Left Behind

Every year, American high school test scores slip a little more in international comparisons. The top declining subjects include math, reading comprehension and science. We used to be first in everything, but austerity measures (accelerated by the Great Recession but never restored after it passed), pressure to allow religious priorities with voucher-funded charter schools (an Education Secretary, Betsy DeVos priority), and shifting priorities to favor business over individuals have taken their toll. Union pressure to favor seniority over competence didn’t help either.

We’ve slipped down generally to 17^th to 19^th in world rankings in these categories… and our global competitiveness is increasingly a casualty. Tariffs don’t fix the underlying lack of competitive training and education. Tax cuts for the rich haven’t moved the needle when it comes to preparing our youth to live and work in our complex and increasingly automated economy. Wasted gifts to the rich to engage in lucrative (for them) stock buybacks and give themselves big dividends.

Post-secondary college tuition debt is crippling young people just starting out. Billionaire DeVos’ trying to force students at bankrupt “for profit” colleges, deeply in debt without the training they paid for, to repay most of their federal loans is a disgusting effort to reverse policies created during the Obama administration. So far, the courts are fighting her as well.

A lot of assumptions seem to be dying in an obviously different technologically-driven world. You cannot have decent public education without ubiquitous access to relatively state-of-the-art computers and textbooks (which can be delivered on an iPad or equivalent). You cannot teach traditional subjects without embracing obvious changes. In Shanghai, for example, there are several schools experimenting with using math as the basic language of instruction (vs Mandarin), never allowing the class to move on to another subject until all students are fluent with the current subject matter. The results are staggeringly successful.

We don’t even know how to use teachers effectively. Classrooms are often overflowing with too many students, often operating at varying levels of competence. Public schools too often are simply warehouses, promoting kids to the next grade just to move them through the system. Inner city dropout rates in large urban school districts still hover around 50%, creating a permanent underclass that simply cannot support itself through legitimate work.

We have around 13 thousand school districts in the United States (France, for example has one), many prioritizing an unconstitutional vision of religious doctrine (e.g., creationism) over hard facts, a reality reinforced by a climate-change-denying, anti-scientific administration-in-charge in Washington. Big school districts tend to force their view of appropriate education on textbook manufacturers, and that’s the way it is. If there is an emphasis on pragmatic and necessary education, the feeble attempts to tie federal aid to federal standards has been a failure to date.

Broken homes, fathers and mothers out of the home by reason of criminal incarceration, parents without  an educational priority, parents having to work several jobs to make ends meet (creating latch-key kids by the millions), drug addiction, too many single-parent families, too many dangerous neighborhoods with substandard schools and too much endemic poverty have taken their bite out of too many children’s futures. Kids often show up for kindergarten already hopelessly behind because of where they came from.

We need money. To upgrade classrooms and fix deteriorating facilities. To reduce class size. To modernize how we teach. To train more teachers. To pay them better. There’s a catch-22: paying higher teacher wages to get better people often results in being able to hire fewer new teachers.  And, as the California experience described below suggests, to get children into basic educational mode earlier.  Howard Blume, writing for the September 18^th Los Angeles Times, explains in a tale that clearly reaches far beyond California:

“When students enter school in California, they learn at a pace on par with — if not better than — those in other states… The problem is that they arrive far behind their national peers, and they never catch up… This conclusion, from a sweeping research project aimed at charting future education policy, focuses new attention on what is often overlooked: infant and toddler care, parenting skills, preschool and early childhood education.

“The researchers argue that if California wants to improve student achievement in schools, it has to start much earlier so that children are prepared when they show up for kindergarten… Many ‘don’t have access to any care, let alone quality care,’ said Stanford University education professor Deborah Stipek, one of the lead researchers. ‘It’s not just a problem for low-income families, although affordability is a serious issue. It’s a problem for many, many families because fewer people are going into being providers for child care.’

“Those who tend to be least prepared for school are low-income Latino and black students, including recent immigrants and those in foster care, the experts said… And this is connected to another challenge facing educators in California: The achievement gap between Asian and white students and their black and Latino peers. Data show that all students are doing better but that the gap is not closing.

“Other states have made more progress. Ten years ago, eight states had a larger achievement gap than California when comparing white and Latino students in eighth-grade reading. Now, only four have larger gaps… ‘We’re moving backward in that respect,’ said Christopher Edley Jr., president of the Opportunity Institute, a nonprofit organization that took part in the research…

“The idea of providing needed support from birth onward — as part of an education plan — is not new. It’s embodied in such smaller-scale projects as the Harlem Children’s Zone, where generous private funding helps children from birth to college. Many see the Harlem project as a model, but an expensive one and therefore hard to replicate.

“Stipek said one reason California children are unprepared for school is a lack of quality child care and preschool… More than half of the people who provide child care qualify for federal or state welfare or other forms of public assistance, Stipek said… ‘That tells you something about the salaries that are paid,’ she said… Compared with other states, California also has lower standards for child-care providers and preschool teachers. But tightening standards alone would only exacerbate the shortage of workers, Stipek said.

“The research released Monday [9/17] comprises 36 studies and involved more than 100 experts who examined a broad range of topics. They looked at new and recent data and did some of their own number-crunching. A similar effort 10 years ago became the launch pad for the education reforms of Gov. Jerry Brown.

“One goal was to evaluate the Brown-era measures, which directed a substantial infusion of new money to help the neediest students — English learners, students in foster care and those from low-income families — as they moved through grade school. But the new research suggests this extra help needs to start sooner… The extra money provided through Brown’s reforms did have an effect. The researchers found a correlation between increased money and higher graduation rates…” Upward mobility used to be a fact of the American Dream. It is all but gone now, buried in a maze of unkeepable political promises and a system that is heavily tilted in favor of the rich and big business at the expense of everything else. It needs to come back.

I’m Peter Dekom, and we need to upgrade and invest in ourselves, perhaps exempting public school teachers (not administrators) from federal income tax… as a starter.