Many students say they go to school to hang out with their friends.
Most people agree that the school reform movement has not succeeded in finding the answer to poor student achievement. An new book, Beyond the Classroom, contends that it never will if we insist on looking only at what schools do -- or don't do -- and ignore the part that students and their attitudes and values play in the equation.
But the first order of business for author Laurence Steinberg, a professor of developmental psychology at Temple University, and his co-authors, professors B. Bradford Brown of the University of Wisconsin and Sanford M. Dornbusch of Stanford, is to demolish the claims of school reform critics who say we don't really have any problems with student achievement. According to education reform "revisionists" like David Berliner, Bruce Biddle, and Gerald Bracey, declining test scores are just a myth and the poor performance of U.S. students in international comparisons is a statistical freak. They say there is nothing wrong with the achievement of our students -- or if there is, it is mainly poor minority students who are in trouble.
This kind of stuff is being well received by educators all over the country who are tired of hearing bad news, but Steinberg and his collaborators give it the short shrift it deserves. They point out that SAT scores dropped for everyone -- not just poor, minority kids -- and NAEP scores remain flat. Furthermore, scandalously few students achieve top NAEP levels, which are not very demanding -- including middle class students, who are supposed to be doing just fine. As for the international comparisons of student achievement, Steinberg, Brown, and Dornbusch say they reveal once again the relative weakness of our high-achieving students:
Comparisons of even our best students with those from other nations are discouraging. Indeed, in mathematics and science, our top students know less than students in other industrialized countries who are considered merely average by their countries' standards.
But Beyond the Classroom's main argument is with people who say that poor student achievement is chiefly -- or even entirely -- the fault of the schools. Believing that student attitudes are bound to influence student performance, Steinberg and his colleagues administered questionnaires to 20,000 students over a three-year period to get a detailed picture of students' values and their lives, inside and outside of school. The sample mirrored the general population, with 40 percent of the students drawn from ethnic minorities. The researchers also conducted focus groups and individual interviews with 600 students and 500 sets of parents.
Steinberg and his colleagues found that there is a pervasive pressure for students to do the minimum necessary to get by. As they put it, "Not only is there little room in most schools for the academically oriented, there is substantial peer pressure on students to underachieve." Students reported that they were afraid to try to do a good job in school for fear of what their friends would think, and they said their friends laughed at students who worked hard. Academic achievement was so little valued that when asked which crowd they would like to be part of, many more students chose the "druggies" ( one in six) than the "brains" ( one in ten). The brains didn't think much of their position, either; half wished they were in a different crowd.
As a result, many students said they go to school to hang out with their friends and "do not take school, or their studies, seriously." Their out-of-school activities mirror their in-school attitudes. Homework? Students spend, on average, four hours per week on it. (Compare this with four hours per day spent by students in other industrialized democracies.) And half of those questioned said they don't bother with homework assignments at all. Few read for pleasure, but two-thirds have after-school jobs involving more than 15 hours a week. To compensate, many said they take easier classes; others admitted to being so tired that they were unable to do their schoolwork.
As far as students can see, their attitudes toward academic achievement are right in line with those of the adult world. Students believe that their parents are largely indifferent to how well their children do in school. And they can't help but get that message from most colleges and employers. Are the schools blameless? Of course not. But as this book makes clear, it is absurd and dangerous to hold the schools entirely responsible. As long as we do, we will not be able to see the problem clearly -- or find its remedy.
These comments only scratch the surface of Beyond the Classroom. The discussion on ethnicity and achievement, which pulls together many of the book's themes, is particularly valuable. So are the suggestions about what we should do to deal with the problem of student disengagement. I'll return to them in a later column.