1103 Public Education – Both Underachieving and Expensive
Someone once described the character of a world-class American education plan. They wrote: “It is important that people who are to live and work together shall have a common mind — a like heritage of purpose, religious ideals, love of country, beauty, and wisdom to guide and inspire them.” They went on to suggest portions of literature which would be appropriate to memorize: the Ten Commandments, the Golden Rule, the Boy Scout oath, various patriotic songs, etc.
The students who benefited from this publication for teachers, “The American Citizens Handbook,” published by the National Education Association in 1951, would go on to win the space race, encode the 1964 Civil Rights Act, produce huge advances in medicine, and make America the most prosperous, most benevolent superpower in history. They had been taught memorization, computation, phonetic reading and the facts of our nation’s history from a position of deep respect instead of cynicism.
Beginning in the 1960s, the educational landscape began to change and by the early 1970s began to stagnate. Theorists such as Dewey, Piaget and Vigotsky influenced a shift away from hugely successful direct instruction and toward students building their own knowledge and solutions. The new approach threw out the idea that knowledge and truth existed outside of the student. Instead, truth and learning were deemed a product of each person’s own processes. The impact of this shift has infected every part of education, including private education, and has since yielded a host of experiments on our children.
The results of this gradual mega-shift have been less than impressive. Ostensibly, to help deal with the resulting deficiencies, educational bureaucracies and teachers unions mushroomed while local parental control withered. Public education became as much a political enterprise as an institution of learning, a tool for the liberalization of the culture.
In 1970, the federal government spent the equivalent of $31.5 billion on K-12 education; by 2009 spending had soared to $82.9 billion. As Adam Schaeffer noted in a recent editorial for Investors Business Daily, from 1992 to 2011 education spending from tax revenues increased by 90 percent for states and 73 percent for local governments. Half of their tax income will be spent on educationally related obligations this year. Yet, from 1973 to 2008, average math scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress only moved from 304 to 306 (out of 500) and reading scores hit a lackluster 286 in 2008 compared to 285 almost 40 years earlier.
Academic mediocrity in K-12 classrooms began in teacher education classrooms. Rather than learning to be skilled and innovative instructors, able to enhance and be creative with knowledge, they were taught to be facilitators of groups, learning centers and time-consuming projects.
Solutions to America’s self-imposed educational ills are obvious. One of the largest, most comprehensive but most ignored studies of teaching strategies ever done was the Department of Education’s Project Follow-Through. After lasting 18 years and going through a billion dollars, it arrived at one glaring conclusion: Direct instruction blasted eight other methodologies out of the water. It was successful across racial, economic and cultural divides.
According to the latest findings, the same kind of success holds true with well-run charter and private schools. With little bureaucracy, exceptionally committed staff and heavily involved parents, these schools compete against an educational monopoly on a hostile playing field with less money but have consistently out performed conventional public classrooms. In a competitive system, if they don’t perform, they disappear.