In recent opinion polls, more than nine out of ten Americans said they were “disturbed” about indications that our students and workers are having trouble competing with their foreign counterparts. Six in ten viewed these developments with “serious alarm.” In May of last year, 75 percent said that “the U.S. is in a state of decline compared with Japan, West Germany, and other leading European and Asian countries.” Clearly, the “Morning in America” mood of a decade ago is gone.

Actually, with regard to education, as many commentators have pointed out, there is both bad news and good news today. But the bad news is very bad, and to most people, the good news does not seem very good, or very important, or relevant to our ability to hold our own in international competition.

I disagree: not about the bad news, but about the good. I think that both the value and the importance of the good news have been vastly underrated, especially by experts, and that its relevance to our international problems has been missed entirely. This is less surprising than it appears. Many experts had high hopes for the so-called Excellence Movement of the 1980’s; but the good news is not really a product of that movement. It is a dividend from the reform movement that preceded it, the Reform of 1976.

The only education-reform movement of the last three decades that worked, the Reform of 1976 was a Cinderella from the start, and though its results are still coming in, its significance has yet to be appreciated. The experts who were nearly unanimous in denouncing its methods at the outset are nearly unanimous today in dismissing its results as trivial. They are sure it has nothing to teach us about how to prepare American students for the 21st century.

I am convinced that it does.

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The Bad News: Two Failed Reforms

The Excellence Movement of the 1980’s was the most recent in a string of conflicting educational reforms that have kept American schools in turmoil for the last thirty years. When the turmoil began in the 1960’s, the American people were not concerned about excellence. They took its presence for granted, at least among advantaged students. So did the experts in psychology, education, and other social sciences. They focused instead on self-esteem, the critical variable (they said) for all intellectual development, the master key to learning.

The job of educators, the reformers of the 1960’s accordingly told us, was to raise self-esteem; if we did that, excellence would take care of itself. The self-esteem they had in mind, however, was not earned self-esteem but what I have elsewhere referred to as the “feel-good-now” variety; and the means they favored involved the wholesale trashing of academic and disciplinary standards seen as injurious to it.

The results of this approach were soon apparent. Scores on all major norm-referenced tests of academic ability from the 5th grade on began to decline in the second half of the 1960’s and continued to slide downhill at an accelerating rate throughout the 1970’s. The long decline finally came to an end in 1980, when American scores stabilized at a point more than half a standard deviation¹ below the level of the 1950’s and the early 1960’s.

The initial reaction to the decline was mixed. Some experts saw it as a serious setback for American education and called for a restoration of academic standards and discipline; others called for a war on the tests that recorded the decline, insisting that they were unfair and irrelevant. Although hard empirical data indicated that such charges against the tests were false, the evidence was quite technical and abstract, and few outside the business- and industrial-psychology community really understood it. As a result, it had relatively little impact on the public debate or its resolution.

What tipped the scales of public policy against the anti-testing coalition and galvanized the Excellence Movement of the 1980’s was the news that on nineteen international tests, U.S. students never ranked first or second and, in comparison with other developed nations, came in last seven times. In the worst cases, the test-score gap between American adolescents and their European and Asian peers was a full standard deviation wide.

I broke that news in an article in the Public Interest in 1982. The data on which I based my conclusions had been collected in the late 1960’s and in the 1970’s, but had been misanalyzed, then buried. A Nation at Risk, the Report of a National Commission on Excellence in Education appointed by President Reagan, came out the next year. It highlighted my conclusions and used them to launch the education-reform movement of the 1980’s.

President Reagan’s Commission called for a long list of specific reforms. His Department of Education under William J. Bennett provided high-profile cheerleaders for the movement and, in a booklet entitled What Works, an even longer list of suggested reforms. Elected officials in all 50 states embraced the movement with enthusiasm and made substantial commitments to it, with strong support from the business community. Most of the reforms were in fact implemented in most states, some in all.

The decade is over now, and the results are in. Data from good domestic tests like the SAT show that in an absolute sense we did not really get worse in the 1980’s as we had done in the 1960’s and 70’s, but neither did we get much better. For the most part we stood still, stuck on the plateau we had reached in 1980. Our foreign competitors, however, did not stand still; they surged ahead, rapidly, so that the worst-case gap between our children and theirs is no longer one standard deviation, but closer to two.

This time, the news of our failure was promptly and accurately reported, but it did not galvanize. It discouraged. Americans no longer take excellence for granted, and they have a profound new grasp of the relationship between educational failure and economic decline. The growing dominance of foreign companies in product market after product market has brought the point home to ordinary Americans.

Today, those ordinary Americans are clear about the urgency of the need to do better, but they do not know how, and they do not believe the experts do, either. Some fear that nothing we can do will really change the bottom line, and a surprising number of experts agree, in private. Increasing numbers believe that only a shrinking minority of our students will ever really be able to attain excellence. That is the bad news, and it is pretty bad.

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The Good News: The Cinderella Reform

The good news is, first, that minimum competence—literacy and numeracy, basically—is now nearly universal among our high-school graduates. And, second, while the SAT scores of American students in general have stayed pretty much the same for a decade, those of minority students have not. From 1980 to 1989, Hispanic and Asian scores on such advanced tests rose by about a quarter of a standard deviation, black scores by almost half a standard deviation.

Yet there is not much cheer in any of this, the experts agree. After all, we are not going to close the yawning international gap with minimum competence. For that, we need advanced competence—the kind we measure with tests like the SAT, ASVAB, and the GATB, which go beyond literacy and numeracy to measure reasoning and problem-solving with words and with numbers. On such tests, most American students made no real gains at all, while the gains made by minority students on those same advanced tests were not enough to close the domestic gap between minority and majority scores, let alone the international gap between us and other developed nations. That, at any rate, is the usual expert appraisal of the good news about how American students are doing as we enter the 90’s.

My own appraisal is different. Viewed in a vacuum, the news that minimum competence is now nearly universal among American high-school graduates does not seem much of an accomplishment. But if we look back to where we stood in the early 1970’s, we see that we have not gone downhill or gotten stuck on a plateau, but have had major positive change.

Twice in the early 70’s the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) gave a test of functional literacy to national samples of 17-year-olds who were still in school. Minimum-competence tests generally require literacy with numbers as well as with words, but NAEP’s 1975 test, like its 1971 test, contained only verbal questions and consisted solely of easy items based on the types of reading materials encountered in everyday life, things like heating instructions on frozen food, and safety signs in shops. It was the sort of test on which the only good score is a perfect score. Students who got less than 90 percent right were classified as semi-literate; those who got less than 75 percent right as illiterate.

In 1975, the better of the two years, 12.6 percent were illiterate and 44.4 percent semi-literate. Among students whose parents had not completed high school, more than 20 percent were illiterate and more than 60 percent semi-literate. Among black students, more than 40 percent were illiterate and more than 80 percent semi-literate.

Contrast that with NAEP’s findings today: virtually universal literacy and numeracy among 17 year-olds who remain in school, regardless of race or parental education. Black high-school graduates, especially, have made a really dramatic turnaround. Whereas, in 1975, less than 20 percent of them were fully literate in the reading-only, minimum-competence sense, today almost all of them are fully literate, and they can all do basic math as well. In state after state, black students made that turnaround as a group, almost all of them, all at once, and in just a few short years. It happened in the late 1970’s and the very early 1980’s, just before the Excellence Movement was launched in 1983. And it happened as a result of a very different kind of reform movement, a grass-roots movement with no national leadership at all.

This movement took off at the local level in 1976, and by 1980 it had spread to 38 states. It was called the Minimum Competence Testing Movement, and it was, in essence, a popular uprising. It was also the only successful education-reform movement of the last three decades.

The success it had is exactly the sort of success we need at the advanced competence level—a big, quick, forward step for all our students, all at once. A step like that would get us off the plateau we have been stuck on since 1980; would change our international ranking; and, by laying a lot of fears to rest, would have a calming effect on some of our most divisive and wrenching internal disputes. To achieve such a success, we need to apply the methods of the Minimum Competence Movement to our problems with advanced competence. But to do that, we must first convince education experts that these methods are worthy of more respectful attention than they have heretofore received.

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Cinderella and the Experts

Why do the experts fail to see the Minimum Competence Movement as a model for education reform? At first glance, the answer may seem obvious: the movement set a minimum standard, and most experts, liberals and conservatives alike, think that standard was easy to meet, much too easy to teach us anything about how to help our students meet a higher standard.

Yet the obvious answer looks a lot less obvious to anyone who rereads what these same experts were saying a decade ago about the odds against getting almost all our students to meet the minimum-competence standard. They did not say it was easy then; they said it was impossible.

The Minimum Competence Movement made the opposite assumption. In fact, its essence, its key demand, was that no student be given a high-school diploma without first passing a test showing that he could read everyday English and do simple arithmetic. It was the demand mainly of parents who were anguished about the fact that millions of their children were graduating from high school without the competence to go to the grocery store with a shopping list and come back with the right items and the right change. They were determined to change that, and convinced that a required exit test would produce the result they demanded.

Most experts were appalled, and spoke out against the movement loudly and often in meetings, conferences, and speeches, in professional journals and the popular press, and in the federal courts as well. Liberal and conservative experts who agreed on nothing else agreed that this was a primitive and simplistic response to a very complex problem. Requiring a passing grade on a test for a high-school diploma could not possibly solve that problem because it would not even begin to deal with any of the underlying factors that caused it, factors like low self-esteem, poverty, family breakdown, cultural disadvantages and mismatches, and, of course, racism, not to mention poor schools, inadequate teachers, and a lack of appropriate educational content, methods, and resources. Nor would a test requirement for high-school graduation produce an improvement in student performance. It was a totally ineffective way of trying to deal with academic failure. It could not help anyone; it could only hurt, and it was naive or disingenuous to argue otherwise.

There was near unanimity on another point, too. The students who would be hurt the most, experts said, were minority students. Disproportionate numbers of them would fail the test and be denied high-school diplomas. That would stigmatize them for life, do severe damage to their self-esteem and motivation, and close off all further academic and career opportunities, locking them into a permanent underclass. The result would be a widening of the gap between the haves and the have-nots in American society, deepening our racial divisions and moving us away from equality and justice.

The experts were certain that a prime reason for the great popular appeal of so benighted a movement was public ignorance. Many thought it also reflected the underlying racism of American society. And because they were sure it would have an adverse impact on minority students, they were also sure that it must be unconstitutional. A legal challenge in Florida, Debra P. v. Turlington, provided the test case. The experts argued their position in the federal district court there, and they won, initially. In 1979, Judge George C. Carr issued a temporary injunction against the denial of high-school diplomas to students who failed Florida’s minimum-competence test. The experts were back in court in 1983, asking Judge Carr to make the injunction permanent. But he did not. Instead he lifted it, reversing his earlier judgment and holding that the minimum-competence requirement was not a burden on minority students but a benefit, one that would help them overcome the legacy of past discrimination.

I did not testify in Debra P. in 1979; I did in 1983, and Judge Carr was kind enough then to credit my testimony for his changed views on several key points. But it was the results of the Minimum Competence Movement itself that must have had the greatest impact on him. On the first few tries, 80 to 90 percent of Florida’s minority students failed the test. But they were not crushed, as the experts predicted they would be, and they did not give up and drop out in droves without diplomas. They kept trying, and their teachers did too, working hard to help them learn from failure and, ultimately, to master the skills they needed to graduate. By the fifth try, better than 90 percent of them did just that. They left school not just with a piece of paper, but in possession of basic skills that prepared them better for life than their older siblings had been when they left the same schools in the early 1970’s. Not yet well-prepared, but significantly better prepared.

The new graduates were, by and large, the same students who had failed the test on their first few tries; the dropout rate did not go up. The teachers were the same and the test was, too; it did not get easier. Student self-esteem was not raised—flunking a test is not an ego-inflating experience—and none of the other presumed causes of poor academic performance changed either, at least not for the better. Poverty, cultural clashes, and racism remained very real problems; family breakdowns increased, to frightening levels. So did crime. These were, after all, the years when the hard-drug epidemic burst on the scene.

Florida’s students somehow managed to surmount all that. They wanted their diplomas, knew what they had to do to get them, and they did it. And what happened in Florida happened all across the nation, wherever the minimum-competence sanction was in force. Clearly, the experts were wrong. None of their dire predictions about the impact of the movement was borne out. Its effects, especially for minority students, were uniformly positive.

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Why Minimums Work at the Basic Level

What did the reformers of ’76 get right that the reformers of ’83 would get wrong?

Both movements arose, in large part, as reactions against the education reforms of the 1960’s. Both rejected the core belief of the 60’s reformers: that raising self-esteem is, in and of itself, an effective way to promote intellectual development. Both rejected the main corollary of that belief, the idea that academic standards, as embodied in tests, grades, and requirements, are not necessary or helpful but actually retard intellectual development, because they damage self-esteem. At the heart of both the Minimum Competence Movement and the Excellence Movement were a rejection of these ideas, a reaffirmation of faith in the utility of academic standards, and a call for the restoration of those standards. One call was heeded; the other was not.

The difference in the height of the standards each movement set was one critical factor, and the most obvious, but close analysis reveals at least four others.

First, the Minimum Competence Movement set a single, unitary standard, defined it clearly, measured success or failure in achieving it with a single test, and tied it tightly to a powerful incentive: high-school graduation. It focused on two skills, reading and arithmetic, and demanded that all students master them at the level it set, and that all demonstrate their mastery by passing the same test.

Second, the standard was pure, in the sense that it told students and teachers what they had to do, how it would be measured, and what consequences would follow, but said nothing at all about how students and teachers were to go about the task. Choices about teaching and learning methods and materials were left to teachers and students. Likewise, organization: school staff members were free to structure their activities and relationships in any way they chose, so long as they produced the mandated result.

Third, the message to every student was: “You need these skills to be a contributing member of our society and our society needs your contribution. These skills are so central to your ability to make that contribution that we won’t let you move ahead without them. All the other worthy goals you and your teachers may have must be pursued in addition to, not instead of, the achievement of minimum competence in reading and arithmetic. No other evidence of its achievement is acceptable: if you want to graduate, you must pass our test.”

Fourth, the message to teachers had the same bare-bones honesty, along with an appropriate dose of humility. It said: “Our goal is clear, the route to it is not. Teaching is an art, not a science. We don’t think there is a single right way for you to proceed in all instances, and we don’t pretend to know one. We count on you, on your professional skill and creativity, to find a way to get every student to reach the goal we have set.”

By contrast, the Excellence Movement took a totally different approach to standard-setting. It provided no single definition of excellence, and no operational measure of it. Its proponents were in favor of a lot of good things, some measurable, some not. There was no single overriding standard, but rather a multiplicity of standards with many other things mixed in, many goals and many detailed ideas—about appropriate educational curriculum and content, about school structure and organization—that proponents thought would help students get where they wanted them to go. No real feedback was provided on whether they had actually gotten there; there were no external rewards for those who did, and no consequences for those who did not. The Excellence Movement relied on exhortations and a checklist of new requirements, not on incentives, to produce the result it sought.

All these differences help to explain why the Minimum Competence Movement produced clear positive changes and the Excellence Movement did not. But they offer only a partial explanation of the good news about minimum competence, and no explanation at all for the other piece of good news, the news that minority students made big gains on advanced competence tests, too. To explain that, we must focus on why minimum standards are superior to maximum standards for most public purposes.

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Why Minimums Work at the Advanced Level

Grand promises are a standard commodity in American politics—as standard as is the failure to deliver on them. Americans, however, are a realistic people, and when someone promises them the moon, or its educational equivalent—e.g., that all students will soon be “above average”—they tend to discount the promise while giving some credit to the bearer for high hopes and good intentions. As a result, things usually work out for everyone concerned, as long as the underlying realities are not really threatening.

Today, those underlying realities really are threatening. Our standard of living and our place in the world are at risk because our educational system is failing to produce students and workers who can hold their own in global competition. We cannot afford many more years of broken promises in education. We must deliver, and to do that, we must make promises which can be kept, and for which we can be held accountable. Realistic promises about new minimums are such promises.

Some education experts see a danger that the minimum will become the maximum, lowering students’ aspirations and efforts. Others remain convinced that it makes more sense to concentrate on raising the ceiling, and encouraging everyone to reach for it, even if they do not expect everyone to succeed. I disagree. If the floor is raised by lifting a house off its foundation onto a new and higher base, the ceiling will rise by itself. This “automatic ceiling effect,” as I call it, explains the other piece of good news on the education-reform front: the fact that in the 1980’s, the scores of minority students rose by as much as half a standard deviation on advanced competence tests like the SAT. A change of that size is significant even if we view it in a vacuum. Viewed in historical context, it is really a giant step forward, and so long overdue that many experts cannot quite believe it now.

The gains of black students were the most dramatic, and the most unexpected. Right after Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, experts had predicted such dramatic changes in black scores, and were confident that they knew how to effect them. As the years and then the decades passed, the experts remained confident about the worth of at least some of the methods they were using to bring about change, but fewer and fewer remained confident that change would ever come. For no matter how many times the schools of America were turned upside down, black scores stayed stubbornly the same, year after discouraging year. Wherever the experts looked, whatever they did, their early hopes for a quick fix were mocked, their worst fears about the role of genetic differences were energized. To explain the disappointing lack of progress, most fell back on some variant of the centuries-of-slavery thesis, and reluctantly embraced its corollary: that it would take centuries to undo the damage, too.

Black students surprised them by jumping ahead on advanced-competence tests just when least expected, and no one, to my knowledge, has yet offered a cogent explanation of why it happened when it did. I think the automatic-ceiling effect provides the explanation. Setting a functional literacy standard for high-school graduation in most American schools where minorities predominated raised the floor, and the ceiling rose with it. That, I believe, is why more minority students than ever before not only met the minimum but went far beyond it to improve their scores on advanced tests like the SAT.

Illiterate students, after all, have no chance at all of developing the kind of advanced competence with words and numbers that tests like the SAT measure. They cannot even begin to work toward that level until they have first learned to deal with words and numbers at the most basic level. Functional literacy, or minimum competence, is the entry ticket to the race for advanced competence, and as in any race, increasing the number of entrants increases the number who cross the finish line.

Why did setting the minimum-competence requirement at the high-school graduation level not have the same effect on white students? Because functional illiteracy is not the norm in many all-or mainly white high schools. The actual number of illiterate white students is, of course, very large; there are so many more white than minority students that even a small percentage in trouble makes for a very big problem. The movement helped these students just as it did minority students, but it only helped them climb up to the floor that most of their classmates were already on. It did not raise the floor, so for whites the ceiling stayed where it was.

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A New Set of Minimums

What we need to do now is to raise the floor again, and this time, raise it in a way that lifts all our students onto a higher base. Educators and political leaders in many states have already tried to do that by revising the minimum-competence standard upward. I think they are making a mistake. The minimum-competence standard, and the tests that reflect it, should be retained, because the achievement of basic literacy and numeracy marks a critical turning point in intellectual development, and we need information about how many students reach it, and when.

What I would propose instead is that we make the minimum-competence test the standard for grade-school graduation. That would give all our children an incentive, not only to master the basics, but to do so early enough to have at least four years left to work on developing the kind of advanced competence they need to succeed in life, as opposed to just getting by. To make sure they do develop it, the standard for high-school graduation should be a minimum score on a test of advanced competence like the SAT, the GATB, or ASVAB.

I single out these three major national tests because they all define advanced competence in the same way: the ability to solve problems by reasoning abstractly with words and numbers. All three also measure in the same way, using written, multiple-choice questions, because that is the fastest, most accurate, and least expensive way to do it.

Most Americans who are concerned about education already have some familiarity with the SAT, which measures the kind of competence critical to success in higher education. That same kind of competence is just as critical to success in business and industry, and is measured by the U.S. Labor Department’s GATB; in the military, it is measured by the ASVAB used by the Pentagon. All American students need to develop this kind of competence if they are to advance in life, and they should not be allowed to graduate from high school without it, irrespectively of whether they plan to go to college or to work.

Most experts, however, do not believe that all students can achieve advanced competence. In my opinion these experts overestimate the role genes play in intellectual development, and underestimate the role of focused effort and practice. Genes do, of course, play a role, just as they do in the development of musical and athletic ability. Yet the sound advice, from athletic coaches and music teachers alike, is “practice, practice, practice.”

Other nations do not share the American prejudice that intellegence is a fixed and unchanging phenomenon. Japanese parents, for example, see hard work, not talent, as the main ingredient in intellectual development. And well they might: in the first few decades after World War II, Japanese schools used a combination of tough standards and strong incentives, and even though the gene pool in that unusually homogeneous nation did not change at all, the IQ’s of Japanese children rose substantially. Western European nations have also managed to raise their national IQ’s by substantial amounts in just the last few decades, in spite of a large influx of low-scoring immigrant children, many of them the offspring of guest-workers from underdeveloped countries.

There is no reason to believe that Americans cannot do the same thing, by applying the lessons of the Minimum Competence Movement. For high-school graduation, I would require the equivalent of an SAT score of at least 700 (out of a possible 1600), for college entrance the equivalent of 750, and for college graduation 800. I would also let American high-school students know exactly what is required of them by giving the exit test to all entering freshman. I would give them their scores, too, so they would know where they were as well as where they needed to go, and I would do so again at the end of each year so that they and their parents and teachers could chart their progress.

If these standards were put in place, broadly, and maintained at least at these levels throughout most of the 1990’s, it would be safe to predict a significant across-the-board rise in American intellectual competence. By the year 2000 a gain of half a standard deviation would seem likely, and a gain of a full standard deviation quite possible.

Given the link between test scores and economic productivity, there is little doubt that American productivity would also rise, with all the attendant benefits.

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An Iatrogenic Illness

But I want to deal, once more, with the fear that the intellectual minimums I advocate will be impossible for many minority students to meet; if all the special efforts made to help black students in the years after Brown failed to produce any positive change, maybe change simply is not possible in this area, at least not now, or soon? Yet consider the possibility that black students failed to improve precisely because of those efforts, and that they are just now beginning to recover from the educational equivalent of an iatrogenic illness. Iatrogenic illnesses are caused by treatment; common in the clinical world, they exist in the educational world, too. Malice is not the issue here. Educational experts gave black children the same medicine they gave white children, only more of it. The problem is that many of their ideas turned out to be as wrong-headed as they were well-intentioned—as evidenced in the 1960’s and 1970’s by the big score declines of white students.

Consider, too, the message about tests that dominant groups of American experts and policy-makers have been sending to minority children for the last three decades. Most recently, a Ford Foundation report on testing in general, and a National Academy of Sciences report on the GATB in particular, have said, in a more polished and restrained tone, the same thing the National Education Association and Ralph Nader used to say more aggressively: in effect, “You can’t do well on these narrow, biased, standardized tests, and you shouldn’t have to, because they’re not really fair and they’re not really important.” In fact, as we have seen, they really are important, critically important, if we are to maintain our standard of living and our place in the world in the next century. Surely the time has come to level with our children about the fact and to send all of them a new and different message: that they can and must do better, for our sake, as well as for theirs.

¹ The standard deviation (SD) is the square root of the total amount of variation among all scores in any set of scores (the variance). To get a sense of its magnitude, assume a drop of 1 SD between students in 1960 and 1980: only about 15 percent of students in 1980 would score above the 1960 mean; about 85 percent would score below it. In the actual difference at issue here, half an SD, about 30 percent of today's students score above the old mean, about 70 percent below it.