Standards, Information, and the Demand for student Achievement
نویسندگان
چکیده
ver the last eighteen years, changes in the American economy have dramatically increased the skills workers need to earn a middle-class living. However, almost half of American students now leave high school without the requisite skills. The mismatch between the growing skill demands of employers and the skills of graduating students creates a need for dramatic school improvement. Yet improvements have been slow in coming. The question is why? In this paper, we argue that a major obstacle to higher student achievement is a lack of good information comparing achievement levels to labor market requirements—the kind of information that can come through academic standards and assessments. Without this information, parents are unable to assess accurately the quality of their children's education. To appreciate a parent's situation, consider the precise nature of the nation's achievement problem. When the media report that U.S. schools are in serious need of improvement, parents reasonably infer that the stories refer to U.S. schools that have collapsed. While schools in some big cities have collapsed, this is not the general pattern. The average math and reading scores of white seventeen-year-old Americans are slightly higher today than they were in the early 1970s, and the average scores of black and Hispanic seventeen-year-olds are considerably higher (see table). 1 The nation has an achievement problem not because achievement levels have fallen but because job requirements are rising much faster than achievement levels have improved. If parents had the information to compare their children's achievement with the economy's requirements, they could see this problem and push schools for more rigorous curricula, just as they now push for anti-drug and Richard J. Murnane is a professor at the
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