Last week the College Boards reported that SAT scores went down to the lowest since 1995. The average combined reading and math scores slipped from 508 to 497 in six years. The reason? The College Board issued an explanation that the diversity of the students who are taking the exams is wider than ever. Thus, the scores will be lower.
We can take that at face value or we can do dig deeper and be faced with having to deal with the ugly fact that minorities are getting the short shrift when it comes to quality public school education. (Note: I do not see the phrase quality public school education as an oxymoron. There are good public schools and there are inferior private ones.) Tax money is only part of the explanation. A lot of it is what the parents expose their child(ren) to and demand when it comes to learning. Case in point: my son is four, the same age as one of his best friends. I pulled my son out of a local Chabad-run school because I thought the "teachers" were not challenging him academically. My son's friend's mother thought children don't have to know much at that age, let alone younger, kept him there, and enrolled him in another religious preschool when she moved to North Carolina. My son is way ahead of hers academically, thanks to my being proactive and sending him to a NAYEC-accredited school. For months, he's been able to count to 100 and backward in English and from zero to 10 in Hebrew. My son has been able to spell all the months of the since the age of three and a half. Her son can't. It's not that he's stupid. It's what he was taught (or not) and his parents' choice of schools. I met a seven-year-old privately educated girl who couldn't spell as well as my son could at half her age.
But I digress. Recently I blogged about the varying philosophies of how math should be taught. Innumeracy has been a huge issue in this country, along with lack of adequate training in science. The irony is that kids are natural scientists. Watch a baby or toddler in a high chair discover gravity as he or she tips over a bowl of cereal. Of course, parents carry on and eventually the kid becomes intimidated.
Not being a professional educator, I don't know what the answers are, except that there is no easy fix, no one size fits all solutions. Forget trying the politicians to do the right thing about more equitable distribution of tax dollars to the various schools. But what about standardizing curriculum across every school in the United States and, hopefully, keep that standard high? Each state has different guidelines about what children need to know by the time they reach kindergarten. I know that at warehouse clubs, one can buyfor under $10.00 a big, fat workbook with various levels of the curriculum that is suitable for children. Trust me when I say that isn't the only answer. My son pulls the book away and doens't obey me when I tell him to follow the instructions about tracing particular letters in the color that matches the sample on the page. But I tried to use it as a complement to what he was learning in school. Maybe other parents have more compliant children. The Stamford public schools introduce foreign languages in the seventh grade (so late!) and use the Rosetta Stone CDs, which can be bought for under $800.00. The point is that the parent must be interested enough to learn what his child is capable of learning and when. The benefit of "pushing" children when they're younger is that it is easier to understand how they learn. Some children learn more with visual or tactile aids. In our case, we also knew that our son does not have dyslexia or any other noticeable learning disability.If he did, it might be easier to get intervention now than when he is older and will also have to deal with issues of self-confidence and self-esteem.
There is a lot of controversy about how much to push children. In all honesty, I don't think kids are pushed enough to learn. I don't mean that every American child should be forced to put in as many hours studying as their European or Asian counterparts do. Sports, dance lessons, etc. take a lot of priority. It's extremely hard for single parents to offer the same level of care and attention as two parents in the same household. And for parents who work at highly demanding jobs (many of which don't even pay very well), the stress of and gaps in coordinating daycare, school and aftershool programs are tough, even when there is a nanny or grandparent to help. That said, keep in mind that American students have lagged big time. During the 1990s, one of the early partners of Fairfield Greenwich Group got a divorce from his Swedish-born wife. She took their two children to Sweden and found that despite the finest schools in Greenwich, her children's Swedish co-horts were two years advanced academically.
As I said, I don't know what the answers are. I'm beating myself up for not doing more about my son's education, and I know I'm doing more than other parents are. He is learning at school, at the various children's musuems we take him to and the educational television shows and videos we watch with him. And, yes, he is still having fun, as any four-year-old should.
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