Our students have just gotten another set of very poor grades. I'm talking about the reports on reading and writing skills among American school children issued this week by the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). These reports show no significant progress in raising the low reading levels of our students between 1971 and last year and no progress at all in raising their rotten writing levels.
By now, this kind of bad news from NAEP, which has been testing what our students know for the past 20 years, may hardly seem like news at all. But the new NAEP results offer us important evidence of the continuing failure of our schools, and we can't afford to ignore it.
First, though, there is one piece of good news. Black and Hispanic students continue to improve their reading achievement as the white majority virtually stands still. For example, between NAEP's 1971 reading assessment and this year's, black 17-year-olds narrowed the gap between them and white 17-year-olds from 53 points to 20 points.
But when black students and Hispanic students catch up to white students in reading and writing, we are still going to be a nation crippled by low achievement in both these areas. Consider this. The Writing Report Card, 1984-88 shows that only 64.4 percent of 17-year-olds can write an "adequate" letter of application for a job. By adequate, NAEP means something that might get the writer a job interview barely. Here's an example of the kind of letter nearly two-thirds of our eleventh graders would write: "I would like to work in a restaurant [sic], or a store. I have worked in restaurants before and it was fun. I also think that it would be fun to be a salesperson, because I'm good with people. I want a fun job, because I'm the type of person that does well in a certain thing, when I like what I'm doing and I'd like to do well in my job." How eager would you be to interview the kid who wrote this?
Students do even worse with persuasive writing. Only 26.9 percent of 17-year-olds could do an adequate job when asked to write a letter to their senator discussing whether or not to reduce funding for the space program. And a pitiful 21 percent were adequate at taking a stand on a community issue and refuting the opposing position.
As for NAEP' s top category, "elaborated" writing -- that is, writing that does a good job of informing or persuading (the kind your need for real college work or a good technical job) -- a tiny number of 17-yearolds have advanced that far: a mere 4.1 percent for job letters; 1 percent for the letter to the senator; and 0.3 percent for the community issue.
When it comes to reading, the numbers in The Reading Report Card, 1971-1988 look better, but analysis shows they're just as alarming. None of our students are illiterate, and most of them (98.9 percent) can answer questions that require them to generalize from a paragraph that is short and simple. But only 41. 8 New York Times-January 14, 1990 Page 1 of2 percent can read and comprehend at what NAEP calls the "adept" level. And in case the word "adept" gives you the impression of a high degree of skill, we're just talking about being able to read something like this article. Only 4.8 percent of 17-year-olds can function at NAEP's advanced level, which involves being able to use ideas found in complex pieces of writing, as opposed to simply being able to parrot them back. This level probably corresponds to the kind of reading students face when they go to a good college.
It's true that reading at some levels has improved since 1971. Then, only 39.2 percent of students could read at the adept level, in comparison with the current 41.8 percent. But at this rate, we'll be in the middle of the next century before we break 50 percent. In the meantime, we're losing ground with students reading at the advanced level: 6.6 percent could do so in 1971, in comparison with 4.8 percent in the 1988 assessment.
What does all this mean? And what must we do? It means that when most Americans graduate from high school, they have only the skills they will need if they plan to spend their lives working in a fast-food restaurant or pumping gas. They're not the well-educated, adaptable workforce we'll need to keep the US from declining into a third-rate economic power. And they're not citizens who can read, think, talk -- and safeguard our democracy.
What we must do is to realize that this is not just someone else's problem. It's not only a Chicago problem or a New York problem or a Mississippi problem. It's not only a problem of poor or minority children: If a mere 41 percent of our 17-year-olds can write a top-notch letter of application and 4.8 percent can read a piece of complicated prose, it's a problem that touches the majority of our students the ones from the privileged suburbs as well as the devastated inner cities.
But the evidence of 20 years suggests that as long as we have only national figures to look at, everybody will continue to think that their own kids are doing OK. Breaking the figures down by state won't help either; people in one part of the state will say, "We're doing a good job around here, but up north ... " No, the only way to shake people up and make them see that student achievement levels are everybody's problem is to have good assessments of every student in every school. Unless we have assessments that show people what children in their own communities know and are able to do, another 20 years might pass before we convince Americans that our schools need major help and restructuring.