America's schools: still failing after all these years

National Review, Sept 15, 1997 by Barbara Lerner

WHAT do the latest round of international test results released June 10 tell us about how American students are faring in the Nineties? President Clinton and his friends in the education establishment say they prove we've made great progress since 1983 when the famous report A Nation at Risk warned us that our kids were dangerously far behind their foreign peers.

That was Clinton's spin, and the press bought it. "The findings may startle people used to thinking the worst of the schools, but they are consistent with generally positive trends in national tests," wrote James Bennett in the New York Times. His colleague Peter Applebome quibbled about the size of the great leap forward, calling A Nation at Risk "brilliant propaganda," echoing the trendy revisionist line that we never were as far behind as it said we were. Still, he agreed with his peers: we are doing much better now. Chalk up one more for the consensus.

And a sorry consensus it is, because what it really proves is that, when it comes to educational test results, press and pols alike suffer from selective amnesia.

Here are the facts. The latest round of international tests was conducted in 1994 and 1995, and American 4th graders, 9- and 10-year-olds, mainly -- call them "the Tens" -- did us proud. On the science test, especially, Tens from 26 nations took it, and our Tens outscored 23 of them, coming in third, a little behind Japan and Korea but significantly ahead of Tens from other developed nations.

Good news? Sure. Progress? No -- no change at all, at this age level. Because what press and pols forgot is the fact that our Tens did quite well in the first round of international tests in the Sixties and Seventies too, especially on the Science test. Tens from 15 nations took it then, and, then as now, our Tens scored third. Japan was ahead of us then too. Sweden's Tens edged us out for the Number 2 spot that time, but, then as now, our Tens were ahead of Tens from a host of developed nations.

So why are pols and press so sure there has been such a big, positive change? Because although they forgot how well our Tens did in the past, they remember the most arresting sentence in A Nation at Risk, the one-sentence summary of our competitive standing after the first round of international tests in the Sixties and Seventies. Here it is again:

The results for the United States were these: Out of 19 tests, we were never ranked first or second; we came in last 3 times; and, if comparisons are limited to other developed nations only, the U.S. ranked at the bottom 7 times.

I wrote that sentence -- A Nation at Risk lifted it, verbatim, from an analysis of a mass of test data I published in The Public Interest in 1982. And I'm here to tell you there's no contradiction between it and the good news about our Tens. Because what I summarized in that sentence was the performance of our older students as well as our younger ones, and it was the dismal scores of our older kids in general and our 17- and 18-year-old high-school seniors in particular that made the news so bad.

I summarized the good news too, and pointed to the place where the good news about our kids begins to turn into bad news, the place where American kids, who start out so bright and eager and ready, begin turning into the academic laggards we graduate from high school. Press and politicians ignored that summary then too. Here it is again:

Here, it is important to note that there is virtually unanimous agreement that there was no decline in achievement in the first half of elementary school in the 1960s or in the 1970s. Instead, there were improvements in many areas. . . . The decline in student achievement scores over the last two decades begins in about the fifth grade. . . .

That's what happened last time, and press and politicians need to pay attention, because it looks as if it's happening still. The scores of today's seniors won't be released until next spring, but we do have the scores of our 8th-graders. They show what the Times's James Bennett calls "a mysterious sag." But it isn't mysterious at all. It's a repetition of an old pattern -- our pattern, a pattern that is the opposite of the English one.

English kids start out slowly in the early years, perform erratically in the in-between years, then soar ahead in the high-school years, producing graduates who are at or near the top in international competition when it matters most, at the end. Our kids do just the reverse. They score above average in the first four primary-school grades, sink to the average level in the next four, and then decline farther and faster in high school, ending up far below average.

We know that happened to our kids in the past, and we know why: because American schools stopped enforcing standards for academic achievement and discipline for older students in the late Sixties. Older students, after all, resist. They don't just do what grown-ups tell them, the way little kids do. They do it only if they believe the grown-ups doing the telling are serious. And they know whether we are serious or not by the consequences. In most American schools from the late Sixties on, the reality was, and still is, that nothing happens to our older kids if they don't meet whatever standards we claim we have. They stay in school, get promoted, graduate on time, and go on to college, whether they've learned anything or not.