One of the most bizarre aspects of the United States is how we organize public education at the elementary and secondary levels. For mysterious historical reasons, we leave all of the important decisions — from curriculum and testing to financing and bus routes — in the hands of local school boards. 130,000 of them, all told. The result, predictably enough, is screaming chaos. Not only do we have haphazard ideas about what to teach and how to judge how well it’s been taught, but the dispersal of resources makes economies of scale impossible, so we don’t put anything like the appropriate amount of effort into developing new techniques and training our teachers.
And it shows. Matt Miller has written a compelling article in The Atlantic, documenting how our screwy system — unique, apparently, in the developed world — has utterly failed to give our children the educations they deserve.
The United States spends more than nearly every other nation on schools, but out of 29 developed countries in a 2003 assessment, we ranked 24th in math and in problem-solving, 18th in science, and 15th in reading. Half of all black and Latino students in the U.S. don’t graduate on time (or ever) from high school. As of 2005, about 70 percent of eighth-graders were not proficient in reading. By the end of eighth grade, what passes for a math curriculum in America is two years behind that of other countries.
This dismal failure might at least be explicable if it served some misguided egalitarian impulse, but it doesn’t. This map, from Miller’s article, shows the spending per pupil on a county-by-county basis; the poorest counties spend less than $7,500 per student, while the rich ones are over $17,500. (Click for larger version.)
Is there any theory behind the idea that students should getter significantly better or worse educations based on the county in which they are born? This isn’t an issue of private vs. public; it’s a public service, paid for by taxes, just like Medicare or national defense. But we finance public education by combination of state and local revenues, rather than through the national government.
Faced with such a patently misguided system, the most common calls for reform involve the imposition of some sort of national standards, such as those featured in the No Child Left Behind Act that has lately been foisted on our schools. In principle, national standards are a great idea; in a sensible system, however, they be the last of a series of necessary reforms. It’s like a team that hires a new football coach, who addresses the team on the first day of practice by saying “Here’s the system: we’re going to win all of our games!” Without an actual playbook, appropriate equipment, and some strategy, exhortations to do better aren’t going to achieve any tangible results.
It’s obvious what is needed: a basic national curriculum that is shared by all schools, with a set of requirements that leave room for creativity and innovation by individual districts within the overall framework. (There is no reason why American math classes should be two grade levels behind European math classes.) Plus, crucially, an overhaul of the financing system so that resources are distributed fairly. Those are just the minimal reforms that every sensible person should be able to agree on; after those are implemented, we can return to our regularly scheduled debates about school choice and bilingual education. Apparently the problem is that conservatives hate “national” and liberals hate “standards,” and both are afraid of the teachers’ unions. So we should all be able to compromise and do the right thing! As Miller says, “We started down this road on schooling a long time ago. Time now to finish the journey.”
Re Haelfix
1. Mr. anon has already corrected Mr. Haelfix relative to the Un. of Chicago being a private school.
2. Mr. Haelfix stated that most college students in the US attend private schools. When called on that statement, he moves the goal posts and states that the best schools are private schools. Although the IVY league schools, Un. of Chicago, and Stanford are excellent schools, so are most of the public institutions such as the Un. of California, as already mentioned by Mr. anon.
3. In many states, virtually all students attend public universities. For instance, in Virginia, there are no private colleges of any significance.
I didn’t know that about U Chicago -shrug- Otoh the point stands. If the US had nationalized all the Ivy leagues and every private university 60 years ago, I very much doubt the system would be as competitive and wonderful as it is today.
You might have a few great schools, but not nearly as many as that which competition engenders. No data, just semi obvious anecdotes.
For a laugh, why not wander over to a Harvard forum and try to sell the idea that they need to be nationalized.
The state of our educational system, and our trailing behind numerous foreign powers in standards of learning and testing, is a direct result of the American society’s lack of interest in their children.
Sean said:
If this is true, than we are worse off than I thought. Parents don’t have time to put effort into their children? Their children’s education and their children’s futures are too time-consuming for parents? Then fine, we deserve collapse. We deserve a dim future. But our children do not, yet we are laying the crumbling foundations for just that anyways. We aren’t going to have to live through the torment of rebuilding society from a collapse we caused, who cares about who’s left, right? We’ll be dead right? It is that mentality that spells sadness for the lives of our children or would-be children for their future. It is the lack of planning, of foresight in adults today to care about a future and the next step than they selfishly care about them alone, and their own lives. Disregarding others and their well-being will, inevitably, leads whatever system that requires such involvement, to an end.
If parents are not going to put themselves on the backburner for their children, to ensure that their children’s future is secure because they made the conscious decision to help teach or be closely involved in the teaching of their children, informing them of how to succeed, how to love and care about themselves and others, how to contribute to something greater than themselves, then it is no wonder to me why our government is in financial disarray, why the education system plummets as consumerism, media (propaganda), drug dealers, rich bankers/politicians or any other person who takes advantage of a misinformed and depressed public, profit.
We let it happen. We are so internal in thinking all of this is attacking us from the outside in, when it’s really happening because of what we do from the inside out. Each individual person in this country is responsible for their actions, and the collective actions of every individual person is manifest in what our country appears to be doing, dying. We, as individuals, have pointed the blame at any and every person but ourselves for our problems. What is our country doing right now? Pointing the blame at terrorists, any other person than ourselves, for the hole we have dug ourselves into. But no, we didn’t do it, it was the other guy.
Until people begin to care, actually care about their own lives, about their children’s lives and futures, and their community’s well-being, nothing in this country will shine ever again. There will be no fast food chains stuffing 4% more food into our people than is necessary for annual needs in this country, there will be no fancy electronics, no sports games, no holidays, no high-energy physics experiments, no NASA. The system will collapse if the people no longer want it or no longer care about it, and the only sign of people actually wanting the system is the system succeeding. It doesn’t take much to realize that the system, in this case, isn’t.
We are trying so hard to ignore what we consider “bad” in this country with more sports, more alcohol, harder drugs, raunchier illicit sex, less work, and longer holidays. The same thing Rome did before the Praetorian guard began assassinating Caeser after Caeser desperately trying to find a leader who could lay down the disgusting truth of what the Roman Empire had become, and turned the people into a greater society by leading them to rebuild. That Caeser never came, and Rome has been gone for 1500 years.
Its because we don’t care enough to be educated, or that its so much easier to be distracted by shiny things, than to crack a book and get some culture in you, some science, some mystery or fiction, some history, some other information than what is sucking your life away in the telescreen. If people are too comfortable to be educated, if people are too comfortable to try and learn about anything, then they will never know that the collapse of civilized society happens over, and over, and over again for the same reasons. Funny, there was a discovery made a few years back about a civilization that “fell into the sea” on the coast of India. It is carbon dated at 9,000 BC. Humans have been on this planet for a long time, and we’ve constructed civilization after civilization and apparently have yet to learn from our mistakes.
The clincher is coming. We’ll see if humanity is up to the task. I fear that the world stage has escalated so greatly in significant events, warming, nuclear threat, political legerdemain, that we may only have this last chance.
Wayne
Nationalizing the public school system would simply entrench the bureaucracy even further. And would remove local, state control. Something the Founders wished to avoid unless absolutely necessary.
More expensive areas (higher real estate prices, higher average salaries, greater overall wealth) need to spend more on schools than less expensive areas. This is to attract teachers (for example, so that they can afford to live in the area, or at least within commuting range of the area).
Some areas spend $7500 per pupil, some spend $17,500 per pupil. Hardly surprising. A combination of factors.
(I didn’t see a proposal to actually equalize spending, and I hope we don’t. This would have the obvious effects of making it virtually impossible to hire teachers in expensive areas, while dumping a lot of money into rural, poor, nonindustrialized, low tech regions. While some teachers might then live like kinds in these poor regions, this would solve nothing.)
The problems with our public school system, as with our medical care system, have many causes. Listing a few:
* The removal of fear. Kids are no longer frightened into thinking about what they learn so as to be able to find a job someday. They just coast along, barely studying, content in the belief that things will work out. Many university grads are now “barristas” at Starbucks. Sure, the world needs philosophers and historians, but the large numbers of people with BAs in “Sociology” or “History of Consciousness” (a popular major at UC Santa Cruz, near me), and the swelling ranks of underemployed college grads tells the important story.
(And things are even grimmer for high school grads and dropouts who are reading 2-4 levels below their nominal grade level.)
* My first and last employer, Intel, is busy moving design and engineering jobs offshore as fast as it possibly can. It finds American students less capable than in decades past. (We had hourly workers who could not read simple instructions. We had engineers who could not compose a single-page memo. Sad to say, many Indian and Chinese engineers had a better grasp of English, in the sense of explaining things, than the native Americans had.)
* The decoupling between effort and success is happening in other ways as well. Kids look to financial success as a “get rich quick” scam, with corners cut, with financial shenanigans, with government being the bail out sugar daddy for those who gamble and lose. (We are privatizing the gains, socializing the losses. The younger generation has grown up thinking this is the way things work.)
* Schools ended “tracking” decades ago. Now classes tend to move at the pace of the slowest, dullest child. (“No child left behind.”)
* Whatever the situation with “juvenile delinquents” was in the 50s, things are undeniably vastly worse today. Gangs in the schools, lock-down of campuses, teachers hired primarily to maintain order.
* In my area, my four nearest neighbors who have public-school-aged kids all, and I mean all four of the families, are paying through the nose to put their kids in private schools. These range from a Christian school, a Catholic school, and even a Hindu-oriented school (that takes non-Indians–Mount Madonna School, for anyone interested in Googling). They would rather pay their property taxes (about $6000 per year per house, regardless of whether one has kids) AND then pay $8-20K a year per child to send their kids to a private school. Private schools can discipline students (I don’t mean corporal punishment, BTW) in ways that public schools are not allowed. Students can simply be told not to return to class. Gangs and disruptions are now allowed. Academics are emphasized. Sort of the way things were at one time in the U.S.
Meanwhile, the local high schools are “gladiator academies.” (Watsonville High, Renaissance High.) And not just because they are about 95% Hispanic. More than the ethnicity is the cultural attitude toward education, gangs, and teenaged pregnancy. An article a couple of days ago captures the situation:
“Smart vs. cool: Culture, race and ethnicity in Silicon Valley schools
By Sharon Noguchi and Jessie Mangaliman
Mercury News
Article Launched: 04/06/2008 01:38:55 AM PDT
Sandra Romero and Bibiana Vega do their best to shrug off taunts from fellow Latino classmates at Del Mar High School in San Jose.
The 17-year-old seniors are called “whitewashed.” Mataditas – dorks. Cerebritas – brainiacs. They’re told they’re “losing their culture” – just because Sandra has a 4.0 grade-point average and Bibiana has a 3.5.
The put-downs are clear: Smart is not cool.
And too many Latino students are choosing cool over school.
But a few miles away at Hyde Middle School, in the heavily Asian Cupertino Union School District, Tiffany Nguyen detects the opposite attitude. If you’re not smart, “you’re really looked down on,” said the Vietnamese-American eighth-grader.
”
(Google on characteristic phrases to find the ever-changing URL.)
I think things are pretty hopeless, frankly. We live in a society addicted to debt, to putting toys and luxuries on the credit card, to worrying about tomorrow at some later time, to decoupling hard work and success. We live in a fantasy world.
–Tim May
Haelfix,
You know what they say about anecdotal evidence versus hard data.
Fact of the matter is, most other countries would kill to have a system like UT, UM, or UC.
You want George Bush and Dick Cheney telling our
kids how and what to think???
Nuff said right there.
For Anon and Haelfix,
Here is a ranking of world universities done by some university in China: http://ed.sjtu.edu.cn/rank/2007/ARWU2007_Top100.htm
This is an academic status ranking, and the US dominance is incredible: 17 of the top 20 and 39 of the top 50 are US universities. Even if the US private schools are removed, the US would still lead. Of course, part of the strength of the US system is due to the fact that US schools hire so many foreign born professors.
Getting back to the high school debate..
I do think some of that money could be rerouted and spent on preparing a comprehensive exam for 8th graders. At least, something better than the SSAT (or whatever its called), which reads like something a psychologist would have outputed, rather than a test of knowledge and skill. Its poor as it stands.
Also it would be easier to get a real benchmark of academic competence per area, rather than simply polling who has high IQ scores.
A root cause of all this is a rampant anti-intellectual streak that runs thru American history, and therefore the cultural (this problem is addressed in an old book, Anti-Intellectualism in America, by I can’t remember (sorry)) backdrop of America. For example, the near reverence of the “self-made man”, of sports figures over teachers (even at the secondary school level), and so forth. I’ve taught at the high school, middle school (8th grade, ick) (public and private), and university level (undergrad and grad). In all cases, teaching is considered a lesser profession and skill (even at the university level…be honest…good performance in the classroom in the least factor in being awarded tenure, tho poor performance can be an excuse for denial). This is a major reason for such things as lousy salaries and poor parental participation (altho notice how eagerly they support athletics); teaching is simply not a respected profession in this country. Given the work load, often crappy conditions and the lack of support mentioned above, it’s nearly impossible to attract and retain excellent teachers. There are marvelous teachers out there, and they probably should be canonized. But unless there is a remake of the infrastructure AND a change in society’s attitude towards teaching as a profession, I think the outlook is pretty bleak.
Re Haelfix
Back to secondary schools, there is a school in the US which has graduated 7 Nobel Prize winners in physics. I would be willing to bet Mr. Haelfix a considerable sum of money that he will not find another secondary school anywhere in the world with such a record. A private school? Not so; it’s the Bronx School of Science, a public school.
Wayne wrote:
So Wayne, why do we have teachers and other education professionals? Why should amateurs decide what should be taught and how, when there are people who, you know, are professionals at this kind of thing? To go a bit further, why do we have experts at all?
It’s the matter of parents wanting to dump all that responsibility on someone else. The point is that we assume everyone else to do our job for us because we’re just “too busy.” We have experts in the first place because their parents helped establish such an environment during their youth that they could be educated. The public school system has become merely a crutch for parents to dump more responsibilities of raising a child on someone else instead of bucking up and not only being involved in establishing a healthy environment for their children to grow and learn in, but being involved in that education by ensuring the experts involved are up to the task.
Just casting off their children’s education, a significant factor in their growth, to “experts” is not something a parent who truly wishes their children to grow up and enjoy a future better than their own should be doing. Raising children is raising the future, if you cannot see the importance in this then I’ve made my point all over again.
Furthermore, what “experts” are teaching our children to be disinterested in school, drop out, and score worse and worse on “standardized exams?” Clearly the experts aren’t doing enough, or are not being supported enough by, whom? Parents.
I am not saying “amateurs” as you say, should be deemed the ruler of all things educational, that’s absurd. Clearly the experts know more efficient tools, but that has not been enough. We’ve left our children to be taught under the regulations of “experts” thus far, and it isn’t working. It isn’t working because parents have not been interested enough in their children’s lives to ask the right questions or act accordingly when their children are failing school, to ensure these experts are indeed doing their job, or that those who are employing these experts are doing their job.
It’s a lack of interest on both fronts that leads to our present situation.
If one says parents are uneducated or have no idea what they are doing, that is ridiculous. Of course parenting is an overwhelming task at times, but saying one does not know how to ensure a healthy environment for their children is not true. It becomes a matter of how much do they care to do the job they promised to do when they had a child to begin with. If one isn’t going to put forth the effort that is called for, then don’t have children. This, still, isn’t the case. This, still, is why our children are less educated than others abroad.
Wayne
My parents got a more thorough education than I did, albeit less broad. I received a better education than my children. I question whether my grandchildren are getting educated at all – their ignorance is usually appalling. They have learned nothing in 10 years I couldn’t learn in in 3 months. They have no interest in learning for the sake of knowing, for the challenge, for just learning.
If you really investigate where children are and are not being educated, you will find it less a matter of money or politics and more an question of culture. I grew up in the rural Western Colorado in a culture that valued education. It still has a pretty good school system, locally administered, locally financed, and locally supported by the parents and community. I now live a couple of hours North of NYC. The local school system is decidedly mediocre – locally misadministered, locally misfianaced – because it is not really supported by the community. Politics only take over a school system when the parents abdicate their responsibility and fail to support good school teachers and administrators. Then time-servers carve out their careers and real teaching goes down the tubes. We are now at least one generation into ignorance and I can’t tell you how many times I have seen teachers who are incompetent, uncultured and ignorant. Of course, I see writers and commentators whose livelihood is the use of language – and they are unable to write or speak properly. Politicians, particularly at the state level, are usually as ignorant as they are venal.
I suspect the real problem is that learning is no longer rewarded – the ignorant can prosper as well as the educated, so why bother. I could dig into the debasement of criteria in the name of equality, but that would take a book.
SLC, thats an impressive school certainly, but I’d put Andover/Exeter and some of the other prep schools up against it any day of the week. If you insist, we can look at acceptance rate to Ivy Leagues, SAT or AP scores or whatever other measure you’d like.
Re Haelfix
1. How many graduates of Andover or Exeter have won Nobel prizes in Physics (or in any other field, i.e. medicine, chemistry, etc.)? SAT scores are not measures of accomplishment, merely indications of persons who can do well on tests. SAT scores don’t measure creativity which is the basis of scientific accomplishment. I rather suspect that the greatest scientist of the 20th century, Albert Einstein, would not have done well on SAT tests (he was a mediocre student in Germany and Switzerland, mostly because he was mildly dyslexic).
2. Mr. Haelfix seems to be infatuated with Ivy League schools. Actually, for a student interested in engineering, the Ivy League schools would be a poor choice (except perhaps Cornell). Such a student would be much better served at state universities or schools like MIT or Cal Tech.
Admittedly not having read the entire thread carefully, I would add some points.
The foundation of local and public education in the US is the Northwest Ordnance of 1787.
Is there a nation where a lack of a national curriculum has nonetheless resulted in success? Yes- the US.
Parents help their children if they read or pay higher levies in richer districts. It is not necessary for them to read what their children read to see an improvement in outcomes. In fact, it seems likely that much of the “boost” from growing up in an affluent family results from other experiences than education in a school.
Do local schoolboards set curriculum? I find that to be just about as likely as that the schoolboards would be building their own buses. Textbooks are acknowledged to set the pace, and I imagine that somewhere there are “curriculum committees”. Cannot say I have researched this, but the idea of schoolboards making up curriculum just seems unlikely.
And just as a personal opinion, I haven’t been that impressed with what the federal government has done in my lifetime. My enthusiasm for taking the power out of my neighbor’s hands and giving it to the federal government is about zero.
Thank you Ray. Well put.
Ray said:
He is correct. We must ask ourselves why this is so. I read an article about two weeks ago that discussed how, given the recent financial debacle in the United States, that more and more thirty, forty, and fifty year olds are moving back in with their parents.
Let me say that again. More and more thirty, forty, and fifty year olds are moving back in with their parents.
They can no longer afford car payments, credit card payments (for all the fancy toys they couldn’t afford), rent, and living expenses because they have recently been laid off and cannot find work to compensate their lifestyles. Or, they are too lazy to find work at all and only feel obligated to when their parents’ finances begin to suffer from their presence. For all those who were legitimately ravaged by the financial situation and honestly had no other way to survive, this is not meant for you, and you are the minority.
Warning: Abandon all hope ye who read what’s here.
Parallel this with the vast majority of college students moving back in with their parents immediately following college (after taking six years to finish their degree). Immediately. They can’t find a job, or again, are too lazy to find one, or further still, are not equipped with life skills to do so and cannot support themselves. Parents feel “guilty” if they do not shelter their children once again, and are now opening their doors to “help out” their kids who apparently were “shafted” in the whole growing up/education/life-lesson experiences.
This is absurd. When my Dad was a kid, it was normal to be kicked out at 18 (or earlier) with a wad of cash (or not) in their hand and respectfully told “Good luck.” Those kids joined the military or got married. More fortunate ones went to college on their parents’ ticket. Those kids are my generation’s parents. Those kids made a living, got jobs, prospered, and finally had children that they devoted their time and energy towards ensuring they had a better future. Some thought kicking out kids at 18 was harsh. In all the pampering, in all the ways they thought they were giving a little extra help, their children never learned how to get along on their own, and we end up with thirty, forty, and fifty year old babies.
Chicks in the nest are slowly nudged out by the mother when they are properly grown. Each little chick plummets to the earth to a seemingly gruesome fate when instinct kicks in and their wings start flapping. How is a chick that can’t fly possibly going to live past day one? How is a chick going to learn how to fly without getting pushed the hell out by the parents? Parents assume their 18 years olds will be taught how to fly in college, when really, all they are being taught is how to hang up their wings and get fat in the nest.
What kind of society is developing here? What can we expect when fifty year old babies are casting conservative votes, or collecting unemployment, or for god’s sake driving when they can’t even afford their own car payments? I am extra extra careful on the road these days, I may look over and see a toddler in the driver’s seat of an SUV with a cell phone in their ear. A fifty year old toddler.
Give me a break. I understand that it took a generation or so for this crap to sink in to the American public but still no one has the faintest notion of doing anything about it. Everyone is so glossy-eyed by the glorious telescreen and fancy electronics and MySpace that while the real world crumbles around them, their misreality stays intact. Why? So that the ones in power now have to barely lift a finger or two to mastermind something like a North American Union. Google it.
The awesome part about all this is it hits me, and my friends, and our futures. It hits my generation that has to clean up all this garbage, while baby-boomers (no pun intended) are shriveling away, golfing and drinking beer on an even sicklier social security fund that only siphons the life force away from our generation’s counterattack to this mess. I’m not complaining, because I already know we (those less ignorant in this generation) are capable of the challenge. I’m trying to make obvious the truth. The fact is, I witness a majority of students at universities across the country that don’t give a rat’s ass more than the next fraternity boy. The next hundred years will be entirely held on the shoulders of the students today that want our children to have a better future. So it’s our obligation to fix this desecration.
I’ll get off the soap box, I apologize for the rant, but this is significant right here. It all started with a lack of effort from the parents of the recent generations that are still willing to remove the responsibilities of life from their children and take on “parenthood” all over again. It’s not even parenthood anymore, for parenthood is preparing one’s children for life. It’s more of a sponsorship for ignorance.
Those babies are never going to grow up, and those babies are still going to be voting for conservatives that will do nothing to change this shite state of affairs, sucking money from the system, and for god’s sake driving SUVs, shooting up petroleum, all while talking on cell phones as the only ones capable of changing this country for the better are undermined for their youth. God bless the Holy American Empire. I mean the USA.
Wayne
Wayne (#67) wrote:
>
> .. Those babies are never going to grow up ..
We have a similar problem in the UK, whereby young people leaving college are now saddled with large debts for their tuition fees and find the cheapest property costs several times their salary, so that a mortgage (even before the credit crunch) is out of the question.
The main problem here is that the Government (partly at the behest of the EU, but mostly on their own initiative) has thrown open the doors to literally millions of immigrants over the last ten years, for so-called cheap labour and to bolster property prices and give property owners a specious “feel good” feeling.
Also, when offspring of the indigenous populace (and of earlier immigrants, who also of course suffer the same effects) can’t afford properties to raise families of their own, the age profile will be further skewed, leading to more calls from the baboons in charge to admit yet more immigrants to maintain the working/retired ratio.
Interesting discussions. I’m with you on this Sean (for the record, I’ve got two kids in public schools).
I suppose the American equivalent of opening the doors to all immigrants was the over-reaction involved in the Equal Rights movement. Sensible and decent people were always appalled by the racism that has existed here since the country was founded. In attempting to correct that, the government went crazy. Instead of creating equal opportunity, it tried to legislate equal results. Instead of making college available to all, it tried to guarantee a college degree to everyone, whether it is earned or not. All this did was debase the value of a degree. I might seem that viewed that way, it is appropriate to feel education is not necessary, but this mistakes education for diplomas. Given the current situation, diplomas are meaningless, but education is still valuable. Problem is that society can’t seem to tell the difference. Result is an uneducated populace.
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I am amazed that no one has yet raised the possibility that not all children are created equal. There seems to be a general assumption on this list that if the conditions were fixed just so, all children would be above average.
Unfortunately, intelligence and thus educational achievement is tightly linked to genes. IQ is at least 50% heritable folks! No amount of social engineering will ever eliminate the wide disparities between certain groups in terms of their educational achievement, unless that engineering includes weeding out the dim and mentally unfit via eugenics, which I strongly oppose. Eugenics was, however, an important part of the Progressive agenda during the early 20th century.