U.S. students learning less, reports say

U.S. high-school students are taking tougher classes, receiving better grades and, apparently, learning less than their counterparts of 15 years ago.

Those were the discouraging implications of two reports issued Thursday by the federal Education Department, assessing the performance of students in both public and private schools. Together, the reports raised sobering questions about the past two decades of educational reform, including whether the movement to raise school standards has amounted to much more than window dressing.

"I think we're sleeping through a crisis," said David Driscoll, the Massachusetts commissioner of education, during a Washington news conference convened by the Education Department. He called the study results "stunning."

Bruce Fuller, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, said he found the results "dismal." The reports summarized two major government efforts to measure the performance of high-school seniors as part of the National Assessment of Educational Progress. One was a standardized test of 12th graders conducted in 2005. The other was an analysis of the transcripts of students who graduated from high school that year.

The transcript study showed that, compared with students in similar studies going back to 1990, the 2005 graduates had racked up more high-school credits, had taken more college preparatory classes and had higher grade-point averages. The average GPA rose from 2.68 in 1990 to 2.98 in 2005.

However, the standardized test results showed that 12th-grade reading scores have generally been dropping since 1992, casting doubt on what students are learning in those college-prep classes.

Math scores posed a different sort of mystery, because the Education Department switched to a new test in 2005 that wasn't directly comparable to those used before. Still, the results of the new test didn't inspire confidence: Fewer than one-quarter of the 12th graders tested scored in the "proficient" range.

The reports also showed the gap separating white and black, and white and Hispanic students, has barely budged since the early 1990s. And while the results were not broken down by state, a broad regional breakdown showed the West and Southeast lagged well behind the Midwest and, to a lesser extent, the Northeast.

The reading and math test was given to 21,000 high-school seniors at 900 U.S. schools, including 200 private schools. The transcript study was based on 26,000 transcripts from 720 schools, 80 of them private. The reports did not give separate results for public vs. private schools.

"What we see out of these results is a very disturbing picture of the knowledge and skills of the young people about to go into college and the workforce," said Daria Hall, assistant director of the Education Trust, a Washington-based nonprofit dedicated to improving education, especially for poor and minority students.

Among other things, Hall said the transcript study provided clear evidence of grade inflation, as well as "course inflation" — offering high-level courses that have "the right names" but a dumbed-down curriculum.