Having retired from academe and in a need of a break from my solo home improvement business, I tried my hand at substitute teaching, with the intention of gathering material for a book, the first draft of which I bring out in this blog. For a year I subbed in all thirteen public schools in my local school district, covering classes from Kindergarten to AP calculus, from social studies to ESL, from physical education to life-skill for the mentally impaired, and everything in between. Friends had forewarned me that subbing in our public schools had far more negatives than positives, and they were right. Save for a few rewarding experiences, much of what I witnessed from day one was downright appalling. And from books, newspaper articles and e-mail correspondence with knowledgeable critics, I subsequently learned that the conditions in my school district were par for the course in most public schools throughout America. If the American taxpayer only knew the full inside story of our public education establishment, they would demand their money back. Hopefully, this blog will open some eyes.
Pandemonium in the Crisis Room
Assignment in the crisis room of an elementary school. No sooner had the morning bell rung than a 10-year-old-boy in the Emotionally Disturbed (ED) class facing the crisis the crisis room went berserk. A few minutes earlier he had given the ED teacher, her aide, and me a big hug. Now he was shrieking uncontrollably, his cherub face ugly with rage. What prompted the shrieking he wouldn’t say, nor could the teachers figure it out. Maybe another kid had said something he didn’t like, or violated his space, or maybe something he saw or heard triggered a recollection of some unpleasant experience.
The ED teacher knelt by the shirking boy, and, in a soft, loving voice, tried to calm him down. She offered him a coloring book, a box of new crayons, a lollipop, techniques obviously learned in ED-training workshops. But this infuriated the boy all the more. He kicked at her shins, —“Get away from me! B_ _ _ _ ”—and shrieking the epithet, broke away from her, sidestepped the aide and me—I had come in to help—and proceeded to dash helter-skelter about the room, ripping up books, breaking pencils, throwing art supplies, and wreaking all the damage he could before we could corner him.
The teacher finally restrained him by crossing his arms in front of him and gripping his wrists, the proper way, I was told, of applying a restraining hold on a child. Like most ED teachers I’ve met, she was surprisingly strong. She sat down with the boy on her lap—he still shrieking, she saying nothing—and thus they remained, while the aide did her best to keep the rest of class under control. Several of the kids had started mocking the shrieking boy and threatening to “kick his butt” unless he shut up. Others seized the moment to rip up books and break pencils that the shrieking boy had overlooked. One smallish kid amused himself by karate-kicking the cage of Ralph, the class’ pet guinea pig. Guinea pigs in normal classes tend to sleep and munch placidly most of the day. Ralph, by contrast, was a nervous wreck. He scurried about squealing and pawing at the wire walls of his cage. He also had lost much of his hair.
Meanwhile, five boys had come into the closet-sized crisis room where I was subbing. These boys were not certifiably ED, just chronic troublemakers. Regular teachers, under pressure to boost test scores, understandably, didn’t want such kids disturbing their classes, so they would sent them to the crisis room at the first hint of trouble. The ones in my charge that day had spent most of the school year in the crisis room, doing little and learning nothing. Academically all were far behind their peers.
My five charges, it turned out, didn’t like one another at all, and to express their dislike, began badmouthing their mothers. One boy told another that his mom’s hairy p_ _ _ _ stank . The other boy retorted that his mom was a “ho,” and with exaggerated hip thrusts mimed how she plied her trade. The other three joined in with like insults. That such filth was spewing from children made it all the more appalling.
I tried to calm my charges by offering to show them how to make origami birds and wallets, but my educationally correct approach didn’t work any better with them than the ED teacher’s blandishments had worked with her berserk student. Their reaction was to start pummeling one another. The sharp smack of fists on bone and flesh indicated that this was for real. I stepped in between them, now holding one back, now the other, until my co-teacher, who had just arrived, came to my aid. In the melee, one boy punched her in the stomach. Another one kicked me in the ribs, two of which I had fractured the month earlier trying to break up a fight in a middle school, and were still sore. Another one deliberately broke my glasses and tried to smash my thermos bottle. Somehow I managed to catch it before it hit the floor.
After a while the boys grew tired and went back to their seats, but not in peace. They resumed reviling their moms, then, bored with that, started in on my co-teacher and me, calling us every name imaginable. One boy threatened to stab me in the eye with a tack he had pulled from the bulletin board. Another one warned me that his daddy would follow me home and cut me to pieces. Another said he was going to sue me and reached for the telephone to call his lawyer. The kid couldn’t read or do simple math but he knew his legal rights. He knew that the law was stacked against teachers and none would dare lash back at a student, not even verbally, or in self-defense. Very, very gingerly I wrested the telephone away from him made him sit down. The first boy, meanwhile, regaled the group with a rap song, rich in F_ _ _ phrases, about the necessity of selling drugs in order to survive. I looked up at the clock. It was only 9:30. Still five and a half hours to go. Only the calming presence of my co-teacher, a saintly Christian woman—one of many such in our city schools—kept me from walking out on that assignment.
Meanwhile, in the ED room, the berserk boy tried to bolt the school and, when stopped, had so waxed out of control that the principal phoned his mother and asked her to take him home. The mom, however, wouldn’t come. Claimed she was too busy. The principal then tried, for two hours, to get hold of the Social Services employee whose job it was to take out-control kids home, but the man could not be located anywhere. So it fell on the teacher and her aide to do his job, during their lunch hour. Two regular teachers then had to give up of their planning time to cover for them. On route home, the boy tried several times to jump out of the car, and nearly succeeded. Had he gotten hurt, however slightly, the teacher and her aide would have been in big trouble. Back from the ride, the two young women looked ten years older.
A witness from another age or culture would have said that those kids in ED and crisis rooms were possessed by demons, and I would have been inclined to agree. Six months of subbing in public schools have led me to suspect that demons do indeed exist, and in huge numbers. Pandemonium—in the etymological sense of the word—was precisely what I witnessed that day in that elementary school.
The vile rapping, the fighting, the cursing, continued, unrelentingly, until the final bell rang at 3:00 P.M. Now and then the principal, a counselor and other teachers pulled from their planning time would drop by and try to establish order, but to no avail. There was not a thing they could do. All their training on how to deal with “needy” children was useless. Educators cannot be expected to double up as psychiatrists and correctional officers.
Those kids that ruined my day—they didn’t even allow me time to eat lunch or visit the rest room—were a pathetic lot. Most will probably end up in prison, or worse. As a parent, I felt very sorry for them. But I felt even sorrier for the hundreds of normal students whose education they had been disrupting since they entered kindergarten and would continue to disrupt as long as they remain in school.
Directly across the hall from the crisis room were two regular first-grade classes. I could not but notice how the pandemonium in the ED and crisis room, which sometimes spilled out into the halls, was affecting the first-graders. Most were markedly stressed out by it, while others, envious of the attention lavished on the troublemakers, had become inclined to emulate them. And their noxious effect was not limited to the first-graders across the hall. Over the course of the year it had spread like a virus to all other classes throughout the school. Most substitute teachers, myself now included, refused to served there, and when the school year ended, half the regular teachers, the entire office staff, the principal, and the assistant principal either transferred to another city school or quit to find work in another school district. Some, I suspect, have made career changes. How that sorry situation came to pass in one the better funded school districts in the greatest nation in the world is beyond comprehension.
The "Mickey Mouse" Education Major
When I was a college student in the 1960’s, school-of-education courses were notorious for their lack of academic rigor. Professors in other departments mocked them, and liberal arts students looking for easy credits took them as electives. "Mickey Mouse” was what everybody called them.
Although I never enrolled in an education course, years later, as a professor and supervisor of student teachers at three universities, I did sit in on several that my students were required to take, and I saw for myself that the disparaging things said about them were largely true. I recall, for instance, one three-credit course on how to ventilate a classroom, arrange bookshelves and operate an overhead projector. The widely held notion that public school teachers go into teaching because they are incapable of doing anything else, no doubt originated with former college students and professors in other fields who remember those "Mickey Mouse" courses. And from what I hear, things have not changed much.
Back in the 1960’s, and in the good old days before that, the level of instruction dispensed by school-of-education-trained teachers in the U.S. may have been good enough for the majority of students who upon graduation from high school could readily find steady and life-long employment in semiskilled trades. Many did not even need to graduate. A rudimentary knowledge of the three R’s, if that, was all then required. But that, clearly, is not the case in today’s global, high-tech job market. Modern-day teachers steeped in the traditional school-of-education “Mickey Mouse” pap—time to start telling it like it is—lack the intellectual heft to adequately serve our students. And the same goes for the principals, administrators, counselors, and the slew of specialists running our public schools. .
The problem is especially dire at the elementary level. In his best-seller, The Conspiracy of Ignorance: The Failure of American Public Schools, (1999) Martin L. Gross notes that elementary school teachers have to take so many education courses--40 percent of their total undergraduate credit hours--that most come out of college no better educated in the core academic subjects than community college graduates. Less gracious critics claim that on the average the educational level of elementary school teachers is no higher than that of a middling high school sophomore. Most, to be sure put in long hours nights and weekends preparing classes and do a great job decorating their classrooms. But intellectually speaking, very few measure up.
Consider the trouble so many American high school students of normal intelligence are having learning math. On average, only 25 percent of seniors score at a proficiency level on national tests, and that despite all-out effort by schools to teach them, not math, but how to take the test.
School officials attribute this mass failure to the fact that many public schools nowadays serve a disproportionate number of disadvantaged students A lame excuse. The root of the problem really lies in the fact that most elementary school teacher does not know his or her math well enough to their students the foundation and encouragement they need to master the subject in the higher grades. With few exceptions all the ones I have met over the years openly confess that the reason they majored in education (as their low SAT and GRE math scores reflect) was they were never any good at math. They so fear and hate math that they subconsciously, or perhaps deliberately, project their bias to their students by watering down the subject under the guise of making it “fun.” Predictably, by the time their students reach middle school a good many likewise fear and hate math.
And pretty much the same holds true for science, (only 18 percent of high school seniors in the U.S. score at proficiency level) and, though to lesser degree, for language arts and social studies as well. It’s a no-brainer that if elementary school teachers were better versed in the core academic subjects, many of the learning problems and educational deficiencies plaguing school students today would not exist.
School bureaucrats have tried to patch up the problem with "resource teachers," specialists to whom students are sent for instruction that their regular classroom teacher cannot provide them. Thought this is better than nothing, it's not good enough, for much of the kids’ school time is wasted day shuttling back and forth between classrooms. Most of those resources teachers, moreover, are not all that knowledgeable, having received but a superficial, cursory training in how to teach their subject, rather than taking legitimate college-level courses in the subject itself. .
That as many as 40 percent of engineering and science students enrolled in American are foreign born and educated because our high school graduates lack the interest or cannot make the grade, is not only a national shame, but a major detriment to our economic competitiveness and, possibly, to our national security. Some of those students will remain in the U.S and become loyal citizens but many others will return to their home country, taking their skills with them.
American public education system needs fixing, and soon, lest the nation continue on its downward spiral vis à vis the rest of the world. But the fixing cannot be entrusted to those who created the mess in the first place and covertly have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo. The so-called improvements they serve up every couple of years are but rehashing of failed policies and strategies harking back 60, 70 years under a different jargon.
I therefore hold with Martin L. Gross and the growing number of critics who advocate scrapping the undergraduate education program and requiring the new generation of teachers to earn a bona fide B.A. or M.A. degree. The art of how-to-manage a classroom—crowd control, really—can best be learned on the job and through informal consultation with experienced colleagues. “Operation Phoenix” would be an apt name for the radical change needed.
The Case for Homeschooling
Public education in America is hopelessly broken. For the past 30 or so years everything imaginable has been tried and retried to fix it, but nothing has worked. High-sounding titles and jargon is all we have to show for the billions of taxpayer dollars thrown at the problem-- No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top, special ed., bilingual ed., English as a second language, mainstreaming, inclusion, differentiation, reading specialists, resource teachers, whole language, cooperative learning, integrated curriculum, flexible groupings, the new math, the new grammar, conflict resolution, state standardized testing, magnet schools, charter schools, talented and gifted programs, afterschool programs, preschool programs, free lunch program, rubrics, etc., etc. – Yet according to the latest international rankings, American middle-schoolers came in 31st in key subjects like math and science, about the same as 30 years ago. The students ranked were representative groups from the top of their classes in their respective nations. Had students in general been included, our representative group would have ranked even lower. Many, in fact, graduate from high school unable to read and compute above a fourth-grade level, if that.
So what can American parents do to assure that their kids get the basic education they will need to compete in today’s global job market? One option is to enroll them in private schools. But not many parents could afford that. Besides, the quality of education offered in most private schools is not that great either. For the average American family the best option by far is homeschooling.
Now it’s no surprise that the growing popularity of homeschooling has elicited vehement opposition among public school teachers, education professors, teacher unions, school boards, state, local and Federal educrats, and others with vested interests in maintaining the status quo. The gist of their rationale goes something like this:
Homeschooling is a sham, inferior, unnatural, off-the-wall kind of do-it-yourself instruction loosely stitched-together by religious recluses and social misfits incapable of coping with the traditional, time-tested, offering of public education. Common sense alone shows that in order to learn, develop and become socialized to their full potential, children must be taught by certified teachers in resource-rich schools and classrooms where they can interact, cooperate, and exchange ideas with large groups of peers.
Well, to begin with, the pro-public school advocates, got their historical sequence backwards. American public schools as they exist today are a relatively recent development. Conceived in the 1880s to acculturate working-class immigrants and prepare them for factory employment, the schools were modeled like assembly lines in which students were grouped by age, instructed according to a regular, prescribed schedule, and processed uniformly from grade to grade. And to this day, nothing has changed. .
Before that time, the typical American school was a small one-room affair serving no more than 20 students of mixed ages, the older ones helping the younger, each learning at his or her own pace, under the supervision of a single teacher independent of administrative higher-ups.
The school master or mistress on those days was usually the best educated and highly respected member of the community. In sparsely populated rural areas kids were taught at home by itinerant tutors or, if none could be had, by family members or neighbors. Among the wealthy, the usual form of education for children under 12, and often into adulthood, was homeschooling.
Notable homeschooled Americans, to name but a few, include: William Penn, Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, George Mason, Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, Robert E. Lee, Clara Barton Susan B. Anthony, Theodore Roosevelt, Booker T. Washington, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Woodrow Wilson.
The lives and works of these great public figures soundly debunk the pet socialization argument of the anti-homeschooling advocates. Surely none can be accused of being timid, reclusive, misfits. The notion that unsocialized kids sequestered all day in a classroom with other equally unsocialized peers will somehow socialize one another, is ludicrous. And the same goes with the notion that such kids can enlighten one another by thrashing among themselves opinions on subjects of which they know nothing about. Much like those notable homeschoolers of past generations, homeschoolers today tend to spend much of their time listening to adults who know their stuff, running errands with their parents, helping out in the family business, interacting with people of all persuasions and ages, as well as with peers. All the ones I’ve met are active in the Boy Scouts, athletic teams, bands, theater, and other peer groups. None that I’ve heard of are locked up in closets or otherwise cut off from the real world. Though I have no hard stats to prove it, there is plenty of anecdotal evidence suggesting that incidents of violence, drug addiction, bullying, rape, depression, unwanted pregnancies and other such pathological problems are on average, far less prevalent in homeschools than in the best of public schools.
Also self- debunking is notion that only certified public school teachers are qualified to educate children. Elementary public school teachers in America generally are not much better educated in the core subjects than a high school sophomore. Most of their formal college education consists of courses in crowd control and teaching methodology. In effect, they are a throwback to the 1880’s when a rudimentary knowledge of the three R’s was all they needed to instruct future factory workers. Though, sad to say, many certified teachers today don’t even know their Three R’s.
Teaching a child one-one, adjusting to his or her learning rhythm as the instruction progresses, comes quite naturally to any parent, relative or neighbor of normal maturity and intelligence. A legitimate college education is preferable but not necessary for homeschooling children. A year’s worth of educational materials and background information for the tutor can be had for less than the cost of a NFL game ticket, or once the tutor gets the hang of it, from the Internet or the public library as the need arises. And baby-sitting for the kids when not being tutored usually poses no problem as most homeschooling families either have a stay-at-home parent or guardian, take turns with the kids, or share baby-sitting time with other homeschooling families. They don’t need the all-day baby-sitting service of public schools.
Another advantage of homeschooling is that more can be accomplished in one hour of distraction-free individualized instruction than in six hours of fits and starts in a typically crowded and often disruption- prone classroom. The reason why public school students are assigned homework is that the only way most can learn is by working alone or, if necessary, with someone’s help in the privacy of their room. In effect, by homeschooling.
Note also how the jargonized programs listed at the beginning of this blog—flexible groupings, differentiation, integrated curriculum, talented and gifted, special ed.—betray the fact that the powers-that-be in public education are aware that the assembly-line model designed to mass-produce interchangeable factory workers in the 1880’s, doesn’t work with modern-day kids of diverse abilities and backgrounds. To their credit, the powers-that-be have tried to correct the problem, but hidebound as they are to that obsolete model, they can’t.
To clinch the point I wished to make, I close with a partial list of other notable homeschoolers in American and world history: Andrew Carnegie, Walt Whitman, Louisa May Alcott, Mark Twain, Willa Cather, Robert Frost, the Wright Brothers, Thomas Edison, Willa Cather, William Blake, Charles Dickens, John Stuart Mill, Winston Churchill, Albert Einstein, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Blaise Pascal, Leonardo da Vinci, King James I, Alexander the Great, Socrates, Buddha, Moses, The proof is in the pudding.
De Facto Segregation
The last of segregated public schools in America were officially desegregated decades ago. Today black and white kids attend school under the same roof. Yet within the schools, segregation persist. Black and white kids tend socialize only with members of their own race. By the time they reach middle school, they eat lunch at separate tables and, though there's no noticeable animosity between them, few show any interest in crossing racial lines to make friends. Even in sports, segregation is the norm. Black kids go out almost exclusively for basketball and football, while white kids tend more toward to baseball, lacrosse and crew.
This de facto segregation in our public schools stems in large measure, not from perceived differences in skin color or culture among students, but from a class distinction inadvertently—not to say surreptitiously-- fomented by the education establishment. Not that public school officials are bigots as such. Most are staunch liberals. Many are themselves African American. Yet the harm they do black kids under the guise of helping them would put an old-fashioned racist to shame.
This reverse discrimination was triggered in large measure by the “white flight” to private schools. Public school had made the mistake of construing integration as the mixing of advantaged students. mainly white, and disadvantaged students. mainly black, in the same classroom. They believed that one group would bond with and uplift the other. Well-informed parents, however, correctly saw this social engineering as a recipe for academic disaster. Though most parents were strong believers in racial equality, they drew the line where their children’s education was concerned. Many bolted for private or parochial schools, never to return. Some went so far as to sell their homes and move to another county, where the public schools were reputedly better. Many minority parents who could afford it bolted as well.
Under pressure from middle class parents who, as taxpayers, opted to stay and demand an optimum education for their children, school officials created a private school environment for them within the public school system. Most white middle-class students today are routinely classified as “talented and gifted” (the mother of all euphemisms) and placed in rigorous, no-nonsense classes. In the upper grades, they enroll in advanced placement (AP) courses, earn a 3.5+ point-grade average, make the dean’s list, score high in their SATs and, when they graduate, go on to the first-rate colleges.
Black students from working class families, on the other hand, had no one to deliver them from the social engineering. The bright and the not-so-bright, the hard-working and the indolent, the well-behaved and the delinquent were all kept together in the same classes. So none could learn their full potential, and all were conveniently tagged as “needy.” Worse yet, the “neediest” of the lot, the ones who caused most trouble, were the ones bestowed the lion’s share of the schools’ resources and services. School officials had created the problem (teachers only followed orders) and now sought to correct it with even more social engineering. Instead of focusing on the able black students and creating positive role models for the rest to follow—as in the program for middle-class students, and in the real world, for that matter--educators focused on the least able. Instead of pulling them up from the top, they tried to push them up from the bottom, and by so doing kept everybody down.
Visit or, better yet, substitute teach in any integrated public schools and you will be struck at once by the undue attention given to troublesome black kids at the expense of their normal peers. The worst of the troublemakers, in effect, have come to define the culture of their schools. “Dumbing down” is too mild a term for it.. Some of the schools in subbed were more like mental health or correctional facilities than institutions of learning.
The only way to end the de facto segregation in our public schools is to give priority to the normal black kids, the vast majority. Just because they cause no trouble doesn’t mean that they can fend for themselves. Take them out of their dysfunctional classes, provide them with tutors, allow each one to progress according to his or her own ability, discipline and challenge them the same as their white peers, and they will integrate in short order; and when they do, many of the problems now plaguing public education will automatically disappear. As for the troublemakers, once they realize they are no longer the center of attention, some, at least, will change their ways.
Forced Equality
Imagine that you work in an office where some lout across the room chatters incessantly, badmouths other employees, curses and threatens anyone who so much as cast a disapproving look in his direction, and he cannot be removed or fired, no matter how obnoxious he becomes. Nor can you ask for a transfer to another office or quit to find another job. You are stuck in that office with that lout or others like him for the next ten years. Imagine further that more attention and benefits are lavished on the lout than on conscientious employees like yourself who do their job without bothering anybody. Unless you had an unusually strong or saintly personality, you’d probably develop a bad case of stress, become demoralized, and lose all interest in your work.
Such a workplace environment, of course, couldn’t exist in the real world. But In the surreal world of public education, it’s par for the course. School officials since the 1960’s have taken great pains to protect students from psychological as well as physical harm. They train teachers not to raise their voice in anger, to respect cultural differences, to be sensitive to learning disabilities, and so forth. Yet, they seem blind to the mental anguish they cause by mixing normal and unruly kids together in the same classroom.
The theory behind this long-standing practice is that when unruly kids are integrated with normal kids, they uplift one another. The unruly ones supposedly pick up good habits from the normal ones, and the normal ones, in turn, learn valuable lessons in human relations by serving as tutors and role models for the unruly ones.
But what really happens is that the unruly ones, unable or unwilling to keep up, become more unruly than ever. while the normal ones, unable to concentrate, become demoralized and, over time, dumb down. The more sensitive ones often develop lasting emotional problems.
Public school higher-ups, however, are not wont to give up a bad idea. The reason their social engineering doesn’t work, they insist, is that teachers lack the necessary skills to carry it off. So they force teachers to attend frequent staff- workshops and meetings on “mainstreaming,” “differentiation,’ “inclusion,” or whatever the latest jargon calls it. The experts brought in to conduct the workshops, though, never stay around to demonstrate their alleged expertise in a real classroom with real students. Once they are done lecturing, they hightail it back to the security of their offices.
These experts and those who hire them work in places where there are no unruly colleagues around to make their lives miserable. Why they persist in denying the same to K-12 students, who, after all, are much more impressionable and vulnerable than adults, is a question begging for a clear answer.
The Victimization Canard
Political correct policy in America holds that only members of racial and ethnic minorities who have been or feel they have been victimized by bigotry are qualified to staff organizations created to serve disadvantaged minorities. So it was that in the aftermath of the 1960’s civil rights movement, the U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare, HEW, became an employment windfall for non-white minority folks. Politically incorrect critics in private—for to speak out publicly would have branded them as racists-- derided HEW, as a token or “soft” agency, as distinguished from the “hard” agencies, like the Justice and State Departments, which were staffed mainly by whites. To this day, the majority of employees in the two departments formed in 1979 from the splitting-up of HEW—Education, and Health and Human Resources--are still preponderantly staffed by minorities.
Another institution that subscribes dogmatically to that unwritten policy is the K-12 public education establishment. Visit any public school in America with a sizable population of minority students—in D.C,. The Bronx, Detroit, Los Angeles, Atlanta, to name some--and you will invariably find that most, if not all, teachers, counselors, secretaries, custodians, hall monitors, in-house police officers, administrators, central office personnel and union officials are members of the prevalent local minorities.
But here the question arises: If the rationale behind the practice of employing minority individuals to serve help their own is as self-evident as its adherents claim, why is it that, after holding sway, unchallenged, for fifty years, most K-12 minority students in America rank so far below their white peers in math, science, language arts and every other substantive subject? Most, in fact, come out of high school—half do not even graduate—worse educated than were their grandparents before the advent of the civil rights movement.
The many reasons given boil down to one: an entrenched, lingering bigotry on the part of the white majority: The general lack of parental guidance in poor minority communities, the peer-pressure among their kids to disrupt classes and fail in school, the high rate of teen pregnancy, (many 16-year-olds are already on their third child), the street gang violence—are all somehow the fault of white people.
Now there is no denying that prejudice persists in America, not so much the blatant KKK variety, but, perhaps worse, the sentiment, disguised as benevolence, which, in effect, maintains that minorities, like children, are incapable of coping without the assistance and guidance of white protectors—a “velvet” prejudice, as one perceptive critic called it. Then, too, there are the guilt-ridden white folk who, though they themselves discriminated against no one, nonetheless feel obliged to make amends for past injustices by going out their way to help minority folk, even when their help is not wanted or wanted.
But there is another, darker, side to the picture. Consider the TV clips of the violence wantonly meted out by police and soldiers against poor villagers and slum dwellers in underdeveloped countries. The powers that be in those miserable places—dictators, royalty, feudal lords, or whoever—may be the ones who order the violence, but the thugs who do the dirty work for them invariably come from the same lower classes they victimize, self-loathing wannabes intent on moving up the pecking order by beating up and lording it over their own kind. Nothing so arouses hatred and fear among the wretchedly poor in those places than the strut of uniformed, well-armed thugs who were once their neighbors.
But back to America. The point I’m getting at is that the notion that only members of minorities have the sympathy and understanding to serve minorities is not necessarily true. One reason why minority K-12 kids still lag behind their white peers is that, subconsciously or consciously, not all minority teachers, educrats and officials in public education, want their students to succeed. Pillory me for bringing it up, but after fifty years of letting the problem fester in secret, it’s high time it was brought to light.
Let me hasten to explain that not every minority members the public education establishment public education is like those wannabe thugs in underdeveloped countries who beat up on the poor classes from which they came. Among minority K-12 educators that I have personally met more than a few are first-rate professionals, but, sadly, most do not come close. Some are rank opportunists simply, Some are no better educated than middling junior college graduates. (Try checking up on their credentials and you run into a bureaucratic stonewall.) Others, the ones that concern us here, clearly have personal issues that militate against educating minority students. And I say clearly because, though there are no formal studies proving the point—no researcher I know of would dare to undertake such a study—all you need to do is labor in the trenches of public schools for a while, as I did for five years, to see that what I’m saying is true.
As President Barack Obama well put it, “nations that out-educate us today, will out-compete us tomorrow.” Actually, this is happening already. As we speak, American students, whites included, rank 16th the, Tested alone, our American minority students would rank much lower, and that despite the fact that the money spend on them, dollar cost per student is (xxx) times that of (xxx), the number one nation. Economically and militarily we may still be the world’s premier superpower, but we unless we take drastic measures to upgrade the quality of education of our future generation, we are doomed to end up a has-been, second-rate nation.
The Moral Sewer
At a middle school where I subbed one day, a fellow sub from Ghana joined me for lunch in the school cafeteria. We tried to carry on a conversation but had trouble hearing each other over the loud, foul-mouthed bantering among a group of African American students, boys and girls, sitting at the table next to us. Finally my friend, unable to finish his lunch, excused himself. As he got up to leave, he cast a look of disgust at the students and made a comment that, had he been a white man, would have gotten him fired for racism. The students just jeered at him, mocking his Ghanan accent long after he had exited the cafeteria.
Not all African American kids act that way, of course. The majority of those I taught were conscientious and well mannered. Still, I feel obliged to report, as have many witnesses in and out of school, that of all ethnic groups, the one with the largest proportion of dysfunctional students are by far the African Americans. The official apology for their putrid behavior is that they have been brutalized by a 300-year legacy of racial bigotry. How a 13-year-old kid can be brutalized for 300 years defies all mathematical logic, but in the surreal world of public education anything is possible. Some African American kids no doubt have had a hard life, but, in the main, not nearly as hard as peers from other ethnic groups. Compared to immigrant youngsters from war-torn countries like Sierra Leone, most of our troublesome African American kids have led a charmed life. They come to school well fed, well equipped with CD players and well shod with the $150 athletic shoes. Unlike their grandparents, they never suffered the indignity of having to sit in back of a bus or drink from a separate water fountain. The main reason the behave way they do is that they are undisciplined at home and spoiled rotten in school.
At the aforementioned middle school, where I subbed on number of occasions, a small group of African American boys relentlessly harried their teachers, and us subs in particular. One would leave pornographic drawings on my desk. Another would greet me and the class with obscene gestures when he entered the room. Another spit in my thermos bottle when I wasn’t looking. Another threatened to kill me—run over me in the street—because I had stopped him from fondling a female student. Once, against the wise advice against the wise advice of regular teachers, I rushed out in the hall to help break up a brawl between rival gang members. In the melee, one kid pummeled another over the head with a metal chair. It was a miracle that he didn’t kill him. Finally, the two city police officers stationed in the school arrived on the scene and, after a considerable struggle, subdued the chair-wielding kid and led him away in handcuffs. After a brief suspension the kid was back in school. That armed police officers were stationed in all our public schools, allegedly to keep outside evil-doers at bay, but, in fact, to protect students, teachers and staff from in-house African American rowdies, was a mark of shame. School officials, though, did not see it that way.
Because that middle school at the time had no crisis room I first tried to deal with the problem by sending the troublemakers to the principal’s office. But the principal would only send them right back in minutes, and they would come swaggering into the classroom, gloating that there was nothing that I nor any teacher could do to them. I then took to writing memos to Central Office, documenting in detail how those few troublemakers were preventing their classmates from learning, but that didn’t work either. The pro-forma response from Central Office was that that kind of behavior was typical of inner city culture, and that it was the job of teachers to accept and deal with it. The only help they offered me was an occasional lecture on “differentiation,” the latest fad on how to integrate out-of-control students, and a visit from an administration whose idea of motivating teachers consisted of jotting down the names of those who didn’t wear smiles on their faces. As one hall-monitor put it, the powers-that-be had given the troublemakers the run of the school.
But it wasn’t us teachers who took the brunt of the abuse. The ones victimized were other African American students, the majority of the student body. Three to four times more time and resources were invested on the troublemakers than on their normal peers. For those deserving kids there were no special team meetings, no home visits, no individual counseling, no tutoring programs. It was assumed that since they didn’t cause trouble they need no help.
Much to their credit, the parents of white-middle class had seen to it that their children were declared “talented and gifted” (the mother of all euphemisms) and placed in advanced, disruption-free classes. But the African American kids had no one to advocate for them. Though just as bright and self-motivated, they were left to languish in inferior classes with the troublemakers. My former students at that middle schools, now seniors, are still segregated academically, most of the white kids preparing for a college, and the majority of African Americans facing a bleak future of limited opportunities. The troublemakers on whom so much energy and resources was invested all quit school when they reached the legal age of 18. Unofficially they had quit when they were 8.
A county commissioner in the North Carolina community where I now reside once had to the guts to opine that African American rowdies who make it their business to wreak havoc in the local public schools were product of a “moral sewer.” Naturally, he was skewered as a racist by public figures and news media pundits from all sides of the political spectrum. Some African American civic leaders, though, while not openly siding with him, did not disagree with him either. They knew in their hearts of hearts that the gist of his remark was largely true.
Out-of-Control Teacher Unions
The widespread reining-in of public sector unions by U.S. State governors was long overdue. Labor unions in the private sector are automatically restrained from overreaching: If employers take excessive advantage of their workers, unionized workers, by striking or deliberately slowing down production, minimize their employers’ profits and thereby compel the employers to treat them fairly. On the other hand, if the workers demand too much from their employers, the employers can close shop and take their business elsewhere. So both sides keep each other in check by adversarial self-interest.
With the public sector no such restraints on unions exist. Because the employer here is government and government cannot take its business elsewhere, unionized workers can demand, and get, all they want with near impunity, the only constrain being the money exacted from taxpayers, which public labor unions tend to regard as limitless. Not surprisingly, it is the cost of meeting the ever-rising demands of public sector unions that is bankrupting state and municipal governments in the U.S. and, for that matter, entire nations like Greece, Ireland and Portugal.
Then, too, there is the issue of the quality of the work provided by unionized public sector workers. Occasional instances of featherbedding and corruption aside, firefighters, police officers, paramedics, refuse collectors, and most other public sectors workers in America provide vital services to their community. But such is not always the case with K-12 public school teachers, as clearly evident by the inferior, not say dismal, performance of American public school vis à vis those in other developed countries, and even in some developing countries. On average, your typical union-protected classroom teachers in American public schools, especially those at the crucial elementary school level--not to mention the host of featherbedded teaching assistants, administrators, bureaucrats, counselors, clinicians specialists and such--are not educators in the full sense of the word. (See my blog “Uneducated Educators.”) Professional baby-sitters would be a more apt name for them. In Singapore new public school teachers are recruited from the top 30% of their graduating class. In the United States they come from the bottom 23%. Not surprisingly, 15-year-olds in Singapore ranked second in recent international academic tests, while the American counterparts ranked 31st.
Budget slashing U.S. governors might consider easing up a bit on crucial public unions, like those representing police and firefighters, but as regard the mammoth, mediocrity-promoting teacher unions, they would be doing their constituents a huge favor by drastically curtailing their power, or eliminating it altogether.
Costlly, Bloated Textbools
Back in the 1950’s when I was a high school student, our text books were so small and light enough that we could easily carry around the whole set by hand and fit them into our lockers with plenty of room to spare. Students today don’t have it that easy. Their textbooks so heavy that they have to lug them around in backpacks, and so large that they have trouble stuffing them in their lockers.
In my day, boys who were “going steady” were expected to carry their girl friends’ textbooks as well. But that chivalrous custom is no longer feasible. So ponderous are modern textbooks—the average weight of the usual weighing as much as 40 lbs—that they can cause serious injury. Jan Richardson, president of the American Physical Therapy Association warns parents that when kids sling their heavy backpacks over one shoulder “they can strain shoulder and neck muscles and cause a temporary curvature of the spine.”
Now one would think that modern textbooks are so much larger because they contain a lot more important information. But that’s seldom the case. Most don’t cover their subject nearly as well as old books did. The reason for the jumbo size is that they are overloaded with extraneous material.
My old algebra text—6 by 8 ½ in., 420 pages, had nothing but algebra in it: clear explanations, graphic illustrations and lots of practice problems. Everything we needed for learning the subject was in the books. An even better example of compactness is the 1845 edition of Algebra, Upon the Inductive Method of Instruction. This diminutive text covered algebra 1 and part of algebra 2 in only 275 pages, and it’s light and small enough, 7½ by 4 ½ in., to fit in the spread of an average-sized hand. A whole generation of notable Americans—Emily Dickinson, Louisa May Alcott, James Garfield, George Armstrong Custer, to name some—learned their algebra quite well from this little text.
By stark contrast, the average Algebra 1 text in vogue today is upwards of 750 pages long, 10¼ by 8 in., weighs a ton, and teems with irrelevant illustrations in full color of wild animals, cars, airplanes, boats, rockets,, buildings, landscapes, seascapes. Then there are the ubiquitous politically-correct photos of minority folks clad in laboratory garb, women athletes, women executives, and successful-looking immigrant entrepreneurs, together with lengthy captions and biographical blurbs. How these minority folks benefitted from or contributed to mathematics is never made clear.
As a first-generation immigrant, I appreciate the goodwill intended by the politically-correct material. But as an educator, I find them intrusive, particularly in math textbooks. To accommodate the pictures, many of which occupy as much as half a page, the books give short-shrift to the subject, often forcing teachers to scrounge for supplementary worksheets or to write their own. The pictures, moreover, tend to distract students and prevent them from learning. Most math students find it difficult to focus on a bunch of little black numbers and symbols when there are so many bright illustrations flashing before their eyes.
Another problem with modern textbooks is their exorbitant cost. The retail cost of a paperback workbook printed on plain paper and with no illustration, like those of the Schaum’s Outlines Series
, comes to about $20 (in 2010 dollars) The wholesale cost of hardcover textbooks printed on pricy glossy paper and chock full of colorful illustrations, each color requiring a separate printing, can run as high as $150. That’s a lot to pay for fancy extraneous material. Public school officials claim that they are ever looking for ways to improve education and cut costs. They could do both by adopting textbooks with fewer frills and more substance.
Dumbed Down Algebra
Until a few years ago most public school students took general or business math. Only college-bound students took algebra, and because the subject required a certain degree of intellectual maturity, it wasn't offered until the ninth grade. Today high school students throughout America are required to take algebra. Only those with serious learning disabilities are exempt. For high achievers who wish to surge ahead of the pack, the subject is offered as early as the seventh grade.
Now one would assume that the powers-that-be in public education who made algebra mandatory had solid evidence that students today are better prepared in mathematics than those of generations past. But no such evidence, solid or otherwise, exists. On the contrary, as math tests scores over the last 50 years show, students today are not nearly as well prepared in the subject. Classmates of mine who took business math at the rural public school I attended in the 1950's had a much better comprehension of mathematics than most students I've worked with in Alexandria.
At the middle school where I once covered an eight-grade general math class on a long-term assignment most of my students were at fourth-grade level, it that. Few had had an inkling of the multiplication tables and many were still counting with their fingers. Their elementary school teachers obviously had not been able to give them the mathematical foundation they needed. (Many K-5 teachers admit they aren't very good at math. Some actually hate the subject.) By the end of the year some had had progressed to about a fifth-grade level, a substantial improvement, but far short of the comprehension and skills required for algebra. Nonetheless, all were required to register for algebra the following year.
More troublesome still was my advanced algebra class. The students in the main were reasonably well-behaved kids, mainly white, from middleclass families and, therefore, on the school's "talented and gifted," program. Yet, with few exceptions, most didn't know how to work with fractions, decimals or integers. They lacked the power of concentration to set up and solve multiple-step problems. They were incapable of manipulating symbols and reasoning in abstract terms. Like many of my general math students, some had not yet learned their multiplication tables and were still counting with their fingers. All had been issued expensive graphing calculators, a terrible mistake, and led to believe that algebra consisted simply of pushing buttons and getting the right answers.
A parent who blamed his daughter's inability to learn algebra on my poor teaching skills and insensitivity, dropped by regularly to remind me that the girl was just a child, and in that regard he was right. Intellectually and emotionally the girl and her classmates were still children. Given another year or two to mature and learn their basic math, most might have mastered algebra and gone on to higher mathematics without much trouble. But, as it turned out, all they got from their premature exposure to algebra was a lot of stress. Some, I suspect, will hate math as long as they live.
The education establishment, however, is not wont to give up a bad idea. If it cannot bring the kids up to algebra, then it will bring algebra down to the kids. Algebra teachers in the early grades are instructed to make the subject fun, not intellectually enjoyable, but entertainingly fun. I recall having to attend a workshop on how to teach equations with toy-like chips that looked very much like the math manipulatives used in kindergarten. On another occasion, a higher-up called me to her office to tell me that my students would learn Algebra a lot better if I decorated my classroom with pictures of sport celebrities, who, for all I knew, were not particularly famous for their mathematical prowess. The graphs and formulas I had put on the walls apparently weren't entertaining enough.
And if this dumbing down of the subject were not enough, students who can't learn Algebra I in one year, the normal time, now can study it at a slower pace by taking Algebra I Part 1 one year and Algebra I Part 2 the following year. Algebra II likewise is broken up into two parts, much of which consists of remedial work in basic arithmetic. But no matter how much the subject is fragmented and students unprepared for it are not going to learn it.
State mandated test scores in Algebra have improved slightly in recent years. but only because teachers are under strict orders to teach to the tests, and because test-takers are allowed to use graphing calculators. But ask Algebra public school students to solve problem that requires them to reason algebraically—for example: if a worker can do 2½ jobs in 30 seconds, how many jobs can he do in 3¼ hours?—and most couldn't begin to solve it. The early Algebra and Algebra-for-all program served up by our public schools may look great on paper, but, in truth, it's a sham.
The Troublemakers
For reasons that no amount of theorizing can explain, there are students that declare war on our public schools. They start fights, trash classrooms, steal, deface school property, shout obscenities, and in every way imaginable make a nuisance of themselves. The usual disciplinary measures--an hour in the crisis room, a short in-school suspension--have no effect on them. They know they can wreak havoc with impunity and do, from the moment they enter school in the morning until the final bell rings in the afternoon. Some become especially obnoxious on the bus to and from school.
As a substitute teacher I have had my share of encounters with such students. I have been sassed, mocked, cursed and threatened with bodily harm and legal action. I have found pornographic drawings on my desk and spit in my thermos bottle. I have broken up fights and thwarted sexual assaults. The measly wage I received for subbing couldn't have begun to compensate for the abuse and stress i had to endure.
Yet nothing was done about it. On the contrary, accommodating dysfunctional behavior has become a top priority in our public schools. Typically, over one fourth of their staff—counselors, social workers, psychologists, crisis teachers, hall monitors, in-house police officers—are devoted to serving or, to be precise, pandering to a handful of troublemakers. And instead of preparing classes and grading papers, teachers often have to waste their precious planning time discussing and documenting behavior problems.
At a middle school where I once subbed on a long assignment, I had to attend a number of meetings with counselors and fellow teachers--sometimes as many as ten persons--to discuss the case of one incorrigible offender. Calculating our hourly pay, those fruitless meetings (the kid, a 16-year-old eighth grader, eventually quit school) cost our city taxpayers over $10,000. Adding to that the $20,000 + a year spent keeping him in school and multiplying the amount by scores of other kids like him throughout our public schools, the total came up to huge waste of the taxpayers money. Educating students who caused no trouble, on the other hand, came to only $10,000 a year.
Unruly students no doubt have serious problems and need help. Some appear to be emotionally disturbed or mentally ill. As a parent, I feel sorry for them. But I feel more sorry still for the hundreds of normal students whose education they have been hindering since elementary school. Talented and Gifted (TAG) and Honors students can work in peace. Their influential parents have seen to it that no disruptive students are enrolled in their classes. Otherwise, they would bolt to private schools in heartbeat. The average students, the ones most at risk, are the ones who have to put up with the chaos. Getting cursed and threatened does not gall me nearly as much as seeing normal kids unable to concentrate because some attention-seeking classmate is in the habit of throwing wads of paper across the room or banging on his desk.
When I bring up the matter to school officials they invariably tell me, in a most solemn tone, as if quoting from the Scriptures that “the law requires we educate all students." Well, if that's the case, I suggest they reinterpret the law, or lobby to get it changed, because, as test scores and .all reliable indicators show, they are educating only a small number of their students. It doesn't take a genius to see that many of the ills plaguing our public schools--poor tests scores, teacher burnout, rising costs, the flight to private and charter schools--are due in large part to the corrosive behavior of a few troublemakers.
Political correctness and psychobabble doesn't work with those kids. The only way to deal with them is to declare them non-students--what they really are--and place them in a separate facility, away from our schools, where their special needs can be met, and they can do others no harm.
The Great High Tech Scam
No sooner had the first computers come on the market than IT companies began to hawk their product to public schools. Computers could teach students every subject they needed to learn. Some CEO’s even predicted that their machines would eventually replace teachers.
Public school officials back then had no reason to doubt the sales pitch. The computer, after all, was the invention of the century. If computers had enabled rocket scientists to put men on moon, then computers could surely be used to educated children.
So, sight unseen, public schools began investing heavily on computer products and altering their curriculum around them. Today, every public school in America worth its name has at least one computer in every classroom and a state-of-the-art computer lab. In elementary schools, physical education and recess have been scaled down to accommodate computer instruction. In the upper-grades, computer technology is included in some state-mandated tests, along with math, language arts, science and social studies; while traditional subjects like foreign languages, music and art, despite their proven educational value, are left out.
At $536 billion and rising, (2004 dollars) the collective budget of public schools in America is greater than that of the GNP of most foreign countries. Needless to say, selling IT hardware and software to such a deep-pockets customer is huge business. But how have public school students profited from it? From what I’ve seen first hand and heard from the better educated teachers in the profession, not at all.
Consider the flashy Breakthrough to Literacy program used in many kindergartens throughout America, in which a cartoon elephant taught kids how to splash colors and match words with pictures. Though used extensively by public school kindergartens throughout America, this costly program, as test scores clearly showed, did not rendered kids better readers or writers than those of generations past. Teachers required to use the program tell me that once the novelty wore off, their students found it boring. The McGuffey primer used in the nineteenth century, with its scant black white lithographs and emphasis on the written word, was probably more interesting to kids and produced better results.
In the upper grades, when the Internet was first introduced, students lined up for a turn at their classroom computer, not to conduct research as intended, but to cruise pop entertainment sites. Now that the sites are restricted, they have pretty much lost interested in computers, except to access their e-mail, or play video games. Most of the information they need for their assignments can be easier gathered from books and journals, the old-fashioned way.
Kids have learned to click on icons and get responses, but not much else. That awesome education that computers supposedly are giving them is as illusory as the emperor’s fancy duds in the Hans Christian Andersen’s tale. The argument that being around computers makes one high-tech savvy doesn’t wash either. One can no more learn about computer science by merely using computers than a motorist can learn mechanical engineering by driving a car.
Then there’s the unsettling impact computers are having on the teaching profession. Teachers who have been on the job for 20 years now are told that they can’t pass muster unless they master the latest educational software. Most teachers I know find the standard features on their computers--e-mail, word processing, grading and attendance programs, Internet access—extremely useful. Few, however, appreciate having to spend so much of their valuable time in staff-development workshops learning programs for which they have no use and, moreover, become obsolete as soon as they learn them. Those who happen to be technologically disadvantaged or disaffected should consider retiring or finding another line or work. As Washington Post Columnist Marc Fisher noted about the trend in general, “computer training has become the living hell of the American workplace.” (2/6/03)
So why do public schools continue to invest so much on IT equipment? Conspicuous consumption? Ignorance? I have no clue.
Uneducated Educators
Every attempt to upgrade the quality of education in America has failed because the players in the K-12 public education establishment—Federal, state and local educrats; school of education professors; teacher union officials; superintendents; principals, administrators and teachers —are, for the most part, too poorly educated themselves to know what a real education is.
Particularly egregious are the educational deficiencies elementary school teachers. As much as 60% of the typical school-of-education curriculum for elementary education majors consists mainly of crowd-control courses. Further diluting their education is the option of meeting core academic requirements with watered-down courses designed especially for them, like how to teach math to first-graders, instead of the real math.
Ask elementary school teachers why they chose to major in education rather than earn a standard B.A. or B.S. degree, and most will confess that they dreaded the math requirement. Thus it is not surprising that later, as teachers, they invariably project their fears onto their students by making math sound so dreadfully boring and difficult that they tend to sugarcoat the subject beyond recognition. The main reason why so many American high school students have trouble mastering Algebra is not so much their Algebra teachers are inept, though more than a few are, but because their teachers back in elementary school failed to teach them the fundamentals of arithmetic. And much the same holds true with science, language skills and social studies.
So, given the entrenched shortcomings of the public education establishment, there is no reason to assume that Barack’s Obama’s proposed Race to the Top program to improve the quality of K-12 will work any better than George Bush’s No Child Behind, Eisenhower’s National Defense Education Ace or any such other government plan. Try as one might , one cannot get seeds to sprout in unfertile soil.
Yet something must be done, and fast, for it is clear that without a well educated labor force, this country cannot hope to compete successfully in today’s global economy. At present, many scientists and engineers employed in the U.S and half of students in those fields enrolled in U.S. universities come from foreign countries where a solid state-supported K-12 education is top priority. But we cannot expect this brain-drain to continue indefinitely. Some of those highly-skilled professionals and university graduates will settle permanently in the U.S., but just as many are likely to return to their home countries once economic and social conditions there improve, and when their universities catch up with ours, there will no need to for their students to come to the U.S. to complete their education.
Free market advocates--the late Milton Friedman, for one--have suggested that privatizing K-12 public schools and forcing them to compete with one another would compel them to provide their charges with an optimum education in order to stay in business. Now, if education were a tangible, easily measured product like, say, houses or automobiles, the free market approach would work. But the success or failure of an overall education program takes years to asses. It cannot be recorded in a quarterly balance sheet. Much like national defense and law enforcement, education is one of those intangible social institutions that doesn’t lend itself to the "invisible hand" of capitalism.
And, by the same token, rewarding good teachers with promotions and higher salaries, wouldn’t work either, because it likewise takes years for a teacher’s competence or lack thereof to manifest itself. Seemingly boring, plodding teachers may turn out to be better educators than perky ones who keep their classes entertained. Nor can end-of-year standardized test scores by relied upon to measure long-range progress. Such test scores can be, and often are, manipulated or falsified to produce the desired results. As I substitute teacher, I’ve covered math classes where students were taught to take the state-mandate test, yet learned hardly anything about the subject. So what to do? Below are some recommendations.
First and foremost, dismantle the entire K-12 public education establishment. This would include the U.S. Department of Education, (which Ronald Reagan had promised to do but never got around to it), university school-of-education departments, teacher unions, and state and local education bureaucracies. Some members of the Libertarian Cato Institute have already made a similar recommendation. State governors of New Jersey, Colorado, Nevada, Mississippi and California, among others, have, in effect, started the dismantling process by drastically cutting the fat off their K-12 education budget.
Require that teachers and administrators earn legitimate undergraduate degrees from duly accredited colleges and universities. Some new hires, no doubt, will turn out to be poor educators. Not everybody is psychological fit for the profession. But those who make the grade will, at least, have the intellectual heft to do right by their students. The nuts and bolts of classroom management they can quickly, intuitively learn on the job and from informal consultation with colleagues. Because no two students and no two classes are the same, the art of teaching cannot be reduced to a science requiring special courses and seminars, as professors and educrats falsely claim to justify their existence.
Eliminate the specialists. Rather than solve problems as they arise, the usual practice in public education is to create specialists to deal with the problem. For example, if students are having trouble learning to read, a degree or certificate in "Reading," properly couched in the latest sociological jargon, is created, Classroom teachers then send their poor readers to the reading specialist, and though the students, predictably, come back as illiterate as ever, school officials, when pressed for an explanation, will argue that by implementing the program, scientifically proven to work over time, they are doing all they can to help those students. So al in all, the only ones who benefit from the reading program are the School of Education professors who concocted the program, classroom teacher who are spared the burden of working with underachievers, and, most of all, the reading specialist, whose class ratios are small, usually one-to-one, a cushy job, to say the least. Moreover, the specialists have no incentive to solve the problems, for if they did, they would be out of a job And the same holds true for math, Special Ed, Conflict Resolution, Diversity Counseling, Bilingual Ed and ESL specialists. (As I can attest from my personal experience as a 14-year-old Cuban immigrant, foreign students naturally pick up English from their American peers, not from ESL specialists.)
Eliminate superintendents and school boards. Public school superintendents typically are outsiders who bungle things in the district where they served, and then move on to do the same in a new district, usually in a distant part the country, where their record is not well known. In their first year in office, they tend to make all sorts of superficial changes—transferring teachers and principals from one school to another, rehashing old programs, issuing gilded press releases, holding public meeting, etc.—and by the time it becomes evident, four years or so later, that these changes were no more effective, or even worse, than those made by their failed predecessors, they resign and move on to their next job.
As for school boards members, too many tend to be aspiring politicians who use the board as a means of launching a career into higher office. Many mayors, state congresspersons, and governors started out serving on school boards. Others board members are in it for personal gain, like a building contractor in our district who has made a sizable fortune remodeling schools that needed not remodeling. Superintendents and school boards may have at one time served a useful purpose, but no more. The taxpayer money spend on them is largely wasted. Their traditionally job—approving the hiring of new teachers and staff, reporting to the city council, keeping the public informed, promoting fund-raising events—could easily be done by a revolving ad hoc committee of principals and teachers, at no extra cost to the taxpayers, provide, course, that the principals and teachers are well-educated professionals educators--which takes us back to the recommendation that the entire public education establishment must first be dismantled. Teacher unions and government officials beholden to them will, of course, raise a big howl, as they are wont to do when challenged do, but they must be told in no uncertain terms that their howling is no longer convincing.
The aggregate cost of public education in the 50 states is upwards of $900 billion. Add to that the $70 billion appropriated in 2010 for the U.S Department of Education budget and other bits and ends hidden in other budgets, and the education bill to the American taxpayer comes to a cool trillion. That's a lot to spend on a system that is largely broken. By conservative estimates, anywhere from one half to two thirds of that stratospheric cost could be saved by implementing the recommendations outlined above.
Operation Phoenix would be an apt name for the reform needed.
Why Johnny Can't Read Revisited
Every year elementary schools throughout America expend huge amounts of energy and resources trying to teach their students to read at grade level, but to little avail. For all the workshops, strategies and reading specialists, kids today are on average less literate than their grandparents were at their age.
Teachers and school officials are quick to attribute this on-going failure to our sizeable population of needy and broken-home students, and they are not altogether wrong. But one major reason why so many kids today have trouble learning to read is that are not being taught to read words but to look at pictures.
Consider the typical first-grade reading primers. Most of the space in these booklets is occupied by large, colorful illustrations. The actual reading material consists of no more than a few words per page, and some pages have no words at all.
The idea behind this preponderance of illustrations is that it attracts young students to books and, thus, to literacy. True, the many pretty pictures of animals, houses, schools, parks and children at play do appeal to young students. They love to leaf through their books and retell the stories told conveyed by the pictures. But that does not motivate or teach them to read. On the contrary, the pictures distract them from the scant text and prevent them from forming their own mental images, as true reading requires.
Given a picture of a bright red apple and the word "apple" printed below it in small dark letters, most normal six-year-olds will look at the picture and ignore the word. They need not go through the trouble of decoding the letters a-p-p-l-e and conceptualizing an apple if they have a vivid picture of one right before their eyes. They may learn to trace the word under the picture and say it, but show them the word without the picture and few are able to read it. As Virginia Woolf put it, "Reading is a longer and more complicated process than seeing."
This is not to imply, of course, that illustrations have no educational value. It would be very difficult, if not impossible, to learn math, science, geography and most other subjects without visual illustrations. A good picture is, as they say, worth a thousand words. This power of pictures over words, however, is precisely what makes them so distracting to children trying to learn how to read. Pictures easily distract even literate adults. Note how you can become totally engrossed in a good mystery novel, yet tend to skim over or even ignore the text of a well-illustrated magazine.
In his 1955 landmark book, Why Johnny Can't Read, Rudolph Flesch traced the decline of literacy in our schools to the wholesale abandonment of phonics in the 1920's. But that also happened to be the time when technological developments in printing began to tilt the emphasis in children's books from text to illustrations; and in the 75 years since, as the illustrations became more attractive and plentiful, children have had increasingly more trouble learning to read.
Today, with the added visual distractions of TV and computers,
de rigueur in every classroom in America, it's a wonder that our children ever learn to read at all. A major reason why so many high school students have reading problems is that they never outgrew their dependence on pictures. They may be able to mouth the words, but without the pictures, they cannot make sense of what they are reading.
Before our public schools embark on yet another costly but fruitless reading program, they ought to consider that reading, by definition, is the comprehension of written or printed words. Give the children books with fewer pictures and more words--or, better yet, no pictures, only words--and most will be reading fluently at grade level in a matter of months.