The Education Disaster

View 809 Wednesday, February 05, 2014

“Transparency and the rule of law will be the touchstones of this presidency.”

President Barack Obama, January 31, 2009

 

If you like your health plan, you can keep your health plan. Period.

Barrack Obama, famously.

As of Noon all our heaters are in repair, we no longer have a cesspool under our house, and both Roberta and I are slowly recovering from whatever our flu shots didn’t inoculate us against. I should be getting back to work.

The following is a ramble, but I think it gets a point across. I have written several more comprehensive essays on education, and I think my views are fairly well known. Injustice consists of treating equal people unequally – and in treating unequal people equally. Our education system is unjust. I am willing to discuss just what ought to be done about that, but it first requires admitting that the largest item in the budget of each and every state in this union is not being spent well. Our education system is a shambles. Moore’s Law makes jobs obsolete weekly. Last year more people stopped looking for work than there were new jobs created. Much of the potential middle class graduates with lifelong crushing debt. Many college graduates wait on tables – which I did in order to get a college education.

Something is wrong.

No Child Left Behind 

Dear Mr. Pournelle,

I have greatly enjoyed you writing, both in books and in your blog. Some years ago, we purchased, used and enjoyed Mrs. Pournelle’s "Uncover to Discover" reading instruction program.

It pains me to speak in favor of governmental, especially federal regulation. However, I must say something in favor of No Child Left Behind.

In the context of "America hating its bright kids" you have suggested that NCLB, by requiring more resources, at least in the form of teacher attention and time, being directed to low-performing children, makes those resources less available for bright and/or self motivated children. The implication is that schools and teachers can tell which children are brighter and stupider, and that their unimpeded freedom to direct their attentions as they see fit would lead to a better allocation of resources.

Respectfully, this is not true, and is in fact a load of horse manure. Indeed, you yourself have noted your wife’s success in teaching children who arrived at her classroom with piles of paperwork from previous "teachers" proving that these children could not be taught.

Teachers and principals, unhampered by formal accountability for the progress of every student, and insulated by modern school rules and policies from contact or observation by parents, as well as by the fact that employed, lower income mothers (& fathers) may not have the opportunity to even try to observe or be involved in school day activities, will nurture the children they choose to nurture, and ignore or neglect those they choose to neglect. Absent NCLB, or some work-alike objective test that "outs" and penalizes failure to teach, or try to teach, every child, some children will spend their days in time-outs in the hallway, or the principals vestibule, and no one who cares will even know.

I speak feelingly, because I am the parent of a very bright little girl, who tested into the kindergarten class of a magnet school for highly able children (one of the top 2 scores of the 1,200 children who took the test that year), and then spent a very large part of the year sitting in the hallway. Mostly for fidgetting in class. Also for getting a drink of water out of turn, for running (not walking) to the bathroom, for giving away her sparkly pencils, for exclaiming during Pres. Obama’s speech, talking out of turn, spilling milk, getting a paper towel without permission, removing her coat without permission, and so on. Not always good behavior, and certainly difficult, but also not outside what a teacher ought to be able to handle.

Next, we enrolled her in a Montessori school with an excellent reputation, and a large percentage of Notre Dame professors among its parents. This school, in explicit opposition to NCLB, eschewed ALL testing of any kind whatsoever. Evelyn had one very good semester there; it even undid much of the harm inflicted the previous year in kindergarten.

Then, the teacher was diagnosed with cancer, stage 4, and very rightly turned her whole attention to her own health and survival. Unfortunately, the school did not secure a regular substitute teacher for her, and the class drifted, for the balance of that year, and the entire next year, when the previously excellent teacher was back, but still ill, distracted, and functioning sub-par. We and various other parents met with the principal, individually and in groups, and we received promises and assurances which we gave too much credence.

In third grade, we had our daughter’s achievement tested by a 3rd party, and found, as we should have realized earlier, that her formal education had essentially ended at the first semester of first grade, and she would have been better off playing in her sandbox and helping me with housework the next year and a half.

Here is what I think happened: The teacher had excellent abilities, but she was sick and tired, and so she directed her limited energies towards those children who were easy, or whose parents were able to be present – or drop in unexpectedly – during the school day, and the more difficult children, which would certainly include my highly active, imaginative, and inventive daughter, spent vast amounts of time banished to the hallway, or the secretary’s office. I heard later, from other parents, that my daughter was hardly ever actually in the classroom. I wish they had told me at the time.

An annual test, such as the Iowa test used to be, would have been of great service to our family. Indeed, my greatest problem with the testing requirements of NCLB is that it does not require ENOUGH testing; a lot can be lost between 3rd and 5th grade.

Yours, Karen R. Hammond-Nash

South Bend, Indiana

I must have been singularly unclear, but I have written on this so often I thought my view was pretty well known. I must have been particularly unclear.

The problem with No Child Left Behind is that teachers have far more incentive to spend time getting students from grade D to grade C than to enable B students to learn how to get an A. This wouldn’t be all that bad if there were still some attention to the brighter kids, but in fact there usually isn’t. Yet it is the bright kids who are going to be needed in our increasingly technological society. Not everyone will be able to participate in the new technology. They need to learn useful skills; and neither our high schools nor our universities act as if they know this. The real tragedy is that the kid who struggles to get a C in today’s high school isn’t likely to have learned anything useful for his future life, for he still isn’t going to college; and he needs a job he hasn’t been trained for.

As to my wife’s experience: after about 1950 the official policy of the State of California, adopted by the State Board of Education and enforced by the Superintendent of Public Instruction was that learning phonics is not learning to read, and therefore teachers should not waste time teaching phonics. During that period most of the tenured professors of education entered the university system,. They were told to believe that phonics was useless, so they did not learn how to teach children to read. Few professors of education have actually taught anyone to read, but they are expected to teach incoming undergraduates how to teach pupils to read. The result is predictable and in fact was predicted, by me as well as many others, when all this happened. The former Superintendent has subsequently admitted he was wrong, and apologized, but the education system is still a wreck, and 60% of students reading at grade level in high school is considered a good school. Since “read at grade level” doesn’t necessarily mean they can read books other than controlled vocabulary works, you may translate that as “only 40% illiterate”. How those kids are not to be left behind is a total mystery.

The school system gets more and more expensive, but it has worse and worse results.

Very bright kids can take advantage of new technology, and while it is better to have a real education directed by teachers who care and who we know the subject matter, it is possible to learn a lot on your own: as I learned in Capleville. But when I got to Christian Brothers and had intellectually qualified teachers I learned a lot more.

“In the context of "America hating its bright kids" you have suggested that NCLB, by requiring more resources, at least in the form of teacher attention and time, being directed to low-performing children, makes those resources less available for bright and/or self motivated children. The implication is that schools and teachers can tell which children are brighter and stupider, and that their unimpeded freedom to direct their attentions as they see fit would lead to a better allocation of resources.

“Respectfully, this is not true, and is in fact a load of horse manure. Indeed, you yourself have noted your wife’s success in teaching children who arrived at her classroom with piles of paperwork from previous "teachers" proving that these children could not be taught.”

There is no need to be respectful of the view you have inferred from my writing, but I did not intend to imply it. I have never in my life indicated that I think that giving school teachers – public employees, paid by taxes extracted from the citizens – “unimpeded freedom to direct their attentions as they see fit” would be a good idea. I do not think that I should be required to pay taxes in order to allow school teachers to indulge whims.

It certainly is the case that competent teachers can and for a long time did determine which children would profit from education and which would be better to learn skills. I am not astonished that this seems incredible, but I invite your attention to the education textbooks of the first quarter of the Twentieth Century, or most of the writings on education from the Nineteenth. It was never thought likely that any large number of students would go to college or that they would profit from going there. The need to select a small minority for university prep education generated a lot of stress, and no wonder; but fortunately that isn’t today’s problem. We used to think that only a very few would profitably go to college.

The GI Bill changed that notion when it was found that far more than a small elite group could profit from education, and for a while the University system in the United States was open to everyone, not just the rich and the super bright. I am a product of that era; between the Korean GI Bill, my willingness to wait tables for my food, and my high school curiosity about electronics that let me get an undergraduate assistantship in my senior year, I managed quite well, as did many others who would otherwise never have become college graduates.

But alas, that does not mean that everyone can or should attempt a world class university prep education. Bill Gates once said that every child deserved a world class university prep education, and it was a great mistake. A world class university prep education doesn’t prepare students for a lot else; and although the GI Bill experiment demonstrated that a large portion of the population ought to go to college than had been traditional before World War II, it also generated enough results to let us infer that while more than 10% ought to go to college and “get an education”, that was by no means true of all. It also indicated that the universities hadn’t been optimum in their allocation of resources. Traditionally universities had turned out “educated people”, but also others; the professions, which were not quite the same. No one expected a doctor to be “educated” in the traditional sense, nor a lawyer either. Then came engineers and technologists. The result was C P Snow” Two Cultures and then the Voodoo Sciences. We’ve been over that in the past.

The public school system was not originally designed to give everyone a world class university prep education; in fact it wasn’t really intended to give that to anyone. The school system is supposed to be an investment in the future, preparing future citizens to be productive and responsible members of the community. At the same time the universities were not designed to accept huge portions of the population, many of them uninterested “an education” as traditionally understood. They wanted to learn how to get good jobs and make a good living and be productive and responsible citizens – precisely what the high schools had been designed to do.

But the high schools were doing it because they were more and more being pressured to turn out students with a world class college prep education – even though at least half of them could not possible profit from a world class university education, at least not what the world class universities were capable of providing.

And there we stand. At least half the kids in most high schools aren’t learning much that will help them in their future life. If they happen to be in a class that is disrupted by lack of discipline because the school had mainstreamed someone who ought to be somewhere else, the result is predictable – but inevitable. No one gets any education at all.

The problem is that all the kids are not equal. Does that mean that potential engineers or physicists or chip designers or computer programmers – those who are good at manipulating abstract symbols and doing mathematics – are “better” than those whose talents lie more in salesmanship, both being “better” than those destined for factory jobs or clerical work or, home management?

I don’t disagree that schools ought to insist that teachers actually teach something. My solution to that would be to return the real control of the schools to locally elected school boards who represent the taxpayers who have to pay the teachers and the rent on the buildings and the administrators and all the frills and necessities. If need be subsidize the poorer districts, and supervise them even more heavily to assure that the money spent buys worthwhile teachers.

But I will insist again: unless those who have the ability to learn the prerequisites of technology are caught early and given the skills to learn, the society is not getting a proper return on its education investment. It would be great if we could pick out which, among the bright kids, will be the future Steve Jobs, and which will be philosophers and statesmen, but we can’t do that. Fortunately we don’t have to. But we damned well do need to decide who should get a world class university prep education, and who ought to learn a lot about manual arts. And yes we provide bridges from one track to the other, and we will not always get it right; but we can sure do better than schools with 60% reading at grade level.

And that’s no horse manure. Nor bull manure for that matter.

Freedom is not free. Free men are not equal. Equal men are not free.