At the recent White House celebration for Goals 2000, there were lots of placards saying "World-Class Standards." Perhaps this will be our newest education slogan, and we'll soon see schools across the country creating their own "world-class standards" -- which will be a few notches above what they have now. But there is a world out there. If we are serious about emulating the standards to which other advanced industrialized countries hold their students, we can find out about them. They are not state secrets.
With this in mind, AFT and the National Center for Improving Science Education have produced the first in a planned series of reports. "What College-Bound Students Abroad Are Expected To Know about Biology" offers actual examinations taken by students seeking college entrance in England and Wales, Germany, France and Japan, as well as a U.S. Advanced Placement (AP) biology exam. The report also includes a brief description of each country's school system to provide a context for its examination.
Of course, exams are not the same thing as standards. To come at the standards in these other countries, you also need to examine their curriculums and textbooks. But exams reveal a lot about what students are taught and the level of comprehension expected of them. And when you look at how many kids take the exams -- and how many pass them -- you can reach some pretty sound conclusions about the standards for high school biology students in these countries.
What do we see? The exams are all demanding, but many more youngsters take and pass them in other countries than in the U.S. From 30 to nearly 60 percent of students in England and Wales, France, Germany and Japan take advanced biology exams like the ones reproduced in this report, and 25 to 36 percent pass them. In the U.S., only 7 percent of students take the AP biology exam, and 4 percent pass.
Furthermore, as the report tells us, college-bound kids in these other countries must pass at least three exams of comparable difficulty in three different areas, so their achievement is broad as well as deep. Probably more of our kids could do well on AP exams, but even if twice as many U.S. students passed the AP biology exam or something comparative, that would still only be 8 percent as opposed to 25 percent in England and 36 percent in Japan.
When confronted with the contrast in achievement between U.S. students and kids in other advanced industrialized nations, people usually say that other systems are elitist, and we educate everybody. But which is more elitist? A system that is able to get 36 percent of all its students to pass a demanding exam or one like ours where only 4 percent pass? Every country has an elite group of students, but ours is tiny, and these other countries are approaching the point where half their youngsters will belong to the elite. We think that any system with high standards educates the few at the expense of the many; these figures show us something quite different.
The accusation of elitism in these other systems used to be well founded. Until relatively recently, few students graduated from high school and fewer went on to college, but the numbers have risen dramatically. In England, for example, the percentage of students going to college has doubled in the last decade or so -- without a corresponding drop in standards. The increase in the students meeting high standards should encourage us, especially given the fact that these societies, except for Japan, are far more diverse than they once were. How did they manage? They did it the hard way -- by maintaining their high standards and telling kids, "If you want to go to college, you must learn this material and pass these exams. We will help you."
The story is similar for kids from Japan or France or Germany who are not college bound. Holding some youngsters to high academic standards does not mean ignoring the rest. There are high, though different, standards for kids who want to get a job or enter a technical school and exams for these youngsters, too. AFT plans a companion report that will give specimen examinations and talk about what is expected of noncollege-bound students in other advanced industrialized countries.
Goals 2000 offers us a chance to rethink our educational standards using the best ideas from successful systems abroad. But the most important thing we can learn from these systems is that standards alone are not enough. Students have to be willing to do the hard work necessary to meet the standards. Unless something kids want, like going to college or getting a job, is tied to meeting them -- unless there are stakes -- the most carefully devised standards will be meaningless.