In the last posting, this blog outlined some cultural conditions that
bode ill for the general health of the US polity and of the nation. Part of that landscape includes less than optimal
conditions in the nation’s schools and those institutional structures that support
and give authority to those schools.
That posting claims that in terms of the civic responsibilities of
schools, they are not measuring up.
The noted criticism of American
schools has taken many forms, but generally a good deal of literature that generally
comments on social maladies has been critical of the lack of educational
success. All the way back to the 1990s,
Christopher Hurn puts the source of this criticism into some perspective.
The
best known evidence for the claim that high school achievement has declined is
the trend of Scholastic Aptitude Test scores.
In the early 1960s those tests were taken by only a very small
proportion of high school students, primarily those who were planning to attend
highly selective colleges and universities.
As the proportion of students taking these tests has increased, one
would expect some decline as the average ability of students taking the test
moves closer to the average ability of all high school students.[1]
Hurn goes on to point out that in the twenty or so years before his
report, the number of students taking this test has remained basically the
same. That indicates that declines in
student performance are difficult to explain.
He notes that those
scores moved unmistakably downward until 1980 and were steady after that year and
that these scores are consistent with other testing. More recently, 2015 saw the lowest scores in
some time.[2] The current state of SAT scores is somewhat
mired in issues – such as the use of “adversity scores,” which attempts to take
into account socio/economic conditions deemed as negatively affecting student
performance. In addition, the effects
surrounding the pandemic have also made interpreting more current scores more
difficult.
Overall, though, no one is touting more recent
performance in students around the country.
In 2017, a Pew Report judged US schools as woefully below what many believe
they should be. Here are their overall
findings,
How do U.S. students compare with their peers
around the world? Recently released data from international math and science
assessments indicate that U.S. students continue to rank around the middle of
the pack and behind students in many other advanced industrial nations.
One of the biggest
cross-national tests is the Programme for International Student Assessment
(PISA), which every three years measures reading ability, math and science
literacy and other key skills among 15-year-olds in dozens of developed and
developing countries. The recent PISA
results, from 2015, placed the U.S. an unimpressive 38th out of 71
countries in math and 24th in science. Among the 35 members of the Organization for
Economic Cooperation and Development, which sponsors the PISA initiative, the
U.S. ranked 30th in math and 19th in science.
Younger American
students fare somewhat better on a similar cross-national assessment, the
Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study. That study, known as TIMSS, has tested
students in grades four and eight every four years since 1995. In the most recent tests, from 2015, 10
countries (out of 48 total) had statistically higher average fourth-grade math
scores than the U.S., while 7 countries had higher average science scores. In the eighth-grade tests, 7 out of 37
countries had statistically higher average math scores than the U.S., and 7 had
higher science scores.[3]
In short, things, as
judged by this blogger, have not improved in the years since the turn of the current
century.
The perception is that schools are not accomplishing their
basic function. Complaints from
government, business, and other sectors of society abound. That environment becomes fertile ground for
any uprising in sentiments that might even take bizarre turns as one sees with
the gubernatorial campaign in Virginia where critical race theory took center
stage. This has led to a variety of
suggestions as to what schools should do.
Reformers have suggested changes that are usually geared toward
curriculum; some suggestions have been adopted, but little has changed in terms
of the problems cited. Among the
reports, though, there has been a contradiction of findings as studies are
conducted to measure whether such “reforms” as school choice improve
educational result, as the sample of the above studies indicates. And as this recent political season has
vividly demonstrated, the politicization of school issues does little to achieve
improvements or show the way to a better day.
It is not the purpose of this blog to settle these
debates. Here, it is sufficient to point
out the perceived problem and to speculate that the problem might not lie in
whether or not American schools are doing better or worse than schools prior to
1960, but that perhaps schools are not doing a good enough job given the
demands of the fast moving – some say, constantly transforming – economy. To date, those changes that have taken place
in the economy have resulted in significant numbers of fellow Americans being displaced
in their jobs.[4]
That is, current indicators point to a continuous situation
of competitive realities that threaten the future economic well-being of this
nation. This is unfortunate because the
nation has already experienced lowering real wages among the working classes of
the nation’s labor pool. To date, Americans
in too high numbers in the general population have not fully appreciated how victimized
those segments have been by global forces.
This blog will pick up this review in the next posting. The reader, it is hoped, will keep the aim of
this review in mind. That is, given the
national shifts and their consequences – such as less concern for inherently
local issues including education – one sees an inherent devaluation of
federalist ideals. The next posting will
continue describing this deficiency in education and how it affects other concerns,
for example, the economy and the availability of employment for American
workers.
[1] Christopher J. Hurn, The Limits and Possibilities
of Schooling: An Introduction to the
Sociology of Education (New York, NY:
Harper and Row, 1993).
[2] Nick Anderson, “SAT Scores at Lowest Level in 10
Years, Fueling Worries about High Schools,” The Washington Post (September
3, 2015).
[3] Drew Desilver, “U.S. Students’ Academic Achievement
Still Lags That of Their Peers in Many Other Countries,” Pew Report Center
(February 15, 2017), accessed November 4, 2021, https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/02/15/u-s-students-internationally-math-science/ .
[4] This blogger, in his published book, Toward a
Federated Nation, dedicates a chapter to the prevailing problem of displaced
segments of the labor pool as jobs have been exported to low income labor
nations, such as China and Vietnam. See
Robert Gutierrez, Toward a Federated Nation (Tallahassee, FL: Gravitas/Civics Books, 2020, available
through Amazon).
