It's refreshing to hear that NPR is alert to the ?education crisis? rhetoric peddled seemingly nonstop. I wrote about this disaster-language just recently, in relation to civics education, but I could've written about it in relation to just about anything?put bluntly, crisis rhetoric has become the de facto response to education-related news items, with wonks tripping over themselves to be the first to deploy it. Race to the bottom? Race to the Top? How about race to see who can be the most disproportionate, overwrought, distressed, and panicked??(Reminds me of Al Sharpton,?sans humor.)
The NAEP history results were recently released, and before anyone could blink dozens of stories chockablock with doom-and-gloom quotes from the usual suspects had materialized on news sites. One wonders if education reporters don't just have a template for such pieces; just?substitute the date, the subject, and a few quotes, and?the thing's?ready to run.
In a piece titled ?Fact Is, Students Have Never Known History,? NPR presented the following quote:
The test called upon the students to identify at least two of the contributions to the political, economic, or social developments of the United States by such famous Americans as Lincoln, Jefferson, Jackson, and Theodore Roosevelt . . . Only 22 percent of American students had mastered enough history in their high school days to identify two contributions made by Lincoln to this country.
It is from a New York Times article published in 1943.
Education policy is a field that seems to attract lots of people who are impervious to realizing the inanity of doing the same things, over and over. For every savvy individual who thinks and writes about schools there are ten whose perspectives are hazy with an obscurative mix of groupthink, childish idealism, logical impotence, and, yes, historical ignorance. The irony is thick: Education ?reformers? take to the airwaves to deplore American students' ignorance of history while they, themselves, seem wholly unaware of recent history?i.e., that American students have always been deficient in their understanding of the subject. Something that has always been cannot a crisis be.
And here's a question nobody seems to care about: Why would students compelled to take the NAEP give a damn about the answers they choose??Why would?pupils with half a brain not just Christmas tree the thing and get on with their days (and these are the data on which?so much rests?)??In this sense, then, falling NAEP scores may be a positive development?perhaps they show that American pupils are getting savvier, declining to spend their time jumping through hoops and taking an exam just so a bunch of people in Washington can eventually, inevitably?decry the results!
?Liam Julian, Bernard Lee Schwartz Policy Fellow