When we talk about the poor performance of our students, there are always plenty of explanations. Public schools are rigid and bureaucratic; the curriculum is impoverished; students have no incentive to work hard; teachers have so many other responsibilities that they hardly have the time or energy to do their real job -- in other words, it's everybody's fault but the students'. People seldom talk about the attitudes and habits of mind kids bring to school. What responsibility do students -- and their parents -- have for school performance? Usually I avoid asking this question; it sounds too much like passing the buck. But recently, a couple of things have brought it forcibly home to me.
A few weeks ago, Harold Stevenson, co-author of The Learning Gap (New York: Summit Books, 1992), a book comparing education in Asia and the U.S. that I've already discussed in this column, talked to the AFT Executive Council. We asked him about the reasons for the differences in achievement between our kids and the Asian students he had studied, and he talked about the structure of the school day and the way teachers conduct lessons. But he also had a lot to say about the attitudes of students and their parents toward school and learning.
Stevenson studied school children in Minneapolis; metropolitan Chicago; Sendai, Japan; Taipei, Taiwan; and Beijing for over 10 years. Asian students performed far better than American students on all tests Stevenson and his colleagues administered. Nevertheless, the American parents who were interviewed expressed much greater satisfaction with the quality of the education their children were getting than their Asian counterparts. Eighty percent of American mothers thought their children's schools were good or excellent in comparison, for instance, with 40 percent of Taiwanese mothers. And our kids were more satisfied with themselves and their performance than the Asian kids with theirs.
What can we make out of this? For one thing, Asian parents and children have higher -- or different -- standards from ours. Some of Stevenson's other findings bear this out. Whereas Asian mothers say that the most important thing for their school-age children is to study hard and do well in school, American mothers say that school achievement is just one among a number of things: Kids should also be popular, good in sports and have other skills. Of course the youngsters reflect this attitude. When kids in Beijing and metropolitan Chicago were asked what was most important to them, nearly 70 percent of the Chinese kids said education. Only I0 percent of our kids mentioned education; they valued money and things.
Stevenson and his colleagues also found that Americans didn't have much faith in the efficacy of working hard in school. When Asian mothers were asked when they could predict their children's performance on college entrance exams, they replied, by 11th or 12th grade. American mothers responded, at the end of elementary school. In other words, Americans believed that ability, not work, was what counted. When Asian students were asked the most important factor in math performance, 70 percent of the Japanese and 60 percent of the Taiwanese said studying hard. Only a little over 20 percent of American students mentioned work; and 55 percent attributed success to having a good teacher.
Some of the same points are made by Nathan Caplan, Marcella Choy and John Whitmore in "Indochinese Refugee Families and Academic Achievement" (Scientific American, February 1992). The children whom Caplan, Choy and Whitmore studied were from poor Vietnamese and Laotian families who came to this country in the 1980s. They had "lost months, even years, of formal schooling while living in relocation camps .... [and] they suffered disruption and trauma as they escaped from Southeast Asia." The students arrived with little or no English and went to schools in poor, inner-city areas. Nevertheless 27 percent had an A average and over 50 percent a B average, and their grades in math were even higher. This was not because of lax standards: Half of them scored in the top 25 percent on standardized math tests.
Are Asian kids just smarter than American kids? Of course not. Caplan, Choy and Whitmore find, like Stevenson, that these kids and their parents believe effort to be more important than ability -- and the kids take the effort. After supper, "the table is cleared, and homework begins." Older children help the younger ones and "seem to learn as much from teaching as from being taught." The arrangement makes learning a part of family life, so youngsters are comfortable with it. This comfort carries over to school and makes the kids more likely to perform well.
The article discusses other factors that contribute to the success of these children. But both it and Stevenson suggest that we are neglecting something important in our efforts to reform American education.
We talk a lot about accountability for teachers and administrators and school boards. But what about the students? Are they learning at home that education is worth having -- and worth working hard to get? Are they learning that achievement is mostly a result of the work they put in? Or are they being told that they are not really responsible for their success or failure?
In all other industrialized countries, where students achieve at much higher levels than our kids, students are held accountable for their learning. We can fiddle all we like with ways of making the adults in our schools accountable, but we will not raise student achievement levels to where they need to be unless parents and students take the job of learning seriously and kids come to school ready to be accountable, too.