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¹Public education in the US is in crisis. . . . the dropout rate at many inner-city high schools is 70 or 80%. Illiteracy among black adults is estimated to be 44%, compared with 16% among whites. (Kristin Helmore and Karen Laing, "Exiles Among Us," The Christian Science Monitor, November 13, pp. 21-24).

²One million young people drop out of high school every year. Rates approach 50% in some inner cities. Of the 2.4 million who graduate, as many as 25% cannot read or write at the eighth grade, or "functionally literate," level, according to some estimates. Most 17-year-olds in school cannot summarize a newspaper article, write a good letter requesting a job, solve real-life math problems, or follow a bus schedule. ("America's Schools Still Aren't Making the Grade," Business Week, September 19, 1988, pp. 129, 132, 134-136).

³On April 26, 1983, the National Commission on Excellence in Education, after assessing the current status of our public school system, issued the warning: "Our nation is at risk."

I disagree. When 25 percent of our students are dropping out and 14 million more are graduating functionally illiterate, we are not "a nation at risk," we are "a nation in crisis.". . .

87 percent of pregnant teenagers are high school dropouts.

Who's to blame for America's sky-high dropout rate, now over 25 percent? . . . The problem is not the dropouts. The problem is a dysfunctional education system that produces dropouts. . . . We must accept that we are an aging and declining society that requires rededication and commitment to support the full development of all our youth socially, culturally, educationally, economically, and spiritually. (Byron N. Kusinawa, "A Nation in Crisis: The Dropout Dilemma," NEA Today, January 1988, pp. 61-65).

⁴America's standing as the world's top economic power is in peril, and schools are catching much of the blame. Teenagers in other countries indeed do learn more --a result of working harder to meet higher standards. . .

Headlines have bannered the sad news about American education for years: "Johnny Can't Read" . . . "Johnny Can't Count". . . "Johnny Can't Write." . . .

. . . Students in the U.S. now enter the job market with inferior skills. Once the unquestioned champion in industrial research, America is watching its lead dwindle. . . . how American students are falling behind.

When Japanese teenagers finish the 12th grade, they have the equivalent of three to four more years of school than U.S. high-school graduates . . . half of them know as much as the average U.S. college graduate . . .

. . . Most people who get Ph.D.'s in engineering in the U.S. are foreigners. . . .

Nine of 10 Japanese get high-school diplomas. But nearly a quarter of America's teenagers drop out . . .

. . . this week sees still another indictment of U.S. education: New details on how thousands of 12th graders in selected countries did on a 1982 algebra test given by the International Association for Evaluation of Educational Achievement. Hong Kong ranked first, barely ahead of Japan. The U.S. finished 14th among the 15 countries, just ahead of Thailand,. . .

. . . With a 180-day schedule, the U.S. is one of the few major countries with classrooms idle over half the year. Japanese schools operate more than 240 days, including half-days on Saturdays.

. . . Between the ages of 6 and 18, American children on average watch 15,000 hours of television. That's 2,000 hours more than time spent in school.

. . . Japanese teachers hold as much social status as engineers. . . . they still earn 2.4 times the nation's per capita income. By contrast, American teachers make only 1.7 times the U.S. figure . . .

Around the world, even in Japan, the starting gun has sounded in a race to overhaul education systems, . . .

Japanese reformers moan that their country is "an educational waste-land" in a state of desolation.". . . "For 100 years, we worked hard to catch up with the West in education," . . . "Now that we've accomplished that aim, we're at a loss, lacking a new goal." ("The Brain Battle," U.S. News & World Report, January 19, 1987, pp. 58-64).

⁵. . . First, compared with their peers in Asian and European countries, American students stand out for how little they work. Second, compared with Asians and Europeans, American students stand out for how poorly they do.

AS TO THE FIRST: CONSIDER A LIST . . . of the varying number of days in a standard school year. . . .

Japan	243	New Zealand	190
West Germany	226-240	Nigeria	190
South Korea	220	British Columbia	185
Israel	216	France	185
Luxembourg	216	Ontario	185
Soviet Union	211	Ireland	184
Netherlands	200	New Brunswick	182
Scotland	200	Quebec	180
Thailand	200	Spain	180
Hong Kong	195	Sweden	180
England/Wales	192	United States	180
Hungary	192	French Belgium	175
Swaziland	191	Flemish Belgium	160
Finland	190

 

. . . Americans have a deviant propensity to work less than almost anyone else.

(AS TO THE SECOND . . . )

When the IEA* conducted its most recent mathematics assessment, in 1981-1982, the results were disheartening for Americans. In an eighth-grade match-up, among twenty school systems surveyed, the American students ranked tenth in arithmetic, twelfth in algebra, and sixteenth in geometry. Japan, our principal economic competitor, finished first in all three of these categories. In an intimation of the economic times that might lie ahead, Hungarian students finished ahead of Americans in all three categories. Even Thailand, until recently considered a Third World country rather than a member of the thriving Pacific rim, saw its students finish ahead of the Americans in geometry. . . . consider a representative portion of the results for the three subjects:

Student Achievement by Subject Area

(U.S. 12th-Grade Equivalent)

Advanced Algebra Functions/Calculus/Geometry

1. Hong Kong	1. Hong Kong	1. Hong Kong
2. Japan	2. Japan	2. Japan
3. Finland	3. England/Wales	3. England/Wales
4. England/Wales	4. Finland	4. Sweden
5. Flemish Belgium	5. Sweden	5. Finland
6. Israel	6. New Zealand	6. New Zealand
7. Sweden	7. Flemish Belgium	7. Flemish Belgium
8. Ontario	8. Ontario	8. Scotland
9. New Zealand	9. Israel	9. Ontario
10. French Belgium	10. French Belgium	10. French Belgium
11. Scotland	11. Scotland	11. Israel
12. Brit. Columbia	12. United States	12. United States
13. Hungary	13. Thailand	13. Hungary
14. United States	14. Hungary	14. Brit. Columbia
15. Thailand	15. Brit. Columbia	15. Thailand

 

In an alternative effort to measure the performance of elites, the IEA calculated the average achievement score of the top one percent of the twelfth-graders in each country. The United States came out as the lowest of any country for which data were available. In other words, our most able students scored lower in algebra than their top-notch peers in any other country. . . .

The United States faces a time-in-school deficit every bit as serious as the trade deficit and the balance-of-payments problem: each year, American children receive hundreds of hours less schooling than many of their European or Asian mates, and the resulting harm promises to be cumulative and lasting. . . .

A belief in innate traits and personal aptitudes could be said, after all, merely to mimic the individualistic strain in American culture. People might be different, and some might be stronger intellectually than others, but who cared in a country where success could come through grit and hard work? . . .

In present-day American culture observers like Harold Stevenson and Merry White, a professor of sociology at Boston University, see a terrible inversion at work. . . .

"Compared to the Asians we interviewed, Americans placed more emphasis on differences in innate ability as the basis for variations in achievement. . . .

If aptitude rather than effort is seen as the key to achievement, the result will be to undermine the work ethic, at least as it applies to education. Time spent in a classroom will not seem very important.

As Stevenson indicates, among those who disagree with Americans on the relative importance of effort are none other than the Japanese. Their culture puts little stock in the notion of traits and aptitudes, placing paramount emphasis instead on what White calls "the path of pure endeavor." Here is a Japanese challenge more profound than economic competition. . . .

THE GOOD NEWS IN 1990 IS THAT AMERICAN complacency is giving way; these days everybody talks about the hardworking Asians and the buoyant Europeans. The bad news is that the newest emotions are American discouragement, defensiveness, and paranoia. Polling in 1989 showed nearly half the public in this country subscribing to the notion that the United States is in "decline." . . .

One staple of conversation among American parents is the supposed association between the rigors of Japanese education and suicide among Japanese youths. . . .

In 1975 the suicide rates in Japan . . . were all higher than the U.S. rates. But by 1984 the Japanese numbers . . . had gone down and the American numbers had more or less held steady, with the result that the American suicide rates were higher for all three age groups. . . .

While the payoff for hard work is great in terms of student achievement, the side effects generate controversy and soul-searching among the Japanese public. . . . suggests two general truths about education in present-day Japan: first, things are very far from perfect, and second, the system is not unyielding but subject to pressure and criticism--and presumably improvement as well. . . .

When Roger Porter, a presidential aide for economic and domestic policy, labels American education "depressing and uninspiring," dismay at our prospect dampens our appetite for meeting the challenge. The end-of-the-American-century, fall-of-a-great-power talk has gone too far. . ..

Nothing is more critical to national security in the post-Cold War era than schooling our children, . . . The world is shrinking. Change is inevitable. It is only a matter of time. (Michael J. Barrett, "The Case for More School Days," The Atlantic Monthly, November 1990, pp. 78-106).

⁶A generation ago, American public schools began to walk away from their role as moral educators. Schools feared they would be accused of imposing religion or "indoctrinating" children, so they stuck to academics, leaving moral instruction to parents and the community. . . .

Today, leaders from Ronald Reagan to Mario Cuomo have been calling for schools to pay more attention to students' moral development. . . . this renaissance of moral education . . . "Not every child is going to be smart, but every child has the potential to be good." . . .

A stress on conduct, not theory. Despite the advent of new approaches to moral education, most educators and communities today, however, eventually center on the traditional model of character development. . . . through direct instruction . . . and a consistent and firmly enforced system of discipline. . . . How students act from day to day is more important than their ability to reason through a moral problem. . ..

After a generation of dissension and confusion, schools have turned their attention back to the moral fiber of their young charges. The high costs of neglect have become unbearable. Cortland's Tom Lickona describes his dream of a moral generation: "We'd see less materialism and greed, which are the driving forces behind the public scandals. . . ."

As support for moral education grows, more schools will join the movement. They have no choice. "There is a hunger for morality in the land," . . . (Eleanor Smith, "The New Moral Classroom," Psychology Today, May 1989, pp. 32-36).

⁷Signs of new awareness abound. THE BUDGET doubled this year at the Ethics Resource Center, . . . And ethics courses have become a growth industry. . . . In six years, an ethics class at Harvard's Business School has gone from 25 students to 160. . . . "We concluded that there has been progress and more interest in ethics than ever before, but we're nowhere near home. . . . after a time, people realize there's something more to life. (Bernice Kanner, pp. 30-34).