Once again, the SAT scores are down. True, it was a decline of only two points, but they were down. There's a lot of disagreement about what SAT scores mean or whether they're important. But, let's face it. If the scores had gone up, we would have jumped for joy and taken credit. When the scores go down, we take the blame.
There was some good news. The scores of most minority groups continued to go up significantly, with the largest increases in 1988 being shown by blacks and Mexican Americans. Many more students took the test, and minority students represented nearly half the total of additional test takers-great developments. Still, even though whites were the only group that did not show substantial increases in SAT scores over the past decade, the gap between minority and majority scores remains very large ( except in the case of Asian Americans).
The SAT announcement came with cries of disappointment. Why aren't the scores up after all the reforms that have been instituted? Doesn't this mean that the reforms aren't working or that school people are subverting them?
Before we pronounce school reform a failure, we should remember the time frame we're talking about. A Nation at Risk was released only five years ago. The nation debated over it and other reports. It took most states two, three, or four years to develop and enact many of the reform recommendations into law-and these laws usually gave school districts some time to comply. This means that most changes in schools are only one, two or three years old. And that means the 17-year-olds who took the SAT this year were already 14, 15 or 16 years old when the reforms went into effect!
Can anyone really expect that making changes in the last one to three years of the 12-year education of a student would result in much of a difference? Why are usually sensible people talking as if they expected improvements over such a short period of time? (Of course, misplaced credit is as bad as misplaced blame. When there was a rise in the SAT scores between 1983-85, it was falsely attributed to the recent reforms. But it was most likely the result of something done 10-12 years before.)
Now, I'm not saying that as a result of the reforms we will see improved SAT scores 12 years from now. I don't know whether these reforms will work or whether they will improve scores. What I am saying is that we won't know whether these reforms will raise or lower scores until we see the scores of those students who will have spent most of their elementary and secondary school years in schools that have been subject to these reforms. And even then we might not know if it was the reform movement that was actually responsible for the test scores we were getting. We'd have to ask whether the reforms had made it from the statehouse to the schoolhouse, whether or not there were more or fewer eligible kids getting Head Start or Chapter 1 services, whether more or fewer children were poor, etc. Raising these questions is not shirking accountability, but part of the process of accounting for student outcomes. Most of all, we need a better perspective on change than the one we have. At a number of recent meetings, Owen B. Butler, retired Chairman of The Proctor & Gamble Company and Chairman of the Committee for Economic Development (CED), told us how he, one of the world's top business leaders, looked at the job of improving our schools.
"All of you know that within the last couple of weeks the Secretary of Education has reported to the President and the nation on how we are doing five years after A Nation at Risk. He reports a little bit of measurable progress in a few areas, and I think generally laments the lack of progress in other areas.
"I don't assess the situation at all the way the Secretary of Education does. I don't think his assessment is wrong; I just think it is woefully incomplete. Imagine the difficulty of what we at CED and others throughout the nation are trying to do. We are trying to change the way we go about educating our young. We are trying to change from a system in which teachers are regarded as almost assembly-line classroom production workers to a system in which teachers are free to innovate and experiment and use creativity to improve teaching. We are trying to deregulate, to move control of the schools from top-down to bottom-up. We are trying to provide better financing and attract better people into the profession. This requires a total change in 'corporate culture.'
"What kind of 'corporation' are you changing? If you define America's public school system in corporate terms, what we are trying to change is a corporation with about $160 billion annual revenue, which is organized into fifty totally autonomous divisions, which are, in turn, organized into 16,000 autonomous or semi-autonomous subsidiaries. Each one of those 16,000 subsidiaries has its own board of directors, its own chief officer, and its own labor agreements.
"When you look at the scope of that organization and its long history, then no effort to change that culture can be expected to produce results in five years. If you get anything started in five years, you are doing well.
"And we are getting things started. What is exciting and what we ought to be looking at now are the new programs that are in place .... We are starting to change that culture and move it in the right direction."
Butler isn't saying that all we need to do is to start change and wait patiently for the results. You have to keep working at it, make adjustments, throw out the bad, refine the good and keep your eyes on the goals. But one of the surest ways to derail change is to be fixated on short-term results and to draw hasty conclusions about their meaning. That's part of what got American business into trouble, and that's what's getting our reform movement into trouble. Business is learning its lesson about the importance of a longterm vision. If we're to change our schools, so should we.
Mr. Butler's remarks appear in "CED AND EDUCATION: National Impact and Next Steps," A CED Symposium, from CED.