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.
“Free” education is the one program that some people don’t seem to want to take advantage of.
Results matter after school. The US consistently producers achievers in various different areas: Science, Finance, Sports...etc. The results of pre college test is not destiny.
But, we are wasting too much money on education in different forms.
The USA must always be a welcoming nation, but stop this forced, this planned diversity with emphasis on third world countries.
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.
As a general rule the intelligence of the child mirrors that of the parents. Add that to the above and it is a dismal picture.
bkmk
The last 2 lines say it all, IMHO.
Totally disagree! There have always been single parents and disfunctional families in society, but children have managed to learn once they are exposed to good teaching and good educational content whether by a tutor or classroom or experience. Just read an old Horatio Alger novel - which are fiction, I know; but that is the point. The expectation of the novel is that poor city kids can do great things if they put their will and mind to it.
It is the assumption that children from lower classes or disfunctional families cannot learn and the educational methods twisted to fit that model that have imprisoned most of American children today into becoming barely literate after 12 years of mandatory public education.
srbfl
The interesting thing about this with the white and Oriental students scoring as well or better than their European and Asian counterparts s how closely those statistics compare with murder statistics. If murderbrates among US whites and Orientals are matched with their foreign counterparts, it turns out the US murder rate is equal to or less than that among their foreign counterparts. IOW the US bad education and murder rate problems are primarily concentrated among the black and Hispanic populations and are caused primarily by those groups’ generally unhealthy culture, something no amount of resource squandering can change.
I live in a community that has a higher than average income. It is 85% white. We have no “section 8” housing in town.
Both of my kids went to public school here. Our test scores and college achievement are near tops in the country for a public, not specialized, high school.
Our schools are not successful because we are white. They are successful because the parents in this town are involved, and we have exceptionally high expectations. We are successful adults, and we hold our schools to the same standards we are held to in our jobs.
The folks on our school committee are business leaders, educators and parents. Every once in a while we get a political wannabe, but they don’t last.
You want schools that work...you need to get involved in them. You must demand success, and not accept the union line BS.
Yes. See Dr. Ben Carson for reference. There are others, but they don’t come to mind right now.
Not so much intelligence as initiative. If the parent or even caretaker relentlessly instills initiative instead of victim mentality, much can be accomplished.
Look at the story of Dr. Ben Carson for just one such example.
This whole article is spot on. Many of our so-called educators are what I call "hyper-educated". They think so highly of their own fancypants accomplishments, but they are sadly lacking in logic and reason and the ability to instill a passion for learning.
Great minds post alike.
We invent things because we are free to dream and, more importantly, to PROFIT from our efforts.
For now.
Tale of Two Granddaughters; one mother is activly engaged in doing the hard work to follow up with school and teachers making sure that homework is done and grades are maintained.
The other mother is lazy, on the dole and does none of the above mentioned things. This granddaughter is failing, has been held back and forced passed. This girl is being taught to be like her mother, fat, lazy, lying and cheating.
Both daughters were raised in a home with attentive parents who valued hard work, education, thrift, and integrity. Education like the author mentions is a personal committment to do what it takes to be self suficant.
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.
BINGO!
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