Kenyon says rigor needs to return to classroom

Insight on the News, August 17, 1998 by Stephen Goode

Educator and SSAT testing chief Regan Kenyon believes greater emphasis must be placed on challenging students, as well as expanding opportunity and allowing competition in class.

Regan Kenyon heads the Princeton, N.J.-based Secondary School Admission Test Board, which administers the Secondary School Admission Test, or SSAT, annually to about 40,000 students who are planning to attend private boarding or day schools. About 210 schools require the SSAT as part of their admission standards. Another 350 request or accept SSAT scores.

A lifelong educator, Kenyon has worked in both public and private schools. He's a great believer that what parents want and what kids need in schools is rigor, but he believes that rigor and discipline have been lost in America's schools because our educators ardently have been pursuing badly conceived education ideas -- notions that it's wrong to let bright kids be as bright as they're capable of, and notions that it's far more important to give students strong feelings of self-esteem than it is to have them master the material they should be expected to master.

When he was 24, Kenyon tells Insight, he ran a small school on St. Croix in the U.S. Virgin Islands, with "no government interference, no regulations." He later started a high school there. "People were poor. Sometimes in these houses the mommas were barefoot, but the parents painted the school. The kids cleaned the toilets. I saw what people were able to do, no matter where they came from, when they wanted a good education for their kids. It was a formative experience for me, working with those people, sending these kids to various places in the United States; one went to Harvard."

Insight: The decline in rigor in our schools disturbs you?

Regan Kenyon: Yes. What is this that we've done that so many of our kids don't have any homework that will keep them busy until 9 or 10 o'clock at night? I am a firm believer that you should be working until 9 or 10 o'clock at night on homework. I don't care whether that's good or not for your self-esteem.

The famous recent report showed we finished 19th in science, 16th in math [among the industrialized nations of the world] and No. 1 in self-esteem. How did you do? Terrible! How do you feel about what you did? Great!

Isn't there something absurd about what's going on here?

It used to be that if you didn't do your homework you were in trouble. There was no way around it, you were in trouble. What is the concept now that says we can't expel kids; what is this concept that says we can't say, "I'm sorry, but you don't belong in this place!" When's the last time you saw or heard of a truant officer? They're a concept that is long gone.

Insight: You're head of a major testing organization. Standardized tests long have been criticized as being discriminatory against minorities and women. Are they?

RK: First of all, tests are meant to discriminate, but they're meant to discriminate on academic ability, not on gender or race or anything else. They should find some people who are much better and some people who don't do as well.

As far as our test [the SSAT] is concerned, we now have 72 forms of the test, with about 150 questions on each one, and among those questions we found six questions that groups answered differently. And that's all -- six. This meant that girls answered differently than boys, or maybe a particular race answered differently.

Psychometrics [the psychological theory or technique of mental measurement] is now sophisticated enough that we're not talking about a question that is obviously biased when you look at it. This is not Carl Yastrzemski's batting average [which girls theoretically might not be able to answer]. There is no obvious mason why a group or a gender answers it differently, but they do, and all we do is take it and throw it out.

Insight: What happened to rigor in our education system?

RK: Since the Great Society, we've made great strides in raising expectations in this country, not only in terms of minorities but also for women. But there was a big price: At the same time we expanded opportunity, we began to do away with our education system, we began to mainstream everybody.

There are recent studies out that show that very high academically talented kids perform better in grade school when they're grouped with high academically talented kids on complex problems. They perform less well when they're grouped with low academically talented kids on complex problems.

Right now, we're mainstreaming everybody, and we're not taking these smart kids out and pushing them. Shouldn't we combine both of these [expanding opportunity and allowing competition in the classroom] and allow more and more of these kids who have high academic talents to push them, as well as have them grouped with everyone to share and help bring everyone up?

Insight: You favor nationwide standards in education?

RK: In the beginning of the century, the medical profession developed nationwide standards. And the law profession, nationwide standards. We don't have nationwide standards in education. Now, isn't that ridiculous?