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

Diluting the Solution

These divergent trends--simultaneous increased enrollment in academic courses and stagnant achievement--suggest an hypothesis: in order to accommodate a wider range of student abilities and previous attainments in academic courses, the content of those courses has been diluted. This may be the inevitable consequence of policies that stress uniform academic treatments for all students.

First consider evidence from studies of curriculum and textbooks. The serious deterioration of textbook content appears to have begun in the 1960s. The late Jeanne Chall and Sue S. Conard studied widely used textbooks covering the period from 1945 to 1975 and noted, "On the whole, the later the copyright dates of the textbooks for the same grade, the easier they were, as measured by indices of readability level, maturity level, difficulty of questions, and extent of illustration."

There is reason to believe that curriculum materials have continued to weaken since the publication of Risk, The so-called "math wars" were prompted by the release of newer texts seen as grossly inadequate because of their deemphasis of rich content. The unchallenging curriculum stimulated the growth of parent-led protest organizations such as HOLD and Mathematically Correct. Many of the offending new mathematics programs were sponsored by, of all institutions, the National Science Foundation.

For instance, one of these programs, the Core-Plus Mathematics Project, was found by a reviewer to have "generated massive resentment among the students who were the experimental subjects during early implementation. Many students found themselves ill prepared for college, even though they came from highly educated homes and had a high likelihood of success." Just one example of the sheer vacuity of Core-Plus is that it had no section at all on factoring polynomials.

Another measure of the degree to which high-school academic courses have been watered down is provided by achievement scores in districts and schools where more children are raking academic courses. Consider data on algebra enrollments and achievement from California. There is a negative partial correlation of .67 between enrollment and achievement among individual schools in 8th-grade algebra, meaning that high enrollment percentages in algebra were correlated with lower scores, This was after controlling for students' mean achievement in 7th-grade math the previous year, which establishes that the correlation is not simply the result of diluting the test-raking pool with more students.

This suggests that the more students a school enrolls in algebra, the more school officials feel the need to use curriculum materials with less challenging content. Flooding academic courses with under-prepared students may have had the net effect of driving the rigor out of these courses.

The best course of action is for high schools to reinstate truly rigorous academic courses, but to differentiate among students with respect to the extent and rate of progress through the sequence of courses. For example, multiple levels of diplomas could be offered based on courses completed, although this progress should still be verified by external exams, as in the International Baccalaureate program. This would be a major improvement over the other form of differentiated curriculum (rigorous content for the college-bound, nonacademic content for the rest) that A Nation at Risk warned against, while also respecting the fact that not all students can handle the same lockstep schedule of rigorous courses.