Public Education Has Improved Greatly In Recent Years; Still More Needs to Be Done

Despite media coverage of schools labeled as "in need of improvement" under the federal "No Child Left Behind" Act, the public education system in the United States has actually experienced some tremendous successes and made dramatic improvements. As William J. Mathis writes in Financing America's Future - How Money Counts, "Today, we have a superb record of educational improvement and we are the only economic super-power. This is a testament to education's success over these 20 years, not a sign of its failure."

Today, test scores seem to demonstrate an unprecedented level of academic achievement reached by America's students. As reported by the Center on Education Policy in "What's Good About Public Schools," in the last 10 years, math and reading scores in grades 4 and 8 have risen for all major ethnic groups. In the upper grades, average SAT scores have improved by almost 20 points since 1990, while ACT scores have remained steady, even though much broader cross-sections of our students are taking these exams. Major gains by African American and Hispanic students are masked by these averages, as reported by the Washington Post.

Although certain school districts experience high levels of student dropouts, data from the National Center for Education Statistics demonstrate that current overall dropout rates have decreased since the 1970's and 1980's. As more high school seniors are graduating from public schools, college admissions have also increased for all groups since 1990.

Much Work Remains

The quality of the nation's public schools has improved overall, yet we need an increased commitment to public education to address remaining inequalities of opportunity and resources in the school system. Officials must provide the additional resources for programs and quality teaching needed to overcome the remaining achievement gap between students of different ethnic origin and economic class.

Prepared June 14, 2004