception of a halcyon past) to garner support for
their views. Such action...is dishonest and unnecessary. Indeed,
excellence is a goal that should be advocated on its own
merits."(p. 778).
What may we reasonably conclude from these studies of
standardized tests? First, there is no convincing evidence of a
decline in standardized test performance. This is true of
intelligence tests, the SAT, the NAEP tests, and the standardized
achievement tests used by local school districts. If any case for
change in these scores can be made, it is that the standardized
aptitude and achievement test scores are going up, not down.
Educators working under almost intolerable conditions in some
settings have not as a group failed society. Rather, it appears
that society has failed education. It is incredibly difficult to
keep academic achievement constant or improve it with increasing
numbers of poor children, unhealthy children, children from
dysfunctional families, and children from dysfunctional
neighborhoods. Yet the public school system of the United States
has actually done remarkably well as it receives, instructs, and
nurtures children who are poor, without health care, and from
families and neighborhoods that barely function. Moreover, as we
shall see, they have done this with quite reasonable budgets too.
Charge: Money doesn't matter. School people are always saying
they need more money but there is no relationship between amount
spent on education and the productivity of the schools.
This charge is recognized as false by everyone connected with
education, but accepted as truth by uninformed taxpayers and
politicians. Let us look first at data correlating SAT scores with
money spent by state (Capulsky and Ducoffe, 1992); see Table 6.
| Table 6.
Public School Expenditures Per Pupil: Comparison of Lowest and
Highest Spending States (From Copulsky, William and Ducoffe,
Robert, (1992), Why raising educational expenditures can lower SAT
scores.) | | |
| |
| State | School
Expenditures
per Pupil, 1989-90 | Ave. SAT Score,
1990 | |
|
| | | Lowest Spending States | | | |
| 1) Utah | $2733 | 1031 | |
| 2) Idaho | 3016 | 968 | |
| 3) Mississippi | 3220 | 996 | |
| 4) Arkansas | 3272 | 981 | |
| 5) So. Dakota | 3312 | 1061 | |
| 6) Louisiana | 3313 | 993 | |
| 7) Alabama | 3319 | 984 | |
|
| | | Highest Spending States | | |
| 1) Maryland | $5887 | 908 | |
| 2) Rhode Island | 6253 | 883 | |
| 3) Massachusetts | 6740 | 900 | |
| 4) Alaska | 7252 | 914 | |
| 5) Connecticut | 7930 | 901 | |
| 6) New York | 8165 | 882 | |
| 7) New Jersey | 8439 | 891 | |
|
Median Values | | |
Low Spenders | $3272 |
993 | |
| High Spenders | 7252 | 900 | | |
|
| |
In this table we see that the seven states spending the least
on education, averaging about $3,200 per pupil per year, spend on
the education of their youth about half of what is spent by the
seven states with the highest per-pupil expenditures. Furthermore,
when you look at the average SAT scores for those states, you see
that the lowest spending states seem to clearly outperform the
highest spending states. From such data one can easily infer that
money does not matter or that the lowest spending states are
incredibly efficient and that the highest spending states are not.
Such might be the simple view. Now let us look at the percentage of
high school seniors in these states taking the SAT in 1990 in Table
7.
| Table 7.
Public School Expenditures Per Pupil: Comparison of Lowest and
Highest Spending States with Percent Taking SAT Added (From
Copulsky, William and Ducoffe, Robert, (1992), Why raising
educational expenditures can lower SAT scores.) | |
|
| |
| State | School Expenditures
per Pupil, 1989-90 | Ave. SAT
Score, 1990 | % of
Seniors
taking SAT, 1990 | |
| | | Lowest Spending States | | | |
| 1) Utah | $2733 | 1031 | 5% |
| 2) Idaho | 3016 | 968 | 17 |
| 3) Mississippi | 3220 | 996 | 4 |
| 4) Arkansas | 3272 | 981 | 6 |
| 5) So. Dakota | 3312 | 1061 | 5 |
| 6) Louisiana | 3313 | 993 | 9 |
| 7) Alabama | 3319 | 984 | 8 |
|
| | | Highest Spending States | | |
| 1) Maryland | $5887 | 908 | 59% |
| 2) Rhode Island | 6253 | 883 | 62 |
| 3) Massachusetts | 6740 | 900 | 72 |
| 4) Alaska | 7252 | 914 | 42 |
| 5) Connecticut | 7930 | 901 | 74 |
| 6) New York | 8165 | 882 | 70 |
| 7) New Jersey | 8439 | 891 | 69 |
|
Median Values | | |
Low Spenders | $3272 |
993 | 6% |
| High Spenders | 7252 | 900 | 69% | |
|
| |
The highest spending states have, on average, eleven times
higher percentages of their students taking the SAT than the lowest
spending states. These data are related to comments I have already
made, about the kinds of students who nowadays take the SATs. These
data force us to consider an important question regarding the
productivity of our schools, particularly schools with the
hardest-to-teach children. What should our criteria be for
evaluating the American schools of the twenty-first century? Should
we concentrate on the SAT score or should we strive for the
development of more highly educated men and women? Should high
school educators focus on getting their students to answer more
items right on the test, or should they be focusing on getting more
of their students to go to college? Working under difficult
conditions, with a greater at-risk population, the highest spending
states posted a loss of up to ten items or about seven percent of
the raw score points on the SAT, but they posted an eleven hundred
fifty percent increase in the percent of high school seniors
thinking about going to college. What better use of money can one
think of? Particularly when you realize that a good share of the
higher expenditures per-pupil in those high spending states is due
to a) the extraordinarily high extra costs of special education, a
natural consequence of poverty and illness; and b) the
extraordinarily high per-pupil expenditures made by some of the
wealthiest suburban districts in the nation, paying two and three
times the cost per-pupil per-year as that of an inner city school
district (Kozol, 1991).
Let us now look at other data on the issue of money. Card and
Krueger (1990) examined whether current income could be predicted
from characteristics of the state school systems where men received
their education during the first half of the century. After the
usual statistical controls were applied, the researchers found that
teachers' salaries, class size, and length of the school year, were
significant predictors of future earnings. States that had spent
the most had produced citizens that had earned the most. Teachers'
salaries show up repeatedly in other data as an important factor in
improving the quality of the education provided. For example,
Manski (1987) found that higher salaries attract teaching
candidates with higher academic ability, and Murnane and Olsen
(1989) found that teachers' salaries affect the accumulation of
experience in the profession. So higher salaries in education, as
in most occupations, seem to attract and keep more people of
talent. Does that pay off? You bet!
Ferguson (1991), in the Harvard Journal on Legislation,
presents convincing data on this issue. Both teachers and students
throughout Texas were tested for academic proficiency, providing an
unusual set of data for looking at the effects of teacher ability,
teacher experience, class size, and professional certification on
student performance in reading and mathematics. In this case
achievement test data on millions of students in nine-hundred
districts were examined longitudinally from 1986 to 1990. In these
complex data two rather simple findings emerged. First, teachers'
academic proficiency explains twenty to twenty five percent of the
variation across districts in the average scores made by students
on academic achievement tests. The smarter the teachers, the
smarter their pupils appeared to be, when standardized achievement
tests were administered to both groups. Second, teachers with more
years of experience have students with higher test scores, lower
drop-out rates, and higher rates of taking the SAT. Experience
counts for about ten percent of the variation in student test
scores across districts. The effects are such that an increase of
ten percent in the number of teachers with nine or more years
experience within a district is predicted to reduce drop-out rates
by about four percent and increase the percentage of students
taking the SAT by three percent. Dollars appear to be more likely
to purchase bright and experienced professionals. In return they
are more likely to provide us with higher achieving students.
Perhaps the Heritage Foundation might like to reconsider its
statement that:
...virtually all studies of school performance, in fact,
reveal that spending has little bearing on student
achievement.... Research demonstrates that [concentrating on
performance assessment] will be far more successful than those
[reforms] that concentrate on salary levels and class size.
(Heritage Foundation, 1989, pp 1-2).
Ferguson also had something to say to the Heritage Foundation
about class size. He found that in grades one through seven, each
additional student in excess of a class size eighteen causes
district academic achievement to fall--and the fall is between ten
and twenty percent of a standard deviation per additional pupil
over eighteen. Thus, mean performance of a typical fourth grade
class of twenty-five students is predicted to be thirty-five
percentile ranks below a similar class with only eighteen students.
These effects for class-size are larger than ordinarily found, but
totally consistent with experimental data recently reported by J.
Finn et al. (1990).
Ferguson also found something to gladden the hearts of teacher
educators, namely, that the percentage of teachers with master's
degrees accounts for five percent of the variation in student
scores across districts in grades one through seven. So we learn
from Ferguson and from other supporting data that academically more
proficient teachers, who are more experienced, who are better
educated, and who work with smaller classes, are associated with
students who demonstrate significantly higher school achievement.
It costs money to attract academically talented teachers, keep them
on the job, update their professional skills, and provide them with
working conditions that enable them to perform well. Those
districts that are willing and able to pay the costs attract the
more talented teachers from neighboring districts, and they
eventually get the best in a region (see Kozol, 1991). This is
called a market, and when it exists, as when some districts spend
more on instructional variables, those districts can improve their
academic performance. Their improvement, however, must be at the
expense of the districts unable to pay the price. This strikes me
as an inherently undemocratic system.
It is important to ask, when someone says money does not
matter, whether the money we are talking about is for instructional
purposes, such as teachers' salaries, class size, professional
growth, and so forth, or whether it is for other purposes. The
per-pupil expenditures for busing in rural areas, for building new
facilities, for athletic programs and for other non-instructional
costs, should not be expected to have direct effects on student
achievement. But the money school districts spend on instructional
variables, including the teachers' salaries, matters a great deal.
Whoever says money does not matter has simply not disaggregated the
data.
Charge: American schools are too expensive. We spend more on
education than any other country in the world, and we have little
to show for it.
There is no shortage of citizens and politicians who will say
this, despite the ease with which it can be shown to be false.
Rasell and Mishel (1990) inform us that President Bush has received
advice from the chair of the Council of Economic Advisors, Michael
Boskin, who said we spend more per pupil than most of the other
industrialized economies. Former Secretary of Education Cavazos and
current Secretary of Education Alexander said we spend more than
our rivals Germany and Japan. The ever-advising Chester Finn wrote
in the New York Times that we "spend more per pupil than any other
nation." And John Sununu, formerly the President's chief of staff
and close advisor, just before the educational summit meeting of
1989 declared that "We spend twice as much [on education] as the
Japanese and almost 40 percent more than all the other major
industrialized countries of the world." The Economic Policy
Institute of Washington (Rasell and Mishel, 1990) checked the
veracity of these statements. It appears that the people who make
these claims, like David Stockman before them, made up the numbers
as they went along. Their only concern is the advancement of their
own political agenda, which may well be the destruction of the
public school system through disinformation.
The United States of America, according to UNESCO data, is
tied with Canada and the Netherlands, and all three fall behind
Sweden in the amount spent per pupil for education in K-12 and
higher education (Rasell and Mishel, 1990). Even though we are not
first, we look good in this comparison because we spend much more
than most nations on higher education, and have two to three times
more people per 100,000 population enrolled in higher education
than most other countries. When it comes only to pre-primary,
primary and secondary education, however, we actually spend much
less than the average industrialized nation. We spend dramatically
less! Observe the relative positions in Table 8.
| Table 8.
Expenditures in 1988 Dollars for K-12 Education as a Percent of Per
Capita Income (1985) for 16 Industrialized Nations (UNESCO and NCES
Data, Page 15, Rassell and Mishel, 1990). | | Rank
| Dollars | Percent |
| Sweden | 1 | $5900 |
36% |
| Austria | 2 | $4300 |
29% | | Switzerland | 3 | $7000 |
29% | | Norway | 4 | $4900 |
27% | | Belgium | 5 | $3200 |
25% | | Denmark | 6 | $4400 |
24% | | Japan | 7 | $4800 |
24% | | Canada | 8 | $3600 |
24% | | W. Germany | 9 | $4000 |
23% | | France | 10 | $3000 |
23% | | Netherlands | 11 | $3200 |
23% | | United Kingdom | 12 | $2300 |
22% | | Italy | 13 | $1800 |
22% | | United States | 14 | $3500 |
21% | | Australia | 15 | $2300 |
19% | | Ireland | 16 | $1400 |
19% |
In 1988 dollars we rank ninth among sixteen
industrialized nations in per-pupil expenditures in grades K-12,
spending fourteen percent less than Germany, thirty percent less
than Japan, and fifty-one percent less than Switzerland. We can
also compare ourselves to other countries in terms of the percent
of per capita income spent on education.
When we do that comparison we find that out of sixteen
industrialized nations, thirteen of them spent a greater percent of
per-capita income on K-12 education than we do. If we were to come
up to the average percentage of per capita income of the fifteen
other industrialized nations, just to the average percentage
expended per capita in those countries, not to the levels of those
countries that spend the most, we would have to invest an
additional $20 billion per year in K-12 education! Mr. Sununu,
Professor Finn, and the two Secretaries of Education must know
this. Is it possible that they are conducting a disinformation
campaign?
Perhaps we do not teach as much in the lower grades as some
would like. But we do not have to. We can provide the needed
learning for a relatively large percentage of our students during
their post-secondary studies. Our nation has chosen to invest its
money into higher education. Consequently, our educational system
provides about twenty-five percent of a cohort with college
degrees, and it is the envy of the world. We run a costly and
terrific K-16 school system, but we must acknowledge that we run an
impoverished and relatively less well achieving K-12 system of
education. Moreover, in many of the countries that spend more per
capita than we do, the funding is relatively even across regions
and cities. But in our nation we have, as Jonathan Kozol vividly
describes, Savage inequalities (1991) in our funding for schools.
Even though the average expenditures in the primary and secondary
schools are low for the nation as a whole, the actual annual
expenditures for some of our students in school districts at the
bottom of the distribution from which we calculated the mean are
actually much, much lower. To our shame, conditions in many of our
school districts resemble those in the non-industrialized nations
of the world.
Given the expenditures on K-12 education, I can only conclude
that our education president, George Bush, was not telling the
truth when his lips were read and he was quoted as saying at the
education summit of 1989 that the United States "lavishes
unsurpassed resources on [our children's] schooling" (Bush, 1989).
Actually, he should have said we are among the most cost-efficient
nations in the world, with an amazingly high level of productivity
for the comparatively low level of investment that our society
makes in K-12 education.
Charge: Our high schools, colleges and universities are not
supplying us with enough mathematicians and scientists to maintain
our competitiveness in world markets.
Once again the Sandia National Laboratories have compiled data
suggesting this is not so (Carson, Heulskamp, and Woodall, 1991).
Data from the National Science Foundation provide the percent of
natural science and engineering bachelor's degrees awarded from the
1960s to the 1990s.
| Table 9.
Natural Science Engineering Bachelors Degree Rate: Degrees per 22
year-old U.S. Population (Adapted from Carson, Huelskamp Woodall,
1991, p. 61) |
| Degree Type | 1960 | 1965 | 1970 | 1975 |
1980 | 1985 | 1990 | | Computer Sci. | 0% | 0% | .1% |
.2% | .3% | .8% |
.5% | | Natural Sci. |
2.2 | 2.4 | 2.6 |
2.6 | 2.4 | 2.0 |
1.9 | | Engineering | 1.8 |
1.5 | 1.4 | 1.3 |
1.5 | 1.8 | 1.7 |
In Table 9, data on the percent of twenty-two-year-olds
receiving science and engineering degrees are remarkably steady
over time. Moreover, while the actual numbers continue to be small,
we have improved the percentages of minorities and women who now
have access to technical jobs, as revealed in the Table 10.
| Table 10
Percent Increase in Mathematics, Computer Science, Physical Science
and Engineering Bachelors Degrees for Selected Subpopulations From
1976-77 to 1986-87 (Adapted from Carson, Huelskamp Woodall, 1991,
p. 63) | | White | Afr-Amer | Asian | Nat-Amer | Hispanic | Females | | 50% |
150% | 420% |
120% | 150% |
200% |
Educators should take enormous pride in the trends
revealed in these data. We hope that these trends will not be
reversed by the substantial reductions in support of higher
education for poor and minority students at a time when the costs
for post-secondary education are increasing.
What is also worth noting about this supposedly failing system
of ours is that when our students finish their baccalaureate, they
know as much as they ever did, at least as measured by the Graduate
Record Examination (GRE), the test taken by most of those
contemplating post-graduate education. See Table 11.
|
Table 11
Graduate Record Exam Scores for U.S. Citizens (Adapted from Carson,
Huelskamp Woodall, 1991, p. 67 Original data from the National
Center for Educational
Statistics) | |
|
|
| |
1975 | 1980 | 1985 | |
|
|
| GRE-Math |
515 |
520 | 530 | |
| GRE-Verbal | 490 |
500 | 480 |
|
In fact, as revealed in these data, the 1980s saw college
graduates in possession of higher mathematics skills than they ever
had before. Furthermore, just since 1982 the measure of analytical
and logical reasoning on the GRE, assessing what we normally call
thinking, has increased about a third of a standard deviation. And
it has gone up while the number of examinees taking the test has
increased sixteen percent (Educational Testing Service, 1991). So
the validity of the charge that undergraduate education is failing
like every other part of the educational system is as questionable
as the other laments we hear throughout the land.
Although we see that the supply of mathematicians and
scientists is steady, and that they are probably as talented as
ever, we still have not addressed the charge that the supply in
these fields is not keeping up with the demand. In fact, there is
solid data to suggest that the supply is exceeding demand! First of
all we now exceed or are at parity with our economic competitors in
terms of the technical competence of our work force, for example,
in the number of engineers and physical scientists in the work
force per hundred workers (Carson, Huelskamp, and Woodall, 1991, p.
107). So if we have lost our economic edge in the world market
place it may well be because of poor business management and faulty
government economic policies, but it certainly is not due to the
lack of a technically skilled workforce. But that is the present.
The future supply in these fields does look gloomy, but that is
true only as long as the economy's demand for such individuals is
not examined. When demand as well as supply is examined, it turns
out that the economy is not now able to absorb all the scientists
and engineers that we produce. The Sandia report estimates that
even with no increase in the rate of supply of scientists and
engineers we will accumulate a surplus of about one million by the
year 2010. Given the reduction in military spending we are likely
to see over the next few years, the glut of trained scientists is
likely to be even higher than the forecasts that were made a year
or two ago. In my gloomiest moments I think the business community
and politicians who demand even higher production of engineers and
scientists from the schools do so because the cost of labor for
these individuals is higher than for others in the market. An
oversupply will certainly drive down the salaries of such workers.
It is also interesting to note that while the business
community is arguing for greater production of engineers and
scientists by the schools, it is at the same time informing us that
it really has enough adequately prepared technically skilled
people. Examining two different contemporary surveys of the five
most important and five least important skills needed by employers,
the Sandia scientists uncovered data in complete accordance with
other studies conducted throughout this century.
Survey of Workforce Skill Requirements conducted by the Michigan
Education Department and the Rochester New York School District
(Adapted from Carson, Huelskamp Woodall, 1991, p.131).
Five Most Important Skills for Employment:
|
Michigan Survey |
Rochester Survey | |
| No substance abuse | No substance
abuse | |
| Honest, integrity | Follow
directions | |
| Follow directions | Read
instructions | |
| Respect others | Follow safety
rules | |
| Punctuality, attendance | Respect
others | |
Five Least Important Skills for Employment
|
Michigan Survey |
Rochester Survey | |
| Mathematics | Natural sciences | |
| Social sciences | Calculus | |
| Natural sciences | Computers | |
| Computer programming | Art | |
| Foreign
language | Foreign
languages | |
As revealed in the above list, and in dozens of other studies,
it is the affective and motivational characteristics of workers
that our employers worry most about. They depend on employees to
show up on time, to get along with others, to care about doing well
on the job, and so forth. They do not find the technical ability of
the work force to be a problem for them.
The myth of the coming shortage of technically able workers
has also been debunked by the Economic Policy Institute (Mishel and
Teixeira, 1991). They conclude from their analysis of the present
and future labor force that
"The projected shift in the occupational employment mix
necessitates a small shift in educational requirements that can be
accomplished if those entering the labor force have, on
average, one-fourth of a grade level more education than those
retiring from the labor force" (p. 13).
How can this be? Do we merely require only one-quarter of a
grade level more education? These researchers explain that the five
most highly skilled and growing occupational groups will only make
up about six percent of the the job pool by the year 2000. On the
other hand, service jobs, requiring the least technical skill, will
actually grow the fastest overall in the next few years, and they
will constitute about seventeen percent of the job pool by the year
2000. Apparently this nation is not in any danger of failing to
meet its technological needs.
An explanation for the level of national proficiency we
achieve as a nation in technical and scientific fields is offered
by labor economist John Bishop, writing in the scholarly journal
Curriculum Studies (1990). He asked whether evidence from the labor
market supports the claims of critics of schooling that there are
economic benefits associated with better preparation in science,
mathematics and language arts. Studying longitudinal data sets he
found that during the first eight years on the job, young men
without college education receive no rewards from the labor market
for their ability in science, mathematical reasoning or language
arts. For the non- college bound female there was some effect on
wages for mathematical reasoning, but none for competence in
science or language arts. Bishop's conclusions explain a good deal
of American student behavior for me when he says:
"The tendency of so many American high school students to
avoid rigorous mathematics and science courses and their poor
performance on international science and mathematics tests,
may, therefore, well be a rational response to the lack of labour
market rewards" (p.123).
Although personal rewards cannot be found for high levels of
school achievement in these areas, Bishop does note that increased
economic productivity is associated with increased mathematical and
technical knowledge. So we have reason to want our students to be
mathematically and scientifically literate. But that is a more
reasonable goal than the one the President and the press have
adopted unthinkingly, being the number one nation in science and
mathematics. It is my fervent hope that we do not try to become the
number one achieving nation in science and mathematics because a)
we value a different set of childhood experiences; b) we simply do
not reward such skills; c) we have enough people with those skills
now; d) we will have an oversupply of people with those skills soon
enough; and e) we have a world wide pool of technically competent
Pakistanis, Indians, Asians and Latin Americans from which to draw
if we ever need to. That is, of course, if we can get over our
xenophobia and racism.
Another finding from the work of the Sandia National
Laboratories provides a response to those who grumble that so many
of our graduate degrees in mathematics and the natural sciences go
to so many foreign-born students. It turns out that we are blessed
with the good luck that over half of these talented individuals
choose to stay in our country. These individuals become relatively
high earning law-abiding citizens, though no matter how much some
people might wish it, they will never look white.
Like most Americans I want a nation that is technologically
literate, a citizenry that knows enough mathematics and science to
evaluate the solutions to the complicated problems that are
produced in a technologically sophisticated world. Basic
technological literacy is a reasonable curricular goal for our
nation. Bashing other countries in the international educational
competitions is a political agenda-- not an educational one.
Charge: The United States is an enormous failure in the
international comparisons of educational achievement.
This charge gets the citizens of our nation riled. National
pride, as at the Olympics, is involved. But if we are to have a
competition then let us ask only that it is fair. I would ask five
questions about such comparisons before I would spend one moment
worrying about our students' performance. First, I would like to
know if we Americans want for our children a childhood like that
experienced by Japanese, Korean, Israeli or Indian children? I do
not think so. Their children are raised in their ways and our
children are raised in our way. As you might expect, we have a
vision of what constitutes a "normal" childhood that is uniquely
American. My middle-class neighbors seem to agree that their
children should be able to watch a good deal of TV; participate in
organized sports such as Little League, basketball, and soccer;
engage in after school activities such as piano lessons and dance;
spend weekends predominantly in leisure activities; work after
school when they become teenagers; have their own car and begin to
date while in high-school; and so forth. To accomplish all this, of
course, children cannot be burdened by excessive amounts of
homework. This kind of American consensus about childhood is one
designed to produce uniquely American youth--some of the most
creative and spontaneous children the world has ever seen, who are
not afraid to challenge adults and their authority, at least in
comparison to the youth of many other nations. And these students
do go on to more challenging schooling at the college level, in
numbers that are the envy of the world.
It is clear that our system is not designed to produce masses
of academically highly achieving students before the college years.
You cannot have both high levels of history, language, mathematics
and science achievement for great numbers of students and the
conception of childhood that I have just sketched. We have proved,
however, that this system can produce sufficiently high numbers of
students for the nation's needs. That is really all that is
needed. Our nation is certainly not at risk because of the
conceptions of childhood that we hold.
Second, I would ask of such international comparisons that
they inform me whether the groups being compared have spent the
same amount of time practicing the skills that are to be assessed.
Suppose I ran a simple training study, using two groups to assess
their ability to fix computers. Now suppose one of those groups had
two years more practice in fixing computers than the other one did.
Would it surprise anyone if the group that practiced for an
additional two years appeared markedly better at fixing computers?
Of course not. Yet this is exactly what we do when we compare
American and Japanese students of the same age. Given the
additional forty school days in the Japanese school year, across
ten years of schooling, we find by the simplest arithmetic that the
typical Japanese student, in comparison to the typical American
student, has the equivalent of over two extra years of schooling
when they are both, say, sixteen years old. Moreover, given the
additional time in private "after-school" schools and in Saturday
school (the juku schools, attended by a large percent of the
Japanese school-age population), we note still greater amounts of
education accumulated by the Japanese children of the same age as
their American counterparts. Furthermore, given the immense amount
of homework assigned and completed, immense at least by American
standards, we note that the average Japanese student of the same
age as an American student has accumulated huge amounts of extra
time practicing school subjects at home and on weekends. Suppose
you now compare these groups in terms of their mathematics and
science achievement in the tenth grade. It would be really
newsworthy if the results were any different then they are now. The
results we get are exactly what one should expect. They are as
predictable as is criticism of our public system of education by
our leaders.
Third, I would want to make sure that the samples of students
that take the test are somehow equivalent. It is easy for the
United States to produce a representative sample of 13- or 16-year
olds for an international comparison. Is that also true of some of
our international competitors? Some of the nations in these studies
have neither an accurate census nor a school system that attempts
to keep everyone in school. We have a larger percentage of our
school-age population in school than most other nations. Thus our
representative sample is culturally and economically more
heterogeneous. (See the insightful review of this issue by Rotberg,
1990). In the first international assessments of educational
achievement (IEA), from which we learned how awful the United
States was doing, the average performance of seventy-five percent
of the cohort in the United States was compared with the average
scores of the top nine percent of the students in West Germany, the
top thirteen percent in the Netherlands, and the top forty-five
percent in Sweden (Rotberg, 1990). Could the results be predicted?
In the most recent international comparisons of science and
mathematics achievement (Lapointe, Askew, Mead, 1992; Lapointe,
Mead Askew, 1992), the United States did not do as well as Korea
and Taiwan. But I noticed in the appendix of the reports that we
had more children than they did with fewer years of formal
schooling. All other things being equal, when around ten percent of
our sample has a year or two years less schooling than the sample
of the same age from Korea and Taiwan, you have a sampling problem.
What could be newsworthy about differences in achievement when the
samples are not equivalent?
Fourth, I would like to be sure that the opportunity to learn
was the same for the different groups in the international
comparisons. We should note that school systems that do not hold as
many children as we do until high school graduation, and who have
fewer students continuing through to higher education, need to
teach many things at an earlier point in the curriculum. Calculus
and probability are examples of that in the area of mathematics.
Because we are a nation that is rich enough and democratic enough
to attempt to retain our youngsters longer in school, and because
we send a comparatively large number of them on to college, we
often look poorly in the international comparisons. Many of our
students learn what they need to learn later than in other
countries.
We need to remember that students will not do well on any
content they have not been exposed to. Opportunity to learn a
subject is probably the single best predictor of achievement that
we have. If you cannot control for it, you have no basis for
comparing achievement. Westbury (in press) has data on this issue.
He looked at the findings of the Second International Mathematics
Study, where our performance appeared to be so bad that Congress
and the press vilified the educational establishment for weeks.
Westbury asked whether we see in the performance of the Japanese
and others, evidence of efficiency and effectiveness in education,
or merely evidence that national curricula differ. He looked at the
algebra performance of eighth graders and saw that the 273 United
States classes in the sample were labelled as remedial, typical,
pre-algebra, and algebra classes. To no great surprise, only the
pre-algebra and the algebra classes in the sample had nearly the
same amount of exposure as the Japanese classes in the sample to
the algebra items that made up the test. These classes constituted
only about twenty- five percent of the United States sample of
classes. Three quarters of the classes in the United States sample
were simply not exposed to the same curriculum as were the
Japanese. Can you guess what the result might be in such a
comparison? Westbury disagregated the data, something not done by
the press or the politicians. These data are shown in Table 12.
|
Table 12
Median Scores of American and Japanese Students in Mathematics
Achievement, Second International Study of Mathematics (Westbury,
in press). | | Remedial
Courses | Typical
Courses |
Pre-Algebra
Courses |
Algebra
Courses |
Japan
Sample | Median
% Correct |
21 | 34 |
60 | 72 |
62 |
Now we see that American students in the pre-algebra and the
real algebra classes perform as well or better than do the Japanese
students. But as a whole, of course, we do not and cannot perform
as well as they do, given the curriculum decisions we make,
including the tracking systems we use in seeking to accommodate a
heterogeneous population. There is a flaw in this comparison,
however, because the American students represented the top twenty
percent of the national sample in mathematical ability. It is not
fair to compare them against an undifferentiated Japanese sample.
Recognizing that, Westbury went on to compare the Americans in the
pre-algebra and the algebra classes with the top twenty percent of
the Japanese sample. Table 13 shows that comparison:
|
Table 13
Median Scores of American Pre-Algebra and Algebra Students and the
Top Quintile of the Japanese Sample (Westbury,
in press). | | Pre-Algebra | Algebra |
Top Quintile
of Japan
Sample | Median
%
Correct | 59 | 72 |
71 |
The results are about the same for the genuine algebra class.
American students with the same opportunity to learn in the schools
perform as well as the Japanese. Maybe better! The differences in
achievement between nations are most parsimoniously explained as
differences in national curricula, rather than as differences in
the efficiency or effectiveness of a particular national system of
education. International comparisons such as these make us realize
that American students, including the most ordinary ones, are
capable of learning more mathematics at earlier ages, if that is
what we want them to learn. The comparisons also remind us that
tracking by ability might be a bad policy for the nation. But while
we should wrestle with those legitimate curriculum issues, we need
not blame our students and castigate their teachers for gross
failure. Our nation, particularly at state and local levels, has
made curricula decisions that are in accord with prevailing views
of childhood and of education. We can change those if we want. But
the system has actually been serving the nation well for decades,
and as noted, it is producing all the mathematicians and scientists
this economy can use for the foreseeable future.
Finally, in considering the results of international
comparisons, I would like to be assured that the motivation of the
students who took the tests was similar across different nations.
The Quality Control Observer for the recent international
comparisons (Lapointe, Askew Mead, 1992, p. 24) reports on the
high achieving Koreans:
The math teacher...calls the names of the 13-year olds in the
room who have been selected as part of the IAEP sample. As
each name is called, the student stands at attention at his
or her desk until the list is complete. Then, to the
supportive and encouraging applause of their colleagues, the
chosen ones leave to [take the assessment].
As Bracey (1991) noted, these students are taking the test for
the honor of their country. In the United States our students know
that neither they, nor their parents, nor their teacher, will ever
see the scores they make. It is not an honor to take the test, but
an inconvenience. I can hear some of the kids I know saying: "You
should have seen the diagrams I drew on my answer sheet, man, they
were great, until I fell asleep!"
I cannot find much to worry about in the international
comparisons. Every nation has a vision of childhood, of
development, schooling, equality, and success. While our nation
heatedly debates these visions, as it should, and we modify our
visions, as a dynamic society must, let us just note that the
system we created has been remarkably successful for a large number
of the children and parents we serve.
The Children and Parents Served by the Public Schools
It was not difficult for me to find respectable data
suggesting that the basic premises underlying contemporary thinking
about school reform in the nation are faulty. It is not that the
data I have presented are "true," while the arguments of others are
"false." And it is not that I am a defender of the status quo, for
I am not. It is simply that there are numerous lines of evidence
suggesting that the American public school system is not a failure.
We have seen that the charge suggesting that contemporary
youth are not as smart as they used to be is debatable. They may,
in fact, be smarter than they have ever been, at least as measured
by the most well-respected intelligence tests that we have, and by
student performance in advanced placement courses and on the GRE.
Schooling seems to have made these achievements possible. On
standardized tests, whether we use the SATs, the NAEP examinations,
the Iowa Tests of Basic Skills, the California Achievement Test,
the specially designed social studies tests of Drs. Ravitch and
Finn, or many other standardized tests, we can find more evidence
for increased achievement over time, or evidence for maintenance of
achievement, than we can for a decline in achievement. Educators
should be given presidential citations for this accomplishment,
since their success took place during the time period when the
problems of the young people served by the public schools have
become more difficult for the schools to solve.
The National Commission on Children (1991), chaired by Senator
Rockefeller, makes this abundantly clear. For example, in 1970 12
percent of our youth lived in one parent households. By 1989 that
rate had more than doubled, to 25 percent. Over 17 million children
under the age of thirteen have mothers working outside the home.
Over eight million children under the age of 18 currently have no
health coverage. Since 1980 no progress has been made in reducing
the rate of low birth-weight babies, and for African- American
babies that rate has actually risen. Public school teachers must
nurture children whose families are poor, ill, and stressed. And
the longer they remain in that state, the less hope those children
have of it ever being different. According to federal definitions,
about 13 million youngsters live in poverty, two million more than
just a decade ago. Five million of those children live in families
with incomes half the amount the government sets as the poverty
level. From 1976 to 1989 educators have been dealing with the
emotional lives of children whose age group has seen a 259 percent
increase in child abuse and neglect. In the early 1980s we had 275
thousand youngsters in foster homes, by 1995 we will have 550
thousand in foster homes. The government informs us that our nation
has up to 100,000 children under 16 who are actually homeless every
night, and as many as one million adolescents each year who are
throwaways or runaways, living on the streets, in cars or with
friends (Foscarinis, 1991). Regardless of the nature or the
severity of the problem, it is the public educational system that
is called on to work with these children.
Educators worked with teenagers that, as a group, were 100
percent more likely to be murdered in 1989 than they were in 1965.
Educators work today with African-American teenagers that are more
likely to die of gunshot wounds than from all natural causes of
death combined. From the 1960s to the 1970s, mostly among white
adolescents, educators saw the suicide rate double, and then rise
another 30 percent by the 1980s. While our black youth are getting
shot at record levels, our white youth are killing themselves off
at record levels.
During this time period the public schools of our nation seem
to have maintained or increased their productivity. I wish industry
were nearly as productive, adaptive and cost efficient. For we
learned that the nation does not spend nearly enough on pre-
primary, primary and secondary education as it professes to, and we
learned also that money spent for instructional purposes has direct
effects on student achievement. This high achieving, productive,
comparatively cheap system of education is producing all the
technically able workers we need, and it has done so for years. Our
work force, though not our business leaders, seem to be among the
most skilled in the world. And in the international comparisons of
school achievement we have learned the remarkable fact that school
children learn what schools choose to teach them, and that,
conversely, they do not learn what schools do not teach. National
systems of education have schools and curricula that reflect their
visions of childhood and achievement. Comparative assessments, if
they are any good, will show those national differences more
clearly. On the other hand, we learn absolutely nothing that is not
simple to predict when there is inadequate sampling, lack of
control over the the time spent preparing for the assessment,
differences in opportunity to learn, and differences in motivation.
This American system of ours has performed so well that the
majority of parents with students in public schools have been very
satisfied with the teachers their children have. Local parents
throughout the nation have been saying to the poll takers for fifty
years that their local schools are pretty darn good. In one recent
example of this (Elam, 1990) a nationally representative group of
parents were asked how they rated the school attended by their
oldest child. A startling 72 percent of the parents awarded that
school the grade of A or B. Only two percent of the parents who
have the greatest contact with the public schools thought the
school their child attended deserved a grade of F. These data are
relatively unchanged since the end of World War Two. Reform
proposals before us recommending choice in schooling are based on
a belief that the customer is dissatisfied with the schools and
that the schools are failing to do their job. I can find no
evidence that either is true when we look at the nation as a whole.
Why then would so much be made of choice? Perhaps some people have
noted that the public expenditures for education are large and it
would be nice to get that budget into the private sector. Then
education could be treated as a privilege, not a right, and it
would ensure that children of wealthier segments of our population
will inherit their positions. This is frightening.
I find it ironic that Total Quality Management (TQM),
suggested by business leaders as a cure for supposedly ailing
schools, requires constant assessment of customer satisfaction. We
educators have done that and been found terrific by the parents who
have children in the schools, our customers. Those who see the
schools as a failure usually do not have children in the public
schools. For example, the ever-critical Dr. Finn, whose daughter
attended Exeter (Kozol, 1991), says that the ordinary parents of
the nation are not to be trusted with their opinions. They haven't
got rigorous enough standards to make these kinds of judgments
about the schools (C. Finn, 1991). People who find the general
public unable to make intelligent judgments scare me. They are
often part of a self-proclaimed elite that, for the good of the
nation, will be pleased to tell each of us what we are to believe
and how we are to act. I would much rather put my faith in the
common people of the country, as messy as that can sometimes
be.
The Critics
At least some of the criticism of the schools comes from an
elite that is against public schooling. They need to be fought as
they have had to be fought from the beginning of the crusade for
public schooling (Cremin, 1989). There have always been those who
never could believe in the intelligence of the common person, or
they never wanted to share the advantages of education with common
people. The late, wise historian of education, Lawrence Cremin, has
remarked on this issue:
....social groups possessing a relatively rare and highly
valued commodity that establishes their superiority over
other social groups are reluctant to see that commodity
more widely distributed. Wide distribution becomes
tantamount to devaluation...(Cremin, 1989, p. 11)
Some of the criticism of education, however, is simple
scapegoating. It is no longer fashionable in most social settings,
and in the mainstream press, to blame the great economic and social
tragedies of contemporary American life on the international Jewish
conspiracy, or on the lack of motivation or talent of
African-American, Polish-American or Mexican- American workers. The
greedy union bosses and the welfare queens cannot be blamed anymore
since we no longer have strong unions, and the amounts spent on
welfare are small potatoes compared to the amounts we used to bail
out the savings and loan companies. Their robbery of the American
people was perpetrated by nice, middle-class, well-educated,
religious white men from two-parent households, the kind of
Americans who wouldn't possibly want to hurt their nation. But
blame for society's ills, of which there seem so many, needs to be
assigned somewhere. And there was one ordinarily passive,
relatively defenseless group available. From 1983 on this nation
has been told relentlessly by its leaders that we are a nation at
risk because our schools and our teachers have failed us. But the
truth, I think, is that those leaders have failed the schools and
the teachers of America. Rather than lead us to ruin, the vast
majority of teachers have run a system that is remarkably good for
the relatively advantaged children of America. The teachers in the
schools with the least support, serving children who need the most
help, are indeed, having a harder time. Those schools may be
failing, but the causes for that are usually outside the school
building. Those causes are embedded in the social inequities
prevalent in our society.
It is easy to use the schools as a scapegoat. It has been a
traditional American pastime. For example, in 1909 the Atlantic
Monthly criticized the schools for a) not teaching enough
knowledge, b) not teaching thinking skills, and c) not preparing
young people for jobs. These laments are still current ninety years
later and seem to have been current since public schooling began in
the United States of America. The Ladies Home Journal of 1912 has
always been my favorite. There Ella Francis Lynch criticized the
schools because life in America had changed and the schools had not
changed with them, another old criticism of persistent currency.
That year the Journal also pointed out to their readers that the
tests and the grades given in schools were ruining our nation,
another contemporary theme. Lynch, however, had a way with words
that was wonderful. She questioned if the millions of middle-class
women who were her audience could
...imagine a more grossly stupid, a more genuinely
asinine system tenaciously persisted in to the fearful
detriment of over seventeen million children and at a
cost to you of over four-hundred and three million
dollars each year--a system that not only is absolutely
ineffective in its results, but also actually harmful in that
it throws every year ninety-three out of every one
hundred children into the world of action absolutely
unfitted for even the simplest tasks of life? Can you
wonder that we have so many inefficient men and women; that in
so many families there are so many failures; that our boys and
girls can make so little money that in the one case they are
driven into the saloons from discouragement, and in the other
into the brothels to save themselves from starvation? Yet that
is exactly what the public-school system is today doing, and
has been doing.
But let us jump ahead to the 1946 "Ladies Home Journal," where
it was reported that teachers were inadequately trained to meet the
needs of the baby boomers; where poor pay was rampant; where there
were discrepancies in schooling based upon geography, income and
class; where there were no standards anymore; and where
indifference to the schools by parents was rampant (this discussion
is adapted from Kent, 1987). Time magazine in 1949 charged that the
schools were failing to teach traditional subject matter because it
was too concerned with life adjustment education. The year 1951
seemed a particularly good year for criticism (Kent, 1987), though
most people think of that time period as among those halcyon days
of yore. From Readers Digest and the Scientific Monthly we learn
that
There were complaints from frustrated university
professors and angry business people that public school
students were woefully unprepared for college as well as
for work. The typical high school student could not write a
clear English sentence, do simple mathematics, or find
common geographical locations such as Boston or New
York City. There were no basic standards....The schools
also were ignoring religion. The curriculum was
inappropriate for life at mid-century, giving students
worthless information and outdated training and worst of
all, boring them. As one critic put it: "We are offering
them a slingshot education in a hydrogen-bomb age."
(Kent, 1987, p. 142).
In 1953, we saw publication of Arthur Bestor's Educational
wastelands: The retreat from learning in our public schools and
Albert Lynds best-selling Quackery in the public schools. In the
late 1950s we saw Hyman Rickover rip the schools, for they were
endangering the nation. In the "Saturday Evening Post" a captain of
a missile site reported that the draftees he received were unable
to read, write or do simple arithmetic, and that he was getting the
best of the recruits! "Life" magazine of 1958 said we were paying too
much attention to "stupid children" and not enough to the
gifted--that we simply had to set higher standards. Familiar
laments, all.
And the business community was in on the criticisms then, as
it is today (see Rippa, 1988). While celebrating the first quarter
century of the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM), the
treasurer in 1920 was applauded vigorously when he said
I live in a manufacturing town....We are going to spend
over a million dollars for a high school to teach the
children of the working people of that town white collar,
starched collar jobs....The expenditure that is now being
made [for the public school system], and the laws that
are being passed for its expenditure are as absolutely a
waste as though it were thrown into the gutter (Rippa,
1988, p. 142).
In 1927 the chairman of the NAM education committee told the
businessmen of the Association that
Forty percent of high school graduates haven't a
command of simple arithmetic, cannot multiply, subtract,
and divide correctly in simple numbers and fractions.
Over forty percent of them cannot accurately express
themselves in the English language or cannot write in
their mother tongue (Rippa, 1988, p. 143).
It sounds so familiar. And this was when only a small elite
finished high school. I wonder how the nation survived?
Furthermore, decades before the lectures about Total Quality
Management were offered to the schools by our business community,
a community that by and large has failed to keep America
economically strong, business executives also felt it necessary to
lecture educators. The spokesperson for the National Association of
Manufacturers informed the schools of his day about the marvels of
management in that day, claiming that "the public schools should be
systematized, thoroughly, comprehensively, and with the sole view
of utmost efficiency; efficiency in every direction, to the last
degree, and for the last child" (Rippa, 1988, p. 141). It should be
clear by now that for the business community and the general
citizenry of our nation the games of kick-the-teacher and
dump-on-the-schools have a long history. Along with baseball, it
seems to be our national pastime.
Conclusion
So what shall we make of all this? The data suggesting the
gross failure of the American school system simply will not hold
up. There has been a campaign of disinformation. As Clark Kerr
noted "seldom in the course of policy making in the U. S have so
many firm convictions held by so many been based on so little
convincing proof" (Education Week, 2/27/91). A school reform
movement based on so many invalid assumptions is bound to be
wrongheaded. Some of the school reform efforts are thinly disguised
elitist attempts to get rid of public education, to protect the
privilege such individuals have already bestowed on their children.
After all, the greater the disparities in schooling, the greater
the assurance that the privileged have someone to mow their lawns,
to wait at their tables and care for their children. The reforms
they offer-- higher standards, a tougher curriculum, more tests,
with no increase in spending, will insure that the children of New
Trier High School, near Chicago, and the children of Princeton, New
Jersey, and the children of Manhasset, New York, will succeed even
more than they do today. The children at P. S. 79 in the Bronx, New
York, will fail at even greater rates than they do today. Children
at P. S. 79 and similar schools in Los Angeles, California; Camden,
New Jersey; Detroit, Michigan; and San Antonio, Texas—schools
described so poignantly by Jonathan Kozol—do not have textbooks
for their students, are forced to hold some of their classes in
closets, teach word processing skills without any word processors,
teach science without laboratories, conduct physical education and
art classes without proper equipment. These are schools that can
not regulate heating or cooling or keep out the rain. Their
teachers are often those rejected by the wealthier suburbs, and
large percentages of their classes are taught by uncertified
people.
Reforms of the kind being proposed will exacerbate the
differences between the have and the have-not school districts. The
haves are already doing quite well. Those children of privilege are
attending decent schools, achieving well, scoring well on
standardized tests, graduating high school, and going to college.
They are the smartest and healthiest generation America has ever
produced. There really is not much to reform for these kids, since
their schools are not failing, at least by the traditional measures
we use to assess such things. On the other hand, I see nothing in
America 2000, and the new schools that are to break-the-mold, that
will address the social issues causing parts of our nationUs school
system to be in ruin.
Instead of President Bush's goals for year 2000, let
me suggest some that address the real failures of our schools more
directly. First, let us agree with our education President that all
children should come to school ready to learn. Let us therefore
provide high quality day care and preschool to all American
children, and ensure that they and their families have the finest
health care in the world. This is how we can ensure that they will
come to school ready to profit.
Second, let us choose, as President Bush did, to have safe
schools. But let us go on to guarantee every child a school where
plumbing works, where toilet paper and chalk are available, where
heating and cooling systems are operational, where the rain does
not run into the school building, and, where the plaster is not
falling. Let us guarantee each child access to current textbooks,
computers, and science laboratories, and provide children who are
eligible the bilingual education to which they are legally
entitled. Maybe we could just guarantee that every child in America
shall have a certified teacher who knows their name and their
family.
Third, by the year 2000 we should be number one in the world
in the percentage of eighteen year olds that are politically and
socially involved. Far more important than our mathematics and our
science scores is the involvement of the next generation in
maintaining our democracy and helping those within it that need
assistance—the young, the ill, the old, the retarded, the
illiterate, the hungry and the homeless. Schools that cannot turn
out politically active and socially helpful citizens should be
identified, and their rates of failure announced in the newspapers.
Fourth, by the year 2000 we should strive to make the American
teacher the highest paid in the world. Here is where we should
emulate the Japanese. We should pay our teachers what they pay
theirs. This would mean our teachers would earn ten percent more
than whatever the top-level civil servant earns in the service of
government. This would purchase and keep the talent needed to give
our students the best schooling in the world.
Fifth, we should equalize the funding for schooling, so that
schools in one part of the state or even within a district, cannot
spend twice or three times more per-child per-year than other
schools in the state. The parents of Grosse Pointe and Great Neck
and Princeton should inform the state legislatures what it takes to
educate their children properly, and that standard of support
should be applied to every district in the state.
It is my belief that the American school system, as a whole,
has been and continues to be a remarkable success. The campaign to
discredit it and to blame it for the ills of our nation, leads
inevitably to making the wrong decisions about what to fix. Greater
school improvement will come from providing poor people with jobs
that pay enough to allow them to live with dignity, than from all
the fooling around we can do with curriculum and instruction, or
with standards and tests. Children who are poor, unhealthy, and
from families and neighborhoods that are dysfunctional do not do
well in schools. Educators cannot work miracles. Children from
families that have some hope, some income and some health care have
a chance. Families with those characteristics are in less stress
and they take control of their neighborhoods. P. S. 79, on 181st
Street in the Bronx is a neighborhood elementary school that is
failing, and it was not always that way. When people in the
tenements around that school had hope, that ugly school for the
working classes was remarkably successful. I know. It is the school
I attended in the neighborhood in which I grew up.
Educators must now speak up. It is time for us to inform the
politicians and business leaders of America that we cannot solve
all the problems that they are creating. We will no longer take the
blame for their actions. All of us in this nation must find ways to
help each family live with dignity, so those families can give
their children hope. Education is irrelevant to those without hope,
and succeeds, remarkably well for these who have it.
Acknowledgment
Thanks are due to Ursula Casanova, N.L. Gage, Thomas McGowan
and James Powell for their help with earlier drafts of this
paper.
References
Bennett, W. L. (1984). To reclaim a legacy: A report on
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About the Author
David C. Berliner
College of Education
Arizona State University
Tempe, AZ 85287
Email: berliner@asu.edu
David C. Berliner is Professor of Educational
Psychology and Curriculum and Instruction in the College of Education at Arizona
State University. He is co-author of Educational Psychology
(5th edition)(with N. L. Gage), Putting Research to Work (with U.
Casanova)
and co-editor of Perspectives on Instructional Time
(with C. Fisher). He is a past president of the American Educational Research
Association and of the Division of Educational Psychology of the American Psychological Association.
He is also a Fellow of the Center
for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences. His interests are in research
on teaching, teacher education, and education policy.
Copyright 1993 by the
Education Policy Analysis Archives
The World Wide Web address for the Education Policy
Analysis Archives is
epaa.asu.edu General questions about
appropriateness of topics or
particular articles may be addressed to the Editor,
Gene V Glass,
glass@asu.edu or reach
him at College of Education, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ
85287-2411.
Editorial Board
John Covaleskie
Syracuse University |
Andrew Coulson
|
Alan Davis
University of Colorado--Denver |
Mark E. Fetler
mfetler@ctc.ca.gov |
Thomas F. Green
tfgreen@mailbox.syr.edu
Syracuse University |
Alison I. Griffith
agriffith@edu.yorku.ca |
Arlen Gullickson
gullickson@gw.wmich.edu |
Ernest R. House
ernie.house@colorado.edu |
Aimee Howley
ess016@marshall.wvnet.edu |
Craig B. Howley
u56e3@wvnvm.bitnet |
William Hunter
hunter@acs.ucalgary.ca |
Richard M. Jaeger
rmjaeger@iris.uncg.edu |
Benjamin Levin
levin@ccu.umanitoba.ca |
Thomas
Mauhs-Pugh
thomas.mauhs-pugh@dartmouth.edu |
Dewayne Matthews
dm@wiche.edu |
Mary P. McKeown
iadmpm@asuvm.inre.asu.edu |
Les McLean
lmclean@oise.on.ca |
Susan Bobbitt Nolen
sunolen@u.washington.edu |
Anne L. Pemberton
apembert@pen.k12.va.us |
Hugh G. Petrie
prohugh@ubvms.cc.buffalo.edu |
Richard C. Richardson
richard.richardson@asu.edu |
Anthony G. Rud Jr.
rud@purdue.edu |
Dennis Sayers
dmsayers@ucdavis.edu |
Jay Scribner
jayscrib@tenet.edu |
Robert Stonehill
rstonehi@inet.ed.gov |
Robert T. Stout
aorxs@asuvm.inre.asu.edu |
|
times since February 2, 1993