How Educated Are We - High School Graduates, College4 Graduates, Educational Attainment, Literacy Rates: The Early Years, Functional Literacy And Educational Attainment

How educated are we? The answer seems to change depending upon your point of view.

First, we look at graduation rates and educational attainment. We see that the high school graduation rates have soared since the 1870s. And, although rates have fallen off in the last 30 years of the 20th Century, by 2000, the percentage of graduates was the highest it had been since 1960. The number of college students has also been on the rise since the 1870s, with a dramatic increase from 1950-2000.

Educational attainment for all racial groups has been rising steadily since 1960. The simple literacy rate for adults has been going up ever since the 1870s, reaching a rate of 99.3% in 1979. "Functional literacy" became a concept after 1980. How do educational attainment and employment relate to a person's level of functional literacy?

Next, we examine the reading and math skills of children in the United States. The test scores of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) varied little in the past 30 years. Are students proficient in reading and math according to these tests? How do our children compare to others in the world? In reading, the United States ranks in the top 10. In math, we still rank in the top 10 for 4th graders, but we drop in the rankings for 8th and 12th graders. Why aren't the students in the U.S. keeping up with students from other nations?

Standardized testing became a tool for measuring school performance in the 1970s, just as Federal spending on education increased. Has the rise in per-pupil funding correlated to a rise in standardized test scores? Since the late 1980s, Federal and State governments tied funding to standardized test scores. This added emphasis has created some unintended consequences. The next panel discusses some of the issues opponents of standardized testing have with the system. Standardized tests are not just for assessing student progress throughout grades K-12. The next two panels discuss the SAT and the ACT, standardized tests used for college entrance.

Test results show that most students have learned "the basics" by graduation. Professors and employers think otherwise. We look at disparities between test results and the opinions of professors and employers. With employers saying that 61% of students graduate without learning "the basics," is a high school diploma worth anything? The last panel takes a look at this issue.