Why Have Americans Never Admired Their Own Schools?

I am proud to be labeled a contrarian, if that means that one must look at the evidence before making a judgment about anything.

For the past 10 years or so, I have been amazed at the ease with which any negative comment about the public schools appeared in print and the extreme difficulty of getting anything that was factual and neutral into the public domain. (Indeed, I once received an award from an education press group for doing the best factual piece during that year dealing with the achievements of America s public schools. I found out later that mine was the only piece entered. No one else had written anything positive about schools in that entire year.)

In 1993, I published a synthesis of virtually everything that was known about school achievement, from the Sandia Report to the SATs. The conclusion: America's top 20 percent of students are world class on almost any measure, the next 40 percent are deserving of postsecondary education in some package, and the bottom 30 to 40 percent are awful. The latter is due mainly to disadvantages our nation's youngsters bring with them to the kindergarten door on the first day of school, such as having one of the highest rates of youth poverty of any NATO country.

The performance gap between Japan's top and bottom tenth is very small. The distance from the U.S. top and bottom is huge. In my April 1993 article for the monthly journal Phi Delta Kappan, "American Education: The Good, The Bad, and The Task," I advocated a national effort to get more of the bottom group into the middle with a special focus on reducing youth poverty--the greatest single force holding down school achievement.

Responses to that call were fascinating. Many contended that if one praised the schools for anything, teachers would get lazy and students would stop learning. Others said that poverty was the fault of the child and that working hard to transcend poverty was what America was all about. Still others said the news media were not in the business of praising people, that only bad news is news, that I was dumping all of education's problems on the American family, that I was against standards, etc.

All of the Contrarians, from Bracey to Berliner to me, have been labeled "apologists for the status quo," even though we have all been quite specific about what needs to be done to make schools better.

The truth of any social institution is complex in terms of results. Consider Aid for Families with Dependent Children, a highly successful program for 25 percent of recipients who are off the program in six months or less, awful for another 25 percent who are still on after 37 months, while the middle half are skewed toward the successful side. That is simply too complex to be a good sound bite for Dan Rather, but it is precisely the nature of the evidence for AFDC and schools.

Why do our contemporaries insist that nothing positive be said about schools? Although Berliner's book documents brilliantly the existence of the conspiracy, he does not explain the reason for its existence. My belief is that the nation's public schools (and teachers) never have been admired during any period in American history.

Being a very ahistorical people, Americans never have looked back in history to see whether we could learn something that would make contemporary school reform efforts more effective.

If one goes back to Arthur Bestor's Educational Wastelands, to Why Johnny Can't Read, to the Conant Report, or to Albert Lynd's Quackery in the Public Schools, one finds criticism well before the now-institutionalized report, A Nation at Risk, assumed by many to be the first major criticism of public education, had ever seen the light of day.

In addition, schools of education have been regularly trounced by university faculty as being second-rate, partly for perceived inferior scholarship by the education faculty, partly for their habit of associating with (or even visiting!) public schools, which, as every arts and sciences professor knew, were full of intellectual contaminants, something akin to visiting a leper colony. Indeed, this author took part in a debate in New York City on public schools and heard the distinguished philosopher Sydney Hook describe an education course as "imitation pearls cast before real swine."

Why this almost pathological revulsion in academe over the public schools?

If one goes back to the early days of the nation, one can find several clues. The first laws making school attendance compulsory appeared in 1642 and 1647 in New England (of course). They came to be known as the Old Deluder Laws because of their function. Satan was the Old Deluder, and because the devil finds work for idle hands to do, it seemed wise to teach young people to read and write, primarily to keep the devil away. No reference was made to the creation of a new American intellectual elite nor the formation of a new political leadership nor anything else grandiose or deserving of respect, just teaching little brats to read to keep the devil from their door. Law, medicine, and preaching all clearly were professions. Keeping school was not; anybody could do it, even before the Declaration of Independence!

One did not even need to be particularly smart, as the portrayal of Ichabod Crane made clear. Our pragmatic ancestors valued pragmatic skills as a necessity--you built your own house, you farmed your own land. Jefferson's view of the learned farmer, pausing at the end of the planting row to read a couple of paragraphs from Plato, was clearly science fiction. When Ralph Waldo Emerson founded The American Scholar, the first American literary magazine, he clearly did not have schoolteachers in mind as its audience.

Thus, from the beginnings of our nation, school teachers were separated from the academic enterprise. (In France, by contrast, elementary school math teachers meet regularly with math teachers from all other levels, including the grandes ecoles.)

A Contemptible Task

A second major school function has been to socialize the millions of immigrants, plus their children, the "wretched refuse of your teeming shores," to American language and culture. Immigrant populations have been overwhelmingly European from our beginnings to about 1960. European immigration is now only about 15 percent of the total, with immigrants from South and Central America and Asia representing 85 percent or more. One pervasive characteristic of Americans is to show contempt for any immigrants who came here after you did. Again, to teach English to native speakers of Italian, German, and French is seen as a rather grubby task, certainly not requiring the skills of a scholar. Or today, with children who speak Spanish, Vietnamese or Guatemalan.

Teaching was seen as a fairly contemptible task that everyone could do if they had the time. The teacher worked with the scruffiest, least respected Americans of all--the newly arrived. They have diseases, they drink too much, they had too many children, they were lazy, and they didn't take care of their property--all because they arrived after us.

This contempt for recent immigrants meant teachers always have had the job of trying to make Americans out of this inferior raw material--not exactly the respect you confer on a judge or a brain surgeon.

Military Bashing

Increasingly, our schools also have been responsible for the "smarts" of the American military. Long before the 1942 National Defense Education Act (the first and most fortuitous linking of the military and education), there was a concern that schools were not helpful in preparing a military elite.

During the Civil War, it was clear that southern commanders had much superior education in the art of war, while northerners (recently arrived immigrants and their children) had inferior education in their public schools.

In World War II and the Cold War, constant reference was made to the excellence of Soviet schools, where every student took five years of math and science through calculus, once again leading to the utter contempt for the "soft" American educational system, with its life adjustment curricula and sensitivity training, even though it was American scientific and technical skills that proved superior to all others in World War II.

Again, teaching received no glory or credit because the leadership behind the training in the World War II v-l 2 and v-16 programs was the American military, not the public schools. Later, the Conant Report, named after the esteemed Harvard president who chaired a presidentially appointed commission, also assumed little or no teacher participation in curriculum. The proposed new content for the nation's schools would be developed by curriculum experts, i.e., university professors. The radical reforms of the Physical Science Study Committee, the School Mathematics Study Group of Illinois, and "Beberman Math" (all major curriculum reforms of the 1960s) were designed to be teacher-proof, meaning that teachers would not be able to screw things up as long as they stayed strictly with the instruction guide. (Would surgeons have been told how to do appendectomies this way?)

Once again, the experts from higher education's arts and sciences, and not from schools of education, would set the course for public schools, and teachers would be bound to follow their cookbooks.

Grabbing Attention

Is it any wonder that assigning schools these functions and treating teachers as automatons would produce a weltanschaung that would show the American public school teacher throughout American history as an Ichabod Crane? The current plethora of national commissions, task forces, and other reform-minded groups have produced more than 100 reports since 1992, almost all starting from the premise that (of course) our schools are failing and that teachers are incompetent.

To some extent, if you want to get people's attention, you must begin with a statement that the sky is falling. Abraham Flexner's report on American medicine in 1913 was successful first because he pointed out the major failings of the profession, but it also indicated exactly what medicine needed to do to get back on track. In A Nation at Risk, people came to believe that the sky was indeed falling for public schools, but the report departed from Flexner's at this point in that there was no clearly presented remedy for the problems of the schools as Flexner provided for medicine. (In addition, there is a remarkable paucity of evidence in A Nation at Risk.)

A contemporary educational issue is that demographically, the underlying problems (youth poverty, lowincome single parents and unwed mothers, enormous population shifts as 103 million of us change residence every five years, increasing older populations with no direct contact with schools, the middle-class flight from cities to suburbs) cannot be attacked directly through the educational system.

At a conference I attended in Michigan, the audience response to questions as to what the state was prepared to do about the doubling of the number of youth below the poverty line was charter schools. How charter schools will reduce youth poverty defies the imagination and never was clarified. It may be that it's more fun talking about charter schools in vacua than it is talking about having twice as many kids in Michigan below the poverty line.

Refocusing Attention

I have attempted to demonstrate there never was a golden age for America's public schools when everyone was literate in English as well as three other languages, knowledgeable about American and world history, conversant with the latest in physics and biology, and knew the names of all the members of their state legislature as well as the U.S. Congress, and when "all the children were above average." We now are better educated as a people than we have ever been.

Certainly things looked better when only the 30 percent at the top of the economic heap graduated from high school and everyone else dug ditches, but do we really want to do that again? If there really are 15 million people who are "illiterate" today (and measuring literacy is a task that borders on theology), how many were there in 1920?

The frustration in the Chicken Little argument is that we are prevented from the really important thing: (1) admitting that schools do many things better than ever (computer skills for starters), (2) agreeing that some things still need improvement, then (3) concentrating on the new tasks we want schools to achieve for young people entering a new century as well as a new millennium.

Additional Work by Bud Hodgkinson

Those who want to read more by Harold "Bud" Hodgkinson may consult the following:

* Bringing Tomorrow into Focus, Institute for Educational Leadership, Washington, D.C., 1996 (available by calling 202-822-8405)

* "American Education: The Good, the Bad and the Task," Phi Delta Kappan, April 1993 (available by calling 800-766-1156)

* "Schools Are Awful, Aren't They?" Education Week, Oct. 30, 1991 (available by calling 202-686-0800)

* "The Right Schools for the Right Kids," Educational Leadership, February 1988, (available by calling 703-549-9110)

* Immigrants to America: The Asian Experience, 1995, and Hispanic Americans: A Look Behind, a Look Ahead, 1996, Institute for Educational Leadership (available by calling 202-822-8405)