Learning Less

Are U.S. public school students learning less now than they did a decade or even a few years ago? According to the newly published results of three separate, national tests, the answer seems to be yes.

The strongest evidence for the decline in classroom learning comes from the annual Scholastic Aptitude Tests, which most college admissions offices use to judge applicants. SAT scores have been falling every year since 1962, and the new figures--based on last year's tests taken by 1 million high school students--show that the trend is continuing (TIME, Dec. 31, 1973). Over the past twelve years the average score has dropped from 478 to 440 on the verbal test and from 502 to 478 on the mathematics test. Highest possible score: 800.

A Real Drop. After analyzing the latest results, Sam McCandless, director of admissions testing for the College Entrance Examination Board, says the decline is "real." He insists that previous rationalizations--lower scores might be caused by technical changes in the SATs or by greater numbers of poor and minority students taking the tests--do not hold up. The reason for the drop, says McCandless: a decline in students' "developed reasoning ability."

Some educators place much of the blame on television, says Stanford Admissions Dean Fred Hargadon: "This is the generation of students affected most by the media revolution." But at least some of the responsibility for the lower scores must be placed on the schools themselves. "There is no question that there is less emphasis on language skills in elementary and secondary schools," says Princeton Admissions Director Timothy Callard. "The emphasis is on students expressing themselves freely at the expense of rigorous work. And this shows up on SAT scores."

Helping to confirm the general downward trend in learning, the National Assessment of Educational Progress--a federally funded testing organization--reported last week that students knew less about science in 1973 than they did three years earlier. The test, which covered 90,000 students in elementary and junior and senior high schools in all parts of the nation, showed the sharpest decline among 17-year-olds in large cities, although suburban students' test scores fell too.

The results of the third study, sponsored by the U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare and announced last week, showed that public school students' reading levels have been falling since the mid-1960s. Whatever the cause, it is clear from all three studies that the cure lies in the classroom.

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