In recent years, much has been written about the rise in mental health issues among America’s youth, reinforced by the 2021 public advisory from the U.S. Surgeon General who called this situation a “crisis.”
The concerns are valid, but too often the focus has been on treating the symptoms instead of addressing the root causes of this crisis.
To solve this problem, we must not only provide more counseling services to young people with mental health disorders, but also understand a key part of the social structure that gives rise to these disorders: the normative pressure cooker of public schooling.
Fostering this understanding is extremely important if we are to address the underlying causes of the youth mental health crisis and create transformative change in our public schools.
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Here’s the story: Over the past four decades, “A nation in danger,” a report released by the U.S. Department of Education in 1983, denouncing the dire state of public schools, served as the primary impetus for mobilizing the standards-based school reform movement.
The report uses striking language that has resonated in the education policy field since it was written, declaring in the first paragraph that “the educational foundations of our society are currently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a nation and a people.”
The primary evidence for this claim was a decline in test scores, and the standards-driven reform movement has been obsessed with test scores ever since.
The report, however, was based on a statistics-laden lie.
The problem is that the scores weren’t actually going down. A follow-up report commissioned by the Secretary of Energy in 1990 and written by scientists at Sandia National Laboratories, looked more closely at the data and found a glaring statistical error that negated the claim of declining scores.
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They looked at SAT scores from the years 1970 to 1989 and found that, yes, the overall average score had declined. But when they looked at individual subgroups of applicants, they found that scores for almost all subgroups — including those at the bottom and the top tier of income and achievement levels — actually remained stable or increased.
They found the same phenomenon for the results of the National Assessment of Educational Progress in the areas of science, mathematics and reading.
What could explain this apparent contradiction? Statisticians call it Simpson’s paradox. This happened because more students with lower academic skills were taking these tests and planning to enroll in college.
This lowered the average score while increasing the diversity of college applicants. The “rising tide of mediocrity” was actually a rising tide of opportunity.
Thus, the story of academic failure had no real basis. But the government never released the Sandia report or retracted “A Nation at Risk,” and the report’s harmful legacy endures to this day.
In fact, efforts in the standards-driven reform movement over the past few decades have relied on misleading reports, including the 2001 report. No Child Left Behind Actthe 2015 Every Student Succeeds ActTHE Common core standards and associated tests mandated by various state education departments. Many local school districts also use tests to demonstrate accountability to standards.
The standards-driven reform movement has played a key role in shaping the educational world our students now live in, one that is test-driven and creates so much stress in their lives.
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Test-based standards put pressure on teachers to teach to the tests in order to protect students and themselves from the stigma of academic failure. That means narrowing the curriculum to more intensively tested subjects – literacy, math and, to a lesser extent, science – and sidelining social studies, music, art and literature.
And even literacy has taken a huge hit. Literacy tests focus on reading at the paragraph level, so reading books is considered a waste of time, and reading is only about doing well enough to pass the test. All work and no play.
Moreover, despite the primary goal of the standards-driven reform movement—improving standardized test scores—our schools have failed to do so, as the evolutionary psychology professor convincingly explains. Pierre Graywho presented multiple references demonstrating this failure.
In conclusion, history shows that “A Nation in Danger” gave birth to the standards-driven reform movement that created a public school culture focused on teaching to the exam, preparing for the exam, and taking the exam – that is, “drill and kill.” This focus has discounted opportunities to learn for learning’s sake and pursue intrinsic interests rather than extrinsic rewards, which has negatively impacted students’ health and well-being.
By lifting the veil on the report’s misleading analysis and shining a light on its terribly harmful consequences, we hope to inspire educators and parents to call for the transformative change in our public schools that our young people deserve and need to thrive during these unprecedented times.
David Labaree is a sociologist, author, and professor emeritus at the Graduate School of Education at Stanford University. Deborah Malizia is a lawyer and mediator who studies mediation training as an approach to increasing the emotional well-being of lawyers and young people.
Contact the opinion editor at opinion@hechingerreport.org.
This story about standards-based testing was produced by The Hechinger reportan independent, nonprofit news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Register with Hechinger weekly newsletter.
The article OPINION: The pressure cooker of standards-driven public education is the real crisis we face appeared first on The Hechinger Report.
