Battling for Education Quality:
The American Story

by Sue Berryman

Improving educational quality is difficult under all conditions, but the decentralized nature of the American education system complicates the challenge. The US Constitution gives power over education to the states, which usually delegate most of it to local communities. Accordingly, federal policymakers have virtually no power to guide system-wide changes except through sustained consensus-building among the decentralized players. And the players are multiple: Today US public education consists of 15,000 local school boards, 86,000 schools, 2.7 million teachers and 46 million students.

In the second half of this century, the current focus on quality was preceded by a focus on access. From the mid-1950s to the 1970s, under the impetus of the civil rights movement, the share of students completing their secondary education increased by 12 percent. Simultaneously, the variance in educational standards grew, and schools were increasingly used as social service delivery agencies. In the first international assessments in the 1960s and 1970s, students in the United States tested last among industrialized nations on 7 out of 19 tests, and placed first or second in none. After a political battle, resolved by an agreement to report results only by region, not by state, the first national assessment of educational progress (NAEP) was conducted in 1969-70. It measured the science achievement of 9-, 13- and 17-year-old students; like the international tests, it found evidence of mediocre student achievement. Yet, there was little immediate national reaction to either the NAEP or international assessment results.

It took another decade for the battle for quality to be launched. In 1983, the US Secretary of Education released the report "A Nation at Risk," the impetus for which was a perceived sense of collapsing educational standards. As the 1980s progressed, the skill demands of an internationalizing economy added to the pressure for improving quality. This process accelerated the demand for better knowledge and skills among workers; at the same time, it accelerated the decline in wages for less-skilled workers, as well as their employment share.

In the fifteen years since the publication of a "A Nation at Risk," the United States has taken a number of important steps to improve quality and quality management. In 1986, the National Academy of Sciences published "Creating a Center for Education Statistics: A Time for Action," a report highly critical of the century-old National Center for Education Statistics (NCES). The report launched a major attack on the quality of educational indicators; in the absence of good measures of performance, critics felt that the quality reform process was not well-guided. By using the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) educational indicators network to expedite improvement, the NCES has become a professional, competent and policy-relevant organization in less than a decade.

In addition to improving indicators, the United States has taken other measures to promote education quality improvement by:

Raising standards for experienced teachers. The National Board for Professional Teaching Standards was established to define skill and knowledge standards for master teachers, and to design and administer assessments. The first certificates were offered in 1994. Certification is entirely voluntary.

Raising standards for new teachers. Many states have historically had low credentialling standards, and 26 percent of the new hires in 1996 did not meet even these standards. In the mid-1990s, the Educational Testing Service (ETS) defined higher credentialling standards and assessment protocols for beginning teachers. State adoption of these standards is voluntary.

Building support for quality at the national level. In 1989, the state governors and President Bush agreed to establish national goals for US education, reflecting the recognition that a national consensus was needed to improve educational quality. Again, state and local adoption of these goals is voluntary.

Improving curricula. In the 1990s, national professional associations began to establish national curricular frameworks. Five years after its completion, the mathematics framework has begun to appear in textbooks and teaching. However, the implementation of other curricular frameworks has stalled.

How have the reforms affected student learning? The first international assessment to follow these reforms, which was conducted in the early 1990s, revealed poor performance by US 9- and 13-year-olds in science and mathematics, together with improved scores on literacy tests. Trends for average NAEP scores in mathematics, science, reading and writing have been flat. There has been a reduction in the variance of the scores, and the performance gaps between white and black students have narrowed; however, these gains were achieved primarily in factual knowledge and simple operations, rather than in operations requiring higher-order thinking skills. The just-published Third International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) for 4th-, 8th- and 12th-grade students showed US 8th-graders testing below average in mathematics and slightly above average in science. Fourth-graders in the United States, by contrast, tested near the top of all countries in the TIMSS in both mathematics and science.

In addition to measuring achievement, the TIMSS analyzed the content and performance expectations of the science and mathematics curricula for 46 countries. The results for the United States may help explain the weak test performance of US students: the curricula lack focus; topics come into the curricula early and stay late, but are not treated with any depth; and textbooks for any given grade cover markedly more topics than those for many comparator countries. Thus, US 8th-grade math texts typically cover 30 to 35 topics, while German and Japanese texts cover fewer than 10 topics; in the case of 8th-grade science, the gap is 50 to 65 versus 15. These analyses suggest that students return to the same topics for several years, but in no depth, resulting in inefficient use of instructional time. The TIMSS videotapes of US, Japanese and German mathematics classes generate further explanations for US achievement problems. For example, relative to Japanese teachers, US teachers stress skills (i.e., be able to do) rather than thinking (i.e., be able to understand). US teachers explain how to solve a problem, and students practice; Japanese teachers ask students to try to solve the problem themselves, and then students share their solutions with guidance from the teacher.

Where does the United States stand today in the battle for quality? Progress has been painfully slow, but there is a growing national consensus about the importance of high learning standards. There is a slow shift from top-down unassimilated reforms to a focus on how learning happens in the classroom. National institutions that should ultimately improve learning are being established. There is an increased focus on learning outcomes and a gradual integrating of cognitive science research into the understanding of how teachers and children learn. In brief, the United States is very slowly closing in on improvements — better curricula and textbooks, higher skill and knowledge standards for teachers, higher and different learning standards for students, assessments that reflect these standards, and incentives for teachers to focus on student learning. There is still a long way to go, and the US battle for quality dramatizes the fact that improving learning requires a focus on quality over a sustained period of time. It also shows that the sources of low quality are not always obvious, as evidenced by the recent analyses of US curricula, textbooks, and teaching practices; all inputs to the learning process must be examined for their contribution to educational quality.

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