The US education system comes in for a lot of trash talk in the media and by politicians and business people. This has seeped into the public consciousness and it is now taken as a given that the US educational system is in dire straits and needs radical changes in order to be rescued from disaster. The 2011 book Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses by Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa is another such book that pointed the finger at US college education as failing its students. Using a single measure of achievement, it compared a cohort of students from the first semester to the fourth semester and claimed to find negligible gains in learning, hence the title of their book.
This is hardly convincing on its face. The so-called ‘sophomore slump’ is a well-documented phenomenon (See the 1994 book Developing Reflective Judgment by Patricia King and Karen Strohm Kitchener) and by using this time period and ignoring the rise thereafter in the third and fourth years, the authors were pretty much assured of arriving at their conclusion. Yet from this limited data they drew some sweeping conclusions of the state of American higher education as a whole and since those conclusions were bad, they were seized on by the media and highly publicized.
I read the book and was really disappointed at how it arrived at its conclusions. Alexander Astin is a highly respected educator who has systematically studied the state of US higher education for decades and his review points out serious flaws in the study’s methodology and why we should not take its conclusions seriously.
Sweeping condemnations of the US education system are based on gross distortions of the facts. So why the propagation of the idea of widespread failure?
I have long felt (and argued so in my 2005 book The Achievement Gap in US Education: Canaries in the Mine) that this denigration is part of a systematic campaign to discredit the public school system in order to destroy it and replace it with government-supported private schools. The systemic starving of public school budgets, the abuse directed at teachers and the teaching profession, the explosion of standardized testing, non-stop ranking of schools and teachers, ‘No Child Left Behind’, etc. all seemed designed to convince parents that the schools their children go to are awful and they should panic and look elsewhere. This has enabled people like Bill and Melinda Gates with their wealthy foundation to force through changes in the system that serve this ideological agenda even though they have no educational credentials.
The reality is quite mixed. The US public education system is not great and could be better but it has a lot of strengths. It has some schools and school districts that are floundering and others that are doing well. It is by no means a basket case and thinking of it that way is not helpful.