Posted on by Californiacontrarian

Help !

I watched a lot of the World Series that just finished, and it was exciting. The camera angles, the replays, and the statistics made the games all the more interesting. At some point during the Series, it dawned on me that perhaps baseball is the only sport in which being successful 1/3 of the time is considered an outstanding achievement. For those of you who are not baseball fans – if a player gets a base-hit one time out of three at bats, his batting average is .333, and he is considered to be very proficient at hitting. However, in football, if a quarterback completes only 1/3 of his passes, he is judged as a sub-proficient quarterback, and in all likelihood will soon be on the bench. Likewise, if a tennis player gets only 1/3 of his serves in, he needs a lot of work on his serve to be judged as proficient. If no improvement, he will not be winning much of anything!  Could it be that batting average in our national past-time, baseball, has clouded our judgement in other areas, such that being proficient 33% of the time is okay? This long lead-in is a segue to the recent results of the “Nation’s Report Card,” which are the results from the National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP). The results assess the progress of students nationwide every two years. This years results were obtained from testing mostly about 300,000 fourth-graders and just short of 300,000 eight-graders, mainly in math and reading. The students that were tested attended both public and Catholic schools nationwide. Children from both large city public schools as well as smaller urban and rural area schools were included in the test group. The results nationwide as well as the results for various sub-groups were okay if you compare them to baseball batting averages, but woeful if you compare them to quarterbacks’ completion percentages. For math, as a nation, the percent of students who were “at or above NAEP proficient“ was 34% in eighth-grade. For eighth-grade reading the percent that tested “at or above NAEP proficient” was also 34%! Over the past decade there has been no significant improvement in either math or reading performance, and in fact, nationwide the average eighth-grade reading score has declined three points compared to two years ago!  Help!

Even more depressing, the percent NAEP-“at or above proficient” for twelfth-graders nationwide decreased to 25% in math! ( the twelfth-grade reading proficiency was about the same as in eighth-grade at 37%.). Help! Even more astonishing, the “at or above proficiency” for eighth-grade students was 18% for US History (12% for twelfth-grade) and 23% for eighth grade Civics (24% for twelfth-grade). In a few years these uneducated students will be eligible to vote! Yikes! HELP!
Is this the best we can do as a nation? 
Many years ago, the Beatles sang, “Help, we need somebody. Help, not just anybody.”
Perhaps, we should pay more attention to these Beatles lyrics, and go back to the drawing-board for elementary & middle school education. (Start over from scratch?) “At or above proficient” with regards to the education of our children should not be judged the same as baseball batting averages!

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