Bell Curve

420 Living Together The Leveling of American Education 42 1Bits of national memorabilia like this reinforce an impression that isnearly universal in this country: American elementary and secondaryeducation used to be better. The 1983 report by the Department of Education,A Nation at Risk, said so most famously, concluding that "wehave, in effect, been committing an act of unthinking, unilateral educationaldisarmament."' Its chairman concluded flatly that "for the firsttime in the history of our country, the educational skills of one generationwill not surpass, will not equal, will not even approach, those oftheir parents."jWe begin by affirming the conventional wisdom in one respect: Theacademicof the average American student looks awful atfirst glance. Consider illiteracy, for example. Some authorities claimthat a third of the population is functionally illiter~e.~ No one reallyknows-when does "literacy" begin?-but no matter where the precisefigure lies, the proportion is large. As of 1990,16 percent of the 17-yearoldsstill in school were below the level called "intermediate" in the NationalAssessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) reading test-ineffect, below the threshold for dealing with moderately complex writtenmaterial.5 Then one must consider that more than 20 percent of 17-year-olds had already dropped out of school and were not part of thesample,' bringing us somewhere above 20 percent of the population whocannot use reading as a flexible tool of daily life.There is a profusion of horror stories in other subjects. Fewer thanone in three American 17-year-olds in a nationally representative samplecould place the Civil War within the correct half-century of its actualoccurrence.' Fewer than 60 percent of American 17-year-olds couldcorrectly answer the item, "A hockey team won five of its 20 games.What percent of the games did it win?"R More than 60 percent of adultsin their early twenties cannot synthesize the main argument of a newspaperarticle."orty-four percent of adult Americans cannot understand"help wanted" ads well enough to match their qualifications with thejob requirements. Twenty-two percent cannot address a letter wellenough to make sure the post office can deliver it.'"Critics of American education also point to international comparisons.Between the early 1960s and the end of the 1980s, six major internationalstudies compared mathematical competence, scienceknowledge, or both, across countries.[''' The National Center for EducationStatistics has conveniently assembled all of the results for thefirst five studies in a series of twenty-two tables showing the UnitedStates' ranking for each scale. The results for the industrialized countriesare easily summarized: In seven of the twenty-two tables, theUnited States is at the very bottom; in eight others, within two countriesof the bottom; in four of the remaining seven, in the bottom half.''The most recent study, conducted in 1991, found that the United Statescontinued to rank near the bottom on every test of every age group forthe math tests and near the middle on the science tests."International comparisons need to be interpreted cautio~sl~.~'~' Butthe most common defense for America's poor showing is losing credibility.For years, educators excused America's performance as the priceAmerica pays for retaining such a high proportion of its students intohigh school. Rut Japan has had as high a retention rate for years, andrecently many European nations, including some that continue tooutscore us on the international tests, have caught up as we11.I5The picture is surely depressing. But as we look hack to the idealizedAmerica of the earlier part of the century, can we catch sight of Americanschool children who, on average, would have done any better onsuch measures than the youngsters of today? A growing number of educationalresearchers are arguing that the answer is no.16 With qualificationsthat the chapter will explain, we associate ourselves with theirfindings. According to every longitudinal measure that we have been ahle tofind, there is no evidence that the preparation of the average American youthis worse in the 1990s than it has ever been. Considerable evidence suggeststhat, on the contrary, education for the average youth has improvedsteadily throughout the twentieth century except for a period of declinein the late 1960s and early 1970s (which justified to some degree thealarming conclusions of the early 1980s) but from which the educationalsystem has already fully recovered. How can we get away with thesestatements that seem so contrary to what everyone knows? We do it bymeans of that innocuous word, "average."During the first half of the twentieth century, education for the averageAmerican young person improved steadily, partly because the averageAmerican young person spent more time in school than previously(Chapter 6). But much other evidence, marshaled convincingly byeconomist John Bishop, indicates a steady, long-term improvement inwhat Bishop calls "general intellectual achievement" that extendedfrom the earliest data at the turn of the century into the 1960s." Evenif we discount some of these results as reflections of the Flynn effect,[lR1