The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life (73 page)

The United States has not yet completed the first half-century of human history in which universal secondary education became a goal. It was not until 1963 that the dropout rate fell below 30 percent of all 17-year-olds. Already we have seen improving performance in academic tests for the average student as educational opportunities have spread across the population. At about the same time, educators—and educational critics—stopped thinking hard or openly about variation in intellectual abilities. It is time to reopen the issue. What constitutes educational success for persons at various points along the cognitive ability distribution? The aspirations of educational reformers should be accompanied by a realistic and systematic assessment of where the room for improvement lies, taking the cognitive distribution into account.

Some critics blame students who do not work hard enough, rather than schools that fail to teach, for the shortcomings of American education. One hears repeatedly about students as couch potatoes. The average American student, it is said, takes the easy way out compared not only to the fabled Japanese but to children in countries such as Norway, the Netherlands, Ireland, and Italy.
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The obvious policy implication is
to do something to make students work harder. Lengthen the school year. Lengthen the school day. Require homework every night. Toughen the grading.
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The proposals fill the air. We think many of them are good ideas. But: the closer one looks at the reasons why students do not work harder, the less it seems that they are to blame.

First,
most American parents do not want drastic increases in the academic work load.
Some of the evidence for this lies in quantitative survey data. In Harold Stevenson’s landmark cross-national study of Chinese, Japanese, and American education, 91 percent of American parents said their school is doing an “excellent or good job,” compared to only half that proportion of Taiwanese or Japanese parents.
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It has become a truism in survey research: Americans tell interviewers that American education in general is going to the dogs, then in the next breath give high marks to their children’s own school.
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In surveys, many American parents are either apathetic about school or hostile toward more homework and tougher grading.
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In this climate, more demanding standards cannot easily be imposed from above.

But if you live near a public school, you need not search the technical journals to verify the point. Visit the school and talk to any teacher about the last half-dozen parents who have complained to him. For every parent who visits the principal to tell him that Johnny isn’t getting enough homework are several who visit to complain Johnny is being overworked. Parents who are upset about inflated grades seldom make a teacher’s life miserable. Parents who are upset about their child’s low grade do.

Parents
do
want orderly classrooms, no weapons, no violence, no drugs, and other safeguards for their children that many schools, especially in large cities, no longer provide. These urgent needs are fueling much of the shift into private schools and political backing for the “school choice” movement. But the average parent seems unprepared to support genuinely stiffer academic standards.

A second point is that
the average American student has little incentive to work harder than he already does in high school.
Economist John Bishop has taken the lead in making this case, emphasizing two points.
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Bishop first observes that a demanding high school curriculum is not necessary for admission to most colleges. For most college-bound students, finding the money is harder than amassing the necessary high school record. And it’s their parents who typically need to find the money. Why bother to take tough courses? This is true even of talented students applying to
selective schools; only a handful of schools at the summit routinely turn away students with SATs in the 1200s and up (see Chapter 1). A student who tests reasonably well (he knows this by the time he gets to high school) and doesn’t have his sights set on the likes of Yale does not have to be too careful about which courses to take as long as his grades are decent. Only youngsters who aspire to colleges that usually take students with higher scores than their own have a strong incentive to study hard—and however common this situation may seem at the school attended by the children of most of our readers, it describes a minuscule proportion of the national high school population.

Bishop also shows that achievement in high school does not pay off in higher wages or better jobs. Many employers assume that the high school diploma no longer means much more than that the student warmed a seat for twelve years. Others are willing to look at high school transcripts as part of the hiring process, but though schools are legally obligated to respond to requests for transcripts, hardly any transcripts ever reach the employer, and those that do usually arrive so late that they are useless.
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Using the NLSY, Bishop found that better test scores in science, language arts, and math were associated with
lower
wages and employment among young men in the first ten years after high school.
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Students, like everybody else, respond to what’s in it for them. There’s close to nothing in it for them in working hard in high school. Ergo, they do not work hard in high school.

How might policy changes reconnect high school performance with payoffs after graduation? For students not continuing to college, Bishop recommends a variety of measures to certify competencies, to make transcripts understandable and available to employers, and to build up data banks, national or regional (private, not federal), to enable youths to send their “competency profile” to potential employers.
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Such programs may work if employers of high school graduates had a shortage of competent workers applying for jobs. Some pilot projects are underway that should tell how much such data banks are needed and used.
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But in thinking about linking up performance in high school with the job market, here is a dose of realism: When it comes to predicting job productivity in most common jobs, an employer who routinely trains new employees in specific job skills anyway hasn’t much reason to care about whether the applicant got an A or a C in high school English or, for that matter, how well the applicant did in high school vocational courses, except perhaps as a rough measure of how
bright and conscientious the applicant is. On the average, and assuming no legal restrictions on testing, an employer can get a better idea of how well a job applicant will perform in job training by giving him an inexpensive twelve-minute intelligence test than by anything that the high school can tell the employer about the applicant’s academic record.
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This puts sharp limits on how interested employers will be high school performance.

As far as colleges are concerned, what incentive do they have to raise admissions requirements if it means fewer students? During and just after the baby boom years, private colleges added many students to their rosters and now face an oversupply of places for a shrinking market. Few prefer to go out of business rather than take students with modest credentials. Public universities make their admissions policies in response to political pressures that generally push them toward more inclusiveness, not less. When neither buyer nor seller profits from higher standards, why would standards rise?

In ways that few people want to acknowledge, America does not want its schools to take a large leap in what they demand of youngsters. Our conclusion is that if parents, students, and employers do not broadly support a significantly more demanding educational system, it’s not going to happen. Nonetheless, a variety of sensible reforms are on the table—more homework, a longer school year, and the like. Why don’t we at least recommend that the federal government mandate these good things? On this question, the experience of the 1960s and 1970s serves as an object lesson for today.

Educational reformers in the 1960s and 1970s were confident that
their
ideas were good things to do. They were impatient with the conservatism of local school districts. They turned to a responsive White House, Congress, and Supreme Court, achieved many of their objectives, and thereby contributed to a historic shift in American education. On balance, the turn was for the worse as far as academic excellence was concerned, but that doesn’t mean the ideas were bad in themselves. Ideas such as more racial integration in the schools, more attention to the needs of disadvantaged students, and more equitable treatment of students in disciplinary matters do not seem less obviously “good” to us
than ideals such as more homework and a longer school year. It was not the core ideas that were at fault (in most instances) but some basic problems that go with reforming American education at a national level.

We characterize the situation as follows: Slow improvement seems to have been a natural part of twentieth-century American education until the 1960s. This slow improvement had great inertia, in the sense that a slow-moving freight train has inertia. It is very difficult for an outside force to accelerate the freight train but comparatively easy for an outside force to derail it. In the United States, the federal government tends to be an outside force, more often derailing than pushing along, for reasons that are peculiarly American.

In countries such as France and Germany, with more homogeneous populations and more authoritarian and unapologetically elitest educational traditions, the national government can get away with centralized school systems that educate their brightest youth well. In the United States, it cannot. Federal standards, federal rules, and federal curricula, were they to be established, would inevitably be watered down and educational goals would be compromised with social and political ones. The federal government responds to pushes from all sides and gets equally nervous about affirming the genius of either
Huck Finn
or Charles Darwin. Powerful teachers’ organizations will not tolerate certification tests that flunk large numbers of teachers. Organizations that represent minority groups will not tolerate national educational standards that cause large numbers of minority children to flunk. These are political facts of life that will not change soon, no matter who is in the White House.

With America’s immense diversity and its tradition of local control, Washington is the wrong place to look for either energy or wisdom on educational reform. In our view, any natural impulse toward educational improvement will be best nourished by letting the internal forces—the motivations of parents for their children and teachers for a satisfying career—have their head. We will state our recommendation in broad terms:

The federal government should actively support programs that enable all parents, not just affluent ones, to choose the school that their children attend.
Current movements to provide increased parental choice in schools are a hopeful sign, whether it be choice within the public school system, vouchers, or tuition tax credits. Without being any more specific than that, we urge that increased parental choice extend to private as well as
public schools, and to religious private schools as well as secular ones.

Will increased parental choice help, given the modest academic goals that many parents have for their children? There are reasons for thinking it will First, the learning that goes on in a school depends on the school environment as well as on its curriculum. Here, the great majority of parents and teachers stand on common ground. Orderly classrooms and well-enforced codes of behavior do not need to be mandated but simply permitted; parents, teachers, and administrators alike will see to it, if the control they once had over their schools is returned to them. To have America’s children, poor as well as rich, once again attending safe, orderly schools would be no small achievement and would likely foster more learning than the often chaotic public schools do now.

Gifted youngsters would also benefit by restoring local control. While most parents do not want an authentically tougher education for their children, some do, and they tend to be concentrated among the parents of the brightest. Policy should make it as easy as possible for them to match up with classes that satisfy their ambitions.

To the extent that the government succeeds in this first goal, the others that we have in mind become less important. But as long as the current situation prevails, in which federal money and the conditions surrounding it play a major role in shaping public education, we recommend two other measures:

A federal prize scholarship program.
This is one instance in which a specific, federal program could do some good in restoring educational excellence. As the law stands, federal scholarships and loan assistance are awarded almost exclusively on the basis of financial need, leaving the administration of standards to the colleges that admit and teach the students. That program may continue as is, but Congress should add a second program, not contingent on financial need but awarded competitively—for example, a flat one-time award of $20,000 to the 25,000 students in the country earning the top scores on standardized tests of academic achievement, over and above whatever scholarship assistance the student was receiving from other sources. How much would such “American Scholars” (the Congress might call them) cost? Five hundred million dollars a year—an amount equivalent to a rounding error in the national budget but one that would dramatically transform the signal that the federal government sends about the value it places on academic excellence.
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Reallocate some portion of existing elementary and secondary school federal
aid away from programs for the disadvantaged to programs for the gifted.
The objective is to make sure that public school systems have roughly the same capability to provide for students at the high end of the distribution as they have for helping students at the low end. A collateral part of this reform should be to rescind any federal regulations or grant requirements that might discourage local school systems from experimenting with or supporting programs for the gifted. At present, there is an overwhelming tilt toward enriching the education of children from the low end of the cognitive ability distribution. We propose more of a balance across the cognitive ability distribution.