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Hero For Christ

The Failures of American Education



8/3/04

Introduction

Why are American public schools so bad?

Most people would say the answer is: Methods, Resources and Personnel.

They think either that
  1. people are teaching in the wrong manner,
  2. or that they there is not enough money to teach well,
  3. or that the wrong people are teaching.
I would say that none of these answers is correct. My experience in the school system has convinced me of all of the following:
  1. There are ample, well-known methods of proven effectiveness to teach children.
  2. There are more-than-adequate resources in most schools (to at least do a much better job of teaching than actually takes place) and
  3. most people who enter the field of education are smart, well-educated, well- intentioned, and motivated.
Therefore if
  1. effective methods are not being used, and
  2. individual classrooms never seem to have adequate resources, and
  3. among the teachers,
    1. the smart and the well-educated leave the field, and
    2. the well-intentioned and motivated lose both their motivation and their good intentions
...then we should see all of the above as symptoms of systemic problems, and none of them as root-level causes.

My view is that the crisis in education is not Methods, Resources and Personnel.

It is Vision, Purpose and Morals.

Contents

  1. Introduction
  2. The Crisis of Vision
  3. The Crisis of Purpose
  4. The Crisis of Morals
  5. Strategies for Change

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The Crisis of Vision

The cause of the crisis of vision is simple. We live in an increasingly pluralist society, filled with diversity of opinion and belief on every possible subject. However, the public school system is intended to serve every citizen equally, without preference given to any one point of view.

Although admirable in concept, this goal is proving increasingly unworkable in practice. For one thing, fewer and fewer pieces of knowledge can be presented as "value-neutral." Should "evolution" and "creationism" be taught as competing theories in science class? How should subjects such as abortion, the Gulf War, Vietnam, and the 2000 election be treated in history and social studies classes? Should teachers take into account the fact that events such as the civil rights movement and the Japanese internment may have vastly different meaning and significance for members of different cultural groups?

The answers to all of these questions must be carefully calculated to not offend anyone. The result is not merely a tepid, sanitized, presentation of knowledge drained of significance and subjectivity. It is also (and more damagingly) the creation of a worldview with no clear answers to the following questions:
  1. What does it mean to be human?
  2. What is a human being's place in the universe? and
  3. What is our vision for the graduates of our school?
In the absence of answers to those questions that will be acceptable to all the school's diverse constituents, most schools base their vision on the nearest thing that America has to a universal creed --the profit motive. Because of that, everything in education today is predicated on one question: Will it lead to a good job? This, however, is a terrible way to structure education for three major reasons:
  1. obtaining a good job "someday" is not a good motivator for most students
  2. much of what is most important in education (for instance the arts and humanities) does not relate directly to employment and
  3. taking employment as the highest goal implies unquestioning acceptance of a status quo that is actively harming the poorest students, and ultimately destructive for our country and our world as a whole.

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Next

Cycle of Methods

The crisis of vision also leads to the "Cycle of Methods" (which will be familiar to any veteran of the public schools).
  1. Every two years a new educational reform is announced with great fanfare.
    • Workshops are held, teachers are trained, and materials are purchased.
    • Meanwhile the old methods and materials are banned and discarded.
  2. Initially, the reform meets with resistance from teachers and students, and student achievement plummets.
  3. After about a year and a half, most people have adjusted to the new system, and student achievement begins to rise.
  4. At that point another new reform is announced, and the whole cycle starts again.

(Note: This cycle is an incomplete Phase-One-and-Two-only version of a Quadrophasic Cycle)

This explains the great paradox of school reform, which is that the schools are always "improving" but the overall trend is a steady decline.

The only exit to the cycle is to realize that any legitimate set of methods can work, as long as they are aligned to stable and viable vision, used consistently over the course of time, and supplemented as needed by other methods. In other words, when the vision comes first, the methods follow. When, however, the vision is bankrupt, no set of methods can be effective.


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Next

The Crisis of Purpose:

Most people believe that the purpose of schools is to teach content knowledge (facts and dates, and so forth) and skills (reading, writing, mathematics, etcetera.) However, this ignores the fact that most of the substantive information we teach children over the course of their time in school could be covered in a much shorter period of time -- perhaps as little as four or five years. So what is the remainder of what is taught in schools?

The answer is:
  1. Social Status Indicators,
  2. Socioeconomic Determinism, and
  3. Obedience to the Status Quo.
The cruel irony is that there is a direct relationship between this and one of America's greatest moral strengths, its egalitarianism. Because modern American society has few legal barriers to social mobility, social class distinctions are maintained in other ways.

In essence, those with wealth, power and opportunity (quite naturally) want to ensure those same advantages for their children. So they accomplish that in the following ways:
  1. by establishing exclusive enclaves complete with the best education money can buy (i.e. private schools and white-flight suburban school districts).
  2. by applying political pressure to ensure that the programs for their children are clearly better in terms of status and quality than the programs for other children (see examples below).
  3. by supporting broad educational policies that "incidentally" disadvantage poorer school districts (see examples below).
The three worst parts about this system are
  1. that it maintains itself automatically, and for the most part without conscious effort or understanding
  2. that it is supported and maintained largely by people with good intentions.
  3. that it causes the victims of the system to blame themselves, while the beneficiaries of the system remain blissfully unaware of having gained any unfair advantage.

EXAMPLE ONE:

In their 1996 study "The Politics of Culture: Understanding Local Political Resistance to Detracking in Racially Mixed Schools" (In "Education: Culture, Economy, Society," Halsey, Lauder, Brown, Wells) Amy Stuart Wells and Irene Serna describe what happens when a school attempts to give the same high-quality education to all its students, despite them being from diverse socioeconomic and racial backgrounds:

The wealthier and more powerful parents refuse to believe in the worth of any education that could be provided to all students equally. They demand programs for their children that are visibly different and better than the standard school programs. If their requests are not met, they threaten to abandon the school system entirely.

Under such pressure, most districts elect to pacify their elite students with open or de facto tracking systems, magnet schools, "gifted" programs and enrichment activities, all of which generally draw participation that correlates closely with wealth.

EXAMPLE TWO:

Ohio, in the early 1990's, was swept up in the "proficiency test" movement, as were many states across the nation. The reason was that the quality of education at wealthy suburban schools and poor inner city schools had diverged so sharply that a high school diploma no longer gave any meaningful information about the qualifications of the person who owned it. This gave rise to a public outcry from two sources
  1. wealthy parents concerned that their children's diplomas would be devalued by the (worthless) diplomas being issued in the inner city, and
  2. poor parents angry that their children were not receiving better educations.
Proficiency testing, at least on the surface, seemed to answer both these concerns. By preventing students who failed the exams from receiving diplomas, it protected the worth of the remaining diplomas. And by providing a visible measure of progress, it offered poor parents a way of monitoring the education given to their children.

However, the way it worked in practice was quite different. Although the (poorly- designed) tests were billed to the public as evaluating mastery of basic content knowledge, they were predicated on the possession of a complex range of cognitive skills that heavily favored the methods used in wealthier schools. Therefore, instead of providing a range of results based on content mastery, students in a given school were likely to fail or succeed en masse --a substantial boost to the wealthy parents' subconscious need to validate their own schools and methods.

The poorer school districts also found, to their distress, that instead of gaining additional resources to help pass the tests, the results were used (at least initially) as a way to justify withholding resources and support --putatively as an "incentive" for bad schools to do better.

The tests were also designed to be "unteachable" as a way of discouraging the phenomena of "teaching to the test". Nevertheless, most of the wealthy districts immediately began intensive test preparation sessions to ensure a 99-100% passing rate.

The poorer school districts, conversely, ignored the tests as long as they could, and then eventually capitulated, in some cases overhauling their entire curriculum to center around passing the tests. Of course, since the tests were deliberately "unteachable," this meant making a total hash of the natural learning progression.

Nonetheless, over the course of the next decade, the urban school districts did eventually manage to make progress towards improving passage rates on the tests (which were redesigned and improved to the point where they were no longer as blatantly unfair and as poorly designed). However just at the point when the inner cities were making significant improvements in test scores, Ohio announced that the proficiency test concept was being abandoned, and a new, entirely different kind of test would be introduced.

Ostensibly, the reason was to respond to widespread concerns about proficiency test validity. However, the timing of the changeover suggests a subconscious need to maintain the ability of the testing system to discriminate between inner city and suburban students.


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Next

The Crisis of Morals

Contrary to popular belief, we are teaching morals and values in all schools, and these are what they are:

If your child is going to a poor urban (or rural) school, he or she is probably learning the following in the classroom:
  • Blind obedience to authority
  • Acceptance of arbitrary conditions
  • Lack of focus
  • Low self-worth and self-image
  • Intellectual dependence
These are the values of the "culture of poverty." They are instilled into the children whom society intends to be poor all their lives because these values will help those children be accepting of their place in life, of low wages, of hard labor, of disrespect, closed doors, and circumscribed options.

Unfortunately these values are substituted for self-discipline and initiative, which are qualities that are subtly subverted and/or devalued in this environment. That, in turn, leads to a hash irony: Once a child has been socialized in this manner, it is difficult to treat him or her in anything but a heavily authoritarian way. One result is that idealistic teachers turn overnight into hardened disciplinarians. Another is that parents who have already been socialized to the same values complain if their children do happen to be guided towards taking initiative and gaining self-determination --because it is seen as undermining the authoritarian parent at home.

Of course, no self-respecting child would swallow such a hostile set of indoctrinations without a fight, so, simultaneous with the moral lessons of the classroom, the child learns a set of counter-lessons and methods of resistance from peers. These include:
  • Hostility towards and mistrust of authority
  • Solidarity at the expense of achievement
  • Hatred of academics
  • Criminality
Of these, the second is especially significant, because it means that success is seen as an abandonment of the group. Therefore the child of this background is forced to choose between personal success and a connection to his or her peers.

As a whole, these methods of resistance are notable in that they mainly harm the resistors themselves, their peers, and their community. They do nothing to alter the system.

The end result is that the child in the poor urban school is prepared for one of the following futures:
  • Minimum wage service or labor jobs
  • Chronic unemployment
  • Criminal behavior
  • Permanent institutionalization
The one advantage to the children in this grouping is that their communities are sometimes strong enough to successfully resist the effects of the system. If so, such children may retain a foundation in a traditional set of values. This often include honesty, generosity, the importance of family, the importance of the community, the importance of religion and spirituality and the importance of the arts as practiced or experienced at a personal day-to-day level.

However, the tragedy of the system is that children are forced into a false choice between such values and the values of intellectual achievement.

The middle-class child is also being taught a set of values in his or her classroom:
  • Support of the system
  • The importance of following rules
  • Conformity
  • Advancement at all costs
  • Exclusion of others
  • Disdain for the disadvantaged
The upwardly mobile middle-class family is often acutely aware of its closeness to the lower-class, and is anxious to separate itself in any way possible. In addition, they see other members of the middle class as rivals and are constantly competing to gain the upper hand in terms of status.

Despite this, there is a tendency towards conformity, an acceptance of the status quo, and a surprising lack of initiative and vision that exists in the middle class. Middle-class students tend to be clique-ish and exclusionary, and they often simply follow their families, in being constrained by social norms. Middle-class rebellion is common, but tends to follow a well-established pattern --a period of destructiveness (in the company of a group) that is subsequently suppressed, hushed-up and ignored.

This group is highly mobile, and while relationships may be formed within communities, these tend to be superficial and based on mutual self-interest. There is a pronounced tendency towards civic responsibility in the middle class, but it tends to be narrowly focused on the middle-class family's own neighborhood or community. The middle class has a tendency to deny, ignore and disavow problems, particularly those taking place elsewhere.

All of this reflects the way middle-class enclaves are established --through flight away from regions of diversity (and the attendant difficulties thereof) and towards a supposed paradise of homogeneity and material comfort.

The middle-class child with an abundance of ambition, but a poverty of vision, tends to end up as a professional, an educator, or a member of middle management, particularly if the child is first generation middle-class. The middle class is the group that keeps the entire system running, usually without realizing that:
  1. they are being exploited by the system they shore up
  2. the system they support is oppressive to the lower socioeconomic classes, and
  3. that the upper echelons of society are not entered simply through working one's way up the ranks.
One interesting thing to note about the middle-class school in particular is that the teachers at such schools are not generally better than those at inner-city schools. However, they teach under conditions that make success nearly inevitable:
  1. Most middle class parents aggressively teach their children at home, and/or enroll their children in enrichment programs. This means that most middle-class children enter school having already mastered the basics of reading and mathematics, an advantage that stays with them throughout their schooling.
  2. Middle class children are also taught to be intensely self-directed and self- disciplined.
The combination of these factors makes the teacher's job easy.

The above explains an essential paradox of education --that the same methods which meet with great success in wealthier schools are often abject failures in poorer schools. The children in the wealthier schools enter the classroom with a preparation and a set of cultural norms that prepare them to get the most out of such methods, whereas the poorer children, lacking that foundation, are like non-swimmers thrown into deep waters.

The use of such methods in a setting where students have different backgrounds also leads to an expanding gap in achievement between the prepared and the unprepared students.

The upper class is invisible to most people who are not in it. The values that it teaches to its children are entitlement, self-centeredness and self-indulgence. Although many associate the upper class with jobs such as doctor, lawyer, and professor, members of the real upper class are more likely to have jobs such as C.E.O. (or V.P.), politician, or investor; or to live on trust funds and wealthy spouses as playboys and socialites.

Many upper-class people are actually quite unhappy. However, there is a key advantage to being wealthy. If you have the will and the values to want to do something to help society, you are likely to have the resources and the ability to do it. For this reason, wealthy people in America have traditionally funded many social reform and arts efforts.

However, in general, those with wealth and power learn to use it to their own selfish benefit, the middle class learns that winning is everything, and the poor learn self- destructive behaviors. And while it is possible to move from one category to another, the usual price is to become estranged from one's origins, repudiating the values and the culture one grew up with, and embracing the culture and values of one's new socioeconomic home. The results promise to be disastrous for America.


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Strategies for Educational Change

This essay has focused on the failures of America and American education. However America is still a society with a great deal of genuine social mobility, as well as opportunities for those with the will and the know-how to access them.

Strategies for parents:

Right now, the best choice for most parents is an inner-city charter or magnet school with a diverse population, a commitment to social activism, a strong sense of vision, and an openness to innovative methods. These do exist, but they are not easy to locate, and are generally oversubscribed. However these are among the few places where one might find a combination of moral courage and vision, genuine diversity, and a high-quality education.

Strategies for teachers and administrators:

Particularly if you teach in a poor urban or rural setting, your only way to bring your students a good education is to set a strong moral vision that opposes the status quo. The reason is as follows:
  • If you don't oppose the status quo, then you support the status quo
  • The status quo is harmful to students, particularly in lower socioeconomic classes
  • Therefore if you don't oppose the status quo, then you are harming your students This sets up a situation where the adults in the building participate in an undeclared war with the students.

    To be blunt, if you are not willing to be a revolutionary, then you should not be in the field of education.

    Conversely, if you are willing to teach your students to be self-directed and proactive, and are willing to teach them to fight for what they believe in, then you will be on their side, the way a teacher or administrator is supposed to be, and you will no longer need to spend the majority of your time worrying about classroom management. In essence, you will create a culture of learning and cooperation, rather than a culture of learned helplessness and hostility.

    This is difficult to do at the level of a single classroom, because the students will be heavily influenced by the rest of the school. It is more effectively done at the level of a school building. Most effective of all would be to transform a school system at a district wide (or even statewide) level, but this is very improbable due to political pressures.

    Methods For Working Effectively in Lower Socioeconomic Schools:

    1. Start by teaching the basics (addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, reading, writing) in a very simple and direct manner using any methods that are effective for a given child. Use as much resources as needed to ensure that all children achieve complete mastery. Guide children towards self-discipline and self-direction from an early age, and use peer tutoring and peer mentoring to supplement human resources.
    2. As soon as (but not before) mastery is achieved, move a given child on towards a more exploratory and project-based model of learning, again utilizing peer mentoring and peer tutoring.
    3. Continually stress a vision not based on "jobs" or economic advancement, but on the transformation of society, starting with the local community.

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    Comments below:

    • See Also:

    1. Instructional+Method
    2. Educational+Logbook

    Comments from Readers:

    Well i wasn't able to read the whole essay but in my my own words of concern, our education system is a very big problem in America today. I, myself, growing up in a small town and attending a rather small, simple Church-school believe its because we have left God out of the equation. I believe the only way our Nation can regain its morality is by putting God first. The only hope for our country is to stand up and say, "we need God in America again!" P.S. I was reading this essay to help myself better understand what people really believe is hindering our education system. I am writing an essay myself for my English as I am finishing up my last year of highschool. The information (all of) you have provided will be very helpful in finishing my essay. Thank You, Ashley
  • Ashley, Maine
    5/8/07
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