Posted on 12/12/2013 9:07:23 AM PST by SeekAndFind
Everyone knows that America’s education system is broken. Committees are convened, grants are dispensed and new studies are rolled off the educational assembly line every few months that purport to change everything by showing that the entire process of educating children from medieval to modern times was completely wrong.
Education has come to be a science of its own with a jargon full of nebulous pseudo-scientific terminology impenetrable to the ordinary person. The majority of public school teachers now have master’s degrees because it takes more than some ignorant BA to tell Johnny to pay attention in class or he’ll never amount to anything in life.
Unfortunately the majority of teachers were also so busy getting their graduate degrees that they didn’t actually put in any classroom time. The students of tomorrow are being taught by other students who have an MA and papers on educational unleveling through cognitive disequilibrium across multiple modalities but very little actual experience with students.
Educational reform has become a ridiculously popular topic. Documentaries like “Waiting for Superman” have convinced everyone that they have what it takes to reform education. Everyone includes M. Night Shyamalan (the director of that movie where Bruce Willis was really dead all along) who has his own book out claiming to have the five strategies that can save education.
Only one of them involves ghosts and aliens.
But what if the surprise twist ending for education reform is that education doesn’t actually need reforming? What if it doesn’t require teachers with graduate degrees, a billion dollars worth of studies and helicopter reforms by liberal tycoons? What if the American educational system is doing about as well as can be expected considering the social conditions that it has to work with?
Most educational reformers would agree that’s a dangerous heresy right up there with not believing that the planet is about to go up in smoke because of cow flatulence. They point to how much better children in Japan or Finland are doing at math and warn that if we don’t spend billions more on studies that will tell us how to improve education, America will fall behind.
We’ll no longer be the country that invents things. Instead we’ll be ignorant savages fighting over scraps of raw meat in the back alley behind a Taco Bell. That is if we can’t put enough teachers with graduate degrees and mad text scaffolding skills into the classroom.
But after decades of warnings, America is still the country that invents things; even if one of those things is an obsession with turning the little schoolhouse into a nightmarish blend of experimental psychology, sociology experiment, diet club and TSA line at the airport.
It’s an article of faith that our schools are failing our children. But most dedicated educational reformers don’t mean that schools are failing their children. They mean that urban schools are failing minority children. Like gun violence, failing schools are largely an urban problem being passed off as a national crisis. And it’s not the schools that are failing. It’s the students.
The gap in test scores between America and other countries goes away when broken down by race. White American students top those of most European countries. Asian American students come out ahead of them. It’s not that Asian students somehow have access to better schools. Often they go to the same urban multicultural schools that are “failing” everyone else.
The difference is that they are determined to succeed because their parents want them to.
Our schools are badly run and awash in ridiculous theories and worse budgets. But they aren’t failing our children. They are functioning about as well as any part of government can and they are for the most part doing their core job. Any student who makes it through twelve grades without achieving basic math and literacy skills hasn’t been failed by the school. He has made a choice not to learn. More often the choice has been made for him.
A school cannot take the place of the family. It isn’t meant to. Nor are educational theories the determinant of whether a child learns or doesn’t learn. Learning does not begin in the classroom. It begins at home. The first explorations of language and space take place in the nursery. And they determine more about the child’s future than all the synergistic educational strategies for 21st century learners.
The school is not the most vital element in education just as the government is not the most vital element in the economy. Systems don’t take the place of human relationships. Governments cannot replace families. Schools aren’t failing children in Detroit or Chicago. Families are failing their children and the schools by not holding together.
Children from single parent homes are at double the risk of dropping out. Children with never-married mothers score worse than children with divorced mothers. Across the world, regardless of race or creed, children living in a normal household with a father and mother performed better in school than their counterparts.
It doesn’t matter whether the MA’s in their twenties who have spent more time being students than doing anything else manage to agendize their dynamic action plans or not. It does matter whether there is a father in the house. And that father can’t be Uncle Sam.
It does not take a village or four administrators and three teachers, two school psychologists and an educational theorist to raise a child. It takes a family.
If the American school system is a mess, it’s because it has been reformed to death until it has stopped being a system for educating children and become a system for educating teachers and administrators about all the latest trends in educational theory. The classroom has become an ER where all the children are assumed to be coming in with fatal educational traumas and can only be saved by using the latest techniques developed by a study funded by Bill and Melinda Gates.
Like so much of the nonsense that bedevils America, educational reform is based on the progressive assumption that students are static objects and that government education is a dynamic system. With enough research, the code to teaching students will be cracked and every student in the country can then be educated to become a supergenius.
Progressive policies fail by ignoring human choices. They try to centrally plan everything and discover belatedly that they aren’t in control because their plans are undermined by individual choices.
Bill Gates has sunk a fortune into educational reform and yet he’s a college dropout who by his own admission barely did enough work in school to get by. Does Gates really believe that Harvard and his upscale prep school failed him? Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bell and the Wright Brothers invented the modern world as we know it. They have one other thing in common. None of them actually finished their schooling.
Big schools or small schools. Large class sizes or small class sizes. Recontextualize the paradigm or don’t. These things don’t matter very much.
Education is not a system. It is not a technique. It is a culture. American education is only as strong as American culture. Systematizing educational techniques cannot take the place of the family values that make for a healthy child and the national values that make for a healthy adult.
Pardon me madam.. l didn’t say they couldn’t. Take your pick tennis shoes or books... but don’t take your old hack to the Derby. It is not just the placement that we don’t choose but also the breaks we may get, (what we bring to the table) and ...
how hard we hit it?.
Kindest regards as always.
Good article. Bottom line, families that invest time and energy into their kids get better results. preparing kids to learn, behave and have respect will greatly improve their ability to learn....as long as other kids parents do the same.
The K-12 system is very biased with leftwing propaganda even if its not “broken”
These statistics probably are similar when it comes to crime in the US. Take out the black and Hispanic crimes and we are one of the safest countries in the world
I’d be interested to see these numbers adjusted for household income.
Certain cultures are doing better than others in school probably because some cultures promote structured family units which teach children the value of wise time investment.
Otherwise, one problem with America’s schools is that, for many decades, many working parents have been using public schools as a babysitter, such parents basically not having the energy at the end of a day to ask their children how they were indoctrinated in entitlement socialism at school that day.
Also, instead of promoting the cliche, “reading, writing and arithmetic,” schools should be teaching reading, writing, arithmetic and federal government’s constitutionally limited powers.
In fact, military training issues aside, as a consequence of teachers likely not knowing what Congress’s constitutionally limited power are, teachers don’t understand that Congress has no constitutonal authority to do the following. Congress cannot regulate and fund any aspect of public schools, including not laying taxes which corrupt federal politicians use to subsidize school programs that encourage vote-winning entitlement programs.
Oh, no doubt it’s broken.
I do agree it’s full of LW BS and black magic. Can’t teach anyway when over half the time is spent getting students under control.
bkmk
Black people don’t study and consequently flunk out.
And send the bill to the taxpayers.
Surprise!
Anybody who has ever spent time in a public school has observed these results up close and personal.
A friend who just turned 70 (she’s a youthful 70), wants to get the H out of the public school system. She bit the bullet & stayed there long enough to get maximum Social Security. Would have wanted to stay longer, for financial reasons. But no money on earth will give her any incentive, at this point.
She gave up teaching these kids — black/Hispanic, inner city; you get the picture. When I told her that a lot of them were from basically rural people, she initially accused me of being racist (although I feel the same way about certain whites). Now she agrees with me. There are just too many variables, all working against them. Money thrown at improving the schools (& the scores) has been money thrown down the sewer.
It’s not that these kids are a totally lost cause. Maybe some will pull themselves up by the bootstraps later; others might get a lucky break. But most will follow the familiar, dismal trajectory — gangs, pregnancy, welfare.
No, it is the acceptance of disruptive behavior from many kids which have sabotaged learning in inner-city classrooms.
In the suburbs, it's the abandonment of grouping kids by ability which has caused slower students to hold back the faster students.
And when you break down crime stats by race and ethnicity, white non-Hispanic America's homicide rate is not higher than Europe's, despite all the guns we have.
But there is a major flaw in the thesis that income differences explain the racial gap. Consider these three observable facts from The College Board's 2005 data on the SAT:This phenomenon was also noted in "The Bell Curve".• Whites from families with incomes of less than $10,000 had a mean SAT score of 993. This is 129 points higher than the national mean for all blacks.
• Whites from families with incomes below $10,000 had a mean SAT test score that was 61 points higher than blacks whose families had incomes of between $80,000 and $100,000.
• Blacks from families with incomes of more than $100,000 had a mean SAT score that was 85 points below the mean score for whites from all income levels, 139 points below the mean score of whites from families at the same income level, and 10 points below the average score of white students from families whose income was less than $10,000.
Thanks.
It's like the violence problem. Is America one of the most violent of the first-world western nations? Perhaps. But a certain demographic that makes up less than 13% of the population is responsible for committing OVER HALF of all of the violent crime in this country. Without that demographic, our violent crime rate would be half of what it is.
The same thing goes for education. A couple demographic groups drag down our national test score average to such an extent that, instead of being in 7th place, we're in 19th and falling.
The cultures of these demographics is what needs to be changed.
vdare.com is closed for Christmas. Your link doesn’t work.
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