Why High School 'Rigor' Is Often Just a Facade
Even though many students arrive unprepared to do high school-level work, educators are under pressure to keep up appearances
High school transcripts look more impressive than ever, but they often don’t reflect actual learning. One big reason that is generally overlooked: the elementary and middle school curriculum fails to equip kids with the knowledge they need to do high school level work.
A recently released federal study analyzed high school transcripts from a representative sample of high school graduates in the class of 2019. As compared to their peers ten years before, this group took tougher courses, earned more credits overall, and had higher GPAs—all of which sounds like real progress.
But when researchers linked grades in math and science courses to scores on standardized tests in those subjects given as part of the National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP, they found something disturbing. Science scores were flat and math scores actually declined, even for students taking more rigorous courses.
Researchers chose to focus on math and science because it’s easier to distinguish between basic and advanced courses in those areas, according to Linda Hamilton, a statistician at the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES). And because the content of those fields is relatively standardized, it can also be easier to measure actual achievement. But, as has been documented in other studies, the disconnect between grades and learning isn’t confined to math and science.
The obvious explanation is grade inflation—and mislabeled courses. “Algebra 1 is not Algebra 1 just because it’s labeled Algebra 1,” a federal official said when announcing the results of the high school transcript study. It’s easier to make a situation look good than to engineer actual improvement.
Concerns about equity may also be a factor. Some school districts, seeing a lack of minority representation in honors classes, have tried to solve the problem by declaring all classes “honors” or labeling nearly all students “gifted.” Teachers may feel that students who lack access to Wi Fi or tutors shouldn’t be penalized by getting lower grades.
In fact, some observers don’t see the discrepancy between grades and test scores as a problem. They argue that grades reflect factors tests can’t measure, like behavior and perseverance. Or they say grade inflation is actually a good thing, because it boosts students’ self-confidence.
But while “soft skills” like perseverance are important, they’re not a substitute for learning; students need both. And it’s great to boost students’ confidence, but only if you’re also giving them a solid basis for that confidence. Otherwise, they’re likely to discover at some point—in college, or on the job—that they lack the knowledge or skills that are expected, and their confidence will crumble.
This Potemkin village of “rigor” isn’t necessarily the fault of teachers or students. Fundamentally, it’s the result of a defective system. And it’s affecting students from all socioeconomic backgrounds.
The specific causes of students’ difficulties doing high school-level work vary with the subject. In math, students may not have an understanding of math concepts, or they may not have achieved automaticity with basics like multiplication tables—or both. With reading, they may never have learned to sound out words fluently, or they may lack the knowledge and vocabulary assumed by the texts in the curriculum—or both.
Many students don’t learn much history or science before high school, either because it simply isn’t taught, or because it isn’t taught in a way that will stick. All of these possible problems stem from a disconnect between teacher training and materials, on the one hand, and what science has discovered about how people learn, on the other.
The problem is most obvious in schools in high-poverty areas. Several years ago, news outlets reported that at one D.C. high school, nearly two thirds of graduates didn’t actually deserve diplomas; one teacher said he’d encountered more than one or two seniors who couldn’t read or write. More recently, a news report revealed that 77% of students at a Baltimore high school tested at an elementary reading level; the school has a 61% graduation rate.
But even at schools in affluent areas, students may lack so much knowledge of the world that they struggle to make sense of what they’re expected to learn. Amusing—if somewhat horrifying—videos have been made of college students who don’t know who won the Civil War, or adults who can’t name a single country when shown a map of the world. But it’s no laughing matter.
Recently, I got an arresting email from a high school English teacher named Mary Smith (yes, it’s a pseudonym) who had read my book The Knowledge Gap, about the lack of content in the elementary curriculum and its damaging effects in later years. The book resonated with her experience teaching at a high school in a low-income urban neighborhood, she wrote, but she assumed the “knowledge issue” was confined to such schools.
Then she switched to “a top-performing school in a wealthy district,” where she sees “a knowledge deficit so deep in my students, I feel something needs to be done about it immediately.” When I spoke to Smith, she told me she had started giving her students “knowledge tests” to gauge their preparedness to read books in the curriculum. Before teaching Elie Wiesel’s Holocaust memoir, Night, for example, she asked them to name five countries in Europe. Most couldn’t, and some weren’t sure where Europe was.
“Less than half of my students know where the Grand Canyon is,” Smith wrote in her email. “Not one of my freshmen could list three notable American authors. Only 20% could list 10 U.S. Presidents. It's no longer a gap. It's a hole. Nobody has knowledge.”
Smith said that other teachers at her current school see there’s a problem, but nobody thinks the cause is a lack of content in the curriculum before high school. In a small district, they’re loath to say anything that might be seen as blaming teachers at lower grade levels. Instead, they blame it on students’ addiction to their phones—an explanation Smith dismisses.
When it comes to giving out grades, Smith says teachers get little guidance, aside from an injunction not to give Fs to freshman. (Nevertheless, she says, she’s giving “a ton of Fs,” even though she allows kids to rewrite their assignments indefinitely.) Teachers don’t want to give “everyone in the class a C,” she says, because they worry it would reflect badly on their own performance as teachers.
Smith believes students are suffering from the system’s failure to provide them with access to knowledge. She says they’re reluctant to volunteer information in class because they’re aware of how much they don’t know and they “don’t want to look stupid.” She also suspects their lack of information about the world, and the emphasis on “higher-order thinking skills” over knowledge, feeds into the rampant anxiety she sees.
“This group of kids has grown up 'thinking deeply,'” she wrote in her email. “However, they have not been given the bricks of knowledge required to build the houses of thinking. Can you imagine being asked to build and build and build without any materials?”
As Smith says, something needs to be done about this “immediately.” But what? In the short term, high school teachers need to recognize that many of the problems they see stem from students’ lack of contextual knowledge, not abstract thinking “skills.” Like Smith, they can do their best to fill those gaps rather than handing out grades that don’t reflect actual learning—and explicit, carefully sequenced writing activities can help a lot.
But the most effective solution to this problem is to inject more content into the elementary curriculum—history, science, the arts—and to educate teachers at all grade levels about the importance of storing information in long-term memory. Fortunately, more and more schools are adopting knowledge-building curricula beginning in kindergarten.
That won’t help today’s high school students, who are being sent out into the world ill-equipped to succeed. But if we start changing the elementary curriculum now, maybe the NAEP high school transcript study of 2029 will reflect true increased achievement instead of helping to expose a regime of “rigor” that is little more than a façade.
This post originally appeared on Forbes.com.
"Ms. Smith" is quite right--I am dismayed with the level of world knowledge my students possess. Jay Leno used to do a segment called "Jaywalking", which highlighted this and was used as a comedic tool. Sadly, it is just the opposite---a tragedy.
So much to say about such a deeply disturbing topic.
This appears to be the result of a perfect storm comprising a dizzying array of factors. The educational industry from top to bottom would be the leading suspect. But add to this the advent of social media as it now is, morphed into the current mortification of laziness-inducing smorgasbord of instant gratification. So many things. Kids don't read. There is no good reason for this. There never was a good reason for this. There are too many bad reasons for this, to count.
As if reading escaped from the barn, got over the hedge, under the fence, around the wall, skipped town, got away, and otherwise became as abandoned as an orphan child on a summer Sunday found upon the steps of a 19th Century workhouse. Oops. Look what happened when we weren't looking.
Much to say about reading and just what foundational bedrock it is to a substantial and solid education, one that can withstand the rigors, the challenges and the tests of time (witness current events and pop revolutions posing as new and improved ways of being for humans).
But before all that. The basis of knowledge. I recall a different time. A time when at the tender age of 8, in the dead heat of summer, poised to embark upon the middle grades of elementary school (that would be grade four & five)) long, vigorous and extended pissing contests with my neighborhood friends about who knew what, and to what degree, and to what extent, and how much they could actually back that knowledge up, and how unassailable it appeared to be to our inquiring, curious and ever so slightly (then) sarcastic, cynical and emerging suspicious minds. Oh Yeah? we chorused.
The thing is, we knew stuff. The tallest building in the world. The highest mountain. The important dates of WW2. The largest animal in the world, and of course, the largest animal that had ever lived. And cascading thousands and thousands of other wee tasty tidbits such as this. Gathered hither and yon, as if we were the true hunter gatherers of valuable things to know.
And so it went, and kept on going. How to fix a bike. And then how to fix a car. As well as long drawn histories of heroic mythology, separated from what was actual and real.
And then eventually storming our way into cosmology itself, examining infinity, and razors' edges of philosophical pretzel twists without having a clue that this was in fact, what we were doing.
How did all of this get done? Easy. We found most of it in books. But more to the point, it stuck like glue. It stuck because of the time it took to look it up, read about it, comprehend what was read, think about it, and file it away.
There is a theory about compounded knowledge-crunching. Imagine thinking one's way through a thing, a problem, a conundrum, a complexity, a perplexity. And in so doing, calling up layers upon layers of previously stored away memory files, drawn up in an instant. All this in the time it takes to speak it out loud, or write it down. No google search.
And so comes that fluid, blessed, weaving, elegant, articulated dance with ideas. The more it's done, the more lovely is the choreography. The bolder and more confident, the more adept, the more strident and useful, the deeper it goes and steeper it climbs. This life of the mind. Weaving throughout a social life, a boxed set of acknowledged accomplishments that allow one into court proceedings, challenges, debate, call for clarification, struggle for understanding, and that voyage down through the ages of human artistry.
That's a lot to answer for. That's even more to leave out, or leave behind, or forget that once upon a time it mattered, and how, and why.
But oh, so most importantly, the bare beginnings of all this stuff can start so tenderly young. It is truly wonderful. So when this does not happen (as if we've forgotten how, or just what necessity called for it) we are handicapping children in a most awful way.
Children are born with insatiable curiosities for a reason. They have traveled (from wherever they've traveled from) and arrived alive, and quite naturally, like visiting aliens upon our planet and to this existence, are curious as to what makes all this tick. Why would they not be?
So to feed the flames of this fire and watch it burn is an incredible thing.
On the other hand, to quench it, stamp it out (or worse, capture its essence for selfish reasons) is a criminal thing.
Not too long ago, out of sheer and utter bored absence of motivation to do anything more productive, I decided to have some fun with an online quiz, which prompted me to name un-named countries in the world. Away we went in a whirl. The algorithm strove mightily, and threw everything but the kitchen sink at me, but after about 100 or so questions, finally gave up. I had drawn a perfect score.
So what, you say.
Well, there is that.
But the point is, when for whatever reason something or someone draws my attention to somewhere in the world where something or other is going on, I know where it is. Just that. And often I know a whole lot more about the place than just its mere location. Just because.
It so happens that I am not American. But I know very much more about American geography, history, climate, geology, culture, and a host of other things, than do many Americans. I don't make a big deal about this. It is neither their fault, nor my own. It is just that as a kid, America was my laboratory, my petri dish, my library, my documented data source, my fascination, and many other things. What made it all work was the set of tools I'd been handed to take it all apart and then put it all back together again. That is an education.
No-one ever really told me back then what my education was supposed to do, or be for. It was understood that it was up to me to figure that one out. Imagine. That kind of freedom.
That land of the free bit. I always got that. Like second nature. Like a thing born to. Like the spin of a bicycle wheel, like the swirl and crunch of ice skates, like a high dive off a low cliff into sun-sparkled water, like the dazzlement of being caught in the gaze of a hawk, like the big wheel of Milky Way's arm curling around us in a black sky, as if no more soothing lullabye could ever exist.
And so on.
I don't know if this point can be proven. Knowing and understanding things, literacy and all its consequences, a lifelong sentence of a sense of wonder, surprise and gratitude for all of it.
I could not ever quite understand myself, just what might be better than this.