October 7, 1996, Monday, Final Edition

       Whenever I hear talk about the conservative conspiracy to undermine faith in public schools by creating the false impression of a crisis in American education, I am reminded of a scene from Annie Hall, in which Carol Kane suggests that Woody Allen's inability to make love to her is due to his obsession with the Kennedy assassination. In response to Allen's neurotic insistence that the Warren Report was a coverup, Kane points out that a conspiracy of this magnitude would have necessitated the cooperation of too many different people, ranging from J. Edgar Hoover to the men's room attendant in the Senate.

Educational-conspiracy theorists, like David C. Berliner, need to explain why the view that American education is in trouble is held not only by conservative commentators such as William Bennett, but by Albert Shanker, president of the American Federation of Teachers, who has little to gain by undermining confidence in public schools and is too wise to be taken in by a manufactured crisis. They also need to explain the complicity of the 23-year-old cashier at my local convenience store, who keeps pretending not to know how to make change without the use of an electronic cash register, or my undergraduate students, who, to undermine my faith in American high schools, cannily fill their essays with spelling and grammatical mistakes that reasonably educated eighth-graders in other countries wouldn't make.

Recent trends in Scholastic Assessment Tests, or SAT, scores are not reassuring. Math scores are up slightly in recent years, but verbal scores are down; combined SAT scores are back to their early 1970s levels, but they still lag well behind what they were in the mid-1960s. Part of this is due to the fact that the applicant pool has changed, but part of it isn't. Bottom line: College applicants today are less able than their counterparts were 30 years ago.

Put the SAT data aside, though, and look at performance on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP, dubbed by some as "the Nation's Report Card." The NAEP measures the sorts of skills our students should be mastering. For example, its assessment of writing emphasizes students' ability to produce a coherent and persuasive written argument rather than their knowledge of specific rules of grammar; its assessment of science proficiency measures students' ability to apply scientific knowledge to the solution of a problem, rather than their possession of that knowledge alone, and so forth.

The percentage of students performing today at the top levels on the NAEP is shockingly low, especially considering that the definition of excellence on these tests is exceedingly liberal. To earn a top score on the mathematics portion of the NAEP, a high-school junior need not demonstrate any skills beyond algebra. Yet, in 1992, only 7 percent of high-school juniors scored in this category. The news on science is no more encouraging: In 1992, only one in 10 juniors could "infer relationships and draw conclusions using detailed scientific knowledge," the criterion for scoring at the highest proficiency level in that domain.

The situation is even worse in the humanities. Only 7 percent of 17-year-olds are able to "synthesize and learn from specialized reading materials," the generous criterion that places a student at the top level on this test. Fewer than 2 percent of juniors earned top marks on the writing assessment, where the highest proficiency level was characterized simply by "coherent" writing that "tended to contain supportive details and discussion that contributed to the effectiveness of the response" (my italics). Evidently, this is now all it takes to be judged an excellent writer by American educational standards.

Nor is there any reason to lull ourselves into thinking that America's educational problems are limited to poor minority youngsters attending inner-city schools. Because the 1994 NAEP report presented trends in achievement scores broken down by type of community, it is possible to look separately at the performance of students who are enrolled in advantaged urban schools in metropolitan areas and their surrounding suburbs in which a high proportion of the students' parents are professionals or managers.

There is little reason for middle-class parents to be cheerful about their children's educational performance. Among 17-year-olds enrolled in advantaged urban and suburban schools, writing proficiency actually has declined over time. Scores in math, science and reading - low to begin with - have not changed at all. Among 13-year-olds from comparably advantaged schools, the same picture emerges: No improvement in math, science or reading proficiency, and a decline in writing skills. At no age level, in no subject area, has there been an increase in the past decade in the proportion of students who score at the highest level of proficiency.

America barely has begun to feel the impact of our achievement problem in the economic marketplace. But we already can see quite clearly the devastating effects of low and stagnating elementary and high-school achievement on American colleges and universities. Three-fourths of American college faculty report that the entering students they teach lack basic skills. Current estimates are that 30 to 40 percent of entering freshmen across the country require remedial coursework in reading and writing and an even higher number in mathematics to pursue "college-level" coursework. A recent study of entrants into the California State University system indicated that half of all freshmen needed remedial education in math, and nearly half needed remedial education in English - up substantially in just the last few years.

It is virtually impossible to know what proportion of university instructional expenditures are devoted to remedial vs. regular instruction. It is safe to say, however, that if one-third to one-half of the entering college students in this country require remedial education, the declining achievement of American youth must be costing America's colleges and universities a fortune. During the 1993-94 school year, for example, California's community colleges spent $300 million on remediation. American colleges and universities devoting more of their resources to remedial education are devoting less to advanced instruction, which means that even literate college graduates today have less exposure to challenging coursework than did their counterparts in previous eras.

Most discussions of the economic costs of the achievement decline focus on the long-term implications for the American economy. But there are immediate costs to American business, which must make do with a labor supply that is inadequately educated and poorly trained. A recent report from the National Adult Literacy Study provides telling evidence of how poorly equipped our college graduates are to function in a highly competitive international economy in which success depends on a highly skilled, literate labor force. The study found that fewer than half of all American college graduates - not half of all Americans, but half of all college graduates - were able to write a coherent essay describing an argument presented in a newspaper article they read or could contrast the opinions expressed in two opposing editorials. Only one-third of the college graduates could write a brief letter explaining a billing error. Only 11 percent of four-year college graduates and only 4 percent of two-year college graduates were sufficiently literate to be able to summarize, based on information they were given, two ways that attorneys may challenge prospective jurors.

American student achievement is barely at the level it was in the early-1970s, and in many respects student achievement is significantly lower than it was 30 years ago. Although educators have tried their best to find alternative explanations for the decline, the evidence clearly shows that the drop in achievement is genuine, substantial and pervasive across ethnic, socioeconomic and age groups. To top it off, the accepted definition of educational excellence has eroded nearly to the point of meaninglessness and yet, only a handful of students qualify for the dubious distinction of placing in the top category. As a 1992 Congressional Budget Office report concluded, the existence of an "overall drop in achievement [entailing] sizeable declines in higher-level skills, such as inference and problem-solving, is beyond question. Yet, the Oliver Stones of educational psychology keep insisting that the crisis is phony.

Despite attempts by some to deny that there is a problem - critiquing the achievement studies over technical details, trying to silence the messengers of bad news, dumbing down the curriculum on college campuses, changing the way achievement is measured and assessed - the issue will not go away. If leaders in American education delay facing the truth - that we have an achievement crisis in this country of gargantuan proportions - solving the problem only will become more difficult and costly.

The causes of our educational problems, or the remedies needed to address them, do not lie solely within in our schools and classrooms. Indeed, two decades of tinkering with America's schools as a way of responding to the crisis have been an unmitigated failure. Beyond the Classroom, the recently published study conducted by myself and my coauthors of 20,000 teenagers and their families in nine very different American communities concludes that the sorry state of student achievement in America is due more to the conditions of students' lives outside of school than it is to what takes place within school walls. The failure of educational policies to reverse the decline in achievement is due to our obsession with reforming schools and classrooms, and the general disregard of the contributing forces that, while outside the boundaries of the school, are more influential.

There is a crisis in American education, but the crisis is not entirely in America's schools. Schools do not have high-enough standards, to be sure. But the crisis also is in our families, where too many parents have checked out; our neighborhoods, where peer groups poke fun at students who try to do well; and our society, which celebrates anti-intellectualism and glorifies stupidity.

Steinberg is a professor of psychology at Temple University and coauthor of Beyond the Classroom: Why School Reform Has Failed and What Parents Need to Do.

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