Customer Reviews

What Do Our 17-Year Olds Know?: A Report on the First National Assessment of History and Literature

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1 star:		(1)

 

 

1 star is too generous for a book that posses as a report but is a collection of unsubstantiated opinions based on a multiple choice test that would render any freshman in his/her quantitative research course an F-. For example, there exists no bibliography or endnotes. Neither is there a useful description of rudimentary elements of the study, such as how and where students were selected. We are simply told there were 8000 students "divided up by region (i.e., northeast, central, west, and southeast) and by size and type of community." We are not told of how groups were assigned within the study or if this was even a consideration.
There are tables of correct and incorrect scores, percentages and assigned letter grades but no discussion of validity or reliability, either internal or external, nor is there any mention of the study's generalizability. While there is a description of the questions, there is no actual list of the questions on the test, nor any indication of where they could be found. The only thing we know about how the questions were derived is that they were discarded by the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP)and used by Ravitch and Finn. (Ravitch should formally disown this project)
The likelihood that this collection of discarded questions could generate a reliable and valid test is laughable. Indeed, one should probably question the likelihood that the results of such a collection is capable of telling us much of anything at all--except, perhaps, that Harvard and Columbia may need to require more credits on the rudiments of quantitative research.

A groundbreaking book when it came out.

For the past 20 years, Chester Finn has been a behind the scenes and in some cases, in front of the crowd leader for most of the great education reforms that have occurred in the past 20 years. Having had the great fortune to be one of Finn's students at Vanderbilt many years ago, I have had a chance to read the plethora of great books and articles that Finn has published. This is another in that series. Don't just buy this book and The Educated Child (which apparently is a huge bestseller) go back and buy all his books. Finn is a great academic who is blessed with an ability to communicate to the common person.

Finn may talk about the education that children receive but he is the best educator a parent can ever find.

Don McNay...