International examinations designed to compare students from all over the world usually show American students at or near the bottom. This is not, as some people say, a result of the exams' being unfair. We can see the same poor performance if we look at results of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), which tests representative samples of American students in a variety of subjects.
Take the 1990 NAEP writing examination. Eleventh graders were given a number of simple writing tasks. They were asked to apply for a summer job, stating their qualifications; argue for or against establishing a bike lane in their locality; and prepare a brief news story about a haunted house, based on notes they were given. None of these assignments calls for great skill in analysis or sophisticated powers of reasoning--just the kind of competence you would need to write a memo or a letter to the editor or to apply for a job. However, the results were very poor.
On the haunted house assignment, nearly half of the students produced a response that was rated "unsatisfactory" or "minimal," and what NAEP calls minimal is barely literate. Here's an example:
The house with no windows. This is a house with deadend hallways, 36 rooms and stairs leading to the cieling [sic]. Doorways go nowhere and all this to confuse ghosts.
The other half wrote reports that were judged to be "adequate" or better, but again, the standard was
very low, as you can see from this example:
Man builds strange house to scare ghosts. He says that he did it to confuse the ghosts. But why may we ask would he want to spend 10 years building a house. For instance there are stairs that go nowhere and hallways that go nowhere. This house had 36 rooms. If you ask me it is kind of strange.
Only 2 percent of the representative sample of eleventh graders produced an "elaborated" piece of writing that did a good job of organizing and presenting the material. In other words, with less than a year to go before high school graduation, only 2 percent were prepared to write a real college essay. (Compare this with students graduating from secondary school in Germany or France. Their exams require four-hour essays on subjects like the development of the American presidency since World War II, and 30 percent of German students and over 50 percent of French students pass.) You'd think American parents would be raising the roof Instead, according to a 1991 Lou Harris poll, 56 percent of the parents whose children went to work right after high school considered their kids "well prepared" in writing, and so did 77 percent of the parents whose children went on to co lege.
Why? The vast majority of these students are passing and many of them are getting good grades. That's hard to understand when you look at the NAEP examples, but perhaps there's a clue in the story of Adele Jones, a high school algebra teacher in Georgetown, Delaware.
According to columnist Colman McCarthy (Washington Post, July 3, 1993), Ms. Jones's school board fired her last month for "incompetence" because she failed "too many" of her students--27 percent in 1991-92 and 42 percent in the previous academic year.
What does this mean? There's no evidence that the board has ever fired a teacher for passing students who should have failed, but in this case they fired a teacher for failing students, even though the students themselves have a lot of respect for her high standards. Over one-third of the kids in her high school walked out in protest when whe was fired, and there were signs reading "I Failed Ms. Jones's Class and It Was My Fault" and "Just Because a Student Is Failing Doesn't Mean the Teacher Is."
The board is clearly much more interested in good PR than in student achievement. When "too many" kids fail, this looks bad for the school system, and parents are likely to complain. Ms. Jones mistakenly thought her job was to teach algebra and grade her students fairly passing those who learned the material and failing those who did not. The school board has set her straight on that.
Stories like Ms. Jones's do not appear in pring very often because most teachers have already gotten the message. With the firing of Ms. Jones, we can expect that the rest will, too. The students have also gotten the message. And as long as school boards and parents act as though it's the teacher's job to give every kid a passing grate--no matter what the kid knows and can do--it should not surprise us if the achievement of our students stays right where it is--in the cellar.