A Few Radical Proposals
The value of formal education for the citizens of the United States has been a matter of serious concern since the founding of the Republic. While Thomas Jefferson was the American Minister to France following the Revolutionary War, he observed that ordinary French citizens were, as quoted by Dr. Diane Ravitch, “in the grip of ignorance, superstition, poverty, and oppression of mind and body in every form.” Dr. Ravitch went on to describe a letter Jefferson wrote to his friend George Wyeth in Williamsburg, Virginia. “He was delighted that the Virginia legislature had finally agreed to enact the statute for religious freedom that he had some seven years earlier. However, he wrote Wythe, the most important bill before the legislature, which still had not passed, was ‘for diffusion of knowledge among the people. No other sure foundation can be devised for the preservation of freedom, and happiness.’” Jefferson exhorted his friend to pursue a crusade against ignorance by passing a law that ensured education for the common people. -Dr. Diane Ravitch, The Troubled Crusade, American Education, 1945-1980, Basic Books, Inc., Publishers, New York, 1983]. “In 1875, Ulysses S. Grant, the second Republican president, called for a constitutional amendment that would mandate free public schools and prohibit the use of public money for sectarian schools.” -Jack Jennings, When Politics Comes First: The Reasons Republicans Shifted to Supporting Private Schools, Huffington Post Blog, September, 2012].
Almost every president and congress, state governor, and state legislature, special interest groups, and scores of philanthropists, hedge fund, and other individual and corporate millionaires from that time to this have wrestled with the issues of what should be taught, how should it be taught, to whom it should be taught, and how to ensure and to measure the efficacy of educational programs. Some of the major, and incredibly generous philanthropies are: the Ford Foundation, the Carnegie Corporation Foundation, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Walter H. Annenberg Challenge Grants, Lilly Endowment, David and Lucille Packard Foundation, W.K. Kellogg Foundation, Walton Family Foundation, Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation, Warren Buffett, Michael and Susan Dell Foundation. All are private foundations with a great deal of power and are not subjected to public oversight or parental, or voter accountability. It is important to note that—almost without exception—these powerful foundations promote alternatives to public education and oppose teacher and other public sector unions.
Most of the programs were well intentioned (with the significant exception of the denial of access to good education for African-Americans in the Southern states and other states which sided, at least in spirit, with the Confederacy and post-civil war racist policies). What was produced by those well-intentioned individuals and groups was an amalgam of ever shifting pedagogy, mandates, pursuit of fads, social movements, opinions of educational savants pushing panaceas, and politically correct enthusiasms which periodically swept the educational landscape. There were programs to get rid of recess in order to develop a more stringent environment, programs to ban spelling, punctuation, and grammar to make attendance at school more fun. It was not long ago that many states began teaching mathematics that did not require students to arrive at answers or even show that they understood the processes required to find answers. Math curricula were introduced into the educational milieu in liberal states that presented the strictest of all educational disciplines in a context of politically correct social ideology—often with more social indoctrination than actual math.
Well publicized federal, state, and private initiatives over the decades include:
- The Roosevelt Administration’s provision of immediate relief in the form of a $20 million federal appropriation to help shore up those schools and districts most in danger of collapse as a result of the Great Depression
- Truman’s President’s Commission on Higher Education (1947) which impacted public elementary and high school education for the next three administrations
- Eisenhower’s creation of the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW), and after the unanimous ruling of the Supreme Court in the case of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, in 1954, that federal aid could not support the construction of racially segregated schools and desegregation
- Kennedy’s Vocational Education Act and Economic Opportunity Act (including Adult Basic Education)
- Lyndon B. Johnson’s Elementary & Secondary Education Act and multiple amendments, National Vocational Student Loan Insurance Act, Bilingual Education Act, Handicapped Children’s Early Education Assistance Act, and Title V of the Civil Rights Act which resulted in a markedly increased federal presence in education—the government exercised its right to withdraw funding from any school that violated anti-discrimination laws. Affirmative action/reverse discrimination, The Bilingual Education Act.
- Nixon’s launching of the Experimental Schools Program (ESP) and National Institute of Education (NIE), desegregation busing, and Emergency School Aid Act
- Carter’s Department of Education Organization Act and the Refugee Education Assistance Act, racial quotas
- Reagan’s Education Consolidation and Improvement Act, Follow Through Act, Head Start Act, Education of the Deaf Act, Hawkins-Stafford School Improvements, Tribally Controlled Schools Act, Education and Training for a Competitive America Act, Educational Partnerships Act
- Clinton’s Goals 2000, Educate America Act, School-to-Work Opportunities Act, Improving America’s Schools Act, Education Infrastructure Act, Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, Reading Excellence Act, Carl D. Perkins Vocational and Technical Education Act, Education Flexibility Partnership Demonstration Act, Sections 112 & 115 of American Competitiveness in the 21st Century Act
- G.W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind Act and its subsequent waivers, English Language Acquisition Act, Education of the Blind Act, America Competes Act, Improving Head Start for School Readiness Act
- Obama’s American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, or ARRA, –N.Y. State Archives and the U.S. Department of Education, Common Core State Standards established by the National Governors Association Center for Best Practices (NGA Center) and the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO)]
- Establishment of magnet schools and virtual learning systems
- Liberalization of parental privileges to establish home schools
- And school vouchers.
With the gargantuan efforts and expenditures indicated above, one would expect the United States of America to have the best educational system and the best educated students in the world as measured by national and international testing standards. However, we have fallen far short of that expectation. In his 2011 State of the Union address, President Obama noted that “America has fallen to ninth in the proportion of young people with college degrees” and that “as many as a quarter of our students aren’t even finishing high school.” A comprehensive study of charter schools by the Center for Research on Education Outcomes at Stanford University found that overall, charter schools did worse than similar traditional public schools. “Only 17 percent of charters produced higher test scores than comparable public schools, while 37 percent deliver learning results that are significantly worse than their students would have realized had they remained in traditional public schools.” [Surpassing Shanghai: An Agenda for American Education Built on the World’s Leading Systems by Marc S. Tucker and colleagues]. In October, 2013, the Center on Education Policy released a report that reviewed ten years of research on voucher programs in Wisconsin, Ohio, Florida, and Washington, D.C. The alarming conclusion for parents who have chosen this alternative to usual public schools is that students using vouchers to attend private schools do not generally attain higher test scores than public school students.
Why is it that we do not have a stellar grammar and high school educational system and why do a great many other nations outperform us—both our educational system and our students in head-to-head competition? We will discuss that aspect of the issues in the next blogspot and what might we do about that in the third and subsequent blogspots in this series.
