David S. Kahn offers a whithering condemnation of America's mediocre public education system by laying the responsibility for plummeting SAT scores right where it belongs: on the schools.
People complain that the SAT is biased and that the bias explains why students don't do well. That's true--it is biased. It's biased against people who aren't well-educated. The test isn't causing people to have bad educations, it's merely reflecting the reality. And if you don't like your reflection, that doesn't mean that you should smash the mirror.That the new SAT tests more reading comprehension than the old test did is a good thing. Colleges complain that their incoming students don't have sufficient skills to read and analyze the kind of material that their professors will assign them. I hope that the new SAT's emphasis will make students realize that you can't get much of an education if you can't read.
Maybe the decline in SAT scores will force people to notice that their children are not getting good educations. If your children don't read or do math, why would you think that they would do well on the SAT? I would love to get into a time machine and go back to 1960 and give this new SAT to high-school students back then. I suspect that they would do much better than today's students. If we want people to get good scores on the SAT, I have a suggestion. Stop complaining about how unfair the test is and do your homework.
I've written before that our society foolishly puts school teachers on a pedestal despite their rather poor results, and I think much of the blame rests with the teachers' unions which utterly refuse to move past seniority-based employment despite the demonstrated benefits of merit pay on teacher performance. We need to eliminate public education or at the very least create some economic pressure for schools and teachers to improve, such as widespread voucher programs.
I think that the problem is more complicated: People don't agree on what constitutes a good education. Some people want technically oriented math and science. Others want more of a Renaissance education: literature, theater, art, etc. An astonishing number of parents view public school as primarily a sports program where the students must occasionally sit in class and pretend to learn. And some people question the value of teaching Shakespeare to future manual laborers, and favor routing kids to vocational programs.
The disagreement reaches higher levels, over whether the public schools should work at creating leaders, thinkers, or followers. If you start with the premise that socialist utopia requires lots of followers and very few leaders or thinkers, then the current public school setup makes a frightening amount of sense.
A very one-dimensional view of public education, MW. Come visit some of the public schools over in my neck of the woods and maybe you'd get an idea for how distorted your particular view of public education, in general, really is.
You'll find that there are many public school districts who don't waste money, whose students excel in spite of being on the low end of the scale in terms of operating budgets, whose teacher unions don't hinder the educational process to the degree you're talking about (support staff unions are another matter), and overall are very good examples of what public education should be.
It's very easy for you, MW, and private tutoring entrepreneur David S. Kahn (who I'm sure profits considerably from the poor performance of some of the public schools in his area) to be armchair critics of public education. I, on the other hand, work in a public school district (not as a teacher, but as a non-union IT professional) and have been involved with public school districts in WI for the better part of my working career. I know all about the poorly performing public schools in, say, Milwaukee.. and see many of the things you talk about. On the other hand, I've also seen a lot of the good schools.
The bottom line is.. LAUSD, MPS (Milwaukee Public Schools), and the public schools in NYC that Mr. Kahn probably is familiar with are not representative of public education in general. They certainly are not any of the school districts I've worked for.
Before you pass judgement on public education as a whole, it would be prudent to at least have some experience with the other end of the spectrum; the schools that do perform well and who don't waste money.
Mark, I've had personal experience with rich-neighborhood public schools in three different school districts, and I agree with Michael. The problem isn't so much inefficiency, but rather the goals they're shooting for. Even the children of the rich are being taught mostly to feel good about themselves, and to have politically correct views on issues of the day. Kids believe that their purpose in life is to have fun and be socially popular.
In the 13 years of my daughter's public-school education, I met very few teachers who were interested in pushing children toward academic excellence. The overwhelming majority were focused on:
1) being popular with the kids and having fun,
2) staying out of trouble, punching a clock, and collecting a paycheck, or
3) satisfying personal desires for control, affection, or the advancement of some political agenda.
In my experience, most educators do not share my idea of what a good education consists of, and what the proper point of school is. I believe (and I bet that Michael agrees) that schools should push kids to learn how to do hard math problems, how to read hard books, and lots of facts about history and science. School should push kids to learn, and those kids who don't learn should get bad grades. Schools should encourage excellence rather than comforting the mediocre.
The problem with today's public schools is no mere misallocation of resources. It's philosophical. No matter how much money we give the schools, the problem will remain that the people who run them aren't trying to educate kids in traditional sense.
BB: My personal experience with school districts in many parts of Wisconsin has been exactly as you believe it should. The goals they shoot for are traditional education in traditional ways.
Most of the teachers I've met.. both in and out of Wisconsin.. weren't focused on any of the 3 items you listed. They were focused on getting through to kids and helping them learn what they should be learning.
Fortunately, I had a rather positive experience at my public high school (Lafayette High School in Ballwin, MO) which was named America's Top High School in '97 by Redbook Magazine.
Sadly, as I attend public college here in California, many of my high school classes were much harder than any of my college courses, and most of my professors in high school had Master's or Doctorate degrees in their fields and were insanely intelligent and interested in the student's mind, while most of my public college professors are simply there to talk about evil Halliburton.
So, I guess I agree with Mark for once in my entire life. But, it does seem that the schools Mark is talking about and my own public school experience are the exception to the norm.
I'd bet that "the norm" in California isn't "the norm" across the rest of the nation.
Sure, it may be hard to define what a "good education" is (techie versus classics, leader versus follower). And sure, it may be hard to really get a feel for how good most public schools are (We mostly just have our experience to go on - As Nick always says; The plural of "anecdote" is not "data"). However, it's probably safe to say that American public school kids should be exposed to more advanced curriculum points eariler, so that by the end of high school, they have learned more.
So to me the biggest question is, Why not teach harder stuff earlier? To me that is the biggest difference between public and private schools: Kids in private schools (and in good public schools) learn the same things but a year or two earlier, while kids in many public schools are so "behind" that they could not possibly take AP classes during their last 2 years of high school. In my view of ideal education, every kid would take all-AP classes at the end of high-school. Every kid would be on the faster track.
How do private schools pull this off? Well, they have smaller classes and highly paid teachers and more resources (those 3 things just mean "more money"), so they can give kids one-on-one attention. Also, most private-school teachers (versus few public-school teachers) know that challenging all kids can be painful for many kids but is ultimately a lot better than NOT challenging them and letting them do easy stuff all the time. (If you have to pick between bored students and struggling students, pick struggling students). It is also true that parents of private-school kids are probably successful and place great value on education - a value they probably managed to get across to their kids to some extent - while many public-school parents feel like school is something unimportant that's there just to keep kids busy all day, hopefully with minimal involvement required from the parent. These different parental values are probably a big part of what motivates private school teachers to push hard and public school teachers NOT to.
It's kind of a catch-22 situation: You have to try and convince parents of public-school kids about the value of education, in order for teachers to be encouraged to push kids harder... But you have to actually PROVIDE a good education in public schools, in order to be able to convince parents of public-school kids about the value of a good public-school education.
So both parents AND the schools share responsibility. The schools must offer advanced classes and have teachers qualified for teaching them. The parents must make their kids know that it is important to learn, to work hard, to be curious, and to be smart. Sure, motivating kids to learn is something that a very good teacher COULD do as well, but I do think the parents share that responsibility.
When you read that some high percentage of kids in a school did not pass such-and-such a standardized test, I look at it this way: Some of the kids DID pass, so the school IS teaching the material. But why are not all kids in a position to learn that material? In part because the school does not want to challenge all kids, but in part because not all kids have parents who taught them to want to be academically challenged.
I highly recommend this book on the subject.
My personal experience with all this is: I went to private elementary schools. Then my parents put me in a public middle school. The first year (6th grade), I was clearly one of the top 3 students in the class. The second year, I was taking some classes at the local public high school, and was bored by other classes. So I went back to a private school for 8th grade. I went to a different private school for high-school, one where ALL students ONLY took I.B. courses during their last two years. There was just no other choice. While I was at college, I got into teaching. I taught both ends: groups of highly-motivated kids from good middle- and high-schools, and groups of kids taking remedial classes at a very bad high school. The difference got me thinking about why my education was good, and what about the bad schools kept kids from learning. A lot of it has to do with the school not really pushing kids to learn more, some of it has to do with teachers who aren't good at making the material interesting or relevant, and a lot of it has to do with kids who don't see the point of working hard at school to begin with. Is it reasonable to place on teachers the responsibility of making a kid realise that, if you do well in school, you can do whatever you want with your life? I think we need good parenting, and things like after-school programs, in order to make sure more kids get that message.
PS; I was kinda amused by how Ben Bateman wrote about how "schools should push kids to learn how to do hard math problems, how to read hard books, and lots of facts about history and science". Why are math and reading about methods/thinking ("how"), while science and history are about "facts"? Science and history are not about "facts" any more than literature or math. Science and history are about skepticism, they are about knowing whether or not you can know something, and how to investigate what you want to find out in a way that is as reliable as possible, with the fewest confounding factors. From studying history and science we know what is good evidence versus what is BS. When I was in middle school I knew enough science to see right through the claims made by alternative medicine (or at least to see that the evidence did not justify the claims). History is also about learning why a society changes, and how much it can change, so history allows you to justify your vision of a better society with "evidence", and to imagine how those improvements can actually happen. So no, history and science teach you "how" to think critically, skeptically, and socially, and that is much more important than teaching "facts". Sure, you need facts as a foundation for analysis, but that's true of literature as well, and in math you need axioms.
Bernardo writes:
Perhaps this was true of the private schools you attended. My wife has taught in private schools, and substituted in public schools. Private schools have LESS money, and pay their teachers substantially less than public schools. The average private school isn't a rich kid's prep school; it's a Catholic or Protestant school that is struggling to pay its bills, and struggling to keep tuition below $3000 per year, for fear that parents will decide that as important as a good education is, they just can't afford it.I have some serious criticisms of California public schools (and much less of what I have seen of Idaho public schools), but the biggest problem, in my opinion, isn't the teachers, but the values that parents implant in their kids. Part of why we pulled my son out of public school in California, and put him at the private school where my wife was teaching, is that many of the teachers were primarily engaged in crowd control--not teaching. My son told us that in many of his classes, day after day, there was no teaching at all--just a teacher screaming at kids to shut up and sit down.
Here in Boise, things were better. In middle school, about half the kids would simply continue to talk, and rather than waste energy trying to get them to shut up, the teachers just talked louder, for the benefit of the half the kids that were prepared to learn.
There are a lot of parents who have simply not taught their little brats to behave. This makes teaching very difficult--especially when they become a majority of the classroom. When my wife and I were in elementary school in the Los Angeles area in the 1960s, there were usually one or two kids in any class with a behavior problem--almost always a boy. My wife's experiences substituting in Sonoma County schools was that about half the girls and nearly all the boys were behavior problems. After all, school is just daycare with books.
There are some serious problems with public education, and propaganda masquerading as education is certainly one of them. Lowering standards to meet racial expectations is a problem.
Funding is a problem, but not because the government is spending less money than it used to, but because Congressional action in the 1970s to require mainstreaming of children with severe retardation and disability problems gobbled up a lot of resources that used to be spent on the 85%-90% of kids who were able to learn.
The core problem, however, remains ill-behaved kids. There's a reason that Japanese classes often have 50 students in them, and yet their system still works reasonably well--kids are taught early on to control themselves, and behave. That's largely gone in the U.S. as a parenting style, because so many kids aren't being raised by Mom and Dad, but by a daycare provider.
Yes! That is the main problem at my kid's school! The behavior of the other kids. There is this sub-set of children that simply need to be removed from the classroom. But the school can not afford to do it. If they get rid of all the kids that cause problems, they would lose half if not more of their kids. And each head means X dollars.
So we come full circle: The advantage of private schools over public is that the private schools can kick kids out. They don't always do it, but at least a few of them can and do.
I think that the problem for private schools is not financial. Not tolerating bratty kids might well be an economic gain, if parents with nice kids stick around.
The problem is sometimes philosophical, and sometimes practical. Philosophically, many private school teachers believe in unlimited tolerance for each child's misbehavior. Practically, it can be difficult to weed out the bad ones, hard to know where to draw the line, and very awkward to tell a parent not to bring back her child.
The best screening device I've seen is for the school to insist on a certain number of hours per semester in personal service at the school. Parents of good children usually see no problem. Parents of brats are indignant at the demand.
The public schools' problem is almost entirely philosophical. Public school teachers and administrator are carefully inculcated in the religion of infinite tolerance at any cost. So they generally don't believe in their own moral right to toss out bad kids. And as a practical matter it is probably very, very difficult for a public-school teacher to get rid of bad kids. It doesn't have to be that way. It wasn't always that way. But that's how it is today. The public schools won't improve until they believe that they can and should expel bad children, or at least segregate the bad children from those who want to learn.
In my daughter's third-grade year at a public school in a wealthy neighborhood, one girl in the class had Down's Sydrome. This meant that she had the mind of a toddler, and couldn't participate in any of the class activities. It also meant that she needed constant attention so that she wouldn't make messes, get lost, or hurt herself.
So every day, one of the other children was assigned to watch this girl. The child didn't get to learn anything that day, because watching that girl was a full-time job. When I asked as politely as I could why my daughter's day had been wasted in involuntary babysitting, I was told how wonderful it was for retarded children to be mainstreamed, so that they could feel accepted in normal society. I wanted to ask why they were so sure that the benefit to that girl outweighed the cost to my daughter and the other children in the class. I doubt that anyone at that school would have understood the question, and I was certain that it would have offended them.
That would never have happened at a private school.
In the school district I work for.. and others I've been involved with.. most kids who fall under the umbrella of "special education" are not integrated into the "mainstream" in terms of taking the same classes at the same times as "mainstream" students. The kids with cognitive and/or physical handicaps have their own teachers and their own classroom(s). Special Education makes up a considerable portion of our budget because of it.. but it's for the greater good of not only the special ed. students, but the others as well. These special ed. kids do have interaction with "mainstream" students outside of the classroom setting.. in the halls at passing periods, etc.. so the "mainstream" kids are at least exposed to people who are quite a bit different from them.. and that's rarely a bad thing.
I, personally, would like to see the administration.. primarily at the high school.. to be harder on students who misbehave, but that problem is personnel-specific, not systemic. I'm not talking about expulsions, which don't happen often here (and don't need to happen more often).. I'm talking about making kids serve detentions, forcing them to get to class on time, etc.; pretty small stuff, really.. but these small things can go a long way toward putting kids on the right track.
So while Kahn brings a broad set of data to bear on his argument, Mark, you've offered two of the common refuges of constipated minds: the appeal to unsubstantiated personal experience, and the appeal to outliers.
Plenty of high school teachers have articulated criticisms similar to Kahn's. Their experience has not led them to confuse cowardice with a grasp of complexity.