WHAT HAVE 17-YEAR-OLDS KNOWN IN THE PAST

Calls by many for excellence in the 1980s were predicated upon and reinforced the perception that American education has declined; these calls stimulated the use of testing to assess the nation's students. The results of a national test on American history and literature, reported in 1987 by Diane Ravitch and Chester Finn in What Do Our 17-Year-Olds Know?, seem to support a view of decline. This study attempts to determine how much American history high school students knew in the past and how this compares with Ravitch and Finn's results. Several bases for comparison are reported: results of the earliest large-scale history test administrations, the content and difficulty of past nationally administered tests, and past student performance on individual test questions similar in content to questions in Ravitch and Finn's test. The results suggest that students of the 1980s may not be demonstrably different from students in the past.