National Center for Policy Analysis

MONTH IN REVIEW

Education
July,1996

HOW ABOUT "THE DECLINE AND FALL OF AMERICAN EDUCATION?"

While many academics are calling for a return to a required core curriculum in which students study the classics of civilization, some U. S. colleges and universities are offering vacuous courses under trendy titles to lure students, according to educational experts. Following their graduation, job applicants will be able to boast to personnel departments that they prepared for employment with courses such as:

"The Souls of Animals," offered at Bowdoin College, which plumbs the question of animals' "thoughts and beliefs," and whether they have any "moral status."
"Girltalk," available at Wesleyan University," which focuses on Virginia Woolf and Oscar Wilde and "the centrality of the discourses of fashion, fandom, gossip and shopping..."
"Contemporary Hysteria: The Drama of Righteous Gullibility," at Bennington College, which argues that "the greatest period of hysteria and witch hunting in this country's history is happening now."
When all else fails, there's always sex: "Sexuality in Global Perspective," at Duke University; "History of Sex," at Wesleyan; "Love and Sex in Japanese Literature," also Wesleyan; "Presentations of Sex and Sexuality in Spanish Novels and Films," at Bowdoin; "Renaissance Sexualities" at Swarthmore, and so forth.

Writer and emeritus professor Gertrude Himmelfarb at the City University of New York calls the courses "a terrible, terrible waste of time in a young person's life." She warns that the "use of irony and wordplay in these course titles is a post-modernist trick to suggest multiple meanings and complexity where, in fact, there is very little."

Source: William H. Honan, "The Dry Yields to the Droll, the Prosaic to the Provocative in College Offerings," New York Times, July 3, 1996.

COLLEGE STUDENTS PLAYING THE DISABILITY CARD

Hundreds of thousands of U. S. college students are receiving special educational favors under the Americans with Disabilities Act. And with the numbers rising each year, educators are questioning whether many of the students are afflicted with the learning disabilities they claim.

The 1990 ADA required educational institutions to make all "reasonable accommodations" necessary to put those with disabilities -- including learning disabilities -- on level ground with other students.

According to one study, in just three years the number of students asking for help almost doubled to 3 percent of the more than 14 million enrolled in college in 1994.
Other studies, using various definitions of learning disability, show that anywhere from 160,000 to 300,000 students are receiving special treatment.
The proportion of students in grade schools and high schools who claim learning disabilities -- many of whom will be heading for college -- has risen to 15 percent according to advocacy groups.
The number of students with special accommodations for physical or mental disabilities taking college entrance exams doubled from 1991 to 1995 to more than 55,000.

As for the extra costs involved, just a school-provided notetaker, for example, can cost thousands of dollars per school year for each student who claims to need the help. Other special accommodations can involve extra time and a room alone for all tests, as well as private briefings by professors in the event the student may have dozed during a lecture.

Educators are suspicious of student claims of disabilities such as "disrationalia," supposedly the inability to think and behave rationally, despite adequate intelligence, "disorder of written expression" and "foreign language learning disability." There is no standard test for most of these supposed maladies, and they occur only as vaguely identifiable manifestations peculiar to each individual.

One reason some educators are suspicious of these "disabilities": a survey at Boston University revealed that 40 percent of "learning disabled" students made it all the way through high school without having their problem diagnosed. And the experience of other schools confirm what Harvard found: one-quarter of those asking for special help had not had a learning problem diagnosed until arriving at college.

Furthermore, educators and others warn that students who are abusing the system are setting themselves up for disappointments when they enter the workforce -- where employers probably won't grant them special treatment.

Source: Victoria Allen (Public Broadcasting System), "A Disability Crutch," USA Today, July 10, 1996.

EDUCATIONAL FAILURE BEGINS AT HOME

A study of more than 20,000 teenagers in nine different American communities suggests that the sorry state of student achievement in America is due more to lack of parental interest and peer values than to what takes place within school classrooms.

A recent study found half of all college freshmen in the California state university system needed remedial education in math, and nearly half needed remedial education in English. Researchers from Temple University think that they discovered the reasons for the lack of college preparation and poor achievement test scores by analyzing data on 20,000 high school students in nine very different communities.

They report in "Beyond the Classroom: Why School Reform Has Failed and what Parents Need to Do" that nearly one in three parents is seriously disengaged from their adolescent's life and education. For example,

About one-sixth of all students report that their parents don't care whether they earn good grades.
Only about one-fifth of parents consistently attend school programs.
Nearly one-third of students say their parents have no idea how they are doing in school.

Widespread parental disengagement has left a large proportion of adolescents far more susceptible to the influence of their friends than in past generations. And this influence is taking its toll.

Fewer than one in five students say their friends think it is important to get good grades in school.
Less than one-fourth regularly discuss schoolwork with their friends.
Nearly one-fifth say they do not try as hard as they can in school because they are worried about what their friends might think.

The authors of the study make these suggestions:

Refocus the national educational debate on changing parents' and students' attitudes and behavior.
Conduct a serious discussion about the high rate of parental irresponsibility.
Recognize that the prevailing attitude of "getting by" is in part a direct consequence of an educational system that neither rewards excellence nor punishes failure.
Support school-sponsored extracurricular programs and extend them to as many students as possible.

They also recommend that recognition be paid to the fact that schooling is the primary activity and purpose of children and adolescents. And that striving to do well there is more important than socializing, organized sports, after-school jobs or any other activity.

Source: Laurence Steinberg (Temple University), "Failure Outside the Classroom," Wall Street Journal, July 11, 1996.

TRYING TO BOOST BLACK STUDENTS' PERFORMANCE

Educators and policy-makers have tried any number of programs over the years to better educate black youngsters. But the overall performance scores remain disappointing.

A U.S. Department of Education study compared the reading test scores of black 17-year-olds with those of white students going back to the 1979-80 school year, with these findings:

In the period 1979-80 through 1987-88, black students significantly improved their reading skills -- although they continued to trail white students.
From 1987-88 through 1991-92, black scores entered a decline -- while white's scores continued a modest increasing trend.

While for some in the educational bureaucracy the answer will always be more money, others point to the need for tough and involved administrators and teachers, as well as involved parents and guaranteed safety on school premises.

In a 1976 article, "Patterns of Black Excellence," Thomas Sowell, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, pointed to a tradition of black achievement dating to well before the civil rights era. From the post-Civil War era to the 1950s, pupils at some leading all-black schools in Atlanta, New Orleans, Brooklyn and Washington, D. C., more than held their own against most white high school students.

At Dunbar High School in Washington, D. C., for example, black students had higher attendance records and better city-wide test scores than whites -- despite run-down facilities and fewer teachers.

Sowell credits these factors for the black students' performance:

Teachers were dedicated, qualified and demanding.
They would often personally appeal to and persuade financially-strapped parents to keep their children in school rather than sending them off to work.
Rather than excusing poor performance because of a student's background -- too often the case today -- teachers had high expectations of students.

Others also cite factors such as trust and cooperation among teachers, principals and parents, and safety in school halls. When those factors fade, trouble follows.

In the early 1990s, 3 million crimes were attempted or completed each year inside schools or on school property.
Nearly 300,000 high school students are attacked each month -- and one in every 20 teachers is assaulted each year.
A 1993 Harris poll revealed that 13 percent of students at some time had carried a knife or gun to school.

Not surprisingly, students who reported being crime victims at school tended to have lower grades. Moreover, the best teachers resist transfers to more dangerous schools.

Such conditions forced the U.S. Department of Education to spend $480 million in fiscal year 1995 on its new Safe and Drug-Free Schools and Communities Program.

Source: Carl Horowitz, "History 101 for Black Schools," Investor's Business Daily, July 26, 1996.