What should the public make of all this? Are the schools getting better, worse, or just jogging in place? The answer is yes and no and and all of the above. And, as the presidential campaign approaches,’ the picture is likely to become even blurrier. Both parties are already scouring the stream of confounding statistics, plucking selective evidence for one partisan point or another. Republicans will likely continue to trumpet the negative numbers in order to prove that government needs to give public-school students vouchers to pay for private tuition. Democrats will latch on to the scraps of positive news in order to lobby for more federal dollars and shore up defenses against further attacks.
But Republicans rallying support for private-school tuition vouchers have plenty of contrary evidence to toss into the debate. The NAEP history results showed that children who attend private and parochial schools scored on average 20 percent higher than their public-school counterparts-fodder for voucher advocates. Furthermore, only 1 percent of the 22,500 students who took the test demonstrated advanced knowledge-meaning they not only knew key facts, but could also analyze historical trends and interpret their impact. More than two thirds knew that Susan B. Anthony was a leader for women’s voting rights, yet only about one third knew that Thomas Edison invented the phonograph, providing a negative nugget for those who believe “politically correct” influences have drummed white men out of the curriculum.
Even when scores have improved, there is almost always a flip side: the NAEP science scores were better than in 1982, but still worse than in 1972. “I think the Clinton administration has been trying to sell the idea that we’ve turned the corner,” said Chester Finn, senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and former assistant secretary of education under Reagan. “But we’re still crawling from the cellar halfway to the first floor.”
Buried in the cellar is the idea of national curriculum standards, world class teachers’ guides meant to bolster student competency in all core subjects. The idea once had bipartisan support. But the history standards, which added a heavy dose of multicultural stories, ran into right-wing objections as soon as they were floated. It’s an odd situation. The nation that may be losing faith in its schools can’t decide what its kids ought to be taught.
