Is the American Education System in Trouble?

Educational Problems

IS THE AMERICAN EDUCATIONAL SYSTEM IN TROUBLE?

The United States has enjoyed a long history of providing public education for all students. However, many people believe that our educational system does not function well and that it has not for some time. Although multiple ways to improve public education have been tried, the belief persists that our schools produce under-educated students who are under-prepared for college or work. The goal of education is to teach students, but not all the students learn well, and for those who do not learn, we cannot always find either adequate explanations or solutions.

For some decades, the United States has attempted to use group testing to track the success of our educational programs. One attempt was by use of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) tests (Ipka, 2003). These tests provide raw scores of from 0 to 500. The Department of Education decided that students would be classified as performing at a "basic" grade level if their raw score was 208. Below that was considered "below basic. Higher-performing students were classified as either "proficient" or "advanced." In 1994 40% of students fell below the minimum raw score of 208 for reading, suggesting a serious problem with reading instruction (McQuillan, 1998).

Naturally, experts then looked for the cause of these apparent reading problems. One possible cause was a learning disability in reading, often called dyslexia (McQuillan, 1998). Some research suggested that as many as 20% of our students might be dyslexic, which could, conceivably, explain a significant number of the reading scores below that basic cutoff mark on the NAEP.

Finding students with learning disabilities points to an immediate solution: provide reading remediation so those students can catch up. Other possible causes for academic failure don't point to obvious solutions. We have seen significant social and/or economic differences among students for as long as we have had public schools. In his 1990 book, Savage Inequalities, Jonathan Kozol documented in great detail just how wide the differences in access to good education could be between groups in our country (Kozol, 1992). Kozol documented a number of serious problems including unequal school funding, language barriers for students for whom English is their second language, and the lingering effects of systematic segregation in our schools and in society. Kozol's book demonstrates just how hard it can be to diminish the impact of social problems on education, because the Brown vs. Board of Education decision, declaring that separate was not equal and forcing the dismantlement of systematic educational segregation, was passed in 1954 (Ipka, 2003). Nevertheless, significant gaps remain between the achievement of middle-class and poorer students (Ipka, 2003), and some racial groups outperform others for reasons that simply are not easily explained.

However, all these criticisms of public education have their own problems. Between 1971, when the NAEP was first administered, and 2001, average raw scores varied little, suggesting that student reading abilities have not plummeted in recent years (McQuillan, 1998). In addition, in 1991 the General Accounting Office looked at interpretation of NAEP test scores and saw serious flaws in their approach. The break point of 209 was arbitrarily determined, and using raw scores without statistical analysis is an invalid approach (McQuillan, 1998), raising serious questions about one of our major tools for evaluating our educational success or failure.

Other problems exist when we attempt to look at learning disabilities as a cause for school failure. While some statistics suggest that 20% of students may be dyslexic, the same authors concluded that while 20% might be behind in reading, when reading ability was compared to intellectual capacity, only 8% were significantly behind their peers. The authors used a discrepancy of 1.5 standard deviations to determine who was dyslexic (McQuillan, 1998). While McQuillan (1998) found other faults with the researchers' methodology, it is reasonable to assume that something was going significantly wrong with acquisition of reading skills for those 8% of students.

This brings us back to the NAEP results suggesting that 40% of students had significant reading problems. Clearly both numbers can't be right.

Finally, we must face the hard reality that social inequalities, differences in educational funding and other factors outside schools' control can have a profound effect on student progress (Kozol, 1992). At the same time, however, we see examples every day of individuals and schools who rise above such outside influences. We see students who learn well under trying circumstances and schools that teach well in spite of markedly limited resources. The truth is that we don't completely know how social factors influence education for better or worse, and that in spite of systematically trying to solve those problems for decades, significant difficulties remain.