Bell Curve

43 8 Living Together The Leveling of American Education 439selective schools; only a handful of schools at the summit routinely turnaway students with SATs in the 1200s and up (see Chapter 1). A studentwho tests reasonably well (he knows this by the time he gets tohigh school) and doesn't have his sights set on the likes of Yale does nothave to be too careful about which courses to take as long as his gradesare decent. Only youngsters who aspire to colleges that usually take studentswith higher scores than their own have a strong incentive to studyhard-and however common this situation may seem at the school attendedby the children of most of our readers, it describes a minusculeproportion of the national high school population.Bishop also shows that achievement in high school does not pay offin higher wages or better jobs. Many employers assume that the highschool diploma no longer means much more than that the studentwarmed a seat for twelve years. Others are willing to look at high schooltranscripts as part of the hiring process, but though schools are le~allyobligated to respond to requests for transcripts, hardly any transcriptsever reach the employer, and those that do usually arrive so late thatthey are ~se1ess.l~~' Using the NLSY, Bishop found that better test scoresin science, language arts, and math were associated with lower wagesand employment among young men in the first ten years after h~ghschool.58 Students, like everybody else, respond to what's in it for them.There's close to nothing in it for them in working hard in high school.Ergo, they do not work hard in high school.How might policy changes reconnect high school performance withpayoffs after graduation? For students not continuing to college, Bishoprecommends a variety of measures to certify competencies, to make transcriptsunderstandable and available to employers, and to hu~ld up databanks, national or regional (private, not federal), to enable youths tosend their "competency profile" to potential employers.5ySuch programs may work if employers of high school graduates hada shortage of competent workers applying for jobs. Some pilot projectsare underway that should tell how much such data banks are needed andused.h0 But in thinking about linking up performance in high schoolwith the job market, here is a dose of realism: When it comes to predictingjob productivity in most common jobs, an employer who routinelytrains new employees in specific job skills anyway hasn't muchreason to care about whether the applicant got an A or a C in highschool English or, for that matter, how well the applicant did in highschool vocational courses, except perhaps as a rough measure of howbright and conscientious the applicant is. O n the average, and assumingno legal restrictions on testing, an employer can get a better idea ofhow well a job applicant will perform in job training by giving him aninexpensive twelve-minute intelligence test than by anything that thehigh school can tell the employer about the applicant's academicrecord.16'l This puts sharp limits on how interested employers will behigh school performance.As far as colleges are concerned, what incentive do they have to raiseadmissions requirements if it means fewer students? During and just afterthe baby boom years, private colleges added many students to theirrosters and now face an oversupply of places for a shrinking market. Fewprefer to go out of business rather than take students with modest credentials.Public universities make their admissions policies in responseto political pressures that generally push them toward more inclusiveness,not less. When neither buyer nor seller profits from higher standards,why would standards rise!Realism About How Federal Reforms Will Work in the AmericanContextIn ways that few people want to acknowledge, America does not wantits schools to take a large leap in what they demand of youngsters. Ourconclusion is that if parents, students, and employers do not broadly supporta significantly more demanding educational system, it's not goingto happen. Nonetheless, a variety of sensible reforms are on the tablemorehomework, a longer school year, and the like. Why don't we atleast recommend that the federal government mandate these goodthings? On this question, the experience of the 1960s and 1970s servesas an object lesson for today.Educational reformers in the 1960s and 1970s were confident thattheir ideas were good things to do. They were impatient with the conservatismof local school districts. They turned to a responsive WhiteHouse, Congress, and Supreme Court, achieved many of their objectives,and thereby contributed to a historic shift in American education.On balance, the turn was for the worse as far as academic excellencewas concerned, but that doesn't mean the ideas were bad in themselves.Ideas such as more racial integration in the schools, more attention tothe needs of disadvantaged students, and more equitable treatment ofstudents in disciplinary matters do not seem less obviously "good" to us