Third, the increased reliance on testing to gauge American educational progress has buttressed these paradigm shifts. A number of tests developed by two international education agencies working with the U.S. Department of Education measure how well American schoolchildren are doing compared to their international peers. The International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA) conducts two periodic assessments. The older one, Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS), has measured, at four-year intervals beginning in 1995, the mathematical and science proficiency of fourth- and eighth-grade schoolchildren in sixty or so countries. The other, Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS), has been given at five-year intervals since 2001 to fourth graders in forty-two countries to assess reading comprehension. Starting in 1997, and at three-year intervals, the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) has been assessing the mathematical and science proficiency of fifteen-year-olds in more than seventy countries in its Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) tests. The United States participates fully in all of these international assessments and, to date, American schoolchildren have not done especially well in any of them (I will review the findings later in this chapter), a widely cited fact that accounts for much of the current American educational angst.
Testing has become even more important in gauging academic achievement within the United States, primarily to address—and remedy—disparities among schoolchildren of different ethnic and socioeconomic groups. While common for decades, public school testing took a quantum leap forward with the passage of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 2001 (No Child Left Behind, or NCLB). NCLB requires all states, as a condition of receiving federal school aid, to test all third- to eighth-grade students annually to determine their achievement levels in reading and math. For certain student cohorts (especially black and Hispanic schoolchildren) that test below benchmark proficiency levels, states and school districts must show “adequate yearly progress” in test results or risk losing some portion of their federal aid. Testing is also a key element of local school accountability to parents and other “stakeholders,” as most states now issue district-level and individual school student achievement “report cards.”
One of the unfortunate political compromises made by the George W. Bush administration to secure passage of NCLB was to permit each state to develop and use its own tests. This almost guaranteed a kind of testing “race to the bottom,” because if a state implemented really rigorous tests it faced a greater risk of falling short of its own (and national) achievement benchmarks and triggering federal sanctions. Therefore, for anyone wanting to know how well students are doing in any American state, the only reliable set of academic achievement tests is that administered by the U.S. Department of Education: the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), dubbed “the nation’s report card.”
Fourth, and finally, the most recent and urgent reason for comprehensively revising American educational practice is the growing recognition that, for the United States to remain a global economic power, Americans must excel in the global “knowledge economy.” The knowledge economy, both in the United States and abroad, puts a labor market premium on brains over brawn and, even among brains, on keen analytical abilities (requiring stronger mathematical and scientific proficiency) and communication skills (requiring greater literacy).
All of these concerns have coalesced in a new educational paradigm that obligates America’s schools and colleges to:
1. Instill higher academic expectations backed by more rigorous curricula to meet the demands of the knowledge economy and to restore American global educational preeminence.
2. No longer allow the scholastic achievement of their students to depend on good genes and good fortune, with the corollary that all students—including the most disadvantaged poor and minority children—must be brought to some satisfactory level of academic proficiency.
3. Keep track of their educational progress through frequent and reliable testing, and be prepared to continuously revise their educational policies accordingly, implementing proven “evidence-based” strategies.
Some features of the new paradigm have not gone unchallenged. The abandonment of cognitive and socioeconomic educational determinism and its companion, holding schools and teachers accountable for student performance based on testing, while pretty much “the law of the land,” face resistance from two quarters. Schoolteachers, standing as they do at the front lines of accountability for satisfactory levels of student achievement, not only are understandably anxious about what this means for their job security and pay, but also not so secretly question the basic premise. They say, not without reason, that it is naive and unfair to put the entire burden of student achievement—especially for the poorest or most handicapped children—on their shoulders. As one commentator observes, regarding the New Orleans school system:
The criminal justice and health care systems may be broken, living-wage jobs in short supply, and families forced to live in unstable or unsafe conditions. But the buck supposedly stops in the classroom. Thus teachers can find themselves charged with remedying an impossibly broad set of challenges that go far beyond reading at grade level.9
They have a point. In chapters 3 and 4 I address ways in which we can significantly boost student achievement and, while not letting teachers off the hook, also not impose on them the entire burden of eliminating performance disparities.
The other opposition comes from a segment of contrarian opinion that believes that education reform efforts aimed at closing achievement gaps are largely futile because schoolchildren’s cognitive and cultural disadvantages are too deep-seated to overcome. Instead, they argue that not all Americans need to be educated to the level of college readiness, and that this goal is not achievable in any case. The policy prescription we are to infer from this bleak assessment is that we should go back to the old paradigm of cognitive and social stratification: stop wasting money or energy on school reform and focus education efforts on those most likely to succeed academically with the goal of preparing them—and only them—for college, and, as in the old days, steer the educational losers into industries and occupations that may require specialized training (e.g., hair stylists, telephone installers) but not a thorough general education.
Are the contrarians correct? First, their position is not new; it is merely a rationale for reestablishing the status quo that prevailed in the first two-thirds of the last century. Taken to its extreme, it echoes the educational elitists of every era to justify the kind of educational rationing and stratification that used to be endemic throughout the world—something repugnant to the egalitarian American ethos. But the best empirical refutation is found in the academic fortunes of upper-middle-class American children. Central to the contrarian’s view is the argument that half of all children must be—in terms of statistical logic—below average and therefore should be automatically disqualified from aspiring to or getting a college education. Yet this same logic should also apply to children from the upper middle class. Countless studies refute the notion that just because upper-middle-class adults engage in “assortative” (i.e., class-based) mating, their children have any genetic advantage in intelligence.10 Yet, despite not being necessarily “smarter” than the general population—or even than the majority of disadvantaged children—nearly all upper-middle-class children graduate from high school and most go on to and graduate from college—mainly because their well-educated parents see to it. Bottom line: if upper-middle-class kids of middling (or even inferior) ability can get—and benefit from—a good education, then all other kids should be able to as well. So, despite the doubters, we need not abandon the idealistic new American public education paradigm; we just have to make it work.
MILESTONES ON THE ROAD TO THE NEW PARADIGM
Widespread acceptance of America’s new educational paradigm did not occur overnight; it is the