Inside American Education (2 page)

Science is not the only field in which American students are lacking in knowledge and—more importantly—in the ability to tie what they know together to form a coherent chain of reasoning. Many American students seem unaware of even the need for such a process. Test scores are only the tip of the iceberg. Professor Diane Ravitch, a scholar specializing in the study of American education, reports that “professors complain about students who arrive at college with strong convictions but not enough knowledge to argue persuasively for their beliefs.” As Professor Ravitch concludes: “Having opinions without knowledge is not of much value; not knowing the difference between them is a positive indicator of ignorance.”
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In short, it is not merely that Johnny can’t read, or even that Johnny can’t think.
Johnny doesn’t know what thinking is
, because thinking is so often confused with feeling in many public schools.

Psycho-Therapeutic “Education”

The phrase “I feel” is often used by American students to introduce a conclusion, rather than say “I think,” or “I know,” much less “I conclude.” Unfortunately, “I feel” is often the most accurate term—and is regarded as sufficient by many teachers, as well as students. The net result, as in mathematics, is that many students are confident incompetents, whether discussing social issues, world events, or other subjects. The emphasis is on having students express opinions on issues, and on having those opinions taken seriously (enhancing self-esteem), regardless of whether there is anything behind them. When a reporter who spent months in a Los Angeles high school asked graduating seniors what they had learned, he received this reply from a boy described as “the smartest student in the class”:

I learned that in the Vietnam War, North and South Korea fought against each other, and then there was a truce at the 38th parallel, and that Eisenhower had something to do with it.

The reporter asked:

Would it bother you to know that the things you learned were wrong?

The answer was:

Not really. Because what we really learned from Miss Silver was that we were worth listening to, that we could express ourselves and that an adult would listen, even if we were wrong. That’s why Miss Silver will always be our favorite teacher. She made us feel like we mattered, like we were important.

The teacher herself saw her role in very similar terms:

I want to be real in class and be a human being…. And I want my students to know that they can be themselves and I’ll still listen to them. I want every one of them to have a chance to express himself or herself. Those are my priorities.
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Neither this teacher nor this school was unique. A large literature has urged teachers to be non-judgmental, to “humanize”
the classroom, to raise the “self-esteem” of students. A leading writer on such matters, the late psychotherapist Carl Rogers, spoke of “helping students to prize themselves, to build their confidence and self-esteem,”
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of “teachers who are real persons”
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and who “humanize their classrooms.”
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It was
assumed
that intellectual development would be part of this process.
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The Los Angeles reporter’s observation, however, was that the students he saw “know little in the way of organized thought processes or even basic ways of solving intellectual problems.” While the reporter noted the “sincerity or intensity” of the teachers, he nevertheless concluded: “A human being who has not been taught to think clearly is a danger in a free society.”
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Too many American students learn neither an intellectual process nor a knowledge base, nor acquire habits of study. Writer Mary McCarthy, after a stint on campus as a visiting professor, said that today’s college students seemed “almost totally ignorant of the whole period spanned by my life, to say nothing of what happened before.”
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More generally, a Carnegie Foundation survey of faculty members found that 67 percent of the professors reported “a widespread lowering of standards in American higher education,” 75 percent characterized their students as “seriously underprepared in basic skills,” and 62 percent reported “grade inflation” as a problem at their colleges.
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Moreover, 55 percent said that undergraduates at their institution “only do enough to get by.”
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Just how little that is may be indicated by the fact that only 33 percent of college students put in 16 or more hours of study per week outside of class in 1985—and this declined to 23 percent by 1988.
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As of 1966, 52 percent of all college freshmen had checked at least one book out of a library during the preceding year. By 1990, only 27 percent had done so.
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Educators and parents are not the only ones dissatisfied with the kinds of students American schools are turning out. A survey of Fortune 500 companies showed that 58 percent complained of the difficulty of finding employees with basic skills.
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The Chief Executive Officer of Pacific Telesis reported: “Only four out of every 10 candidates for entry-level jobs at Pacific Telesis are able to pass our entry exams, which are based on a seventh-grade level.”
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In 1989, New York Life began airlifting
its health insurance claims to Ireland for processing, because American workers made too many mistakes.
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Changes over Time

One of the reasons why basics are not learned is that they are not taught—at least not at the same level or with the same emphasis as in the past. For example, the process of making public school textbooks easier to read has been going on so long and so widely that it has even acquired a well-known generic name—“dumbing down.” For example, when a well-known history book was revised with an eye toward the high school market, words like “spectacle” and “admired” were eliminated as “difficult.”
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Some idea of how far this deliberate erosion of standards has gone may be gotten from looking at the once-standard
McGuffey’s
Readers from generations ago, or by looking at examinations from that by-gone era.
McGuffey’s First Reader
, for example, included diacritical marks to indicate the pronunciation of vowels and the emphasis of syllables.
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McGuffey’s Third Reader
contained such words as “heath” and “benighted” and asked such questions as “What is this species of composition called?” and “Relate the facts of this dialogue.”
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McGuffey’s Fourth Reader
included selections from Longfellow and Hawthorne, and the
Fifth Reader
from Shakespeare.
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These were not the textbooks of the elite but of the masses. For the better part of a century, from 1836 to 1920,
McGuffey’s Readers
were so widely used that they sold more than 122 million copies—second in sales only to the Bible.
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In the early years of the twentieth century, pupils finishing the eighth grade in Kansas had to pass an examination which included spelling such words as “elucidation” and “animosity,” defining such terms as “zenith” and “panegyric,” as well as diagramming sentences and doing such problems in arithmetic as finding the interest earned on a $900 note, at 8 percent, after 2 years, 2 months, and 6 days.
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Questions of similar difficulty were asked in geography and history—all in order to get a diploma awarded at the end of the eighth grade. These
were not elite prep schools. Often they were one-room school houses in rural Kansas.

EXCUSES FOR FAILURE

The responses of the educational establishment to the academic deficiencies of their students today include (1) secrecy, (2) camouflage, (3) denial, (4) shifting the blame elsewhere, and (5) demanding more money.

“Confidentiality” policies maintain secrecy, while inflated grades and a policy of not recording failing grades help many institutions to camouflage the facts, so that optimistic public statements can effectively deny what is happening. When the facts become so blatant as to overwhelm these defenses, the strategy is simply to shift the blame to some other factor—outside the educational system. These include both social factors and financial resources.

Social Factors

Although educators have been quick to blame the failures of the schools on factors outside the schools, there has been remarkably little critical examination of these claims. It is unquestionably true that the home backgrounds of children influence how well they do in school, and that these backgrounds vary by social class and by race.
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However, to say that an influence exists is not to say that it explains the particular pattern that we see.

Many have tried to use the changing social mixture of students in American schools and colleges as an explanation of declining test scores. American Federation of Teachers president Albert Shanker used this tactic during a 1986 debate at the University of California at Davis. During the period of falling SAT scores, Shanker said, schools had “discouraged students from dropping out,” thereby retaining “more difficult youngsters,” whose scores presumably lowered the average.

In reality, however, SAT scores declined
at the top
, not because there were more low scores averaged in. More than 116,000 students scored above 600 on the verbal SAT in 1972
and fewer than 71,000 scored that high ten years later.
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Between the early 1960s and the early 1980s, median SAT scores dropped at colleges from coast to coast, including the most prestigious institutions. Both verbal and quantitative SAT scores declined at Yale, Princeton, Cal Tech, the University of Chicago, Oberlin, Rice, Brandeis, Carleton, Pomona, Reed, Whitman, and Davidson, for example. The composite score decline was more than 100 points at Brandeis and Reed.
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As Diane Ravitch put it: “The shrinkage of the top scorers has proceeded steadily since the 1960s and obviously is unrelated to the overall composition of the test group.”
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Obviously—except to the educational establishment.

The false argument that retaining a higher proportion of low-performance students accounts of low average scores is also used to excuse the dismal performance of American students in international comparisons. But virtually all 13-year-olds are in school in all the countries surveyed in international mathematics performance surveys. While some countries have a smaller proportion of their students remain in school to reach the last year of high school than the United States does, Japan has an even higher proportion staying in school to finish than the U.S. does, so selectivity can hardly explain the superior performance of the Japanese.
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Carnegie Foundation President Ernest L. Boyer has claimed that for “a small percentage of students” at the top, “the American high school provides an outstanding education, perhaps the finest in the world.”
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However, this wholly unsubstantiated statement is contradicted by the results of international tests. The top 5 percent of American high school seniors scored last on algebra and calculus tests administered to the top 5 percent of twelfth-graders from a dozen countries.
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While it is undoubtedly true that there are many negative factors at work in many low-income neighborhood schools, especially those in the inner-city ghettos and barrios, that does not automatically explain away the declining academic performances of American schools in general. Black and Hispanic students have lower than average test scores on such examinations as the Scholastic Aptitude Test, but their SAT scores cannot explain the national decline, for Hispanic scores have
risen
during much of the national decline, and black scores have risen still more.
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Even in low-income, crime-ridden neighborhoods, Catholic and other private schools have often produced far better academic results than the public schools in the same areas.
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The public schools’ usual attempts to escape comparisons by claiming that Catholic and other private schools have children from higher-income, better-educated families will not work in these particular cases. A Rand Corporation study not only confined its sample of Catholic schools to those in low-income ghetto and barrio neighborhoods in New York, but also included youngsters whose parents did
not
pay to send them to Catholic schools, but whose tuition there was paid by private individuals who wanted to enable an unselected sample of public school children to attend Catholic schools, to see if these unselected youngsters would also do better than those remaining in the public schools. The youngsters who transferred into the Catholic schools did significantly better than their peers who remained in the public schools, even though these transferees from the public school came mostly from single-parent households on welfare and entered the Catholic schools two or more years behind on placement tests, some scoring in the bottom tenth.
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For that matter, some special public schools located in poor neighborhoods also did much better than most other public schools.
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In short, better schools produce demonstrably better results, even in the worst neighborhoods.