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Most of our disagreements over the schools, as, for example, the current sharply opposed reactions to the film, Waiting for Superman, would be softened, if not made to disappear entirely, if we could just agree on a few fundamental truths about the schools, an agreement which need not, in my opinion, be super hard to reach.

And what might be fundamental truths about the schools on which we could agree?

Here’s one: A good number of our schools are doing their job well, turning out about a million graduates a year who will go on to college and end up with satisfactory and productive positions in society, thereby contributing substantially to the country’s on-going leadership role in the world. (And interesting question, why aren’t we talking more about our school successes, of which there are many?)

What critics of the schools never seem to take into account is the vastness of the subject matter. There are nearly 100,000 public schools in the country, and there are few conclusions that could be drawn about all of them, or indeed more than just a few of them.

Does anyone even know how many of these schools are successful? Probably not. And we can’t say because most schools, in spite of the No Child Left Behind law, that would label them one or the other, by, say, a determination of adequate yearly progress or not, will always have plenty of individual student successes and individual failures, defying their being placed in one or the other category of failing or successful schools.

Here’s another truth about the schools.  A sizable number of them, particularly of those located in our inner cities and with large impoverished, otherwise disadvantaged, and probably minority student bodies, are not doing well and are often grouped together as failing schools. I don’t think that anyone denies that this is the case, although there will be almost as many prescriptions for dealing with it as there are reformers.

Actually, the myriad, critical voices of the reformers, with so much to say about how things should be done differently, often overlook that the failing schools may be doing their “job” quite well given the circumstances of their students’ lives.

But it’s still the case that whatever they’re doing is clearly not enough for their students, whose needs probably go far beyond the capabilities of the schools alone to provide for them. Although I don’t have a number for the failures I would expect that the school success stories far outnumber them. And most of all we shouldn’t take the failed school environments as being most representative of all our schools.

These first two truths about the schools, the huge number of them and the relatively small number that are failing their students, ought most of all keep us from making global declarations about the condition of the schools, for they probably represent, in their totality, more conditions than you could ever imagine.

We ought to cease applying single descriptive adjectives to all 100,000 individual school environments. It can’t be done and the now much too prevailing global discussion of the condition of our schools ought to be taken off the table.

We should rather be talking about particular schools, particular successes and failures, and about what can be done to grow the successful school environments and shrink the number of failures.

I have two more fundamental truths to mention. The third one I arrive at by trying to answer the question — what is the most important single ingredient in the mix making up a successful school environment?

And the answer most often given is teachers. Schools? why it’s the teachers, stupid. But the teachers themselves, might say no, it’s not us, but the money, stupid. And the teachers say this not necessarily because they’re interested in more money for themselves (although if they’re any good they probably are).

Rather the teachers more than anyone else can see on a daily basis all that could be done, educationally, when the money is plentiful, as, say at a Phillips Academy or a Sidwell Friends School where Malia and Sasha are students.

Well my answer to the question about the principal ingredient in the mix is not the teachers nor the money, but the students themselves, and in particular the level of student motivation, the students’ readiness for learning, that which in the best cases they bring to school with them.

And if this is true, that it’s the motivation, stupid, (and who would deny it?) all our reform efforts, all our discussions about the schools and how we might improve the education of our children, ought to be zeroed in on how to start and then grow student motivation. Most children have it at the start but then lose it by 4th or 5th grade. We’ve known this forever but have failed also forever to stop the loss.

I have for now just one more “fundamental truth” about the schools. And I’m sure that this one will be by far the most controversial of all. And I truly expect not to obtain agreement from my readers. Here is, for this posting anyway, my fourth and last truth.

The schools are terribly mistaken to give so much attention (for many liberals this is almost the raison d’être of the schools) to “teaching” citizenship. I say this even when I’d be the first to admit that good citizenship, with all that this signifies for all of us, may be the ultimate virtue to be cherished and protected by the citizens of a liberal democracy.

So why are the schools mistaken about this? Well, because virtue, even in the more down-to-earth form of good citizenship, can’t be taught. And we’ve probably known this, at least since the time of Plato and his teacher, Socrates.

Instead of trying to make good citizens that which can take up more school time than the teaching of reading and writing, let alone art and music, the schools ought to limit themselves to what in fact we pay them to do with our taxes, to teaching the skills we have learned ourselves, perhaps in school, and the knowledge we have acquired, some of it in school.

This is hard enough and when we fail to do this, and “graduate” 18 year olds possessing verbal and math proficiency levels of 13 and 14 year olds, or less, we ought to own up to our failure and go into rehab.  That which will mean spending a lot of time refashioning and thereby improving our too often less than satisfactory attempts to transfer skills and knowledge, and a lot less time talking “at the kids,” about life and country and what it means to be a good citizen etc., all those vitally important things for our democracy that they won’t learn in school but only in their own time and in their own lived lives and through their own experiences.

I can show you a school that transfers successfully a knowledge of the calculus, the ability to write, how to play a musical instrument, dance moves etc. Can you show me a school that transfers successfully even a part, let alone the  whole, of the behavior that makes up a good citizen? I don’t think so.

Now from all this what might we say about the film, Waiting for Superman? Clearly the film is mostly taken up with my second fundamental truth above. And the film does persuasively show us that at least a small segment of our disadvantaged, impoverished, and minority inner city youth can be encouraged to abandon all their “excuses,” all those reasons why they can’t learn, at the door usually of a charter public school, and begin to take on themselves the principal responsibility for their learning.

What the film is not is a reasoned critique of our public schools. For only the failing schools I mention are the subject, and there are only a relatively few of these even mentioned in the film. The vast majority of the 100,000 or so public schools are left out entirely.

The mistake, made first by the producer and subsequently by the viewers, was to foster the false impression that the subject matter addressed in the film was public school education. It’s not, or at most as I hope I have shown, only in small part.

In my earlier Blog I said that if Diane Ravitch had read George Santayana’s Reason in Common Sense she wouldn’t have written her most recent book, The Death and Life of the American School System. Here is why I said that.

Santayana in the passage quoted, says this: Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement.

Isn’t this, in just two sentences, what Ravitch took 11 chapters and some 300 pages to say? Santayana’s words suggest that the schools will improve if we retain, or hold onto what’s there already (the good within them?). For too many reforms (changes) mean too little retention, or attention to what’s there. Too many reforms mean going in too many directions at once, and as a result going nowhere at all, which, as Ravitch says, has been the dismal outcome of our seemingly endless series of school reform movements up until now.

In my lifetime, meaning the 77 years that I have lived, what has changed the most, and what the least? Clearly what has changed the most are the new skills that I have needed to acquire, from one year to the next, if not from one day to another, in order to fully benefit from the constant stream of technological marvels that man’s scientific and inventive genius has placed at my and everyone’s disposal, the world wide web or internet being the latest and perhaps greatest of these.

What has changed the least is everything else, including religion, human relations, relations between countries, between citizens of one country, relations between husband and wife, brother and sister, and in regard to the future and therefore perhaps most important of all, how we educate the young. For in our thinking about, and in particular our practice of education, we have made little or no progress since the time of the Greeks. Indeed, one might say that for the most part we are simply failing to educate our young people.

That is if education is more than acquiring specialized knowledge and particular skills. For in regard to these we are probably doing well enough. Enough young people, probably only a minority since college graduates make up just a quarter of our country’s adult population, are graduating from our schools with the knowledge and skills necessary to keep the economy and the country running well enough.

But our schools have never been even close to becoming what they were intended to be, incubators of well read, sensitive, and thoughtful young people who would go on to become good citizens and life long learners themselves, insuring in their turn not just the survival but the flourishing of their land and people.

Virtue, in other words, has found little or no place in our children’s school curricula. Furthermore virtue is no more to be found among our school graduates than among those who have dropped out along the way.

So in my lifetime a good candidate for what has changed the least is education. This is ironic in that what has changed the most is all that we have learned, although not in schools and mostly from scientists, about ourselves and about the world. Ironic because whereas education ought to have reflected the huge changes in our knowledge of the world it has continued in its set ways as if nothing had changed.

We still have the room full of kids, of the same age and equally ignorant, being talked at by the teacher hardly less ignorant than her students given the impossibility of her knowing more than a tiny, tiny fraction of what there is out there to know about whatever her subject may be. This is the way things were when I was in public elementary school myself in the 1930s, and it’s the way things are for my grandchildren today.

Reforms are meant to change things. Given the endless series of reforms that our public schools have been subject to during my lifetime the schools ought to be different today, and much better than they were. But they are no different and probably much worse, although there’s some justification for the latter, for their having failed to live up to Horace Mann’s promise.

For the schools today are pretending to prepare everyone for college, an impossible if admirable task. This accounts most of all for the all too familiar atmosphere of failure present in the schools in our large cities, those schools that are attended for the most part by an impoverished and usually minority youth population.

When I was a child only a small minority of the youth population was expected to go on to college and those who did, remaining in school through high school, were consequently a much more academically select group than those who are kept often unwillingly in school today.

One school reform, often mentioned and talked about, also throughout my lifetime, might have brought real changes. But as in so many respects our society seems unable to make changes to the way it has done things in the past. This is the way it was when I was a kid. This is the way it should be now. And most of all the people in charge of things are well paid and secure and want to go on being in charge, do nothing that might put what they have at risk.

Government organizations and structures, no longer dependent on the vote or the will of the people for their existence, the U.S. Postoffice, for example, the Defense Department, the Entitlement programs such as Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and the many others, are all in need of basic reforms, but so far have resisted change.

The one school reform, still talked about, and still capable, perhaps even in my lifetime, of replacing a failed system of schooling with a system of education where children learn, is one that removes the central administrative bureaucracy from the running of our schools and turns all decision making authority over to the parents and children.

This just one necessary reform is that parents and children choose their schools, and doing so decide what they want from their schools. Then, as soon as they do this, schools reflecting their likings and interests will begin to appear. In other words schooling needs only to be returned to the market place (where it was at one time) in order to again be consequential in the lives of children.

As soon as the sending of packages was no longer the sole right and responsibility of the U.S. Postal Service many more packages were sent, more cheaply and more quickly. Similarly the education of our children ought not to be the sole right and responsibility of teachers and administrators and school boards. If that were to happen, if our one reform were to take place, children, through their own efforts, might begin to learn.

The money for doing this is already available. Through our taxes we are already providing all children with a “free” education at least up to and through high school. Whatever we are paying now for our children’s schooling, say $9,000, would be made available to the parents to be used for the school of their choice. If it’s their money to spend they’ll start to take much greater interest in the product they are buying.

To improve the schools ought to be no different from the way we improve our cars and computers. You do what the people want, you don’t give them what you think they should have.

When parents are customers they will flock to those schools that do best for their children, and the good schools will improve, and the bad schools, unlike at present, will disappear. The schools will begin to reflect, as they haven’t up until now in my lifetime and as they should, the interests and abilities of the students.

At the present time these interests and abilities are pretty much left out of the considerations of the teachers and administrators as they prepare for the new school year, the result being that they lose probably a majority of their students from day one.

As a result of this reform the schools will become more diverse than ever before. There will be music and art schools, sports academies, many more vocational schools than there are now, language schools, and many others that we can’t even imagine. The traditional college preparatory program will still be available, but this program will become, as it should be, just one among many.

Listening to the interests and abilities of the students, and allowing the parents the power to choose, this will permit and encourage “a thousand flowers to bloom.”

In February of 2006 David Berliner told the American Association of School Administrators Federal Relations luncheon that the 600 pound gorilla sitting in the nation’s classrooms and making it difficult (if not impossible) for schools to do their job was poverty.

Many, especially those on the political Left, believe this. These reformers would address the failure of many inner city public schools to educate by making available to the impoverished communities where these children live many more of the resources and advantages that suburban children generally enjoy naturally. In other words, these people say that if you would have poor children learn look first to eliminating the presence of poverty, that 600 pound gorilla in the classroom.

And there are others, those on the political Right, who see poverty, not as a reason, but as an excuse for not learning. These “no excuses” people (from the book, No Excuses: Closing the Racial Gap in Learning, by Abigail Thernstrom and Stephan Thernstrom) affirm that proper classroom procedures and discipline, high expectations of students and teachers, accountability etc. can assure that learning will take place no matter the gorilla’s presence.

And of course there are those who would do both, eliminate the impoverished and disadvantaged living conditions that the children bring with them to school, and also make high demands of the students and teachers in the classroom.

Richard Rothstein of the Economic Policy Institute has called for this approach, what he describes as a “Broader, Bolder Approach,” insisting that schools alone are not enough, that they need lots of help, such as better and expanded health care including family counseling services, schools for parents etc. as well as longer school days with afterschool programs, summer sessions for the students, and more and better early childhood initiatives.

But there is another elephant or 800 pound gorilla in the classroom, and no one is talking about this one. This is segregation which is back and in force. Too often our inner city classrooms are segregated in regard to both race and class. Even the best “no excuses” schools, the KIPP schools and others, those schools that are raising test scores and almost eliminating thereby the test score gap between inner city and suburban schools, mostly have students of a single skin color, black, and a single class, poor.

Once again, as in 1954, when in Brown vs. the Board of Education the Supreme Court ruled that Plessy vs. Ferguson was unconstitutional, that separate was not equal, we’re confronted with separate and “equal” schools. And this time there seems to be no solution, either in the courts or in the legislatures.

At that earlier time the solution was busing across the city. OK, that was doable, but busing across city lines into the suburbs? No way is that going to happen. The whites have fled to the suburbs and there are mostly only impoverished minority populations remaining in the cities. And it’s just not possible to integrate city schools when nearly all city school kids are of the same color or class.

Richard Kahlenberg has proposed enlarging the city school districts to include the suburbs, as in Wake County, NC, or in the single city, Cambridge, MA, that which would again enable integration to take place by busing. But the logistics of this, busing to the suburbs for example, are probably insurmountable, let alone the entrenched opposition of the suburban parents to allowing poor inner city children into their own children’s schools and classrooms.

KIPP Schools, and schools like KIPP seem the best we can do for the actual situation in our inner cities. But let no one mistake it, this situation is again, at best, separate and unequal. And the KIPP solution is in any case only for a relatively small number of students.

While KIPP schools are proposing that by 2012 there could be as many as 24,000 poor, mostly black students in their schools how many others are there out there, not reached by the “no excuses” schools? Depending on what poverty definition you use there are anywhere from 10 to 20 million children living in poverty.

As long as the school populations in our cities are poor and minority there is little chance that these children will ever profit from the great benefit of attending school with others who are significantly different from them in regard to both race and class, and from whom they might discover that the race and class into which they were born need not be their destiny, as too often it is for too many of them at the present time.

Education Week

By Robert Epstein
From Commentary in Ed Week,
April 4, 2007

Well, not quite. But while writing a new book called The Case Against Adolescence: Rediscovering the Adult in Every Teen, I explored some ideas that go almost that far.

I’m a father of four children, and about 10 years ago I noticed—I couldn’t help but notice—that my 15-year-old son was remarkably mature. He balanced work and play far better than I did, and he seemed quite ready to live on his own. Why, I wondered, was he not allowed to drive or vote, and why did he have so few options? Simply because of his age, he couldn’t own property or do any interesting or fulfilling work, and he had no choice but to attend high school for several more years before getting on with his “real” life.

As a longtime professor and researcher, I got curious. Were our young people always required to attend school, and were their work opportunities always limited to babysitting, yard work, and cleaning the floors at fast-food joints? Were they always subject to so many restrictions? Are teenagers necessarily incompetent and irresponsible, as the media tell us? Is there really an immature “teenage brain” that holds them back? After all, past puberty, technically speaking we’re not really children anymore, and presumably through most of human history we bore our young when we were quite young ourselves. It occurred to me that young people must be capable of functioning as competent adults, or the human race quite probably would not exist.
—Steven Braden

Over time, through interviews, surveys, and scholarly research, I began to investigate these matters in depth. What I learned amazed me—even shocked me.

Consider school, for example. The first compulsory education law in the United States wasn’t enacted until 1852. This Massachusetts law required that all young people between the ages of 8 and 14 attend school three months a year—unless, that is, they could demonstrate that they already knew the material; in other words, this law was competency-based. It took 15 years before any other states followed Massachusetts’ lead and 66 years before all states did. Along the way, some powerful segments of society staunchly opposed the mandatory education trend. In 1892, for example, the Democratic Party stated as part of its national platform, “We are opposed to state interference with parental rights and rights of conscience in the education of children.”
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Restrictions on work by young people also took hold very gradually. In fact, the earliest “child labor” laws in the United States actually required young people to work. It wasn’t until the late 1800s that laws restricting the work opportunities of young people began to take hold. Those laws, too, were fiercely opposed, and in fact the first federal laws restricting youth labor—enacted in 1916, 1918, and 1933—were all swiftly struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court. After all, young people had worked side by side with adults throughout history, and they still helped support their families and their communities in countries around the world; the idea that there should be limits on youth labor, or that young people shouldn’t be allowed to do any work, seemed outrageous to many people.

Eventually, multiple forces—the desire to “Americanize” the tens of millions of immigrants streaming into the United States to get jobs in the land of opportunity, the effort to rescue millions of young laborers from horrendous working conditions in the factories and mines, the extreme determination of America’s growing labor unions to protect adult jobs, and, most especially, the extremely high unemployment rate (27 percent or so) during the Great Depression—created the systems we have today: laws severely restricting or prohibiting youth labor, and school systems modeled after the new factories, established to teach “industrial discipline” to young people and to homogenize their knowledge and thinking.

Unfortunately, the dramatic changes set in motion by the turmoil of America’s industrial revolution also obliterated from modern consciousness the true abilities of young people, leaving adults with the faulty belief that teenagers were inherently irresponsible and incompetent. What’s more, the rate at which restrictions were placed on young people began to accelerate after the 1930s, and increased dramatically after the social turmoil of the 1960s. Surveys I’ve conducted suggest that teenagers today are subject to 10 times as many restrictions as are mainstream adults, to twice as many restrictions as are active-duty U.S. Marines, and even to twice as many restrictions as are incarcerated felons.

Over the past century or so, we have, through a growing set of restrictions, artificially extended childhood by perhaps a decade or more, and we have also completely isolated young people from adults, severing the “child-adult continuum” that has existed throughout history. This trend is continuing. Just last year, Reg Weaver, the second-term president of the National Education Association, while lamenting the fact that 30 percent or more of our young people never complete high school, called for extending the minimum age of school leaving to 21. When adults see young people misbehaving or underperforming, they often respond by infantilizing young people even more, and the new restrictions often cause even more distress among our young.

Some leaders in education are far more trusting of our nation’s young—and also recognize the inherent dangers of infantilization and isolation. The former New York City and New York state teacher of the year John Taylor Gatto has long warned about the dangers of artificially extending childhood, and has blamed our schools for damaging families and stifling creativity and a love of learning. Leon Botstein, the longtime president of Bard College and the youngest college president (at 23) in U.S. history, has called for the outright abolition of our high school system, pointing out the obvious: High school is a waste of time for the majority of the students—that is, for those who haven’t already dropped out.

Our educational institutions today are cursed by at least four fatal legacies of the Industrial Revolution—ideas that may have been helpful a century ago but have no place in today’s world.
In today’s fast-paced world, education needs to be spread out over a lifetime, and the main thing we need to teach our young people is to love the process of learning.

First, although cars can be assembled on demand, it’s absurd to teach people when they’re not ready to learn. As the brilliant German educator Kurt Hahn (the founder of Outward Bound) said, teaching people who are aren’t ready is like “pouring and pouring into a jug and never looking to see whether the lid is off.”

Second, although mass education was exciting in the era that invented mass production, it does a great disservice to the vast majority of students. People have radically different learning styles and abilities, and effective learning—learning that benefits all students—is necessarily individualized and self-paced. This is the elephant in the classroom from which no teacher can hide.

Third, although it’s efficient to cram all apparently essential knowledge into the first two decades of life, the main thing we teach most students with this approach is to hate school. In today’s fast-paced world, education needs to be spread out over a lifetime, and the main thing we need to teach our young people is to love the process of learning.

Finally, whereas that first compulsory-education law in Massachusetts was competency-based, the system that grew in its wake requires all young people to attend school, no matter what they know. Even worse, the system provides no incentives for students to master material quickly, and few or no meaningful options for young people who do leave school.

A century ago, there was no way to address these concerns, but, thanks to computers and the Internet, we now have rapidly improving tools that will soon allow virtually all young people to master essential material at their own pace, and to do so at any point in their lives. There will probably always be a place for the classroom, but it will be a place where intense and intimate learning takes place with highly willing students, not a step on an assembly line.

Are young people really inherently incompetent and irresponsible? The research I conducted with my colleague Diane Dumas suggests that teenagers are as competent as adults across a wide range of adult abilities, and other research has long shown that they are actually superior to adults on tests of memory, intelligence, and perception. The assertion that teenagers have an “immature” brain that necessarily causes turmoil is completely invalidated when we look at anthropological research from around the world. Anthropologists have identified more than 100 contemporary societies in which teenage turmoil is completely absent; most of these societies don’t even have terms for adolescence. Even more compelling, long-term anthropological studies initiated at Harvard in the 1980s show that teenage turmoil begins to appear in societies within a few years after those societies adopt Western schooling practices and are exposed to Western media. Finally, a wealth of data shows that when young people are given meaningful responsibility and meaningful contact with adults, they quickly rise to the challenge, and their “inner adult” emerges.

A careful look at these issues yields startling conclusions: The social-emotional turmoil experienced by many young people in the United States is entirely a creation of modern culture. We produce such turmoil by infantilizing our young and isolating them from adults. Modern schooling and restrictions on youth labor are remnants of the Industrial Revolution that are no longer appropriate for today’s world; the exploitative factories are long gone, and we have the ability now to provide mass education on an individual basis.

Teenagers are inherently highly capable young adults; to undo the damage we have done, we need to establish competency-based systems that give these young people opportunities and incentives to join the adult world as rapidly as possible.

Robert Epstein is a former editor in chief of Psychology Today, a contributing editor for Scientific American Mind, a visiting scholar at the University of California, San Diego, and the host of “Psyched!” on Sirius Satellite Radio. His latest book, The Case Against Adolescence: Rediscovering the Adult in Every Teen, was published last week by Quill Driver Books