Quality is in the Eye of the Beholder

Abstract

With educational reform a top political priority today, it seems time to stop and evaluate evaluations that almost daily assult our consciousness. Is education tottering on brink of failure and chaos? Is special education being mainstreamed into obsolescene? And what exactly constitutes quality? Simple, you say, just check present product against industry standards and see how it measures up. Thus, we can reach consensus on well-built car or best compact disc recording of Mahler's First Symphony. But education is not a product and children are not so readily quantifiable. How do you establish quality standards for something so elusive as a child's education? Still attempts are made all time to define such standards and results usually put American education near bottom. U.S. students consistently score poorly when compared to their Japanese and European counterparts. Yet careful investigation reveals that in many other countries, students being tested are educational elite. In some European countries, language tests are given in is spoken only by elite minority. And in Japan, school year is 243 days long; most students experience incredible academic pressure from preschool on; their mothers are private tutors and overseers of homework; and still many do not make it successfully to college or once there fall apart from pressure. Japanese educators are beginning to study American and Canadian education for their ability to foster creativity and originality. Now a check on SATs and their declining scores over past few decades. A recent study by Sandia National Laboratories of Albuquerque, New Mexico, points out that the decline arises from fact that more students in bottom half of class are taking SAT today than in years past.... Additionally, every ethnic group taking test is performing better today than it did 15 years ago. (Perspectives on Education in American, Annotated Briefing - Third Draft, May 1991) Other standardized tests show similar results. Performance on National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) has remained steady or improved since NAEP's inception in 1969, with single exception of scores of 17-year-olds in science. Even these science assessments have shown improvement from 1982 to 1990. Drop-out rates constitute another area where careful analysis reveals that U.S. drop-out rates are not quite so dreadful as many politicians would have us believe. U.S. Department of Education statistics indicate that on-time graduation rate has been constant for over 2 decades at about 75%. Factor in night-schools, G.E.D., and other reentry opportunities, and rate climbs to over 85% for young adults. Compare this to 1910 graduation rate of 10%! Yet it was also in 1910 that John Dewey wrote the intellectual side of education consists in formulation of wide-awake, careful, thorough habits of thinking.... There is no single and uniform power of thought, but a multitude of different (How We Think). These words were applied to those elite 10% then, now they apply to all students, in all facets of education, including of course special education. As numbers of students served in special education has steadily increased, much has been made, and I fear even more will be made, of increasing costs of these services. Accounting methods can interpret data in widely differing ways but many will report that 25 to 30% of education funds are beign spent on 10% of school population that receive special education services. …