The least common denominator: the effort to push underprepared students into academic courses has driven the rigor out of many textbooks and classrooms - Feature

Education Next, Spring, 2003 by Williamson M. Evers, Paul Clopton

A Nation at Risk argued that much of America's decline in academic achievement could be traced to the "cafeteria-style curriculum" or "curricular smorgasbord" offered to high-school students. The report said that the presence of so many nonacademic courses in the curriculum--such as preparation for adulthood, off-campus work experiences, and physical and health education--was compromising America's commitment to high-quality academics. This, the National Commission on Excellence in Education, was the result of society's placing a "multitude of often conflicting demands" on the schools, which were asked to solve "personal, social, and political problems" that the home and other social institutions were failing to fix.

Risk charged the larger society with the sin of burdening schools with so many nonacademic responsibilities. Yet it appears at least as likely that the schools eagerly took on these burdens.

Bureaucracies like to grow, to widen their mission, to rake on more duties and thereby expand their budgets and influence. That's as true of public schools as of any other agency. The "comprehensive" high school, for example, could grow ever more comprehensive by offering more courses, many of them nonacademic.

This was not just a bureaucratic imperative; it also followed the thinking of progressive educators, who viewed the 19th-century high school as elitist, dominated by the wishes of college officials. Progressive educators believed that in order to make high schools more "democratic" they needed to provide most students a different curriculum, one that included a multitude of practical, problem-solving courses that were supposedly "relevant."

Once progressive educators gave up academic content as the basis for the curriculum, they were prey to all sorts of crackpot fads. They made pseudoscientific predictions about children's futures. They decided schools had to help students adjust to adulthood. They tried to reshape the curriculum to advance utopian political ideas. Under the influence of progressive educators, the curriculum was filled with watered-down and nonacademic courses.

The New Basics

The commission's antidote to the curricular smorgasbord was to recommend that all high-school students be required to take a set of courses called the "New Basics." The New Basics required every prospective graduate to take a minimum of four years of English, three years of mathematics, three years of science, three years of social studies, and half a year of computer science. College-bound students were also advised to study a foreign language for at least two years.

High schools responded favorably to this admonition, at least superficially. The share of students completing the New Basics rose from 2 percent in 1982 to 29 percent in 1998 (see Figure 1). If you put aside the computer-science requirement, the increase was from 10 percent to 44 percent.

Completion rates for specific mathematics and science courses increased dramatically as well. The percentage of high-school graduates who took Geometry increased from 47 percent to 70 percent; the rate for Algebra II rose from 40 percent to 62 percent; and for Precalculus, it went from 6 percent to 23 percent. Less substantial increases were seen in Chemistry, Physics, and Biology (see Figures 2 & 3 in Caroline Hoxby, "Reforms for Whom?" p. 47).

Such notable gains in academic course taking should have resulted in impressive gains in achievement. However, as Paul Peterson shows (see "Ticket to Nowhere," p. 39), long-term trend data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) reveal only small increases in mathematics and science scores after 1982, when scores for 17-year-olds reached their nadir.

Even more worrisome is the fact that these achievement levels on NAEP are considerably lower than would be expected from students who are taking rigorous academic classes. Consider the performance description for students scoring 350 on the NAEP mathematics scale--a score well above the average achievement level:

Students at this level can apply a range of reasoning skills to solve multi-step problems. They can solve routine problems involving fractions and percents, recognize properties of basic geometric figures, and work with exponents and square roots. They can solve a variety of two-step problems using variables, identify equivalent algebraic expressions, and solve linear equations and inequalities. They are developing an understanding of functions and coordinate systems.

This definition does not describe work at the Precalculus level or even the Algebra II level; it more closely resembles the less difficult content from Algebra I and Geometry. Yet even the average among top-quartile students in the United States has never reached this level.

The relative weakness of even our most advanced students is confirmed by scores on the advanced physics and mathematics components of the 1995 Third International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS), which is administered only to students who have taken these courses. In physics the United States scored significantly lower than 14 of the 15 participating countries; in advanced math U.S. scores were significantly lower than those of 11 of 15 participating countries. On neither exam was the U.S. score significantly higher than that of any other nation. Nor did we register any improvement from the Second International Mathematics Study, conducted in the early 1980s.