How well are our students doing? People often answer this by saying that 50 percent go on to college -- which is more than in any other country. This sounds terrific. After all, college-bound students, here and abroad, are considered a nation's best, and if we're producing the world's highest percentage of top students, our education system must be tip top. But numbers don't tell us whether the kids really know anything or whether they are going to college in order to get their high school ( or junior high school) education. They don't address the question of standards.
A couple of weeks ago, I suggested that one way of doing this was to look at the exams college-bound students in some other industrialized nations take. What do students in Germany or France have to know and be able to do in order to get into college? What are the standards for their top students? And how do they stack up with what we ask of our college-bound kids in the SAT and ACT exams?
Compared with other countries, we don't ask for a lot - and we get even less. Students in other countries have to know subject matter, weigh evidence and write essays. Our kids have to pick out correct answers from lists. But while the percentage of kids who meet the demanding standards in these other countries is increasing, the percentage of our kids who meet a much laxer standard by getting top scores on the SATs has declined.
As Daniel J. Singal points out in "The Other Crisis in Education" (The Atlantic Monthly, November 1991), the average SAT verbal score at what are called selective colleges has dropped 50 to 60 points in the last 25 years. And it's not, as Singal says, "that these particular schools have slipped in their relative standings." The point is that "there has been a 40 percent decline in the proportion of students scoring over 600, [so] there are far fewer high scoring students to go around."
What difference do these 60 lost points make? Singal, who teaches English at Hobart and William Smith, and teachers from other colleges with whom he spoke say one of the differences is that students are much poorer readers than they used to be: They catch less of what they read and remember less. Here's how Singal puts it: "So much escapes them; even those of above-average ability absorb no more than a dusting of detail from a printed text. And without such detailed information it's impossible for them to gain a real understanding of what the author is saying."
Students can't read as much as they used to, either. A teacher from the University of Michigan who remembers assigning one book a week during the 1960s now allows two or three weeks per book. And the books had better not be too hard: Most freshman and sophomores, he says, can't even handle a journalist like Walter Lippmann.
If you can't read very well -- or very much -- you probably can't write very well. Students at Harvard, who are the cream of the crop, have "very, very limited" vocabularies, according to the director of the expository writing program there, and their sentences don't often rise above the subject-predicate, subject-predicate model. Teachers in less prestigious schools might be delighted with this kind of simple-minded correctness; instead they are likely to get "mangled sentences, essays composed without the slightest sense of paragraphing, and writing that can't sustain a thought for more than half a page."
It's not just the language of these students that is feeble; their thinking skills are, too. They have a hard time, according to a teacher at Yale, thinking through an issue and using evidence to reach a conclusion. A 25-year veteran from Smith describes the problem this way: "Students come to us having sat around for twelve years expressing attitudes toward things rather than analyzing .... They are always ready to tell you how they feel about an issue, but they have never learned how to construct a rational argument to defend their opinions."
And the students don't know anything. Singal cites a teacher of American social history at Berkeley whose upper-level students can't always tell the difference between the American Revolution and the Civil War, which are, after all, just "two big events that happened way back in the past."
Does this really matter? People often claim that knowing facts is unimportant because you can always look them up in a reference book. But as Singal points out, there is an intimate connection, between students' "deficit in factual knowledge and the decline in verbal skills": He says, "No matter how fascinating or valuable a new detail might be, a person finds it almost impossible to hold in memory and have available for retrieval unless it can be placed in some kind of larger context." So it's not surprising that kids who come to college not knowing anything about American history can't tell the Federalist Papers from the Dred Scott Decision -- and can't think about them, either.
It's meaningless to talk about how many kids we send to college unless we also talk about the standards we have for them. And when we compare our college-entry exams with those in other countries or look at what our very best kids in our most selective colleges are able to do, it should be easy to resist the temptation to pay ourselves on the back.