LEADING TO A GLOBAL ARENA
In the last posting, this blog outlined some cultural conditions that bode ill for the general health of the US polity and of the nation. Part of that landscape includes less than optimal conditions in the nation’s schools and those institutional structures that support and give authority to those schools. That posting claims that in terms of the civic responsibilities of schools, they are not measuring up.
The noted criticism of American schools has taken many forms, but generally a good deal of literature that generally comments on social maladies has been critical of the lack of educational success. All the way back to the 1990s, Christopher Hurn puts the source of this criticism into some perspective.
The best known evidence for the claim that high school achievement has declined is the trend of Scholastic Aptitude Test scores. In the early 1960s those tests were taken by only a very small proportion of high school students, primarily those who were planning to attend highly selective colleges and universities. As the proportion of students taking these tests has increased, one would expect some decline as the average ability of students taking the test moves closer to the average ability of all high school students.[1]
Hurn goes on to point out that in the twenty or so years before his report, the number of students taking this test has remained basically the same. That indicates that declines in student performance are difficult to explain.
He notes that those scores moved unmistakably downward until 1980 and were steady after that year and that these scores are consistent with other testing. More recently, 2015 saw the lowest scores in some time.[2] The current state of SAT scores is somewhat mired in issues – such as the use of “adversity scores,” which attempts to take into account socio/economic conditions deemed as negatively affecting student performance. In addition, the effects surrounding the pandemic have also made interpreting more current scores more difficult.
Overall, though, no one is touting more recent performance in students around the country. In 2017, a Pew Report judged US schools as woefully below what many believe they should be. Here are their overall findings,
How do U.S. students compare with their peers around the world? Recently released data from international math and science assessments indicate that U.S. students continue to rank around the middle of the pack and behind students in many other advanced industrial nations.
One of the biggest cross-national tests is the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), which every three years measures reading ability, math and science literacy and other key skills among 15-year-olds in dozens of developed and developing countries. The recent PISA results, from 2015, placed the U.S. an unimpressive 38th out of 71 countries in math and 24th in science. Among the 35 members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, which sponsors the PISA initiative, the U.S. ranked 30th in math and 19th in science.
Younger American students fare somewhat better on a similar cross-national assessment, the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study. That study, known as TIMSS, has tested students in grades four and eight every four years since 1995. In the most recent tests, from 2015, 10 countries (out of 48 total) had statistically higher average fourth-grade math scores than the U.S., while 7 countries had higher average science scores. In the eighth-grade tests, 7 out of 37 countries had statistically higher average math scores than the U.S., and 7 had higher science scores.[3]
In short, things, as judged by this blogger, have not improved in the years since the turn of the current century.
The perception is that schools are not accomplishing their basic function. Complaints from government, business, and other sectors of society abound. That environment becomes fertile ground for any uprising in sentiments that might even take bizarre turns as one sees with the gubernatorial campaign in Virginia where critical race theory took center stage. This has led to a variety of suggestions as to what schools should do.
Reformers have suggested changes that are usually geared toward curriculum; some suggestions have been adopted, but little has changed in terms of the problems cited. Among the reports, though, there has been a contradiction of findings as studies are conducted to measure whether such “reforms” as school choice improve educational result, as the sample of the above studies indicates. And as this recent political season has vividly demonstrated, the politicization of school issues does little to achieve improvements or show the way to a better day.
It is not the purpose of this blog to settle these debates. Here, it is sufficient to point out the perceived problem and to speculate that the problem might not lie in whether or not American schools are doing better or worse than schools prior to 1960, but that perhaps schools are not doing a good enough job given the demands of the fast moving – some say, constantly transforming – economy. To date, those changes that have taken place in the economy have resulted in significant numbers of fellow Americans being displaced in their jobs.[4]
That is, current indicators point to a continuous situation of competitive realities that threaten the future economic well-being of this nation. This is unfortunate because the nation has already experienced lowering real wages among the working classes of the nation’s labor pool. To date, Americans in too high numbers in the general population have not fully appreciated how victimized those segments have been by global forces.
This blog will pick up this review in the next posting. The reader, it is hoped, will keep the aim of this review in mind. That is, given the national shifts and their consequences – such as less concern for inherently local issues including education – one sees an inherent devaluation of federalist ideals. The next posting will continue describing this deficiency in education and how it affects other concerns, for example, the economy and the availability of employment for American workers.
[1] Christopher J. Hurn, The Limits and Possibilities of Schooling: An Introduction to the Sociology of Education (New York, NY: Harper and Row, 1993).
[2] Nick Anderson, “SAT Scores at Lowest Level in 10 Years, Fueling Worries about High Schools,” The Washington Post (September 3, 2015).
[3] Drew Desilver, “U.S. Students’ Academic Achievement Still Lags That of Their Peers in Many Other Countries,” Pew Report Center (February 15, 2017), accessed November 4, 2021, https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/02/15/u-s-students-internationally-math-science/ .
[4] This blogger, in his published book, Toward a Federated Nation, dedicates a chapter to the prevailing problem of displaced segments of the labor pool as jobs have been exported to low income labor nations, such as China and Vietnam. See Robert Gutierrez, Toward a Federated Nation (Tallahassee, FL: Gravitas/Civics Books, 2020, available through Amazon).
