It's not very often that we're able to conduct education research on a massive scale and get answers to big questions. But where funding and researchers falter, history sometimes takes a hand.
Some years ago, I unwittingly became part of one of the biggest pieces of education research ever done in this country. In 1968, I led the teachers of New York City in three long strikes. Basically, the schools were shut in September, and they didn't open again until mid-November. There was a lot of bitterness about these strikes, and when they were over, we did what we could to re-establish connections.
But the following June, early on a Sunday morning, my assistant knocked at my door. When I opened it, he thrust the New York Times in my face and said, "Look what that S.O.B the superintendent has done to us now!" He was talking about a big story on student test scores. All the scores were down by two or three or four months over the previous year. And this was across the board-regardless of the students' race or socioeconomic status of their parents. The superintendent of course attributed the decline to the teachers' strike and the kids' being deprived of school for all those months. As my assistant continued to fume about this dig at the union, I told him it could have been much worse. "How?" he asked me. "Suppose there'd been no difference," I said. "Or suppose the scores had gone up."
This was at a time when many studies had come out saying that schools make no difference in how much kids learn: The real determinant, they said, is socioeconomic status. Many policymakers were beginning to use this argument as a reason for reducing education funding. And here, for the first time, we had massive evidence that kids learn more when they go to school than when they stay away. (This was hardly a surprise to the man in the street, but some academics needed proof for it.)
Now, history is going to give us a chance to do another piece of important education research. In recent years, we've seen the emergence of theory that associates kids' failure in school with a lack of self-esteem. According to this view, African-American and Hispanic and native American youngsters, for example, suffer from a lack of self-esteem because text books and the media
concentrate on white males and neglect the contributions of these other groups. As a result, many of these kids' achieve poorly in school.
This theory has led to big efforts by the media to be more inclusive and to some very positive changes in textbooks and teaching materials. More remains to be done, but anyone who compares current textbooks with those of a few years ago will see a fuller and more balanced treatment of the roles of minority groups and women in U.S. history and society.
According to some historians, the theory has even led some people, who see self-esteem as the key issue in student achievement, to invent history in order to bolster students' self-esteem. But will an increase in self-esteem indeed boost achievement?
Well, look at the decline in our Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) scores. For many years we did pretty well, but scores started going down when our national self-esteem reached a low point during the Vietnam War. And this was followed, within a few years, by Watergate and our humiliation in Iran and later in Lebanon. At the same time, we were losing our industrial base and were starting to be known for products that were shoddy in comparison to what our global competitors were producing. The middle class was shrinking and the number of people in poverty was growing. As all these trends continued, the SAT and other standardized test scores kept dropping. Could this be the result of lowered self-esteem? We will now have an opportunity to test this hypothesis.
There's no doubt that, as a result of our victory over Iraq, our national self-esteem is soaring and is as high as it was when we were the first to reach the moon or when we defeated the Axis powers in World War II-perhaps even higher. And if the self-esteem theory is true, we should be looking, a year or two down the road, at substantial improvements in SAT and standardized test scores.
And if it's true, maybe we can look for an even more substantial jump in the test scores of African- American students. In the past, events that cause the kind of joy we feel over the success of the war in the Persian Gulf were dominated by whites. That's not true this time. Our top military man, General Colin Powell, is African-American. And in TV interviews, we've seen a disproportionate number of black soldiers talking intelligently and movingly about their commitment to their country's goals. This is partly because a disproportionate number of black soldiers served, African-Americans can claim a disproportionate amount of the credit and take a disproportionate pride in the achievement.
George Bush, who has done a magnificent job leading the country, has certainly earned the victor's laurels. And if we get the increase in test scores I've been talking about, they may be enough to get him the title of "education president," too. But just in case the theory doesn't work out, we'd better get back to work on raising our students' achievement.