Evaluating U.S. Education

Press, Volume CVII, Issue 31384, 1 June 1967, Page 10

Evaluating U.S. Education

A nation-wide project to evaluate United States elementary and secondary education was bound to arouse controversy—and it has. This has not deterred the Carnegie Corporation, a private philanthropic foundation, from embarking on a project which will take several years and cost up to five million dollars. Dr. Clark Kerr, former University of California president, will head the study. A trial run for this vast project is under way: testing, examination questions, and approaches to about 40.000 school children and adults around the country. The final versions of the examinations are at least a year away. They will involve about a million participants representing various segments of the population.

The final testing will sample four age groups: children aged 9, 13 and 17, and young adults between 29 and 35. The sample will be broken down to show school dropouts, geographic region, type of school (public, private, parochial), sex, family income, location of home (metropolis, small city, suburb, rural). This ambitious attempt to find out how well United States schools are doing their job hos already won some

widely scattered but vociferous opposition. Some critics fear the results will lead to unfair comparisons; others think it may encourage outsiders to attempt to dictate what is taught in the classrooms. Some feel students are already subjected to too much learning. The New Mexico state superintendent of public instruction says he will try to bar the tests from New Mexico schoo':.

But the Carnegie Corporation has plenty of support, including that of many school officials. “The needs in education now are so great it’s worth a risk to try to attain a better product,” says Detroit Superintendent of Schools (Mr Norman Drachler).

New York State Commissioner of Education (Mr James Allen) agrees. With the nation’s increasingly mobile population, “education is no longer a purely local matter,” he says, adding that people “will make judgments about their schools anyway, and the assessment can’t help but allow them to make better judgments.” Federal officials such as the United States Commissioner of Education (Mr Harold Howe) have spoken in favour of the project. The Carnegie Corporation originally conceived the project in 1964 with encouragement from the

United States Office of Education and Mr Francis Keppel, then Commissioner of Education.

The assessment will cover art, music, science, social science, reading, writing; literature, mathematics, vocational education and citizenship. The final versions of the test in all subjects would take about 20 hours, so no single participant will be tested in all fields. The results will provide a composite picture. Elaborate preparations are being made in planning the test itself, which will guage writing and problem-solving ability in addition to containing the more usual short answer and multiple choice questions commonly used for standardised achievement tests. Panels of various experts—in music, for example, including a composer as well as teachers—are deciding test objectives and framing questions; panels of non-experts, including mostly parents, are helping to evaluate them. Procedures are being developed for uniform reporting of data. The massive testing will begin in 1968. When the final results of the assessment are published, they are expected to inspire nationwide debate on the aims, methods and content of United States education.