ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Thursday, July 11, 1996 TAG: 9607110014
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-10 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: THOMAS M. SHERMAN
AS POINTED out in your May 28 editorial (``Is the VEA scared of change''), we have many reasons to be disappointed in our schools. They haven't ensured that every child lives in a home where parents care about their children and earn a living wage. Schools haven't prevented drug abuse or alcoholism, and have failed to eliminate violence. Schools have failed to eliminate teen smoking, and haven't ensured that all children receive adequate health care. And, despite ever-increasing education expenditures, they haven't halted corporate downsizings that have devastated many families.
Nonetheless, there are reasons to be proud of the schools' accomplishments. Our investment in them has produced what's arguably the most efficient economy in the world. Focused efforts on curricular reform have resulted in the rise of the quality of products produced in the United States to world-class standards.
One of our great failings as a society is to determine what our schools should do in terms specific enough that we can increase performance. Devising and administering tests certainly isn't enough. This is, as I see it, the main problem with the current testing program advocated by the State Department of Education.
Traditionally, we define by "winning" - being first - and we suffer mightily from the Super Bowl complex. Schools today are certainly no worse than in times past, and likely considerably better. However, from this "winning" perspective, we define success in terms of test scores.
On international comparisons, the United States often scores in the middle to the bottom. Our relative position generally has less to do with the quality of our schools than the nature of our society. Our schools are inclusive whereas our competitors' are exclusive. Nonetheless, both Presidents Bush and Clinton declared our goal is to be No. 1 in science test scores in international comparisons. But do we really need to be No. 1?
Our best students always match or exceed the scores of the best students from other countries. So, we're not falling behind in developing comparable talent pools in any sense. And the development of a sufficiently expanded science-teaching infrastructure would cost billions of dollars. The result might be more students knowing more science, but that's far from certain because, frankly, not all 16-year-olds want to devote themselves to science.
And, what would we accomplish if we did achieve No. 1 in science? We've led the world overwhelmingly for decades in basic and applied science research, Nobel prize winners and technology innovation. We're still in first place on these important dimensions. I suspect we would gain little from the great expenditures of money, time and talent just to be No. 1.
Two goals define success more reasonably:
To provide for a self-selected core of science-interested students the best learning opportunities possible. Perhaps advanced-science schooling should be available to 30 percent or 40 percent of all students. Of these, we could measure success by international comparisons. More importantly, we can judge the level and quality of these students' knowledge.
To halt the incredible science trashing that's sweeping our public media. For the 70 percent of students who aren't going to be scientists, let's teach them to be good consumers and strong supporters of science. This will maintain in a much more important way the long-term national support we've had for basic and applied research. This is what has given us the competitive edge over the rest of the world.
Another way we define the purposes of education is in terms of observed failures of society. When the Russians beat us into space, education was declared deficient, and massive reforms were instituted. The result was we won the race to the moon. When we found ourselves trailing the Japanese in commerce with shoddy products and inefficient businesses bloated with waste, we declared our nation at risk because of our schools, and we initiated another massive education-reform effort. This one worked, too. We now have one of the most efficient economies in the world.
So, will these new tests help us measure school achievement any more clearly? I suspect not under the approaches we use now to define school success.
The solution is to abandon school as a tool of reform. This doesn't mean school reform should be abandoned or that we should declare schools "good enough." But we should recognize that defining school outcomes is too difficult, and begin to think of schools as a way we measure our success.
From this point of view, positive changes in schools will reflect positive improvement in the communities they serve. For example, communities with low-performing schools could be targeted for improved child health care, higher-wage employment opportunities, improved adult parenting and job-preparation programs. The impact of these reforms will show up fairly quickly. We will have solid evidence of successes and, maybe best of all, get away from unproductive and redundant bickering over pseudo-changes that have little if any potential to promote real change. In the future, rather than tools of reform, schools should be measures of how well we succeed as a society to serve our own needs.
Thomas M. Sherman of Blacksburg is a professor in the College of Human Resources and Education at Virginia Tech.
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