Wilson Quarterly
Though most states have set content standards in the core subjects, more than half of them deserve a D, or worse, for their efforts, according to the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation.
"The present 'state of state standards' is bleaker than we had hoped--and than the country needs," concludes a highly critical report released by the Washington-based foundation. "Too many standards are vague. Too many are hostile to knowledge and infatuated with 'cognitive skills.' Most are entranced by 'relevance' to students' lives, effectively subordinating education to current events and contemporary culture." And, it continues, their weakness is a "grave threat to standards-based education reform."
When we focus on how to improve our schools we take for granted the most powerful influence on the quality of American education: Parents. Do parents really consider school the most important part of a child’s education? How much are they willing to give up so that their children learn more? There are indications that many parents have trouble accepting the fact that improving education is not a pain-free exercise. In Virginia, when tough new statewide tests revealed earlier this year that only 6.5 percent of the schools met state standards, many parents (and others) responded with cries of anger and disbelief. Their anger was directed not at the schools but at the standards. There are other signs that parents’ commitment to academic excellence is not very deep. A 1996 Gallup Poll asked: “Which one of the following would you prefer of an oldest child–that the child get A grades or that he or she or that he or she get average grades and be active in extracurricular?” Only 33 percent of public school parents answered that they would prefer A grades, while 56 percent preferred average grades combined with extracurricular activities.
The distribution of teens; time represents a huge drain on academic learning. More than one third of the teens with part-time jobs said they take easier classes to keep up their grades. Nearly 40 percent of students who participate in after school activities, usually sports, reported that they were too tired to study. More than one-third of students said they get through the school day by “goofing off with friends” and an equal number reported spending five or more hours a week “partying.” And these self-reports probably underestimate the problem.
The big story here is that teenagers time is structured around a “well rounded” life. American families might value academic achievement, but not if it intrudes on the rituals of teen existence, especially part time employment, sports, and a busy social calendar.
This stands in stark contrast to other
nations. In Europe and most Asian countries, it is assumed that the central purpose of childhood is to learn. Part-time employment of teenagers is rare, sports are noticeably subordinate to a students academic responsibilities, and although their is plenty of socializing, it is usually in conjunction with studying or working with others on academic projects. The American students four hours of homework a week is equal to what students in the rest of the industrial world complete every day.
Significant cultural differences also appear in how parents judge their children’s academic performance. A study by James Stigler of the University of California, Los Angeles and Harold Stevenson of the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, asked several hundred mothers from the United States, Japan and China about the school performance of their fifth-grade children. More than 50 percent of the American mothers pronounced themselves very satisfied with their children’s schoolwork, as opposed to only five percent of the Asian mothers. On tests measuring what these what these same children actually knew, however, the American students scored far below their Chinese and Japanese counterparts. When asked to explain their children’s poor performance, the American mothers cited a lack of inborn ability. When the Japanese and Chinese children failed, their parents blamed the kids for not working hard enough.
American parents see academic achievement as a product of intrinsic ability more than hard work, and as just one of many attributes they want children to possess, and as something their own kids are accomplishing anyway. These beliefs, along with widespread peer pressure against academic excellence (who wants to be a “geek”), an unrelenting strain of anti-intellectualism in American culture, and the weak academic demands of schools, combine to dampen the importance of academics for American youth and their parents.
We need not let educators off the hook, but parents bear some responsibility both for the lax standards in today’s schools and for students mediocre achievement. Parents appear more willing to embrace academic excellence in the abstract than to organize their family’s daily life in order to achieve it.
This complacency undermines meaningful school reform. Raising their level of achievement is hard work. Unless children can actually learn more math, science, literature, and history without breaking a sweat, then the prospects for reforms that ask children and parents for more –– more time, more homework, more effort –– are not very good. We don’t hear much about what today’s educational reforms may require of families, many with single working parents. Indeed, when it comes to the subject of parents, the rhetoric seldom gets beyond calls for more “parental involvement” or for “empowering” parents. Reforms that grant parents control over where their children go to school, a favorite of the Right, or that offer parents a stake in governing local school affairs, a favorite of the left, may prove to be valuable public policies for other reasons, but they have not yet convinced skeptics that they will significantly increase student achievement.
