The report calls into question a number of fashionable remedies for mediocre student achievement.
Last week, the Third International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) released its eagerly awaited results for eighth-grade students in 41 nations. TIMSS is important for a number of reasons. It tested more students than any comparable study -- over half a million randomly selected youngsters. And because it ironed out the technical problems that led to questions about earlier international comparisons, we can have real confidence in its findings.
What do TIMSS test scores say about the math and science achievement of U.S. eighth graders? We are not at the bottom. In fact, we are in the middle of the pack -- a little below the average in math and a little above in science. This puts us pretty much on a par with many of our major trading partners -- Germany, England, and Canada, for example. That is good news. The bad news is that we are not on top -- with Singapore, Korea, Japan the Czech Republic, and Hungary -- which is where we have to be.
How do we get there? TIMSS provides some important signposts. Researchers not only tested students; they also compared curriculums and textbooks from all 41 countries; they questioned students, teachers, and administrators about attitudes, practices, and policies; and they carried out classroom observations and videotaped and analyzed math lessons in Japan, Germany, and the U.S. The first installment of TIMSS provides a kind of window into what goes on in eighth-grade math and science classrooms throughout the developed world. When the reports on fourth and twelfth grades comes out, we will have a fuller picture, but much is already clear.
TIMSS calls into question a number of fashionable explanations and remedies for mediocre student achievement. For one thing, we are not going to raise student achievement by instituting a longer school day or school year. TIMSS tells us that U.S. students already spend more time in class than German or Japanese students. Nor will it help to give our students more homework or somehow induce them to turn off the T.V. TIMS S shows that American students get more homework than Japanese students and what no more television than they do. Some obvious solutions we've heard about turn out not to be so obvious after all.
However, TIMMS is unequivocal about what the school systems of successful nations share -- and it is not vouchers or charter schools or any of the other jazzy schemes that we are being urged to try. Nearly all of these nations have clear and rigorous national or state curriculum standards, and everything they do in the schools is hitched to these standards. We do not have such standards.
When TIMSS researchers analyzed U.S. textbook and curriculum samples, they found that what our students are taught in math and science is fragmented and unfocused. This should be no surprise given the fact that our national system still consists of 15,000 school districts, each making its own decisions about curriculum. Textbooks in standards-based systems focus on what the standards say that students must know. Here, where textbook publishers want to accommodate as many different school curriculums as possible, we have textbooks crammed with topics, nearly all treated in a superficial way. Since districts rely on these textbooks, it is no wonder that the curriculum is, as TIMSS says, "a mile wide and an inch deep."
Another critical difference between high-performing systems and ours is that their standards involve incentives for working hard in school -- and consequences for failing. Students in these systems understand that success in school - and on rigorous gateway exams -- will be important to their future. In Japan, for example, students who have been educated together through eighth grade take a tough exam that decides what high school they will go to, and this, in turn, influences what college they will get into. In the U.S., there are no such stakes connected with academic achievement. So except for students who hope to enter a selective college, there is no reason to work hard. Are these differences related to the high achievement of Japanese students on TIMSS and the average achievement of ours? There is no question about it.
We have made some progress in bringing standards and stakes for students to this country, but supporters face an uphill battle. In the meantime, "innovative" solutions to our school problems grab media and political attention - vouchers, charter schools, private management of public schools (remember EAI?). They often grab the funding, too. TIMS S demonstrates once again that the answer is not one of these new or sexy or headline-making proposals. High standards of achievement with stakes attached are an old-fashioned, commonsense approach that is not the stuff of slogans. But it works in other successful school systems, and it can work here.