Managesmarter.org: Generational Series 3 on Biz Kids

The National Assessment of Educational Progress is more informally known as the Nation's Report Card. It's an ongoing assessment of what American students know and can do in various subjects, such as civics, geography, mathematics, and history. The program assesses the performance of 4th, 8th, and 12th graders and compares that performance to the results of the last assessment in that topic. The 2006 report card for history results, for example, shows that overall knowledge of history among students improved since the last assessment in 1994. Of those students, 66 percent of 4th graders understood the symbolism of the Statue of Liberty, but only 14 percent of 12th graders could explain why the U.S. was involved in the Korean War.

Maeroff says the history scores are dismal. And in comparison with students around the world, American students just don't perform at the same level. For example, American students scored poorly in mathematics compared to most of the other nations in the 2003 Programme for International Student Assessment, a three-year study of the knowledge and skills of 15-year-olds in most of the industrialized nations.

But Alexandra Starr, writing in Slate magazine, argues that the NAEP tests don't tell the story because individual students never find out how they do on these tests. They're intended to assess knowledge, so students aren't told their scores and there are no consequences for passing, failing, or even not taking the test at all. On the other hand, Starr writes, "The dubiousness of these test results becomes clear when you compare them to the results of tests that actually do matter for teenagers: high-school exit exams and college boards.…Look at Texas: In 2004, results counted toward graduation for the first time, and pass rates on both the math and English portions of the test leapt almost 20 points."

Whether or not the NAEP overstates American students' ignorance, there is a problem in American education, says Conrad Follmer, an independent education consultant in Havertown, PA. "Research suggests that, compared with other nations, our expectations haven't been high enough and we have students spend too much time on isolated computational practice," he says. "We have made too much a habit of teaching students in isolation, without interconnecting different subjects."