| IN
MY OPINION
The
Educational System — Ignored
by Joseph Coates
Early in the last
century elementary school education boomed. By the Second World War
completing high school was the big development. Following the war, college
and university education swelled to an unprecedented extent. In the
last third of the century quaternary education, beyond the formal diploma
and degree granting system of primary, secondary, and tertiary education,
took its place as the biggest development. The nation is now fully committed
to education at all four levels, but still approaches it from personal,
institutional and governmental perspectives as it each of the levels
were an independent activity based on separate considerations, evaluations,
participation and funding.
Evolution, of course, continues at each level. We have now moved primary
school substantially back into mostly mandatory kindergarten and even
further with the growth of the nursery school. At the other end colleges
and universities in their constant search for more revenue are beginning
to compete in the quaternary area with training programs, executive
programs, and specialized educational activities, often in their off
season, that is, in the summer. The state college systems have seen
great political and practical value in geographic spread so that the
community college is now a solidly ensconced aspect of tertiary education.
It is booming since it is usually put on a sink-or-swim basis and hence
has become the most entrepreneurial and successful part of tertiary
education. The community colleges also are linking themselves closely
to the quaternary phase of learning.
Despite all of this dynamism, the fact remains that few people in positions
of responsibility at any of the four levels pay much attention to the
system as a whole. They do of course give lip service to it. The primary
and secondary levels are casually aware that their products flow into
the workforce or into tertiary education, while tertiary education knows
and largely ignores that its output must eventually go to work. All
are aware of the growing competition from the quaternary sector.
The theme of this essay is that the overall system is performing far
below what it could or should and unequivocally below what the high
allocation of resources and the vast employment of people in the system
should yield. I suggest some of the reasons for this incoherence in
order to stimulate interest in reform.
The decline in K-12 has been recognized for decades and documented and
deplored by a handful of studies and commissions, all of which almost
mechanically repeat the same message, but lead to no action. It has
reached the stage where now a second generation of Americans are victims
of the decline in primary and secondary education. This situation makes
it difficult to appreciate and acknowledge the catastrophic cognitive
collapse of K-12.
Kids today do not know where France is, are not quite sure which way
South America is on the map, really do not know what the two sides fought
about in the Civil War, or cannot quite tell you for sure what the New
England states are. Yet they have parents who are about 65 percent or
so satisfied to very satisfied with the education their children are
getting. Why is that? Those parents are the first generation produced
by the terribly degraded system. Those parents cannot do numbers in
their head, cannot spell words with more than six letters. They do not
know history and think that geography is a science about rocks, and
really have no idea of where the picture goes when you turn off the
TV set. Without their intense concern and aggressive deploring of the
status of K-12, legislators have no incentive to do much.
Many things have led to the decline in K-12, including better opportunities
for the intelligent women who were once the backbone of that system.
There also is the heaping of many new non-educational missions onto
K-12. Perhaps most important of all, a grossly misfired attempt to improve
the quality of school teachers has resulted in an iron triangle promoting
incompetence in teaching. In order to justify higher pay, teachers have
to have more education. Colleges were quite willing to cooperate since
this created new students. Formal courses and degrees mean higher pay.
Everyone benefited and seems satisfied. The content of that teacher
training as seen by anyone who has been through it is so watered down
as to be mere slop. But the iron triangle between the educational bureaucracy,
teachers and their labor unions, and the schools of education is such
that everybody makes out while the students end up short-changed.
It would be madness to claim that there are no good or great teachers
in K-12, but it is doubtful that more then 20 percent of them are knowledgeable,
trained, motivated, able, and committed enough to aggressively educate
students. The situation is so bad that about one-third of college freshman
now undergo some kind of remedial course work that could not even be
dignified as advanced high school. It just rehashes routine skills that
they did not learn in the first 12 grades. One would never guess that
an advanced and wealthy nation would treat its putative greatest asset,
children, so shabbily.
At the college level of course no one needs to give a moment's concern
to the premier schools—the Harvards, the Yales, the Caltechs, and
the Berkeleys. They have the cream of the crop, and the crop is so big
that there will always be enough cream to keep their pitchers full.
The real problem is in the other private, state, and municipal colleges
and universities. Rather than looking at education as a flow system,
the second tier, and public colleges and universities accept whatever
comes along, refusing to denounce the deplorable quality of the freshmen
and in turn failing to motivate children's parents to take effective
action to frighten the legislatures into school reform.
Why does this happen? It is easier to go along than to rock the boat.
A further problem is that tertiary education has been watered down in
several ways—more vacation time, fewer hours required for credit
points, and fewer credit hours required for graduation. In my judgment
a typical college graduate today, compared to 1950 or 1955, is getting
only 70 percent as much formal education, quite aside from the content
and its quality.
The portion of tertiary education that is the star of American education
and the envy of the world are the graduate schools. We outshine the
rest of the world. Now isn't that ironic, that we can have decaying
primary and secondary levels but a glowing graduate level? Not at all!
The system is so large that we can continually find enough students
to fill the postgraduate slots. On the other hand we are far below what
we need in graduate education of native-born students. An increasingly
high percentage of graduate students are foreign rather than native
born. That in part has to do with the relative economic structures of
foreign countries. It also has to do with the relatively high pay for
Americans with bachelors and masters degrees and the relatively long
time required to complete a doctorate.
The fundamental lack in systems thinking and action at each level is
a good reason for each of the numberless actors to remain silent, making
no protest about the quality of and the input and output of students
throughout the system. Eventually students get dumped into the workforce.
Neither the secondary nor the tertiary level pays attention to the fact
that their products will soon work. Massive education of people for
degrees in psychology, history, or English does not make personal, social,
or economic sense. There is nothing wrong with, and great value in,
adequate learning in English, psychology, and history. But to let the
students decide, or let parents—still too uninformed to make good
plans—decide on a choice of degree field, is an outrage. What kind
of production system gives no attention to the quality, the utilitarian
value, or the serviceability of its output? Why do those in academic
careers not cry out against the state of the system? For many young
academics, it is the publish-or-perish struggle for tenure. For older,
tenured faculty, it may be simply too much trouble. After all, the professorate
has historically been great on debate but limp in action.
K-12 and certainly college, as part of the tertiary level, needs much
more attention to the content of the curriculum and preparation for
work. The centerpiece of reform at both the secondary and tertiary levels
should be the traditional three goals of education: preparation for
work; training for civic duty; and carrying the cultural heritage.
Just think about this. It is common among people to say “Oh, I
don't have a good memory” as they fail to recall something quite
ordinary, but we never ever hear anyone say “I don't think well.”
Yet the problem that surrounds us is that there are endless numbers
of our fellow citizens who simply do not think well. That is the worst
abuse perpetrated by primary, secondary, and tertiary education.
Quaternary education comes into play as a growing factor to pick up
the pieces, to help people with their hobbies and personal interests,
and often to enhance their skills in present or future employment. Even
there the system is slow to recognize that the populations most in need
of quaternary education are those who have dropped out of school prematurely
or who are blue collar and hence with too limited opportunities to advance
in the information based society. One of the characteristics of this
needy group is that they often abhor the classroom because they have
had bad experiences with it. To expect for them to go to a classroom
and give up their time is to expect snow in July. What our system has
to do is recognize the reason why more people do not participate in
quaternary education and respond accordingly. Research in Canada, which
is a good model for the USA, shows that ordinary citizens undertake
a half-dozen self-initiated learning projects in the course of a year.
Virtually none of them are part of any formal system.
Is there anything happening that could change the system? Yes. The most
adversely affected group that is served by the educational system is
business. We are all familiar with the repeated stories of the inability
of corporations to hire competent people. Yet businesses have stood
back from taking effective political action. Most of their actions are
unfocused even when well-intentioned, and not politically powerful enough
to jolt the local or the state government into basic reform. Let us
hope that something will occur to alert the business community of what
it must do. That is not to say that there are not many good business
sponsored programs out there, but they are not effective at the core
of the problem. Changing the content and organization of the educational
system to move it to responsive and responsible preparation of students
for a full future life is urgently needed.
Perhaps we are closer to bringing about change than is obvious. Drawing
on one of the black activists of the 1960s, Julius Lester wrote, Look
Out, Whitey! Black Power Gon' Get your Mama. To paraphrase that,
educators better watch out cause distance learning is gonna eat yo
lunch.
Distance learning and computer-assisted learning are doing fairly well
at the postgraduate level and moving into many courses in science and
engineering in college. It will soon become clear that the only reason
for going to college will be for those courses that absolutely require
hands-on and second, to find a life's mate. Public or private education
costs a family $25,000 to $200,000. The chance to do a fair amount of
that remotely has to be appealing. That will in turn lead to a star
system. Would anyone be satisfied with the best from East Nowhere College
when one can get the top professors from anywhere on tape or screen?
Cost effectiveness will drive business more to distance learning. The
economics of potential savings will drive parents in the same direction.
At the other end of the educational system, find yourself a middle class
three to seven year old and watch them. They are well on their way to
becoming virtuosos with the computer. As they move on into the formal
system they will find it utterly inadequate for their own level of skill.
Parents will demand more, or they will withdraw their children, as about
2 percent have now done, for home-based learning. Or they will seriously
augment the home-based leaning through remote learning, and the effect
of that will be pressure all the way from K-12.
This brief essay cannot cover recommendations, specifics, and details
of what might be done to reform the system. Where you stand in the flow
may permit your advocacy or actions to improve the whole system. Colleges
and universities are not noted for their collegiality, but individuals
may always rise to the bait. An appeal to administrators for systemic
action is also unlikely to be productive since their primary function
is rearranging the deck chairs and stilling unrest. Any fundamental
changes in the total system would take six to 12 years to show up, which
works against any administrative hope for long range planning. Nevertheless
there are things that could be done. Here are a few suggestions:
There is a great opportunity for an AAUP project involving a
comparison of stratified samples of students in different curricula,
in terms of occupational, income, social, and personal consequences.
A number of different groups could begin an annual inventory and evaluation
of innovations five to ten years ago, to establish and certify successes.
The evaluation of remedial education tied to a report on the sources
of students requiring it could be valuable in state systems, the primary
appeal being to better define the effective use of resources. This could
possibly motivate the state system to apply pressure to the K-12 elements
in their own states.
Distinctly different for state higher education would be detailed reports
on the sources of low performing students for similar feedback to those
responsible for K-12.
The initiation of social responsibility reports on a department by department
basis could be begun at any college or university, since there are sociologists
on every campus. This could interestingly be tied to a project of the
American Sociological Association. If the social responsibility reports
did what I think they would, it could quickly spread across the country.
Business is the largest single organized group in the country unequivocally
suffering from the deterioration in all three levels of education. In
those communities where one or two businesses predominate, they have
a special opportunity to organize other elements of the community into
K-12 reform. Of course, business must keep its hands off any suggestion
of curriculum modification, but that would take care of itself if the
community reform program advocated the following:
• Eliminate everyone from the classroom who is not a teacher, with
the exception of classes for the handicapped.
• Subject
all teachers to a test of knowledge of their subject (I estimate one-third
would be enthusiastically retained, one-third given their walking papers,
and one-third offered solid remedial training).
• Put the principals back in power; too much control has gone downtown
or to the county seat.
• Provide
lateral entry into teaching by substantive testing and where appropriate
provide a three-month crash course in pedagogy.
The failure of the recurrent national surveys of education to bring
about change has resulted from their failure to be tied to proposed
actions and to groups ready to implement those actions.•
This
article appears in the October 1, 2002 issue
of the Emerald Journal On
the Horizon. |
