Student Achievement: What Is The Problem?
Five different views of the _student achievement_ problem_each suggesting a different course of action.
Recent National Assessment of Educational Progress scores confirm what most people believe: Despite enormous expense and effort, the country has not yet solved its student-achievement problem. There is less agreement, however, about the real problem or its true symptoms. In fact, the symptom on which our current strategies are based—a faltering economy attributed to poor training in science and math—was last seen a decade ago. Given this circumstance, it is hardly surprising that our strategies are not working.
To solve the country's educational problems, we need to employ a basic problem- solving framework: Identify the symptoms, seek their underlying causes, develop strategies that directly address these causes, monitor progress, and modify our strategies if the symptoms don't improve or others appear. This may sound fundamental, but current practice is to lump a range of symptoms into a single "problem," and to address this problem with one main improvement strategy—high standards and rigorous testing. As results have disappointed, state and national leaders have been unwilling to re-examine the symptoms or review their methods. Instead, when rigorous testing has not led to higher scores, teachers and students are accused of not taking the test seriously. And the most often proposed solution is more rigorous testing. Little attention is paid to the possibility that our strategies may not address the real issues. Perhaps this explains why so much effort and money have yielded so few improvements.
Defining problems based on symptoms and causes is still the best starting point for solving those problems. What follows are five different views of the "student achievement" problem. They are all connected, but each problem definition suggests a...
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