

|
November 1991
The Other Crisis in American Education
A college professor looks at the
forgotten victims of our mediocre educational system--the potentially high
achievers whose SAT scores have fallen, and who read less, understand less of
what they read, and know less than the top students of a generation ago.
by Daniel J. Singal
Two crises are stalking American education. Each poses a major threat to the
nation's future. The two are very different in character and will require
separate strategies if we wish to solve them; yet to date, almost without
exception, those concerned with restoring excellence to our schools have lumped
them together.
The first crisis, which centers on disadvantaged minority children attending
inner-city schools, has received considerable attention, as well it should. Put
simply, it involves students whose habitat makes it very difficult for them to
learn. The key issues are more social than educational. These children clearly
need dedicated teachers and a sound curriculum, the two staples of a quality
school, but the fact remains that most of them will not make significant
progress until they also have decent housing, a better diet, and a safer
environment in which to live.
The second crisis, in contrast, is far more academic than social and to a
surprising extent invisible. It involves approximately half the country's
student population--the group that educators refer to as "college-bound."
Although the overwhelming majority of these students attend suburban schools, a
fair number can be found in big-city or consolidated rural districts, or in
independent or parochial schools. Beginning in the mid-1970s these students
have been entering college so badly prepared that they have performed far below
potential, often to the point of functional disability. We tend to assume that
with their high aptitude for learning, they should be able to fend for
themselves. However, the experience of the past fifteen years has proved
decisively that they can't.
For most people, any mention of the problems of American education almost
immediately conjures up an image of the wretched conditions in the
stereotypical urban ghetto school. But can we really explain the sharp decline
in college-entrance-exam scores by pointing to the inner cities, where only a
tiny fraction of students even take the Scholastic Aptitude Test, or SAT? Do so
many freshmen entering prestigious institutions like Harvard and Berkeley
display a limited mastery of basic historical facts, not to mention of their
own language, because they come from crime-ridden neighborhoods or school
districts with no tax base?
If one looks at the aggregate statistics of American education from this
perspective, the full dimensions of this other crisis become strikingly
apparent. Consider the recent history of the Stanford Achievement Test, which
has long served as one of the main instruments for measuring pupil progress in
our schools. According to Herbert Rudman, a professor of educational psychology
at Michigan State University and a co-author of the test for more than three
decades, from the 1920s to the late 1960s American children taking the Stanford
made significant gains in their test performance. They made so much progress,
in fact, that as the test was revised each decade, the level of difficulty of
the questions was increased substantially, reflecting the increasing level of
challenge of the instructional materials being used in the schools.
From the late 1960s to the early 1980s, however, we managed to squander the
better part of that progress, with the greatest losses coming in the high
schools. During the past few years the Stanford and other test results have
shown some improvement in math and science, and in language skills at the
elementary school level. But there has been little or no movement in the verbal
areas among junior high and high school students, and seasoned test
interpreters have also seen a tendency for the gains made in the early years of
school to wash out as the child becomes older. In effect, the test numbers
substantiate what the National Commission on Excellence in Education
concluded--quoting the education analyst Paul Copperman--in 1983 in A Nation at
Risk: "Each generation of Americans has outstripped its parents in education,
in literacy, and in economic attainment. For the first time in the history of
our country, the educational skills of one generation will not surpass, will
not equal, will not even approach, those of their parents."
The blame for this wholesale decline in test scores is often put on a throng of
underachieving minority students thought to have been pulling down national
test averages, but in fact just the opposite is true. To be sure, it is
possible to attribute much of the relatively small initial drop in SAT scores,
from 1963 to 1970, to the fact that blacks and other minorities began taking
the test in larger numbers during those years, but since then the composition
of the test population has not changed in any way that would dramatically
affect test scores. Most important, blacks have made gradual but significant
gains in the past two decades, as measured by school achievement tests like the
Stanford and by college-entrance exams. Although their average scores still
fall substantially below those of whites, their combined (verbal and math) SAT
scores rose by 49 points during the 1980s alone.
"Perhaps the most untold story of American education in the past few years is
the achievement of black students," Gregory R. Anrig, the president of the
Educational Testing Service, declares. "The hard data are encouraging." The sad
irony, of course, is that this progress came at a time when the Reagan
Administration was proposing drastic cuts in the amount of federal scholarship
aid available to students from low-income families, most likely leading many
young blacks to believe that a college education was not within their reach.
While students in the bottom quartile have shown slow but steady improvement
since the 1960s, average test scores have nonetheless gone down, primarily
because of the performance of those in the top quartile. This "highest cohort
of achievers," Rudman writes, has shown "the greatest declines across a variety
of subjects as well as across age-level groups." Analysts have also found "a
substantial drop among those children in the middle range of achievement," he
continues, "but less loss and some modest gains at the lower levels." In other
words, our brightest youngsters, those most likely to be headed for selective
colleges, have suffered the most dramatic setbacks over the past two decades--a
fact with grave implications for our ability to compete with other nations in
the future. If this is true--and abundant evidence exists to suggest that it
is--then we indeed have a second major crisis in our education system.
SIXTY POINTS LOST ON THE SAT
Look at what has happened on the SAT, a test that retains its well-deserved
status as the most important educational measuring device in America. Despite
the test's many critics, the number of colleges relying on the SAT keeps
increasing, because it provides such an accurate gauge of the basic skills
needed for college-level work, among them reading comprehension, vocabulary,
and the ability to reason with mathematical concepts. The SAT also has the
virtue of having a rock-steady scoring system: it is calibrated, by the College
Board, so that a score earned in 1991 will represent almost exactly the same
level of performance as it did in, say, 1961. Thus, by tracking the percentage
of students coming in above the benchmark of 600 on the College Board scale
(which runs from 200 to 800), one can get a good sense of how the country's
most capable students have fared over the years.
The news is not encouraging. In 1972, of the high school seniors taking the SAT
11.4 percent had verbal scores over 600; by 1983 the number had dropped to 6.9
percent, and, despite modest gains in the mid-1980s, it remains in that
disheartening vicinity. That's a decline of nearly 40 percent. The decline
since the mid-1960s has probably been closer to 50 percent, but unfortunately
the College Board changed its reporting system in 1972, and earlier data isn't
available. The math SAT presents a somewhat different story. Though the
percentage scoring over 600 dropped from 17.9 in 1972 to 14.4 by 1981, it has
climbed back up to 17.9 in 1991. However, an influx of high-scoring
Asian-American students (who now make up eight percent of those taking the
test, as compared with two percent in 1972) has apparently had much to do with
this recent upsurge.
To grasp what these national figures really mean, it helps to approach them
from the standpoint of the individual student. How, we should ask, would the
drop in SAT scores affect a typical top-quartile senior at a well-regarded
suburban high school in 1991? To my knowledge, no published studies have
addressed this question, but the available information, including my own
research, suggests that our hypothetical senior would come in roughly fifty to
sixty points lower on the verbal section and twenty-five points lower on the
math than he or she would have in 1970.
Consider the trend in average freshman scores at selective colleges. Indeed,
perusing a twenty-year-old edition of Barron's Profiles of American Colleges is
an experience equivalent to entering a different world, with tuitions much
lower and SAT scores much higher than at most schools today. In 1970 students
arriving at top-ranked institutions like Columbia College, Swarthmore College,
the University of Chicago, and Pomona College posted average verbal SATs from
670 to 695; by the mid-1980s the scores ranged from 620 to 640, and they have
stayed roughly in that neighborhood ever since. The same pattern appears at
colleges a notch or two lower in the academic hierarchy. To take a few examples
from different geographic areas, from 1970 to 1987 average verbal scores went
from 644 to 570 at Hamilton College, from 607 to 563 at Washington University,
from 600 to 560 at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, and from 560 to 499
at the University of California at Santa Barbara.
The point is not that these particular schools have slipped in their relative
standings. They all currently receive ratings the same as or higher than those
they received twenty years ago from Barron's in terms of competition for
admission. One could pick almost any selective institution at random and find
the same trend (an exception: the stronger schools in the South, where test
scores held steady or rose in the wake of desegregation). Nor can one attribute
the drop in scores to a change in the size of the test population or in the
percentage of high school seniors taking the SAT (the latter figure has risen
significantly only in the past few years, too recently to have affected the
1987 scores). To be sure, an increase in the number of minority students
attending these institutions has been a factor, but the basic problem remains:
with a 40 percent decline in the proportion of students scoring over 600, there
are far fewer high-scoring students to go around.
But do these numbers matter? Does a loss of sixty points on the verbal SAT
translate into a significant difference in a student's educational experience
at college? The testimony of those who teach at the college level suggests that
the answer is yes. When a national poll in 1989 asked professors whether they
thought undergraduates were "seriously underprepared in basic skills," 75
percent said yes and only 15 percent said no. The same poll asked whether
institutions of higher learning were spending "too much time and money teaching
students what they should have learned in high school." Sixty-eight percent
said yes. Professors feel like this, I should add, not because they are old
scolds given to grousing about students but because their work brings them into
daily contact with the manifold ways in which the American education system has
failed these young people.
Those who tend to dismiss those sixty lost SAT points as insignificant haven't
seen a college term paper lately. It's not that freshmen in 1991 are unable to
read or write. Most of them possess what the National Assessment of Educational
Progress calls "satisfactory" skills in this area. But is that enough for
college? Do they have sufficient command of the English language to comprehend
a college-level text, think through a complex issue, or express a reasonably
sophisticated argument on paper? Those of us who were teaching in the early
1970s can attest that the overwhelming majority of freshmen at the more
selective colleges arrived with such "advanced" skills. Now only a handful come
so equipped.
THE CONTEXT OF IGNORANCE
Take reading, for example. "While the nation's students have the skills to
derive a surface understanding of what they read," the
NAEP recently reported, "they have difficulty when asked to defend or elaborate
upon this surface understanding." That's what most college faculty would say.
Emilia da Costa, a Latin America specialist who has taught at Yale for the past
eighteen years, estimates that whereas 70 percent of her students can pick out
the general theme of an essay or a book, only 25 percent come away with
in-depth comprehension of what they read. David Samson, a former lecturer in
history and literature at Harvard, likewise observes, "No one reads for nuance.
They pay no attention to detail." My own experience confirms this. Countless
times I have been amazed at how little students have managed to glean from a
book I know they have read, to the point where they are often unable to recall
the names of prominently mentioned figures. So much escapes them; even those of
above-average ability absorb no more than a dusting of detail from a printed
text. And without such detailed information it's impossible for them to gain a
real understanding of what the author is saying.
Equally distressing is the rate at which today's students read. A friend of
mine at the University of Michigan remembers that in the 1960s the normal
assignment in his courses was one book a week. Now he allows two to three weeks
for each title. He has also reluctantly had to adjust the level of difficulty
of his assignments: even a journalist like Walter Lippmann is too hard for most
freshmen and sophomores these days, he finds. Again, this is typical. Twelve to
fifteen books over a fifteen-week semester used to be the rule of thumb at
selective colleges. Today it is six to eight books, and they had better be
short texts, written in relatively simple English.
As one might expect, students who don't read at an advanced level can't write
well either. Their knowledge of grammar is not bad, according to Richard
Marius, the director of the expository writing program at Harvard, but "the
number of words available to express their thoughts is very, very limited, and
the forms by which they express themselves are also very limited." The average
incoming Harvard student, he observes, has a "utilitarian command of language"
resulting in sentences that follow a simple subject-predicate,
subject-predicate format with little variation or richness of verbal
expression. Harvard, of course, gets the cream of the crop. Those of us
teaching at lesser institutions would be happy with utilitarian but serviceable
prose from our freshmen. More often we get mangled sentences, essays composed
without the slightest sense of paragraphing, and writing that can't sustain a
thought for more than half a page.
Along with this impoverishment of language comes a downturn in reasoning
skills. Da Costa laments that students are no longer trained in logical
analysis, and consequently have difficulty using evidence to reach a
conclusion. R. Jackson Wilson finds this to be the greatest change he has
observed during a quarter century of teaching history at Smith College.
"Students come to us having sat around for twelve years expressing attitudes
toward things rather than analyzing," he says. "They are always ready to tell
you how they feel about an issue, but they have never learned how to construct
a rational argument to defend their opinions." Again, these complaints are
amply substantiated by data from the National Assessment of Educational
Progress. On one test of analytic writing measuring "the ability to provide
evidence, reason logically, and make a well-developed point," only four tenths
of one percent of eleventh graders performed at the "elaborated" (what I
believe should be considered college-freshman) level.
Finally, no account of the present condition of college students would be
complete without mention of the extraordinary dearth of factual knowledge they
bring to college. Horror stories on this topic abound--and they are probably
all true. I will never forget two unusually capable juniors, one of whom was a
star political-science major, who came to my office a few years ago to ask what
was this thing called the New Deal. I had made reference to it during a lecture
on the assumption that everyone in the class would be well acquainted with
Franklin Roosevelt's domestic program, but I was wrong: the two students had
checked with their friends, and none of them had heard of the New Deal either.
Another junior recently asked me to help him pick a twentieth-century American
novelist on whom to write a term paper. He had heard vaguely of F. Scott
Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway, but did not recognize the names of Sinclair
Lewis, John Dos Passos, Norman Mailer, William Styron, and Saul Bellow.
Indeed, one can't assume that college students know anything anymore. Paula
Fass, a professor of history at the University of California at Berkeley,
remains astonished that sophomores and juniors in her upper-level course on
American social history are often unable to differentiate between the American
Revolution and the Civil War, but rather see them as two big events that
happened way back in the past. Alan Heimert, a veteran member of the Harvard
English department, encounters the same mushy grasp of historical knowledge and
blames it on the "trendy social-studies curriculum" now taught in most high
schools which covers broad thematic topics rather than history. "They are aware
that someone oppressed someone else," he says with only slight exaggeration,
"but they aren't sure exactly what took place and they have no idea of the
order in which it happened."
Though not always recognized, a direct connection exists between this deficit
in factual knowledge and the decline in verbal skills. Most reading, after all,
is at bottom a form of information processing in which the mind selects what it
wants to know from the printed page and files it away for future use. In
conducting that operation of selecting, interpreting, and storing information,
the reader constantly relies on his or her previous stock of knowledge as a
vital frame of reference. No matter how fascinating or valuable a new detail
might be, a person finds it almost impossible to hold in memory and have
available for retrieval unless it can be placed in some kind of larger context.
Providing that basic intellectual scaffolding used to be a major function of a
good high school education. Year-long survey courses in history and literature,
covering the United States, Europe, and the world, were designed to ensure that
college-bound students would have the necessary background to make sense of the
new subject matter they would encounter in college. Yet few high schools today
teach that kind of curriculum.
Little wonder that so many students experience great difficulty in absorbing
detail; since they have no context in which to fit what they read, it quickly
flows out of their minds. Unable to retain much, they find little profit in
reading, which leads them to read less, which in turn makes it harder for them
to improve their reading skills.
One often hears this generation accused of laziness. They don't perform well in
school or college or later on the job, it is said, because they lack
motivation. I don't happen to subscribe to that theory. The percentage of
students who are truly lazy--that is, who simply have an aversion to work--is
probably no greater today than it has been in the past. The real problem, I'm
convinced, is that college-bound youngsters over the past two decades have not
received the quality education they deserve. As R. Jackson Wilson observes of
his students at Smith, this generation is typically "good-spirited,
refreshingly uncowed by teachers' authority, and very willing to work." They
enter college with high ambitions, only to find those ambitions dashed in many
cases by inadequate skills and knowledge. The normal activities required to
earn a bachelor's degree--reading, writing, researching, and reasoning--are so
difficult for them that a large number (I would guess a majority at most
schools) simply give up in frustration. Some actually leave; the rest go
through the motions, learning and contributing little, until it's time to pick
up their diplomas. We rightly worry about the nation's high school dropouts.
Perhaps we should worry as well about these silent college "dropouts."
HOW GOOD SCHOOLS BUCK THE TREND
What has caused this great decline in our schools? The multitude of reports
that now fill the library shelves tend to designate "social factors" as the
prime culprit. Television usually heads the list, followed by rock music, the
influence of adolescent peer groups, the increase in both single-parent
families and households where both parents work, and even faulty nutrition.
Those who attribute the loss of academic performance to social factors don't
take account of the small number of high schools around the country that have
managed to escape the downturn. Some are posh private academies; a few are
located in blue-collar neighborhoods. What they have in common is a pattern of
stable or even rising test scores at a time when virtually all the schools
around them experienced sharp declines. There is no indication that the
children attending these exceptional schools watched significantly fewer hours
of television, listened to less heavy-metal music, were less likely to have
working mothers, or ate fewer Big Macs than other children. Rather, they appear
to have had the good fortune to go to schools that were intent on steering a
steady course in a time of rapid change, thus countering the potentially
negative impact of various social factors.
It would seem obvious good sense to look closely at this select group of
schools to determine what they have been doing right, but as far as I can
determine this has been done in only two national studies. The better one was
issued by the National Association of Secondary School Principals (NASSP) in
1978, under the somewhat pedestrian title Guidelines for Improving SAT Scores.
Now out of print and hard to find, it contains one of the most perceptive
diagnoses available of the underlying malady in our schools.
The report identifies one main characteristic that successful schools have
shared--the belief that academics must invariably receive priority over every
other activity. "The difference comes," we are told, "from a singular
commitment to academic achievement for the college-bound student." These
schools did not ignore the other dimensions of student life. By and large, the
NASSP found, schools that maintained excellence in academics sought to be
excellent in everything else they did, they "proved to be apt jugglers, keeping
all important balls in the air." But academic work came first.
Two other factors help account for the prowess of these schools in holding the
line against deterioration. The first is a dogged reliance on a traditional
liberal-arts curriculum. In an era of mini-courses and electives, the tiny
group of high schools that kept test scores and achievement high continued to
require year-long courses in literature and to encourage enrollment in rigorous
math classes, including geometry and advanced algebra. Though the learning
environment in those schools was often "broad and imaginative," in the words of
the NASSP, fundamentals such as English grammar and vocabulary received heavy
stress. The other key factor in preserving academic quality was the practice of
grouping students by ability in as many subjects as possible The contrast was
stark: schools that had "severely declining test scores" had "moved
determinedly toward heterogeneous grouping" (that is, mixed students of
differing ability levels in the same classes), while the "schools who have
maintained good SAT scores" tended "to prefer homogeneous grouping."
If attaining educational excellence is this simple, why have these high-quality
schools become so rare? The answer lies in the cultural ferment of the 1960s.
THE INCUBUS OF THE SIXTIES
In every conceivable fashion the reigning ethos of those times was hostile to
excellence in education. Individual achievement fell under intense suspicion,
as did attempts to maintain standards. Discriminating among students on the
basis of ability or performance was branded "elitist." Educational gurus of the
day called for essentially nonacademic schools, whose main purpose would be to
build habits of social cooperation and equality rather than to train the mind.
A good education, it was said, maximized the child's innate spontaneity,
creativity, and affection for others. To the extent that logic and acquired
knowledge interfered with that process, they were devalued.
This populist tidal wave receded by the late 1970s, but the mediocrity it left
in its wake remains. The extent of the devastation has varied by subject area:
math and the natural sciences, which continue to be blessed with relatively
widespread agreement on what should be taught, have escaped the worst damage
(though test scores in these areas still fall below average in comparisons with
scores in other industrialized nations), while English and history now lie in
ruins in all too many schools. The latter, of course, are the disciplines
primarily responsible for inculcating verbal skills and for supplying the broad
framework of knowledge that students need for success in college. Yet it is
precisely in these areas that the spirit of the sixties remains most evident,
hovering over the high schools and junior highs like a ghost.
Consider the teaching of English. The Great Books, of course, are out of
fashion. A few get assigned as a token gesture, but are rarely set in
chronological order. The results of a questionnaire I recently distributed at
Hobart and William Smith Colleges suggest that less than a quarter of the
college-bound population now gets a real year-long survey of American
literature, with probably no more than 15 percent taking such a course in
British or European literature. Instead, students all too often are given works
that, as the English department at one highly ranked independent school puts
it, are "age-appropriate" and "reflect [a] concern for social pluralism."
"Age-appropriate" means giving students assignments "that reflect their
interests as adolescents, that they can read without constant recourse to a
dictionary, and from which they can take whatever they are inspired to take."
Nor are they asked to read much. Most ninth- and tenth-grade English reading
lists are limited to four or five titles a year. According to Arthur N.
Applebee, the director of the National Research Center on Literature Teaching
and Learning, the typical college-bound high school student reads only
sixty-five pages a week (even with Advanced Placement courses factored in), or
less than ten pages a night. A check of the typical high school curriculum
would disclose that plays are favorite choices these days (they tend to be much
shorter than novels and make easier reading), along with personal memoirs. The
rich diet of fiction and poetry that used to be served up--Dickens, Twain, Poe,
Hawthorne, Shakespeare, Chaucer, Thoreau, Dickinson, Milton, Melville, and
Steinbeck--is increasingly hard to find.
These changes in the teaching of literature matter greatly because reading is
the primary vehicle by which students absorb the rhythms and patterns of
language. The more a person encounters sophisticated prose, the more he or she
will pick up varied sentence structure, vocabulary in context, and even
spelling, as well as advanced descriptive techniques and narrative strategies.
Feed a student the literary equivalent of junk food and you will get an
impoverished command of English, which is what we too often see in the current
crop of college freshmen. And yet, because most new teachers these days are
themselves the product of this new English curriculum, the trend continues to
run the wrong way.
The rest of the English curriculum also reflects the impact of the sixties. If
the reports I get from my students are accurate, it would appear that formal
drills on grammar, vocabulary, spelling, and diction are infrequent these days.
Teachers may toss an occasional drill into the schedule to keep parents
satisfied, but the assumption is that students will absorb these things
automatically from their reading. Given what students currently read, however,
that's a dubious assumption. As for writing, when it is assigned (there seems
to be wide variation among schools on this), it tends to take the form of
"personal expression"--with assignments calling for first-person narratives
that describe what the student has seen, felt, or experienced. Essays in which
the writer marshals evidence to support a coherent, logical argument are all
too rare. Since that kind of exercise might dampen creativity, it must be
minimized. The outcome is utterly predictable. "Analytic writing was difficult
for students in all grades," the National Assessment of Educational Progress
noted in summarizing the results of its various writing tests in 1984, while
students "had less difficulty with tasks requiring short responses based on
personal experience."
In sum, this is a generation whose members may be better equipped to track the
progress of their souls in diaries than any group of Americans since the
Puritans. But as for writing papers in college, or later producing the sorts of
documents that get the world's work done, that's another story. In contrast, a
survey conducted by the Educational Testing Service in the mid-1960s, just
before countercultural innovations swept away the old curriculum, discovered
that over twice as many high school students of that era said that they
"frequently" wrote papers criticizing the literary works they were studying (a
valuable pedagogic strategy because it forces the student to become a much
closer reader) as said that they "frequently" wrote papers based on personal
experience.
THE SHOCK OF COLLEGE-LEVEL DEMANDS
The same tendency appears in other key subjects. Students headed for college
used to get a solid grasp of both American and European history at the high
school level. Now, as most people are aware, they pass through an array of
social-studies courses designed to impress upon them the central values of the
sixties, including concern for the natural environment, respect for people of
different racial and ethnic groups, and women's rights. These values are
important and should certainly be included in the curriculum. But teaching them
in such a superficial manner, devoid of any historical context, simply doesn't
work--as the alarming increase in racist and sexist incidents that has plagued
college campuses in the past few years would suggest. Above all, this spotty
social-studies approach deprives students of that vital base of in-depth
knowledge they must have to succeed as undergraduates.
Accompanying this pervasive dumbing-down of the curriculum has been a wholesale
change in school philosophy. In place of "stretching" students, the key
objective in previous eras, the goal has become not to "stress" them. One hears
again and again that kids growing up "need time to smell the roses." (That they
are more likely to spend their free hours in front of a television or cruising
a shopping mall seems never to be considered.) Placing serious academic demands
on them, it is thought, might impede their natural development and perhaps even
render them neurotic. But the stress they avoid in high school often comes back
to haunt them in college. An extensive survey of college freshmen recently
found that an increasing number say they are "overwhelmed by all I have to do."
"We have very high suicide rates among college students now," the survey's
director, Alexander Astin, says. This should come as no surprise: having had
little previous experience with stress, students are not well equipped to face
the normal and necessary pressures of either college or the "real world."
Perhaps most crucial, the sixties mentality, with its strong animus against
what it defines as "elitism," has shifted the locus of concern in American
education from high to low achievers. All over the country educators today
typically judge themselves by how well they can reach the least-able student in
the system, the slowest one in the class. Programs to help the culturally
disadvantaged and the learning-disabled have proliferated, while those for the
gifted receive no more than token interest.
The prevailing ideology holds that it is much better to give up the prospect of
excellence than to take the chance of injuring any student's self-esteem.
Instead of trying to spur children on to set high standards for themselves,
teachers invest their energies in making sure that slow learners do not come to
think of themselves as failures. These attitudes have become so ingrained that
in conversations with teachers and administrators one often senses a virtual
prejudice against bright students. There is at times an underlying feeling,
never articulated, that such children start off with too many advantages, and
that it would be just as well to hold them back until their less fortunate
contemporaries catch up with them. At a minimum, the assumption goes, students
of above-average ability will in due course find their way to classy colleges
and thus don't need any special consideration from their schools.
In adopting this posture, one must remember, the education profession has
simply been carrying out its social mandate. In the wake of the sixties the
country seemed to be telling the schools that the prime mission now was to
produce equality rather than excellence--to lift up those on the bottom,
whether they were there because of race, class, ethnicity, or low ability. As
the test scores tell us, the education establishment took this mission to
heart. Those in the bottom quartile have shown slow but steady progress, while
those in the top quartile have exhibited a sharp decline. Only since the
appearance of A Nation at Risk, in 1983, with its warning about "a rising tide
of mediocrity" sweeping over the schools, have we started to realize the
sizable hidden cost that this currant educational strategy has exacted.
Here it is necessary to be precise: the problem is not the pursuit of equality
as such but the bias against excellence that has accompanied it. If anything,
the effort to help children who start off life severely handicapped by their
socioeconomic circumstances deserves more money and attention than it has
received to date. However, that effort need not and must not obscure from view
the quite separate problem of restoring academic quality to our schools. If
real change is to occur in this regard, we must make clear to teachers and
administrators that their mandate has been revised--that we want to move toward
social equality AND academic excellence.
FOUR REMEDIES
Most of the reform proposals currently on the table fail to speak to the other
crisis in American education. The majority are designed to raise minimum
standards or to cut the high school dropout rate. To the extent that
higher-level academics gets mentioned, the discussion usually centers on such
topics as critical-thinking and "process writing" skills and cooperative
learning groups, as if a few minor adjustments in technique could make a
significant difference. Almost no one addresses the fundamental, substantive
issues that must be dealt with if we really want to restore excellence to our
schools.
If that IS our objective--if we are determined to recover the ground we have
lost since 1970--then we should take the following concrete steps:
1) Dramatically increase the quality and quantity of assigned reading for
students at all grade levels. By the senior year of high school, college-bound
students should be reading the equivalent of at least twelve books a year FOR
CLASS, not counting textbooks, along with six to eight additional books under
the rubrics of independent and summer reading. To build up to this amount, the
reading load should be adjusted in each of the preceding grades so that
students become gradually accustomed to reading more each year. (A good rule of
thumb might be to have college-bound students read the same number of books
each year as their grade number--eight books in the eighth grade, nine books in
the ninth, and so on.) Since reading is a learned skill that can almost
invariably be improved by practice, the sheer number of pages counts--the more
the better. But there should also be an effort to make the assigned texts as
complex and challenging as possible. In the end, nothing builds a true command
of language faster than this kind of regimen.
I can already hear a chorus of educators declaring this proposal to be utterly
unworkable. "Kids just don't read anymore," they will say. But the fact is that
this sort of reading load, which was standard in the best American schools a
quarter century ago, is still standard in some schools today. At McDonogh, an
independent school just outside Baltimore that enrolls college-bound students
from a wide range of ability levels, fifteen to twenty assigned books a year in
English class is not unusual for eleventh and twelfth graders. College
admissions officers I know rave about how well prepared McDonogh graduates are
and how enthusiastic about learning. The secret, I'm convinced, is in the
reading. I see no reason why other schools can't follow McDonogh's example.
2) Bring back required survey courses as the staple of the high school
humanities curriculum. There are many different ways to do this. My preference
would be to have one year of coordinated courses in history and English focused
on the United States, another year focused on Europe, and a third year devoted
to the non-European world. Issues of race and gender would naturally arise; it
is hard, for instance, to cover American literature without including black and
women writers, or to discuss our past without spending considerable time on
slavery and segregation. But the main purpose of this curriculum would be to
ensure that students enter college with a firm knowledge of how the world they
will inherit has developed.
3) Institute a flexible program of ability grouping at both the elementary and
secondary school levels. Few issues in education can raise tempers faster than
ability grouping, and few are more badly misunderstood. The most common error
is to confuse ability grouping with "tracking," a practice in which students
are sorted out at an early age according to their scores on intelligence tests
and placed in separate "tracks" for fast, medium, and slow learners, where they
remain through high school. Reformers in the 1960s rightly objected to that
kind of predestination, pointing out that minority and working-class children
were often routinely put in the slow track and thus deprived of the chance to
advance themselves through schooling. But unfortunately this assault on
tracking soon broadened to include ability grouping, a somewhat murky term that
I would contend should be defined as a system for dividing students up on the
basis of their actual performance in individual subjects. Under ability
grouping a student might start off in the fast group in math but the slow one
in English, with the placements changing from year to year depending on his or
her progress. The guiding principle is not to give privileged treatment to any
one group but rather to provide instruction closely tailored to the learning
needs of each child.
Does ability grouping work? The research can supply whatever verdict one
favors. Until roughly the mid-1960s most of the studies tended to show that
ability grouping was beneficial. Then came the cultural revolution of the late
1960s. For the next two decades researchers found that ability grouping was
damaging to most students, especially those at the bottom. The pendulum now
seems to be swinging back the other way, with a number of recent investigators
suggesting that such grouping does not harm anyone and can be of great value to
those of above-average ability, provided they get a special curriculum that is
truly challenging rather than simply moving through the standard curriculum at
a faster pace. Moreover, these newer studies suggest that ability grouping may
actually enhance the achievement of slower learners if they, too, are given a
curriculum and teaching style specially designed for them. A unique program at
South Mecklenburg High School, in Charlotte, North Carolina, has even found
that ability grouping can significantly help those in the middle ability range,
though once again the crucial element is instruction tailored to their needs.
Since the research is contradictory, perhaps the best way to decide the issue
is to apply common sense. It is obvious that with children of different ability
levels in the same classroom, everything will tend toward a level just a notch
above the lowest common denominator. Instead of being challenged to develop
their talents to the fullest, the most capable students will be forced to work,
in effect, at half speed. The math problems set before them will require little
effort on their part to solve; the English texts will not stretch them in the
least. As a result, these students quickly discover that there is no reason for
them ever to extend themselves, that they can coast through school with minimal
effort.
Ability grouping continues to face formidable political opposition; last year,
regrettably, the education task force of the National Governors' Association
took its first major step by denouncing it (though its statement was so brief
that one has difficulty telling whether it opposes ability grouping or
tracking). Thus compromises may be in order. One possibility is the system of
intensive courses adopted by the Waynflete School, in Portland, Maine. An
intensive section in English entails a heavier than normal load of reading in
more-advanced texts, more-sophisticated writing assignments, and faster-paced
instruction. The key is that all students are free to try an intensive section;
there is no teacher placement involved. Those doing so run little risk: since
the curriculum includes the same core material covered in a regular section,
students unable to handle the demands can drop back at any time during the
school year.
This arrangement has several advantages. One is that the "regular" sections are
truly regular, rather than "slow" or "remedial," so that those enrolled in them
feel no stigma whatsoever. Better yet, students who voluntarily contract to be
in a special section are especially motivated. Administrators at Waynflete
report being pleasantly surprised at the number of kids with middle-range
academic ability who perform well in intensive sections because they enjoy the
challenge. And of course, this is a reform that can be implemented with
relatively little disruption to other programs and at virtually no extra
expense. It seems clear that more schools should be trying this system, yet to
date, so far as I can tell, it remains unique to Waynflete.
4) Attract more bright college graduates into the teaching profession. It is
astonishing, but all too true, that the average verbal SAT score of the young
people drawn into teaching has hovered around 400 for more than a decade. "Half
of the newly employed mathematics, science, and English teachers are not
qualified to teach these subjects," bemoaned A Nation at Risk. Clearly, if we
want top-notch instruction for college-bound students in the years ahead, we
must find a new supply of capable teachers.
To the familiar prescriptions of offering much higher pay and better working
conditions I would add that it's time to abolish certification requirements for
teachers, at least above the elementary school level. When they first came into
being, those requirements served the important purpose of helping to raise
standards, but today their only function is to discourage talented would-be
teachers from entering the profession. Indeed, certification actually serves to
lower standards: instead of acquiring a thoroughgoing knowledge of their
subject, future teachers spend far too much of their time in college and
graduate school taking Mickey Mouse courses on how to construct a lesson plan.
Private schools do not require certification, yet they manage to attract a
teaching corps of much higher quality--even at lower salaries than the public
schools pay. "Our teachers never learned how to teach, which is why they teach
so well," quips Laurance Levy, the former head of McDonogh's first-rate English
department.
My impression is that many in the top quartile of the class at our best
colleges would flood into teaching if they could do so on the basis of a
liberal-arts bachelor's degree--and if they could avoid the kind of stifling
bureaucratic control that is all too often a teacher's lot today. Some states,
including New Jersey, have experimented with letting young teachers of this
description loose in their classrooms, apparently with much success, though,
alas, these new teachers are eventually required to obtain certification. And
programs at various selective private colleges and universities permit would-be
teachers to combine a liberal-arts degree and professional training. But for
the most part the cumbersome, outdated apparatus of the teaching profession
remains in place.
The solution? While it is probably not politically possible in most states to
dismantle the existing system in the near future, why not set up a parallel
system to provide an alternate career path for new teachers? Those liberal-arts
college graduates choosing the new path would go straight to the classroom and
be exempt from all formal professional training. They would, however, have
more-experienced teachers in their schools serving as their mentors. Attracting
these people into the profession would necessitate a much higher pay scale but
also something more. When I recently asked a group of exceptionally capable
students at my college if they would consider a teaching career along these
lines, three quarters at first said yes, but soon reversed themselves. They had
witnessed the demeaning conditions under which most teachers work, they
explained, and wouldn't want the job even if salaries were more appealing. The
only way to lure them into the classroom, it became clear, would be to give
them considerable freedom to shape their own curricula, allow them to choose
instructional materials, and spare them the petty annoyances like the
ubiquitous loudspeaker announcements that can suddenly disrupt a class. If the
governors really want to do something useful to upgrade education, establishing
this alternative career path is perhaps the most valuable project they could
take up.
A MORAL ISSUE
The other crisis in American education has ominous implications for the
well-being of our political system. According to a recent study by the Times
Mirror Center for the People and the Press, titled "The Age of Indifference,"
young Americans aged eighteen to twenty-nine are remarkably uninformed. They do
read, the survey found, but primarily lightweight publications like People
rather than serious newspapers or periodicals. Most striking, a majority of
these young adults report that they often first become aware of political
candidates from television commercials. This response cuts across all
educational levels: college graduates and high school dropouts alike displayed
a troubling ignorance of political facts and a reliance on sound-bites as their
basic source of political knowledge. The "limited appetites and aptitudes" of
this generation, the Times Mirror Center concluded, are already adversely
affecting "the practice of politics and the nature of our democracy."
One could advance a host of reasons--economic, social, and cultural--why this
other crisis in education needs immediate attention. But in the end the most
important is probably moral, having to do with the responsibility of each
generation to look after the well-being of its children. Observing the
performance of students who have been arriving at college campuses over the
past decade, one can only conclude that the present generation of American
parents has been failing in its obligation to provide its offspring with a
high-quality education. It seems safe to predict that this failure will have
specific consequences in a lower sense of professional fulfillment for these
youngsters as they pursue their careers, and will hamper their ability to stay
competitive with contemporaries in many European and Asian countries, where
college-bound students typically do get the benefit of first-rate schools. Is
it right or sensible to place our children at such a strong disadvantage before
they even begin their adult lives?
As the United Negro College Fund aptly puts it, a mind is a terrible thing to
waste. It's time to recognize that we have been wasting far too many good ones.
Copyright © 1991, Daniel J. Singal. All rights
reserved.
The Atlantic Monthly; November 1991; The Other Crisis in American Education;
Volume 268, No. 5;
pages 59-74.
|