Facing the Message

Teachers in this country are no slouches. They teach more classes per week than teachers in most other advanced countries, and they also cover more material in a school year than their international peers. But their students, at least in the crucial fields of science and mathematics, seem to learn less. I am writing this before the late-November release of the student achievement scores on the Third International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS). Enough information is already available from TIMSS to predict that, when those scores are released, the headlines will be nasty business for U.S. schools, teachers, and students. We have lost the horse race - again - even though we pledged back in 1989, when we adopted those national goals for education, to be in the in math and science achievement by the year 2000. Such a naive prediction assumed that the nation's schools would embrace the goal, adopt high standards, put resources into seeing that students met those standards, and produce students who, on average at least, would relish trigonometry and organic chemistry. That didn't happen and won't happen in the near future. The reason is that behind the student achievement scores to be released by TIMSS is a much larger picture of lack of performance, not by students and teachers alone, but also by forces largely beyond their control - systems designed to put every possible barrier in the path of high achievement in this country. Couple this with a preference on the part of policy makers and the public for silver-bullet solutions to the problem of low performance by students, and we'll no longer have to wonder we are decidedly not first in the world in math and science achievement. The TIMSS achievement scores are not the message. They are the messenger, affirming what many other studies and sources are saying about the state of education reform in this country. The curriculum content and instructional data released by TIMSS a month before the student scores help explain much of the why behind the scores. True, teachers in the U.S. teach more classes and cover more content than teachers elsewhere, but in countries in which student achievement is much higher than here, the surrounding situation is much different. In Germany, for example, teachers teach slightly more than 20 class sessions per week; in Japan, they teach fewer than 20 per week; in the U.S., the average is 30. In addition, much of the content of the curriculum in math and science in this country is repeated grade after grade. It is a mile wide and an inch deep, commented Larry Suter, who supervised the TIMSS research for the National Science Foundation, which co-sponsored the study in the U.S. with the National Center for Education Statistics. Moreover, few eighth-grade students in the U.S. study fundamental concepts of algebra; in many other countries, all eighth-graders study them. The coordinator of TIMSS in the U.S., William Schmidt of Michigan State University, examined and compared more than 1,600 curriculum resources from more than 40 countries that participated in TIMSS and concluded that textbooks in the U.S. make minimal demands on students. Policy makers might look at these data and propose a simple answer - teach algebra earlier - ignoring their previous decisions that make this idea almost impossible. Under many state certification policies, teachers up to the secondary grades lack content certification of any kind; most are prepared for K-8 classrooms and are not qualified to teach such subjects as algebra. What's more, principals in middle schools and in rural areas prefer such loose certification because it allows them to shift teachers around to fill their schools' changing needs. …