Let’s tackle the right education crisis
There’s a national security crisis in U.S. education. I’m no history sleuth, but it must have come on fast just after February 2010. That’s when Secretary of Defense Robert Gates sent the last Quadrennial Defense Review up to Capitol Hill, with no mention of U.S. education at all. Two years later, in March 2012, Joel Klein and Condoleezza Rice issued a report from the Council on Foreign Relations that declared American education to be so failed as to put U.S. national security at risk.
National security crises can arise suddenly. But education crises? Schooling kids is much as Max Weber once described politics – “a strong and slow boring of hard boards.” You can lose a school building or a teacher overnight, but you don’t fall into a national-security-like crisis by mid-morning recess. You don’t get out of it by homeroom the next day, either.
American education today does feel like it’s in crisis. But not the one Rice and Klein would have us believe. Klein and Rice say the problem is: “Johnny still can’t read, ‘rite or ‘rithmetic.” They say tests and standards are the fix. And like George Bush did down at Ground Zero after 9/11, they’ve gone to “The Pile,” megaphone in hand, shouting the alarm. This time, though, it’s not Saddam and WMD. It’s China, Finland, Singapore and our schools.
Few doubt the utility of standards and testing. But as my colleague Stephen M. Walt wrote in his dissent to the Rice-Klein report, the data is all over the place. Last week, for example, we learned that 75 percent of students graduated high school on time, the highest rate in a decade. Progress through grade level is good. Graduation rates are climbing. More are headed to college than ever before.
If we’re going to war, let’s get the problem right.
There is a crisis in American education worth going after hard. It’s one we can fix, and only a fool wouldn’t want to, whether its draped in the American flag or just sitting there quietly waiting to wreak havoc. Almost 1 million K-12 teachers – 29 percent of U.S. public school teachers – say they plan to quit within the next five years. Two years ago it was 17 percent. For those teachers with six to 20 years on the job – the heart of the batting order – 40 percent now say they plan to wave the white flag.
How do we know? Because Pew and Harris Interactive told us so last month in the 28th annual MetLife “Survey of the American Teacher.” Pew famously puts out the dullest, most obvious, least controversial survey findings imaginable. No one ever accused Pew of “rock piling” it.
The school reform deniers
By Steven Brill All opinions expressed are his own.
Every year I tell students in a journalism seminar I teach about the junior reporter for The American Lawyer – the magazine I founded and edited –who committed a classic error when he submitted a draft of a profile about some lawyer in the news who had made it big. Midway through the article, the young reporter described a showcase this lawyer had in his office that displayed a bunch of combat medals. The reporter declared, matter-of-factly, that our legal hero had won the medals for his heroics in Vietnam, which was relevant, he added, because the lawyer made his war record and his lock-n-load approach to his work part of his pitch to potential clients.
In the margin next to the statement about the lawyer having won the medals I wrote, “Who says?” When the reporter came to ask me what I had meant, I told him to check with the Pentagon about the supposed medals. Which the reporter did, and which caused a mini-scandal after we reported in our otherwise positive profile that our hero hadn’t won them.
The story has three points. First, that reporters should believe nothing told to them by a biased source, especially when what they are being told is a checkable fact. Second, that while opinions deserve balanced reporting of both sides’ views, facts are facts. They are knowable. The guy either got medals or he didn’t. Third, the best way to test facts that you think you know is to put them in front of the person with the greatest stake in refuting them. In this case when we confronted the lawyer with the Pentagon’s records that he had not won any medals, he produced no evidence to the contrary and, in fact, ultimately confessed his deception. Case closed.
I have thought about the lawyer who didn’t win the medals a lot in the two years since I parachuted into a giant story that I started out knowing little about: the battle raging across the country over education reform. After I had seen a reference to them in the New York Post, I showed up one morning in June 2009 at one of New York City’s “Rubber Rooms.” These were the places that housed hundreds of New York City teachers whom the Department of Education had accused of misconduct or incompetence, but who were protected by union tenure rules and, therefore, remained on the payroll for years pending the outcome of endless arbitration hearings, which typically resulted in them being returned to class by arbitrators whose $1,400-a-day contracts had to be approved every year by the teachers’ union.
The minute I saw these people sleeping, playing board games, chatting, or — in the case of a cheerful, $85,000 a year former middle school teacher — lounging in a beach chair she had brought from home, the story seemed obvious. As schools chancellor Joel Klein and his staff had argued, the Rubber Room was a symbol of a system gone haywire.
However, there seemed to be another side. The union had maintained that the Rubber Room teachers were victims, and New York’s public radio station, WNYC, had broadcast a report in which several of these Rubber Room teachers were interviewed complaining about how they were being persecuted for having complained about Klein’s misdeeds or misconduct.
Unions have given teachers a bad hame. Teachers have to figure out at what point they stop benefiting from union actions. Is all this bad press really worth it?
While all the comments bear some degree of truth and pint at the many symptoms of educational failure the core of educational dysfunction in American public schools is in the antiquated and discontinuous policies and practices that hold the performance of public schools to the original purposes of K12 education. The schools still are designed to create workers and to sort them into the caste system of 19th century America. A system based on industrial capitalism. There is no effort to address the ability of students to improve the quality of cognitive development, in short “how to learn”. The schools are still driven by a desire to indoctrinate students about what to learn not how to learn. There is scant evidence that critical thought or human development are the purpose of a K12 education. The best that can be said of the current system is that it trains students to perform a job or task at various levels of difficulty or complexity. That would include the entire K12 syllabus including science and math. The effort is not to promote in students an inherent capacity as mathematicians or scientists but to acquire the information that constitutes math and science without the personal and individual capacity to be either a mathematician or a scientist. The schools treat students at every level and age as raw material to be shaped to the needs of an industrial society, not to develop as complete and autonomous individuals. In short we need a school system that is predicated on a desire and competency for human development. The worst that can be said is that the schools are convincing us that the purpose of life is to work. The real purpose of life is to live, not work. We are designed to learn and learning is the inherent purpose of life for human beings.
The system (K12 to the doctorate) has been corrupted by industrial values that evaluate human effort by economic standards. As a society we hold in contempt any effort to questions the assumptions that support the premises of the core curriculum. There is no inquiry, and further there is no pedagogy that supports the implementation of inquiry as a cognitive ability and practice. The deficit in the schools of education to engage the community in a pursuit of understanding rather than the embrace of dysfunctional epistemology. There is no knowledge without a knower and the practice of replacing knowledge with information is an easy but empty practice that seems epidemic in our 21st century corporate state. The schools have abandoned the idea that the center of a civil society is the personal responsibility of the individual for the whole, the polity, the community, the common wealth. The academy urges us to abandon that responsibility to our selves and our children and leave it to the oligarchs who now walk the ramparts of corporate America. The problem with the public schools is in the vacuousness of our own efforts and short-sightedness of our vision. We are being led by economists who would bribe our children to do better(?) on tests like some common commercial enterprise – that which they were naturally designed to do. The shame is that we have turned education over to the philistines in corporate America, the lawyers and the masters of political intrigue. Joel Klein couldn’t bring MicroSoft to heel and as a reward he got the children of New York City to chew on.
The purpose of education ought to be driven by human development not industrialist values and incentives.