Schools of Thought

Jay Mathews has a cheery column in today's Washington Post in which he asserts that despite the seeming deluge of bad news about American schools, things aren't as bad as they may appear. I think Mathews is always thought-provoking, but here his self-described pollyana and the source he draws it from are being almost naive. I'm an optimist too, but one must understand the grave crisis facing American education to have a proper appreciation for the breadth of measures necessary to fix it. Mathews writes:

The Center on Education Policy report ["Do you know the latest good news about education"] cites several overlooked facts that appear to me to be uncontested:

* More Americans are completing high school or college. The percentage of Americans 25 or older who completed high school increased from 74 percent in 1985 to 84 percent in 2002. The portion of people in that age group who completed college rose from 19 to 27 percent in the same period. Much attention has been paid recently to the fact that other developed countries have caught up with the United States in college completion, but we should not begrudge them their own good news. At least we have improved.

* More children are getting more hours of early education. Full-day kindergarten, for instance, is serving more than 60 percent of children of kindergarten age, compared to less than a third in 1983.

* Broadly speaking, the achievement gap is narrowing. "On long-term NAEP [National Assessment of Educational Progress] trend assessments in math and reading, test score gaps between white and minority students have narrowed to the smallest margins in three decades," said the center's summary of the report.

* Average SAT scores are going up, even as more students take the test. The math average of 518 for members of the class of 2004 is 14 points higher than 1994 and 21 points higher than 1984. That class's verbal score of 508 is 9 points higher than 1994 and 4 points higher than 1984, after a decline in scores that inspired much of the public school restructuring of the 1980s and 1990s.

Let's take these one by one.

-More Americans are completing high school or college. This measure looks at the percentage of Americans age 25 or older. While it's great that the number is rising, it is not particularly precise, especially with regards to high school. Here's the important number: Best we can tell, somewhere around 30% of students nationwide who enter 9th grade don't graduate four years later. For blacks and latinos, that number is a jaw-dropping 50%. Completing high school in four or five years is a bare minimum requirement for having the social capital to fulfill ones potential, to say nothing of becoming financially stable. That one in two minority students don't graduate -- hundreds and hundreds of thousands of kids -- is not worth sugarcoating. It's worth solving.

-More children are getting more hours of early education. This is indeed an encouraging trend, and we need to keep up the momentum and extend it to Pre-K as well.

-Broadly speaking, the achievement gap is closing. This may be technically true, but it's not closing nearly fast enough to think we're truly on the right track. Digging into the NAEP report, we see that among 9-year-olds in reading, the black-white gap remains 26 points, down just 3 since 1996 and 7 since 1994. In math, the black-white gap is between 23 and 29 points for all tested age groups, with ten-year gap decrease of no more than 2 points.

On the 2003 main NAEP, black students in 32 states were at least 20 points, or 2 years worth of learning, behind their non-minority peers in 4th grade math, and latino students in 25 states were at least 20 points behind their non-minority peers in 4th grade reading. When you get into the state assessment numbers, the picture is much the same; huge 20, 30, 40 point gaps, and 3-year improvements usually in the low single digits. The achievement gap may be crawling closed, but it remains a huge, massive, pressing problem that current efforts are not sufficient to conquer.

-Average SAT scores are going up, even as more students are taking the test. This is nice, and i'm not going to deny that the math score improvement is solid (though one has to wonder how much technology/advanced calculators has to do with that). But, two points: First, a 4-point increase in reading scores since 1984. A 4-point increase in twenty-one years. Reading is a pretty static thing; you can read, or you can't. No potential confounding factors. A 4 point increase in twenty-one years is frighteningly poor, with or without more kids taking the test. The College Board itself even notes that no positive trend in verbal scores can yet be established (verbal scores went down as recently as between 2001 and 2002). Second, and this goes back to graduation rates, ~2.6 million kids take the SAT or ACT annually, but there are more than 3.5 million kids per grade in high school. With only 0.2 million more kids taking the ACT in 2004 than 1994 and 0.4 million more kids now taking the SAT, the trajectory is underwhelming.

I think optimism is good. I'm optimistic that things can change, that there's a future in which every child gets an unparalleled education that provides him or her with the industry to achieve his or her highest potential. But we're not there right now and we're not on course, and any attempt to gloss over the harsh realities does a disservice both to ourselves and to the millions of children crying out for a quality education.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 20, 2005 at 1:07 PM. |