PART IV
EDUCATIONAL ISSUES
THE WRONG FILTER
Headlines were made by the results of the Third International Mathematics and Science Study. Yet nobody should have been surprised, since our students have been doing badly on international tests for decades.
American 12th graders fell below the international average in general mathematics and general science. In advanced mathematics, our students were tied for last place and in physics they had sole possession of last place.
Students from Asian nations, who usually do very well on such tests, did not take part in these particular tests. So American students are trailing the pack among the also-rans.
While the American educational system is falling behind academically, it is leading the world in excuses. One of these excuses is that more of our students reach the 12th grade, so that we are comparing our average with other countries' elites.
While that may be true for some countries, there are other countries that have as high a percentage of their students finish secondary school as we do—and some have a higher percentage completing secondary education. Both kinds of countries beat out our students.
Another excuse is that our population has so many disadvantaged minorities that this drags down the average. But when you compare our very top students with the top students from other countries, ours still get clobbered.
U.S. Secretary of Education Richard Riley responded to the sad results from these international tests by calling them “unacceptable.” Nonsense! Such dismal results have been accepted for years and will be accepted for years to come, so long as the National Education Association continues to contribute millions of dollars to political campaigns.
From the standpoint of the NEA, the American public schools are not a failure but a great big success. These schools provide NEA members with jobs where they have iron-clad tenure, automatic raises, and no accountability for bad performances by their students or themselves.
The public schools also have a virtual monopoly on the supply of schoolchildren, except for those whose parents are affluent enough to be able to afford private schools or dedicated enough to homeschool their children. What this all adds up to is that the public schools can do pretty much whatever they want to, including avoiding academic training and indulging themselves in all sorts of fads and psychobabble, including “self-esteem.”
In this latest round of international tests, American students led the world in one department: “self-esteem.” As in previous international tests, American students had the highest perception of how well they had done. Seventy percent said that they thought they had done well. This would be comic if it were not so tragic.
While there are many particular things that can be criticized in our public schools, even the critics often miss the point when they fail to see that the key to all these counterproductive policies are the people who make them. If we purged the public schools of all the time-wasting silliness there today, we would have accomplished little if the same kinds of people were left in place to bring in new non-academic nonsense tomorrow.
Innumerable tests over many decades have shown that the mental test scores of people who specialize in education are among the lowest of any college students. This is not an accident. Given the incredibly bad courses in education that abound, in even the top universities, intelligent people are repelled, while mediocrities and incompetents sail through.
If you are not going to change that, then you are not going to change the low quality of American public schools. Education courses are a filter. They filter out intelligent students and let mediocrities pass through.
Just as you are not going to catch ocean fish in mountain lakes, no matter how expensive your fishing equipment, so you are not going to get an academically proficient or even academically oriented class of people coming out of education schools and education courses. First-rate people do not come out of such places because they do not go into such places or do not stay if they do.
Raising teachers' salaries will not do it. You will just get more expensive mediocrities in the classroom and more expensive incompetents being graduated from our schools.
TOO MANY Ph.D.s?
When anyone who owns a business discovers that unsold products are piling up on the shelf or in the warehouse, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that it is time to cut back production until the inventory declines. But no such logic applies in the academic world.
Complaints about the excess number of Ph.D.s in the humanities have gone on for years. The answer? Have the government create new programs to hire the excess Ph.D.s that no one else wants to hire. Create more post-doctoral fellowships, so that the taxpayers can carry these people for a few more years before they are finally forced out into the cruel world that the rest of us live in all the time.
Every year, for 12 consecutive years, American universities have broken all previous records for the number of Ph.D.s awarded. The number of doctorates awarded in 1997 was nearly one-third larger than it was just a decade earlier. Forget about supply and demand when it comes to academia.
Ironically, doctorates in science, engineering and mathematics have come down somewhat in recent years, even though American companies are recruiting engineers from India, Russia and other places. But in English, history and other humanities fields, the graduate schools are flooding the market with people for whom there are no jobs.
Behind all these strange goings-on in academia is the simple fact that colleges and universities are spending other people's money—and neither the donors nor the taxpayers have the time to monitor what is happening on campuses across the country.
Professors of English gain prestige and professional advancement by spinning esoteric theories of literature and promoting other avant-garde notions. Whether the sophomores understand English grammar or know any adjectives beyond “awesome” is not their problem. Lower-level courses are taught disproportionately by graduate students who are working toward their own Ph.D.s and earning a meager salary by teaching basic courses that professors disdain to teach.
Reduce the number of graduate students and professors will be forced to sully their hands teaching introductory courses, instead of spending their time preparing papers on sexuality and Sophocles for the Modern Language Association meetings. It is impossible to caricature the papers presented at the Modern Language Association meetings. Indeed, it is impossible to cite some of the titles in a family newspaper.
A rich country like the United States can afford to waste money on many foolish projects. But no country can afford the degeneration and internal strife bred by idle hands for whom the devil finds work.
Among the great curses of the Third World are large numbers of people with degrees and the pretensions that go with them, but without any productive skills to contribute to raising the material standard of living in those countries. Worse, these superfluous degree-holders promote political instability and economic chaos through demagoguery and policies based on fashionable ideologies that have never had to stand the test of results.
It has taken decades for Latin America to get over “dependency theory” that blamed that region's lag behind the industrial nations of Europe and North America on the evil machinations of Yankees and other imperialists. The living standards of whole generations have been sacrificed trying out policies based on half-baked theories that each country should become “independent” of the world market by producing its own products to substitute for the products it formerly imported.
Nor has Latin America been alone in promoting self-defeating economic policies, based on the ideological fashions of superfluous degree-holders. It took many African countries decades of disastrous experiments with socialistic policies before some of them belatedly turned away from these nostrums and toward market-oriented policies that have finally begun raising their people's standards of living above where they were when they were colonies of European imperialist powers.
The Uni
ted States is not a Third World country, of course. But it has many less fortunate people, whose aspirations for a better life can be needlessly frittered away by ideas from those who have been shielded from reality in the name of education.
“NO EXCUSES”
Tests show that most low-income students in the 8th grade still cannot multiply or divide two-digit numbers by other two-digit numbers. That is, they cannot tell you what 14 times 15 equals or what 60 divided by 12 is.
Against this background, you might think that there would be enormous interest in those particular low-income and minority schools where the students equal or exceed the national norms in verbal or mathematical skills. But you would be wrong.
Some of these successful schools have had to run a gauntlet of hassles from education bureaucrats. A principal of a successful minority school in California was hassled because she used phonics instead of “whole language” and because she taught foreign-born children in English instead of the various languages in the bilingual programs. The fact that she was succeeding where others were failing did not exempt her from being harassed.
In Massachusetts, a principal had trouble even getting approval to set up a school that would be using standardized tests to assess the progress of his students, most of whom were from minority groups. He was called a “racist” and a “Nazi.” His students ended up with the highest test scores in town. Some Nazi!
However phony the accusation, the hostility behind it was very real. The education establishment—the teachers' unions, the schools of education, and state and federal education bureaucrats—are out to protect their turf and their dogmas at all costs. People who challenge their beliefs, in words or deeds, are to be denounced, demonized, harassed or otherwise driven from the scene.
Despite having to buck the education establishment, some brave principals and teachers have created oases of excellence for low-income, minority students in a vast educational desert. A recently published book titled No Excuses by Samuel Casey Carter provides sketches of 21 such schools, scattered around the country.
Again and again, this book shows schools where minority students from the bottom of the socioeconomic scale are scoring above the national average on standardized tests that are supposed to be so “culturally biased” that only white, middle-class students can do well on them. That is one of the many widely-used excuses by “educators” who fail to educate. And that is why the very different philosophy in these successful schools is called a “No Excuses” philosophy—no excuses for students or teachers.
How have successful schools for low-income, minority students done it? Largely by ignoring education “experts” and going against the theories and practices that reign elsewhere in American schools. Those schools which have low-income black, Hispanic and other minority students scoring higher than many white, middle-class students elsewhere in math and English typically feature real teaching rather than “activities” or “projects,” phonics rather than “whole language,” standardized tests rather than mushy evaluations, and in general a back-to-basics approach.
However, do not think for one moment that the fact that one theory of education fails and another succeeds is going to change the people who run our public schools or who control our teachers' colleges. Those people have tenure and their pay is not affected in the slightest by whether or not they produce educated students.
Even incompetent teachers are hard to get rid of in most public school systems. In New York state, it takes an average of 15 months and more than $170,000 to fire one teacher.
From the standpoint of the education establishment in general, and the teachers' unions in particular, our education system is not a failure, even though American children usually finish at or near the bottom in international tests. The public school system is a success for those who run it, in terms of protecting their jobs, their turf, their dogmas and—above all—their power to use vulnerable children as guinea pigs for the fads that come and go.
Parents, voters and taxpayers also need to understand that our public schools are not failing. They are succeeding in substituting self-serving agendas for the task of conveying the accumulated knowledge of the past to today's younger generation.
While there are many serious social problems making it harder to educate children today, there are nevertheless schools which succeed in spite of those problems—but only because education is their top priority.
Get a copy of No Excuses. It is published by the Heritage Foundation in Washington.
BACK DOOR QUOTAS
Ever since racial quotas in college admissions were banned by Proposition 209 in California and by the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals in Texas, academics and politicians have been racking their brains to come up with something that would allow quotas to continue under new names.
The latest attempt to get away from admitting students by their own individual qualifications is a proposal from the president of the University of California that the standard Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT I) no longer be required of students applying for college admissions.
According to UC President Richard C. Atkinson, an “overemphasis on the SAT is distorting educational priorities and practice.” Moreover, “the test is perceived by many as unfair” and its results “can have devastating impact on the self-esteem and aspirations of young students.”
This is a masterpiece of mushiness. How much emphasis is “over” emphasis? And if that is really the problem, then why not simply reduce the emphasis instead of throwing out the test? But of course this was just a talking point, so it would be unfair to expect either evidence or logic to back up the claim of “over” emphasis, much less a rational response in the unlikely event that this could be demonstrated.
As for the test being “perceived” as unfair, what isn't? And how many other people perceive it as fairer than the alternatives? Arbitrarily singling out those who have one opinion as the one to follow would allow anybody to advocate any policy (or its opposite) on any issue, anywhere and any time.
The same goes for the “self-esteem” argument. Believe me, my self-esteem would suffer if I had to go out on a golf course and compete with Tiger Woods or onto a tennis court and compete with Pete Sampras or Andre Agassi. We would have to throw out every criterion in every field if we wanted to avoid damaging the self-esteem of those who fail.
But do not think that a madman is in charge of the University of California. Dr. Atkinson must know better. These are standard arguments by those who want to bring quotas in by the back door, when they can no longer come in the front door.
These ploys are not even confined to the United States. When courts in India put limits on how far group quotas could go, all sorts of non-academic factors suddenly blossomed in the university admissions process. Subjective factors like “aptitude” and “general abilities” were given great weight, even when these were assessed in interviews that lasted only three minutes per applicant. Dr. Atkinson seeks similar “holistic” criteria.
In India, subjective factors were clearly being used as automatic offsets to differences in academic qualifications. As one Indian court put it, there was a “disturbing” pattern of discrepancy between interview rankings and rankings on other criteria. Students with unsatisfactory academic records nevertheless received “very high marks at the interviews,” while “a large number of students who had secured very high marks in the university examinations and who performed well in their earlier class had secured low marks at the interviews.”
In short, inconvenient academic criteria were being gotten rid of, so that group quotas could continue in new disguises. That is precisely what getting rid of standardized academic tests is all about. Similarly, admitting the top X percent of each high school's graduates is more of the same deceptive sleight-of-hand. The top 10 percent of students from one high school may be less qualified than the merely average student from another high school.
The claim is often made that the SAT is “culturally biased.” But life it
self is culturally biased. If you can't handle math and the English language, you are in big trouble.
If the “culturally biased” argument is meant to insinuate that these tests falsely predict a lower academic achievement level for minority students than they later achieve, then that is a purely factual question. And the facts have devastated that theory time and again, for years on end. No wonder the quota crowd don't want to define exactly what they mean by “culturally biased,” nor put it to the test of facts.
The tests are not unfair. Life is unfair. If you are serious about wanting minority students to have a better chance in life, then you need to start years before they take the SAT. And you need to stop deceiving them and the American people.
WE ARE ALL “DROPOUTS”
Hats off to Jackson Toby, who wrote in The Weekly Standard what few have dared to say in the past three decades: “Let them drop out.” He argues that too many students are finding nothing but frustration and resentment at being trapped for hours every day in high schools that are boring and meaningless to them.
This argument was made back in the 1960s by the late and great Edward Banfield in his classic book, The Unheavenly City. Moreover, he had hard facts to back up what he said. Studies indicated that it was not dropping out that led youngsters into delinquency and crime but staying in school after they had lost all interest in it and lost all respect for it.
Nevertheless, incessant propaganda from the education establishment has made the word “dropout” one that inspires horror. But all of us are dropouts—and should be. At some point or other, we all leave the educational system.
Some leave in high school, some leave after high school, some leave in or after college and others leave after completing a Ph.D. or after finishing a post-doctoral fellowship. But nobody's whole life is spent going to school. Nor should it be.
Controversial Essays Page 12