Kevin Drum looks at the latest story about American students lagging the world in science test scores, and notes that this has been going on at least since he was in school. This leads him to wonder whether it’s really as bad as all that:
I still wonder about this. If American kids are getting mediocre educations, and if they’ve been getting these mediocre educations for several decades now, shouldn’t this have long since shown up in the business world, the tech world, and the financial world? And yet, it hasn’t. So what’s the deal? Makes me wonder if maybe American kids don’t actually suck all that bad after all.
Of course, the problem pre-dates even a geezer like Kevin– the source that I have close to hand for this is Bill Bryson’s 1994 book Made in America, which notes that
What is almost always overlooked in these debates is that people have been complaining about declining educational standards for about as long as there have been schools to complain about. “Bad spelling, incorrectness as well as inelegance of expression in writing, ignorance of the simplest rules of punctuation, and almost entire want of familiarity with English literature, are far from rare among young men of eighteen otherwise well prepared for college,” lamented the president of Harvard in 1871. A colleague of his despaired of “the tedious mediocrity” of compositions among students and the want of “fresh thought.” Princeton University was so alarmed at the quality of its undergraduates that in the 1870s it established a remedial writing clinic.
He also mentions a study (but annoyingly does not provide a cite– it’s probably this one from 1987) that questions whether there has really been a decline in literacy over the decades. He also notes the same lack of economic collapse cited by Kevin.
Now, Bryson’s sources are talking about reading, where the story cited by Kevin concerned a science test, but I wouldn’t really expect the findings to be all that much different for science tests. It’d be harder to do the comparison, as there have been significant advancements in science since 1944, and the content taught these days would be rather different than what might’ve been tested back then.
It’s possible, of course, that both conclusions can be right– it might be true that there was no significant decline for the older studies to find, but that educational standards really have cratered in the last twenty years or so. I’m not up on the educational literature, but there’s no shortage of anecdotal evidence in that direction– ask any college professor nearing retirement. But then again, there was probably plenty of anecdotal evidence of an educational collapse in 1871, too…
Would I like for our entering students to be better prepared? Absolutely. I’m consistently baffled and distressed at their struggles with algebra (if I had a dollar for every time I’ve seen 1/(A+B) rewritten as 1/A + 1/B, I’d have enough for dinner at a very nice restaurant), and don’t get me started about the quality of student writing on lab reports. But do I really think that this is an indication that our educational system is in free fall? Not when I think back on the contributions some of my classmates made to a couple of group projects, back in my own college days.
This is not to say that there aren’t serious problems with our educational system, particularly having to do with the vast funding discrepancies between school districts in different parts of the country. And, as noted in previous posts, there are huge racial gaps in educational performance (which are probably inextricably bound up in the economic issues). And, of course, there are persistent attempts to further wreck the system, either by requiring the teaching of patent nonsense, or through “reform” proposals that are misguided at best.
But we’ve been bumbling along with this system for a century or so, and civilization hasn’t come to an end yet. I doubt this latest round of low test scores will be the death knell, either.