The first mistakes are the hardest to undo.
Isn’t it true that any number of the troubled situations we find ourselves in are the result of the bad decisions we made to begin with. Our choice of a partner in marriage. Vietnam and then Iraq, from our bad decisions to go to war without good cause. Huge government deficits now threatening our children’s future, from the bad decisions to fund defense and entitlement programs for which we didn’t have sufficient funds.
Our public school system is a prime case. This system has never worked to everyone’s satisfaction. From the beginning there have been constant attempts to reform it, even to do away with it all together.
But the system has successfully resisted one reform after another and is still with us pretty much as it was in the beginning, still thoroughly inadequate to the task that it had early on set for itself of educating everyone to the level of knowledgeable and responsible citizens of the republic.
What were those mistakes that we made in the beginning that account now for the failures of too many of our public schools to educate? Let me say right away that there have been successes. By no means have all of our schools failed. Our system of public schools has much to be proud of. It has provided great career opportunities for many children, especially those already favored by their family circumstances, and/or by superior aptitude or talent or both.
But at the same time our system of public schools has failed too many, and this failure, I believe, can be traced to three conceptual mistakes that were made at the beginning, errors that are no less with us today, maybe even more so, than they were in the time of Horace Mann some 150 years ago.
What were these three mistakes? First, the inherent differences among children, among learners, were not sufficiently recognized. Children were lumped together then as they still are, primarily by age. Differences in child development, different aptitudes and talents, multiple intelligences were mostly ignored. As a result there was little or no choice.
Second, the position of the teacher was not sufficiently elevated to start with, nor adequately compensated. From the beginning the great importance of medical doctors, but not that of the teachers of young children was recognized. Would it have been, for the great benefit of the entire country, the other way around. And teaching being just about the most demanding profession there is, it was not surprising given the few rewards that the best and brightest would not go into teaching, or if they did would not remain there.
Third, not enough attention was given to the mixing together of children of different races and classes and ethnic origins with the result that schools followed the easier path and became segregated, first of all in regard to race when blacks and native Americans were totally left out of the mix. And second in regard to class, this segregation coming somewhat later but today full blown, reflecting an expanding under- or lowerclass of people, whose means never permitted them to move into the communities of their more affluent fellow citizens.
So three mistakes, or three failures of vision — the failure to recognize the need, the necessity of educational choices, the failure to acknowledge the worth and fundamental importance of the classroom teacher, the failure to realize just how much the disadvantaged and segregated communities where too many of the students lived would unfavaorably impact the work in the classrooms.
The unforeseen and certainly unintended consequences of these failures of vision are still very much with us. Just this past week a Report issued by Mass Inc., Incomplete Grade: Massachusetts Education Reform at 15, contained a number of recommended reforms, all but one of which are addressing problems and failures of the public schools in Massachusetts that may be traced directly back to these three errors of vision.
The Mass Inc. recommendations:
(Regarding the first mistake) More recognition of differences and expansion of student choices:
• Raise the state cap on charter schools and consider allowing effective charter schools to operate additional schools
• Expand the capacity of effective vocational-technical schools
• Strengthen and expand policies to consistently assess students in early grades and provide intervention
• Promote policies that encourage longer school days for high poverty schools and create a targeted initiative around an expanded school year
(Regarding the second) More recognition of the importance of the teacher:
• Create policies that place the most effective teachers in high-poverty schools
• Reward teachers who are shown to be more effective in increasing student achievement
(Regarding the third) Less separation of kids in regard to class (so that where they live becomes less important, since there is little chance of anyone changing that):
• Create incentives for policies that promote socioeconomic integration
So we do know, and we probably have for a long time known, what we need to do in order to undue our earlier mistakes. But what are the probabilities that the Mass Inc. recommendations will be followed?
Probably not great, if at all. Why? Because the opposition to changes of this kind is still very much in force.
Choice (from the coming into play of a huge variety of learning environments) would spell the end of the now all single school learning environment, and along with it the influence of the teacher unions.
Rewarding the teacher in respect to his or her performance would be resisted by the teacher organizations because in their view all teachers are equal and should have the same rewards, based not on merit or achievement, but on time and seniority.
Finally, integration of the suburban neighborhoods where the middle class now for the most part lives would be impossible. The suburban and middle class parents, many of whom have moved out of the cities to leave far behind them the children of what is fast becoming an all American underclass, would not even consider it.
And it is with these children that our failure to educate is most detrimental to their futures. We fail with others too, but they survive, because of such things as where they live, whom they know, and in most case the presence of what they need to move on. It is these children all together who now bear the consequences of our original mistakes of vision, mistakes that can’t be undone, and from which we just can’t walk away as we did in Vietnam and as we are about to do in Iraq, and begin again.
