Endangering Prosperity: A Global View of the American School

7. Substantive Concerns and Political Obstacles

85 The enemy I fear most is complacency. We are about to be hit by the full force of global competition. If we continue to ignore the obvious task at hand while others beat us at our own game, our children and grandchildren will pay the price. We must now establish a sense of urgency. —Charles Vest, 2009 U.S. schools are not helping the next generation reach its full potential. Compared to what is being accomplished by other industrialized countries, the performance of the United States, once the world’s education leader, is now, especially in mathematics, below average. Nor is there much sign that the United States is gaining ground. The failure to address the country’s educational malaise is extremely costly both for the next generation and for the country as a whole. Fortunately, the situation is not intractable. In some parts of the United States and some parts of the world, rapid student Chapter Seven SUBSTANTIVE CONCERNS AND POLITICAL OBSTACLES 13291-07_CH07_3rdPgs.indd 85 6/6/13 10:46 AM 86 SubStantive ConCernS and politiCal obStaCleS achievement gains are being realized. If it can happen elsewhere, including in parts of the United States, there is no reason it cannot happen throughout the country. That is our argument. Not everyone is persuaded by it. Many are reluctant to do anything about it. In this concluding chapter , we consider some of the concerns and objections to the thesis we have developed and some of the political obstacles that must be skirted or overridden if schools are to become more effective. We then turn to the central political challenge school reformers face: the education industry resists reform and reorganization, while the public, though concerned about its schools, is lacking in information , organization, and leadership. Possible Concerns with Our Argument The five primary objections to our analysis are as follows: —Standardized tests are uninformative. —Society, not schools, needs to change. —U.S. growth does not depend on student achievement. —There is a problem, but the solution is more money. —The problem is intractable. Each point deserves a direct response. “Standardized Tests Are Uninformative” Designed by Lewis Terman, standardized tests in the United States were first administered to 1.7 million recruits into the armed forces in World War I to identify quickly and inexpensively individual recruits who could be easily trained for higher-level responsibilities. So successful were these early tests at identifying effective officers that Terman adapted them for civilian life to identify gifted children and place students in appropriate academic tracks. Since Terman thought intelligence was largely 13291-07_CH07_3rdPgs.indd 86 6/6/13 10:46 AM 87 SubStantive ConCernS and politiCal obStaCleS inherited, the idea of an immutable, native intelligence that determined one’s degree of success in life soon took hold. Out of this tradition came the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT), begun in 1926, which claimed to be able to identify at a fairly early age those students who could profit from a college education . It was thought that no one could study for this test, as it was designed to capture native ability, not the knowledge that had been accumulated. Only later did it become apparent that one could benefit from preparation for an SAT test just as one can benefit from preparation for any other test. Those who design the SAT no longer claim that it measures an underlying aptitude and indeed have, for that reason, substituted the acronym for the original name. In contrast to those who developed the SAT, those who designed the NAEP and PISA, as well as tests used to meet federal accountability requirements, intend to measure knowledge and skills, not native ability or underlying aptitude. But they have one characteristic in common with Terman and his successors: the creation of an easily administered test that can yield reliable, valid information at low cost about large populations of students. Standardization means a set of questions with response categories that are fixed, allowing for rapid grading and precise comparison of performance among test takers. The debate over standardized tests has been continuous. The psychometricians who have refined these tests claim that the questions constitute a random cross section of the knowledge and skills that students are expected to have acquired by the age for which the test is designed. Powerful analytical tools have been created to make sure that a test reliably measures competence in the domain that is...