Remember the song, “Kids! What’s the Matter with Kids Today?” from “Bye, Bye, Birdie?”
Watch this. It’s wonderful, and it reminds of how every generation thinks that the younger generation is rotten and declining.
Bill Mathis is a former superintendent in Vermont and now serves as a member of the state board of education. He has steadily opposed the Bad News Club, which constantly bashes the schools and the younger generation, which every generation decries. In this post, he patiently explains that Vermont has exceptionally successful schools. After citing the examples of improvement, Mathis writes:
“As for the greatly lamented “unprepared” college students, only the top scoring 45% enrolled in higher education in 1960. Today, 73% of Vermont children attend higher education — although fewer graduate. As we dip deeper into the pool, we are comparing different cohorts.
Then, there’s the “school failure” industry. Charter school advocates, test manufacturers and politicians profit by manufacturing bad news. They are ably assisted by the media. For example, with the release of the latest national assessment scores, instead of touting the record high scores, ABC led with the theme of “not good enough.” The media did not report that the standard is set so high that no nation in the world could have even half their students meet it.”
Mathis cites the challenges that face Vermont schools. He concludes that “The increasing income gap represents the greatest of problems for our society and our schools. Pretending that adopting higher standards and more tests, by themselves, will close the achievement gap is an irrational distraction.”
This is a hugely important point. Raising standards and adding on more tests do not create jobs, do not feed hungry children, do not narrow the income gap, which is a scandal across our society.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I have twins, a son and a daughter, who began college in 2009, just after the finanial crisis hit. One attended the University of New Hampshire, the other the University of Vermont. Two states, quite proximate to one another, universities similarly ranked, but worlds apart in philosophy.
UNH’s response to the monetary crisis was to reduce state funding to the University by 30% (and there have been further cuts since then). UVM’s response was to increase state funding by 40%. Vermont’s reasoning was that students would need more economic support to continue their education.
New Hampshire’s state motto is “Live Free or Die” – free of taxes that is.
Vermont’s state motto is “Freedom and Unity”. Kinda sums it up.
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You get what you pay for. Low taxes result in less services, including funding for education..
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Sorry! The universities did not make these decisions, but rather the state governments. This should have read:
NH’s response to the monetary crisis was to reduce state funding to the University by 30% (and there have been further cuts since then). VT’s response was to increase state funding by 40%. Vermont’s reasoning was that students would need more economic support to continue their education.
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In his book The Educated Imagination, critic Northrup Frye speaks of a Sumerian tablet, one of the earliest written records that was not simply of the amount of grain in some granary, that says (I am paraphrasing from memory here) that children no longer obey their parents or honor the gods. Robert Frost writes in his “Letter to the Amherst Student” says “It is immodest of a man to think of himself as going down before the worst forces ever mobilized by God.” And yet in education, we get wave after wave of this crap: Things are worse than they have ever been. We need to do something about that. Here’s my totalitarian total solution.
A poster on this blog said, a bit ago, in another thread, that a third of the students entering his college have to take remedial math. He seems to think that CCSS and testing are answers to this problem. But, of course, we’ve had over ten years of NCLB and standards-based testing, and the math standards have been virtually identical across the nation–all modeled very closely on the NCTM standards. It’s the height of idiocy to look at a policy that clearly isn’t working and to say, “Well, what we need to do is to ratchet that up a lot.”
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cx “nor honor the gods”
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And that failed policy, NCLB, was based on just this nonsense about our having schools that have failed. Hysterical nonsense. Moral panic leading to decisions that are doing irreparable harm to kids.
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When first enacted ‘progressive staff’ at the Mass. Dept. of Education, Division of Special Education (back then), used to say that the actual meaning of NCLB was “leave no child untested”. Little did we know our prescience. To have been dead wrong would have been wonderful.
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Well said, John!
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And what is wrong with some remediation where necessary? I don’t see why it’s a big deal.
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I agree that the K-12 education is now being asked to do something different from what it has historically been able to do. The numbers that Bill Mathis quotes, however, should be tempered by the high dropout rate in 1960. Nationally about 27% of students dropped out of high school in 1960 while only about 7% do today. If Vermont was at the national trend, about 61% of students that did not drop out of high school went to college in 1960 and today it is about 78% of students who did not drop out of high school that go to college. A big difference, but not as large as the 45% 73% difference in the original post.
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“how every generation thinks that the younger generation is rotten and declining.”
I think there’s more of this in ed reform than a lot of people are willing to admit.
The vast majority of people in this country attended public schools, yet the vast majority of people in this country are willing to believe the ed reform message that all public schools stink and all young people are less well-educated than they are.
It’s ridiculous. Read the comments beneath any ed reform-slanted newspaper article slamming public schools. It’s a bunch of adults who most likely attended public schools insisting they are much better educated than “kids today”. My father is 85, attended public schools in Scranton Pennsylvania, and he tells me he heard the exact same thing then.
Eli Broad, when he’s denying that he’s privatizing public schools, tells this silly, self-aggrandizing tale about how HE attended public schools that were much, much better than todays’ schools. That explains his incredible brilliance, I suppose, despite the fact that he attended the same public schools he demeans and demonizes. It’s ego. It has nothing to do with reality.
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“It has nothing to do with reality.”
Reality? He don’t need no stinkin reality! (other than the color of green)
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Also, unless you have a kid in public schools (or work in one) you don’t know the current environment. My friends who don’t have children harken back to their own public school experience in the 1980’s and “don’t understand” why anyone would object to standardized testing.
Why, they all aced the Iowa Test of Basic Skills! What’s the problem? These coddled young people of today should be held accountable, like they were!
They have absolutely no idea. None.
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Okay, it’s time we had a heart-to-heart. How much time do you have? How many words are allowed here? Let me preface my remarks with stating that I have seen Ms. Ravitch being interviewed or speaking publicly several times. She is a great hero and a visionary. I can’t disagree with her on much of anything. I have a good friend who is an ex-teacher, long retired and his daughter who teaches that have read her books and praise her highly. I’ve seen many of her blog posts and felt impressed, encouraged, and energized. Yet, I had to put her book down after less than twenty pages. The reason? Because all of this, despite the new threats from privatization and anti-union scumbaggery, was predictable and is part of an endless cycle of good news – bad news views and the solving of the wrong problems, while the real problems are ignored.
We have some really good schools and some really bad schools, and everything in between. In every school there are probably at least a few of the wonderful devoted, competent, nurturing, creative, and sacrificing teachers that we have all known and loved. It is absolutely essential that we have free public schools that provide certain important services to children of all descriptions. Nevertheless, there is absolutely no question that some children are poorly served in most schools and some are grievously injured in some. It would be a major mistake to try to pretend that the statistics that are quoted that reflect badly on the school systems overall for the nation are all irrelevant or due solely to the various interlopers and administrative impositions, such as NCLB, “Race to the Top”, and innumerable other fiascos.
The very least we should expect from schools is that each generation of graduates is as healthy, well-adjusted, actively engaged in family and community, prepared for adult and work responsibilities, and hopeful as possible. That’s a lot and expecting all students to become astute intellectuals or academic geniuses and professionals is a bit unrealistic. However, our collective wish for schools to “educate” is based in a mythology that schools themselves relentlessly promote. An institution simply cannot educate an individual because education is not externally administered under any circumstances. Education is something that individuals pursue within the context of their whole lives for their own purposes by building their personal knowledge, 100% of which is embodied and internal, and most of which is private and inaccessible to analysis or measurement. This is, of course, why testing non-stop is insanity.
Tolstoy, the great author, predicted the dilemmas we face in phenomenal detail in a series of essays. Colin Greer in the book, “The Great School Legend” approximately fifty years ago showed that schools had kept people in their place for the most part, in direct contradiction to the myth that they were responsible for upward mobility and economic progress on the part of the poor and disenfranchised immigrants and others. The Blue Ribbon Coles Commission that produced the study entitled, “A Nation at Risk” tied a wide range of failures and societal problems directly to the sad state of our schools.
Part of the problem is that there are no real bad guys to blame. Everyone is well-intentioned, except possibly for a few self-serving ego-maniacs, such as Michele Rhee. We all bemoan the chronic barriers to progress, such as bureaucracy, politics, institutional lethargy, stingy Republican legislators, racial and economic discrimination, entrenched administrators resistant to new ideas or teacher autonomy, etc., etc. Still, when there are innovations and when some people break out and achieve autonomy, there is no way to translate that into meaningful progress on a wide scale or long-term basis.
There is no simple answer. The mythology has held sway for generations and won’t be easy to debunk. However, there is one common thread that gives us a clue. We have bureaucracies and we have authoritarian systems as a direct consequence of laws that require attendance universally. How could we possibly have mandates that require attendance without following up with huge bureaucratic structures and rules, regulations, statues, guidelines, school boards, curriculum mandates, legal advisories, truant officers, tardy and behavioral sanctions, teacher accountability “standards”, report cards, etc., etc., ad infinitum? I hate to be blunt, but stop complaining about the lack of autonomy and the repressive or stifling conditions in schools if you aren’t going to address the laws that make it all necessary. Hello! Does anyone truly believe that you can force parents to relinquish their parental rights and children to show up daily for ten or twelve years without the means and arbitrary authority to assure compliance at every level and ways to persuade everyone down the line that goals are being met?
Finally, let me remind that schools were never meant to educate. The original purposes for compulsory attendance had nothing to do with education. It was all about disciplining, socializing and indoctrinating young people of the masses to work in the factories, to keep the industrial revolution moving, to fight wars and serve the imperialists, and to become good Bible scholars without too much imagination of personal ambition.
Compulsory attendance is a sacred cow. It is a security blanket. It is heresy to question it because schooling has been totally conflated with education. If that doesn’t become the main topic for discussion, expect to keep going in these maddening circles for another few hundred years. And, by the way, forget about technology and computers to save the day. The new tools are great, but they are merely tools. Let’s get real folks. Dismantle those laws and watch the educational revolution happen.
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Barry Elliott,
I agree with some things you write, disagree with others. I suggest you read my hard-to-find book, “The Revisionists Revised,” which refutes the claim made by Greer and others that public schools were designed merely for social control. That’s what most of us at this site are fighting every day. I, for one, would not be here today without public schools.
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schooling has been totally conflated with education
That is VERY well said, Mr. Eliot!
Schools should be amanuenses for the first part of the lifelong educations that students will give themselves.
From day 1, we should make this very, very clear. You will be a learner, all your life. We’re hear to help you get started with that, to assist you with that. But you’re the one in charge.
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The children entering school today will see changes more radical than all that have occurred in all of human history up to this point. They will have to be intrinsically motivated. Our whole approach, predicated on the external carrot and stick, is wrong. We need to be preparing mental ninjas, not training obedient proles.
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cs: We’re here, of course. Darned typos!
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There have always been those who have seen the schools as primarily vehicles of social control. Those folks are now putting in place a mechanism for school-as-social-control such as we have not seen before in this country (but that has existed in places like Communist China for some time). But the public school as, primarily, a means of control was not what John Adams had in mind when he called for public schools in that amazing section of the Constitution of the State of Massachusetts in which he speaks of the duty of the state to provide free public schooling, available to all. Adams was a revolutionary. He wanted to educate free men and women.
“Wisdom and knowledge, as well as virtue, diffused generally among the body of the people, being necessary for the preservation of their rights and liberties; and as these depend on spreading the opportunities and advantages of education in the various parts of the country, and among the different orders of the people, it shall be the duty of legislatures and magistrates, in all future periods of this commonwealth, to cherish the interests of literature and the sciences, and all seminaries of them; especially the university at Cambridge, public schools and grammar schools in the towns; to encourage private societies and public institutions, rewards and immunities, for the promotion of agriculture, arts, sciences, commerce, trades, manufactures, and a natural history of the country; to countenance and inculcate the principles of humanity and general benevolence, public and private charity, industry and frugality, honesty and punctuality in their dealings; sincerity, good humor, and all social affections, and generous sentiments, among the people.” John Adams, Massachusetts Constitution of 1780, Ch. 5, Sec. 2.
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This doesn’t read, to me, like a recipe for control. It reads to me like a recipe for cultivating varied and vibrant civil culture.
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Mr. Shepherd,
Let us please not confuse “free public education” with compulsory school attendance. The term that is most offensive is “compulsory education”. There is no way to compel education and never will be. This is 2013 and I have to reiterate that schooling does NOT assure anyone education. In far too many cases, it interferes with or proscribes education. John Adams was wise and his desire to see all citizens engaged in intellectual or academic pursuits was apropos for the time. Yet, calling that education is highly debatable. We need babysitting and socialization services more than ever and I have no problem with offering educational opportunities to the masses. We don’t need to allow “experts” and authorities to make our choices for us.
A few more relevant questions worth pondering come to mind. Are not life and education synonymous? Why would one wish to pursue “education” further after graduation if it is seen as an obligation, hard medicine to swallow, drudgery, or something imposed externally? How does one assume ownership of an education that is not sought out voluntarily and with zeal or a minimum of intentionality, and why would one treasure what is not felt as an integral and fully desired part of one’s life and identity? If schooling is imposed and delivered or “administered” to everyone as a routine and impersonal service by largely detached or passionless and anonymous personnel or authorities, how does one come to recognize its inherent value and practical utility?
Naturally, the ideal for good and dedicated educators has been to inspire youth and to find new and creative ways to instill an appreciation for education. But why would we choose to handicap ourselves? Why start out with a paradigm that forces teachers and others to constantly sugar-coat and glorify something that should be experienced as precious and essential (as in of one’s own essence)? How do children remain engaged and intimately involved when education is about a distant and vague future or working to please others for questionable rewards or motives, instead of doing what comes naturally with maximum autonomy and minimal performance pressure? How do we minimize performance pressure if we are herding children, disciplining them more often than instructing them, and processing them like so many low-skilled factory workers?
Am I getting through to anyone? Is the connection (or, in this case the disconnection) any more apparent than previously? If we want young people to feel that education is meaningful and an essential part of their lives, then forcing it upon them regardless of their awareness or readiness is a rather pathetic way to accomplish our purpose. Indeed, it is the best possible way to defeat our own purposes. Some sizable percentage of students will start out with the requisite enthusiasm and some will become engaged and excited at some point along the way. However, all will be misled about the nature of education and life and all will lose much in the translation. It is no accident that most school graduates have little or no inclination to read or study for edification and for their personal growth and pleasure.
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This is a thoughtful piece and it is wise to appreciate instead of training others for “not good enough”.
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