Ken writes in his own inimical, antagonistic style:

> Wrong on all three counts. Educational achievement is not lower than it was
>  thirty years ago.  Education in the U.S. is good compared to the rest of
the
>  world. And it is competition from low-skilled, low-wage workers that is
>  hurting the low-skilled workers here.

> There's been hardly any change in educational achievement over the last
>  thirty or forty years.  For a balanced view, see
>  http://www.schoolchoices.org/roo/sted1.htm
>
>  If you have any actual data to back up your claim, let's see it.  Lots of
>  people believe in some golden past of education, but the facts just don't
>  confirm it.

I don't believe that you'll have any trouble at all finding data to
contradict your claim. Simply go to Google and type in:

     "SAT scores 1963"

(without the quotes). 1963 was the high point for SAT scores in the United
States. You'll find every reason imaginable in the Google search explaining the
drop in scores since then, including the abolition of prayer in schools, but I
credit the drop primarily to cultural effects, in great part because I lived
through those effects.

I entered high school in 1959, two years following the launch of Sputnik in
October, 1957, and graduated in 1963. The effect that Sputnik had on the United
States was immediate and dramatic. Overnight, education became highly valued
-- to the point that it became a tool of war -- and the brightest students
were not seen as an elitist group but were rather viewed as a national treasure,
a critical constituent part of the national defense of the nation. My own high
school was built in the fervor that followed Sputnik, specifically to
increase the intensity of the high school experience.

The high school was divided into three subschools: vocational, college prep
and honors. On the theory that you don't really learn something until you have
to teach it to someone else, the honors program was constructed so that the
honors subschool students taught their own classes to one another. Even so, the
honors program had four staff teachers with Ph.D.'s -- not in education -- but
in their respective fields of study as teachers. The intention was to push as
much of a college curriculum as possible into the junior and senior years of
high school.

Following high school, my future wife, a continent away, went through her
undergraduate and graduate education on a National Defense Education Act
scholarship. My own education was paid for by the US Army, the US Navy, a National
Science Foundation fellowship and a NASA traineeship. At one point, I had such an
excess of scholarships that I had to turn some back. Straight A's at the time
made for a very easy and very exciting life then.

The bargin was a Faustian one however. Fifty percent of the young scientists
of my generation were eventually employed in the development of weapons,
primarily missiles, rockets, satellites and nuclear weapons. But the fervor didn't
last. Any effort of that intensity probably can't be sustained. But I have no
doubt about the effect that it had on the nation or the quality of studentry
it produced.

Of the various sites I found speaking to the drop in SAT scores since 1963,
the one I consider most reasonable is this one:

   -- http://www.brook.edu/dybdocroot/comm/PolicyBriefs/pb023/pb23.htm

======================================

Student Performance

The SAT

Probably the measure of scholastic achievement best known to the public is
the SAT. Designed as an aptitude test, the SAT was supposed to be curriculum
free so that it would not dictate what was taught by any secondary school. SAT
scores reflect the performance of college-bound students, and not all students -
about 40 percent of high school graduates - take the test. The decline of SAT
scores began in the mid-1960s and hit bottom about 1980. Mathematics scores
dropped from a high of 502 in 1963 to a low of 466 in 1980 but by 1995 had
bounced back to a solid 482. Verbal scores reached a high of 478 in 1963, dropped
to the 420s by the late 1970s, and since then have not recovered.

Over the years researchers have debated the meaning of the decline in SAT
scores. Some have concluded that it is solely a reflection of the democratization
of American higher education meaning a growing number of minority,
low-income, and low-ability students in the test-taking pool. Certainly, changing
demographics contributed to the decline, yet something more was happening. Declines
occurred at the top of the ability distribution, especially on the verbal part
of the test. For example, in 1972 (the first year for which comparable data
were available), 116,585 students - 11.4 percent of test takers -scored higher
than 600 on the verbal test. By 1983 that number had fallen to only 66,292, or
6.9 percent of the total. Since then the proportion of high-scoring students
has remained around 7 percent. By contrast, in mathematics the decline at the
top was only temporary. In 1972, 17.9 percent of test takers scored over 600.
That proportion dipped as low as 14.4 percent in 1981, but by 1995 it reached
21 percent - the highest proportion of students ever to exceed 600 on the math
test.

There is no direct relationship between the movement of the scores and the
proportion of test takers from minority backgrounds. Mathematics scores began to
rebound even as the pool became more diverse. In 1980 scores reached their
lowest point when nearly 20 percent of test-takers were from minority
backgrounds. Today, nearly a third of the pool is from minority groups, yet math scores
are significantly higher than in 1980. Still, verbal scores, as mentioned
above, remain near their lowest point.

In 1996 the College Board recentered the SAT scores, setting new norms based
on the performance levels of the 1990s, thus establishing the poor verbal
performance of the past twenty-five years as a new norm. One important reason for
differential performance in mathematics and verbal areas is that for the past
fifteen years students have been taking more advanced courses in mathematics
but not in English. Moreover, the field called English is in disarray. It is
now called language arts and deemphasizes the importance of mastering standard
English. If the national organizations that represent English teachers believe
that proper grammar, spelling, syntax and other conventions of language are
unimportant (the national standards prepared by the National Council of Teachers
of English and the International Reading Association minimize the importance
of standard English), then it is not surprising that America's college-bound
students perform poorly on tests of standard English. These pedagogical trends,
combined with the omnipresence of visual media, do not encourage mastery of
print literacy.

=======================================


Ken also writes:

> So people in call centers and textile mills need to know about evolution?
> Please!  It's the jobs at the _low end_ that the U.S. is losing, not the
> jobs at the high end.

I'm unsure how to respond to this. It seems as if you suggest that certain
people are destined to dead-end jobs with no future, but it is precisely
educational opportunity that allows people to escape such a poverty of options. To
not understand evolutionary biology is only facet of a poorly educated
population, but it is nonetheless a major contributing factor determining who works in
the textile mills and who doesn't.

Wirt Atmar

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