Shootout in the Classroom

From Crossroads in American Education (a 1989 report from the Educational Testing Service) comes this sobering news: “Sixty‐one percent of the 17‐year‐old students could not understand relatively complicated material. … Nearly one half appear to have limited mechanical skills and abilities that go little beyond adding, subtracting, and multiplying with whole numbers. More than half could not evaluate the procedures or results of a scientific study.”