CER Op-Ed
by Jeanne Allen, President
The Center for Education Reform
Richmond Times Dispatch, September 31, 1996
Un-Fudged Reality
Happy Talkers Are Wrong; Achievement Has Declined
Never in his dreams could Bobby McFerrin have imagined that his catchy tune "Don't Worry Be Happy" would come to portray the education establishment's attitude toward the failure of schools to educate all of our children.
Yet, it is true, as a growing club of "Don't Worry Be Happy" (DWBH) enthusiasts argue that everything is fine, was never all that bad in the first place, and even suggest, as David Berliner and Bruce Biddle did in The Manufactured Crisis, that the 1983 report, "A Nation at Risk," was a right-wing plot to bring on vouchers.
The sad truth, however is that academic achievement has fallen, with the reasons for the decline ranging from lowered expectations, to the dumbing down of textbooks, to a growing bureaucracy that engulfs our schools and teachers, to ... on and on.
Most Americans know it. And unlike the DWBH singers, who arrive at their conclusions by using misleading data or by comparing apples to oranges (statistical numbers-cooking that, by the way, has earned them the scorn of some of the most respected scholars in the country) most Americans believe it is important to know accurately how American students are faring, individually and in comparison to children in other neighborhoods, states, and countries.
Here is the straight, un-fudged reality.
Less-academically gifted students did not cause the decline in SAT scores from
1972-1994. It was a sharp drop in performance among students in the top 20
percent of their class that pulled down scores. And academic improvements are
not pushing up scores now. Scores are up, in large part, thanks to a
restructuring of the test, which now asks fewer questions, has less challenging
vocabulary sections, and is simply easier overall. Add to that new scoring
methods and you end up with scores that have no relation to the past.
According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, student performance in reading, history, writing, and geography is barely passable. Very few fourth, eighth, and 12th graders do advanced work, and barely 30 percent of 12th graders are proficient in either reading or history achievement.
A quarter of high school seniors failed to read at even a basic level and only a third demonstrated proficient reading skills. In geography about a third were below basic, while only about a quarter displayed proficiency or better. And in history, nearly 60 percent were below basic and 11 percent demonstrated proficiency.
Don't worry, be happy? Ask parents in Minnesota, where, although its children rank high on SATS, this spring about one-third of eighth graders statewide, and two-thirds of eighth graders in the Twin Cities flunked a basic literacy test.
Ask the principal of Roosevelt High School in Chicago, Rafael Sanchez, who called the recently released scores on the Illinois Test of Achievement and Proficiency disastrous, and who said, "I was sickened by what I saw."
And ask parents in Seattle, Washington, where a local television station quizzed high school students with questions from Professor E. D. Hirsch's book, What Your Sixth Grader Needs to Know. Among the lowlights: 30 percent could not name the nations that boarder the US, fewer than half could calculate 37 percent of 100, and out of the 100 students taking the quiz, only three answered all questions correctly.
Part and parcel to this discussion, of is, of course, the question. Who's to blame? More than anything else, that is what drives the DWBH crowd. Tired of the criticism, unable to escape blame, and unwilling to accept responsibility, they have, simply, declared victory in the war to improve education and through the use of statistical smoke and mirrors set about rewriting history, reality, and the truth.
That, in and of itself, would be bad enough. But the real tragedy of this enterprise is its chilling effect on education reform. Rather than identifying what's wrong with our schools and working to fix it, we are stymied by theories designed not to solve problems but to explain them away, and by a fruitless debate over the proper interpretation of statistical data.
But the question of who's to blame is not the most important one. What is important is that we get all the information out to the public and ask for support in correcting the urgent problems at hand. To use a medical analogy: It may be that the victim needs emergency treatment. Or perhaps out-patient surgery would suffice. Or in the better cases, maybe a check-up is all that's needed. But whatever the degree of academic rigor or failing in your own schools, it's time to ask the hard questions, and demand the kinds of reforms that will correct the problems.
Efforts to restore local control, enforce consequences for good and bad performance, and expand the options available to families would be good places to start. Otherwise we'll be forever hearing the DWBH chorus sing, and, frankly, it's not that great a song anyway.
###
Jeanne Allen is author of THE SCHOOL REFORM HANDBOOK: How to Improve Your Schools, and president of The Center for Education Reform in Washington, DC, a national non-profit advocacy group providing support and guidance to thousands of individuals and communities nationwide who are working to bring fundamental reforms to their schools. For more information, please call (202) 822-9000 or (800) 521-2118, or send e-mail to cer@edreform.com.