Nov. 22, 1999
Contact: Amy Pate, (615) 322-NEWS
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Report card on education in 20th century issued by Vanderbilt University
Desegregation tops list of best education reforms; school "consolidation" and bureaucratization among the worst
NASHVILLE, Tenn. -- Based solely on graduation rates, American education in the 20th century would receive high marks: the number of high school graduates has risen from a little more than one out of 100 students to some four out of five in the past 100 years. But, getting beyond this simple statistic, the American century has seen its share of successes and failures in education, according to faculty at Vanderbilt University's Peabody College of education and human development, who recently issued a report card on reform initiatives and offered insights into education in the new millennium.
Education reform in the 20th century sought to make the public school system, developed in the 19th century, more accessible. "Our system now serves both men and women, all races and all religions, those who are young and those who are mature, those who are disabled and those who are poor. This virtually universal access is the largest legacy of the 20th century," said James W. Guthrie, director of the Peabody Center for Education Policy.
Guthrie and the other participating scholars predict that now that equal access has been almost completely achieved, the next century faces the challenge of making schools more effective and productive.
Following are the best and worst education reforms in the past 100 years.
1. 1954 was the best year for education, when the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously desegregated the nation's racially separated schools with its landmark ruling in Brown v. Board of Education. "The Brown decision, by itself, did not guarantee equality of educational opportunity, but without it such opportunity certainly was not possible," said faculty member and former Nashville school board member Kent Weeks.
2. Standardized testing, now used in more than 40 states, is leveling the playing field among students. "Great strides have been made in understanding how to measure human abilities," according to Peabody Dean Camilla Benbow. "An increasing use of sophisticated computer technology to instruct and appraise student performance is grounded in these measurement developments."
3. Magnet schools, charter schools, voucher plans and other innovative ideas have offered hope to students and educators. They inject a great variety into what could be a moribund school system, according to several members of the panel.
4. The Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 authorized federal funds to improve the schooling of children from low-income households and led to programs such as Head Start. "The 20th century has been notable for educators' firm recognition that out-of-school factors influence a student's academic performance," said Claire Smrekar, associate professor of educational leadership and co-author of a recent book on magnet schools.
5. Publication of A Nation at Risk, the controversial 1983 report that blamed educators for creating mediocre students who couldn't compete with their Asian counterparts. "The report was a mixed blessing. Its thesis was wrong. The American economy was slipping because of bad business management, not bad schools. Still it became a significant publication because it created a demand for higher levels of student achievement and more effective schools," said Guthrie, a professor of public policy and education. A Nation at Risk also prompted the historic 1989 Charlottesville Summit, at which President George Bush and U.S. governors specified the first set of national education performance goals.
The following are among the worst education decisions.
1. Creation of the Carnegie Unit, which measures course credit hours, is used routinely by schools and colleges today to measure a student's progress. "The problem is that the measure counts time in a class rather than performance," explained Peabody Professor Joseph Murphy. "As a result, the number of hours spent in class is the barometer of educational success, rather than the measure of knowledge."
2. Arcane structuring of federal financial aid to schools has undermined the integrity of the instructional process. Intrusive accounting procedures and unjustifiable regulatory measures divert attention from educating students to complying with federal programs. "These programs have eviscerated the fundamental integrity of the instructional process. They created 'pull-out programs' where youngsters were continually taken out of their classrooms and placed with specialists, and students dropped through the cracks," said Guthrie.
3. Massive consolidation of small and rural schools has created large, impersonal school districts. "This was the end for intimate neighborhood schools that closely linked teachers to parents, and the beginning of dysfunctional, large city schools and insensitive school bureaucracies," said Ellen Goldring, professor of educational leadership and co-author with Smrekar of the recent book School Choice in Urban America.
4. Acceptance of Critical Theory has led to loss of rigorous intellectual procedures in colleges and schools of education. "Critical Theory argues that the personal history of a scholar always distorts how he or she sees things and that scientific studies of human behavior are compromised by these biases," said Sally Kilgore, president of the Modern Red School House project. "Taken to its extreme, critical theory would suggest that it is fruitless to search for truth since you can never know it."
Facts about Vanderbilt are on the Media Relations homepage at www.vanderbilt.edu/News. Additional information about Peabody College is at: http://peabody.vanderbilt.edu/peabody.
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