ParisTampaBlog

Looking for solutions to our country’s problems we go on making the same mistakes, in particular making the same incorrect assumptions as to how things might be changed for the better.

In the Wall Street Journal’s Saturday Essay Steven Brill does exactly this sort of thing in what he has to say about education, assuming as he does that in order to improve our schools it will be enough to improve the quality of our teachers, not “super teachers,” just better teachers.

He may be correct that there are not now enough good teachers out there (are there enough good anything?), but he is wrong to assume that any number of good teachers would be enough to turn things around in our failing, or near failing public schools.

He does correctly recognize that the Charter public schools, in spite of some extraordinary successes, such as we find in the so-named No Excuses Schools — KIPP, Achievement First, Cristo Rey, MATCH and others, — are not by themselves enough to turn things around for all.

At present there are just 5000 Charters, vs. over 100,000 traditional schools, or 1 in 20, and there are just 72,000 charter school teachers vs 3.3 million, or about 1 in 50.

Charter Schools, Brill does say, in the long struggle to improve American schools, will lead us to the right place only if we can figure out at the same time a realistic way to motivate and enable the tens, hundreds of thousands of less-than-extraordinary rank and file teachers who are out there.

Now does anyone think that that’s about to happen? I don’t think so. That will never happen no matter what we do. Even doubling teacher salaries will not make the “less-than-extraordinary” extraordinary. This is not the way we change things for the better, nor is it the way people are.

Important changes for the better, if not in our schools, in the education of our children (these are not the same thing) will only come about if students, not just teachers, become motivated, interested, accountable, all of which adjectives do not at present describe hundreds of thousands of the several million students attending our public schools.

Instead of talking about good and bad teachers, we ought to be talking about the motivated, too few, and unmotivated, too many, students themselves.

KIPP’s Dave Levin and the “Saturday Essay’s” Steven Brill both recognize that the heavy teacher load in the charter schools is not sustainable in the long run, and that the many excellent teachers will in large numbers leave after only a few years, this being also true for those doing Teach for America, wanting understandably to have a life of their own.

But the principal mistaken assumption that both Brill and Levin make is that teachers do have the power to change the schools, to grow the achievement of their kids, that through long days, long evenings, often weekends and vacations on the job, that they can make a significant difference in what and how kids learn.

A difference, perhaps, but not significant, and nothing at all compared with what the kids can/could do for themselves. In fact, our major change or reform efforts ought to be directed at the kids, at raising their interest and motivation levels to the point where they start to learn not for us but for themselves.

A good teacher may very well direct all his or her efforts at raising the student’s own desire to learn. But, and this is the critical point, even the good teacher (not to mention the good parent) may not be anywhere near enough to bring this about.

So the mistake is to assume that solutions to our failing public schools can be imposed on the schools, and on the children, from without. Brill’s answer to improve the schools by improving the teachers is not enough for it’s just not true that it takes first of all a good teacher for children to learn, or that with a bad teacher children won’t learn.

A student’s real learning is most often a world apart from both teacher and classroom.

We make a similar mistake in regard to our thinking about health care. Here also we look to impose good health solutions on people, —more health insurance, for example, more access to the latest and costliest drugs and medical technology, more visits to doctors and such. No more than for students’ learning can this, good health, be imposed by our efforts from without.

For just as children will not learn until they hold themselves accountable, responsible for their own learning, people will not experience good health until they themselves become the principal actor in the process, until they take on the principal responsibility for caring for themselves.

Good health does not follow so much from the actions of doctors, from hospital stays, no matter how important these might be in particular, in emergency situations, but from people’s own actions, their own choices, respecting how they will live, what they will eat, how they will exercise their minds and bodies etc.

And as I believe I’ve said many times in earlier Blogs both health care and education ought to start with the consumers of both and with their choices.

I happened earlier today to read Todd Clever’s words when speaking of his United States rugby team. He says:

“The biggest thing in rugby is that everybody plays offense and defense. It’s a team sport with no timeouts, and when things get tough, you have to work it out on the field. It’s not about the coaches. It’s about the players.”

I would say that the biggest thing in education is that the students themselves both learn and teach. That learning has to go on all the time. That there are no timeouts. And that when things get tough the students have to work things out for themselves, wherever they may be.

For just as rugby is about the players, not about the coaches, so education is not about the teachers. Education is about the students.

T. S. Eliot in a brief, 1932 essay, Modern Education and the Classics, had this to say about education:

“Questions of education are frequently discussed as if they bore no relation to the social system in which and for which the education is carried on. This is one of the commonest reasons for the unsatisfactoriness of the answers. It is only within a particular social system that a system of education has any meaning. If education today seems to deteriorate, if it seems to become more and more chaotic and meaningless, it is primarily because we have no settled and satisfactory arrangement of society, and because we have  both vague and diverse opinions about the kind of society we want. Education is a subject which cannot be discussed in a void: our questions raise other questions, social, economic, financial, political. And the bearings are on more ultimate problems even than these: to know what we want in general, we must derive our theory of education from our philosophy of life….”

Educators are still of Eliot’s, I believe, mistaken persuasion, that it is only within a particular social system that a system of education has any meaning, and that questions of education need to be discussed in relation to that social system. For Eliot in 1932 Christianity was losing its hold on the West and as a result education was losing its heart and center.

Perhaps because the fathers’ world does become the world of the sons, the educators assume that the sons should be taught the fathers’ world. And that the son’s school should be like that of the father, as it has in fact been for some 100 years or more.

There may have been times in history that this was indeed the case, when it was enough that the children learned what their fathers knew.

Think of hunter-gatherers (tens of thousands of years during which fathers hunted and mothers gathered), the Zhou Dynasty in China (800 years and 37 emperors), the Roman Empire and the subsequent Christian Europe (some 1500 years preceding the modern era), although this latter period probably had much of the chaos of our own times.

In these earlier civilizations education may have been nothing more than the passing on of the same knowledge and skills through hundreds of generations, much like successive generations of salmon “learning” to return upstream to spawn and die, doing this over and over again, with nary a thought as to what they were doing, for millions of years.

Eliot probably would have liked to bring his children (the children of his time, anyway, of whom I was one) into a Christian civilization, to teach them the tenets of that civilization in school, but that was not possible in 1932, nor is it possible today. That’s no longer the way things are.

Eliot is probably right in that when there is no widely accepted social system there can be no widely accepted system of education. For how then does one answer the question, —education for what— when the what is evolving and changing? One can’t.

But should there ever be, among us, one widely accepted social system, or widely accepted system of education?

The best we’ve come up with in recent times may have been one derived in good part from the tenets of liberal democracy. That the fathers pass on the ideas of Thomas Jefferson, the other founding fathers, John Locke, the Declaration of Independence and all that, to their sons.

But even these men and ideas are aggressively opposed by large numbers of peoples throughout the world. And the sons know this and can no longer blindly accept the word, let alone the world of their fathers.

We need rather to accept that there can be no single system of education, just as there can be no single religion or social system. Our world is of multiple persuasions, is constantly changing, now more than ever, and right before our eyes.

We need to accept the very chaos of our world, the chaos that Eliot rejects. For things, in chaos, if you want to call it that, are evolving too rapidly for fathers to know enough to teach their sons.

And in fact fathers may even learn as much from their sons, as their sons from them. For with their eyes open fathers will see their sons realizing their own and different, and up until then unknown potential, and they will experience the new along with their sons.

What we can say about education is that it should be thoroughly open ended, and that it has to allow space for individual children to grow and develop their own different and particular talents. The social system can no longer be just one. Children are too different for that.

This is not new, but our realization of this may be new.

Education should never again be in the business of subjecting the new and promising talents of the young to the stifling and closed world of the old, as was the case, perhaps of necessity, with the hunter gatherers, the Zhou dynasty, Eliot’s own beloved Christian Middle Ages, and now even the world of our own fathers and mothers.

The thoughts below occurred to me after reading Aaron Smith, director of knowledge management for YES Prep Charter Schools in Houston, Texas. He writes in the von Mises Blog: “What our system of education needs is simple: a recognition that children, parents, and educators are diverse and should be treated as individuals.”

It has occurred to many, of whom I’ve read many, that we have organized our educational system much as the Russian communists organized Soviet society in the first decades of the 20th.c., allowing little or no place for the individual to choose how he would live.

It was best, it was thought then, to sacrifice the individual to what was seen as a greater good, the structure of a society as a whole, and of which the individual was only a tiny part. People’s choices were not theirs to make but were to be made for them, just as now students in our schools are pretty much told what and how they should learn.

This is a kind of socialism. Capitalism of course is not organized in this manner. In a free market society important choices, regarding place of residence, work, family, as well as purchases and acquisitions of all manner of material and spiritual goods and services are for the most part left up to the decisions of individual citizens.

However in our mostly capitalistic society education took a different route, and the market economies of the West in regard to education went the way of the communist countries of the East, deciding no less than they that young people were just not able to make the best choices for themselves in regard to their education. So the choices are made for them, resulting too often on their part, in a loss of interest in schooling and education.

Our system of public schooling has to a considerable degree simply failed to educate large numbers of children. For in our system little or no place is given to the great differences among children, differences no less great than those among adults.

School, instead of having been made a rich and vast opportunity to develop one’s own particular interests and talents, has become for many, and in particular for those most in need of something else, a closed room with little opportunity other than to follow instructions, to take what is given them (or else!).

As it could have been expected there were some children who responded well even to this, “closed shop,” as it were. These were the so-called “good students,” those who helped to make even this inadequate system survive, if not work.

Some others, the so-called gifted and talented, being able to do what was expected of them, what they were told to do, with little or no effort, would often on their own initiative do much more on their own, well outside the school program, thereby developing by their own efforts their own exceptional talents.

Most in the closed room, however, were not “good students,” were not exceptionally talented. And of these many failed and many rebelled, with many of the latter dropping out entirely as they approached driving, voting, and military service ages.

The educators have always known that their own system was not working to everyone’s benefit, or have known it was in need of reform, almost from the beginning.

The result has been an endless series of reforms, begun as long ago as Horace Mann’s first common now public school in the mid 19th. c. and continuing right up until the present time with the No Child Left Behind Law of Teddy Kennedy and George Bush (neither one of whom, by the way, knew much about schooling or education, his own or the country’s).

The reforms of course have utterly failed to improve our educational system in any substantial way or manner. What is remarkable is that in spite of the continued failures of their reforms the professional educators have never ceased to think that the system could be reformed. Long experience ought to have taught them differently.

Within hardly more than a single generation’s experience of their “new world” the Russian communists realized that a state owned and managed economy would not satisfy their people’s needs and wishes. Whereas our educators have still not, after some six generations of trying, realized that a publicly owned and managed educational system will continue to fail to educate the majority of the children.

What is to be done? Nobel Prize winning economist Milton Friedman argued for the modern concept of vouchers in the 1950s, stating that competition would improve schools and cost efficiency. For in fact education is no less a good, a service than anything else, and is best distributed, like any good or service, by a pricing system that responds to the buyer’s own wants, not to what some “authority” figure might want for him.

It’s not hard to see that the excellence of, say, our electrical appliances, our technology, our cars and now fast trains, comes entirely from consumers making their own particular wants and demands known to the producers. Why don’t the educators see that quality education will result from students and parents being able to choose themselves the nature of that education?

The market makes available countless products among which consumers may freely choose. In regard to educational goods and services there is nothing comparable. Why not? There are many different private and excellent educational resources, but because of the cost these are not available to most.

For most, for those without the ability to pay for a private education, there is only the public school and its standardized curriculum, pretty much the same today as it was over 100 years ago. Is it any wonder that few kids in this system love and that many hate school? It’s a wonder, rather, that so few of them have rebelled.

Perhaps this failure to rebel and demand what is theirs comes in good part because of the mystery surrounding the word education. Too many people, and that feeling is caught by the children, feel they are ill-equipped to choose how their children should learn. Whereas in regard to motor vehicles, electrical appliances, the latest technological device, and a myriad other products they wouldn’t think of having someone make choices for them.

People are generally submissive of their own abilities to make good choices for their children, and they too readily yield to the opinions and choices of the experts. For example they are told that math is all important, that two years of algebra, a year of geometry, and a year of pre-calculus are necessary if they would have their child go on to college.

But is this so? Should four years of math in high school be the lot of everyone? The parents don’t, as a rule, question this determination, in spite of what they have seen of their child’s long struggle with, long dislike for the subject.

The market for educational goods and services ought to be no less extensive than the market for all other goods. A simple step, like giving to parents vouchers as recommended by Friedman, vouchers at least as large as the per student cost of public schooling, would cause thousands of new educational opportunities to suddenly appear, responding to and reflecting the huge differences there are among the hundreds of thousands of children now attending our monolithic public school.

There are those who are worried that children and parents, if left on their own, would make the wrong choices, that they wouldn’t by their own free choices of what and how to learn acquire “our” values.

But do they now, in our schools, acquire our values, or at least any single set of values that we would want for them? Of course not. Virtue can’t be taught and we should get out of the business of trying to do so and instead teach those skills and knowledge that the students themselves want to possess. For these are the only ones they will learn anyway.

As much as there are many who want to think so, it is never from our schools that our young people get their beliefs, other perhaps than a belief that school itself is a bummer.

In fact, who has ever been turned into a responsible, and contributing member of the community by attending a public school? Like virtue democratic values can not be taught, and certainly not in the closed classroom. In fact, democratic values may result much more from one’s having the freedom to choose how and what one learns than not.

If, for example, someone wants to spend a year learning to play the guitar (or fish as at the Sudbury Valley School) shouldn’t he be allowed and helped to do so, not told that reading, writing and mathematics come first, with guitar (and fishing) being relegated to free time.

But this kid who so wants to play the guitar knows well from his own experience that adults themselves give much more time to music than to history and literature. Why shouldn’t he do the same, and thereby ready himself for a life of music, much more likely than one of history or algebra?

What probably accounts most for the long survival of our public school system is that kids in spite of the system spend most of their time outside, and even inside school, doing their own things, making their own choices, certainly not doing what they’re told to do.

Therefore, why don’t we make it the business of our schools to help them to do their own thing, instead of as now making them do our thing? Isn’t it obvious by now, after nearly 200 years, that this system hasn’t worked to most children’s benefit?

Any number of people, and not only parents but people with know how, education writers and researchers, proponents of school reform, all sorts of people, including for a long time (although not any more) myself, are convinced that the single most important variable in the equation to improve the public schools (private schools too, but here the need is much less) is the teacher, ——for the better the teacher(s), the better the school. It may be as simple as that.

This widespread opinion ought not to surprise us. That the excellence, or lack of excellence, of any vocation, profession or other endeavor, be it on theater boards during a ballet performance, in a classroom during a lesson, or elsewhere, stems primarily from the excellence of the principal players, be they dancers, teachers or other well versed practitioners of an art.

Now those who are working to improve the schools must most certainly know and understand this, that the teacher is at, or is, the vital center of the school.

But rather than working together to improve the performance and quality of our teachers, the teachers themselves and their unions, as well as those others, the reformers of the public schools, have instead aligned themselves into opposing camps, devoting much of their time and effort to destroying the battle field positions of their opponents, rather than simply coming together and cooperating in a joint effort to improve our schools, and to do so by improving the quality of the teaching.

Those on the one side, the teachers and most especially their union representatives, are all about supporting and protecting their own jobs, in particular with constant lobbying efforts to improve the conditions, circumstances, and atmosphere of the schools, and along with this raising teacher salaries and job benefits.

Those on the other side, the reformers, would have the latter, teacher salaries and job benefits, depend on student performance, and in particular on student test results. For according to the reformers student learning, at least as measured by written tests, not the teacher’s welfare important as that is, should be what school is most about.

And in fact these reformers would hold teachers no less accountable for their students’ success, or failure, than professional ball players, surgeons, cabinet makers, and others, are held accountable for the measured success, or lack thereof, of their own performances while on the job.

Now I would say that both positions are not unreasonable. For both, increasing teacher salaries etc., as well as holding the teacher accountable for the result of his or her efforts in the classroom, make perfect sense as strategies to improve the schools. And it shouldn’t surprise us that both positions have their legions of dedicated defenders.

Then why am I not in the present circumstances hopeful that our public schools will improve as the result of the efforts of both teachers and reformers, those of the unions protecting their teachers and the status quo, and those of the reformers making teachers, and their students accountable. After all they would both improve the teaching, which does seem to be the heart of the school.

I’m not hopeful for a number of reasons, most of all because students learning (and being tested is only one, and maybe not the most significant part of their learning) and not teachers teaching should be the heart of the school. And in all these efforts it’s not, in spite of the increased importance the reformers and the No Child Left Behind Law give to testing, that which is only one, and not the most important measure of what has, or has not been learned.

But first let me make a couple of observations. I assume, for example, not unreasonably I hope, that the main goal of our public schools is, rightly or wrongly, to get kids ready for college. I assume also that the teachers who do this best, who could probably today meet accountability standards, share for the most part a number of characteristics including:

average or better than average ACT or SAT Composite and English scores;
successful attendance and graduation from a selective four year college;
passage on first attempt of proficiency tests in their subject matters;
at least four years of teaching experience;

I assume also that at the present time, those entering the teaching profession, especially those coming from the schools of education, do not, in too many cases, possess these and other similar qualifications. For all too often I read such as the following:

“In summary, we have found that rigorous research indicates that verbal ability and content knowledge are the most important attributes of highly qualified teachers… there is little evidence that education school course work leads to improved student achievement [in these areas]. Furthermore, today’s certification system discourages some of the most talented candidates from entering the profession [therefore] allowing too many poorly qualified individuals to teach.”  (from the Secretary of Education’s first (2002) annual report on teacher quality)

Now a major problem, if not the major problem with our schools may not be what the teachers and the reformers are talking about but the fact that too many poorly qualified individuals are now teaching in our public schools. But this observation is, of course, a kind of third rail, and no one, at least among teachers and school reformers, is talking much about it.

We need to look afresh at the fact that too many kids are not learning in school. And at the real problem which may not so much be the teacher as that we may be asking too much of the teacher. For good, let alone great teaching may not be within the grasp of everyone who has chosen that career. And we should stop acting as if it were.

Perhaps many of our teachers, perhaps a majority of them are never going to be fully up to the task placed upon them. Perhaps all the unions’ protective steps in their behalf, as well as the initiatives of the reformers in their regard are not going to substantially change this situation.

Teaching is not so much a job as an art, or should be, and should be treated as such. We are wrong to treat teaching as a job that with a lot of help anyone can learn to perform adequately. The failure of our schools is telling us, screaming at us that this is not so. For we can no more make good and great teachers than good and great musicians, chess players, and dancers.

And to add immeasurably to the difficulty, if not impossibility of what we are trying to do we have the situation that our best and brightest young people, those who more than satisfy the criteria listed above, are not choosing a career in public school teaching. If they did we would certainly have more good and great teachers than we have now, although still probably not nearly enough.

What are we to do? First and foremost we have to restructure the role of the teacher in the children’s learning. The picture, and for most of us the memory we have of school, is of a teacher in a classroom full of kids of more or less the same age. This picture of school has to change for at the present time this kind of school is no longer working effectively for everyone.

This idea of school may have worked well enough at the time of the one room school house, and also during the 100 years or more when our public school classrooms were staffed by many of the “best and brightest” of our women, to whom during this time other more lucrative careers were not open.

Now, however, there are clearly not enough supermen and superwomen to meet the extraordinarily challenging demands of the innercity classrooms of some 20 to 30 kids, each with widely varying needs and interests. We must come up with other ways for children, and especially for the disadvantaged children of our inner city schools, to learn. We must come up with a new idea of school.

And for this to happen the present teachers and teacher unions will need to work with the reformers, and they will need to agree that the present model does not work, and that additional reform initiatives similar to those of the past will not be enough. A radical restructuring will be necessary.

I believe that there are any number of ways that kids can learn more efficiently and more effectively than they are at the present time. There are any number of programs that could show us the way. But we will have to stop asking more of the teachers than they can possibly do, and begin to do more of the things that do work for kids.

At present too many are teaching without themselves being fluent in the matter being taught, be it science, mathematics, history or literature, those subjects at the core of the college preparatory curriculum. The kids see it, that the teacher doesn’t “speak the language” he would have them learn, and are bored and turned off. We could change this.

It’s no secret that those activities where students seem to learn the most, and are the most turned on, are activities (and subjects) that are led by people who are themselves highly qualified, “fluent” as it were —ball coaches, band leaders, theater arts and dance directors, and, although less often, speakers of other languages. Who ever complains that the kids involved in these activities are not learning?

There is so much to say about all of this. But to bring all of this to a conclusion of sorts let me just observe that as long as mathematicians, scientists, historians, writers et al. are not, as is mostly the case now, in the schools and teaching, we must come up with some other way (than by means of a “substitute teacher” who is not himself mathematician, scientist, historian, or writer) of passing these important skills and knowledge on to our kids.