A Conservative’s Radical Reform Plan for American Education

A Conservative’s Radical Reform Plan for American Education - Three Modest Proposals

"The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of the Conservatives is to prevent the mistakes from being corrected." – G. K. Chesterton

In 1984, following the publication of A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Education Reform, a publication of the National Commission on Excellence in Education, I attended an education seminar in which speaker after speaker kept demanding more to address the problems outlined in the study: more money, more school days during the year, longer school days. Then one speaker got up and said “if something is bad, you don’t want more of it, you want less of it.” It is in that spirit that I hereby present three modest proposals for reforming American education, and in the process, correcting past mistakes.

According to the US Department of Education, in 2007-2008, one third of all entering college students required at least one remedial course in math, English or reading. And that number jumped to 42% when looking at public two-year colleges. And that doesn’t even count the 46% of Americans who never attend college at all. So something like 60-70% of Americans go through 12 years of schooling either without the skills to do college level work or without even the belief that they can do college level work. If we’re not going to teach kids to be prepared for college level math, English or reading in 12 years, why not not teach them in six or eight years and save all that money?

Rethinking the System
There is an early age when children are very good at rote learning, say from five to nine. So by all means, let us pack those years with rote learning, from the alphabet to the multiplication tables. But why spend an entire year trying to teach 5th graders long division and fractions when they could understand the whole concept in a month as freshmen in high school when their brains are more fully developed? A National Assessment of Educational Progress study from 2009 shows that among 12th graders, 26% of students test below the Basic level in reading proficiency and a dismal 56% score below the Basic level in mathematics.

There is a reason we segregate middle schoolers from primary and high schoolers; their brains are so raging with hormones that they can’t learn anything. I honestly can’t remember five things I learned in middle school that didn’t involve basketball or girls.

Up until the turn of the 20th century, few Americans went past 6th or 8th grade. Then, it made sense to pack as much learning into those years as possible. Today, students in most states are required to attend school at least until age 16 if not 18.

In my day (the content has no doubt changed but not the spiral method) we learned about the Pilgrim’s in first grade, drawing an outline of our hand on colored paper to cut out and make a turkey to decorate the walls for Thanksgiving. Then we learned about the Pilgrim’s again in 5th grade Social Studies. Then we learned about them again in 8th grade Geography. Then we learned about them yet again in 10th grade US History. What’s the point? Why teach kids the same sorts of things four different times? The point is to fill up eight hours a day, 180 days a year, for 12 years, and to employ generally reliable Democrat party votes in doing so.

So we waste time teaching the same things over and over. We waste time trying to teach kids things that we could teach them in less time when their brains are more fully developed. We waste time trying to teach kids who, while going through puberty, are busy trying to learn other life lessons which are then more important to them than what is being presented in the classroom. And in the time not wasted, we still fail to prepare a majority of our students to do college level work.

Modest Proposal #1
So I propose that we simply cut out 5th to 8th grades altogether. Certainly, parents still need a place where they can send their kids so the parents can work. But that place doesn’t have to resemble an institutionalized cube farm where kids get told, day after day, to make sure they’ve read the memo about the new TPS cover sheets. Sure, leave the library open. Leave the computer and science labs open. But let the kids play and have some fun.

Self-Esteem
One day my half-brother, then aged 7, who had developed learning disabilities as a result of a botched forceps birth, came home from school and asked my father “Dad? Am I retarded?” My father responded “No. Of course not. Why do you ask?” “Because all the other kids in my class get grades and all I get are gold stars.”

Now if an arguably brain-damaged 7 year-old could see through the whole self-esteem movement why couldn’t his teachers? Or, for that matter, the teachers of today?

What students know that their teachers do not is that self-esteem doesn’t come from a pat on the head or a gold star from a teacher. Self-esteem comes from measuring yourself against your peers. While none of us is good at everything, most of us are good at something. It is just a question of finding out what that something is. And that something will be found in competition with our peers rather than in some value arbitrarily bestowed upon us by a teacher.

Instead of pounding into the heads of slower students, day after day, that they are stupid (which is what they hear and learn despite what a teacher might say or do), let them go out and explore their talents in free play with other students in an attempt to find out what they are good at.

I was serious about keeping the library and the labs open. I guarantee you that whatever psychological phenomenon it is by which a student who can’t wait for summer vacation to start also can’t wait for it to end will drive many students to seek out knowledge after a varying number of days of eight hours of unstructured play. Let the kids who are bored with unstructured play come in and learn what they want to learn, when they want to learn it.

But what about the kids who don’t come in? What about them? These are the same kids who wouldn’t have learned anything in a classroom in the first place. And at least those kids will enter high school without having their self-esteem torn in tatters after four years of being shown, on a daily basis, that they’re stupid.

Computer Programming
Obviously, the high school curriculum would have to be entirely revamped under this system, but those four years of math that the students missed in 5th-8th grade can be squeezed into freshman year. After all, the students’ brains are now more fully developed and the concepts will be more easily understood.

One area I would like to see more prevalent in high school is computer programming. Let me immediately stress and stress again that I don’t really think that the world needs more computer programmers, but that’s not the point. Students are surrounded by computer programs, from their video games to their social networking sites to their smart phones. And yet few of them have a clue as to how those programs came to be. But more importantly, computer programming teaches five fundamentally important life skills.

Problem Solving
The first valuable lesson involves breaking down large problems into smaller manageable ones and then linking the solutions to the smaller ones together to solve the larger one. This is an invaluable skill as life is constantly throwing challenges at us. If we know we have an ability to break down a large challenge into smaller, tractable ones, then maybe we won’t feel quite so overwhelmed sometimes.

Empathy
The second involves empathy. To be a good programmer one simply must put oneself in the shoes of an end user who comes to the application with no idea of how it was put together and no intention of reading the help manual unless absolutely forced to by bad design. The ability to have at least an idea of how others are going to act and react means that maybe we won’t so often be shocked or surprised by what others do.

Precision Programming languages can be unforgiving about the placement of a comma or a semi-colon. An ability to focus and concentrate is absolutely crucial. These are also very valuable life skills to have.

Grammar / Syntax
I remember spending many, long boring hours in 8th grade learning to diagram English sentences. I couldn't see the value of it then or now. Everything I needed to know about English grammar I picked up when I learned French. Every programming language has a different vocabulary, grammar and syntax (differences vary greatly). Learning different programming languages will help students understand English grammar in comparison.

Right and Wrong
Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, if a program doesn’t do what the student wanted it to do or expected it to do, it’s not the computer’s fault or the programming language’s fault or society's fault. It’s the student’s fault for not thinking through the process. Too many students today are taught that "nobody can really know right from wrong." Any programmer can tell you that's not true.

Teaching
There is something fundamentally at odds between what our notion of what education is for and who it is we choose to be our educators. The fundamental purpose of education in a highly technical society is to prepare students to survive in their economic environment. Yet large numbers of our teachers graduated from high school, immediately went to college to get a four year degree with another year of “pedagogy” thrown in and then began teaching. Does it really make sense that those who are supposed to be preparing students to survive in the “real world” have never actually survived in the real world? They may know how to survive in “academia”, but academia makes up but a tiny fraction of the real world.

An education effectiveness study conducted by the LA Times showed that, contrary to received wisdom, a teacher's experience, education and training had very little impact on whether that teacher was actually effective:

"Many of the factors commonly assumed to be important to teachers' effectiveness were not. Although teachers are paid more for experience, education and training, none of this had much bearing on whether they improved their students' performance."

The article describing the study goes on to note: "Nationally, the vast majority [of teachers] who seek tenure get it after a few years on the job, practically ensuring a position for life. After that, pay and job protections depend mostly on seniority, not performance." So we pay teachers more based on seniority and any further education they may attain despite the fact that neither of these substantially correlates with better results for students.

Lastly, when all you see are nails you end up believing that the only tool you need is a hammer. One evening as I was rushing to the auditorium of my daughter's middle school so as not to miss the beginning of her band concert, her principal yelled at me "No running in the halls!" Seriously. If you spend most of your time around 7th and 8th graders, you tend to see everyone as a 7th or 8th grader. Teachers who spend their entire adult working lives with other people's 12 year-olds will have an oddly warped view of the adult world and what's required to succeed in it.

Modest Proposal #2
Teachers should not be allowed to teach K-12 unless they have at least five years of experience outside of academia. Further, teachers should not be able to teach for more than five consecutive years without doing another five year stint, again, outside of academia.

Will there be those who don't wish to become teachers under a regimen in which they are not guaranteed tenure and the perks that go with it? Undoubtedly. But maybe those people who enter the teaching profession primarily for those reasons shouldn't be there in the first place.

But where will our school administrators come from? Where will our Principals and District Superintendents come from if they can't rise through the teaching ranks? But shouldn't the business of running a school district be handled by someone who has actually studied business and even run one? Is it really inconceivable that a CEO who has run a successful business couldn't do a better job of managing a school district than someone who has never been in business?

College One meme that the educational-industrial complex wants to cram down our throats is that "everyone should go to college." This is merely one example of lefties defining a concept as good a priori and then forcing the rest of us to acquiesce to their received wisdom. They will point out that college graduates will earn more money over the course of their lives than non-college graduates. But correlation is not causation. It may be that college graduates are more driven and motivated than their non-graduating cousins, both character traits being key in succeeding in business. The other reason may be that corporate Human Resource box checkers use graduation as a sorting criterion to make their lives easier, thus ensuring that a non-graduate, even though equally qualified, can't even get his foot in the door to prove his worth.

But secondly, many of those American jobs which can never be outsourced or off-shored - framer, roofer, mechanic, plumber, electrician, hair stylist, chef, etc (generally, localized skilled trades) - don't require college at all. They require experience. Real world experience.

Modest Proposal #3
We do not live in Lake Woebegone where all children are above average. Not everyone is meant for college, and not everyone needs college. Further, even those industries which rely heavily on college graduates to fill their employee ranks might find that they can train these workers more efficiently and economically themselves. Consider Computer Science. A graduate in computer science will have chosen from a smorgasbord of his major's elective courses including possibly theory, algorithms, security, networking and maybe a few different programming languages. Not all of these courses will be valuable at any given job. He will then have spent the other half of his college work in core curriculum courses in which he was taught that America in general and corporations in particular are mean, hateful, baby-killing, profit mongers.

So when our computer science graduate arrives for his first day of work at Microsoft , he will have to forget all of what he learned from the core curriculum and probably half of what he learned in his major in order to begin working the Microsoft way. On top of that, he will have to unlearn what he learned badly. So three out of his four college years will have wasted. We might well ask if Microsoft wouldn't have been better off taking him right out of high school and training him properly over the course of that one year? If you factor in three years of wasted college tuition, our programmer would still be better off even if he had to pay Microsoft for the privilege of learning the Microsoft way over the course of that first year.

The same will be true for many white-collar professions: accounting, marketing, advertizing, and sales for example. Again, people wishing to enter these professions would be better off learning the necessary skills directly from the people in those professions themselves rather than wasting 10s of thousands of dollars on useless college courses.

Apprenticing So those who wish to enter skilled blue collar trades might be better off apprenticing in those trades rather than spending their adolescence stuck behind a desk being force fed Maya Angelou. And those who wish to enter white collar professions might be better off learning the requisite skills from the people who are directly in those professions, even if they have to pay to do so.

What Makes these Proposals Conservative?
These proposals do not require a top-down approach. They can be implanted by a single, brave and innovative school district working with local businesses. And hey, if it doesn't work, those students in that district will be no worse off than they are now.

Too often, we conservatives get suckered into the "education" trap because "it's for the children. " But our children are being badly served by an educational-industrial complex that continues to demand more while providing less. And by acquiescing, we continue to fund, maintain and empower an extremely large group of American public school teachers and university professors an overwhelming majority of whom have values antithetical to ours. It's time to wake up and make some changes. It's time to downsize public education. If the bear of public education is mauling our children, we don't want a bigger bear; we want a smaller one.

That’s sexist! /sarc

They may learn, but at what price? The black/white achievement gap in 4th grade is relatively small and grows enormously by 8th grade. There really is no reason today to continue using a system designed to train factory workers decades ago - the bells, the schedules, the sitting quietly, etc. And no particular reason, other than teacher convenience, to assume that all students’ brains will develop at the same rate.

And most of those 5th-8th teachers are realiable democrat votes. Appreciate your feedback though.

I would add to these the following:

4. Revert money away from the federal government and keep it at the state and/or local level, more local than state. More accountability, more what people in an area want taught/have money spent on. Abolish Federal Dept of Education and save everyone money.

5. More solid male teachers. Boys need the good role models of decent, manly male teachers that there used to be before the concerted effort to drive men from the classroom began with the feministas. Emphasis must swing back to boys and encouraging them as the current system is totally lopsided to girls.

In an ideal world this man could open his own school based on these ideas and we could see if they worked

Nowadays it is not possible to innovate- you must follow the state-authorized curriculum or else

He nailed one important point- schools are no longer for educating - they are for indoctrinating future democrats by safely employed democrats

Unions versus child education. Good luck winning against the unions after Obama is done. Higher teacher/administrator salaries and pensions, less work, no innovation, etc.

We have illegals in public schools in our area that threaten students with murder/violence and the schools don’t lift a finger. “It’s a matter for the police.” and the police don’t do anything.

I see likely teenagers of illegals on bikes in my area. At night, they throw large objects on to the interstate. My son was almost killed two nights ago and his car was severly damaged. The police said there has been numerous incidents and they actually were in pursuit, but the kids escaped on their bikes. Legals or illegals, there is a big Salvadrian population in the area and they are big trouble. But the police won’t say anything other than kids.

we learned about the Pilgrim’s in first grade, drawing an outline of our hand on colored paper to cut out and make a turkey to decorate the walls for Thanksgiving. Then we learned about the Pilgrim’s again in 5th grade Social Studies. Then we learned about them again in 8th grade Geography. Then we learned about them yet again in 10th grade US History. What’s the point?

Because, at least in theory, the next time you talk about it they are older and you can go deeper.

So why not wait and go through it once?

Because you have to prepare the ground. Most things need to be learned more than once to be learned.

I believe they need to bring back vocation training, and that every kid should have at least some vocational training. Having some hands-on skills changes your perspective on life and yourself and I think you absorb the academics in a different way.

I have often thought that nobody should be hired to teach if they are under 40 but thats another issue.

We have ceded the battlefield of ideas to our philosophical opponents for too long, and the schools and universities are ground zero for the war of ideas. Give your kids to your enemies for 12 or 16 years and you won't like what you get back. We either take back the responsibility for educating our own kids or we will always be behind the curve, always playing catch-up and never quite catching up.

By the way, I agree with your proposals about computer programming; it achieves part of what I was driving at with my remark about vocational training. It teaches logic, and the laws of consequences, and it renders the kid’s world a much more rational place.

I agree with your remarks about teachers having had a life before they start teaching. And that administrators should come from the business world.

I agree that we should bring back apprenticeships.

I have often thought that high school should give essentially a college education and the college years should give you your job training.

But that both need to be accompanied by hands on skills. Learn to build a computer. Learn to program it. Build houses for Habitat. Something.

An interesting analysis of our Prussian designed education system was done by Gato in The Underground History of American Education. Another analysis of curricula is Bloom’s book, The Closing Of the American Mind.

We are using a cultural Marxist’s curricula which Buckley wrote about in God and Man at Yale in 1950. It promotes everything that defies logic and reason and science and deconstructs through critical theory. Progressives/neo-Marxists destroyed public education in this country, like they intentionally did in Europe.

Get rid of everything designed from Dewey on and start over using the canon of Christian Western Civilization that was used up until Dewey in America.

Do you realize Mark Twain was through with formal education at age 13? Look at all the great thinkers, like Franklin....Lincoln (not even a year in “formal” schooling). Do you actually think that is an accident?

Mass conformity and “one-way” to think is a Prussian design used for social engineering and put into place when they demolished multi-grade classrooms and created government forced schooling. (To shape the “plastic” minds of the masses.)

One fundamental critical issue is the early parenting years (first 7) that prepare the person for “learning”. Children learn morality, decency, language, and self-control in the formative years and should be with loving parents or relatives....never strangers for long hours, especially in institutions (schools).

This break up of the natural family (also because of cultural Marxism) is to destroy independence, individualism, self-esteem, etc.—the main Christian attributes that developed the greatest nation of free people in the history of the world (can’t have free people).

The family has to be addressed, for the earliest years determine the intelligence and ability to learn to such a large extent==emotional health and stress levels determine even if the brain CAN learn.

Here is my education reform plan using capitalist values:

Charge parents for school at the beginning of the term:

At the end of the term, if the student gets a 3.0 AND is tested for all his competencies for his grade level in math, English, science and history and passes, the money is refunded to the parents or carries over to pay for the next grade. Over 12 years of passing, the money earns interest.
After graduating from high school, the parents can gift that money tax free to their children for whatever reason.

If the students don’t pass, then the parents have a choice: Do the grade over again at their expense, take remedial classes over the summer at their expense, or forfeit the money.

Eliminate any kind of social promotion.

On top of that, give every parent the right to use money that goes for public schools to use for charter or private schools, including parochial schools. But the same standards apply. The students have to demonstrate all the competencies for their grade level or don’t get promoted to the next grade.

Also, I would mandate every kid has to take classes in microeconomics, macroeconomics, accounting and business and property law before graduating from high school.

Anybody who has a fundamental education in economics and business will have a hard time justifying their future liberalism.

My reform program is simple and cheap and the illegals will be forced to contribute something to the “free education” they are getting courtesy of the US taxpayer.

The whole school culture doesn’t want men in the classroom at all. Particularly heterosexual Christian white men.

Even the worst teachers are treated differently. Think about teacher rapists (consentual or not). Male teachers are convicted as rapists, lose their jobs, are evil, only did it for sex, control blah blah blah. FEMALE teachers who rape (girls or guys) are treated a lot less harsh, are usually allowed to resign, people write articles defending them, about how they love the kid they raped, are pregnant with the kid’s kid, etc. THere is no difference between them, they all are in positions of power and trust, they are acting IN LOCO PARENTIS and almost no biological parents would sleep with their own kid, there’s no way to justify a teacher doing it. Woman or man. The whole female gym teacher / soccer / field hockey coach thing is shockingly true.

Great point I forgot to mention. Boys get drugs if they just act like boys. Some kids need it because they’ve got real problems, but way too many are diagnosed just to shut them up when there’s no problem. If you are too quiet, you will also be put on drugs. They will also think you are gay.

Now you have teachers and such promoting homosexuality and looking at the kids that don’t fit in well with their peers as potential gays and lesbians. Lucky I made it through school before that crap.

This futuristic world would need bosses to allow their
workers to take off 30 days to go with their chidren each year to school. Large desks attached to a small desk.
That way throughout the school year there would always be
some parents in the classroom. They would have a better understanding of the difficulities or the achievments that their child has. At the end of their 30 days - they rate the teacher. Small children would feel comfortably having Mom or Dad there, troublemakers would not be acting up as much with so many adults in the room. They could be helpers to the teachers and the children. (For the troubled schools where the parents are on welfare etc... they could also learn a thing or two - connecting them to a network of adult learning - getting them out of house and away from TV all day - this would improve their self-esteem). I would call your non-profit “A different Education is better”. Good Luck.

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