Inside American Education (48 page)

1. They have taken our money, betrayed our trust, failed our children, and then lied about the failures with inflated grades and pretty words.
   
2. They have used our children as guinea pigs for experiments, targets for propaganda, and warm bodies to be moved here and there to mix and match for racial balance, pad enrollments in foreign-language programs mislabeled “bilingual,” or just tobe warehoused until labor unions are willing to let them enter the job market.
   
3. They have proclaimed their special concern for minority students, while placing those students into those colleges where they are most likely to fail.
   
4. They have proclaimed their dedication to freedom of ideas and the quest for truth, while turning educational institutions into bastions of dogma and the most intolerant institutions in American society.
   
5. They have presumed to be the conscience of society and to teach ethics to others, while shamelessly exploiting college athletes, overcharging the government, organizing price-fixing cartels, and leaving the teaching of undergraduates to graduate student assistants and junior and part-time faculty, while the tenured faculty pursue research and its rewards.
   

All this says something, not only about educators, but also about the rest of us, who let them get away with such things. At the very least, it says something about the kind of institutional insulation which protects misfeasance and malfeasance from detection and correction. No reforms which leave that institutional insulation intact are likely to escape the fate of innumerable previous reforms, which have either been nullified or turned to the further advantage of the education establishment.

If there is any lesson in the continuing deterioration of American educational standards, despite a growing inflow of money and an escalating proliferation of rules, it must at the very least be that (1) money is not the bottleneck preventing higher educational quality and (2) micro-managing procedures in no way ensures better educational results. The task is not specific prescription but institutional changes to enable results to be monitored and accountability to become a reality in the schools and in the colleges and universities.

Once it is clearly understood that changing an educational establishment which is experienced, skilled, resourceful, and unscrupulous in defense of its territory
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is going to be a bitter battle the question can then be squarely faced as to what the advantages and disadvantages are on each side in the struggles that are sure to follow. For reformers to have any hope of success, it is necessary
but not sufficient
to mobilize enough political muscle to win decisive votes in state legislatures and in
Congress, over the determined opposition of the National Education Association, the National School Boards Association, and many other vocal, organized, well-financed, and influential members of the educational establishment. It can be done. It has been done. But it is not sufficient.

Even after reformers have mobilized enough political support to defeat the education establishment, whether in Washington or in state legislatures, they are much like a nation which has advantages of firepower over its enemy, but lacks enough troops and staying power for a long war of attrition. If reform legislation is set forth as general principles which must later be given specific interpretation and implemented by state education departments, district superintendents, and school principals, then this is a war of attrition which the educational establishment is almost certain to win. For the reformers to win, they must mobilize their superior firepower for decisive assaults on strategic objectives. This means, first of all, that they must be clear in their own minds as to what these strategic objectives are, whether in the school system or in the colleges and universities.

Schools

The first strategic objective in the battle for educational quality in the public schools must be destroying the monopoly of credentialing held by schools and academic departments of education. This battle has already been fought once, apparently won when alternative credentialing processes were created, and yet lost in the wars of attrition that followed, as those teachers acquiring credentials through alternative processes have turned out to be no more than one percent of those still being credentialed by taking education courses.
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It is hard to see how this monopoly can be destroyed, once and for all, as long as such courses remain as sources of employment, tenure, and raises for teachers. It would be worth a considerable amount of money to buy out the existing professors teaching teacher-training courses and close down such courses, departments, and schools permanently. Early-retirement bonuses and research grants in lieu of salaries for teaching could be among the strategies used to help get rid of this
key factor in the low quality of American public school education. There would probably need to be a stick as well as a carrot—a fixed date, after which education courses would lose their legal status as determinants of employment, tenure, and pay raises.

Those who wish to take such courses would remain free to take them and employers who wish to give them weight in choosing among job applicants would likewise remain free to do so. However, the almost unanimous condemnation of such courses suggests that few would survive without the legal monopoly. Alternative programs of teaching training might well spring up, but they would have to be very different to survive in free competition.

Another strategic objective is the abolition of tenure. Here again is an institution which must be destroyed, even if existing possessors of tenure must be compensated or saved by a “grandfather clause.” But if the institution of tenure is not destroyed—if some compromise simply makes terminations easier, for example—then this sets the stage for a war of attrition which the educational establishment is sure to win, as terminations gradually grow more complex and more difficult again, after the reformers have turned their attention elsewhere.

A third crucial institutional objective is accountability. Although the word has been used before, the reality would represent a revolution in American public school education. Discussions of educational institutions at all levels are dominated by input variables and process variables—for example, statistics on expenditures, numbers of students being processed, numbers of embossed pieces of paper issued to those students on completion of particular programs. Qualitative measures of the educational results remain all too rare. The educational establishment has a long—and successful—history of opposing and thwarting virtually all attempts to measure educational results. Even when testing and publication of the results have been mandated by law, schools and boards of education have used their power to choose the tests in such a way that the great majority of jurisdictions end up “above average.”
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Any serious attempt at monitoring results must take the choice of test out of the hands of those who are being monitored. One nationwide test would be ideal, if only to forestall confusion
as how different states and districts compare, and to foreclose the chicanery possible when different tests have been normed on different populations. Not only must the test itself be outside the control of the education establishment; the results must also be monitored outside the establishment, and the consequences be determined elsewhere as well.

Some form of parental choice among schools is essential to provide numerous independent monitors. Despite campaigns of disparagement of parents by educators, where parents and educators differ sharply the parents tend to favor more academic programs and fewer non-academic fads like “affective education,” “multiculturalism,” and the like. Strict academic schools tend to have waiting lists of students whose parents are trying to get them out of trendy schools. No doubt there are some parents who lack the knowledge, the interest, or even the sense of responsibility to make good choices. But the children of such parents would be no worse off than under the current public school system. They would simply not reap the benefits of educational reform. To say that any particular reform is no panacea is to say what must be true of anything human. To object to reforms on such grounds is to say that there can be no reform.

College and Universities

Accountability is the most important strategic objective to be achieved in colleges and universities, as it is in the public schools, and tenure is a key obstacle to that accountability in academia, as elsewhere. Moreover, the wedding of tenure to an up-or-out system of promotion, and to faculty self-governance, add to the difficulties of making academic institutions accountable for the quality of education of undergraduates.

While the up-or-out system of promotion is a vast improvement over the time-and-credentials method of awarding tenure and pay raises in the public schools, it often promotes the sacrificing of teaching for research from the very beginning of a new faculty member’s career. The claim that tenure is essential to academic freedom is belied by the experience of think tanks staffed by scholars very similar to professors—people whose writings are at least as non-conformist and controversial as
those of tenured faculty members. The belief that tenure simply cannot be gotten rid of is belied by the experience of Britain, where it has been gotten rid of.

Stability of employment is not without its benefits, to the institution as well as to the individual. Other organizations recognize that with multi-year contracts or with customs which accomplish the same thing informally. There is no reason why colleges and universities could not extend their current practice of offering multi-year contracts from the junior faculty to the senior faculty, varying the length of these contracts according to the individual and the financial commitments of the institution. Many current faculty abuses, including gross neglect of students, reflect an arrogance and irresponsibility to which iron-clad job security is the institutional foundation. That institutional foundation needs to be destroyed.

Faculty self-governance is also not without its benefits, but the costs are enormous. This self-governance covers many things and not all of them are bad, by any means. At the core of its meaning is the idea that only scholars are competent to judge scholarship within their respective fields. This is undoubtedly true where those fields are genuine disciplines—structures of intellectual principles—such as mathematics or chemistry, rather than mish-mashes of subject matter, spiced with ideology and activism, like too many “interdisciplinary” ethnic, peace, feminist, or other “studies.” However, the more fundamental division is not between various academic departments, but between policy-making in individual academic fields and college-wide or university-wide policy-making.

That chemistry professors should control the curriculum in chemistry is one thing. That they should vote on whether the college or university should permit R.O.T.C., or invest its endowment according to financial or ideological criteria, are issues on which expertise in chemistry is not germane, much less decisive. Yet all sorts of institutional decisions have become—de facto, if not
de jure
—subject to faculty “self-governance.” In many cases, it is no longer self-governance, but the making of institutional policy decisions by professors who are insulated from accountability for the consequences. Administrators can at least be held accountable, in the sense that they can be removed as administrators, even if they still have tenure as faculty members.

The present system of so-called faculty self-governance reduces the accountability of administrators, as well as faculty. College presidents, provosts, and deans are not without means of influencing faculty decisions, beginning with how issues are framed, decisions timed, and information selectively released. Yet the administrators can plead “faculty self-governance” when the trustees, the public, or the legislators are upset with some policy promoted by those administrators and voted on by the faculty. Unlike Robert Burns, professors often see academia as an island, enjoying a sort of extra-territoriality which permits it to offer sanctuary and which makes the calling of police to quell riots a kind of violation of something sacred. Unaccountability breeds unreality as well as irresponsibility.

Accountability to the outside world must be maintained institutionally, for the sake of the internal sense of reality in academia itself. Otherwise, it is all too easy for academics to degenerate into self-indulgence at others’ expense, including indulgence in self-flattering illusions. Just as outside forces have been instrumental in occasionally bringing public schools back to some sense of reality, and to their mission of teaching academic skills, so outside influences have moderated some of the worst excesses of “political correctness” and extravagant spending in academia. Trustees, alumni, and legislators need to bring to bear the rights of those who are supporting the academic enterprise with their money, as well as the rights of the students for whom these schools exist.

As in the public schools, the key to effective monitoring is some independent source of information. If trustees, alumni, or legislators know only what academic administrators tell them, then those controlling knowledge can nullify the power of those to whom they are formally accountable. The answer is not micro-management but independent information. The crucial role of information is well understood by academic administrators themselves, and is attested to by many embarrassing revelations, often with devastating consequences when academic dirty linen is aired in public and comes to the attention of legislators and lawyers.

While a board of trustees cannot micro-manage a college or university, it can certainly equip itself with the institutional means of receiving different views from individual students and faculty members critical of existing policies and practices.
Whether this is done by hiring its own full-time ombudsman or inspector general, or by other means, the board of trustees can open its eyes institutionally, if it chooses. The governor of a state can certainly establish an inspector general for education, reporting directly to the governor on the public schools and the state universities, and a state legislature can certainly create a mini-General Accounting Office for education.