http://www.conservative.org/acuf/issue-163/issue163news1by Donald Devine
Issue 163 – September 8, 2010
What right-wing crazy said this about our public education system?
Now, for years, we’ve recognized that education is a prerequisite for prosperity. And yet, we’ve tolerated a status quo where America lags behind other nations. Just last week, we learned that in a single generation, America went from number one to 12th in college completion rates for young adults. We used to be number one, now we’re number 12. At the same time, our 8th graders trail about eight — 10 other nations — 10 other nations in science and math. Meanwhile, when it comes to black students, African American students trail not only almost every other developed nation abroad, but they badly trail their white classmates here at home — an achievement gap that is widening the income gap between black and white, between rich and poor.
That was President Barack Obama speaking recently before the National Urban League. Finally, the progressives are seeing the light!
Unfortunately, their solutions are the same old, same old. The president said he wanted higher salaries and more support for teachers in addition to the hundreds of billions of Federal dollars he has already sent. “But all I’m asking in return — as a President, as a parent, and as a citizen — is some measure of accountability.” The funds come first and the plea for accountability later. What was the response? The National Education Association labor union voted “no confidence” in his Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, and refused to invite him or the president to their convention; so did the second largest union, the American Federation of Teachers.
George W. Bush followed pretty much the same strategy with pretty much the same results. In 2002, the Bush No Child Left Behind Act increased Federal spending by almost one hundred percent and promised all children would be proficient in math and reading by 2014. The bad news is there has been no progress, with only two years to go. Nick Anderson’s Washington Post on line story about the unreleased 2010 government elementary school data says it all: “National Reading Scores Stagnant” and the math scores “increased” an insignificant 0.002 percent.
As the first products of No Child are graduating high school, the ACT test of 1.6 million secondary students found only 24 percent scored high enough on math, reading, English, and science to assure they could enter college and 28 percent did not even score high enough on a single subject to be eligible for one such course. The composite score in 2007 was 21.2 on a 36 point scale and actually declined a bit to 21.0 in 2010, basically a D grade for secondary education.
As far as higher education, Professor Robert Weissberg reports in his book Bad Students Not Bad Schools that things are perhaps worse at the top of the learning scale.
In 2006, 35% of all Ph.D.’s went to foreign born researchers, but, non- citizens earned 43% of the doctorates in science and engineering and 70% of the Ph.D.s in electrical, civil and industrial/mechanical engineering. In other engineering fields plus math, computer science and physics the figure was “only” 50% (Lederman 2007). In 2007 the number of science and engineering doctorates continued to increase, but those awarded to non-US citizens grew at a far faster rate (Lederman Nov. 24, 2008). And these depressing statistics are only the beginning. Between 1990 and 2000, for example, the proportion of doctorate level foreign born employees in the US rose from 24% to 38% while nearly half of the National Institute of Health’s doctorate level staff were foreign nationals. Fifty-eight percent of the post-docs, future scientists were foreign nationals. Among university science and engineering faculty, 19% are born overseas; in engineering this figure was a little more than a third.
Throwing money at teachers has been the only solution for Federal education policy since the very beginning. It just does not work. Maybe, just maybe, the poor results have something to do with their philosophy of teaching. American education today is still based on the views of 20th Century educator John Dewey, who turned from teaching old-fashioned, basic knowledge with the goal of maximizing intelligence toward the more progressive ideal of preparing children for ”socially engaged” citizenship and achieving self esteem. As the John Dewey Project on Progressive Education described the change:
Led by Dewey, progressive educators opposed a growing national movement that sought to separate academic education for the few and narrow vocational training for the masses. During the 1920s, when education turned increasingly to “scientific” techniques such as intelligence testing and cost-benefit management, progressive educators insisted on the importance of the emotional, artistic, and creative aspects of human development–”the most living and essential parts of our natures,” as Margaret Naumburg put it in The Child and the World. After the Depression began, a group of politically oriented progressive educators, led by George Counts, dared schools to “build a new social order” and published a provocative journal called The Social Frontier to advance their “reconstructionist” critique of laissez faire capitalism.
In other words, progressive education was foisted on American education with the specific purpose of promoting equality of academic study for all, focusing on emotional rather than abstract intelligence, and promoting social rather than competitive interrelationships – all aimed at replacing capitalism and individualism with democratic socialization. Who says American progressive public education has not been successful in meeting its goals of emphasizing emotion over intelligence and dumbing down to the lowest common denominator rather than educating students to the level they are able to absorb? If the goal is self esteem rather than learning, why should test scores ever rise?
Both Presidents Bush and Obama have given unprecedented amounts of Federal funds to education. State and local governments have given even more. Government has a near monopoly over elementary and secondary education, often reinforced by mandatory attendance laws. Grants reduce classroom size, subsidize training, increase salaries and support every whim of the profession. Government owned or supported colleges teach the great majority of students. Polls show that large majorities of academic administrators and teachers are of the progressive persuasion. But nothing works.
With all this power over almost a century of progressive control, the scores keep deteriorating and students continue to have very different capacities and skills. All of the efforts to have “every student above average” – as Professor Stuart Rojstaczer joked about it a few years ago – have not been able to equalize intelligence, talent or perseverance. Is it possible to think of a return to teaching students what they can absorb at different skill levels rather than forcing unwilling and/or unable students to learn what they cannot comprehend and forcing the brightest into mediocrity, as the declining top SAT scores confirm?
When even a Democratic president and education secretary recognize there is something terribly wrong with American education, is begging the powerful education union bosses to be responsible the best we can do? Cannot someone actually do something? As the president noted, we used to be number one – before Dewey and the unions ruined public education.
Donald Devine, the editor of ConservativeBattleline Online, was the director of the U.S. Office of Personnel Management from 1981 to 1985 under Ronald Reagan and is Senior Scholar at Bellevue University’s Center for American Vision and Values.
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