The Truth About Education?? You Can’t Handle The Truth

Our Education Establishment, in plain sight, is doing a second-rate job. Who, we should ask, is in charge of this train wreck, and what motivates them?

First, let’s add up the evidence. The fifty million functional illiterates. The one million dyslexics. The poor performance against international competition, despite our huge budgets. The ignorance of average Americans about basic geographical, historical, and scientific information. SAT scores slide; kids cannot multiply and divide; students reach college not knowing what six times seven is. About 65% of the children in fourth and eighth grades are reading at a level below “proficient,” that is, they are in some sense illiterate.

That’s a dismal record. In any other field, the people in charge would be fired, disqualified, disbarred, drummed out of office, or indicted.

In 1953, Professor Arthur Bestor wrote a book called “Educational Wastelands -- the Retreat From Learning in Our Public Schools.” Our educrats have been doing a lousy job for more than 60 years--that’s well chronicled. Explaining why they persist in doing a bad job is the hard part.

You can play all the evidence back and forth in your mind for a year; I predict you will finally come down to four possible explanations. All unpleasant to contemplate. But let’s try.

First, these people are less than competent. Education is not a field known for recruiting brainiacs, not since 1950. Now it seems to be an intellectual backwater. The main recurrent image is a large school of slow fish drifting from fad to fad.

“However, as we consider the top level of the Education Establishment, the smartest people, don’t we have to assume much greater awareness? There is so much obvious decay, so much intellectual decline, so many dreadful statistics. Surely, the top-tier people have to know exactly what they’re doing and why.”

Educational policy is actually not set by people in education, for the most part. It is set partially by politicians and lawyers, and the other part by people who have meaningless desk jobs where they do not have any contact with students. It is often based on research some of these people did as grad students or as their dissertation. That research is mostly verbiage either based on surveys which students do not take seriously or rubbish that name-drops some behavioral theorist forty-six times a paragraph.

As far as Common Core, I say the hell with it. Each state should decide what they intend regarding education- preferably by allowing it to be handled at the local level, as Newt Gingrich said.

Let’s create public schools that will take each child as far as each one can go. Oh, I agree!! But the educational establishment will NOT accept this, insisting that each child is capable of becoming a theoretical physicist, mechanical engineer, applied mathematician or cranial surgeon -- and if they don't, there is something wrong with the system or the teachers are incompetent boobs from the dregs of colleges and universities. We teachers are being asked to do the impossible. Not every child is capable of mastering courses such as Algebra I. I know this because I taught Algebra I for a number of years. The failure rate at DH's large high school school for Algebra I was 74% this past semester, only THREE students received A's out of 350. Many of those who failed, did so for the second or third time. What we do is pass failing kids around the department to different teachers, all of whom have math credentials and 25+ years of experience and training and all of whom have TRIED EVERYTHING POSSIBLE TO HELP KIDS PASS ALGEBRA I. We follow a very carefully monitored program that is designed (as all the others) to reach each kid at his own level. Not one of these teachers enjoys failing students, we didn't go into teaching to fail students but to help them succeed -- it is the most rewarding aspect of our job. Yet, they're still failing. I defy anyone who thinks "teachers are failing students" to come and show us how to do it. Show us what we've been doing wrong for the past two decades. Which multi-million dollar program that was supposed to help kids "master Algebra I" worked? (answer: none of them). What on earth hasn't been tried?? Maybe, just maybe it's the students AND NOT THE TEACHERS. Why do so many people, especially those who have never taught school, insist that ALL kids are attentive, interested in the subject matter, respectful, on time, have their homework finished, have studied for tests, brought their materials to class and are sitting quietly waiting for an incompetent teacher to begin the lesson? The reality is far different. Never are teachers asked about indifferent, disconnected, disinterested students, of which we have many -- students who refuse to do homework, study or open the textbook, are disrespectful to teachers and other authorities, are disruptive in class, arrive late to school daily and never bring pencil, pen or textbook to class. Call home? Please. We do this repeatedly and send home progress reports every four weeks. We have tutoring before and after school every day for struggling students, very few of whom bother to show up on any given day. Burn the system to the ground? And replace it with what? What do you think would work? I'm listening.

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