One of my favorite kids in this world is about to graduate from
high school. (Hallelujah!) You can bet there will be loud cheering
from our part of the stands. During some of his more dire
screw-ups, those-of-little-faith doubted he would ever make it.
One of my favorite kids in this world is about to graduate from high school. (Hallelujah!) You can bet there will be loud cheering from our part of the stands. During some of his more dire screw-ups, those-of-little-faith doubted he would ever make it. This kid is cool, smooth, charming, funny and killer good-looking, and he has attitude out the wazoo. He’s also been accepted at three perfectly decent institutions of higher learning. (Thank you, Jesus!) There’s just one problem: He’s not educated.
In fact, he sounds almost exactly like “Jeff,” the archetypal kid cited in Marc Tucker and Judy Codding’s book “Educational Standards for Our Schools: How to Set Them, Measure Them and Reach Them.”
“Our first impression of Jeff was that he should be scheduled for a Hollywood screen test … and he was smart, too…. It comes as no surprise to learn that he has lots of friends, is at ease with people and is pretty self-confident. In all these ways, he really does have a lot going for him.”
But then, Tucker and Codding take a closer look at Jeff and all the kids like him: “Just sliding by, the ones who complete high school, often without a solid program, go to community college or directly to work and then drift into community college a few years later … hundreds of kids like Jeff for whom school was important mainly as a social setting, a place to spend time with friends while waiting for life to begin … a student body, a very large fraction of which was bored, drifting and largely uneducated.”
Moaning about the public schools in this country is now a major national pastime. Indeed, a loud claque has concluded that they’re all hopeless and the best thing we can do is dismantle the whole system by providing vouchers for private schools. In fact, our metaphorical glass here is half-full. We have good public schools; indeed, we have some excellent ones. But we also have some awful ones and a whole lot of mediocre ones.
Those who dwell on the half-empty part of the glass are missing the most important change in public education in over a century – the American standards movement. In an amazingly short time – if you use George Bush’s national education summit in 1989 as the starting point – the movement to set educational standards has marched across the nation faster than small-town gossip. “Gov. Roy Romer of Colorado, who served as first chair of the Educational Goals Panel, undertook a one-person crusade to persuade the American people that this country needed explicit education standards and new forms of assessment to go with them,” report Tucker and Codding.
The late Al Shankar of the American Federation of Teachers became a powerful voice for high standards. The Pew Charitable Trusts, the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics and English, and much of the business community got involved. In 1994, President Clinton called for national but not federal standards, and announced his initiative to develop two national examinations, one in reading at the fourth-grade level and one in mathematics at the eighth-grade level.
But as Tucker and Codding also report, we are moving in a herky-jerky fashion. Standards we have – high, internationally competitive standards we do not have. Even so, the changes that have been accomplished at some schools in just a few years using such standards are remarkable. “The single most important obstacle to high student achievement in the United States is our low expectations for our students…. Another factor affecting student performance is no less important: weak motivation to take tough courses and work hard in school.” It is these twin factors that most concern Tucker and Codding.
They know whereof they speak: Codding was formerly the principal of Pasadena High in California, a large, urban, comprehensive high school serving predominantly low-income African American and Latino students. Her account of how that school was restructured – and what it took to do it – is one of the more impressive education stories I’ve read in years. The school changed by focusing intensively on math skills (two classes a day taught by two different teachers). “Nothing about it was easy,” she notes in wry understatement. They had to fire all the vocational ed teachers, scrap electives and make many other painful moves.
After two years of the program, in the spring of ’93, Pasadena High kids’ math scores on the Stanford Achievement Test had jumped from the 26th percentile when the kids were tested in middle school to the 54th percentile and, in the following year, to the 57th percentile. Overall math achievement soared, and failures plummeted – from 47 percent receiving a D or F to 22 percent. The high school went from being the worst-performing school in the district on math achievement to the highest-performing.
There are no simple solutions in education, but Tucker and Codding know that schools and kids can be turned around. I highly recommend their book to everyone interested in our schools and how to improve them.
