Mediocrity in Education

“Our Nation is at risk. Our once unchallenged preeminence in commerce, industry, science, and technological innovation is being overtaken by competitors throughout the world… the educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a Nation and a people.”

This excerpt is from the 1983 report, A Nation at Risk, but more than a quarter-century later, the words ring relevant and true as ever as we continue to tolerate, even encourage, mediocrity in educational performance throughout the nation.
In 2002, the Bush administration passed the landmark No Child Left Behind Act, which aimed to close the achievement gap by raising every child to 100 percent proficiency by the year 2014. NCLB is the most ambitious federal education legislation in U.S. history, but heavily criticized for being under-funded and ineffectively implemented. Under the new mandates, every public school in the nation is responsible for meeting annual proficiency targets called Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP). The most significant flaws of NCLB are that proficiency goals are set at the discretion of states and AYP is determined solely on whether or not a school’s absolute scores reach the required achievement benchmark. Thus, states have incentive to lower the proficiency thresholds and make tests easier so that more students will meet the requisite proficiency levels. This inadvertently creates a perverse “race to the bottom,” which achieves the exact opposite of the goals of NCLB.

The Nation’s Report Card has boasted gains in achievement since the inception of NCLB, but the so-called progress is marginal at best. The reports fail to highlight the fact that a cringe-worthy majority of students still score below proficiency after more than eight years under the new legislation – mostly the poor and minority students for whom NCLB seeks to raise achievement. The National Assessment for Education Progress (NAEP) is currently the only national standardized test that allows for achievement comparisons between states.

Consider the 8th grade Reading scores as a demonstration of the startling lack of literacy progress our students have made in the past 18 years. NAEP classifies the 8th grade reading averages as “significantly different” in 2009 than 1992. On a 0-500 scale, this “significant” difference is between a 260 average in 1992 and a 264 average in 2009. However, this is an apples and oranges comparison to some extent, because testing accommodations were not permitted until 1998. Not surprisingly, the most significant increase in reading averages occurred between 1994 and 1998 – the first year accommodations were permitted – when the averages jumped from 260-264. During the past 11 years, scores dipped to 262 in 2005 and then rose back to 264 in 2009. Effectively, there has been no positive change for 8th grade reading averages since the onset of NCLB in 2002.

When the scores are disaggregated by percentile range, the results are even more shockingly stagnant since 2002. In the 50th, 75th and 90th percentiles, 2009 scores are all equal to the 2002 averages. In the 10th and 25th percentiles, scores are one point lower in 2009 than they were in 2002 after recovering from a dip in 2005.

According to the 2009 results, not a single state or province has reached even 50% proficiency in reading among eighth graders. Connecticut comes closest with 43% at proficient (38%) or advanced (5%) and New Jersey and Massachusetts are close behind with 42% at proficient (37%) or advanced (5%) in each state. Our nation’s capitol ranks lowest with a shameful 12% proficient and 1% advanced. On average, only one third of eighth graders are proficient readers. A statistic with such staggering propensity for economic and social consequences should launch the nation into a flurry of radical reform, but the executive summary headline dispassionately reads, “Reading scores up since 2007 at grade 8 and unchanged at grade 4.”

NCLB’s primary goal is to close the achievement gap that exists along race and class lines. Schools must now disaggregate data for subgroups of students so that low-performing students cannot be masked by averages. NCLB supporters claim that the law has been successful on this account, but close reading of the NAEP report reveals that white students continue to score 20-30 points higher in math and reading. This is the difference between “basic” and “advanced” skills. The discrepancy is equally stark between students who are eligible for free lunch and those who are not. We are still severely failing poor and minority students more than halfway to the 2014 goal.
Aside from the domestic implications of this mediocre performance, the United States falls significantly behind other industrialized nations in math and science. In the 2007 “Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study” (TIMSS), U.S. eighth graders ranked ninth in math and eleventh in science, falling behind China, Hong-Kong, Korea, Singapore, Japan, Russia and England, among others. Our poor performance is especially embarrassing when you consider that we spend more money on education – both in terms of total dollars and per student - than most of these countries combined, with a roughly $500 billion annual education budget. This indicates a severe misallocation of resources in terms of learning outcomes.
Our education system is plagued by mediocrity. As a nation we have collectively ceased to value education as a top priority, indicated by pitifully poor performance, woeful teacher retention and sub-par graduation rates. Aside from being ineffectual, NCLB is also uninspiring in terms of pursuing excellence in education. In more than 600 pages of legislative verbiage, words like “adequacy,” “proficiency,” and “minimum” appear hundreds of time. The world “excellence,” however, is mentioned less than ten times – mostly in the context of ambiguous titles rather than goals or specific recommendations.

Adequacy is not a worthy goal for the future leaders of the world. There is a culture of sufficiency in schools that threatens the prosperity of our nation. In the wake of NCLB, the knee-jerk response in most states was to lower standards to meet achievement levels rather than accepting the challenge to raise achievement to meet tough standards. Our education system fails to encourage life-long learning or the pursuit of academic excellence. Instead, the focus is on checklists of low level thinking standards that are assessed by multiple-choice questions. These skills will not suffice for solving complex global problems like poverty, water shortages, clean energy alternatives, and civil war. If we do not start setting expectations of excellence for our nation’s students, they have no chance of meeting them and they will flounder in the global economy of the 21st century.

The 1983 report prophecies: “History is not kind to idlers… We live among determined, well-educated, and strongly motivated competitors. We compete with them for international standing and markets, not only with products but also with the ideas of our laboratories and neighborhood workshops… Learning is the indispensable investment required for success in the "information age" we are entering.” The tide of mediocrity continues to swell.

Sources:
A Nation At Risk: http://www2.ed.gov/pubs/NatAtRisk/risk.html
Nation's Report Card: The Nation's Report Card - National Assessment of Educational Progress - NAEP