What Works
Learning from the gods of perpetual school reform.

By S. T. Karnick
March 20, 2002 8:45 a.m.

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.