Six Lies Most People Believe About
U.S. Schools
Adults feel comfortable while kids suffer the
consequences.
By
Joy Pullmann
September 23, 2013
Popular lies about U.S. education certainly don’t do the kids any good.
They just let the adults continue to feel comfortable while kids receive
increasing diagnoses of ADHD (one in five boys now) and
special
needs,
delay life milestones like marriage and buying a house, enter a
crippled workforce, and face paying off the
biggest debt in the history of humankind while receiving no
government benefits in return. All these, and more, are directly related
to education quality. No wonder the kids are getting antsy.
So, in the spirit of “the truth shall set you free,” here are a few lies
it’s time to dispel about U.S. education. I call them lies because
they’ve been repeatedly publicly disproven but remain driving forces for
education policy.
Lie 1: America’s rich, suburban schools are high
quality
The United States’ best schools are mediocre
compared to their international peers, even though the United States
spends more money than any country in the world on K-12 education.
The Global Report Card has
recently layered specific, nationwide figures upon broader comparisons
that have long demonstrated our mediocrity. Its authors
give
Beverly Hills as one example. It represents most affluent suburban
districts, which Americans typically think contain great schools. But
they don’t. “If Beverly Hills were relocated to Canada, it would be at
the 46th percentile in math achievement, a below-average district. If the
city were in Singapore, the average student in Beverly Hills would only
be at the 34th percentile…” The schools everyone thinks are so great are
only so because we compare them to our truly awful urban districts,
rather than to actual peers. In short, America suffers from
the Lake Wobegon
effect.
The knee-jerk response to anyone raising the mounds of evidence to this
effect is something I heard from one of Alabama’s best teachers a few
weeks ago: The United States educates and tests all children, not just
the rich city kids like those other countries that outperform us (China,
she’s looking at you). Actually,
many countries that have large minority populations and educate
everyone do it better than the U.S., including Canada, France, Brazil,
and Finland. And
other
research has shown that U.S. kids who have richer families and
parents with more education still lag their international peers in
academic performance. The same holds true if you eliminate minorities
from the comparison.
Lie 2: Poverty is the root of America’s education
problems
Teacher unions and other education determinists
keep insisting mediocre education quality is not teachers’ fault. It’s
society’s fault. American kids perform poorly because they don’t have
enough healthcare, school counselors, museum visits, money, and
parenting. This is an attractive belief for people who want to avoid
responsibility. And it’s not fair to blame teachers for the increasing
numbers of parents who will not give their children a
stable, married home and its requisite emotional and academic
structure, but teachers and schools can overcome poverty and neglect.
We know because some have, and not at random. For example, giving a child
who lags two years behind his peers
an excellent teacher (defined as a top-25-percent teacher) four years in
a row will catch him up. This would close the nation’s persistent
black-white achievement gap.
Perhaps the best argument against this blame-shifting defeatism has been
advanced by self-described liberal and public intellectual
E.D. Hirsch Jr. His works collate decades of research into one
resounding thesis: The achievement gap between black and white, rich and
poor is not due to lack of money. It
largely
comes down to a vocabulary gap, which means a knowledge gap, because
words name things. Perhaps you’ve heard of the
30 million-word gap? Many poor children have a massive vocabulary
deficit that modern U.S. education simply does not overcome. (This is
largely the fault of parents who
put their child in
front of the TV or iPad instead of
reading him books, but teachers can overcome it.) It’s not the money,
it’s the education.
Furthermore, a raft of studies have shown that increasing education
spending does not increase student achievement. The
latest such
study was done last year by Harvard University economists. They
compared state education spending and student achievement and found a
correlation so small it was statistically insignificant.
Lie 3: Schools should teach generic skills like
“critical thinking” and “real-world application”
So why don’t schools overcome the knowledge
deficit? Because prevailing education theory, which has stood strong now
for about half a century, preaches that children don’t need knowledge.
They need skills that can apply to any knowledge.
For a selection of what this content-free philosophy sounds like, I
looked at just two days worth of reporting on how schools are putting
into place new national education goals called Common Core. It would
“
have students practice critical thinking, curiosity and creativity
instead of merely memorizing content”; “It focuses on
how deeply a student understands the content presented”; “The Common
Core State Standards
focus on key topics, allowing teachers to go much deeper, with an
emphasis on real world skills like collaboration, communication and
critical thinking.” The
standards are said to teach children “how to apply what they’ve
learned to real life… ‘It’s skills now, not just content. It’s not just
rote memory anymore.’” In all the reporting on Common Core, no contrary
examples were reported.
Doesn’t it sound good? No more rotten memorization! Just living,
breathing, real-world skills! Unfortunately,
as Hirsch shows, there are no skills that apply to any knowledge
indiscriminately. Believing that, however plausible it sounds, is the
intellectual equivalent of asking a carpenter to apply his chiseling
skills to gardening, or horseback riding. Knowledge acquisition must be
systematic and focused, and
requires memory. You cannot have great reading skill that applies
equally to a passage about the Civil War and to one about the lifecycle
of amoebae. Your ability to read and understand any given passage
depends on
your background knowledge about the subject. In short, you cannot be
a critical thinker without anything to think with or about.
Lie 4: Teachers are well-prepared
professionals
Teacher training ends up handicapping teachers by
instilling in them the most ineffective education philosophies and
methods, such as
the progressive
ideas outlined above. A
review of all the available research on teacher certification (which
usually requires college-level classes) has decisively shown it does not
result in better teachers. It’s likely the mush-brained philosophy of
education schools is a prime reason.
As
George Leef writes, “Back in 1991, Rita Kramer’s book Ed School
Follies: The Miseducation of America’s Teachers argued that our ed
schools were giving the country a steady stream of intellectually weak
teachers who had been steeped in dubious educational theories but knew
very little about the subject matter they were to teach. Despite
widespread and strenuous criticism such as Kramer’s, education schools
have changed very little since then.”
Leef also brings up another largely unknown, touchy reality: Because they
do not demand much of students, teaching programs recruit from the bottom
of the academic barrel. As I’ve
noted
elsewhere, students who intend to major in education have
below-average SAT scores, which equate to a below-proficient ranking on
state tests. Teaching coursework is among the least challenging
available, yet prospective teachers need more remedial classes than their
counterparts in humanities and social sciences. Even so, education majors
receive the highest grades of all college students,
according to research by University of Missouri economics professor
Cory Koedel. The combination of undemanding coursework and grade
inflation perpetuates a culture of low standards throughout education,
Koedel says.
Why don’t ed schools get better? States’ teacher certification mandates,
which in many cases also apply to private school teachers, give education
schools a
monopoly over teacher prep. They don’t have to turn out good teachers
to keep getting customers. So they’re free to perpetuate failed education
philosophies while children consequently continue to suffer.
Lie 5: Education is nonpartisan and
amoral
It’s clear that philosophy influences education
quality. What a teacher believes about how children learn is crucial to
whether her students actually do. The dominant progressive educational
philosophy, however, rests on two contradictory tenets. One, educators
must not impose their moral worldview in the classroom, and two,
education is tool to create progressive social policy. The unavoidable
reality is that education deals with human nature, and because of that it
cannot be neutralphilosophically, religiously, or politically.
Every school necessarily helps children explain our universe and place
within it, just like religion. Progressive education philosophy assumes,
contrary to most major religions, that children are naturally good and
wise enough to direct their own learning. And it aims to use education as
a political tool. Consider the shift in math instruction. Math must now
be “accessible” to poor students, and not by giving them higher-quality
instruction but by lowering expectations, as
Sandra Stotsky
explains. “The primary role of math teachers, constructivists say in
turn, shouldn’t be to explain or otherwise try to ‘transfer’ their
mathematical knowledge to students [because that perpetuates privilege,
she writes earlier]… Instead, they must help the students construct their
own understanding of mathematics and find their own math solutions.” This
obviously reflects specific, and highly debatable, beliefs about humans
and politics.
Many people think religious controversies in schools can be solved by
having schools ignore God altogether. That merely preferences atheism or
agnosticism over every other belief system, whose adherents believe a God
exists. In each case, central religious or irreligious beliefs have
far-reaching implications for how and what every school should teach. The
question is not whether schools promote certain philosophies, but how and
which, and whether families should be forced to enroll their children in
schools that actively contradict family beliefs.
Lie 6: Practically everyone should go to
college
This foolhardy demand rests on the false premise
that the point of an education is job preparation. But any good education
will treat a student as a whole person and not merely an economic unit.
This is particularly important becaue the U.S. education system exists to
undergird our unusual form of government: self-rule.
Check your state constitution.
Mine
says public schools exist because “knowledge and learning, generally
diffused throughout a community, [are] essential to the preservation of a
free government…” Notice it establishes public education to preserve a
free government, not to get people the lifestyles they want. As famed
economist
Milton Friedman writes, vocational education generally does not
create enough of a public good to justify direct government subsidy. “The
individual is rewarded in a free enterprise society by receiving a higher
return for his services than he would otherwise be able to command,” he
says, meaning vocational education primarily benefits the individual, so
they should pay for their own education. (Friedman also discusses ways
for government to facilitate this for poor people without creating
perverse incentives). Ultimately, Friedman agrees with the original
rationale forAmerica’s public education systemsthat they should exist to
provide general education for citizenship.
Nowadays, however, we hear nothing about citizenship, the ostensible
purpose of public education. Education subsidies seem to have devolved
into a mechanism for getting people enough money to make them happy. We
hear
things like this, from Oklahoma Republican Gov. Mary Fallin, just
last week: “It’s clear that a high school degree is no longer adequate to
gain a good job and access to the middle-class life.” Public
schooling is considered everyone’s birthright to the middle class. But
Gov. Fallin is just wrong.
Brookings Institution research recently showed that a person’s chance
of living in poverty is only 2 percent if he or she merely completes high
school, works full time, and marries before creating children.
The past several years have seen a deluge of demands that a high school
diploma now qualify all bearers for non-remedial admission to college.
The Obama administration has unilaterally required this of all states
using No Child Left Behind waivers. This will only further dilute college
academics, because everyone is simply not suited for college. As social
scientist
Charles Murray writes, “The refusal to confront the relationship
between intelligence and success in college has produced a cascade of
harms–to many students who try to go to college, to those who do not, to
the system of higher education, and to the nation as a whole.”
The impetus that unites these lies is that they promote ideas people want
to believe. But lies, however pleasant for one’s peace of mind in the
short run, damage people. Those who run our schools say they care about
children but year after year they continue to perpetuate systems that are
demonstrably harmful to our kids. Those damaged kids will one day grow up
to be citizens who are ill-prepared to face our nation’s challenges. The
future of freedom depends on our willingness to tell hard truths to our
entrenched educational interests and demand accountability for their
actions.
http://thefederalist.com/2013/09/23/six-lies-most-people-believe-about-u-s-schools/#.UkDBewoTPj8.facebook
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