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 s the
Supreme Court deliberates whether the Constitution allows the people
of Cleveland to pay for children's education regardless of whether
the school chosen is public or private, the push for school reform
is coming to a head. Soon we'll know whether radical school reform
— education vouchers — is on the horizon.
But it's far
from clear that the way we pay for our schools is really the heart
of the problem; and therefore, those who are depending on vouchers
to solve it may soon be disappointed. Poll after poll shows that
Americans are dissatisfied with the nation's schools, especially
the public-school systems. That America's schools are lousy and
probably getting worse is widely accepted — and true. Countless
analysts have offered innumerable explanations of why the system,
particularly its elementary and secondary levels, is so poor. Some,
of course, argue that the schools are not really that bad at all,
and they offer numerous reasons for that opinion, all of which fall
under two main headings: one, that three decades of falling standardized
test scores don't tell the real story, and two, that although achievement
is indeed falling, the schools are not the reason.
The first argument,
that the test scores don't actually reflect what students are learning,
does not have much going for it. Businesses, state and local governments,
and parents all have powerful interests in ensuring that standardized
test scores are accurately measuring what students know and can
do. Therefore, to argue that what the tests are looking at is not
as important as "critical thinking" and other such ambiguous
concepts is unpersuasive. People pay for these tests and trust the
results because they are the best on offer and no more accurate
measure is readily imaginable or achievable. It is true, of course,
that some people who do well in life do not do well on tests —
but most do. Moreover, many analysts have argued, backed by much
evidence, that the standardized tests have in fact been dumbed down
in recent years, rather than the opposite. The fact that a person
can now obtain a "perfect" score on the SAT without answering
all the questions correctly is an absurdity that speaks for itself.
No, the evidence
strongly contradicts the argument that measures of student performance
are dropping because the tests are too hard. Therefore, it makes
sense to conclude that students are not doing as well today as in
years past. But who, then, is to blame? Few apologists for the current
system have had the nerve to accuse the children themselves, but
many other scapegoats have been offered up to the gods of perpetual
reform. A very popular explanation among the education establishment
is the lack of resources — antiquated buildings, outmoded technology,
too many students per class, and the like. The Clinton administration
promised to solve these problems by providing more funds to build
new facilities around the country and to hire new teachers, but
the test scores have yet to skyrocket.
And if this
argument is correct, why did students in years past — trapped
as they were in classrooms with almost three-dozen other kids, wood
floors and institutional green walls, no computers or DVD players,
desks bolted to the floor and all facing the same direction, no
air conditioning, and a teacher entirely untrained in psychology
and equipped with little more than a blackboard, a piece of chalk,
and some books and maps — so stunningly outperform today's
kids? A visit to one's local public high school today is quite an
eye-opener — the money these institutions have is really quite
astounding. The gymnasiums and swimming pools at our local school
— for which I am forced to pay — take up more floor space
than just about the entire private high school to which I send my
eldest son at great expense. Yet children thrive at the parochial
school, where per-student expenditures are but a fraction of what
is poured into the surrounding public schools, as they are in most
such institutions across the country, and nearly all the students
there pass the state's pathetically easy exit exam, while less than
half of those at the public school make it. (The argument that such
schools "skim" the best students has been thoroughly refuted
elsewhere and need not be revisited here.) The answer must lie somewhere
other than in the facilities themselves.
Some apologists
for the current system have cited neglectful parents and television
as prime culprits. These are fairly plausible hypotheses, but the
evidence is against them. Children learned much more in the 1920s
than they do now, as comparisons of standardized tests make quite
evident, but surely most parents are no less concerned about their
children's education today than their counterparts were then. More,
if anything. Certainly illegitimacy, parental (and, alas, child)
drug abuse, and other such factors play a role, but equally formidable
handicaps existed in the '20s (alcoholism and racial discrimination,
for example), and the average family's living conditions were far
less opulent than what we enjoy today. A family living in a tiny
apartment without central heating, air conditioning if the climate
indicates it, indoor plumbing, automobiles, and countless entertainment
and labor-saving devices would now be considered shamefully impoverished.
Moreover, these pathologies definitely cannot explain falling scores
in the great majority of neighborhoods where such sins are by no
means prevalent.
Casting about
for a suitable villain, other defenders of the current system —
and concerned individuals of all stripes — cite the deleterious
effects of television. They note that children spend more hours
before the TV than in school — though such numbers are deceiving
when they include weekends, and they don't discriminate between
time spent actively watching as opposed to doing other things (including
homework) with the set on in the background — and they argue
that children would study harder if they didn't wile away their
time staring at the idiot box.
But is that
a cause or an effect? Going back to some Edenic time when students
had nothing to distract them from their homework may be appealing
for other reasons, but it would do nothing to improve kids' academic
performance. In olden days, a glimpse of homework was in fact a
very rare thing. As Diane Weaver Dunne noted in the October 17,
2000, issue of Education World, "During the early part
of the 20th century, society banned homework. Too much homework
was considered unhealthful; it deprived kids of outdoor play and
sunshine." In that same article, Dunne discusses the recent
book The End of Homework: How Homework Disrupts Families, Overburdens
Children, and Limits Learning (2000), which argues that the
benefits of homework have never been proven and that excessive assignments
may well dampen children's desire for learning, permanently. Kids
torn away from their televisions won't necessarily hit the books;
they'll probably just find other fun things to do. (And more power
to 'em, I say.)
Teachers, of
course, have provided a tempting target for blame. Low pay has been
a common complaint in recent years, but teachers were not paid very
much during the 19th century, and they did more than all right by
their charges. Moreover, private school teachers today make less
than their public school counterparts, and their students do just
fine. The argument that low pay ensures that only relatively stupid
people will take up teaching is really quite insulting to a noble
profession. More plausibly, teacher training has come under particular
and well-deserved fire as it has bowed increasingly to eccentric
fads and shortchanged the basics. A 1997 poll by Public Agenda found
that few education-school professors thought it important to train
student teachers to maintain discipline among the children (only
37 percent said yes), correct punctuation, grammar, and spelling
(19 percent), and enforce student punctuality (12 percent). They
pass those cavalier attitudes on to the next generation of teachers.
Future teachers'
subject-matter training is equally poor. In the September/October
1998 issue of Policy Review, Pennsylvania education secretary
Eugene W. Hickock noted that "New York's state education department
recently discovered that hundreds of its teachers, most of whom
have master's degrees, could not pass a standard test in English,
math, and reasoning skills." Also, "In response to a storm
of public criticism, state education officials in Massachusetts
recently repealed their decision to lower the qualifying score on
a rather basic teacher-licensing exam after 59 percent of the applicants
flunked it." Such ignorance is truly astounding. As likely
causes, Hickock cited massive grade inflation in university teaching
programs, and noted that "many teacher-preparation programs
had no meaningful standards for achievement in the academic content
areas their candidates intended to teach. Even in nonacademic coursework,
such as classroom management and professional skills, which these
programs tend to emphasize, few departments had sufficient benchmarks
to assess the progress of aspiring teachers."
Blaming these
obviously silly conditions on the teachers themselves, however,
is patently unfair. The aspiring educators may or may not be content
to be fed such an unsatisfactory diet during their college years,
but they do not set the standards, such as they are; the schools
of education do that.
Hmmm —
now there's an idea. As Sherlock Holmes noted, when you eliminate
the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must
be true. And in this case, what remains is not improbable at all.
There is only one suspect that has had the requisite means, motive,
and opportunity to ruin American education. Consider this: A complaint
heard increasingly during the past four decades has been that American
schools are shortchanging the basics of reading, writing, and ciphering
in favor of mushy stuff called critical thinking, multicultural
training, and efforts to build children's self-esteem. Phonics,
memorization, multiplication tables, and the like have been pushed
aside for theory-based alternatives such as whole language learning,
the New Math, participatory learning, and values clarification,
all based on theories of psychology and instruction prevalent in
the nation's schools of education.
Over centuries
of human civilization, people had learned that certain personalities,
methods, and approaches to teaching worked better than others —
the Socratic method, rote learning, mentoring, and so on. These
conventions came into common use because they worked better than
all others, but they did not have a strong body of psychological
theory behind them, for the obvious reason that psychology had yet
to become a separate discipline. Americans, however, are a practical
people who respect innovation and achievement, and when the managerial
revolution and growth of big government and big business emerged
strongly in the 1930s (and have steadily increased since), that
passion led people (and especially politicians) to yield the authority
over the education of their children to experts more academically
qualified than the local principal and teachers. The bureaucracies
grew, to ensure that facilities and curricula were all up to snuff,
and the role of the superintendent became increasingly powerful
and professionalized. All of this was done with the best of intentions,
of course, to ensure that our children received only the best possible
training, and the shock of the Soviet Union's launch of Sputnik
in 1957 added further urgency to the transition.
But in the
nation's institutions of higher education, where our teachers are
trained, a professor armed with a theory has a distinct advantage
over some poor schlep who just knows what works. (And he has much
better prospects at tenure and promotion time.) Hence, old-fashioned
teaching techniques quickly fell out of fashion as the newly trained
teachers went out into the world, and what had worked for centuries
was rapidly replaced by a series of whiz-bang new systems buttressed
by the latest insights from child psychology. I rather doubt that
most teachers would employ these systems if they were not forced
to, given the dismal results — low achievement, student frustration,
and consequent disruption. Besides, these fads are far less common
in private and parochial schools because they are not (as yet) required
by well-meaning education bureaucracies to implement them.
Clearly, the
new, mo' better education techniques have not worked out as well
as their purveyors promised they would. Quite the contrary, much
to the puzzlement of the academic professionals — hence their
desperate search for alternative explanations, or what we non-theorists
commonly call scapegoats. The fact is, children learn what you teach
them, and if you feed them nonsense and pretend that they're learning
when they are not, they will remain ignorant.
Hence I would
argue that the biggest need in American education today is freedom,
and the one liberty needed above all is freedom from theories that
force teachers into modes of instruction and discipline that are
not effective for the particular children they are expected to educate.
Voucher plans may help liberate some schools from this tyranny of
the experts, but they cannot complete the job. Only a healthy skepticism
toward newfangled education theories and a return to what works
will do that.
The federal
No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, recently signed into law by President
Bush, made lots of noises about improving teacher quality, but the
relevant provisions were largely about allowing the states to spend
federal money more freely, which is good, and forcing them to implement
teacher quality standards, which are ambiguous in the bill and will
thus probably turn out to be of little use. The bill did, however,
include a "Transition to Teaching" element that will enable
schools to "recruit and retain highly qualified mid-career
professionals" and encourage "recruiting teachers through
alternative routs to certification."
That is an
idea that has some chance of breaking the tyranny of Theory, and
therefore is the most hopeful sign for American education in some
time. Education reformers would do well to pursue that opportunity
and allow America's teachers to follow their own natural inclination
to do what works.
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