Readin’, Writin’, and Futility
THOSE of us with kids (whether on the lawn or on the horizon) have a vested interest in education. In fact, next to parenting itself, education is the largest part of the foundation upon which a child will build his or her life. Shortchange them early on and they’ll be paying the price for years: getting pregnant at 17, taking out an absurd mortgage at 25, tacking on fifty extra pounds by 35, and, by 45, torching the house they can’t afford while deep-frying a turkey for their dozen children.
Most of us don’t want that for our kids. But we also innately know that the difference between our darling son decorating the front lawn with rusted-out pick-up trucks on cinder blocks and presiding over a Fortune 500 company pretty much comes down to two major influential factors in his childhood: parenting and education.
Parenting—well, that’s up to us. We raise our sons and daughters the way we think they should be raised, we instill our values and we provide the security and nurturing environment for them to flourish. But, most of all, we cross our fingers and hope we’re doing the right thing.
But education is different. For most of us, it’s out of our hands. When the time comes, we usher our kids out from under our wings and shoo them onto a bus. We think of them learning to conjugate verbs, use correct pronouns, and assemble decent-sized sentences. We have faith that they’ll be able to spell “Wednesday” without looking it up and give the name of the continent they live on without having to mull it over. We hope they’ll be able to locate the state of Florida on a map, divide nine by three and know which countries made up the Axis and the Allies in World War II. We want these things for our children because we know that learning history, science, math, and geography can help them avoid wearing a sandwich board or dressing up as a banana. Even morons know that education is a key to success—that’s how freaking obvious it is.
Fact: We now throw four times more money at public schools than we did forty years ago—back when the government decided to increase its role in teaching our children. You’d think that kind of capital infusion would have given us some pretty solid returns, like playgrounds buzzing with budding Einsteins computing the trajectories of their dodge balls. But, like lots of things the government gets involved with, return on investment was never really their goal.
With very few exceptions, our public schools are costly disasters based on an antiquated tenure system and unmotivated teachers using overstuffed classrooms inside decaying buildings to pass on much of what they don’t know to their undisciplined, uninterested students. (Many teachers wouldn’t even know that that was a run-on sentence.) Those students then enter the workforce or college with a subpar education that is slowly but steadily costing America her standing in the world.
Our schools are so bad that people who can barely afford their rent are willing to spend tens of thousands of dollars to put their kids into private schools. Can you imagine forking over thousands in school taxes every year and then another $30,000 to send your child to a private kindergarten? People in New York City can—and they fight tooth and nail for the privilege! If that’s not damning evidence that public education is rotten, I don’t know what is.
Nationwide, over one million incoming college students require remedial courses just to catch up. That’s shameful. And the price tag for teaching those kids what our billions in tax dollars should have already taught them? It’s $2.5 billion a year. That’s infuriating.
Is it any wonder that no one knows when an apostrophe is called for (including me), or that plenty of people couldn’t tell you the difference between they’re, there, and their? Why? Because their not interested in learning that kind of stuff. There more interested in actress/singer/whatever Jessica Simpson declaring that she thought Chicken of the Sea was chicken or Miss North Carolina answering a simple question by referencing “U.S. Americans.”
We all laugh at that kind of seemingly innocuous ignorance—but is it really that funny? After all, we’re the most powerful, technologically advanced nation on earth. So why are there 32 million Americans who can’t read or write?
In a recent poll conducted by National Geographic, 63 percent of 18 to 24-year-olds could not locate Iraq on a map, 70 percent shrugged their shoulders when asked where Iran and Israel were, and 90 percent had no clue where Afghanistan was. If you’re inclined to cut them some slack for not knowing their Middle East geography, chew on this: 50 percent couldn’t even locate New York State.
I might be willing to forgive the ignorance over Iraq/Afghanistan geography (I’m not exactly Magellan myself) except for the fact that those aren’t just any countries, they’re places where our fathers, mothers, sisters, and brothers have been fighting and dying for years to preserve the very system that these kids seem so uninterested in taking advantage of.
Americans don’t seem to agree on much anymore, but most of us, regardless of faith, economic status, or party affiliation, agree that public schools are lousy. So why can’t we make the commonsense decisions needed to do something about it? Simple—because there are still lots of idiots who say things like . . .
Oh, I don’t know, maybe just the fact that the government has no constitutional authority to be in the education business. How does that work for you?
Education is not a federal issue, it’s a local and state one—which is exactly how it was treated for over two hundred years. Then, Jimmy Carter came along and, by the slimmest of margins (we’re talking about four votes in the House), won approval to create a new ginormous government bureaucracy: the Department of Education (DOE).
The creation of the DOE effectively took control from local and state governments (and Mom and Dad) and dragged it, kicking and screaming, to Washington. It also made the jobs of teachers’ union lobbyists and special-interest groups much, much easier since they now needed to influence only one all-powerful entity rather than each individual school system. If you got your way with the DOE, you got your way with every public school in America.
The only threat to the Department of Education’s existence came early on when President Ronald Reagan actively lobbied to dismantle it. But politics played its part and eventually weakened the resolve of the Reaganites. While the DOE didn’t grow in any great strides under Reagan, it was far from dismantled.
In pushing for his “America 2000” plan (think No Child Left Behind Lite), George H. W. Bush changed course from his predecessor, choosing to embrace the department rather than kill it. Though he didn’t get too far (many Republicans at the time surprisingly still behaved like Republicans and strongly objected to expanding federal influence), he certainly contributed to the DOE’s increasing growth.
Bush the Elder’s early departure changed nothing. Bill Clinton simply picked up the baton, tweaking “America 2000” and creatively renaming it “Goals 2000.” By that time, federal involvement in the school system was taken for granted—so much so that by the time George W. Bush signed No Child Left Behind (which not only fed the beast, it pumped it full of growth hormone and steroids) most Americans were completely anesthetized to the idea of national politicians being in charge of their kids’ education.
Early on, many politicians knew that government would be bad for education and were opposed to a larger federal role. But, as soon as it actually happened, the old “if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em” mentality took over, and politicians abandoned common sense in favor of trying to figure out how to get a piece of the action. Remember the economic-stimulus bill? Plenty of politicians were vehemently opposed to it, but as soon as it became a certainty they stopped fighting it and started figuring out how to parlay its billions into reelection.
Remember Frank Serpico? He was a New York cop who stood up to institutional corruption in the NYPD. He was ostracized and shot in the face for it—but he stood his ground. In the end, he won, and NYPD corruption was dealt a death blow. Serpico wound up being portrayed by Al Pacino in a great movie that bore his name. We could really use some Serpicos on Capitol Hill.
But aside from thinking that centralized planning (which didn’t work so well for the Soviet Union) could fix our schools, there’s another reason to keep education out of the hands of elected officials: power . . . or, more accurately, abuse of it. Schools are a direct conduit to the developing brains of our children (radical Islamists know this, which is why they use textbooks to demonize Jews and Western values). Is there any better way to indoctrinate a generation than by starting on them when they’re young and vulnerable?
You’ve heard the expression too many chefs in the kitchen? Well, when we’re talking about government involvement in education, we’re talking about too many all-powerful chefs cooking in a kitchen they shouldn’t even be allowed in. Think Gordon Ramsay, except none of them know how to cook so they just get in each other’s way, swear, and start grease fires.
It should come as no surprise that a “revolutionary” like President Obama’s pal William Ayers is a professor. In a speech he gave alongside Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez in 2006, Ayers declared that “education is the motor-force of revolution.” He makes no apologies for the fact that he sees his classroom as the perfect environment to indoctrinate students with his anti-American, anti-capitalist worldview. If you’re trying to foment a revolution from the inside, there’s no better place to do it than from in front of the blackboard.
“An Inoffensive History of the World”
“Where Texas Is”
“Columbus: Portrait of Evil”
“Grammer”
“No Child Left Behind: Answer Key Edition”
“Those Poor Indians!”
“Ché Was Awesome”
“Why Mr. Leering Can’t Be Fired”
“The Evils of Capitalism”
Having the government plugged in to the compulsory education of our children is a bad idea because it opens the door for them to promote an agenda (i.e., the Founding Fathers were evil, old white men; Christopher Columbus was a genocidal brute; Fidel Castro is a visionary; corporations bad! government good!; Mexico was just minding its own business until America came along; and the Soviet Union was simply misunderstood), embrace certain viewpoints while censoring others, and adopt standards dictated by desk jockeys in Washington, D.C.
It also gives a single entity the power to determine what our children learn and by what methods they learn it. Then again, that’s exactly what supporters of federally controlled education want. After all, how can progressive education creep its way into the school system on a national scale without national control of the school system?
Education is about learning. Learning, like weight loss, is sometimes hard. You have to stay committed and push yourself day after day to see results. Don’t ever say this in front of a progressive (don’t worry, none of them are reading this book), but some people are better learners than others because some people are smarter than others.
Of course, the progressive education movement doesn’t like that. It’s biased or unfair or something, I forget the actual claim. So they want to make education warmer, friendlier, happier. They believe the educational environment should be nurturing and comforting—not discouraging. That’s why using red pens to correct tests is out (red is harsh!) and purple (ahh, soothing) is in.
Progressive education also attempts to “level the playing field,” which, if I may translate from progressivian to common sense, means: “lowering the standards.” In this feel-good, sunshine and lollipops world, everyone’s work goes up on the walls because it’s all sooooo wonderful! You see, it’s not fair to judge a child’s work because there are no wrong answers, only life experiences.
“If you see a whole paper of red, it looks pretty frightening. Purple stands out, but it doesn’t look as scary as red.”
—Sharon Carlson, health and physical education teacher at John F. Kennedy Middle School in Northampton, Massachusetts.
“I do not use red. Red has a negative connotation, and we want to promote self-confidence. I like purple. I use purple a lot.”
—Robin Slipakoff, second- and third-grade teacher at Mirror Lake Elementary School in Plantation, Florida.
“I never use red to grade papers because it stands out like, ‘Oh, here’s what you did wrong.’ Purple is a more approachable color.”
—Melanie Irvine, a (former) third-grade teacher at Pacific Rim Elementary in Carlsbad, California.
Progressive education began with the goal of providing a nurturing environment that aimed at kids’ hearts rather than their heads. The movement’s leader, John Dewey, was a champion of education reform and believed the whole “teachers teach students facts” concept was so nineteenth-century. He saw the role of the teacher as more of a coach and the role of the state as necessary to “bring about the improvements progressives sought.”
What does that mean as far as how our kids are actually taught in the classroom? Dewey didn’t try to hide his beliefs:
“Existing life is so complex that the child cannot be brought into contact with it without either confusion or distraction; he is either overwhelmed by a multiplicity of activities which are going on, so that he loses his own power of orderly reaction, or he is so stimulated by these various activities that his powers are permanently called into play and he becomes either unduly specialized or else disintegrated.”
“My generation was brought up on right or wrong with no in-between, and red was always in your face. It’s abrasive to me. Purple is just a little bit more gentle. Part of my job is to be attuned to what kids respond to, and red is not one of those colors.”
—Justin Kazmark, teacher at Public School 188 in Manhattan.
“We try to be as gentle as we can and not slice children’s thoughts to pieces with a red pen. The red mark is associated with ‘This is wrong,’ and as you’re trying to guide students in the revision process, it doesn’t mean this is wrong. It’s just here’s what you can do better.”
—Laurie Francis, (former) principal of Del Mar Hills Academy in California.
“I tell teachers to use more neutral colors—blues and greens, and lavender because it’s a calming color. And, of course, kids also like purple because it’s the color of Barney.”
—Stephen Ahle, (former) principal of Pacific Rim Elementary in Carlsbad, California.
It gets even better:
“I believe that the teacher’s place and work in school is to be interpreted from this same basis. The teacher is not in the school to impose certain ideas or to form certain habits in the child, but is there as a member of the community to select the influences which shall affect the child and to assist him in properly responding to these influences.”
In other words, teachers aren’t there to tell a child if he or she is “right or wrong” (especially not in red ink), they’re there to help the child through a touchy-feely period of self-awareness and discovery.
The progressive methodology also emphasizes empathy over narrative. Rather than learning the cold, hard facts about historical events, it’s more important how those events make you feel. Competition is viewed as unhealthy. Grades are hurtful. Freedom is valued over structure, which means students get to do what they want rather than have to suffer through boring lessons like “how to add two numbers together.” And while it no doubt makes school more “fun,” you have to wonder if it bears any responsibility for the fact that there are students who can look at a map of the United States and go, “What’s that?”
The progressive movement has infiltrated both public and private schools in varying degrees—and not just here. One education secretary in the United Kingdom decried progressive education as a “misplaced ideology [that] has let down generations of children.”
He’s right, but plenty of schools, nevertheless, pride themselves on their progressive credentials. In their printed marketing materials, Manhattan’s Little Red School House says its program “continues to reflect and build upon this tradition of progressive education . . . [that] emphasizes individual achievement and collective responsibility.” Likewise, the Teddy McArdle Free School in New Jersey describes itself as “learner-centered”—which is a nice way of saying that the students act as teachers. Even if they’re seven years old. The school has no classes, no curriculum, no homework, and presumably no future rocket scientists graduating from there, either.
Dewey wasn’t the only progressive to understand education’s role in carrying forward their agenda. Before becoming president of the United States, Woodrow Wilson was president of Princeton University—a role that gave him ample opportunity to say idiotic, though telling, things like, “Our problem is not merely to help the students to adjust themselves to world life. Our problem is to make them as unlike their fathers as we can.”
Influencing kids to be “unlike their parents” is a time-tested progressive strategy that is still being used today. Al Gore, for instance, spoke to a group of high school students in early 2009 about global warming and told them, “There are some things about our world that you know that older people don’t know. Why would that be? Well, in a period of rapid change, the old assumptions sometimes just don’t work anymore because they’re out of date. New knowledge, new understandings are much more widely available sometimes to young people who are in school who aren’t weighed down with the old flawed assumptions of the past.”
Gosh I hate those old flawed assumptions, don’t you? I mean, “Hard work and good grades increase your chance of success in life” is soooo outdated. Of course, the reason why progressives target kids is that they are much more receptive to the message that “America is broken and the only way to fix it is through the government.” And when those kids grow up, they turn into people who have the power to turn progressive theory into actual policy, like . . . well . . . Barack Obama.
The Left’s influence on education also continues well beyond high school. In the least-shocking revelation included in this book, one study concluded that right-leaning college professors are majorly outgunned on college campuses and have to work harder to get the same jobs as their liberal peers. But the prevalence of activist and politically oriented professors has another side effect: course offerings like “The Phallus” and “Native American Feminisms.” And we wonder why our college grads don’t seem to know so much.
HIGHER EDUCATION
“(Our) experience nurtures social consciousness and ethical awareness . . . Drawing on the rich legacy of the progressive tradition, we believe that education is an organic, developmental and interactive process of growth encompassing all aspects of the child’s nature .”
—The Little Red Schoolhouse, Manhattan
We are all familiar with the bumper stickers pining for the day that the defense budget goes to the schools and the Pentagon has to hold a bake sale, but comparing educational spending with national defense isn’t particularly fair, clever, or logical.
First of all, we have to spend money on defense because if we don’t defend our country—well, the schools won’t matter much. Take the Republic of Georgia, for instance. Do you really think citizens there are worried about standardized test scores or drunk Russian soldiers driving tanks down their streets?
Giving money to the school system is like giving money to a bum on the street: It might briefly feel rewarding, but deep down you know they’re not going to spend it wisely because they never have. In the case of the bum, your dollar is likely going to support some global distillery, while, in the case of our schools, your dollar is going to support some politician’s agenda.
Schools now enjoy four times more money per student than they did in the 1960s. Have they gotten four times better? No, they have not. Have math and reading skills improved? No, they have not. Have graduation rates improved? No, they have not. Do you think throwing even more money at the problem will improve all of that? No, it will not—though the teachers’ union will probably send you a Christmas card.
“The percentages of 17-year-olds at different levels (of reading) have not changed significantly in comparison to 2004 or 1971.”
“The average score for 17-year-olds in 2008 was not significantly different from the scores in 2004 and 1973.”
—The Nation’s Report Card, 2008 Assessment
The U.S. Census Bureau reports that we spent an average of $9,138 per public school student in 2005–2006. Other estimates claim the real number is actually at least double that amount. Either way, that’s some serious money and we should demand some serious results. But we’re not getting them.
Consider two states: New York, which spends the most per student of any state in the country ($14,884), and Utah, which spends the least ($5,437). Take a look at some key test scores for each of those states:
Yes, New York slightly beats Utah in three out of four categories, but Utah, despite spending nearly $9,500 less per student, still scores above the U.S. average in all four categories.
“Assessment is authentic and holistic. Children are well known by their teachers and peers. There are no tests or letter grades. Instead, narrative reports are written about children that cover all aspects of their development: social, emotional, personal, physical, and intellectual.”
—Prairie Creek Community School, Northfield, Minnesota
If it was about the money, then places like New York and New Jersey (the two highest-spending states) should have test scores well above those of students in Utah and Idaho (the two lowest-spending states). But they don’t. Why? Because it’s not that schools don’t have enough money, it’s that they’re forced by politicians, lobbyists, and special interests to spend it in ways that don’t further their primary goals.
I wonder how many of our illustrious political figures have their darling progeny in *gasp* private schools. And, if they do, I would love to know why. Maybe banning the children of politicians from attending private school would be a good first step toward making sure the public ones get a teeny bit more attention.
It’s worth mentioning that our Constitution makes absolutely no reference to schools or education because the federal government was never supposed to be in the education business in the first place. The Tenth Amendment (“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”) makes that pretty clear. Of course, we don’t really let a little thing like “constitutionality” stand in the way of expanding the central government’s powers anymore.
I assume you mean that vouchers will take money away from the schools that parents don’t want to send their kids to. If a parent doesn’t want his or her child to go to a school, it’s usually because that school is bad. Or dangerous. Or possibly both. Do you blame that parent for wanting a better education for his or her child—or isn’t that exactly the kind of parents we want more of?
The best argument the antivoucher crowd can ever come up with is that vouchers will make parents want to send their children to a better school. Well . . . uh . . . yeah. And what’s wrong with that?
35 percent of Democrats in Congress send their kids to private school. Anyone want to bet that at least some members of that group also oppose vouchers?
In “normal” life we patronize businesses we like and we avoid the ones we don’t. If we prefer Harry’s Burger Joint to Tina’s Diner, we go to Harry’s—even if it’s not as close or convenient as Tina’s. Maybe Tina starts to realize that she’s losing business because her diner is dirty or overcrowded so she changes her menu, improves the quality of her food, fires the bad waiters, and lowers her prices.
The point is that you vote with your wallet, and businesses compete for that vote. That’s how this whole free-market capitalism thing is supposed to work: the best succeed; the worst fail.
But the educational system does not operate in that “normal” world. It’s a government monopoly that lives in a bizarro world where fair and free choice is forbidden. If you live in Zone X (which, ironically, you presumably chose to live in because that house had a better mix of features, location, and price than its competitors) then your child must attend the Zone X school, even if it’s terrible (or “up and coming” which means not as terrible as it was, but still terrible).
Imagine if we used that same system for things other than schools . . . like food (as you may know, I enjoy food analogies quite a bit): What if the government forcibly took a chunk of your money in the form of a “Dining Out” tax, but then dictated that you could eat only at Lucky Fang Chinese Restaurant—because that’s the restaurant you’re zoned for? I assume you’d be pretty unhappy about that, right? Well, too bad—if you don’t like Chinese food, move.
“In case anyone didn’t notice, one of our dads was elected president of the United States on November 4, 2008. This has been an incredible beginning to a year that most of us will never forget.”
—The Director of the University of Chicago
Lab School, a progressive grade school founded by John Dewey himself. Yep, that’s right, in the second least-shocking revelation of this book, Obama sent his kids to a private progressive school in Chicago.
But vouchers change the whole equation. They attach dollars to your child and make your child valuable to a school, instead of the other way around. With vouchers, the tax dollars you’re coughing up can be spent on a school you’re actually excited about. What a novel idea!
A recent Department of Education study revealed that students who used vouchers were reading half a grade ahead of their public school peers. Why didn’t you hear about that study? Because, according to The Wall Street Journal, it was buried and Obama administration officials were forbidden from discussing it. Then, just for good measure, Congress shut down funding for the D.C. voucher program. But, sure, politicians definitely just want what’s best for kids.
When parents are given the option to move their kids from public schools to charter schools, they line up in droves. Why? Because they know that charter schools have accountability for their results. Take the Thurgood Marshall Academy (TMA), a charter school located in Washington, D.C.’s infamous Ward 8. Why is it “infamous”? Because Ward 8 is home to 30 percent of the city’s homicides. Because Ward 8 is home to the lowest average income in the city ($14,000 a year). And because Ward 8 has the lowest high-school-graduation rate in a city full of breathtakingly low graduation rates.
But the Thurgood Marshall Academy is an oasis. Despite everything working against them, students there have managed to post 95 percent attendance rates, along with the third-highest test scores of any D.C. high school with open enrollment. But the most impressive stat of all is that every single member of the school’s first four classes (it opened in 2002) went on to college.
As schools like TMA prosper, public schools will bear the consequences for their years of futility. So what happens to the schools that aren’t chosen by many parents? Really bad ones might die. (Oh my gosh, the f-word: Failure! I hope we at least write their eviction order in purple ink.) Others might lose students, but parents will eventually recognize that smaller class sizes are a positive, perhaps leading to a resurgence.
But there’s an even bigger benefit that would play out over time: Because schools would no longer be monopolies, they’d find themselves competing for dollars with other schools. That means they would actually have to try to earn your business and attract students with incentives like having better teachers, more extracurricular options and cleaner, higher-tech classrooms. Competition is good—imagine that!
Maybe the best reason of all to support school choice is that those entrenched firmly on the side of the status quo—like the teachers’ unions, government bureaucrats, and politicians—are so strongly against it.
“We are not a unionized monopoly.”
—Randi Weingarten, president, American Federation of Teachers and United Federation of Teachers, apparently being serious.
We have no argument there—but a classic idiots’ technique is to confuse the debate. Teachers are completely different from teachers’ unions, just as auto assembly line workers are completely different from the United Auto Workers union. People are people, but unions, generally speaking, are about power and control.
Unions may have been founded with a grand purpose but most are now big, bloated, self-serving bureaucracies with huge budgets and largely left-wing agendas fueled more by politics than a sense of duty to their members. Teachers’ unions are no different, but instead of making bad cars more expensive, creating mounds of needless paperwork, or shutting down the subway system in a strike, they work hard to damage our children’s futures. Maybe the children themselves should have a union.
In his book, The War Against Hope, former education secretary Rod Paige accuses teachers’ unions of having maximum power over the schools with minimal accountability for their failure. He believes they’re resistant to change and willing to fight tooth and nail to retain the status quo and enforce policies that are detrimental to students.
“Wingra parents have to develop confidence in a system that’s different from how they were taught. We don’t give grades here. We don’t give tests and we deliberately deemphasize assessments that compare one student’s progress with that of another.”
—Wingra School, Madison, Wisconsin
If Al Gore had any idea how much paper is wasted in keeping our students from learning, he’d cry us a new ocean. In 2005, the New York City teachers’ contract was 204 pages long, with another 105-page “Memorandum of Understanding” tacked on for good measure. What could possibly be contained in so many sheets of pulped tree? Rules. Primarily, rules that protect union members in almost any circumstance you can imagine, and lots that you can’t.
Trying to fire a bad teacher is, in many districts, like trying to get a cow to walk down stairs: It’s just not going to happen. (See our flowchart on page 130 for proof.) In fact, school administrators know it’s such an
uphill battle that they’re often not inclined to even try. The L.A. Unified School District currently has 30,000 tenured teachers, yet they manage to fire just 21 a year. The ones who are eventually terminated were the worst of the worst, because the ones who didn’t get fired include a teacher who kept pornography, cocaine vials, and marijuana at school and one who was so unable to teach or control her class that students were actually getting injured in it. Bad teachers, like bad priests, are simply shuffled throughout the system so that the damage they do is spread out.
But aside from being unable to get rid of the worst teachers, unions also prevent the best teachers from being rewarded. Salaries aren’t based on merit, but on longevity. Good and bad teachers are paid the same—another remnant of that tiresome we’re all equal mentality from the progressive era.
I wish I could have seen the faces of the teachers’ union lobbyists when they heard Obama say, “I reject a system that rewards failure and protects a person from its consequences.” Oops. I wonder if they all want their money back now.
I will never agree with the premise that just because someone can’t afford something, it’s not good or fair. Frankly that sounds a little socialist. A lot of people can’t afford a Mercedes S Class sedan—but does that mean Mercedes should be forced to stop making them? No—people generally accept the fact that in order to buy a car like that, they will need to have more money. That gives them a little something that we capitalists like to call “incentive.”
Second, most schools offer financial aid to students who qualify for it. That defeats the “only for the rich” argument—as would a voucher program. Do families still have to make sacrifices? Absolutely—but what better way to have parents invested in the success of their children than to have parents literally invested in the success of their children?
Opponents of home-schooling spend a lot of time trying to convince people that those who take education into their own hands create ignorant social misfits. In their opinion, there’s nothing worse than a child spending several hours a day learning at the hands of—shudder —his or her own parents! They also assume that, at the conclusion of the school day, the child is confined to a small, windowless space before being sent off to bed. The end result is obviously a socially maladjusted freak who winds up living in his mom’s basement or shuffling around the neighborhood in fuzzy pajamas.
If home-schooling is such a terrible idea, then why has the national home-schooling rate increased 74 percent in just eight years? Well, here are the top reasons given by parents . . . do any of these resonate with you?
Concern over the school environment
Desire to provide moral or religious instruction
Dissatisfaction with academic instruction at schools
Of course, the reality is that home-schooled children are like any other children. The only difference is that they get focused instruction in a more comfortable environment from an individual who knows, understands, and loves them. Perish the thought! There is nothing that prevents home-schooled kids from socializing with peers, playing in Little League or herdball (otherwise known as “soccer”), going to the movies, hanging out at the park, enrolling in summer camp, etc., etc.
But even if home-schooled kids don’t go drink warm beer in the alley with the public schoolers, they still develop fine. In a 2000 study, home-schooled and public/private-schooled children played among themselves under direct supervision. If you expected the home-schooled kids to have spent their time hidden under the table crying for their mommies, you’re going to be disappointed. All of the kids played together. Or, in the words of the report, “There is no basis to question the social development of home-schooled children.”
If home-schooled kids develop just fine socially, then the only plausible argument left against home-schooling is that they aren’t getting a proper education. Given the disaster in our public schools, that’s a pretty dumb argument, but let’s look at the data anyway.
An independent study of over 5,000 home-schooled students showed that they outperformed public school students by 30 to 37 percentile points in all subjects. Another study of over 5,000 home-schooled children showed that they scored 18 to 28 percentile points above public school averages on the Stanford Achievement Test, one of the leading standardized tests used by schools.
Agatha Christie, Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bell, Ansel Adams, Woodrow Wilson (I’m not sure he helps the cause), Robert Frost, Louisa May Alcott, Venus & Serena Williams
I’m not saying that all parents would make great teachers, or that home schooling is for everyone, but I am saying that the stigma of socially awkward kids with a below-average education is a complete fabrication. Besides, just as with school vouchers, whenever the entrenched powers-that-be are so wildly against something, I tend to think it probably deserves another look.
As with many well-intentioned government programs, No Child Left Behind (NCLB) ultimately fails because it doesn’t level the playing field, it lowers the bar—and lowering the bar is one reason why people can’t spell words anymore. Let’s call it a Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy for the stupid.
Here’s a quick history lesson (especially for you home-schooled kids, since I know you never learned this stuff): Prisoners in Stalin’s forced labor camps were assigned production quotas. Instead of trying to meet them, which was basically impossible, they lied, cheated, and manipulated (it turns out that fear of death is a pretty good motivator).
Authorities all the way up the chain of command turned a blind eye because, in the end, what was more important than tangible results was simply reporting to Stalin that results had been achieved. It was better to claim you cleared an acre of forest than to have actually cleared an acre of forest. Of course, that was one of the reasons why forced labor in the Soviet Union failed, leading to the failure of the Soviet Union itself.
No Child Left Behind works in very much the same way. By setting a timetable with unattainable goals and threatening schools and teachers if they fail to achieve them, they’re incentivizing everyone to game the system. And they do!
ALTERNATE NAMES FOR NO CHILD LEFT BEHIND
No Standards Left Unlowered All Dummies, Move On Up!
No One Can Fail Because It Looks Bad
The George W. Bush Panders to Ted Kennedy Act
Federal Bad Idea #18728
One of the main criticisms of NCLB is that it motivates schools to deny children a broad education and instead focus their entire curriculum on “teaching to the test.” In other words, they don’t worry about teaching kids useful things (like, for example, what a “progressive” really stands for) because they’re never asked that question on a standardized test.
Another way to game the system is by outright cheating. NCLB has the dubious distinction of actually turning the teacher into the cheater in the classroom. To improve overall scores, teachers have been caught asking weak students to stay home on test days, offering “help” in solving problems, fixing wrong answers after the test is over, and allowing extra time to finish.
Cheating is so prevalent that economist Steven D. Levitt (author of Freakonomics) developed an algorithm with a colleague to spot it. The result? They discovered even more cheating than they originally thought. But often times you don’t even need an algorithm, you just need common sense: If one year a school has a pitiful ranking and the next year it’s a miraculous success—something fishy is probably going on. It’s like steroids in baseball. A guy doesn’t go from hitting twelve home runs in one year to forty the next without a little outside help. Yet, because the powers-that-be feel that the ends justify the means, no one cracks down before it’s too late. And with our schools, it’s already way too late.
Unfortunately, NCLB scams aren’t just confined to individual schools. States, eager to report to Uncle Stalin just how great things are going, happily carry it on. In 2004, the number of “failing” schools in Michigan went from 1,500 to 216. A remarkable achievement—until you discover that all the state did was lower the passing score from 75 to 42.
No Child Left Behind’s national test standards are dramatically lower than the standards set by many states. Why? So that states with lower standards (and dumber kids, as a result) will be able to keep up.
Who is the big loser in this scam? Our kids, of course. And who is the biggest winner? The politicians and unions that can cash faux test scores in for heaps of federal cash. What a great system!
It’s true, being a teacher does not pay as well as being a CEO who runs his company into the ground before bailing out of the corporate jet in a golden parachute. But being a teacher doesn’t pay that poorly, either. The 2008 Bureau of Labor Statistics study puts the average middle-school teacher’s annual salary at $52,570. Compare that to policemen at $52,480 or short-order cooks at $20,230. Then remember that teachers have a shorter workday, longer vacations, and public-sector health and retirement benefits that are often better than those of workers in the private sector.
The problem is not that teachers don’t get paid well (although you will never hear me arguing against higher pay for teachers who deserve it), it’s that their pay is based on longevity, not performance. When you don’t reward someone for being good at his or her job, the incentive to be extraordinary is diminished. In fact, the incentive to be mediocre is increased because teachers who stand out are liable to rock the boat.
But good teachers aren’t penalized with antiquated concepts like tenure, because “the man” is trying to keep our kids dumb; they’re not paid more because of the unions. By trying to protect all jobs unions are actually helping their worst-performing members while hurting their best.
Tenure was originally introduced for college professors in 1910 as a way to protect their academic pursuits and research. And, when you think about it in those terms, it kind of makes sense. You want professors to be able to speak their mind, conduct research, and creatively teach controversial subjects without fear of losing their job. In the 1920s, as women fought for the right to vote, tenure was extended to K–12 teachers, even as the requirements for obtaining it were becoming far easier to achieve. College professors still needed to publish papers and were subject to up to a decade of probation. But grade-school teachers? Not so much.
Textbooks 101: Why they don’t teach you anything
The U.S. public school system is, by far, the largest buyer of textbooks. Since textbook publishers want to sell as much of their product as they can, they tailor their books in a way that makes them more appealing. That means pandering to book buyers who want to see diverse, politically correct, nonoffensive drivel. The result is a sterile, boring, non-educational, nonoffensive book. But at least they sell lots of them.
In California it now takes just as little as two years for a teacher to get tenure. Two years, and then you can basically sit back, relax, and not worry about being fired . . . for the rest of your life. Can you think of any good reason why a K–12 teacher should have tenure? I can’t, but the teachers’ unions sure can. Governor Schwarzenegger’s efforts to try and make tenure rules even slightly more reasonable were met with such fierce resistance that you’d have thought he was asking everyone to give up their Priuses.
“We believe that children should develop balance in body and mind through intensive classroom study, quiet time, vigorous play, experiences of the natural world, and reflection on our role as its stewards.”
—The School in Rose Valley, Rose Valley, Pennsylvania
If the system favors upscale white folks, it’s because of the changes that aren’t being made. It’s because the schools fail our children time and again and nothing is ever done. It’s because voucher programs that would take poor kids out of lousy, dangerous schools are being denied.
The system shouldn’t favor anyone—and doesn’t have to, but instead it’s failing everyone.
The big, A+ answer (assuming, of course, that you’re at a school that still allows tests) is to break the cycle of poverty with a cycle of achievement. But we’ll never do that with tenure, unions, politicians, bureaucrats, and special-interest groups all standing in the way.
And blaming “The Man” for those failings is a cop-out. Suggesting that minorities from traditionally poorer socioeconomic backgrounds can’t be on par with white peers is nonsense. Asian immigrants hailing from backgrounds equally as poor as their Hispanic and black counterparts routinely pummel white students in the SATs. How can that be? Shouldn’t they be horribly stifled and at a tremendous disadvantage because of the fact that they’re minorities and, for many of them, English isn’t even spoken at home?
Absolutely—which just goes to show that scores, stats, and studies tell only part of the story. People can twist data to lead you to whatever conclusion is in their best interest, but one thing can’t be twisted because it is indisputable: Our selfish unwillingness to put aside our ideological differences and stop playing politics with education will unquestionably lead not only to the failing of our children, but, ultimately, to the failing of America as well.
