Ranting About Education Again!
Back In March, we had a discussion about the mandatory nature of public schools and I asked why public schools shouldn't be voluntary. The range of thoughtful responses got me thinking about the subject, but I nonetheless return to the same point - why waste money trying to educate those who don't want to be educated?
The importance of this question is evidenced by the recent ruling from a California state judge in Alameda County, which prohibits public schools from denying students a high school diploma just because they failed the high school exit exam. In issuing the injunction, Freedman said he was swayed by the parents' argument that many impoverished and minority students — particularly those learning English as a second language — attend low-performing schools that do not prepare them adequately for the test. Of the 46,700 seniors who have failed the test, 20,600 are designated as limited English learners and 28,300 are poor.
In a nutshell, parents sued the school so their illiterate or semi-literate children can receive high school diplomas.
While there is no denying that the school has some culpability in this unfortunate situation, where were the f'ing parents along the way? By bringing this lawsuit, the parents are essentially admitting that they have not been paying attention to their children's education for the past 12 years or, if they were, they did not care. Those parents should be arrested for child neglect.
20,600 Of those who failed are limited English learners, which makes sense that if you can't speak English, you probably won't be able to pass an exam that has an English section. Others who failed are "poor". No one knows how "poor" is defined for purposes of the statistic, but the reader is supposed to intuitively understand it to mean that school is unfair to them.
I do not buy it for several reasons.
Education cannot be forced down anyone's throats. Without a fundamental curiosity and interest, no one will learn. Period. My mentee, for example, is a sweet, wonderful, kind-hearted teenager who is truly the most understimulated, uncurious child I have ever met. And I've tried everything. The aquarium; marine biology summer camp; the festival of books, Cirque du Soleil, helping me at work, playing video games, tutoring at Sylvan, board games, etc. It doesn't matter. Last year, she got a "D" in her English class because she didn't do a book report. When I asked her why, she said that the book was boring (as if that absolved her of the obligation to do the work) so she wasn't going to read it. And she was completely matter-of-fact about it. Why should she care about her grades? No one else in her family is educated and they are all doing just fine (courtesy of government aid).
In contrast, I recently coached the daughter of one of my dad's friends for a moot court competition. Moot court is a competition in which the participants argue for their fictitious clients before a mock court of appeal. To do well at it, you must be able to read legal jargon, understand judicial philosophy and have incredible public speaking skills. The high school senior volunteered to do it, in addition to her otherwise demanding AP courses, made it to the semi-finals and argued better than some lawyers I have seen in court. Her family is really religious, she lives in a gang-infested neighborhood and the parents barely speak English. If it were up to her Bangladeshi mom, she would have been married off by the time she was 16 and have babies already (thank goodness for her dad who has the opposite opinion). Did I mention she scored a 2310 on the SAT and is getting a full scholarship to the college of her choice? Or that she e-mails me to ask if I prefer Hobbes' or Locke's philosophy? According to the "standardized tests are culturally biased b.s.", she should have failed out of school by 6th grade.
If your culture does not value education, good luck. There is nothing school can do to fix that. Sharky commented in the earlier post that, in this country, being a "nerd" is an insult, while being an idiot is "cool" and exam scores will not improve until that changes; a stark contrast with Egyptian culture that focuses on "nerd" worship. If you have money, but are uneducated, you're still a loser in Egypt. It doesn't matter, which is why most Egyptians you will meet in America are doctors, engineers or a PhD in something. Years ago, my parents helped my uncle's driver immigrate to the U.S. from Egypt. This guy is quite a piece of work. In Egypt, they call his type "saeedee", which more or less translates to "country bumpkin". Dirt poor, to this day can speak barely two words of English (and his Arabic ain't that great either), worked as a construction day laborer for his first few years until he had a horrible accident in which he was disabled and he has been on welfare since. His son, who attended woefully bad LAUSD schools, just graduated with an engineering degree from CalTech. In case you didn't know, CalTech is the west coast equivalent of MIT for the level of genius required to get in there. According to the "my parents can't speak English" and "I'm poor" argument, the son should have been illiterate. But yet, he ended up at CalTech because his father wouldn't have had it any other way.
No more making excuses. If the parents aren't at home letting the children know that education is priority number one, nothing the schools do is going to make a damn bit of difference. If you come from a culture that does not value education, do not cry because the top math and science departments in the country are dominated by Asians. Did you hear about the high school in Silicon Valley that is scaring away white people because it is too academically driven? These parents should be slapped.
It is time to get a grip in this country. If kids don't want to be educated, let them get a job picking fruits and see how they like it. Instead of lowering the bar, how about changing the culture?
posted by Intellectual Insurgent @ 7:32 PM
31 Comments
31 Comments:
You hit the nail on the head. These same "poor" kids will probably end up in a life of crime, or struggling to master the question "Paper or plastic?" But it will be everybody's fault but theirs or their alleged parents.
Absolutely correct. Another thing Bush has failed to implement - voucher programs.
The reason is culture. What you're referring to with your mentee is black hip-hop culture, presumably, as opposed to black church culture, which produces radically different social outcomes. But there's more. Your mentee exemplifies exactly what's wrong with the American educational system.
That system used to be geared, until the late 1950s, at producing good American citizens. You learned foreign languages, science, the classics, the English language, civics, as much religion as was polite, everything you needed to know to be a citizen in your community and your country. As an aside, wingers always bemoan the religion thing being lost, but they're truly missing the point. That was only a small part of a much larger mission.
What really changed was that this citizenship-focused approach was replaced with a workforce approach. In short, you wre trained to be economically productive, which is fine, but is only a small aspect of your entire life. The rest got and gets excluded or downplayed. You don't need to know Shakespeare, let alone John Locke, if you want a career as a [fill in the blank]. But since you study only with the goal of getting that career, it doesn't matter to you.
The societal damage from this shift is huge. By making education only a vehicle for individual advancement, we subtly devalue any kind of learning that is not seen as bringing an immediate or deferred benefit. This in turn gives rise to and fuels the radical individualism that is atomizing our society. Thus, why should I care, or learn about, anything or anyone that does not immediately concern me?
From that come, among other things, fat tax cuts - more for me, so why worry? - gargantuan SUVs, $400 billion CEO retirement packages, a shredded civic fabric, low voter turnout, grotesque environmental degradation, in short, many of the evils that afflict our society.
Plus, our kids are dumb, and happy that way. If you want all of this to change, then change the way the education system understands its mission. Educate citizens, not drones.
:-), StS
sounds like somebdy struck a nerve.
ur mentee isn't meeting ur hopes?
have u tried turning her onto these sites?
but if she doesn't want to do it, tho it may seem 2 b an @ack on ur values, try not to take it personally.
have u read bout pigs n fishes?
SP -
I don't think voucher programs are the answer. First, education is a state right and the fed has no business sticking its nose in it. Second, the ultimate effect of voucers will be circular, i.e. we will end up with a 2-tiered educational system because the good schools will be packed to the gills, while the bad schools suffer (which is pretty much where we are now).
Sharky -
You make a really good point about education for learning's sake v. training people for the workforce. I need to ponder this, but I think you are on to something.
D Nova -
Oh, goodness, my mentee does frustrate me, but she is a symbol of the bigger problem. I used to be on the board of the mentoring program and I cannot tell you how heartbreaking it is to see children falling into the toilet while their parents sue the school district to get them diplomas. The parents really should be punished.
Oh, I'm 100% convinced I'm right about this. Take a look at the development of the NYC school system; it used to be the best system in the country, with more students than today from more diverse backgrounds than today. The mission was expressly to Americanize immigrants and everyone else - and it worked.
The change probably came with the Sputnik shock, when skills training became central. Then of course, with the corporatization of the rest of the culture, the schools turned into drone factories.
:-), StS
II: I can see that your last post, "Don't think of an elephant," and this post about students taking personal responsibility - combined - show your moderate side.
The factory: We had a union drive back in 1996. I'll never forget it, as it was the most devisive thing I've ever experienced. The union only lost by 4%. What does that have to do with the price of beans in China? Everything!
The company literally spent millions keeping the union out. But wait: what could a company spend that money on, to keep a union out - and how could they be insured that money was spent wisely?
Enter the world of organizational and industrial psychology.
OK, OK, what does this have to do with Bush, or education, or anything like that?
Just read on.
The company spent millions on a consulting firm just loaded with industrial and organizational psychologists whose sole focus of study while in college is, what motivates people - and how to take advantage of how their motivated, so they can do more work for less money, and feel greatful for it, in the process.
Here's what it boiled down to:
How people learn, determines what motivates them. I was only told about the "how they learn" part, they didn't tell the floor supervisors how to use the way they learn to manipulate them, which is what this whole thing is all about.
Example:
If you ask someone a deeply personal question...for example: "Do you remember your first kiss?"
Some people will pause and their eyes will go from side-to-side, while they're thinking either about the experience, or whether or not they'll tell the truth about it - or both.
These type of people learn by hearing, according to the industrial and organizational psychologists. How did they establish that? When you look from side-to-side while you're concentrating, you're subconciously trying to look at your ears, which is your source of comfort.
People who fidget are tactile learners. They learn by doing something - you can talk about it all day long with them, but the only way they'll ever learn is by rolling up their sleeves and doing it for themselves.
People who look up - or down, learn by sight. They have to see how it's done by someone else before they feel comfortable tackling something on their own.
These people are looking away from you, because they don't want their eyes distracted while they concentrate.
Most people have a primary way of learning, followed by a secondary way of learning.
OK, so what does this have to do with education, and a student's ability to be motivated?
What if the schools are totally ignoring this line of research, and what if they're just not appealing to a student's need to learn through his or her comfort level, whether they be hearing learners, sight learners, or tactile learners?
An argument may be made that attempts have been made that would appeal to a particular student's learning style, but if that student knows there are a limited number of excersizes that appeal to their learning style, they might be thinking, "Why get all hyped up over one thing that excites me, when I know for a fact that this'll be the only excersize that appeals to the way I learn?"
So is it the school's fault for not appealing to a student's particular learning style?
I don't know. All I can tell you is, the company I worked for used this information to keep a union out, that otherwise would have been voted in by a landslide!!!!! (Damn shame too!)
This is successful, because I've seen it work. Had the company not used this approach, that factory would have been union, big-time!
I don't know why private industry doesn't provide this information to government entities like schools, so the schools can manipulate students into being good learners, just like the company manipulated the workers into being good robots!
Funny how sometimes the solutions that work are being applied for profit, but when it comes to non-profit entities like schools, they don't seem to worry about how to effectively motivate people, because they're too darned worried about other things of practical nature.
Interesting post.
Years ago I read something by Robert A. Heinlein about education. I wish I could lay my handson a copy of the book, as I'm sure I'm gonna mangle his facts. Anyway, he compared the high-school curriculum from his father's turn-of-the-century one-room schoolhouse to a curriculum from the 1970's or 80's. The differences were striking. Latin was gone, as was perfect memorization of the multiplication tables through 20. His point, which he argued very well, was that the schools are softening. And I agree. I don't think my high-school education equalled my father's high-school education from the same school. Nor do I feel my college degree measures up to a degree given in the same field 50 years earlier.
Part of it is (here goes my chant again - I'm gonna keep saying this until you all tell me to shut up) is that we've quit making students take responsibility for their actions. If they don't pass the class, flunk 'em. When I was in high school way back when, we weren't afraid of being held back a year because we knew the school never actually flunk anyone, despite what the teachers said. They were giving us empty threats, and we knew it. Had they actually flunked a few kids, and called parents when kids were doing poorly, I think my attitude would have been a helluva lot different!
The California ruling has just gutted the threat of flunking in the entire state.
Another aspect, as has been touched upon, is that our culture does NOT make learning cool. I remember talking to a teenager years ago as he was staring slack-jawed at some sci-fi action movie on TV. "What would you do if you were in that character's shoes?" I asked. The kid said, "Well, I'd just make a robot that could go shoot the bad guy." When I asked him if he was interested in learning robotics, he said that he was more interested in having FRIENDS who knew how to build robots - it was too much work to do it himself, and it was uncool to go to college. Unfortunately, if everyone in his generation thinks the same way, no one will be able to build his robots... (I recently heard that the boy in that story got his girlfriend pregnant when they were 16 or 17, dropped out of high school and went to work in the factory. I wonder if, now that he's probably in his mid-twenties, he feels cool?)
I have little sympathy for the kids who fail to pass the test, and their whining parents.
My youngest son who is now a Sophomore in College, had to take this test starting as a Freshman in High School. He passed it as a Freshman. He is a good student, but by no means an exceptional student, so the test ain't that damn hard. The bar is pretty damn low.
Most High School students take this test every year starting as Freshman, and guest what, if they pass it as Freshman, I believe they don't have to take it again.
So, if you are a High School Junior and you fail the test, then you know you have work to do to ensure that you do pass it when you are a Senior.
Saying the system is unfair is BS.
Guess what, you don't get to legally drive until you pass a written test, and a driving test. Well, you don't get to graduate from High School if you don't pass a test.
These "poor" kids will probably end up as proud members of the armed forces. The refrain going into Iraq the first time was "who needs smart kids when we have smart bombs?" Hee haw!
That the USA has one of the worst education systems in the industrialized world is no coincidence.
You can find very good schools and very bad schools in the same district. The only difference is the parents.
The good schools in the district have upper and middle class pupils. the parents are involved with the school such as PTA, fund raisers, etc. The parents are the difference period.
II-why waste money trying to educate those who don't want to be educated?
Because the kids who are born to the parents that can't find time to help their children let alone the school need it. The children do not make the choice to be born to parents that can't so their job. The kids learn from the parents -to not care. They grow up and then raise kids the only way they know. The question is how do you break that cycle? Not educating them will only make the divide wider.
MRSleep is on target the exit exam is a simple test ANY 9-12 grade student should pass.
JJ
I don't think that the decay of education is an accident.
Perhaps with some Orwellian cynicism, you have to examine the benefits to our economy of having lots of ignorant, apathetic pop culture addicted consumers. They have a higher marginal propensity to consume, to believe advertising claims and the lies of government. Poorly educated and angry people make good cannon fodder for the cannons and for consumerism.
A lot to think about here. I taught for a while in the French public school system and I admired a lot about it- the centralized curriculum and teacher training, rigorous courses of study, and the Baccalaureat- a very difficult exam which you have to pass to get your high school diploma and go on to university. Of course, the North African immigrant riots last autumn showed us that the French system is far from perfect- and in attempting to make all students "French," they glossed over the cultural differences that are so central to the lives of so many, especially the recent immigrants.
In general, I completely agree with your main themes in this post and those of the commenters. The successes and failures of children in US public school can in large part be traced to parental encouragement and involvement. The question then becomes, what do we as a society do to address parental deficiencies? Ignore them? Offer school vouchers so that children with involved parents can have a better shot while those unlucky enough to have neglectful or whatever parents get left behind? I don't have any concrete answers but I would suggest that our collective responsibility is to level the playing field as much as possible- offer as consistently competent an education as possible, universally, such that those students who are able and willing to take advantage of it can, and those that can't, for whatever reason- well, at least they're in the same system as the achievers and can perhaps learn by example.
Parents are far more important in the education of children, than the school they attend, or the teachers that teach them.
Too many parents expect the schools to do it all. Raise the kids, teach them accountability and responsibility, and the three R's (readin', ritin', rithmetic).
I don't think voucher programs are the answer. First, education is a state right and the fed has no business sticking its nose in it.
I agree, but the feds are already in it, so they have to fix it -- and you know they won't just get out of it.
Second, the ultimate effect of voucers will be circular, i.e. we will end up with a 2-tiered educational system because the good schools will be packed to the gills, while the bad schools suffer (which is pretty much where we are now).
The private sector will compensate for this by creating more private schools. The bad schools need to suffer, and deserve to suffer. Keep the bad with the bad, and pull the rest out of the gutter.
SP -
Here we go again on the limited government issue. :-) The fed has no business in education. If it's already in there, the fight should not be to expand its role, but to get it out of education.
By your logic, once a law has been violated, we might as well encourage more violations. We will never see eye to eye on that principle.
If we assume, based on experience, that voucher programs are politically not feasible, then what is the winger fallback position? Is there one? Any other ideas on fixing instead of doing away with the system?
And II, if we posit for the sake of argument that federal involvement in, say, the schools of Alabama (to pick one theoretical example) produces better outcomes, would you sacrifice those in favor of your Weltanschauung of limited government?
:-), StS
Fair question Sharky (or am I arguing with myself?). :-)
The Tenth Amendment of the Constitution says -
"The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."
Education has always been reserved to the States and all fed attempts to usurp that power are unconstitutional. It is a constitutional issue, regardless of the outcome.
Let's be clear, however. The 14thA provides that no State shall deprive its citizens of equal protection of the laws.
The fight over segregation had to do with the 14thA, not the 10thA. In other words, the state is solely responsible for education, but it must exercise that responsibility within the parameters of the Constitution. And it is the role of the fed to guard our Constitution (can someone please tell chimp that?).
Sharky,
Your rant on the changing focus of education (citizenship v. workforce development) was right on. Except that little leftist rant at the end. ;-)
And as for your question about a fall back to vouchers; I believe that charter schools have provided a decent alternative to traditional public schools, especially in low income communities.
But as has been the case with any true reform, the teachers unions have repeatedly lined up against charter schools because it erodes their control.
II, I think your the issue is that the chimp is confusing the 10 commandments with the first 10 amendments.
II,
In a nutshell, parents sued the school so their illiterate or semi-literate children can receive high school diplomas.
While there is no denying that the school has some culpability in this unfortunate situation, where were the f'ing parents along the way? By bringing this lawsuit, the parents are essentially admitting that they have not been paying attention to their children's education for the past 12 years or, if they were, they did not care. Those parents should be arrested for child neglect.
OUCH! The truth hurts!
Craig,
glad to see you're on board; the more I think about it, the more I think that the focus of the entire system, and with it the culture, needs to be changed. We can't be solely a nation of drones slaving away in cubicles. Now, if you could only move past the somewhat shopworn talking point of pretending that vouchers are the cure-all, we'd be in business. If you do want to educate citizens, you can't move education into the unaccountable private sector and away from public oversight. Seems clear, no?
II,
your constitutional argument has the practical flaw of ignoring the commerce clause. I'd argue that especially with a view to the 'workforce education' dogma, education is at least ancillary to interstate commerce, which establishes legal grounds for federal involvement. Precedent indicates that education is primarily a state matter, but you can't make a constitutional argument that the Feds are to be excluded completely.
:-), StS
Craig,
How are charter schools funded? Although I have heard generally good things about them, my mentee goes to one and it is atrocious how unorganized and incompetent the administration of the school is.
Not to mention the bottom-feeders that make up much of the population of her school. There are two boys who consistently hit on her. One is 15 and already has a baby and the other is 17 and brags about all his sexual escapades.
Sharky,
I have made the constitutional argument that the Fed should be excluded entirely, so the question is whether the Fed can come up with an argument that says it constitutionally can. Your argument, relying on the commerce clause, is the popular approach on that point but I disagree nonetheless.
Since economics are at play in almost everything we do, the broad interpretation of the commerce clause that has been used and abused gives the fed the right to interfere in anything and everything, from abortion to medical marijuana to assisted suicide. That's too slippery of a slope.
Well, other self, whether you agree or not is somewhere beside the point. The commerce clause is valid law, and Congress in its wisdom has seen fit to pass a large body of legislation that relies on it. I think you're being just a bit reductionist in your reading here.
And besides, these days, to violate the constitution, you don't need laws anymore. Chimpie, to think of one example, says laws don't apply to him, since his 'commander in chief' position trumps everything else.
:-), StS
Other self, :-)
There is a judicial principle that states that the law should not be interpreted to create an absurdity; and that two provisions of the same law should be read in a complimentary, not conflicting, way. Nonetheless, courts and Congress read the commerce clause so broadly that it essentially moots the 10th Amendment.
By the way, if it is true that education is better if it focuses on enlightenment rather than job training, then your argument that education of the workforce is ancillary to interstate commerce holds no water. Check - and - mate! :-)
Quite the slippery one, aren't we?
Nonetheless, if we accept the drone factory model as valid, that would establish present authority; changing it might dilute that authority, but under a broad reading of the commerce clause - which is the current interpretation - wouldn't of necessity obviate it, as the schools would still be training the future workforce regardless and by default. The federal mandate is there.
Meanhile, I'm still waiting for an answer on what the right has to offer by way of ideas other than vouchers. I shudder to think that they may have no other ideas.
:-), StS
Stalin- brilliant to bring up the commerce clause, but the general trend of SCOTUS has been to scale back the CC since its 1960's heyday. Virginia v. Lopez- I think that was the case- was the cornerstone of the scaling back movement. There's no way that this even-more-conservative court would be willing to stretch the CC to include education as an "article or instrument" of commerce.
Yay,
Another lawyer to field this one! :-)
I agree with noisette and ii on this one.
The commerce clause is a catch-all for government intrusion in areas that the founders and the Constitution forbids.
ii, I too am in favor of leaving the idea of school to the people and the States.
I also agree that school should not be mandatory. Mandatory is another word for "force." Force is the opposite to "freedom."
None-the-less, a great post and I like what boris had to say, makes sense!
FAR.
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