The good news is that the mathematics score of the top echelon of American students has risen steeply since hitting its low point in 1981. Given all the attention devoted to problems in American education, this finding is worth lingering over for a moment. In a period of just twelve years, from 1981 to 1993, the proportion of 17-year-olds scoring over 700 on the SAT-Math test increased by 143 percent. This dramatic improvement during the 1980s is not explainable by any artifact that we can identify, such as having easier Math SAT questions.33 Nor is it due to the superior math performance of Asian-American students and their increase as a proportion of the SAT population. Asian-Americans are still such a small minority (only 8 percent of test takers in 1992) that their accomplishments cannot account for much of the national improvement. The upward bounce in the Math SAT from 1981 through 1992 was a robust 104 percent among whites.34
Now let us turn to the less happy story about the SAT-Verbal. The proportion of students attaining 700 or higher on the SAT fell sharply from 1967 to the mid-1970s. Furthermore, SAT scores as of 1967 had been dropping for four years before that, so we start from a situation in which the verbal skills of America’s most gifted students dropped precipitously from the early 1960s to the early 1970s. Unlike the Math scores, however, the Verbal scores did not rebound significantly. Nor may one take much comfort from the comparatively shallow slope of the decline as it is depicted in the figure. The proportional size of the drop was large, from about eight students per 1,000 17-year-olds in 1967 to three per 1,000 in 1993, a drop of about 60 percent.35 The other major source of data about highly talented students, the Graduate Record Examination, parallels the story for the students scoring 700 or above on the SAT.36
Among the most gifted students, there is good news about math, bad news about verbal
Source: The College Board.
AN EXPLANATION: DUMBING DOWN
How might these disparate and sometimes contradictory trends be tied together?
One important part of the story begins with the 1950s. Why didn’t the scores fall, though the proportion of students taking the SAT went from a few percent to almost a third of the high school population in little more than a decade? The answer is that the growing numbers of SAT takers were not students with progressively lower levels of academic ability but able students who formerly did not go on to college or went to the state university (and didn’t take the SAT) and now were broadening their horizons. This was the post-World War II era that we described in Chapter 1, when educational meritocracy was on the rise. As the path to the better colleges began to open for youngsters outside the traditional socioeconomic elites, the population of test takers grew explosively. During this period, we can safely assume that the pool opened up to new socioeconomic groups, but it occurred with no dilution of the pool’s academic potential, because the reservoir of academic ability was deep. Then, as the 1950s ended, another factor worked to sustain performance: From the Sputnik scare in 1957 through the early 1960s, American education was gripped by a get-tough reform movement in which math and the sciences were emphasized and high schools were raising standards. Education for the college bound probably improved during this period.
Softened Standards
Then came the mid-1960s and a decade of decline. What happened to education during this period has been described by many observers, and we will not recount it here in detail or place blame.37 The simple and no longer controversial truth is that educational standards declined, along with other momentous changes in American society during that decade.
The educational change is epitomized by the title for this section. “Dumbing down” has become a term of art for the process by which the vocabulary in a textbook is deliberately simplified. We use it in a broader sense. One of the chief effects of the educational reforms of the 1960s was to dumb down elementary and secondary education as a whole, making just about everything easier for the average student and easing the demands on the gifted student.
The dumbing down of textbooks permeated the textbook market, as publishers and authors strove to satisfy school boards, which routinely applied “readability” formulas to the books they were considering.38 Thomas Sowell has described a typical example of this process, in which the words spectacle and admired were deleted from a textbook because they were deemed too difficult for high school students. Sowell compares such timidity to the McGuffey’s Readers, the staple text of nine-teenth-century children in one-room schoolhouses, pointing out that the Third Reader used words such as species, dialogue, heath, benighted—intended for 8-year-olds.39
Dumbing down also occurred in the high school’s college track. More electives were permitted, and the requirements for credits in science, mathematics, and literature were relaxed. There were exceptions, such as the high-quality Advanced Placement courses offered in a minority of high schools, taken by about 1 percent of American students.40 But the broader result was that the number of courses in the core disciplines declined. Educational specialists agree that grades inflated—it took less work, and less homework, to earn good grades41—and that less homework was done.42
In this context, it comes as no surprise that SAT scores declined even among the diminishing proportion of high school seniors who took the SAT during the last half of the 1960s. Indeed, it was not just students who took the SAT who suffered during that period. For a time, educational preparation got worse for everyone, as reflected in the Iowa data and the SAT national norm studies, not just for the college-bound tracks. But why was the size of the drop smaller and the rebound quicker and more complete for the population as a whole than for the SAT population? And why, in the SAT population, do we observe such a large difference between Math, where decline was small and the recovery substantial, and Verbal, where the decline was large with no apparent recovery at all? Why were these contradictory trends most pronounced for the most gifted students?
Competing Agendas
Our explanation is consistent with the facts as we understand them, but we should emphasize that our explanation is interpretive as well. It goes like this:
Since the late 1970s, the public dissatisfaction about the state of American elementary and secondary education has produced some changes. From 1982 to 1987, for example, the proportion of high school graduates who completed a solid program of four years of English, three of social sciences, three of the hard sciences, and three of math more than doubled.43 The average course loads in all the academic areas went up, most dramatically in foreign languages but with sizable gains in science and math as well.44 Many people wanted higher standards in their schools, and the schools tried to respond.
But other pressures were (and are) put on the schools, and they created a gulf between what happened to courses in mathematics and to courses in every other academic field. If a school, trying to have higher standards in math, began to require a basic calculus course for its college prep students, there were limits to the amount of fudging that could be done with the course content. Somehow a core of analytic techniques in calculus had to be part of the course. There was no way around it. Furthermore, there is a well-established standard for deciding whether calculus has been learned: Can the student solve calculus problems?
Another feature of math skills at the high school level is that they can be increased independent of the student’s development in other intellectual skills. A student may learn to manipulate quadratic equations even if he is given not a glimmer of how formal logic might relate to expository prose or to the use of evidence in civics class. It is good that math scores have risen, but it remains true that raising math standards can be routinized in ways that cannot be applied to the rest of the curriculum.
How, for example, does one decide that the standards for an English literature course have been “raised”? In the old days, it wouldn’t have been seen as a difficult question. Standards would be raised if the students were required to read a larger number of the Great Books (no one would have had much quarrel about what they were) o
r if students were required to write longer term papers, subject to stricter grading on argumentation and documentation. But since the late 1960s, such straightforward ways of looking at standards in the humanities, social sciences, and even the physical sciences were corrupted, in the sense that the standards of each discipline were subordinated to other considerations. Chief among these other considerations were multiculturalism in the curriculum, the need to minimize racial differences in performance measures, and enthusiasm for fostering self-esteem independent of performance.45 We assume that a politically compromised curriculum is less likely to sharpen the verbal skills of students than one that hews to standards of intellectual rigor and quality. We make these observations without belittling the issues that have been at center stage in American secondary education. But if the question is why the downhill slide in verbal skills has not reversed, here is one possible explanation: The agendas that have had the most influence on curricula are generally antagonistic to traditional criteria of rigor and excellence.
These influences come together when textbooks are selected by large school systems. A school board runs no risk whatsoever of angry historians picketing their offices. They run grave risks of pickets (and of being voted out of office) if a textbook offends one of the many interest groups that scrutinize possible choices. Publishers know the market and take steps to make sure that their products will sell.
There are doubtless other culprits that help explain the difference between the recovery in math scores and the failure to recover in verbal scores. Television, rather than the printed page, became the primary medium for getting news and recreation at home after mid-century, and that process was also reaching full flower in the 1960s. Telephones displaced letter writing as the medium for long-range communication. Such trends are hostile to traditional definitions of excellence in verbal skills. The simple hypothesis of this story is that these pressures existed across the curriculum and in society at large but that math skills were less susceptible to them. (Math skills may instead have been getting a boost from the accessibility of computers, calculators, and other high-tech gadgetry.) When parents demanded higher standards, their schools introduced higher standards in the math curriculum that really were higher, and higher standards in the humanities and social sciences that really were not.
The same dynamics provide a hypothesis for explaining why the rebound was more complete for the nation’s overall student population than for the SAT population. A textbook that is dumbed down is in fact helpful to the mediocre student. A recent study of six textbooks over a twelve-year period demonstrated that they had indeed been simplified, and students performed significantly better on the current, dumbed-down texts.46 Subjects that were traditionally not included in the curriculum for the lower end of the distribution—for example, exposure to serious literature—have now been so simplified as to be accessible to almost all.
The same dumbed-down textbook can quite easily have a depressing effect on the talented student’s development. And while the textbooks were being simplified, subjects that would push the best students to their limits, such as the classical languages, were all but dropped. Offered this diluted curriculum, talented students do not necessarily take the initiative to stretch themselves. Plenty of students with high IQs will happily choose to write about The Hobbit of Pride and Prejudice for their term paper if that option is given to them. Few of even the most brilliant youngsters tackle the Aeneid on their own.
The Neglect of the Gifted
Another factor in the declining capabilities of America’s brightest students is that the decline occurred when, in policy circles, disadvantaged students were “in” and gifted students were “out.” When the first significant aid went to secondary education at the end of the Eisenhower years, it was for the brightest students who might become scientists or engineers. In 1965, with the passage of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 (ESEA), the funding priority turned 180 degrees, and it has remained anchored in the new position ever since. As of 1993, the ESEA authorized forty-six programs with budgets that added up to $8.6 billion. Most of these programs are specifically designated for students in low-income areas and students with special educational needs. Even the programs that might apply to any sort of student (improvements in science and mathematics education, for example) often are worded in ways that give preference to students from low-income areas. Another set of programs are for support services. And, finally, there are programs designated for the gifted and talented. This is the way that the $8.6 billion budget broke out for fiscal 1993:47
Programs for the disadvantaged 92.2%
Programs that might benefit any student 5.6%
Support and administration of ESEA programs 2.1%
Programs for the gifted 0.1%
This breakdown omits other federal programs with large budgets aimed at the education of the disadvantaged—more than $2 billion for Head Start (funded by the Department of Health and Human Services, not the Department of Education), more than $3 billion for job training programs, plus a scattering of others.48
Theoretically, programs targeted at disadvantaged students could also be programs for the cognitively gifted among the socioeconomically disadvantaged. But that’s not the way it has worked. Disadvantaged as used by three decades of administrators and school boards using ESEA funds has consistently meant not just students who are poor or living in an inner-city neighborhood but students who exhibit learning problems. Programs for the intellectually gifted but otherwise disadvantaged attract little support and, occasionally, hostility. A case in point is Banneker High School in Washington, D.C., a special academic high school in the middle of the black northeast section of the city, established by a former superintendent of schools with the school board’s reluctant permission in 1981.
The establishment of Banneker High followed a proud tradition in Washington, where once-elite Dunbar High had turned out many of the nation’s black leaders. But throughout the 1980s, Banneker was underfunded and repeatedly threatened with closure. Banneker was “elitest,” said an influential school board member, a luxury for parents who “had their children in private school and can no longer afford it and bring them back to essentially a private school at the public expense.”49 Banneker’s “elitest” admissions policy? Applicants had to write an essay, be interviewed, be in the top 18 percent of their class, and read and compute at grade level—a broad conception of “elitist” indeed. Throughout it all, teachers competed to teach at Banneker and students competed to attend. Banneker placed large proportions of its graduates in college and had no significant problems with discipline, drugs, crime, or the other ills of contemporary urban schools.50 And yet, as we write, Banneker continues to be barely tolerated by the school system. Banneker’s story has numerous counterparts in other urban centers. Funds for the economically and socially disadvantaged have meant, for practical purposes, funds concentrated on the cognitively disadvantaged as well.
A POLICY AGENDA
What are the implications for policy? The pros and cons of the specific reforms on the table—national achievement tests, national curricula, school choice, vouchers, tuition tax credits, apprenticeship programs, restoration of the neighborhood school, minimum competency tests, ability grouping, and a host of others—involve nuts-and-bolts issues that are better argued out in detail, on their merits, in works that are specifically devoted to them. We also leave for other settings a discussion of the enormous potential of new technologies, from the personal computer to laser disks to the information superhighway, to enrich and broaden educational resources. Here we concentrate on certain strategic implications about educational reform that flow from our account—first, regarding attempts to upgrade American education as a whole, and then regarding the education of the gifted.
Realism About the Limits of General Improvements in Education
We begin with the first and most widely accepted conclusion: The extent and quality of learning for American students in g
eneral is low—lower than in most other industrialized countries but also (it would seem) low by basic standards of what a person of ordinary ability ought to learn. Before jumping into any particular set of solutions, however, policymakers need to be more realistic about what can be done to improve the education of students in a heterogeneous, nontotalitarian country. Specifically, critics of American education must come to terms with the reality that in a universal education system, many students will not reach the level of education that most people view as basic. Consider again the example of functional illiteracy mentioned earlier: that over 20 percent of 17-year-olds are below the intermediate reading level on the NAEP, meaning that they are marginal readers or worse. This is usually considered a failure of American education, and perhaps it is. But most of these nonreaders come from the bottom of the cognitive ability distribution. How well should they be able to read after a proper education, given the economic, technological, and political constraints on any system of mass education?
The United States has not yet completed the first half-century of human history in which universal secondary education became a goal. It was not until 1963 that the dropout rate fell below 30 percent of all 17-year-olds. Already we have seen improving performance in academic tests for the average student as educational opportunities have spread across the population. At about the same time, educators—and educational critics—stopped thinking hard or openly about variation in intellectual abilities. It is time to reopen the issue. What constitutes educational success for persons at various points along the cognitive ability distribution? The aspirations of educational reformers should be accompanied by a realistic and systematic assessment of where the room for improvement lies, taking the cognitive distribution into account.
The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life Page 49