A problem more specific to schools themselves is pervasive student passivity—a lack of active participation in learning. This problem is commonly found in both public and private schools and all grade levels.
Many students do not perceive the opportunities provided by schooling as a privilege, but rather as a series of hurdles that are mechanically cleared in pursuit of credentials (文凭) that may open doors later in life. Students are bored and much of the pervasive passivity of American students is caused by the educational system.
During this century, expanding state and federal governments favored large regional schools as more efficient means of supervising educational curricula and ensuring uniformity. Schools today, therefore, reflect the high level of bureaucratic organization found throughout American society. Such rigid and impersonal organization can negatively affect administrators, teachers, and students, and this bureaucratic educational system fosters five serious problems.
First, bureaucratic uniformity ignores the cultural variation within count less local communities. It takes schools out of the local community and places them under the control of outside "specialists" who may have little under standing of the everyday lives of students.
Second, bureaucratic schools define success by numerical ratings of performance. School officials focus on attendance rates, dropout rates, and achievement scores. They overlook dimensions of schooling that are difficult to quantify, such as the creativity of students and energy and enthusiasm of teachers. Such bureaucratic school systems tend to define an adequate education in terms of the number of days per year that students are inside a school building rather than the school’s contribution to students’ personal development.
Third, bureaucratic schools have rigid expectations of all students. For example, fif-year-olds are expected to be in the tenth grade, eleven-grade students are expected to score at a certain level on a standardized verbal achievement test. The high school diploma thus rewards a student for going through the proper sequence of educational activities in the proper amount of time. Rarely are exceptionally bright and motivated students allowed to graduate early. Likewise, the system demands that students who have learned little in school graduate with their class.
Fourth, the school’s bureaucratic division of labor requires specialized personnel. High-school students learn English from one teacher, receive guidance from another, and are coached in sports by others. No school official comes to know the "full" student as a complex human being. Students experience this division of labor as a continual shuffling among rigidly divided fifty-minute period throughout the school day.
Fifth, the highly bureaucratic school system gives students little responsibility for their own learning. Similarly, teachers have little latitude in what and how they teach their classes; they dare not accelerate learning for fear of disrupting "the system." Standardized policies dictating what is to be taught and how long the teaching should be taken render teachers as passive and un- imaginative as their students. The expression "numerical ratings" in Paragraph 4 can best be interpreted as ______.