Still at Risk

Somewhere up in the great beyond, Allan Bloom is nodding his head emphatically and sending down a great big "I told you so" to those in charge of educational reform.

Common Core, a group whose mission statement says, "We're working to bring exciting, comprehensive, content-rich instruction to every classroom in America," has released a report entitled "Still at Risk: What Student's Don't Know, Even Now." The report deals with the continuing appearance of weaknesses in students' knowledge of history and literature, although the author firmly believes that were the survey they conducted opened up to include more of the liberal arts and sciences, definite problems would also show up there. The survey the report refers to is a telephone survey (which I'm not exactly sure is the best way to acquire this sort of information) given to 1200 seventeen-year-olds that asked thirty-three multiple choice questions about literature and history. The survey, while not necessarily comparable to a 1986 study conducted by the NAEP in response to the publication of A Nation at Risk, provides the authors of the report with enough information to say that things haven't exactly been picking up since 1986. All in all, the report provides not exactly startling statistics about what today's seventeen-year-olds know and don't know regarding history and literature. Sure, only 43% know when the Civil War took place. And maybe only 67% know that the Bill of Rights guaranteed freedom of speech and religion. Isn't it enough that 97% know that Martin Luther King Jr. gave the "I Have a Dream speech"? Or that 88% saw the movie Pearl Harbor and were able to correctly identify the bombing of Pearl Harbor by the Japanese as the reason the U.S. entered WWII? The more mortifying statistics come from the literature side of things, so future English teachers like myself should be considering alternative employment. Do you know that Oedipus is a tragic Greek figure who killed his father and married his mother? Only 43% of these seventeen-year-olds do. What about The Canterbury Tales? Can you join the 38% who know it's a Middle English poem written by Geoffrey Chaucer about pilgrims making their way to Canterbury? On the bigger and better side of things, 79% remember To Kill a Mockingbird and what its plot is, although I'm sure their memories are enhanced by the movie version they watched in class as a reward for successfully completing the novel.

My pessimistic ramblings aside, the report makes some of the same points Bloom makes, mainly "The first mission of public schooling in a democratic nation is to equip every young person for the responsibilities and privileges of citizenship. This requires that students have the knowledge they need to be prepared for civic responsibilities, further education, or the workforce, in addition to mastering basic skills such as reading and mathematics. To do this well, it is vital that schools familiarize students with the history and culture that form the shared bonds of their national community." Citing the current educational reforms, such as No Child Left Behind, that require teachers to focus on the required standardized tests as the basis for their classroom content and, in a larger context, the school districts' curriculum, the report explains a lot of important, interesting, and well-rounding information is being left out of students' studies. While the fall of society probably isn't going to be the result of these educational "gaps," this may very well mean future students will be exposed to these ideas even less, until they eventually fall out of schools all together, labeled unnecessary to the goals of public education as a whole.

Obviously any report of this type is going to attempt a little fear mongering, and rightly so. I don't want future generations to not know who Oedipus is or have no idea when the Civil War took place. What I find interesting about the report is that it takes into account the parents and their educational background. Not surprisingly, it makes a difference what you read and what you get the chance to experience depending on whether or not your parents went to college or didn't go to college. For example, if you have at least one college educated parent, you are 16% more likely to have read a work of literature outside of school than if your parents aren't college educated. To return to my old friend Oedipus, 59% of respondents who had a college educated parent know who he is, while only 38% of respondents who didn't have college educated parents know who he is. Just as Feinberg and Soltis explain that conflict theorists see raised college standards as something that will indirectly benefit children of the wealthy, it seems that parents with a strong educational background demand greater educational achievement of their children, which would explain why these students had either greater retention of history and literature or greater exposure to it outside of class. As future public educators, we need to be aware of these discrepancies, as well as the limited knowledge students are leaving high school with. Maybe one of us will even be able to figure out a fix to these problems, and then we'll all be able to say we knew so-and-so back when they were first exposed to the scary ideas of educational reform.

Common Core's website.
Slate's article on the report, which features some of the actual survey.
"Still at Risk: What Students Don't Know, Even Now" (.pdf)