Some critics blame students who do not work hard enough, rather than schools that fail to teach, for the shortcomings of American education. One hears repeatedly about students as couch potatoes. The average American student, it is said, takes the easy way out compared not only to the fabled Japanese but to children in countries such as Norway, the Netherlands, Ireland, and Italy.51 The obvious policy implication is to do something to make students work harder. Lengthen the school year. Lengthen the school day. Require homework every night. Toughen the grading.52 The proposals fill the air. We think many of them are good ideas. But: the closer one looks at the reasons why students do not work harder, the less it seems that they are to blame.
First, most American parents do not want drastic increases in the academic work load. Some of the evidence for this lies in quantitative survey data. In Harold Stevenson’s landmark cross-national study of Chinese, Japanese, and American education, 91 percent of American parents said their school is doing an “excellent or good job,” compared to only half that proportion of Taiwanese or Japanese parents.53 It has become a truism in survey research: Americans tell interviewers that American education in general is going to the dogs, then in the next breath give high marks to their children’s own school.54 In surveys, many American parents are either apathetic about school or hostile toward more homework and tougher grading.55 In this climate, more demanding standards cannot easily be imposed from above.
But if you live near a public school, you need not search the technical journals to verify the point. Visit the school and talk to any teacher about the last half-dozen parents who have complained to him. For every parent who visits the principal to tell him that Johnny isn’t getting enough homework are several who visit to complain Johnny is being overworked. Parents who are upset about inflated grades seldom make a teacher’s life miserable. Parents who are upset about their child’s low grade do.
Parents do want orderly classrooms, no weapons, no violence, no drugs, and other safeguards for their children that many schools, especially in large cities, no longer provide. These urgent needs are fueling much of the shift into private schools and political backing for the “school choice” movement. But the average parent seems unprepared to support genuinely stiffer academic standards.
A second point is that the average American student has little incentive to work harder than he already does in high school. Economist John Bishop has taken the lead in making this case, emphasizing two points.56 Bishop first observes that a demanding high school curriculum is not necessary for admission to most colleges. For most college-bound students, finding the money is harder than amassing the necessary high school record. And it’s their parents who typically need to find the money. Why bother to take tough courses? This is true even of talented students applying to selective schools; only a handful of schools at the summit routinely turn away students with SATs in the 1200s and up (see Chapter 1). A student who tests reasonably well (he knows this by the time he gets to high school) and doesn’t have his sights set on the likes of Yale does not have to be too careful about which courses to take as long as his grades are decent. Only youngsters who aspire to colleges that usually take students with higher scores than their own have a strong incentive to study hard—and however common this situation may seem at the school attended by the children of most of our readers, it describes a minuscule proportion of the national high school population.
Bishop also shows that achievement in high school does not pay off in higher wages or better jobs. Many employers assume that the high school diploma no longer means much more than that the student warmed a seat for twelve years. Others are willing to look at high school transcripts as part of the hiring process, but though schools are legally obligated to respond to requests for transcripts, hardly any transcripts ever reach the employer, and those that do usually arrive so late that they are useless.57 Using the NLSY, Bishop found that better test scores in science, language arts, and math were associated with lower wages and employment among young men in the first ten years after high school.58 Students, like everybody else, respond to what’s in it for them. There’s close to nothing in it for them in working hard in high school. Ergo, they do not work hard in high school.
How might policy changes reconnect high school performance with payoffs after graduation? For students not continuing to college, Bishop recommends a variety of measures to certify competencies, to make transcripts understandable and available to employers, and to build up data banks, national or regional (private, not federal), to enable youths to send their “competency profile” to potential employers.59
Such programs may work if employers of high school graduates had a shortage of competent workers applying for jobs. Some pilot projects are underway that should tell how much such data banks are needed and used.60 But in thinking about linking up performance in high school with the job market, here is a dose of realism: When it comes to predicting job productivity in most common jobs, an employer who routinely trains new employees in specific job skills anyway hasn’t much reason to care about whether the applicant got an A or a C in high school English or, for that matter, how well the applicant did in high school vocational courses, except perhaps as a rough measure of how bright and conscientious the applicant is. On the average, and assuming no legal restrictions on testing, an employer can get a better idea of how well a job applicant will perform in job training by giving him an inexpensive twelve-minute intelligence test than by anything that the high school can tell the employer about the applicant’s academic record.61 This puts sharp limits on how interested employers will be high school performance.
As far as colleges are concerned, what incentive do they have to raise admissions requirements if it means fewer students? During and just after the baby boom years, private colleges added many students to their rosters and now face an oversupply of places for a shrinking market. Few prefer to go out of business rather than take students with modest credentials. Public universities make their admissions policies in response to political pressures that generally push them toward more inclusiveness, not less. When neither buyer nor seller profits from higher standards, why would standards rise?
Realism About How Federal Reforms Will Work in the American Context
In ways that few people want to acknowledge, America does not want its schools to take a large leap in what they demand of youngsters. Our conclusion is that if parents, students, and employers do not broadly support a significantly more demanding educational system, it’s not going to happen. Nonetheless, a variety of sensible reforms are on the table—more homework, a longer school year, and the like. Why don’t we at least recommend that the federal government mandate these good things? On this question, the experience of the 1960s and 1970s serves as an object lesson for today.
Educational reformers in the 1960s and 1970s were confident that their ideas were good things to do. They were impatient with the conservatism of local school districts. They turned to a responsive White House, Congress, and Supreme Court, achieved many of their objectives, and thereby contributed to a historic shift in American education. On balance, the turn was for the worse as far as academic excellence was concerned, but that doesn’t mean the ideas were bad in themselves. Ideas such as more racial integration in the schools, more attention to the needs of disadvantaged students, and more equitable treatment of students in disciplinary matters do not seem less obviously “good” to us than ideals such as more homework and a longer school year. It was not the core ideas that were at fault (in most instances) but some basic problems that go with reforming American education at a national level.
We characterize the situation as follows: Slow improvement seems to have been a natural part of twentieth-century American education until the 1960s. This slow improvement had great inertia, in the sense that a slow-moving freight train has inertia. It is very difficult for an outside force to accelerate the freight train but comparatively easy for an outside force to derail it. In the Uni
ted States, the federal government tends to be an outside force, more often derailing than pushing along, for reasons that are peculiarly American.
In countries such as France and Germany, with more homogeneous populations and more authoritarian and unapologetically elitest educational traditions, the national government can get away with centralized school systems that educate their brightest youth well. In the United States, it cannot. Federal standards, federal rules, and federal curricula, were they to be established, would inevitably be watered down and educational goals would be compromised with social and political ones. The federal government responds to pushes from all sides and gets equally nervous about affirming the genius of either Huck Finn or Charles Darwin. Powerful teachers’ organizations will not tolerate certification tests that flunk large numbers of teachers. Organizations that represent minority groups will not tolerate national educational standards that cause large numbers of minority children to flunk. These are political facts of life that will not change soon, no matter who is in the White House.
With America’s immense diversity and its tradition of local control, Washington is the wrong place to look for either energy or wisdom on educational reform. In our view, any natural impulse toward educational improvement will be best nourished by letting the internal forces—the motivations of parents for their children and teachers for a satisfying career—have their head. We will state our recommendation in broad terms:
The federal government should actively support programs that enable all parents, not just affluent ones, to choose the school that their children attend. Current movements to provide increased parental choice in schools are a hopeful sign, whether it be choice within the public school system, vouchers, or tuition tax credits. Without being any more specific than that, we urge that increased parental choice extend to private as well as public schools, and to religious private schools as well as secular ones.
Will increased parental choice help, given the modest academic goals that many parents have for their children? There are reasons for thinking it will First, the learning that goes on in a school depends on the school environment as well as on its curriculum. Here, the great majority of parents and teachers stand on common ground. Orderly classrooms and well-enforced codes of behavior do not need to be mandated but simply permitted; parents, teachers, and administrators alike will see to it, if the control they once had over their schools is returned to them. To have America’s children, poor as well as rich, once again attending safe, orderly schools would be no small achievement and would likely foster more learning than the often chaotic public schools do now.
Gifted youngsters would also benefit by restoring local control. While most parents do not want an authentically tougher education for their children, some do, and they tend to be concentrated among the parents of the brightest. Policy should make it as easy as possible for them to match up with classes that satisfy their ambitions.
To the extent that the government succeeds in this first goal, the others that we have in mind become less important. But as long as the current situation prevails, in which federal money and the conditions surrounding it play a major role in shaping public education, we recommend two other measures:
A federal prize scholarship program. This is one instance in which a specific, federal program could do some good in restoring educational excellence. As the law stands, federal scholarships and loan assistance are awarded almost exclusively on the basis of financial need, leaving the administration of standards to the colleges that admit and teach the students. That program may continue as is, but Congress should add a second program, not contingent on financial need but awarded competitively—for example, a flat one-time award of $20,000 to the 25,000 students in the country earning the top scores on standardized tests of academic achievement, over and above whatever scholarship assistance the student was receiving from other sources. How much would such “American Scholars” (the Congress might call them) cost? Five hundred million dollars a year—an amount equivalent to a rounding error in the national budget but one that would dramatically transform the signal that the federal government sends about the value it places on academic excellence.62
Reallocate some portion of existing elementary and secondary school federal aid away from programs for the disadvantaged to programs for the gifted. The objective is to make sure that public school systems have roughly the same capability to provide for students at the high end of the distribution as they have for helping students at the low end. A collateral part of this reform should be to rescind any federal regulations or grant requirements that might discourage local school systems from experimenting with or supporting programs for the gifted. At present, there is an overwhelming tilt toward enriching the education of children from the low end of the cognitive ability distribution. We propose more of a balance across the cognitive ability distribution.
Restoring the Concept of the Educated Man
Why should the federal government shift money from programs for the disadvantaged to programs for the gifted, when we know that a large portion of the gifted come from privileged families? Why not just support programs for the gifted who happen to come from poor families as well? In Part I, we went to some lengths to describe the dangers of a cognitive elite. And yet here we call for steps that could easily increase the segregation of the gifted from everyone else. Won’t programs for the gifted further isolate them?
The answers to such questions have nothing to do with social justice but much to do with the welfare of the nation, including the ultimate welfare of the disadvantaged.
The first point echoes a continuing theme of this book: To be intellectually gifted is indeed a gift. Nobody “deserves” it. The monetary and social rewards that accrue to being intellectually gifted are growing all the time, for reasons that are easily condemned as being unfair. Never mind, we are saying. These gifted youngsters are important not because they are more virtuous or deserving but because our society’s future depends on them. The one clear and enduring failure of contemporary American education is at the high end of the cognitive ability distribution.
Ideally we would like to see the most gifted children receive a demanding education and attend school side by side with a wide range of children, learning firsthand how the rest of the world lives. But that option is no more available now than it was during the attempts to force the racial integration of urban schools in the 1960s and 1970s. The nation’s elementary and secondary schools are highly segregated by socioeconomic status, they will tend to become more so in the future, and the forces pushing these trends are so powerful, stemming from the deeply rooted causes that we described in Part I, that they can be reversed only by a level of state coercion that would be a cure far deadlier than the disease.
Most gifted students are going to grow up segregated from the rest of society no matter what. They will then go to the elite colleges no matter what, move into successful careers no matter what, and eventually lead the institutions of this country no matter what. Therefore, the nation had better do its damnedest to make them as wise as it can. If they cannot grow up knowing how the rest of the world lives, they can at least grow up with a proper humility about their capacity to reinvent the world de novo and thoughtfully aware of their intellectual, cultural, and ethical heritage. They should be taught their responsibilities as citizens of a broader society.
The educational deficit that worries us is symbolized by the drop in verbal skills on the SAT. What we call verbal skills encompass, among other things, the ability to think about difficult problems: to analyze, pick apart, disaggregate, synthesize, and ultimately to understand. It has seldom been more apparent how important it is that the people who count in business, law, politics, and our universities know how to think about their problems in complex, rigorous modes and how important it is that they bring to their thinking depth of judgment and, in the language of Aristotle, the habit of virtue. This kind of wisdom—for wisdom is what we need more of—does not come
naturally with a high IQ. It has to be added through education, and education of a particular kind.
We are not talking about generalized higher standards. Rather, we are thinking of the classical idea of the “educated man”—which we will amend to “educated person”—in which to be educated meant first of all to master a core body of material and skills. The idea is not wedded to the specific curriculum that made an educated man in the nineteenth-century British public school or in the Greek lyceum. But it is wedded to the idea of certain high intellectual goals. For example, to be an educated person meant being able to write competently and argue logically. Therefore, children were taught the inner logic of grammar and syntax because that kind of attention to detail was believed to carry over to greater precision of thinking. They were expected to learn Aristotle’s catalog of fallacies, because educators understood that the ability to assess an argument in everyday life was honed by mastering the formal elements of logic. Ethics and theology were part of the curriculum, to teach and to refine virtue. We will not try to prescribe how a contemporary curriculum might be revised to achieve the same ends, beyond a few essentials: To be an educated person must mean to have mastered a core of history, literature, arts, ethics, and the sciences and, in the process of learning those disciplines, to have been trained to weigh, analyze, and evaluate according to exacting standards. This process must begin in elementary school and must continue through the university.
The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life Page 50