Excuse time

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Excuse time

The following is from Thomas Sowell. Is Reality Optional? pp. 113 - 114.

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EXCUSE TIME

"THE WORST CONTINUED TO WORSEN," John Kenneth Galbraith said, in his entertaining account of the stock market crash of 1929. Unfortunately, that also applies to American education today.

Recently released statistics show that American high school students have now reached an all-time low in their verbal scores on the Scholastic Aptitude Test, taken by more than a million young people preparing to go on to college. Looking back over the past 30 years, the highest S.A.T. scores were reached in 1963, the entire decade of the 1970s saw declines every year, and the minor improvements of the 1980s never reached the levels achieved 20 years earlier. Now the 1990s have begun with a new decline. The worst continues to worsen.

With years of experience in dealing with bad results, the educational establishment has become expert at explaining them away. The first line of defense is that the results don't mean anything. A favorite variation is that American colleges are now providing "access" to so many "disadvantaged" students that of course the average scores of those applying to college are a little lower.

Unfortunately for this argument, test scores have been declining at the top. Twenty years ago, more than 116,000 students scored above 600 (out of a possible 800) on the S.A.T. Today, with slightly more students taking the test, fewer than 75,000 score that high. In math, about the same proportion score above 600 as in 1971. However, we must remember that 1971 was not a golden age. The decline was already under way for several years by then.

When declining results on a wide variety of tests cannot be talked away, educators then argue that this shows a need for more money to be spent on the public schools. Thus the tables are turned and "society" is put on the moral defensive for having "neglected" the education of the next generation by not "investing" enough in their education, condemning them to "overcrowded classrooms" and the like.

In reality, the United States spends more money per pupil than most other nations, including nations whose youngsters consistently outperform ours on international tests. We spend more money than Japan, for example, whether measured in real per pupil expenditures or as a percentage of our Gross National Product. We have fewer pupils per class than Japan, and in mathematics our classes are less than half the size of Japanese math classes. The only thing we don't have are results. American students have come in last in international math tests.

"Society" has not failed its children. The public schools have failed. That is what all the clever evasions and distractions seek to conceal.

There is really nothing very mysterious about why our public schools are failures. When you select the poorest quality college students to be public school teachers, give them iron-clad tenure, a captive audience, and pay them according to seniority rather than performance, why should the results be surprising?

Money is not the problem here, either. Better-qualified people become private school teachers at lower salaries. The crucial problem is with the filter through which the overwhelming majority of teachers pass—education courses. Mediocrity and incompetence pass readily through such filters, but education courses repel more able and intelligent college students. Paying higher salaries to the kind of people who emerge from this process only makes mediocrity and incompetence more expensive.

It is not simply the dullness or the shallowness of education courses that is crucial, nor is it simply the academic deficiencies of the people who choose to take these courses. Rather, it is the fatal attraction of non-academic projects to people for whom academics have never been a source of achievement or pride. Throughout this century, there has been an on-going struggle between laymen trying to focus the public schools on teaching academic subjects, while the educators have increasingly gone off into the wild blue yonder of endless non-academic fads.

While students in Japan are studying math, science and a foreign language, American students are sitting around in circles unburdening their psyches (and family secrets) in a wide range of psycho-babble courses called "affective education." What with "nuclear education," multiculturalism, environmentalism and a thousand other world-saving crusades, our students are learning to "express themselves" on all sorts of issues for which neither they nor their teachers have even the rudiments of competence.

It is going to be difficult to get teachers who are even academically oriented, much less academically able, as long as education courses are the legally mandated filter through which the vast majority of teachers pass. Such courses are legal prerequisites solely because of the political muscle of the education establishment, whose top priority is preserving the jobs of its own. Forty million American school children are thus sacrificed to preserve the jobs of fewer than 40,000 professors of education. That's more than a thousand youngsters sacrificed for every education professor.

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11 May 2023