An Inquiry into Education in America
ELEMENTARY
The first and most important question about education in America is ” Does Anyone Care?”
You can begin or end every inquiry about the subject with the same simple question and the answers speak for themselves. It doesn’t seem that anybody does.
And that includes such diverse areas as
the genuine value of Pre-K programs and whether they are good enough to do the job of preparation when testing for verification doesn’t exist; do they really work to prepare our four year olds for learning or are they just good places for kids to be in every day? Who knows? Who even bothers to find out?
the repetitive diminishing results of the continuous testing of students to see whether they are learning that became the by-word of modern public education driven by politicians seeking results for the billions spent on education – and not by educators who should have known better;
the war between elementary schools and charter schools for education dollars ignoring the ‘why’ they were developed: to help set new standards of teaching and learning – and instead the dual focus of how well they compare on standardized testing and their ability to evade union membership for their teachers. The better testing results by charters are the result of their intense focus on test prep. The rate of teacher turnover is continuous. The demand for more charters come even though more than one-third of all NYC charters are owned by one company which has built a great business of using public funds for its profits.
To date no testing has been done on whether students from charter schools perform better in high school than their friends from traditional schools. Have they learned more or simply tested better? Who knows? Who has bothered to find out?
the dismal results in NYC schools where only one-third of all graduates are college-ready. What is true today has been true for years: New York spends more money on public schools than any other State and our results are as dismal as all the others. America spends more money on public education than any other industrial nation and our results place us way down the list; never mind the much-talked about Scandinavian countries, Latvia does better!
And speaking of money…two more questions: with all the billions spent on education why are teachers spending their own money on school supplies? And why is it that the schools who are doing the worst work have the most ‘administrators’?
the New York City schools are the most segregated in the nation. The hapless Mayor and the untested journeyman he hired to run the schools have come up with ideas to desegregate that strain the imagination. They propose getting rid of the eight elite high schools which are populated by Asians and some white kids and getting rid of the handful of Gifted and Talented programs which involve 15,000 mostly white and Asian children among the 1.1 million school children – as if those things would desegregate a school system. Can these guys count? Maybe. But can they think creatively? Stop laughing.
the Teacher’s Colleges are still not teaching teachers to teach. Five years ago two reports from major teacher organizations which measure quality of teaching reported this failure to little or no response from teachers, the schools or the media. Today with 1,400 such teacher prep institutions in business, more than half of teachers taking the certification examination fail to pass the test the first time. The indication here is that things have gotten worse and while this failure is known to the field, the silence is apparent and nothing is being done.
HIGHER EDUCATION
When we move on to higher education we begin to see patterns that have become most disturbing because they involve so many millions of our children.
Once upon a time in America, a college education was the pathway to success…not only into the middle class but beyond. Today it appears that a college education is about preventing failure – a totally different view bringing realities that must be explored. But withal, the continuing question “Does Anyone Care?”
And again the necessity of facing some diverse areas:
the stunning cost of college which has tripled within a generation. Why has America allowed this to happen? It is unprecedented anywhere else in the World. We know for sure that incredible endowments exist in many of the nation’s largest schools; that today less than one of five teachers are fulltime Professors while universities spend billions on massive student centers, gyms and student living quarters; we know that middle class families which made higher education in America all but mandatory are spending retirement and healthcare monies in order to finance college; that 44 million Americas owe 1.6 trillion dollars in student debt – more than credit card and auto loans’ and that the median average savings account across middle class America is but $12,000. What is wrong with this picture and who will change it?
the stunning failure of American students is becoming more apparent everyday as colleges report a 40% dropout rate and the fact that 65% of students have sought mental help relief for depression, anxiety and the in ability to deal with the rigors of the work before them. This should be no surprise as elementary and high schools have failed them to prepare for college work despite whatever good marks that achieved to get into college. The deception is real. There is evidence that colleges are now screening high school performance relating to students who are leaving them with empty seats and that schools which are no longer sending them students who can deal with the work – and their graduates – are being ignored.
If the business of higher education has become just that – a business – than America and its parents and children are in for trouble.
As an example of business: the American Government is investigating whether major colleges are reporting the gifts they receive from foreign sources…gifts in excess of $250,000 and what these gifts are buying in terms of influence. Only 3% of 3,700 universities receiving such gifts have reported them.
THE QUESTION
We can keep asking Does Anyone Care – but who will answer? Fifty years of forgetting the simple adage that up until three years old we must learn to read because from then on we read to learn, has seen a genuine drop in the ability of America to teach its children.
History teaches us that all great powers have lost their dominance because they failed to educate their people – and that once lost, power is never regained.
History has also taught us that a measure of greatness in a nation is its creative culture. Where are the great American novelists, playwrights, composers, painters and sculptures of this 21st Century?
Can we only measure the creative success of today in the algorithms that have addicted us to our phones?
Few of our politicians speak of education as the backbone of our nation’s success. Few think of it that way, so few focus on it. If that doesn’t change the tilt of progress will continue on a downward slope.
It’s history and it’s scary.
I’d find many of the hard-to-believe statements here more credible if there were annotated footnotes for them. The most incredible assertion is that it seems that no one cares.