Dumbing Down America—Do We Care?

I first learned about ACTA, American Council of Trustees and Alumni when I heard Anne Neal, president of the organization speak. Anne is a very articulate person with an obvious passion for improving our higher education status. The approach ACTA takes is to first provide objective data on the status of our most important colleges and universities. They work with college trustees, alumni and the media to advocate improvements, that is, corrections to the problems that turn up in their research.

While any of you who have read any of my K-12 education writings, either on my blog, The Education Onion or on Scribd.com know that I have focused on the K-12 area. ACTA’s findings mesh well with what I have found. It seems that the colleges including the most elite, have been acting to dumb down the education that college graduates receive. That is especially true in the traditional sense.

That is exactly what has happened in K-12 as well. In K-12 the dumbing down process started with the replacing of the American Common School approaches pioneered by Horace Mann and others with the Progressive approaches of John Dewey et al. The basic change was from the content rich (knowledge based) approach of the Common Schools to the content poor (process based) approach of the Progressives.

There are several problems with the Progressive approach. In a nutshell, it works much more poorly than the content rich approach it replaced. This is proven by the results of our best competitor nations who use the content rich approach to teach their kids much more successfully than we teach ours. As might be expected, this virtual monopoly of the Progressive method in K-12 schools (some charter schools are exceptions but a majority are not) has caused the input to our colleges and universities to be of reduced quality. A direct result is the trend to dumb down the curricula in college because making up for the lost time in K-12 just would require too much work from the faculty. Also, the colleges have an overhead problem. The administrative portion of their budgets has grown to epic proportions causing the schools to be much more interested in the level of student enrollment (tuition money rolling in to school coffers) than in providing a quality education.

When you are out of control you can do the right thing; cut budgets and bring the overhead in line with the ethic of providing a quality education. Or, you can say to hell with quality and lower standards allowing enrollment to grow to support the overhead. Is there widespread integrity among the faculties of our colleges today? It doesn’t appear so. That is why the trend to dumb down curricula requirements is virtually unstoppable without public outrage to stem the tide.

How bad is it? Here is some data from the ACTA 2009 report, What Will They Learn, A Report on General Education Requirements at 100 of the Nation’s Leading Colleges and Universities. This 55 page report is available on the goacta.org website in the publications area.

ACTA considers that a core college curriculum is challenging, content-rich, and coherent—and it is something that is not necessarily gained in simply amassing 120 credit hours over eight semesters. The ACTA method is to evaluate the general education requirements of each school in the study in seven areas; Composition, Literature, Foreign Language, U.S. Government or History, Economics, Mathematics and Natural or Physical Science. They describe what each requirement means in terms of rigor. Their scoring of the 100 institutions studied involves how many of the core requirements are present in each school. Those with 6 or 7 rate an A grade, 4 or 5 a B, 3 a C, 2 a D, 0 or 1 an F.

ACTA looked at the top 20 National Universities and the top 20 Liberal Arts Colleges as reported in the 2009 US News and World Report America’s Best College Rankings. They also studied the major public universities from all 50 states. Out of the 100 studied, 25 received a grade of F, 17 got D’s and 20 got C’s. Only 33 of the 100 received a B and only 5 achieved an A.
Based on the study ACTA concluded colleges are not delivering on their promises. Of the top 20 national universities, not one earned an A, 4 earned a B, 5 a C, 2 a D and fully 9 earned an F. For the top 20 liberal arts colleges the record is especially depressing. One received an A, 3 received Bs, 2 Cs, 1 D, and 13 received Fs. Of the 60 state Flagships, 4 earned As, 26 earned Bs, 13 earned Cs, 14 received Ds and 3 received Fs.

It is interesting to note that when it comes to education bang for the buck, it is hard to beat the state flagship schools. I won’t argue that the “good old boy” connections you develop in one of the other schools are not of value. However, the primary mission of the schools is to provide a quality education and that should be the priority. Resting on the laurels of your past glory should not.

ACTA is currently arguing against the University of Arkansas which received an A rating but is planning to implement the dumb down approach. ACTA’s argument is that the current high quality requirements should be kept in place. You can read about this fight on their website and access detail on the weak courses that will fill the requirements for graduation at many of the schools studied by accessing the full report on the ACTA website.

This trend is cutting the heart out of our civilization. If you care you need to support the ACTA effort and also the needed reform of our K-12 schools.