Schoolchildren Left Behind

You think you hate your job? Imagine working for the National Assessment of Educational Progress at the U.S. Department of Education, which releases periodic reports on the state of education in America.

Another day, another statistic — and not just any statistic but another sad, despair-inducing statistic, the kind that, piled one on top of another, might make you double-check whether you still qualify for that last slot on the roadkill detail at the highway department.

Last week the NAEP released a pair of reports that at first blush seemed not nearly as sad and despair-inducing as usual. They suggested that the nationwide mania for higher standards in education, begun in 1983 with the famous blue-ribbon study "A Nation at Risk," might at last be showing positive effects among high school seniors.

Almost 2.7 million people graduated from high school in 2005. During their high school careers, according to the NAEP, they received on average 360 more hours of classroom instruction than their counterparts in 1990.

Not only that, but the curricula they completed involved a more challenging course load. In 1990, only 31% of seniors took advanced courses in algebra II or physics; by 2005, the percentage was 51%.

And best of all, the class of 2005 had a significantly higher cumulative gradepoint average than that of the class of 1990 — 2.98, a solid B, versus 2.68, a wobbly C-plus, where a four is the maximum grade.

These findings would be wonderful news — more studying, tougher coursework, and higher grades all at once — were it not for a more sobering fact that the NAEP draws our attention to: There has been no improvement in the students' ability to read, write, or do math.

Scores on standardized reading tests, in fact, show an actual decline since 1992, to 285 from 290 by NAEP's assessment. A similar decline has been evident in knowledge of science. Math achievement of high school students has been harder to compare from year to year, but scores have been little changed at best.

It turns out that "A Nation at Risk" did spur a revolution in American high schools. It just wasn't the kind of revolution we might have expected. In place of reform at the high school level, we got an elaborate confidence game — an extended period of grade inflation to disguise the failures of schools, parents, teachers, and students themselves.

There has already been evidence that grades were being artificially pumped up.

Even as GPAs have continued to rise, one out of every four college freshmen has to take remedial courses in basics like reading and math; in two-year colleges, more than 40% of first-year students need remedial work. A study last year by ACT, a nonprofit testing firm, found that only 51% of test-taking high school seniors were prepared to read at the college level.

In fact, the news is even worse than NAEP's comparison of rising GPAs with declining achievement would suggest.

Kevin Carey, research and policy manager for Education Sector, an independent research organization in Washington, points out that only 75 out of every 100 kids who enter ninth-grade graduate four years later.

"The achievement scores at 12th grade would be a lot lower, except that they don't include the 25 percent of kids who drop out and never even get that far," he says. "It actually paints a rosier picture of how well kids are being prepared for 12th grade than it would otherwise."

For Mr. Carey, the lesson of last week's report is: "Algebra is not algebra is not algebra" — by which he means that simply labeling a course "advanced" or "college prep" tells us next to nothing about the demands being made on the students.

The NAEP report comes just as Congress is set to consider reauthorizing President Bush's landmark education reform, the No Child Left Behind Act. The law, which ties education funding to testable achievement among grade-school and middle-school students, has left high schools mostly untouched.

Already proposals are being made to rope 12th-graders into the No Child law's elaborate system of federally mandated tests, which means that high schools would finally be held accountable for graduating poorly educated seniors. The most recent of these proposals, by the Aspen Institute, received a favorable response from reformers, including within the administration.

Indeed, the administration has tried before to extend the No Child law to upper grades, with no luck. Stopping it was the usual anti-reform stonewall of teachers' unions and congressional Democrats, along with an astonishingly powerful vocational-school lobby.

Those voc-ed lobbyists worry that achievement tests required by the No Child law would push high schools to emphasize college preparation at the expense of vocational education. And they're right to worry: Vocational training gets a smaller share of education funding than ever before, and the trend is accelerating.

In the meantime, this unhappy status quo leaves reformers with little to work with other than the power of publicity, hectoring, and persuasion. Threats might work, too. Here's one: Tell kids they better study harder or they'll end up with a depressing job — like working for the NAEP, compiling statistics about the next generation of kids like them.

Mr. Ferguson is a columnist for Bloomberg News.