How about some good news about schools for a change? Start with a wide-angle lens: Believe it or not, student achievement nationwide has been mostly risingif slowly — in recent years, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, whose latest report came out last week.
Yes, even during the second term of the president whose No Child Left Behind policy was roundly denounced as a fiasco, academic achievement was trending upward.
The math scores of 9- and 13-year- olds, as well as reading scores of 9- year-olds, actually reached all-time highs going back to the early 1970s. And that’s doubly noteworthy given the flood of immigrants who entered the schools during those decades.
In 1971, the U.S. student population was 87 percent white — a figure that has since dropped to about 60 percent. Given the continuing gap between white and minority achievement, it took all groups raising their scores from 40 years ago for a composite average to go up, too.
(By the way, you’ve got to hand it to The New York Times, which found a way to spin its story on the national assessment into an indictment of Bush administration policy. ” ‘No Child’ Law Is Not Closing A Racial Gap,” the Times declared — which is true, but no more so than a headline saying “All Ethnic Groups Making Progress.”)
To be sure, there’s discouraging news, too. Our nation’s high schools can’t seem to get it right. The performance of 17-year-olds in both reading and math has stagnated, despite widespread concern over global competition. Colorado’s assessments have detected a similar pattern: The longer kids are in school, the worse they tend to do (comparatively speaking, of course) in math.
And these are the students who don’t drop out!
What can be done? I rather like what new Denver superintendent Tom Boasberg told supporters of the district’s foundation the other night. “We must move away from the monopoly model of education of the last century . . . ,” Boasberg declared. “We must move away from a centralized, top-down, one-size-fits-all model to a more flexible, decentralized approach that empowers our educators, rewards them for driving student growth, and holds all of us accountable for performance.”
Boasberg’s formula is not aimed at high schools alone, of course, but Denver’s elementary and middle schools are far from being academic powerhouses in many cases, too — a fact the superintendent readily admits. The status quo is “profoundly unacceptable,” he told the gathering.
Still, why does achievement growth flatten among older students, I later asked? Maybe larger middle schools and high schools lose a sense of shared accountability for every student, Boasberg suggested. That’s not inevitable, he added, if schools are organized properly and have the tools to recruit the right staff, reward them for first-rate work and remove those who are not up to the job.
“I’ll take a great teacher with a mediocre curriculum any day over a mediocre teacher with a great curriculum,” he told me.
In an international comparison released in December, “nearly half of eighth-graders scored at the advanced level in math in Taiwan, Korea and Singapore, compared with 6 percent of American students,” The New York Times reported. I’m not trying to scare you. These are small countries, and they ate the lunches of European students, too. But the comparison illustrates why high schools must not remain the Achilles heel of the U.S. system. If our eighth-graders are getting trounced this badly by their Asian counterparts, imagine how our 17-year-olds would fare.
The focus on achievement has begun to work with younger students; now it’s the older students’ turn.
E-mail Vincent Carroll at vcarroll@denverpost.com.
