SpecialtyA recent article in the October 26th Boston Globe entitled “Grade Change” challenges long held assumptions that American public education is vastly inferior to other Western nations and will soon be surpassed China and India as a result of economic changes taking place in those two countries. While my readers know I have been critical of our public education system and believe it can be significantly improved, I have never been convinced that we are “losers” in the world education market. This article, by Jay Matthews, provides some excellent support for the hypothesis that the data against American schools has been unfairly skewed.
Let’s start with a good news-bad news issue. The top 70% of American students rank near the top when compared to the rest of the world. What brings our ratings down to unacceptable levels is the bottom 30%, which, not surprisingly, represents the low-income children from our urban and rural communities. It is this group, the bottom 30%, that we are dramatically failing at a great cost to those students, their families, and our entire society. This is a topic that requires its own article. For now, let us look at some data that explain the errant conclusions about the inferiority of American education.
Math scores are one alleged problem area. Part of the problem in comparing any high school achievement across countries is that high school systems vary in age and content. This was especially important in math where the foreign students tested all had taken advanced calculus while American students had mostly only taken precalculus. When a study was done comparing U. S. students who had also taken advanced calculus, there was little difference across countries. Similarly, in research that compared only students who had taken equivalent courses in reading and science, the results were the same, i.e., U.S. students scored near the top.
Another distortion results from the fact that in Europe most students who work are moved to technical schools and their scores are not included. In the U.S., only a very small percentage of the working students attend vocational schools. (Of course, this is one of the weaknesses of our system, from high school through post-secondary education: many more of our students belong in skill training programs as opposed to traditional academic programs.)
In addition, our society and those of other countries differ in one very dramatic way. Young Americans often take a meandering path to their ultimate careers and a much greater percentage of our learning takes place on the job rather than in the classroom. While to some this may seem disorderly and wasteful, others see it as one of the strengths of our system, i.e., that we allow our youth to explore options, even fail at some, until they find their niche. This is part of a flexible system that allows it to be quite adaptive and resilient.
This brings me to one of my favorite topics: choosing a college. By coincidence it is about that time of the year when many high school seniors are filling out applications for college. In what has become a ridiculous process, the norm has become to apply to a dozen or more schools, many of which are a major reach for the student, and the process comes at a great expense, both financially (application fees) and psychologically (high stress). Yet parents, students, and counselors continue to ignore vast amounts of data to suggest that where you go to college has little impact on how your life turns out.
One of the best such studies, reported in the August 21st issue of Newsweek (“Prestige Panic”), compared outcomes for students who were accepted at the “elite schools” but chose to attend a lessor rated school. These students ended up earning just as much as those who went to the “elite schools.” Even more interesting is a 20 year follow-up comparing students of highly selective schools to those of less selective schools. The results suggest that the former experienced more job dissatisfaction. One interpretation of this was the idea that pushing students to go to the “best college” sets high expectations that often cannot be met. Clearly going to a top college doesn’t guarantee a top outcome. Study after study indicates that not only can one get a terrific education at virtually any college but that the most important factors in determining a “successful life” are the personal strengths the students bring with them including a variety of social and emotional skills.
Thus, I would urge those students who are currently selecting colleges for possible applications to focus more on where they would like to live for the next four years, who they would like to live with (the make-up of the student population), the course options, and the structure of the programs as opposed to the average SAT scores of the freshman class. Apply to schools that are a good fit in all ways, not just the one factor of which school you think will help you earn the most money. Just as an aside, since a good life is about much more than who earns the most, still about 60% of all millionaires were mediocre students who went to ordinary colleges! This should give you the freedom to select fewer schools to apply to and mostly ones that you are likely to get into. It will result in a much less stressful spring when the letters arrive.
One of the key problems with parents still believing that going to the “best college” matters is how much it impacts decisions from birth on. Unfortunately the current economic downturn is making parents (and students) even more anxious about being able to earn a good living and intensifying that misguided notion that the best insurance is to go to the most selective college. So it often starts with investing in useless programs like Baby Einstein videos (data suggests children who watch these end up with a smaller vocabulary by school age!), highly academically oriented preschools as opposed to more socially focused preschools (data suggests that small advantages in reading and math quickly disappear in early elementary school) and spending summers in SAT and other academically focused camps.
All children need for mental stimulation is a parent (or other caretaker) who reads aloud often and talks frequently to the child. Overfocusing on early cognitive development fails to recognize how important social and emotional development is to the ultimate life outcome of a child. Free play is a sad and serious loss for vast numbers of children. And much research repeatedly establishes that one of the most important determinants of a successful adult life (and avoiding serious problems as a child or teen) is a strong emotional connection to an important adult/caretaker during the years of growing up.
There is some strong scientific evidence to support the notion of not stressing cognitive stimulation during the early years of life. It appears that the complexity of learning to do reading, writing, and arithmetic requires the brain to have reached advanced stages of something called myelination, which is the development of a fatty sheathing around the neurons in the brain that enables them to perform more effectively. The key regions of the brain involved in these skills are not fully myelinated until somewhere between ages 5 and 7 (with boys being more on the 7 end), explaining why early education needs to be individualized so young children are actually ready to learn these skills and can avoid the frustration of being asked to do something their brains aren’t ready to do. Add this information to the recent discovery that brain development continues at a high rate until late adolescence and that it progresses, to some degree, throughout life. This knowledge should result in everyone taking pause to challenge the popular notion that if the child is not molded into a learning machine early on, all is lost.
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