Posted on 12/13/2013 6:18:13 AM PST by SJackson
- FrontPage Magazine - http://www.frontpagemag.com -
America’s Education System Isn’t Broken
Posted By Daniel Greenfield On December 12, 2013 @ 12:50 am In Daily Mailer,FrontPage | 71 Comments
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 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.
...not education either...it’s indoctrination for the keepers as well as the inmates!
Semper watching!
******
Japanese and Finnish schools do well because the students are Japanese and Finnish. Japanese and Finnish students in American schools do just as well.
The main problem with American schools is that a lot of the students just don't have the mental acumen to compete with Japanese and Finnish kids. A lot them can't function let alone succeed in an education system that was designed when the nation was 90% European.
No amount of money or new programs is going fix this problem.
We should be judging the educational system more by its goals than its product. "Basic math and literacy" is a woefully inadequate goal, as that should be done by the time they are eight or nine, and yes, I am including the equivalent of two years' worth of algebra. Unless a child has mastered the equivalent of two years' worth of COLLEGE in at least a half dozen scientific disciplines, they will be dysfunctional in the coming century and an incompetent voter ready to be led by the nose by scientific charlatans. More importantly, the system must be replaced or it will continue to induce a demographic catastrophe.
Money quote....in the end you will be the result of the choices you made.
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.
Note that blacks earning $80K and above will mostly have their kids in good, mostly white, suburban schools.
And they will say that this is all due to “test bias.”
Where that argument breaks down is with the >$80K group. These black kids would be in the same neighborhoods as the white kids, in the same classrooms as the white kids. How could "test bias" adversely affect black kids in upper-middle-class neighborhoods, but not be biased against higher-scoring white kids living in trailer parks?
“Instead we’ll be ignorant savages fighting over scraps”
The author’s use of future tense tells us he is living in the past. Good-sized portions of “us” are already savages, who want to intimidate civilized people and force them into the jungle (Knockout King is an example of method; if you adopt defensive measures to avoid attack, they have succeeded in diminishing civilization). Pretending this might happen in the future is a rhetorical trick to justify postponing dire measures we wish we could avoid.
There’s nothing wrong with America’s education system that eliminating the federal “Department of Education” won’t fix.
Throwing more money at the problem won’t help because our education system is a government bureaucracy.
Characteristics of a Bureaucracy:
l. There is no incentive to get the job done as rewards and punishments are not related to performance.
2. The main goal of a bureaucrat is not to perform the function for which he was hired, but to save his job, and, if possible, hire more bureaucrats under him. Thus we see incredibly top-heavy school districts in which administrators outnumber the teachers.
3. Bureaucracies are rigid and unresponsive to the clients they serve. You think the first grade teacher’s main job is to teach your child to read, but in reality, her daily motivation is to avoid the disapproval of the administrators in her building.
4. Information flow is stagnant. In an educational bureaucracy, information about better teaching methods which comes in at the top level (university professors) does not reach the bottom level (classroom teachers).
5. Bureaucracies based on power attract sick individuals who enjoy wielding power over others. Try disagreeing with your child’s principal over educational philosophy and see how nasty he can be.
6. Bureaucracies cannot reform themselves. Americans have been trying to reform their educational system for about 75 years, ever since they discovered Johnny can’t read because the schools ditched phonics.
Bttt
Note: I do NOT agree with this premise!
It is supposed to be a CULTURAL bias, not an economic one. Even rich black kids don’t understand white culture.
Of course that would mean that Asian kids would score poorly because they come from an entirely different culture...
We don't need the newest computer or the latest hare-brained Socialist theory to teach the kids.
The following seemed to raise up a couple of generations of moral, educated Americans:
“The second reader appeared simultaneously with the first and followed the same pattern. It contained reading and spelling with eighty-five lessons, sixteen pictures and one-hundred sixty-six pages. It outlined history, biology, astronomy, zoology, botany; table manners, behavior towards family, attitudes toward God and teachers, the poor; the great and the good. The duties of youth are stressed. Millions of pioneer men and women were alumni of this second reader college, they were able to read and write English.”
http://www.mcguffeyreaders.com/1836_original.htm
Unfortunately, most of the above is abhorrent to the Leftist that are in charge of indoctrinating our children.
Once again Greenfield touches the third rail of education theory...jumps on it, proves it's meaningless, then smashes it to smithereens...
Yep. Any excuse which blames "culture" must take into account the Asian kids being able to get good scores, despite being from cultures that are very different from Western culture.
There was also the Minnesota Transracial Adoption Study, where black kids adopted by upper-middle-class white couples, brought up EXCLUSIVELY in white culture and educated in middle-class schools, did not do significantly better on IQ tests than the black norm.
With kids stupider by the semester, we are facing serious trouble.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.