The Root Cause of Education Mediocrity
Hint: It’s not the students as the title might suggest.
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America’s lazy students just don’t stack up Hans Zeiger / Seattle Times  See, also, Obstacles to Education Quality, A CONTRIBUTING CAUSE TO EDUCATION MEDIOCRITY and A Corollary to The Root Cause of Education Mediocrity. |
Originally posted December
11, 2003
‘All men by nature desire to know," said Aristotle.
From
Metaphysics
- Book 1. I recommend reading it.
Either Aristotle was wrong, or public education is failing to awaken the
academic desires of American students.
According to a new Manhattan
Institute for Policy Research study funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates
Foundation, only
32 percent of recent high-school graduates were qualified to attend a four-year
college.
Further, the report showed that the high-school graduation rate remains
depressingly low at only 70 percent.
For years, American education experts have been alarmed at the growing inability
of public-school students and graduates to compete academically with peers in
other industrialized democratic countries.
As Charles Sykes wrote in his revolutionary 1990s book "Dumbing
Down our Kids: Why America’s Children Feel Good about Themselves but Can’t Read,
Write, or Add":
"When the very best American students — the top 1 percent — are
measured against the best students of other countries, America’s best and
brightest finished at the bottom."
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And, according to a study by the Program
for International Student Assessment, of students in 32 developed countries,
14 countries score higher than the U.S. in reading, 13 have better results in
science, and 17 score above America in mathematics.
It isn’t as though American students aren’t scoring first-places anymore. A
survey by the Princeton Testing Service shows that American students rank
highest among industrialized democracies for amount of time spent watching
videos in class.
See,
Movies,
Videos & TV in School Talk. It’s not just that they watch more videos,
it’s that they watch Disney
cartoons in 8th grade English class!
And William Moloney, chairman of the Washington, D.C.-based Education
Leaders Council, writes that American students feel better about their math
skills than any other country in the free world — while Korean students, who
feel worst about their math skills, outscore everyone else in math.
American
students are famously confident in their ignorance. See, e.g., this
reply to an S-G AP social studies student wherein it was claimed that Thomas
Jefferson was guilty of adultery. Since schools respect all opinions as being
equal–except opinions which are forbidden–American students believe all they
need is an opinion. Student: "My opinion is that 2+2=5." Teacher:
"Good enough!" Fuzzy math is a nod to the opinion-is-education crowd.
More than 40 percent of recent Washington high-school graduates attending
community college enrolled in remedial courses to prepare them for college-level
work, according to the Evergreen
Freedom Foundation, a conservative research group in Olympia.
A public-school system that transfers responsibility for learning basic
knowledge to higher education isn’t giving taxpayers and parents a return for
their money.
More damaging, the failure of schools to prepare students for their future hurts
America economically, socially and intellectually.
Over the past century, public education has devolved from the classical
approach of character plus basics (reading, writing, arithmetic, respect and
responsibility), to skills, to psychological-social engineering.
See,
generally, Social/Cultural
Agendas in Public Schools. See, also, Bullying
and Social Engineering.
Sadly, the experts have been too preoccupied with experimental education,
diversity training, evolution instruction and sex education to realize that 68
percent of students are unprepared for a baccalaureate program.
Last year, for example, the Seattle Public Schools required hundreds of
middle-school students to participate in a costly three-day-long "Challenge
Day," which featured sensitivity seminars at which crying was
encouraged and self-esteem was preached. One
student called the seminars a "psycho cry-fest."
"More money!" the educrats scream from their offices in Olympia and
Washington, D.C.
Yet, as long as money for experimental education is viewed as the only answer
to failing students, schools will continue to disappoint.
Public
education is an experiment. Like the space shuttle program, public
educators have thought the system to be pretty good because we’ve gotten by. But
the system isn’t that good, it’s just been enough–in the past. It’s wholly
inadequate for the present task of educating The
21st Century Student. Consider the applicability to public education of
these statements from the Columbia
Accident Investigation Board:
The Board recognized early on that the accident was probably not an anomalous,
random event, but rather likely rooted to some degree in NASA’s history and
the human space flight program’s culture. Accordingly, the Board broadened its
mandate at the outset to include an investigation of a wide range of
historical and organizational issues, including political and budgetary
considerations, compromises, and changing priorities over the life of the
Space Shuttle Program.To understand the cause of the Columbia accident is to understand how a
program promising reliability and cost efficiency resulted instead in a
developmental vehicle that never achieved the fully operational status NASA
and the nation accorded to it.Although management treated the Shuttle as operational, it was in reality an
experimental vehicle.In our view, the NASA organizational culture had as much to do with this
accident as the foam. Organizational culture refers to the basic values,
norms, beliefs, and practices that characterize the functioning of an
institution. At the most basic level, organizational culture defines the
assumptions that employees make as they carry out their work. It is a powerful
force that can persist through reorganizations and the change of key
personnel. It can be a positive or a negative force.Cultural traits and organizational practices detrimental to safety and
reliability were allowed to develop, including: reliance on past success as a
substitute for sound engineering practices (such as testing to understand why
systems were not performing in accordance with requirements/specifications);
organizational barriers which prevented effective communication of critical
safety information and stifled professional differences of opinion; lack of
integrated management across program elements; and the evolution of an
informal chain of command and decision-making processes that operated outside
the organization’s rules.
That, my friends, is as good an analogy to the problems with public schools as
you will find.
Aristotle was correct: Students can learn and in fact want to learn. According
to Moloney, "All children can learn because all children can work. No
learning occurs without work, and no work occurs without learning."
The problem is that the public schools have minimized the value of work and
maximized the tolerance of laziness.
That’s
true, but it doesn’t go far enough. A core problem of public schools is that
working hard and doing your best doesn’t get you anywhere. There’s no reward for
the student, who sits in the same class, going at the same pace regardless of
whether s/he is ready to move on. The public school system teaches kids
to be lazy because they learn, sooner or later, that putting forth a minimum
effort reaps all the rewards of putting forth maximum effort except for the
absence of your name on the elitist honor roll.
Why should students work hard? It doesn’t matter in the school environment. In
fact, students who don’t work hard are rewarded with tutoring, additional
teachers and more attention. Students who come to school prepared to work and
ready to move on are praised as "good students" but ignored! After a
while, praise
as a motivator diminishes. The only permanent motivators are
self-discipline, responsibility, integrity and genuine accomplishment.
You want students to work hard? You have to give them a reason. And the best
reason I can think of is, "The harder and faster you work, the more college
you’ll be able to finish before leaving high school." And then you have to
let the students plow through the curriculum at a rate that demonstrates 85-90%
competency on each and every element. Many students will finish the K-12 portion
of their education in 8 to 10 years. Others will take 14 or 15 years. It really
doesn’t matter. What matters is that each student be given the opportunity to
succeed to his/her fullest potential.
Controversy arose in the 1990s when the Bellevue, Federal Way and Everett school
districts decided to abandon traditional report cards for "student-friendly
course grading."
According to Dorothy Mollise and Charlotte Matthews, developmental-studies
researchers at the University of Southern Alabama, student-friendly grading
is good for grade-point averages and self-esteem, but it doesn’t equate to
better academics. Academic accountability is not enhanced when the incentive
for students to work hard is destroyed.
Getting
good grades has some impact on motivation, but not nearly enough. For more on
grading policies, see Grades
and Grading Policy.
The decline of the work ethic and character of students is the country’s most
significant academic plague.
I
totally agree. A+ for arriving at the right answer. But, the answer, alone, is
not good enough. You have to know why the answer is right.
Many scapegoat the culture, drugs, parents, sports, computers and entertainment
alternatives. There is some impact from these but nothing that can’t be
compensated for within schools.
The biggest single factor contributing to the decline of the work ethic in
public schools comes directly from the organizational culture and structure of
public schools. The system creates laziness and bad habits as much if not more
than it provides incentives for hard work and rigorous academic study. Just like
NASA, the cause of poor academic outcomes is as much a function of the cultural
traits of schools, organizational practices and reliance on past success as a
substitute for rigorous academics as it is a function of the personal failures
of students to have the traits of responsibility, self-discipline, integrity and
strong work ethics.
Which leads me to make another observation about a current fad being sold as a
means for improving education–parent involvement.
While it’s true that students with involved parents tend to do better in school,
parental involvement in schools is not the cause. The parents who are
involved in schools tend to be those who value responsibility, self-discipline,
integrity and a strong work ethic. It’s the transmission of these values to
their children that makes the difference, not their involvement in schools.
Students with these kinds of parents would do well in school regardless of
whether the parents chose to be involved with the schools or not. And that means
increasing parental involvement in public schools will have no substantial
impact on academic outcomes because involving parents who lack the personal
traits or values that cause academic success does little more than add to their
already busy schedules. The only kind of parental involvement that has a chance
for improving academic outcomes is the kind that comes from making a choice in
deciding which charter or private school to send their children to. Then parents
have a vested interest in seeing that their decisions actually improve student
learning. It’s the motivation that comes from a desire to avoid failure.
A 2002 report by the Josephson
Institute of Ethics, a Los Angeles-based nonprofit ethics-research
organization, reveals that "cheating, stealing and lying by high-school
students have continued their alarming, decade-long upward spiral."
Seventy-four percent of students admitted to cheating on an exam in the past
year and 63 percent admitted to lying to teachers at least twice in the past
year.
See,
Plagiarism
& Cheating.
Students without character have no need for intellect. After all, if there
are other ways to make the grade or complete the assignment without actually
learning, why not take the shortcuts?
It is a school system managed largely on the rejection of character and
academic basics that fails to produce world-class graduates.
Right.
Right. Right.
Maintaining America’s position as leader of the free world requires us to
restore the work ethic and demand moral and educational excellence in our
schools.
Not
quite right. Schools must retool to create an environment in which a strong work
ethic and academic excellence can germinate and thrive. Some schools are already
doing it. See, e.g., High
Standards, High Scores. Bottom line: Public schools produce exactly the kind
of outcomes the system is designed to produce.
Hans Zeiger is a freshman at Hillsdale College in Michigan, an ‘03 Puyallup
High School graduate and a freelancer for The Seattle Times NEXT page.