‘We’ve turned the tide’ on education

Yearly state-by-state testing of reading and math achievement in grades three through eight, required under the federal No Child Left Behind Act, shows America's kids are doing better in elementary and middle school, but still show little improvement at the high school and college levels, according to Education Secretary Margaret Spellings.

Kids in elementary and middle school have made progress because that's where the focus has been, Ms. Spellings said Monday at an education conference sponsored by the Aspen Institute, a think tank.

No Child Left Behind -- signed into law in 2002 -- aims to guarantee every student can read and do math at his grade level by 2014.

Fourth- and eighth-graders are now doing better, though the numbers also reveal how far the schools still have to go. Last year, tests showed 33 percent of kids could read and do math at grade level, compared with 25 percent in 2000, according to Education Department data.

Minority students are doing better, too. The percentage of black and Hispanic students who could read and do math at grade level was 35 percent that of white children last year, the department found -- an improvement from 23 percent in 2000.

But the high schools have shown no such improvement, the secretary admitted. The high school graduation rate -- 72 percent in 2000 -- has improved only marginally, to 74 percent.

And the share of college-bound students found actually ready for college work is 42 percent, the same as in 2000.

There's a long way to go, obviously. A system that hands high school diplomas to 100 kids when 58 aren't ready to do college work -- a system where fewer than 15 percent of minority kids are even meeting today's dumbed-down "standards" -- needs a lot more than "a little improvement."

But the fact that the first improvements are being seen at the lower grade levels is, in itself, encouraging.

The problems in today's high schools -- kids unable to pass proficiency exams, kids graduating high school with what appear to be good grades but then turning out to be woefully unprepared to do basic college math and English when they arrive on campus three months later -- don't start in the ninth or 10th grade. Rather, these problems stem from a "perfect storm" that forms in the lower grades from the merger of social promotion; fuzzy, feel-good curricula more concerned with Amazonian species extinctions than with memorizing multiplication tables; and the success of the teacher unions in blocking merit pay for teachers who achieve real results along with quick "trips to the egress" for those who don't.

Identifying fourth-graders who can't shout out the answer to "seven times nine" without trying to count on their fingers -- as well as fifth- and sixth-graders who can't read fluently from adult texts with multisyllabic words -- isn't rocket science. A schoolteacher transported here from 1908 or even 1868 should be able to tell you in a day which kids are ready for seventh grade -- and the percentages, using her standards, would probably be alarming.

"We've turned the tide," Secretary Spellings told The Associated Press on Monday. "We've started. We've got a long way to go."

We'll see.