PERSPECTIVE ON SCHOOLS : Sinking Scores? Not in the Numbers : Reading and math levels are higher today than n 1970, with the greatest gains by blacks and Latinos.
DAVID GRISSMER, a RAND Corp. researcher, recently led a three-year study on educational achievement, underwritten by the Lilly Endowment. He was interviewed from his Washington office by free-lance reporter Joseph Hanania.
*
Question: Should this country throw in the towel on public education?
Answer: Not unless we want to give up on a major success story. Reading and math achievement levels are higher today than in 1970, with the greatest gains registered by blacks and Latinos. Over the past 25 years, blacks gained 19% in reading and math scores, while Latinos gained 11%. The gains among Latinos would have been even higher had the scores of newly arrived immigrants been factored separately from those of long-term residents and Latino citizens.
*
Q: How did whites do?
A: They gained 3%. We couldn’t factor Asian American scores because they weren’t broken out as a separate grouping in 1970.
*
Q: So test scores for virtually all groups have been going up?
A: Yes, for three major reasons. First, parents today are more highly educated than were parents from previous generations, and student achievement correlates strongly with parental education levels. In addition, family income has remained largely stable, while family size has declined. Thus, more money is being spent on each child.
*
Q: Why have minority scores made such large gains?
A: We believe that minority educational programs may well be succeeding. Certainly, the additional resources invested in minority programs correlate with significantly higher scores. Further research is needed to verify whether this is, indeed, cause and effect.
*
Q: And yet headlines keep blaring out that educational test scores are nose-diving and our schools are on the verge of collapse.
A: True. But the scores most often cited are the SATs, which measure the aptitude of college-bound students who make up less than half of all high school seniors. It’s in the other 55% that achievement--and test scores--have risen most dramatically. To get the full picture, we correlated scores from the U.S. Department of Education tests, called the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP).
*
Q: And yet a few weeks ago, there were front-page reports that even these NAEP scores were plunging.
A: NAEP scores do register short-term fluctuations, and they did show a significant drop for 17-year-olds. Ironically, this may be because of our success keeping more teens in school longer. Greater inclusion of the less-motivated teens--a success by virtually any standard--necessarily depressed the scores. Significantly, the scores of 9- and 13-year-olds, which are a more accurate measure because they are not affected by dropout rates, did not show similar declines. But even if the short-term decline in 17-year-old students’ scores is real, it is still much smaller than the gains made since 1970.
*
Q: Your findings are surprising, to say the least.
A: It wasn’t what we expected, either. In fact, our four-person RAND study group, including a sociologist, a statistician, another researcher and myself, initially set out to discover the factors behind a perceived decline in the schools. We discovered, instead, that there has been no decline in any major group and significant progress in many.
*
Q: So what’s the message of your study?
A: That we need to be a bit more skeptical about all those scare headlines and not panic about our public schools. Although we need to continue exploring ways to improve our schools, we also need to recognize that the average American student today can read, write and solve mathematical problems better than ever.
