What’s Holding Back American Teenagers?
Our high schools are a disaster.
Photo by Creatas/Getty Image
Every once in a while, education
policy squeezes its way onto President Obama’s public agenda, as it did
in during last month’s State of the Union address. Lately, two issues
have grabbed his (and just about everyone else’s) attention:
early-childhood education and access to college. But while these
scholastic bookends are important, there is an awful lot of room for
improvement between them. American high schools, in particular, are a
disaster.
In international assessments, our elementary school students
generally score toward the top of the distribution, and our middle
school students usually place somewhat above the average. But our high
school students score well below the international average, and they
fare especially badly in math and science compared with our country’s
chief economic rivals.
What’s holding back our teenagers?
One clue comes from a little-known 2003 study based on OECD data that compares the world’s 15-year-olds on two measures of student engagement:
participation and “belongingness.” The measure of participation was
based on how often students attended school, arrived on time, and showed
up for class. The measure of belongingness was based on how much
students felt they fit in to the student body, were liked by their
schoolmates, and felt that they had friends in school. We might think of
the first measure as an index of academic engagement and the second as a
measure of social engagement.
On the measure of academic engagement, the U.S. scored only at the
international average, and far lower than our chief economic rivals:
China, Korea, Japan, and Germany. In these countries, students show up
for school and attend their classes more reliably than almost anywhere
else in the world. But on the measure of social engagement, the United
States topped China, Korea, and Japan.
In America, high school is for socializing.
It’s a convenient gathering place, where the really important
activities are interrupted by all those annoying classes. For all but
the very best American students—the ones in AP classes bound for the
nation’s most selective colleges and universities—high school is tedious and unchallenging. Studies that have tracked American adolescents’ moods over the course of the day find that levels of boredom are highest during their time in school.
One might be tempted to write these findings off as mere confirmation of the well-known fact that adolescents find everything boring. In fact, a huge proportion of the world’s high school students say that school is boring. But American high schools are even more boring than schools in nearly every other country,
according to OECD surveys. And surveys of exchange students who have
studied in America, as well as surveys of American adolescents who have
studied abroad, confirm this. More than half of American high school
students who have studied in another country agree that our schools are
easier. Objectively, they are probably correct: American high school students spend far less time on schoolwork than their counterparts in the rest of the world.
Trends in achievement within the U.S. reveal just how bad our high
schools are relative to our schools for younger students. The National
Assessment of Educational Progress, administered by the U.S. Department
of Education, routinely tests three age groups: 9-year-olds,
13-year-olds, and 17-year-olds. Over the past 40 years, reading scores
rose by 6 percent among 9-year-olds and 3 percent among 13-year-olds.
Math scores rose by 11 percent among 9-year-olds and 7 percent among
13-year-olds.
By contrast, high school students haven’t made any progress at all.
Reading and math scores have remained flat among 17-year-olds, as have
their scores on subject area tests in science, writing, geography, and
history. And by absolute, rather than relative, standards, American high
school students’ achievement is scandalous.
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