Education and the Military

The big news this past week has been the Education Trust report that twenty percent of young recruits fail the ASVAB. This is presented as yet more proof positive of the abject failure of American public education. It’s like Chicken Little; “Our schools are failing! Our schools are failing!” The story keeps growing on the Internet. The last I read was that eighty percent fail. The Reformists (you know, the Politicians, Pundits, Polemicists, and too many Professors, Who of All People Should Know Better) are having a field day with this one.

However,  a couple of things about this report bother me.

For one, it conveniently overlooks some things. Most important, American schools vary greatly in quality from excellent to abysmal, but the Reformists love to lump them together, to make it look like American schools in general are performing badly. Often, worst cases are presented as the norm. American Education is not in crisis, but we have too many schools that have been allowed, often cynically, to languish in chronic crisis. The worst of these schools are little more than warehouses for the children of parents who are already disadvantaged. The student who comes out of such a school with a good education does it in spite of the system, not because of it. They are most likely to be found in low income areas in declining urban areas and isolated rural areas. To such schools attention must be paid. That they are allowed to exist is a national scandal. But the Reform movement as currently conceived will do little to help them. The point here is that they bring down the aggregate and can be used to make the case that American schools in general are performing poorly.

This is less than honest reporting, and the various Reformists have various motives for promoting the idea that American education as an institution is in bad shape and must be re-configured or eliminated. Some of these motives may sincerely intend to improve education, but I am convinced that most are cynically self-serving and/or ideology-driven. No one ever lost money or political traction bashing public schools and public school teachers.

Also, I am curious about the test itself. Is it criterion-referenced or norm-referenced? Tests in general are almost necessarily one or the other. Isn’t this a niggling detail? How does it matter?

If it is norm-referenced, as I suspect is the case, the bottom quartile could simply be the back-slope of the bell-curve. The test may have been designed to identify and eliminate the bottom quartile, to screen out the weakest candidates. If this is the case, the test is simply doing what it is supposed to do, and all the alarmist reporting is much ado about nothing much.

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