March 22, 2005

ON EDUCATION: BY RITA KRAMER

In an article (see below) in the New York Sun, Andrew Wolf discussed the continuing relevance of Rita Kramer's book, Ed School Follies. Horsefeathers is pleased to offer(following the Wolf article) Mrs. Kramer's current thoughts on a crisis that has worsened in recent years.

Education School Crisis

BY ANDREW WOLF
March 21, 2005

My erstwhile Bronx High School of Science classmate, Arthur Levine of Columbia University Teachers College, was in the news last week. He is the author of a three-part report on the state of the nation's education schools, the first part of which was released last week. It focuses on the programs designed to educate school leaders. Mr. Levine rejects every existing program as "inadequate and appalling."

The value system promoted in the ed schools has fully infected our school systems, as evidenced by the unfortunate curriculum choices and inflexible instructional mandates of the Department of Education here in New York. The last place reform will come from are those responsible for perpetuating these wrong-headed ideas in the first place.
---Andrew Wolf
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An author is supposed to feel gratified when a book continues to be relevant years after it was published, but I confess to mixed feelings in this case. “Ed School Follies” was intended to let a wider public in on what went on in the institutions that trained the teachers for our children’s schools. It was not the only expose of its kind in the years after the National Commission on Excellence in Education published its report entitled “A Nation at Risk.” That widely publicized 1983 report characterized America’s schools as threatened by “a rising tide of mediocrity” and went on to declare that “If an unfriendly foreign power attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war” [but] “we have allowed this to happen to ourselves.” The report brought the shocking news that while we spent more per pupil on public education than any other nation, our students were consistently among the lowest scoring on international tests of academic achievement, especially in math and science.

It would be gratifying to be able to report that the many subsequent books and articles describing the dismal situation of American education finally changed things, but while there is greater awareness of the problems in our schools, and more efforts to solve them by offering parents choices outside the state system through charter schools and vouchers, the educational establishment goes on throwing more money into the system despite the fact that student achievement remains abysmally low.

What does it say that books like “Ed School Follies,” published more than a decade ago, still describe the current situation? It means, for one thing, that teachers are trained in the context of an ideology that has succeeded in redefining the goal of the public schools. Understanding the history of our democratic institutions and our inherited culture has been replaced by the attempt to turn the schools into agencies of social change. Striving for excellence has been replaced by the push toward egalitarianism that denies differences in abilities, discourages hard work, and fosters a “self-esteem” that has more to do with the politics of group identity than accomplishments earned through effort.

The strategies taught to our future teachers, few of whom have mastered any body of knowledge, any specific subject, include an emphasis on a multiculturism that makes all cultures equal, downplaying the Western tradition underlying this country’s distinctive character and achievements. A panoply of education-school fads have grown out of the theory that children “construct” their own knowledge, that teachers should not present themselves as authorities but as “facilitators.” These pedagogical fashions include the “whole language” method of teaching reading by word recognition rather than by phonics and the “fuzzy math” that encourages children to “construct” their own ways of dealing with numbers to arrive at their own answers, in the hope that they will get the concept if not the recognizably right solution. The advantages of these bizarre tactics for learning are said to be that they do not stifle the young mind with rote learning, drills, or even what have been described as “mere facts.” What the disadvantages are can be seen in the constant lowering of standards, evisceration of curricula, failure to encourage brighter students with more challenging opportunities, and—perhaps worst of all—failure to meet the needs of the students most at risk. While most children from middle-class families, read to and stimulated in various ways from their earliest days, manage to deal with the non-systematic approaches to letters and numbers, the children of poverty and broken homes who get their first taste of learning when they come to school are left behind, fail to thrive, and drop out in large numbers. This despite the fact that over and over it has been demonstrated that they learn better in programs based on the tried and true methods—phonics, memorization, and active instruction by authoritative teachers who impose discipline and convey clear expectations.

Between the destructive effects of the ideology-driven education-school establishment and the self-interest of the teachers’ unions protecting mediocre and even inadequate performance, there seems to be little hope for the schools unless the public-school monopoly gives way to some form of competition. When parents become aware of alternatives to the systems that are failing their children and demand the right to choose their schools, books like “Ed School Follies” will no longer be read. And as the author, I won’t mind.
--Rita Kramer