How Can We Make American Students Smarter?

[ebarker]

Chinese proverb, “Teachers open the doors, but you must enter yourself.” -

The OP had a set of metrics, SAT, ACT, etc scores to kick off the discussion.

Something to consider is the testing methodology and population. For example, here is Georgia it is common to use the comparison of Georgia SAT scores to other states to beat up political opponents. Georgia ranks near the bottom in SAT rankings.

A few years ago the president of SAT sent a well known famous letter (at least in Georgia) to the Governor or Superintendent of Education addressing this issue. Compared to other states, a relatively large percentage of students take the SAT. In some states only the "best and brightest" take the SAT and other areas a much larger and general population take it. This is a form of self-selection that causes distortions in ranking tables, and makes Georgia look comparatively bad.

Why low scores. Socioeconomic ? yes Ability and attitude of teachers ? yes performance management issues at the school district level ? yes parental and home issues ? yes cultural attitudes toward learning ? yes ( STEM and non-stem ) racial and demographic cultural attitudes ? yes

Every summer I have to stop and think about (a) why I participate in FIRST ?and (b) what is a metric of an acceptable outcome ? But, here is a small partial answer.

From an aggregate viewpoint, our team has regularly taken students with decent enough to pretty good 'overall backgrounds' and given them an opportunity to become engaged in something important, and then go to the next step, make really good career choices going into college, make really good decisions about how they view their future. We help students move from a very foggy view of their future into something defined, structured, tangible, exciting.

Our students had a meeting / briefing with the President of Georgia Tech and we were presenting our 'conversion' numbers to him. According to our math, if we could get the same 'conversion' rate in every school in Georgia, Georgia Tech would have to grow by 40 % or more. That is a huge growth number. Nationally the same would hold true for all high schools / universities.

Even then we are talking about harvesting a student population of 1 or 2 % of graduating seniors annually. What about the other 98 %

Get the students really excited about something (doesn't have to be STEM), reach out to the parent, to the community and get them involved, and we can make progress. The student/parent/community has to be a partner in education, not a passive recipient.

In about 1950 the average educational level of U.S. adults was about 8th grade. College graduates were very small portion of the population until after WW2 and the GI bill. 'Book' learning and college didn't happen for masses until the 2nd half of the 20th century.

National dropout rate are declining, but still way too high.

Cultural attitudes toward 'book' learning and STEM are improving ever so slightly.

Fix the culture - that helps the school move from being a day care / social welfare agency to a place of learning.