You Can't Outlaw Failure

June 10, 2003

by PETE DU PONT

Ten years ago the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan published an illuminating and unpopular analysis of American social conscience. "Defining Deviancy Down" explained how America had accepted high rates of violent crime and illegitimacy, rationalizing them as socially acceptable rather than doing anything to lower them. He noted that urban elites increasingly extolled rather than criticized broken families, notwithstanding studies showing a high correlation between single-parent families and educational failure.

Since 1993 crime rates have gone down, especially in New York, but illegitimacy, and the attendant educational failure, remains a social calamity. Rather than confront the problem, many officials and activists prefer to mask it by dumbing down the schools. Now they're meeting opposition, in the form of state regulations requiring high school students to pass a test in order to receive a diploma. Not surprisingly, the activists are fiercely resisting the move toward standards.

Defining educational standards down is hardly a new cause. Intentional grade inflation at America's prestigious universities is the norm. The American Academy of Arts and Sciences reported in 2002 that 22% of Harvard undergraduates received A's in 1966; 33 years later 46% did and 82% of its seniors graduated with honors. The same trend was seen at Princeton, where by 1997 "only 12 percent of all grades fell below the B range." At Dartmouth 44% of grades were in the A range.

In 1995 the SAT was made less difficult and "re-centered" so as to raise scores by about 100 points.

And in the 1970s the Harvard Medical school began a racial preference program, admitting a large number of underqualified minority students. When they began to fail the school's examinations Harvard lowered its standards and adopted a policy that students could retake exams until everyone passed, regardless of the risk this might place on future patients treated by these doctors.

In other words, sensitivity to social injustice led to a fear of failure and thence to a policy of minimal measurement. So that, as one school district in Delaware explained a decade ago as it abolished grades, "every student can be successful, not just those who happen to get an A."

The idea that every student must be declared successful is in direct conflict with efforts in two dozen states to raise educational standards by requiring the passing of a high school graduation test.

A Public Agenda 2001 survey found that 86% of parents thought there should be a basic skills or more challenging diploma test, while only 12% thought it a bad idea. But that hasn't stopped advocates from trying to block the whole testing concept.

In New York 25 different organizations, from the teachers unions and civil-rights advocacy groups to the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund, have opposed exams and the very idea of student assessment.

In Massachusetts the teachers union launched a $600,000 advertising campaign against testing, and the Cambridge school board voted to scrap the graduation requirement tests. The state House voted to exempt special-needs students from the test, never mind that the passing grade is 40% and 92% of all students (and 72% of special needs students) passed the test in 2003.

In Florida a coalition of groups has launched a boycott of state products and tourism until Tallahassee discontinues graduation tests. Never mind that student testing begins in the third grade, that students who fail can retake the test as often as they want, or that 40% of the students who fail the test have also failed to meet other graduation requirements such as passing grades.

Resistance against graduation testing standards is having an impact. While Texas is raising its passing threshold (its failure rate is only 5%) and Florida is continuing to test, Arizona has delayed its testing deadline, and California is considering a delay. Michigan switched from a mandatory graduation exam to a "differentiated diploma," and Wisconsin allowed school districts to opt out from the graduation exam.

A recent New York Times magazine piece, on racial quotas in professional schools, quoted Texas State Rep. Ron Woods: "I am sick and tired of hearing about academic quality. These schools are set up to educate the citizenry! It is more important for us to educate the masses than to set up these Taj Mahal sacred cows that basically suck the lifeblood from a community for their own edification." Lenin's language and European social-justice thinking: "Educate" the citizenry, but under no circumstances measure the quality of their education.

Plumbers and pilots, surgeons and CEOs must meet standards; if students are to succeed in these and other jobs they must meet them too. Dumbing down education is a devastating approach that will constrain students' lifetime opportunities. It is time to replace it with testing, standards, and a commitment to excellence, just what states like Florida and Texas are trying to do.

Mr. du Pont, a former governor of Delaware, is policy chairman of the Dallas-based National Center for Policy Analysis. His column appears once a month.

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