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In 1951, when historian Henry Steele Commager first observed that “no other people ever demanded so much of schools and of education as have the Americans,” he couldn’t have dreamed how much more would be demanded.
Win the Cold War; beat the Germans and the Japanese in the battle for economic supremacy; out-duel the Chinese and Indians in the training of scientists and engineers; Americanize millions of children not just from Southern and Eastern Europe, which Commager celebrated, but from 100 Third World cultures he thought little about; make every child “proficient” in English and math; educate the blind, the mentally handicapped and the emotionally disturbed to the same levels as all others; teach the evils of alcohol, tobacco, illegal drugs and premarital sex; prepare all for college; teach immigrants in their native languages; teach driver’s ed; feed lunch to poor children; entertain the community with Friday-night football and midwinter basketball; sponsor dances and fairs for the kids; and serve as the prime (and often the only) social-welfare agency for both children and parents.
Some of those things were on Commager’s list. Many others are responses to more recent demands and stresses, particularly the rapidly growing gaps in earnings between the very rich and almost everyone else. Given the mandates, is it any wonder that so many Americans think the schools are lousy?
The watershed moment was Oct. 4, 1957, just a half-century ago, when the Soviets launched Sputnik, the world’s first Earth-orbiting satellite, thus beating the United States into space. That event more than any other began the process of nationalizing the task of the schools. Physicist Edward Teller, the patron saint of the H-bomb, called it a defeat worse than the attack on Pearl Harbor. With it, declared the best-selling science-fiction novelist Arthur C. Clarke, “the United States became a second-rate power.”
The long shadow of Sputnik injected new urgency into America’s embryonic space program – more money for rockets and satellites, the establishment of NASA – but its greatest impact was on our educational system. Sputnik reinforced prior attacks on the alleged academic flabbiness of American schools, and especially on child-centered progressive education, and it marked the beginning of a half-century of uninterrupted school-reform efforts that continue to this day. If the country couldn’t shape up its schools and produce more, and better, scientists and engineers, the Russians, who were said to be “training scientists and technical personnel at a pace four times our own,” would beat our brains out. In this way the Sputnik crisis bolstered, even sanctified, the belief that the schools were the answer to virtually every major American problem and added maintenance of the nation’s international supremacy to the agenda.
It also sparked the passage of NDEA, the National Defense Education Act, in 1958, which called for $900 million (then a sizable sum) to beef up math, science and foreign-language teaching in American schools and colleges – it would, said one senator, “add vastly to the strength and security of the United States in the Cold War.” Unless there was “a true revival of learning,” said Sen. J. William Fulbright, the country would be headed for “national disaster.”
The upshot of Sputnik and the various economic, political and social crises of the succeeding years – real or perceived – was (and is) an uninterrupted string of American educational reforms, what Stanford University’s Larry Cuban and David Tyack have called a “tinkering toward utopia.” The list is long: new curricula like the SMSG (School Mathematics Study Group) program (i.e., the “new” math), PSSC (Physical Sciences Study Committee) physics, plus similar programs in chemistry, biology and the social sciences, nearly all devised by academics at Harvard and MIT in the late 1950s and early 1960s; compensatory education programs for disadvantaged students; Head Start; magnet schools; “computer-assisted instruction”; “open schools”; team teaching; class-size reduction; new programs for special education; bilingualism and Ebonics; calls for bigger high schools; calls for smaller high schools; more homework; less homework; laptops for all students; constructivist math; Discovery Learning; Direct Instruction; merit pay; voucher plans; “Whole School Reform”; Success for All; charter schools; KIPP (Knowledge Is Power Program) schools; Edison Schools; Accelerated Schools; school accountability; adequate yearly progress; high-stakes testing for promotion; exit exams; plus an alphabet soup of similar programs. Most Americans have probably been exposed to at least three or four of them.
Along the way there have been endless battles over the power of teachers’ unions, creationism and “intelligent design,” “secular humanism,” sex education and, of course, school prayer. And there have been countless declarations from politicians, official commissions, business organizations, foundations, editorialists and academics – what John Mockler, a leading California education consultant, has called “the schools suck industry” – that our schools are failing us.
Most prominent among them was the 1983 report “A Nation at Risk,” issued by the Reagan Administration’s National Commission on Excellence in Education, which warned of a “rising tide of mediocrity.” Americans had better shape up their schools, it said, or the Germans and the Japanese would beat our economic brains out.
If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today we might well have viewed it as an act of war. As it stands, we have allowed this to happen to ourselves. We have even squandered the gains in student achievement made in the wake of the Sputnik challenge. Moreover, we have dismantled essential support systems which helped make those gains possible. We have, in effect, been committing an act of unthinking, unilateral educational disarmament.
But if the time and the source of the competition were different, the national crisis metaphors were, and to this day remain, precisely the same.
A lot of the touted reforms of the past half-century have been discredited, abandoned and forgotten; according to Chester Finn, who was himself an assistant secretary of education during the Reagan administration, many were “irrelevant and probably harmful.”
Others are currently in their third or fourth incarnation.
What’s almost certain is that many of the things educators, scholars, and politicians thought they knew for sure in the 1950s – such as the wisdom of former Harvard president James Bryant Conant’s 1958 recommendation that small high schools be consolidated because they couldn’t offer a rich enough program – have since been turned on their head. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has spent millions to create small schools, because small schools are friendlier and give students, principals, and teachers a chance to know one another.
Phonics, which replaced “look-say” readers like the “Dick and Jane” series, was replaced by an emphasis on “whole language,” only to be replaced again by phonics.
The certainty that additional university course credits and advanced degrees made for better teachers, an idea on which billions have been spent, has been followed by the belief that they make no difference at all.
In the 1960s, following the precedent set by the NDEA, came NAEP, the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the testing program now referred to as “the nation’s report card.” In 1965 came the federal Elementary and Secondary Education Act and Title I, which has directed billions of dollars to school districts with large numbers of low-income children. This was eventually followed, in 1980, by the creation of a separate Department of Education. In 1989 came the first President Bush’s America 2000 Program (under Bill Clinton it became Goals 2000), which, among other things, called for a 90 percent graduation rate and vowed that U.S. students would be first in the world in math and science by the end of the century.
No Child Left Behind, President George W. Bush’s even more ambitious education act, was signed in early 2002. It requires all students to be tested in the elementary grades, requires schools to get all children to “proficiency” in math and reading by 2013-14, and, in theory, was supposed to have put a “highly qualified” teacher in every classroom by 2005-06. Schools that didn’t meet the goals would be sanctioned with increasingly severe measures, including, in extreme cases, replacement of the entire staff.
Has any of this made a difference? The short answer falls somewhere between not sure and not much. American schools do try to serve a far wider spectrum of students now with more programs and, in the view of some experts, though hardly all, are (probably) better than they were 50 years ago, but they are certainly not good enough, nor are they as good as schools abroad. “Europe and Asia are getting ahead,” says Jack Jennings, the former staff director of the House Education and Labor Committee who now heads the Washington-based Center on Education Policy. “The U.S. is not maintaining its national advantage.”
But most of the wise men and women in the field will inevitably give you more ambiguity than clarity. Even the most knowledgeable among them aren’t sure what’s worked and what hasn’t. Nor – given the radically changed demographics of school enrollment, the increasing percentage of minorities and immigrant children who start school speaking little or no English, the high-tech global economy and escalating demand for higher levels of education, the evolving composition of the workforce and the vastly greater opportunities for women in professions other than teaching or nursing – is it an easy question to answer. The nation, as Ellen Lagemann, the former dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Education, says, has altered its conception of the purposes of schools: “Now we’re trying to take all students to high levels.”
In the late 1950s American schools were still segregated, and a lot of children in the South, forced to work in the fields, didn’t go to school at all between April and October. As recently as 1972, nearly 78 percent of the nation’s schoolchildren were non-Hispanic white; by 2004 that level was at 57 percent. Since 1972 the percentage of Hispanic children in American schools has more than tripled, to 20 percent.
In the three-plus decades since the beginning of NAEP, one of the few available hard (and supposedly objective) indicators of academic achievement, math and reading scores for 9- and 13-year-olds have increased. On the other hand, scores for 17-year-olds have remained flat, despite the large increase, since 1992, in the number of high school students taking advanced classes and earning higher grades.
At the same time, scores for each major ethnic subgroup – whites, blacks and Hispanics – have increased. It’s the growing percentages of black and Hispanic students in U.S. schools, most of whom do less well academically, that have retarded the growth in average scores. As a consequence, the achievement gap between whites and others has been reduced, but, as almost everybody knows, it hasn’t come close to being eliminated. “We’re doing better on college prep,” Stanford’s Larry Cuban says, “but in the lowest quartile the situation is no better.”
A roughly similar picture emerges from the decline in the scores on the SAT, the entrance exam required by most of the nation’s selective colleges, which show a small gain in math since the mid-1960s but a large drop in reading. Given the changing composition of the college-bound population and thus the growing number of students who don’t come from the social and academic elites, the significance of those numbers is also subject to dispute.
Despite steps to increase per pupil spending, decrease student-teacher ratios, strengthen standards and recruit a better-prepared teaching force, student test scores have remained stubbornly flat over the past 35 years. By international standards, the U.S. spends far more than other nations on education – and has smaller class sizes – yet receives far less value in terms of educational outcomes.
In fact, a lot of such international comparisons lack context and are therefore debatable. Because of the relative paucity of social services in this country – as opposed to the universal preschool, health care and similar generous children’s services provided in other developed nations – our schools are forced to serve as a fallback social-service system for millions of American children. In addition to teaching a far greater diversity of children than is the case in other nations, our educational workers must address countless medical, social and family problems before they can even begin to think about teaching math, reading or history.
A recent United Nations Children’s Fund report ranked the United States next to last among 21 wealthy nations in such criteria as material well-being, health and safety, and family well-being. And as Gerald Bracey, the nation’s leading critic of the “schools are failing” critics, points out, tests that make American schools look bad tend to get a lot of attention; when the results are positive, they are generally ignored. Bracey also argues that many of the students tested in other nations on the widely cited TIMSS (Third International Mathematics and Science Study) were two to three years older than the American high schoolers with whom they were compared and had often – at age 20 or 21 – taken more physics and math courses. As should be self-evident, “proficiency” is an arbitrary term.
None of this means that American students are doing particularly well. Against the large and growing number of technically trained people being produced in the Far East, even marginally better public schools may not be good enough. And considering that a rapidly increasing proportion of American students are coming from disadvantaged populations, and that we’re not yet training enough people to replace the skills of the baby boomers when they retire, as they soon will, the picture is far from rosy.
Yet if the reformist Sturm und Drang of the past 50 years should have taught us any lesson, it’s that, when the assignment is national defense or beating foreign economic competitors, the schools are but one factor in our arsenal – and not nearly the most important. We won the Cold War despite our supposedly lousy schools. Our economy prospered while the Japanese entered a decade-long depression despite the dire warnings of “A Nation at Risk.” As nearly all credible research has demonstrated, social, economic and family background is a far more important predictor of academic success than are the schools themselves.
More so than other modern societies – and after a generation of conservative attacks on our social-welfare programs – the United States tends to act as if the schools can do it all. Yet children who come to school hungry, or with vision problems, or with toothaches, and who pass through mean streets to get there, can’t possibly be expected to learn as well as healthy kids. Kids without engaged parents, or with only one functional parent (if that), are almost certain to be less engaged in the classroom. Money is hardly the issue: funding for public schools has never been higher. But neither has the number of tasks charged to the schools, which, in the hope of getting even more money, they have eagerly taken on.
For many contemporary Americans, conservatives particularly, schools have become the surrogate for all other social programs: progressive taxation, the earned-income-tax credit, subsidized housing, universal health insurance, community services and so on.
If there is want, change the schools. If there is unrest or inequality, change the schools.
It is the fashion among ed-policy wonks to complain that American parents are too satisfied with their children’s schools, and the work their children do, even as these kids lag far behind students abroad, whose parents are much less satisfied with both the schools and the schoolwork. But is it just possible that, notwithstanding the mad suburban scramble to place their children in prestigious colleges (much of which also has more to do with social status than with high academic achievement), American parents might understand something that the politicians and businesspeople seemingly do not: that academic achievement is only one element in the future success of their children, that the good life depends on much more than high grades?
Both left and right have been obsessed by the centrality of schools, the former because it is beholden to the teachers’ unions and, in any case, honestly wants more resources for schools; the latter because of its dislike of social-welfare programs and, lately, its privatization agenda. That’s also led to profound confusion not only about the quality of the schools – which has blessed us with all those interminable arguments about high-stakes testing programs – but about what their basic objectives should be. As David Tyack and Larry Cuban put it, “the public schools need to do a better job of teaching students to think, not just in order (supposedly) to rescue an ailing economy but to serve broad civic purposes as well.”
Americans are far too hung up on the notion that in some past golden age the schools were better. When was there ever such an age? The people who blame the schools for today’s ills are themselves products of schools that were under attack for similar failings a couple of generations ago. Are the schools good enough? Of course not. But then, they never were. And as long as we expect schools to solve every cultural and economic challenge the United States faces in an ever-evolving world, as long as we continue to tinker with them as if they were training facilities for warriors in cold wars still to come, they never will be. Perhaps it is time we thought of schools as places where our children might simply learn something – not just for our benefit, not just for the nation’s, but for their own.
(Copyright 2007, Harper’s Magazine Foundation)
