Conservative vs. Liberal: Education

A few months ago while looking for blog reports on the protests at Rep. Kathy Castor’s town hall meeting in August I stumbled across Carol’s Closet. Like I do when I find any local blog I dropped her RSS feed into my reader and started making semi-regular visits.

Carol is very much a voice from the right (though I think she might be uncomfortable with the traditional labels of conservative, Republican, or libertarian). She’s a fan of Instapundit, Michelle Malkin, Redstate, and the right side of the political blogosphere. She is no fan of Obama, climate change True Believers, liberal media, or RINOs. In short, she is my ideological opposite.

While the compulsion to shoot off snarky anonymous responses to her posts was strong, I decided it would be more constructive to ask her if she wanted to debate. After a brief email exchange we settled on education as our topic for a blog debate.

I want to thank Carol for agreeing to do this. And, let me suggest that if you find R/CT to be too liberal for your tastes you might want to start hanging out at Carol’s Closet.

Carol’s portion of the post is first, and my portion follows about halfway down.

***
A View of Education from the Right by Carol at Carol’s Closet

What is the state of education in the United States? Well, it depends on who you ask.

Parents in the United States are overwhelmingly happy with the education that their children receive. In light of the facts, it is hard to imagine why. From the Center for Public Education:

American kids are good readers in comparison to many of their peers across the globe. Only three countries significantly outscored the United States at the elementary and high school levels (PIRLS 2001). The reading performance of U.S. fourth graders was particularly strong. They scored significantly above the international average (PIRLS 2001), while our fifteen year-olds scored slightly above the average (PISA 2000).

U.S. math performance is mediocre. American fourth graders performed above the international average but were significantly outdone by young math students in eleven of the twenty-five nations participating in the assessment (TIMSS 2003). U.S. eighth graders performed about the same (TIMSS 2003). By high school, our students’ performance falls below the international average. Only eleven of the thirty-nine participating nations did significantly worse than the United States (PISA 2003).

U.S. science performance is a study of contrasts. On one hand, both American fourth and eighth graders scored above the international average (TIMSS 2003). Only three countries did significantly better than the United States with their elementary students and American fourth graders outperformed their counterparts in sixteen other countries (TIMSS 2003). But as in math, our high school students were significantly outscored in science by their peers in eighteen of the thirty-eight participating countries with a performance that was below the international average (PISA 2003).

The gap between affluent and poor students in the United States is near the international average. When comparing students’ performance by parents’ educational level, parents’ occupation, and number of books in the home, Canada, Finland, and Iceland had smaller achievement gaps than the United States while Germany had a larger gap (Hampden-Thompson and Johnston 2006). The results are similar when looking at students by their immigration status and first language spoken.

The American adult population (ages sixteen to sixty-five) performed near the bottom on a six-nation assessment of literacy and numeracy. The United States performance exceeded only Italy’s. Outscoring us were Norway, Bermuda, Canada, and Switzerland (ALL 2003).

These results are despite that we far outspend other countries per pupil and contrary to our current Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan’s claims, our students spend more time in the classroom then their counterparts in other countries who consistently outscore them. Worse, only 69.2% of American students graduate from high school and of those who do graduate and go to college, more than 60 percent of students enrolling at two-year colleges, and 20 percent to 30 percent at four-year colleges, must take remedial courses, for no credit, before they can take entry level freshman courses. There is no excuse for our children to leave high school unprepared to take the next step.

How did we get to this point and how do we turn things around? We got to this point because we have lowered our standards and stopped challenging our students. Conservative Albert Jay Nock wrote this of education:

“After the three Rs, or rather for a time in company with them, his staples were Latin, Greek and mathematics. He took up the elements of these two languages very early, and continued at them, with arithmetic and algebra, nearly all the way through primary, and all the way through secondary schools. Whatever else he did, if anything, was inconsiderable except as related to these major subjects; usually some reading in classical history, geography and mythology. When he reached the undergraduate college at the age of sixteen or so, all his language difficulties with Greek and Latin were forever behind him; he could read anything in either tongue, and write in either, and he was thus prepared to deal with both literatures purely as literature, to bestow on them a purely literary interest. He had also in hand arithmetic, and algebra as far as quadratics. Then in four years in college he covered practically the whole range of Greek and Latin literature; mathematics as far as the differential calculus, and including the mathematics of elementary physics and astronomy; a brief course, covering about six weeks, in formal logic; and one as brief in the bare history of the formation and growth of the English language.”

Nock, who passed away in 1945, called it The Great Tradition and it was. School was not about ‘self esteem’ and it wasn’t about fun. The purpose of school was to gain knowledge and become educated. It involved memorization, tons of reading and writing until the students fingers felt like they would fall off. Students were constantly tested and in order to pass the tests they had to know facts. Things were a whole lot tougher then but our students thrived. My how things have changed.

Memorization is now a dirty word. Forget about learning Latin; vocabulary, word meanings, sentence structure, and spelling aren’t important-the “thought process” is. Multiplication tables are boring so children are taught to estimate. Testing is bad. Grades are bad. Rather than challenging students, school is made easy.

Often, teachers are unfairly blamed for the dumbing down of our schools. Much of the dumbing down rests squarely with the parents. Sorry, but I spent too many ‘conference nights’ waiting for my fifteen minutes with one of my children’s teachers and listening to the parent ahead of me berate the teacher because their little Johnny deserved better grades because blah, blah, blah. Self esteem was born and education died. Yes, children are happier when they succeed but only if the success is deserved. They do know the difference. Teachers are responsible for teaching; parents need to be responsible for their children learning. We can and should do more to hold both students and teachers accountable but we cannot force parents to be involved in their children’s education on a day to day basis. Cheating our students of a challenging education is not the answer, does nothing for the child’s self esteem and leaves our children unprepared to meet the future. Instead, school districts should encourage in-school mentoring programs utilizing retirees to provide children with individual attention when they do not receive it at home.

Children drop out of school because they believe that school has nothing more to give them. In many cases, this may be true. Not all students will go to college and there should be no stigma attached to students who despite their best efforts aren’t capable or don’t chose to attend college. High schools should offer students viable alternatives that will allow them to attain a measure of success at whatever they do. If a student wants to go to a trade they will need to know how to estimate a job (math) and take that estimate and turn it in to a proposal (writing). Wouldn’t a student be more likely to stay in school if they felt that they were learning something that would be relevant to their future? If children receive a solid education in the primary grades they should know by high school whether college is in the cards and be adequately prepared to go in a different direction if they desire. Wouldn’t it be better to allow students to enter an apprenticeship program after their sophomore year than to have them drop out with little to no hope for the future?

Thirty years of lower academic standards and less accountability has led to a fall in test scores, higher dropout rates and students who leave school unprepared for college, employment and life. It is time to go back to basics. If we demand more from our students they will deliver.

***
A View of Education from the Left by Re/Creating Tampa‘s Dave

Is there an education problem in the United States? Despite the hand-wringing and the warnings of imminent calamity from both sides of the political spectrum the problem is not as dire as we’ve been led to believe.

Given that education reform is a key platform for both Democrats and Republican, how can I write that? Easy, I checked to see what parents thought about their children’s education. Nearly 80% of parents are happy with the education their children are getting. And that satisfaction rate has been hovering around 77% over the last decade.

The Bush brothers each made education a signature issue. Jeb revamped Florida’s education system, and George W. pushed through the No Child Left Behind act. These efforts came after more than a decade of conservative criticism of our public school system and advocacy for voucher systems and parent “choice.” The Bushes’ moderate conservative reforms have received mixed grades. In Florida the FCAT has created a tool to measure schools, moved Florida out of America’s educational basement, but had no success stemming the rising tide of high school dropouts.

The current administration has some education reforms of its own, and they’re similarly moderate. Since his days as a Senator the President has pushed for schools to emphasize science, technology, engineering, and math. President Obama’s also an advocate of extending the school year to be more competitive with global educational systems. Arne Duncan has been tasked with closing, or substantively revamping, the 5,000 worst-performing schools in the U.S.

There’s no doubt that there’s room for improvement. Measured against the world, some metrics suggest the United States is slipping into mediocrity. But, keep in mind that reading scores among 9-year-olds and young teens improved dramatically from 1970 to 2000, especially among female students. Math scores also improved from 1973 to 2004 for the same age group. And, with the initiatives of this president we should also see increases of people returning to college and finishing their bachelor’s degree. The university system of the United States remains the best in the world, despite showing signs of strain (13 of the top 20 universities in the world are in the US).

The moderate liberal reforms of this administration are the correct first steps. The stimulus has saved the jobs of tens of thousands of teachers. Obama’s address to elementary school children sets the right tone of personal responsibility and high aspirations.

Liberals further to the left of the political spectrum, from John Dewey to Ralph Nader have urged for an education system that places civic responsibility at the center of its education philosophy. The most important thing we can do for our children is to continue to push for the reforms championed by liberals like Dewey and Nader. We need to put civics classes on par with English and math classes. We need to stop teaching our children how to be efficient at rote tasks, and de-emphasize punctuality, obedience, and memorization. Instead we need to focus on critical thinking skills. We need to teach our kids how to ask good questions, how to analyze sources and facts, and how to make cogent arguments. We need to stop educating them for a role in middle management and start educating them for entrepreneurship. Most importantly we need to educate our children on the rights and responsibilities of citizenship.