Our best public schools are first-rate, producing more intense, involved, and creative A-plus students than our most prestigious colleges have room for. …The top 70 percent of U.S. public high schools are pretty good, certainly better than they have ever been, thanks to a growing movement to offer Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate courses.
Our real problem is the bottom 30 percent of U.S. schools, those in urban and rural communities full of low-income children.
[…]In “More Than a horse Race” (2007), Jim Hull, a policy analyst at the Center for Public Education, which is affiliated with the National School Boards Association, analyzed four major studies of school achievement around the world. When Hull looked carefully at the numbers, he found that the United States did much better than the headlines suggest. In reading, only three nations’ students did significantly better than their U.S. elementary and high school counterparts. “The reading performance of U.S. fourth graders was particularly strong,” Hull said. “They scored above the international level . . . while our 15-year-olds scored slightly above the average.” In science, fourth and eighth graders were above the international average, and only three countries did significantly better than the United States at the elementary school level. (It is worth noting that the studies Hull examined did not include India and China, in part because schooling is so minimal for so many children in these two countries that their performance isn’t comparable.)
Hull also examined the frequent charge that American students fare well in international comparisons at earlier ages but fade as they enter their teen years. Some studies did show U.S. fourth graders doing relatively well, eighth graders about average, and high school students below average. But when the American Institutes of Research, a Washington-based think tank, did a more careful, apples-to-apples comparison, making sure the students were actually at the same grade level, those differences disappeared.
[…]There is, in any event, scant evidence that test scores have much to do with national economic performance.
[…]Robert J. Samuelson, a columnist for Newsweek and The Washington Post, analyzed the disconnect between test scores and economic growth. …“People don’t learn only at school,” Samuelson concluded. “If they did, we’d be doomed. In isolation, test scores hardly count. What counts—for the economy, at least—is what people do at work. …What keeps the American economy so productive, Samuelson said, is its flexibility. American companies “have more freedom to set pay rates, hire and fire, and alter work practices.”
Other countries have job training too. The Germans are praised for bringing teenagers to a technical level that makes them valuable in the workplace right after high school. But the U.S. system excels all others in allowing enough freedom for people to flounder and fail and change jobs until they find the niche where their talents are put to best use.
[…]None of this is to say that American schools don’t have many flaws. But their worst failure is that they betray so many of America’s talented young people. …Yet the success stories show that we can provide these children the education they deserve. It takes, among other things, longer school days and more careful selection and training of teachers and principals.
Source: The Wilson Quarterly (Spring2008)
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