Last year, a reader sent me an extraordinary document: an eighth-grade exam taken in a Salina, Kan., schoolhouse in 1895.
At first, I was convinced the test was an urban legend. It seemed that the high level of difficulty would be troublesome for a well-educated adult today. It was implausible that a 14-year-old kid could answer the majority correctly.
Well, with a little digging, I found out that, indeed, the Genealogical Society and Library in Salina had authenticated the document as authentic.
A sampling:
“Name events connected with the following dates: 1607, 1620, 1800, 1849, and 1865?”
“What is meant by the following: Alphabet, phonetic orthography, etymology, syllabication?”
“Name and describe the following: Monrovia, Odessa, Denver, Manitoba, Hecla, Yukon, St. Helena, Juan Fermandez, Aspinwall and Orinoco.”
The reader’s point in sending this historical document was to impress upon me how educational standards have been plummeting nationally over the past hundred-plus years.
Sure, at first glance the test was impressive. But while memorizing facts may give you a leg up on exams, it is never the definitive measure of cognitive ability or success.
The Salina test was taken in an era when most kids did not go on to high school, much less college education. This was their final exam, period. Today, kids are expected to master a broad range of topics. They have more time. The world around them is more complex and so is the education we provide them.
“It’s safe to say kids are more educated today,” Kevin Welner, associate professor of education at the University of Colorado, tells me. “If you walked into a classroom of that time, it may seem more rigorous, but across the board the amount of education we’re requiring of students today, and the expectations we have of them, are substantially higher.”
In the way that my reader might have been missing the larger picture with a century-old test, with our renewed emphasis on accountability in schools, are we attaching too much significance to test scores today?
Last week, in a study released by National Assessment of Educational Progress, we learned that during the past decade, more high school students have been taking difficult courses and attaining higher grades.
The problem is that, at the same time, an increasing number of students were less proficient. For instance, test results from 21,000 high school seniors attending 900 schools across the
country illustrate that a large majority of seniors struggled at basic high-school-level math.
So something doesn’t add up.
The superintendent of schools in
Sacramento, Calif., David Gordon, claimed during a news conference unveiling the study that there is “a disconnect between what we want and expect our 12th-graders to know and do, and what our schools are actually delivering through instruction in the classroom …”
But professor Welner contends that a study like this doesn’t tell parents very much. These days, he says, schools are trying to accomplish different tasks than they were a decade ago. He calls it an “apple and orange” situation.
“Parents would like an easy and compact answer about accountability – a number or a grade regarding the best school and teachers – and there is some worth in tests like CSAPs,” he says. “The entire answer, however, is far more complicated. This is only small portion of the answer.”
Forget college. When I witness the rigorous academic requirements necessary to enroll in a top kindergarten these days, it becomes hard for me to believe that today’s children are less educated than those of 1895 or even 1995.
As parents, we expect accountability from schools. And tests offer a valuable measurement of progress. But it’s clear that exams never tell us the entire story.
That’s something parents should bear in mind.(Visit the National Assessment of Educational Progress study at .)
David Harsanyi’s column appears Monday and Thursday. He can be reached at 303-954-1255 or dharsanyi@denverpost.com.
