Sunday, March 09, 2008
News, In this Issue...

“Is Kofi Annan a drink?”

What you don’t know is hurting your country (and amusing our readers)

“Is Kofi Annan a drink?”

Individuals quizzed by Sunday Paper, clockwise from top left: Richard Newson, Elton Rawls, Leo Markidis, Seamus Sullivan, John Roque, Renee Conreras, Mark Cameron, Benjamin Davis, and Jennifer Nelson.
CREDIT: Stephanie Ramage

How smart are you?

1. Is Kofi Annan a coffee drink? Do you know who Kofi Annan is?
2. Who is the head of al-Qaida?
3. Name a country that begins with the letter “U.”
4. With whom was the U.S. at war during WWII?
5. About what year did Christopher Columbus discover the New World?
6. What currency is used in the United Kingdom?
7. Who is Tony Blair?
8. What is the dominant religion in Israel?
9. Do you think Americans are generally stupid or smart?

(See answers at bottom of page)

By Stephanie Ramage and Josh Clark

Not long ago, the Australian Broadcast Corp. show “The Chaser”—a news parody program along the lines of “The Colbert Report” or Bill Maher, but much funnier—took to the streets of America to find out just how stupid we Yanks really are.

The show’s resulting video shows Americans making arses of themselves as they desperately try to answer questions like, “What kind of currency is used in England?,” “Is Kofi Annan a drink?” and “What is al-Qaida?”

Their answers? “Queen Elizabeth’s money,” “Yes, it’s a coffee drink,” and “It’s a suicide group in Israel and its president is Yassir Arafat. Yeah, everybody knows that.”

If only it were so.

Last week, The Sunday Paper took to the streets of Atlanta to ask some basic history and current events questions based on those “The Chaser” used (see “How Smart Are You?” on this page for the full list). And we got some surprising answers.

Toni Sulmers, a third grade teacher in Decatur, didn’t know who the head of al-Qaida is, and she thought Russia was one of the countries the United States fought against in World War II (but she got the other answers right). Jason Biggs, a 35 year-old audio-visual technician, did about as well. He didn’t know who Kofi Annan was, but he did know that Annan wasn’t a coffee drink, and he thought the dominant religion in Israel is either Islam or Christianity. He was a little iffy on whether the United Kingdom uses the euro or the pound (it’s the pound), but he aced the others.

Garrett Range, a 26-year-old baker in Decatur, named “Yugoslavia. Is that a country?” as a country that beings with the letter “U,” and thought that Christopher Columbus discovered the New World in 1690, and answered No. 8 with: “I wanna say Muslim.”

Yeah, you and a lot of Muslims, Garrett. (After learning it was Judaism, he said, “I knew it was Judaism. My girlfriend is gonna kill me.”)

A lot of people knew that Tony Blair is British, though they weren’t sure what he’d done that was such a big deal. Bennie Foley, a 51-year-old pre-school teacher, gave Blair a new gig that he’d probably relish: Speaker of the House.

But the most surprising thing we learned was that Atlantans actually are smarter than you’d think. We buttonholed about 20 people from East Atlanta to Midtown, and they overwhelmingly answered all the questions in our unscientific poll correctly. The people pictured on our cover, for example, were asked an abbreviated version of the questions—only five—and answered them all correctly.

So the Aussies—people who use the same term, “sheila,” to refer to both female kangaroos and female humans—weren’t entirely fair to us. National sexual preferences aside, however, they are onto something: In our local sample, we didn’t talk to high school students. If we had, it’s likely the results would have been very different.

 

Whaddaya know?

In late February, the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank that counts Newt Gingrich and John R. Bolton among its senior fellows, released a study of 17-year-olds in conjunction with CommonCore.org that reveals:

• Nearly a quarter of the 1,200 teens surveyed could not identify Adolf Hitler;
• 10 percent think he was a munitions manufacturer
• Fewer than half can place the Civil War in the correct half-century
• Only 45 percent can identify Oedipus
• A third do not know that the Bill of Rights guarantees freedom of speech and religion
• Forty-four percent think that “The Scarlet Letter” was either about a witch trial or a piece of correspondence

 

To understand how we’ve come to this sad state of affairs, a little public school history is in order. Twenty-five years ago, the federal government, under President Ronald Reagan, released a report titled “A Nation at Risk.” The report called for “excellence in education” and specifically proposed that all high school students seeking a diploma should study at least four years of English, three years of mathematics, three years of science, three years of social studies and one-half year of computer science. In addition, those who were college-bound were urged to study at least two years of a foreign language.

Some state school systems took up the challenge and performed sumptuously. Massachusetts and California, according to Common Core, did especially well, devising solid curricula that called for the study of specific authors and works of literature and history.

Then, write Antonia Cortese and Dianne Ravitch, trustees of Common Core, “a decade later, the excellence movement was overshadowed by Congressional demands for accountability in Title I legislation, beginning in 1994. Congress required all states to create standards and testing, but only in reading and mathematics. Almost overnight the emphasis in school reform changed from ‘excellence’ to ‘basic skills.’ Without a funeral, and with no public notice, the excellence movement quietly faded away, and in its place rose the test-based accountability movement tied only to basic skills. When No Child Left Behind was enacted in the fall of 2001 and signed into law by President George W. Bush in January 2002, the excellence movement was finally interred and forgotten.”

Focusing on the basic skills included on national tests, or “teaching to the test,” as it’s called, would soon become commonplace. Kelly McCutchen, executive vice president of the Georgia Public Policy Foundation, a think tank devoted to studying how tax dollars are aligned with policy, says the emphasis on the basics isn’t all bad. He serves on the board of a charter school where, he says, it is often the case that students who enroll for ninth grade are reading on a fourth grade level—and that’s one reason why their parents have opted out of public schools.

“It doesn’t matter what you do in history or literature if the kids can’t read,” he says.

That was the general consensus back in 1994, when former Georgia congressman Newt Gingrich was Speaker of the House (not Tony Blair) and supported the Title I legislation mentioned by Common Core. Gingrich’s spokesman, Rick Tyler, says the idea behind H.R. 1804, Section 102, was to establish accountability in teaching basic skills like math and reading. The fact that teachers interpreted that as way of skimping on teaching history and literature, he says, wasn’t Congress’ fault and certainly wasn’t Gingrich’s fault. He also points out that although Common Core’s report was written by Gingrich’s fellow American Enterprise Institute scholar Frederick Hess, Common Core itself is an organization made up of “teachers and teachers’ union people. The report is an indictment of themselves.

“They were supposed to teach basic skills—math and reading—and we have to measure that somehow. We didn’t tell them to teach to the test. We didn’t say stop teaching history and literature,” says Tyler. “The teachers decided to teach to the test.”

But H.R. 1804, that predecessor of the present No Child Left Behind Act, did tie performance to funding. It didn’t take funding away from schools that didn’t perform well on tests, but it offered more funding to schools that did perform well. Not Congress’ problem, says Tyler; not then and not now. Teachers, he says, like to talk about funding, but more money isn’t the answer.

“Detroit public school teachers earn more on average than public school teachers anywhere else in America, but one out of every five students in Detroit fails to graduate on time,” he says. “Yet these teachers are the highest paid in the country.”

Hess, the author of the Common Core report, says “in Gingrich’s defense” that Gingrich and the other Republicans were actually “pushing back against” even narrower basic skills accountability requirements that would have been put in place by a Democratic measure. As an alternative, they cobbled together H.R. 1804.

So why was Congress even taking up the matter? In answer to widespread concerns that American students were lagging behind the rest of the world in math, science and reading skills. That swinging back and forth between encouraging the basics and encouraging a more classic type of education that leans heavy on history, literature and foreign languages, he says, has become a hallmark of American education since at least the 1950s, creating a lot of chaos and controversy and distracting from the job of education.

“We need to get ourselves into a pattern where we are not pinwheeling from one end to the other,” he says.

But there’s a reason that we do it. First of all, as Americans, we believe everyone has a right to an education. Second, we’re competitive. So we vacillate between giving everyone the basics and trying to give the achievers a little bit more than that. The problem is, we aren’t the same country we were when we set up our ideal of public education, and that ideal has become increasingly complicated.

Consider our sheer size. According to the U.S. Department of Education, there are almost 50 million students enrolled in grades K-12 in America’s public schools. It would be easier to educate them if, as was the case 60 years ago, students who were less academically inclined were allowed to drop out and go to work in a trade or at a factory. These days though, schools are supposed to keep everyone in class until the bitter end of 12th grade, even if those students’ abilities—or their concentration, for that matter—ran out in ninth grade.

Besides, if they do drop out, what will they do? The trades and factories that gave refuge to yesterday’s dropouts are largely gone. Today, we still have a tremendous dropout problem, but schools have developed something like a revolving-door admissions policy to satisfy the goal of having no dropouts and the reality that, in fact, not everyone is especially well-suited to finishing high school. students drop out, get behind, and re-enroll. Meanwhile, states like Georgia also push as many students as possible into college; a lot of them end up taking remedial classes and, in some cases, dropping out anyway.

In a speech at a January 2006 Georgia Public Policy Foundation luncheon, former U.S. Attorney General Griffin Bell, a  trustee of Mercer University, noted that, not including the University of Georgia, Georgia Tech and Georgia State University, where the problem is almost non-existent, one third of the 2004 first-year classes in the state’s public university system were remedial classes. In one college, 78 percent of students were in remedial classes, and in eight others the remedial rate was more than 50 percent.

“The problem we have with education is the same that we have had with the mortgage crisis,” says Hess. “For several decades our policy has been to get as many people into houses as possible, but that classic 30-year fixed mortgage isn’t going to be affordable for everyone.”

In making education available to everyone in keeping with our values as a free and democratic nation, it has always been necessary to cut corners here and there. Hess points out that as bad as things seem, in fact, we can’t be 100 percent sure that we’re worse off now than we were 25 years ago—with standards and tests changing all the time, it’s impossible to know. But, he adds, it’s reasonable to assume that some factors were beginning to have an impact even before that.

Take teachers. Hess explains that 60 years ago, women had less access to jobs. Well-educated women usually became teachers or nurses. That might not have been a great situation for women, but it was wonderful for students, who were taught by women who today would be college professors, doctors, lawyers or astrophysicists. At roughly the same time that the vast reservoir of female teachers began to dry up, American schools made an effort to keep everyone in school, something that placed more emphasis on how to teach than on what was actually being taught. Content took a back seat to method as teachers were encouraged to seek advanced degrees in education itself rather than in specific areas like English, history and foreign languages.

“The emphasis has been on teaching students to think for themselves rather than on content mastery and provoking student interest,” says Hess, who was himself a teacher in Louisiana public schools in the early 1990s before landing a National Science Foundation Fellowship and earning advanced degrees in education and government from Harvard University. “Parents have said, ‘That stuff’s just trivia, my kid can look it up on the Internet, we don’t want it.’ But I don’t know what there is to think about if you don’t know about things like Martin Luther King and JFK and what their legacies are.” 

There are no easy answers to the dilemma, Hess says.. It’s clear that there has been a 20 percent reduction in the time devoted to teaching students social studies, for example. The Common Core report states: “Some studies have demonstrated that the curriculum has narrowed, although supporters of the No Child Left Behind law contest these findings. But we agree with those who see a narrowing of the curriculum, because the time available for teaching and learning is not elastic. There are only so many hours in the school day and only so many days in the school year. If more time is given over to testing and test preparation, then obviously less time is available to write essays, read novels, discuss history, conduct science experiments, and debate civic issues.”

Hess offers that perhaps students need more time in school, and it’s a growing sentiment. Some schools have lengthened the school year, virtually abolishing summer break. That has worked for some students, he says, but seeing as how a one-size-fits-all approach is what got us into this mess, maybe that’s not the answer for everyone.

So how did today’s 17-year-olds fare, according to Common Core? Overall, students answered 67 percent of 33 questions correctly, “earning a cumulative grade of D. On the
history section, they earned a C, answering 73 percent of questions correctly. When it came to literature, they earned an F, correctly answering just 57 percent of the questions.”

Wow, those kids need to wake up. Grande Kofi Annan, anyone? SP

Answers to quiz:

 

1. No. Kofi Annan is the former secretary general of the United Nations.
2. Osama bin Laden
3. Uganda, Ukraine, Uzbekistan, Uruguay, or the United States.
4. Germany, Japan, and Italy (although many Italians fought against their own government and for the U.S. and its allies)
5. Chris Columbus sailed the ocean blue in 1492.
6. The pound. The U.K. didn’t switch to the euro.
7. Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom
8. Judaism
9. Well, what do you think?