A Place for Everyone - Part Two

A column by Joel Klein in the Washington Post lamented the woes of the American educational system, and the failure of political candidates to address them (he’s right about that.)  After the usual laundry list of inadequacies in the system and envious comparisons with countries like Hong Kong, Finland, Singapore and South Korea, Klein proposes a three-item agenda: accelerate common standards, professionalize teaching, and promote school choice and innovation.  All three are worthy goals; the fact that these goals are limited and to some extent contradictory he does not note.

No offense is intended to Klein, who is an excellent writer,  but he, like so many others, seems unaware that the U.S. public education system is in fact dealing as well as could be expected, as they say in the intensive care ward, with four avalanches it is almost, but not quite, buried under.  Its lamented demise is, as Twain would say, premature. The first avalanche is mobility, which has in the last 100 years included migrations from countryside to city, from south to north and back again, from east to west, and individual movements all over at the rate of 25 percent per year.  When I was studying organizational sociology, a classic paper in that discipline reported how the practices of teachers in their classrooms were of little concern to higher levels of government because teachers taught to local standards of performance and that was good enough.  The fifth grade in Darien Connecticut and Tupelo Mississippi could be vastly different and no one cared; each addressed the needs and standards of their own community.  That world is no more, and its disappearance has produced the outcry for national standards, though without the recognition of the continued requirement to support local   culture and needs.  Tupelo and Darien still differ in their ways as much as Emmendingen and Selestat.

The second avalanche is the population explosion. 100 years ago, America was still primarily rural; now it is 85 percent urban.  It had a total population of about 78 million; now that is 313 million as of 2012, with 459 million projected as of the year 2050.  25 percent of the population consists of school age children.  Meanwhile, because of school consolidations related to the urbanization, the number of public schools has actually declined from 248,000 down to 108,000.  On average then, though averages are always suspect, the typical school is dealing with over 8 times as many students as it had a century before.  Some of the large high schools now are larger than small college campuses. When I was in high school 60 years ago, in a prosperous school district in the south, maximum class size was limited by rule to 25; in most public schools nowadays, that would be the impossible dream. While the official average class size in America today is about 16, that includes special education and other naturally small classes not a part of the general education classroom.  General education classes are an average nationally of about 25 students, the maximum class at my school 60 years ago. 

It should be noted that the comparable number in Japan is 33 students per class, but that Japan compensates by a much longer school year. Our American heritage from rural days is a long summer school break for farm work, a cultural lag we can ill afford. Affluent Americans fill their children’s summers with mental “enrichment” activities that promote a steady progress from year to year, but among the poor, the long summer break creates an annual “step back” in learning which some educators believe cumulatively accounts for the observed gap in high school between attainment levels of affluent and poor students.

The third avalanche is the democratization/diversity explosion.  That high school of mine was lily-white in the days before desegregation, no Hispanics or Asian heritage students attended, and the most exotic students to us were a few Jewish students whose families had fled the Holocaust. Any urban school these days is a rainbow by comparison.  That has produced teaching challenges as language and cultural differences create a loosening and transformation of the “literary canon”, the base of common reading taught and assumed to be known, that creates a common classroom culture within which learning can progress.  Add to that the mainstreaming of the developmentally challenged and the 21^st century classroom bears little resemblance, even if held in an open field, with those of fifty years ago.

And then came the fourth avalanche, the technological revolution of the 20^th century, beginning with electric lights, automobiles and airplanes and ending with cell phones and iPods and genetic engineering.  In 1900, the typical rural age for completing school was the eighth grade; then it was back to full time work on the farm.  Today, even farm work requires far more education than that.  The realm of technology that must both be used and be taught in the modern class is a universe away from that of our grandfathers.

In the face of all this, chaos and disaster could be, and frequently are, predicted. So how has American education fared?  A century ago, 85 percent of American adults were literate; today 99+ percent are.  A century ago, barely 50 percent had completed the eighth grade; today, over 85 percent have completed high school and 56 percent have at least some college.  We could do better. As a whole, students in the United States lag the best Asian and European nations in international mathematics and science tests. However, US Asians scored comparably to Asian nations and white Americans scored comparably to the best European nations. Although some racial minorities generally score lower than whites in the US, they score as well as whites in European nations. Hispanic Americans have scores comparable to students in Austria and Sweden, while African Americans are comparable to Norway and Ukraine. While American grade level attainment overall slightly lags the international rate, it includes a highly diverse and heterogeneous student population far beyond that dealt with in most other nations.   And that is the key.  In Emmendingen, the children are “sorted”; classrooms are much neater and more manageable that way, and skills can be taught at levels that are clearly superior.  But in France, and America, the classroom includes everyone.

As a response to the avalanches I’ve mentioned, the American public education system has set itself the democratic task of educating not just socioeconomic or ethnic elites, but a whole people in chaotic times.  And it has done, and continues to do, that well.  Its goal is instilling learning, of course.  But beyond that, its goal is to enable the continuance of an American dream since the foundation of the republic, that each child “could grow up to be President.”  Thomas Jefferson recognized that public education is a key to maintaining liberty, but it is more than just the learning instilled.  It is the sense of shared opportunity that is developed in a common classroom that enables we the people to work together for the betterment of all.