Madame Gets Answered

Madame:

Your question is complex. The answer partly depends on perspective on “evil” and “reformed (or transformed).”  The communist countries of Russia (and some other parts of the Soviet Union), as well as China, transformed their educational systems, as has Cuba, effectively going from largely illiterate to almost completely literate.

During much of the Progressive period in both Europe and the Americas, great reforms and forward strides were made in education.  The “relaxation” and “flowering” of here-thereto rigid German education was a part of this, although it would not see its full measure until after WW2.

Both Ghana and South Africa—for different reasons—have made significant reforms to their educational systems.

Israel—and Palestine, surprisingly—have instituted impressive educational systems, of course with different circumstances and different result measurements.

Considering the beginning and the rocky initial steps, Australian education has come impressively far.

The “Little Tigers” (e.g. S. Korea, Taiwan, etc.) built their now solid systems from nearly scratch, although, to be fair, they had a good amount of cultural legacy help.

Turkey after the Ottomans at the same time both consolidated and created whole cloth a new universal education system.  Of course, for 20 or more years, it was effectively under the control and direction of one set of people.

Even the American South  made impressive strides after the Civil War, albeit with some significant setbacks, going from a scant system to a pervasive one.

And the model we keep bringing up—Finland—was dissatisfied with its educational system and went through its own reform period after World War Two.

Yet there is a place I have mentioned before that probably best meets your question’s answer: Japan.  It is an incredible Japanese trait to be resistant to much change until the culture senses an overwhelming need, then change is dramatic and nearly total. Even pre-1868, some strides in education had been made, but the Meiji Restoration infused incredible transformative energy into the whole country—including education.  Setbacks, stifling, and even some degeneration occurred shortly up to and through WW2, but not too long after, another great change occurred, and the Japanese leapt forward.

Your sentiment about corporations and their employees after The Great Recession seems quite accurate.  Can you imagine what a Great Depression, sans a Rooseveltian interventionist administration and Congress, would degrade the attitude and treatment to?

Unions are often necessary, given the structure of capitalism, especially American capitalism.  They need governmental oversight of course.  Sometimes unions can be corrupt, selfish, short-sighted, frustrating, limiting its members’ productivity to the average or mediocre, and susceptible, when its members are minimally educated, to emotional manipulation and other malevolent things. 

I’ve known people who got turned against unions because of the above.  I myself  worked at a place during one summer where I had to pay union dues but got few of the benefits and a whole lot of poor treatment. 

Yet the alternative—no or weak unions—has been in the general shown to be QUITE disadvantageous to the average American worker—and the middle class as a whole.

Banned Books week—perpetual vigilance needed, especially in an era that is, for far too many Americans, post-book.   Apathy can be a catalyst for reactionary malevolence.

Well, I meant to get to talking about last week’s barely media-covered 400,000 person march in NYC on climate change, but I see my windbaggery has shelved that!  

Well Read is Well Educated

Professor J,

Thanks for outlining how we got here. One more question (you know that's a lie, don't you?): has there ever been a case of a country, other than one with diabolical leadership and evil intent, that completely reformed its education system? Finland offers much more of what I'd like to see and think is healthy but our culture more of a problem than the system. Our poor kiddos. The corporate concept of work harder, and for longer hours has trickled down into education. But perhaps that is by design. Corporations hardly need free and divergent thinkers, as Sir Ken points out, but outside of creative ventures they need people to show up on time and do what they're told.

From what I can tell, one of the results of the Great Recession has been that corporate America's attitude toward employees is "You are lucky you have a job."

Okay, I'm seeing your ongoing point (dang it!) about the benefit of unions.

How fortuitous that Banned Book Week lands on the calender while we are having a discussion on education. Every year I'm appalled to see what's on the list. It gets updated from year to year.  The titles are broken down in several different ways from the top ten banned books by decade to the top ten book lists challenged by year. 

 The Hunger Games made the list of ten most challenged books of 2013 and The Glass Castle held the # nine spot in 2012. The Hunger Games...really? And The Glass Castle is written in such a way that will break your heart into a million pieces for the children depicted in this memoir. Some of the scenes still haunt me. I think it would benefit any comfortable and affluent suburban high school student to read it. I found my favorite author, Kurt Vonnegut on several lists. I think he should be required reading for everyone.

The list that always gets me though is the one that lists the classics that have been banned or challenged at some point. I consider so many of these to be necessary reads! And of course now I want to read the ones I've missed.

 The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald
 The Catcher in the Rye, by J.D. Salinger
 The Grapes of Wrath, by John Steinbeck
To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee
The Color Purple, by Alice Walker
Ulysses, by James Joyce
Beloved, by Toni Morrison
The Lord of the Flies, by William Golding 
1984, by George Orwell
Lolita, by Vladmir Nabokov
Of Mice and Men, by John Steinbeck
Catch-22, by Joseph Heller
Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley
Animal Farm, by George Orwell
The Sun Also Rises, by Ernest Hemingway
As I Lay Dying, by William Faulkner
A Farewell to Arms, by Ernest Hemingway
Their Eyes Were Watching God, by Zora Neale Hurston
Invisible Man, by Ralph Ellison
Song of Solomon, by Toni Morrison 
Gone with the Wind, by Margaret Mitchell
Native Son, by Richard Wright
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, by Ken Kesey 
Slaughterhouse-Five, by Kurt Vonnegut 
For Whom the Bell Tolls, by Ernest Hemingway
The Call of the Wild, by Jack London
Go Tell it on the Mountain, by James Baldwin
All the King's Men, by Robert Penn Warren
The Lord of the Rings, by J.R.R. Tolkien
The Jungle, by Upton Sinclair
Lady Chatterley's Lover, by D.H. Lawrence
A Clockwork Orange, by Anthony Burgess
The Awakening, by Kate Chopin
In Cold Blood, by Truman Capote
The Satanic Verses, by Salman Rushdie
Sophie's Choice, by William Styron
Sons and Lovers, by D.H. Lawrence 
Cat's Cradle, by Kurt Vonnegut
A Separate Peace, by John Knowles
Naked Lunch, by William S. Burroughs
Brideshead Revisited, by Evelyn Waugh
Women in Love, by D.H. Lawrence
The Naked and the Dead, by Norman Mailer
Tropic of Cancer, by Henry Miller
An American Tragedy, by Theodore Dreiser
Rabbit, Run, by John Updike
 
That reminds me that some of these are ones I've never gotten around to. Think I'll pick Lolita this year.

The Wreck Of The American Education Train

Madame:

Your paragraph

“There isn't any perfect curriculum. The next program with the catchy name isn't going to fix anything. The problem is one of freedom and time. No one has enough of either. Teachers don't for all the reasons you've listed in your post. Parents don't because they are struggling to make ends meet and families are stressed to the breaking point. And children don't. They are herded from class to class and then after school their schedules keep them from processing the day's events and careful reflection. Imagine someone in charge trying to suggest that we actually do less, or have more recess and time outdoors. Imagine parents having time to engage their children in conversation instead of just being the nightly homework police.”

is one of the best encapsulations of the American elementary/secondary education situation I’ve ever seen.  Of course, the American penchant for filling whatever time there is with diversions and entertainment, along with spectacle-fixation and busybody concern over peripheral matters, rather than true reflection and meaningful work for meaningful change, means we also have to address that flaw before the quite necessary other adjustments you so astutely outline can have good effect.

The question you ask about how education “jumped off the track” is in some respects a direct one, and in others, a complex one.    For true understanding, it requires “deep history,” going back far into the 20^th and even 19^th centuries, but in many respects, American education has been caught up in anti-progressive strategies of the upper-upper class for many decades now.  In their transformation of society, they have sometimes transformed education directly, often because of finances, but even more so done it indirectly, again, because of finances.  It has often been disguised as “reform,” and as they are accomplished masters of long-term strategy, deception, deflection, mis/disinformation, and emotional manipulation, they enlisted many witting and unwitting assistants along the way.

It is not to say the ground was infertile for their methods.  A Nation At Risk, a document I’ve always had ambivalent feelings about, came out of a time when a fair amount of what I term unmoored, fuzzy liberal foolishness, along with initial bureaucratic growth and the results of the beginning of student catering, helped to focus a backlash.  In typical fashion, pieces of the report were concentrated on and the rest ignored.  The conservative rising tide found ready ears in calls for increasing the number of school days in a year, longer school days, etc.  All in the name of more “rigorous academic standards,” a mantra that would culminate of course in No Child Left Behind, with its standardized tests to quantify and measure “achievement”—and punish school systems (and teachers) who did not meet those “standards.”

The sagging fortunes of the middle class coincided with slashing of state budgets for education, leaving the property tax emphasized even more as the discriminator between abled and disabled school districts. Federal aid became more and more needed, but came with more and more “strings,” leading to increase in directly and indirectly associated bureaucracy.  As schools struggled to respond to the unceasing chorus of criticism from a society unable to truly look at itself, they got more administration, more “counselors,” more special assistants, etc. to try to meet the impossible demands and “standards.” 

More and more requirements were made on students’ time outside of the teacher-directed classroom.  Less and less latitude was permitted the teacher on the how, what, and how much of that what the teacher taught.  As society became The Nation of Strangers that Vance Packard tried to warn us so eloquently about, schools became less and less a student body and more and more a collection of individuals (and their parents who emphasized that individual separatism).  Sometimes they were coddled individuals; at other times they were excessively structured (stifled) ones.  The increasing stress factor on nearly all helped to make school less a shared experience of community (and perhaps wonder), and more a required feat of endurance.

Visionless legislators teamed up with visionless administrators to find visionless education “reformers” that inflicted continual rounds of “reform” and “initiatives” to address the symptoms of the above, but of course, they only made most everything worse (a few things got a bit better, at least statistically, but the exceptions only proved the pattern).

Today’s result: More well-off school districts fare better, of course, but, with only a few exceptions, to find great performing schools and great performing students of the kind your memory remembers, you’ll have to look to those that are generally private—and not all private schools, but primarily only those of the upper-upper class. 

Who Has Time to Learn?

Professor J,

Thanks for clearing up the idea of tenure and its benefits. I certainly agree that there isn't much that could be done to make the current system any worse. What we have seems so fractured and dysfunctional as to be beyond saving in form. But we are a people who are intent on throwing good money after bad and who lack imagination for how different something could be. We tweak and tailor ideas that have proved not to work. We try the next new thing that ends up being a rehash of some other bad idea and never consider that the entire thing might be flawed.

I agree with you that teachers should not be told how to teach and should be given much more leeway than they have now about what to teach. I cringe when I think how many teachable moments are lost because a teacher has that ever looming standardized test in the back of her mind and can't risk (or doesn't feel she can) answering thoughtful questions from students or asking them what they might want to learn. I've never met a child that didn't have some interesting questions and ideas that could spark lots of learning if given a chance. More freedom (and free time) all the way around would benefit everyone.

My daughter, who is one project away from graduating with her masters in education, asked me once how I knew how to teach. The truth is, I didn't, but I managed to send them off to high school fairly well prepared and they both loved college and excelled there. I had to tell my daughter that I loosely used a scope and sequence to make sure we didn't have gaping voids. Every other year they took the state achievement test just to make sure I wasn't ruining them. But my overall goal wasn't for them to know everything. My daily mission was not to prepare them for the state issued standardized test. My passionate vision for their education was to spark in them a love of learning and to be curious thinkers.

There isn't any perfect curriculum. The next program with the catchy name isn't going to fix anything. The problem is one of freedom and time. No one has enough of either. Teachers don't for all the reasons you've listed in your post. Parents don't because they are struggling to make ends meet and families are stressed to the breaking point. And children don't. They are herded from class to class and then after school their schedules keep them from processing the day's events and careful reflection. Imagine someone in charge trying to suggest that we actually do less, or have more recess and time outdoors. Imagine parents having time to engage their children in conversation instead of just being the nightly homework police.

We desperately need the paradigm shift Sir Ken outlines. I suspect that standardized testing has now become big business and that we are going to keep going down the wrong road.

Question: When we were growing up, the education we got was less stressed and achieved better results.  I'm assuming it's a string of events and policies, but what caused the education train to jump so far off track in the first place?

A Profession Is Calling

Madame:

First, let’s make sure everyone knows what tenure is:  it is a legal contract that a non-probationary teacher can only be let go for certain specified reasons and by due process.   Tenured teachers are public employees whose generally meager economic remuneration is not supposed to be in yearly danger, barring certain things, as those teachers try to balance many competing priorities and demands from the public and the system.  

Like judges, particularly federal ones who have the judicial equivalent of tenure, public teachers are supposed to be shielded from the insistent, parochial demands of multitudes who would not only attempt to be their masters, but tear them in a hundred directions.  In theory, this allows the knowledgeable teacher to balance and cool those demands in favor of what is best.  In practice, this does not always work out well, but the alternative can be worse.  Teachers may not do WELL under tenure (for all the reasons and more of what I listed last week), but they would likely do worse without it.  Meager pay, high pressure, few benefits, and no job security?  Fast food education would loom.

The firing process for bad teachers has become embroiled in the defensiveness that constantly being under attack has made a lot of teachers’ unions, clouding discernment in a number of cases.  Attempts at getting teachers unions to properly police their own ranks have become stillborn because of the generalized attacks on the unions and teachers themselves. There’s also the contributing atmosphere of the general litigiousness of a disconnected society (and one with a large number of lawyers). 

A student in a public system with no tenure runs the risk of the teacher being bullied or cowed by the meddling and the overbearing, not to mention the truly economically or politically powerful, and all that would mean for a skewed “education.”  Teachers are also supposed to be not just a profession, but a calling.  That calling could get completely impossible if respect sank even further than it has now—and the lack of tenure would signal that.

Do we want our teachers to live in yearly fear of their jobs in addition to all the other things?  Do we want our childrens’ instructors to be nervous wrecks, anxious to please and not knowing which faction, which week, needs pleased the most urgently?

Well, stop-gap measures probably aren’t going to change much, but perhaps they can arrest some of the deterioration.  One of the prime ones is for us to quit telling teachers HOW they should teach, and give them some flexibility on WHAT to teach.  Guidelines (references can be often useful), not requirements, should replace much of the strictures now in place.  The standards , if such are necessary, should be measures of success much less crude than “test scores.” Measures such as the following might be better: community satisfaction, employers’ satisfaction, civic leaders’ satisfaction, higher institutions’ satisfaction, and, perhaps most importantly, the “5/10/20 year” satisfaction marks of the student.  That is, how well the student rates his or her education 5/10/20 years after each milestone (4^th grade, 8^th grade, 12^th grade).  This latter piece would not only increase constructive engagement of the society into the system, but provide reflection that is too often missing from this culture.

Another measure would be to present success stories—both domestic and international—to teachers and schools, and let them tailor to their own local situations (or justify why they disagree).  One of the readiest is to get teachers in front of some of the best teachers (and most innovative thinkers and practitioners), and let them be inspired—especially if a broad range of styles and personalities are presented so that each teacher can find a model they can learn from.   

Of course, in all this, removing many requirements and other bureaucratic weight is a must.  Teachers simply cannot do a great job under that pile.  Getting the freedom to try to do what they think is best will re-awaken teacher energy that has long been suppressed or deadened by the present system.  For instance, what if a teacher, instead of having everyone read the same thing, had an hour every day where students brought whatever they liked to read to class and read to themselves some, read aloud to others some, or even just talked about THEIR material some? With no judgment since it is the love of reading and the enthusiasm of sharing that is being emphasized. 

Naysayers of the above paragraphs might be reminded that it is hard to imagine a WORSE system because of it.  Criticism is justified when a better set of ideas are proposed!

Obviously, from how much I’ve written this week, this is a subject of endless windbaggery from me! :) Keep us informed about how the split in your local school system results!

Reform School

Professor J,

Oh. summer's over, isn't it? My over-scheduled brain needed more time. 

Education seems an appropriate subject for fall. First, I have a question about tenure, which in the case of higher education I can see the benefit of, but not necessarily in K-12. Like lots of other people I have fond memories of beloved teachers, mostly mediocre ones, and two, that as an adult, I now realize should not have been in charge of any classroom anywhere. Do you think teachers do a better job if they know their job is secure forever (just to be clear: I think the trend of paying for success is flawed as well) ? The firing process for bad teachers seems laborious and fraught with the possibility of being sued. So what are the benefits of tenure for teachers in elementary and secondary education? And a follow up: how does tenure benefit a child's education?

Oh, the parents. A terrifying lot. (Insert helicopter sounds.)

Your description of what awaits teachers in the reality of the system is enough to give any education major pause. From what I hear from teacher friends and retired teachers that I work with at the museum, your description is accurate. And these are people who love teaching. On tours you can see their eyes light up when the kids have great questions or figure something out on their own. But their stories of how bad the system has gotten, how much is constantly dumped on them, the ridiculous amount of bureaucratic time wasting that goes on are astounding.

Aren't many of these problems are systemic and intertwined with other problems of our society? The family unit is under intense pressure in our hyperventilating-ly over-scheduled, get ahead (but not really) culture. And instead of working together to solve problems parents and teachers are often in an adversarial situation wherein everyone suffers, especially the child. And bless his heart, he likely hasn't been taught much personal responsibility by his over indulgent parents. I'm painting with a broad brush but the pattern seems fairly universal at this point. I feel like I always have to keep saying "I know there are exceptions!"

 Could you name a few things that you think would be at least stop gap measures that could be implemented without overhauling the entire system? I think that is precisely what needs to be done, but then when it comes to education, I'm a rebel. ;)

We could start with "Stop whining. Clean your room. Read a book." A new mantra for parents.

Our town voted to split from the monstrously huge city/county system and start it's own system. A vastly smaller animal that will allow more local control. We'll see how that goes.

Teacher, Teacher, I Declare

Madame M:

A wonderful tour, visual and otherwise, through the delights of your “turf.”

School has started back up.  This becomes the time of year for politicians, many of them running for election or re-election, to lay blame for America’s abysmal education system entirely at teachers’ feet.  In fact, Robert Gibbs, Obama’s former press secretary, and Campbell Brown, former CNN anchor, have teamed up to “declare war on teacher tenure” (and by inference, war on the teachers unions—and their teachers—that support it).

Leaving aside for the moment the general plutocratic campaign of annihilation against unions in general, of which this is a part, citizens should be aware of a few things:

War has been declared against a group of people that labor under:  high-pressure; constantly increasing demands (although sometimes they merely get shifted, mostly the priorities just get added on to); low pay; little respect (probably the lowest in the developed world—maybe the entire world); little appreciation; often disconnected students; frequently absent or coddling/meddlesome parents; administrators that are too commonly abusive, selfish, incompetent, or serving of outside interests; excessive sports or outside activities emphasis; school funding that is wildly erratic and utterly inconsistent; regularly hostile legislators; and increasingly ideological or outside interest school boards.  All this (and more), and yet with many of the society’s problems—that society can’t or won’t address—laid at the teachers’ feet with the insistent demand of  “fix it!” and oh, yeah, become entirely responsible for those kids’ outcomes, including the quality of those kids’ future jobs.  

And you, Mr. (but usually Ms.) Teacher, your continuance in your chosen profession—forget about reward—will be almost entirely dependent on student “performance” and even how the student feels about you.

Nearly every year, you, teacher, will have to absorb another education “initiative” that is almost certainly fated to derail or be supplanted, with countless extra hours (that the public rarely sees) spent on it to comply or else. 

And after all of the above—plus a great deal more that isn’t listed—the public and their supposed representatives will hurl vitriol at any attempt to defend yourself, wail that the best and brightest don’t go into teaching, scream that you (not the factors above) are to blame for the poor teachers among you, say that schools are failing because of your union and what is needed is privatization (funded privately, of course, and that will markedly increase the already high inequality), and say that you, the little teacher, are entirely responsible for the whole mess.

A disconnected, un-communal society that will neither face reality nor hold itself responsible wants to hold the least powerful responsible.

I have said it before, but it bears repeating:  As David Byrne, Talking Heads lead singer, once remarked, “If this makes sense, STOP MAKING SENSE.”

Home Town Tourists

Professor J,

Aside from literary adventures, this summer has kept me at home. The best has been made of it and now we are at the end. This includes spending lots of time with Mr. Snarky before he leaves on Saturday for six months in the southwest. I'm sure you'll be hearing more about that.

Yesterday we played tourists in our own city.

We broke down and visited Graceland a few years back. We eventually got tired of traveling and having people ask us where we were from and then this:

"Oh, so what is Graceland like?"

It was embarrassing when we had to admit we'd never been there.

We've remedied that and can not only say that we've been to Graceland and recommend the trip, but can recommend a tour of the Gibson Guitar Factory which is located on Beale Street. Yesterday we added another site, the most important site in rock and roll history--Sun Studios. We took along a lifelong friend and local musician who knows more music trivia than anyone I've ever met.

People in this tiny building while we were there were from England, Sweden, Japan, Germany and all across the US. It made us feel even sillier about waiting so long to tour the site which is accessible and centrally located. Graceland's a bit more work to get to.  

The tour was led by a girl who really knew her stuff and is interspersed with music clips and recordings that you don't even know exist. It's a great music history lesson. There's a lot of memorabilia in the museum section on the second floor, but the chills happen in the studio which you can tour in the daytime but is used for recording at night. Musicians still want to record where it all started. 

Of course I got a few photos...

The tape X on the floor is where Elvis stood to make his first recording.