Inside American Education (46 page)

Today’s economic differences and lifestyle differences between black or Hispanic students and their white classmates may in some cases be quite real, but no more so than such differences were among students from various backgrounds in times past, or between many Vietnamese students and their classmates today. These differences were not as academically or socially traumatic as those among black or Hispanic students today because these other groups—including black students on white campuses in an earlier era—did not have to contend with the handicaps growing out of preferential admissions: (1) academic mismatching and (2) the creation of a minority mini-establishment to complement the mismatched students with substandard faculty, leading them in nonintellectual directions.

Nowhere has the moral bankruptcy of academia been more blatant than in its racial policies, which have managed simultaneously to damage every racial or ethnic group involved—with the worst damage being done to blacks, the supposedly most favored beneficiaries. White applicants may be denied admission to some colleges, in favor of less qualified blacks but, with three-quarters of black students failing to graduate nationwide, this “favor” to blacks is much more damaging than
forcing a white student to go to his second-choice college. A graduate of a second-choice college still ends up far better off than someone who failed to graduate from a more prestigious institution.

Academic double standards may be resented by white students, but their principal victims are black students. Not even “affirmative grading” is ultimately a favor to black students, who suffer needlessly longer, until the honest grades they get convince them that they are not going to make it. Academic double standards are like certain medical procedures which do nothing to cure the disease, but simply prolong the suffering of a terminal patient. Both white and black students may end up embittered by this situation—and justifiably so. They are, after all, inexperienced young people to whom college officials have a responsibility.

This is only one of many responsibilities which academics have abdicated, in pursuit of the fashions of the moment or the path of least resistance, with the costs being borne by others.

CHAPTER 11
Bankruptcy

T
HE BRUTAL REALITY
is that the American system of education is bankrupt. Allowed to continue as it is, it will absorb ever more vast resources, without any appreciable improvement in the quality of its output, which is already falling behind world standards. Its educational failures cannot be justified, or even mitigated, by its many non-academic social goals, such as the psychological well-being of students, harmony among racial, ethnic, or other social groups, the prevention of teen-age pregnancy, or the like. It has not merely failed in these areas but has been counterproductive.

This is not a blanket condemnation of every aspect of American education. Even an enterprise in bankruptcy often has valuable assets. Both the assets and the liabilities of our educational system need to be assessed, to see what can be salvaged from the debacle and reorganized into a viable enterprise.

ASSETS AND LIABILITIES

The greatest assets of American education are its postgraduate institutions, especially in the sciences, mathematics, and medicine—all justly renowned around the world—and the enormous generosity of the American people which makes this renown possible. The abundance of resources made available for research, not only in these fields but also in economics, history, and other fields, provides American scholars with decisive advantages over their counterparts in other countries. However, to turn from scholarship to teaching, and from postgraduate education to that in most colleges, and still more so in the elementary and secondary schools, is to turn from the assets to the liabilities.

One symptom of the deficiencies of American colleges is the declining ability of their graduates to compete with foreign students for places in the postgraduate institutions of the United States. This inability to compete is most glaring in such intellectually demanding areas as doctoral programs in mathematics and engineering, where American students have in recent years become a minority in their own country. Only 40 percent of the Ph.D.s in engineering awarded in the United States in 1990 went to Americans.
¹

In elementary and secondary education, the lag of American school children behind their counterparts in other countries has become a widely known disgrace. What is not so widely understood is that this lag is greatest in
thinking
skills, rather than in mere information or even in the application of mathematical recipes, as distinguished from multi-step analysis.
²
Johnny can’t think
. That is the bottom line that makes American education bankrupt.

That bankruptcy is both in institutions and in attitudes. The two go together. Attitudes wholly antithetical to the intellectual development of students flourish in elementary and secondary schools across the country, and are gaining more and more of a foothold in even our elite colleges. The institutional protection of tenure insulates such attitudes from accountability for their consequences. It is not merely that sweeping fads come and go in the schools and colleges, leaving all sorts of educational wreckage in their wake. What is more fundamentally harmful is the enduring attitude of self-indulgence
among educators behind such reckless experiments. It is not enough to discover,
seriatim
and
ex post
, the deficiencies and disasters of particular educational fads, unless it leads to institutional changes restricting the self-indulgence of educators.

In education, as elsewhere, perpetual self-indulgence and divorce from reality are often results of being over-indulged by others. These others include legislators, both in the states and in Washington, who pour ever more billions of tax dollars down a bottomless pit to demonstrate their “commitment” to “education,” without requiring even the most rudimentary accountability for
results
. College trustees who rubber-stamp the expediency-minded policies of smooth-talking college presidents, and alumni who contribute money in utter disregard of what is being done with it, are also among those who overindulge academics. Media coverage of academia is indulgent to the point of gullibility, as reporters hang on every word of professors and college presidents, in a way they would never listen uncritically to businessmen, generals, or politicians. Even law-enforcement agencies are skittish about prosecuting academic institutions, though it would be hard to think of a more unconscionable “conspiracy in restraint of trade” than the National Collegiate Athletic Association.

The assets and liabilities of American education are attitudinal, as well as institutional. One of its chief assets—the public’s generosity to a fault—can also become a liability when it becomes a blank-check subsidy of spoiled-brat attitudes on the part of educators. One small but significant symptom of such attitudes are the many claims by educators that the 1980s were “a decade of greed,” when in fact Americans’ voluntary donations to all sorts of philanthropic causes rose steeply during that decade to unprecedented heights—with education being one of the principal beneficiaries, as government support to education rose nearly 29 percent in real terms and voluntary contributions to higher education reached record heights.
³
As of 1983, there were also 40,000 “partnerships” between businesses and schools, in which the business donated goods, services, money, or all three. Five years later, the number of such arrangements had increased to 140,000.
⁴

Back in the 1970s, when public disenchantment with the demonstrable decline in the performance of public schools led
to resistance to new demands for teacher pay increases and other school expenditures, this resistance to spending was one of the few things to get the education establishment’s attention and lead to a few modest improvements. Yet even a knowledgeable and intelligent journalist could refer to the tax revolt in the 1970s as having “devastated many school systems.”
⁵
One of the few rises in test scores occurred after one of the few declines in the real income of teachers.
⁶
That is hardly devastation. If anything, it was confirmation that educators had been over-indulged and needed to be reminded that the taxpayers’ patience was not unlimited. As public generosity resumed during the 1980s, the rise in test scores leveled off, and in 1988 they began a new decline, with the verbal SAT hitting an all time low in 1991.
⁷

Schools

The institutional assets of American public schools are largely financial, while their liabilities are both institutional and attitudinal. Per-pupil expenditures in the United States are more than $5,000 per year
⁸
—which is to say, more than $100,000 per year for a class of 20 students. American expenditures on education top those in Japan, whether measured absolutely, per-pupil, or as a percentage of Gross National Product. The money is there. The results are not.

Part of the reason for American educational deterioration is that much of this money never reaches the classroom. A study of educational expenditures in New York City found that less than $2,000 reached the classroom out of more than $6,000 spent per pupil. The same was true in Milwaukee, where less than half the money even reached the school.
⁹
Educational bureaucracies, both at boards of education and in the schools, absorb much of the money spent to educate students. One of the reasons why private schools are able to educate students better, while spending far less money per pupil, is that private schools have far less administrative overhead.

The biggest liability of the American public school system is the legal requirement that education courses be taken by people who seek careers as tenured teachers. These courses are almost unanimously condemned—by scholars who have studied
them, teachers who have taken them, and anyone else with the misfortune to have encountered them. The crucial importance of these courses, and the irreparable damage they do, is not because of what they teach or do not teach. It is because they are the filter through which the flow of teachers must pass. Mediocrity and incompetence flow freely through these filters, but they filter out many high-ability people, who refuse to subject themselves to the inanity of education courses, which are the laughing stock of many universities. One of the great advantages of the private schools is that they do not have to rely on getting their teachers from such sources.

Mere defects in the quality of education courses are not, by themselves, what produce such poisonous effects on American education. Most college students studying to become high school teachers take only about one-fifth of their courses in education, and even though students training to become elementary school teachers take about two-fifths of their courses in education, that still leaves a majority of their courses in other fields.
¹⁰
It is the effect of education courses in repelling high-ability people, and attracting people of meagre intellectual ability, which is crucial.

By their virtual monopoly of the credentialing process, schools and departments of education determine the calibre of people who enter the teaching profession—and the inadequacies of those people determine the upper limit of the quality of American education. Just as it is not the mere failure of education courses to provide adequate training that is crucial to the low intellectual quality of teachers, but rather the perverse filtering function these courses perform, so it is not the low academic skills of these teachers which are so damaging in the schools, but rather the historically demonstrable and pervasive tendency of teachers and administrators alike to seek
non-academic
roles and functions for themselves and the schools.

Such recent trends as “affective education,” “multiculturalism” and “environmental studies” are only the latest in a long series of non-academic subjects promoted in the public schools by the National Education Association and kindred groups and movements throughout this century.
¹¹
In the ongoing tug-of-war between the education establishment and outside critics, the education establishment has been consistently pulling in non-intellectual directions. These are the directions
in which non-intellectual people can be expected to pull. Intellectual activity in academic subjects can hardly be a happy memory for people who were consistently in the bottom half of their classes in high school and college.

The painful shallowness of education courses is nothing new. Critics have denounced them throughout their history in this century—to no avail. Similarly, the spread of nonintellectual subjects in the public schools, and the watering-down of academic subjects, have both proceeded virtually unchecked for more than half a century. Even when educational reformers of the 1980s were successful in getting academic requirements written into law, those laws were often effectively nullified in the educational establishment by simply re-naming non-academic courses or teaching existing academic courses at a lower level to accommodate the broader spectrum of students now taking them.

In short, the educational establishment has been very effective in blocking or deflecting attempts to raise the intellectual content and level of American education. Nowhere has it been more successful than in blocking all efforts to end the monopoly of schools and departments of education as gatekeepers of the teaching profession. The consequences of this success include sacrificing the education of more than 40 million American school children to the jobs of less than 40,000 professors of education.
¹²
That is sacrificing the education of more than one thousand youngsters to save one education professor’s job.