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As a postscript to my previous Blog this piece will concern the all out attempt, as reported in today’s NYTimes (September 16, 2007) of the Newton School, a pre-K through 8th. grade school in Newark, NJ. to raise its test scores from their most recent abysmal levels. This effort will be led by the Newark Teachers Union in collaboration with the Seton Hall College of Education.

The story is just one of the hundreds, perhaps thousands, of almost identical stories of failing inner city schools all trying, under the gun of NCLB, to raise the achievement of their mostly poor and minority students, and so far with little or no success.

However, it is not this particular one, nor the thousands of other similar reform efforts that interest me. Rather it was the visit to Newton of Newark’s Mayor, Cory A. Booker, and here I cite the Times reporter’s account of his visit:

The Newton faculty members had planned to introduce the “new Newton” to students during a schoolwide assembly in the afternoon. But it was postponed after Mayor Cory A. Booker stopped by as part of a tour of some of the city’s 77 public schools. Mr. Booker bounded from room to room, dispensing $1 bills to students who had mastered New Jersey history (what is the capital?) and politics (who is the governor?).

Then Mr. Booker came up with a stumper, worthy of $5.

“Who is the vice president of America?” the mayor asked a fifth-grade class. “Come on, I know some people want to forget…”

“George Bush?” guessed one boy.

“George Washington?” said another.

“George Washington Carver?” a third chimed in.

Though the mayor prodded the eager students, no one could name the vice president. Finally, Mr. Booker put his money away.

“All right,” he said. “You have a lot to do this school year.”

Now Cory A. Booker is one impressive guy. A B.A. from Stanford where he played football and made the All-Pacific Ten Academic team, a year at Oxford on a Rhodes scholarship, a J.D. degree from Yale Law School in 1997.

Since 1998 Booker has lived in inner city Newark, the last six years in Brick Towers, a notorious public housing project in Newark’s Central Ward. At present he occupies the top unit in a three-story rental on Hawthorne Avenue on Newark’s south side, an area described as "a drug- and gang-plagued neighborhood of boarded-up houses and empty lots."

So what might you have expected from the Mayor in the way of observations and comments during his visit to the Newton School? Certainly not what the reporter describes. Questions like what is the capital of NJ, who is the governor, who is the vice president of the U.S., and with dollar awards for the correct answers.

For this man, whose own education was the very best that our country can provide, there was only this parting comment following the kids’ failure to come up with the right answers to his questions, “All right, you have a lot to do this school year.”

Not that any of this makes any difference in the lives of these kids, these words or any other words from this Mayor. But to tell the kids that such things as knowing the names of state capitals and governors, and probably kings and rivers, is what education is all about, well that may be a misdemeanor if said only once, but surely a crime if said repeatedly.

The Mayor should have talked with the kids about what they did know, because education is, or should be, all about doing something with what you know or what you have. These kids, like all kids are alive and have all sorts of knowledge and all sorts of interests and it is with these that the school ought to begin.

The Mayor might have asked them about things important to them, about the adults in their lives, about the people and actions that they admired, about what they wanted to do with their lives, about what they wanted from the school, all things that concern the kids themselves. Instead of sending them away with the impression that the name of the vice president of the United States was all that important.

Michael Deshaies in this week’s National Review on line brings to our attention the Intercollegiate Studies Institute report on civic literacy in higher education. See also the article in USA Today by Tracey Wong Briggs.

The report was based on an analysis of the answers given (or not given) to some 60 multiple-choice questions (Take the Test) about America’s history, government, free-market economics, and foreign relations. 14,000 randomly chosen freshmen and seniors on 50 college and university campuses took the test.

Of interest (?) was the fact that scores were hardly different on average for the freshmen and seniors taking the test, 52% and 53% respectively. Nor were there significant differences among the colleges, although the least prestigious schools, Rhodes College in Tennessee, Colorado State, and a few others, showed greater gains from the freshman to the senior year than did the most prestigious schools, such as Brown, Georgetown and Yale, where senior scores were even lower than those of the freshmen.

What should we conclude from this, if anything? Deshaies says that it is shocking that seniors at the most elite universities know less even than the (when they were) freshmen.

Deshaies: “This shocking phenomenon we describe as negative learning. Considering that a university education can cost almost $200,000 and an undergraduate, on average, leaves campus nearly $20,000 in debt, students and parents are entitled to more.”

This study, of course, isn’t the first time that we’re told how little our high school graduates know about their own country. That was Diane Ravitch’s and Chester Finn’s message in their 1989 book, “What Do Our 17-Year-Olds Know?” Innumerable other but similar assessments of what our students don’t know have been made before and since. Regularly and predictably these assessments of what many see as the effectiveness (ineffectiveness) of our public schools have led consistently to major national reform efforts, most recently the No Child Left Behind law.

Deshaies says it’s obvious what must be done. We will need a major new reform of the now ineffectual teaching in our schools and colleges of American history and government. He says, that, "one way to improve instruction is to develop academic centers of excellence on campuses to revitalize the teaching of American history, political science, and economics.” (Deshaies himself is the communications director at one of these centers, the Jack Miller Center for the Teaching of America’s Founding Principles.)

Again and again the American public is informed just how little our students know, and how little they have learned, even while in college, of our country’s history and government institutions. Nothing seems to change. We get up and live the same day all over again, just as Phil Connors in the movie, Groundhog Day.

Are we testing the wrong things, and/or teaching things that can’t be taught or that kids have no interest in learning? The test takers usually don’t even ask these questions. Shouldn’t they?

In fact, is it of any importance that more than half of the seniors in the study could not identify the correct century when the first American colony was established at Jamestown, that fewer than that recognized that the line, "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal," was from the Declaration of Independence, that nearly half of all college seniors, did not know that the Federalist Papers were written in support of the ratification of the U.S. Constitution, and finally, that fewer than half of these same seniors could identify the Baath party as the main source of Saddam Hussein’s political support?

Deborah Meier and Florence Miller reviewed, “What Do Our 17-Year-Olds Know?” in The Nation of January 9, 1988. They write, “When Jean Piaget noted that 6-year-olds gave surprisingly ignorant answers to his simple questions, he didn’t rush into print with the information. How interesting, he thought. The answers I expected are not self-evident. Thus began a life’s work of examining children’s ignorance.”

Meier and Miller say that, Ravitch’s and Finn’s view of ignorance is all to familiar and probably fruitless, in that “they miss the vital connection between knowing and not knowing, and because they do so, not knowing is [becomes] failure, or bad schooling–a case in need of a remedy, a cause for alarm, a reason to rush into print.”

And in fact that’s what most educators conclude when they see the results of these general tests of "essential" knowledge, that the schools are bad, that which is sufficient cause for alarm (the Nation at Risk) and cry out for remedy (No Child Left Behind).

However, after experiencing this nonevent for the nth. time isn’t it time that we came to a different conclusion? Meier and Miller are right to say that the ignorance we uncover is perhaps more interesting in itself than in what it may imply about the effectiveness of our schools and school programs. But they don’t go to say or to show why that ignorance is interesting.

Here’s what I think. What kids know at any given point in time, unless it’s what they’ve learned for a test and the point in time is the eve of that test, reflects much more their own interests, friends, their family environment, and most of all their out-of-school activities, what they do with their own time, for only when, as John Dewey told us, kids fully engage themselves in the activity do they learn. And only in that way does what they learn become a part of their general knowledge.

How many high school seniors or college freshmen do you know who are actively engaged in, say, reading the Federalist Papers? I first read them and remembered them when as a college graduate and new teacher I needed them for something that I was interested in. Isn’t that the way we all learn?

As much as we stress the importance of possessing knowledge of America, its history and its institutions, for our becoming, and being, responsible and participating citizens of the Republic, it’s not an importance that we can simply pass on by our words. How often have you made a child feel the importance of something that is important to you simply by your words?

I try doing this all the time with my grandson, and of course it doesn’t work. Just the other day I had been talking about and having him listen to some of my music. Why did I do this? I knew better. In any case at the end of the day my grandson still preferred Kanye West’s “Stronger” to Schubert’s Notturno Adagio In e Flat.

In this sense much teaching is like preaching. Telling kids the way things are and then expecting them to assimilate (your version) of the way things are. The preacher tells his parishioners the way things are and then expects them to change their lives accordingly. It doesn’t work. I’m sure that for many high school students, and college freshmen, the Declaration of Independence, the Federalist Papers, and many other essential pieces of our country’s history, that these “important” topics are more like Schubert’s Notturno than West’s Stronger.

So what is to be done? Well one thing let’s try to test kids on what they know, because with that we can help them. To find out what they don’t know is no help to them or to us. Certainly no one is going to try after the fact of the test failure to make American history and government subjects of high priority during their remaining years of college. An effort of that kind is test prep and is of no lasting value to anyone.

So what is to be done? Yes, find out what they know. Determine what those 14000 college students have learned during their high school and college years, and estimate how much of that learning, probably very little, did come from their classes. We will probably find out that what they had learned most well came from the situations and circumstances over which the school and college authorities had little or no control. Probably no one "taught" them most of the things they know.

Finally, instead of putting students down as being mostly ignorant of so many important bits of our past we might begin to treat them with respect, as knowledgeable people in their own right, as knowing, and knowing how to do, things that are important to them.

We read, in a recent Atlantic article by Olivia Judson, that Sam Bowles, the economist turned evolutionary biologist, has shown that groups of supercooperative, altruistic humans could indeed have wiped out groups of less united folk.

Bowles’s analysis "suggests that individuals who could not conform, or who were disruptive, would have weakened the whole group; any group that failed to drive out such people, or kill them, would have been more likely to be overwhelmed in battle. Conversely, people who fit in—sharing the food they found, joining in hunting, helping to defend the group, and so on—would have given their group a collective advantage, and thus themselves an individual evolutionary advantage."

I thought of the No Excuses school, where students have to conform to the values of the group or not be allowed to remain in the group. Here in Bowles work we find evolutionary precedent for the No Excuses learning environment. The so-called No Excuses schools, such as the MATCH School, Academy of the Pacific Rim, Roxbury Prep, and a number of others, all Commonwealth Charter Schools in Boston, seem to have achieved a definite "collective advantage," at least as measured by results on standardized tests, over other Boston public schools with similar student bodies in regard to economic and ethnic background. Is it because in these schools the disruptive individual is not allowed to remain in the group?

It’s a fact that too many of our schools have allowed the disruptive individual to remain in the classroom and thereby more or less undermine the real learning that might otherwise have gone on. Why is this so? In the name of what do we go on sacrificing the best interests of the group to the "worst" interests of the disruptive individual?

In this regard see two recent letters appearing in Ed Week in response to a Commentary piece by Jonathan Kozol. While explaining the flight of the young teacher from the inner city school Kozol seemed to ignore the effect of the disruptive student attributing the teacher’s flight solely to the influence of No Child Left Behind.

Perhaps this situation, as incomprehensible as it is in many respects, results from  our refusal to turn anyone away from our public school classrooms, seeing this all tolerant and all inclusive attitude as representing a kind of higher morality than one where only those individuals, willing and ready to fully accept the learning conditions of the classroom and school, are allowed in.

For the moment too many otherwise intelligent and thoughtful educators don’t see our undisciplined school environments as a threat to our very survival whereas evolutionary precedent is suggesting that is exactly what they may be.