All institutions are always in a state of crisis. The economy has to adjust every generation or so to new products, a changing work force, and new ways of raising capital. The airline industry has to find today ways to work out of the problems created by high union contracts, unregulated competition, terrorism, and high oil prices just as it had to find a way out of the cluster of problems that arose after World War II: how to increase the passenger base; how to absorb Army Air Corps bases as civilian airports; how to stake out routes. Medicine switches from being office based to hospital based, from treating infections to treating organ diseases and cancers. Institutions are never just on the cusp between one era and another. The ground shifts so quickly that an era of medicine or industry is only a metaphor for the fact that some features of an institution may coexist for a while together even if one or another of those features will change for any number of reasons.
Education is an institution that is also always changing. Education, however, is described as in a state of crisis rather than merely in the process of responding to the next challenge. That is because education always falls short of the goals it and other institutions of social life set for it. Doctors may be required to treat but they are not required to cure diseases regarded as incurable; generals are expected to win wars, not to put an end to war. Teachers, on the other hand, are expected to provide, as the New York State Court of Appeals has held, “a sound basic education” for every young person, without defining what that would mean, though the phrase would seem to mean, if it has any meaning at all, that every young person will have learned enough to hold down a middle class occupation, regardless of the abilities of the child. Education is, in general, so grand a thing in conception that its goals always outstrip the ability of the institution to meet those goals. The goals of education are no less than to make every member of society economically productive, intellectually inquisitive, morally responsible, socially conscious, and psychologically mature.
Education has been in a state of reconstruction for as long as we know. Plato wondered how minds would develop now that they had the “crutch” of written texts as a substitute for memory. Erasmus thought kings had to be educated differently now that they were more executives than warriors. Jefferson wanted the citizenry educated to live in a republic; Dewey wanted the citizenry educated to live in an industrial age. Today, children are to be educated to live in a global, multi-cultural, information age. No wonder education fails.
Whether education is, in fact, failing, is very difficult to measure. An assessment of the state of American education therefore usually means making certain assumptions about what American education should accomplish, how it should go about accomplishing those goals, and whether or not American society as a whole is supportive of its educational system. People engaged in today’s largely polemical debate about what is happening in American education tend to make one of three arguments, depending on the basic image of education and of social life that they have in mind, and the economic and philosophical interests they are defending.
The first argument derives from a sense that American social structure provides the context for America’s educational system. The educational system is about as good as it can be, except that politicians and do-gooders who know nothing about education can tinker with it to its detriment. Mostly, the quality of education in America will ebb and flow according to the characteristics of the American population. When rural Blacks and Puerto Ricans came north, schools and school standards declined because students whose parents were sharecroppers or farmers would not be prepared to do well at school or to care much about it. When Asians and Eastern European immigrants came to these shores in more recent years, schools and school standards began to recover because the children of immigrants from urban areas do well at school. The school system is only as demanding of its students as it can be, and it can’t set standards so high as to crowd too many students out of the system.
The same dynamics apply to the factors of educational production. Teachers were better, on average, when women of talent couldn’t get jobs in other spheres of life and when the Great Depression forced people with excellent educational credentials into teaching. Teachers will get better when increased pay attracts better quality candidates and when there is a surplus of people with fancy educations who can’t find employment in other sectors of the economy. The number of tenured university jobs declines because teaching slots in higher education are filled with part timers, and so more and more people getting their doctoral degrees will find themselves in secondary education. Testing and curriculum reform can’t do much about these matters.
Not that nothing can be done to improve the system. It is possible to compensate for those external social forces which threaten to overwhelm the system, even if education is and will remain a reflection of the rest of the social structure. Education will not work very well if it does not provide its teachers with a reasonable career and reasonable support; the college graduates who take on teaching may not be the best and the brightest but they don’t therefore have to be the worst and the dullest. Nor will education work very well if families do not prepare their toddlers for education, and support them financially and emotionally once those children are in school.
This demographic view of education was the one presented by Al Gore in 2000, the only time education was ever a leading topic in a Presidential campaign. It is also the view of most teacher and educational administrators, whose professional organizations supported Gore. The idea is that education is a service more or less effectively designed to deliver to students the knowledge and skills they need to prosper. It is necessary to spend more money on salaries, buildings, and smaller class size so as to make up for any deficiencies students bring with them to school and to equalize the outcomes of education. Moreover, once the system is properly financed, education is to be left to the professionals who know what kids can actually do, rather than to parents and politicians who dream of what they would like kids to be able to do and who therefore treat education as the solution to all social problems.
A very different approach to how well American education is doing is based in economics rather than in demographics. Education, like any other institution, is driven by the laws of supply and demand (rather than driven by the supply of and the demands on the relevant populations). Education has simply not been put on an economic footing sound enough to provide quality instruction for important categories of students-- the poor, people of color, the bright and otherwise gifted—even though education is not terrible for most students. Putting that middle aside, American education is no worse than might be expected in a third world country that has not yet seen the prosperity brought on by capitalism. As in Latin American countries and in Southern Europe, the elite do fine and the poor do lousy. So the improvement of education requires the application of the same market principles that apply in other spheres of American life.
Conservatives who take an economic approach to education look at the competition between suppliers as the key to both driving down costs and improving results. A free market approach as that is applied to an institution that has been for a very long time a public service might require providing parents with government supplied vouchers so that they can act as consumers in the education marketplace. That expedient, its advocates claim, will lead to significant improvements in the supply of quality education because schools will have to compete with one another for students and so for the public dollar. The schools will invent better and more efficient ways of improving instructional outcomes. It isn’t necessary to spend more money on education if education is made more accountable to the public it serves if that public is a set of consumers who can select from a number of suppliers.
A system of public education, in this view, is like any other institution that tries to free itself of accountability to the market. Medicine needs the discipline of the insurance companies who pay for the services; the stock market is kept honest not only by the Securities and Exchange Commission, but by the willingness of investors to move their money. Broadcast networks are disciplined by their advertisers if they stray too far from the tastes of the mainstream and by the Federal Communications Commission if they stray too far from good taste. So education needs parents who have the power to walk away from one school to another to keep motivated those who run the schools.
This view of education was part of George Bush’s campaign in 2000. A large scale voucher program, which Bush favored, runs, however, into the problem of providing public support for parochial education, and so it became necessary to look into other ways the federal government can construct or contribute to the construction of a free market in education. One mechanism for school improvement is to provide a federally mandated program of external testing that allows parents to see which schools do well and which do badly, and so make reasonable market driven choices for their children. These tests also provide a way for state governments to decide which schools have failed to educate and so become the focus of remediation or, should the worst case obtain, allow the identification of those units that have failed to win a place in the market and so should close, replaced by new schools which might figure out a way to teach those children the closed schools have failed.
“No Child Left Behind” was the title and the theme of the law passed in 2001 to implement this vision. It was supported by those who wanted conservatism to be compassionate in the sense that it offered programs designed on conservative principles rather than the rejection of all government programs. The law allowed students in failing schools to shift schools. The idea was that parent groups will be able to pressure school systems because the parents will have objective information about outcomes. One trouble with this approach, of course, is that parents without much education themselves do not mind that their schools do not meet high standards, and so will defend failing schools so long as they act as day care centers because those schools are the closest ones to home. The fondness of parents for neighborhood schools is not much different from parents not dissuading their children from going to MacDonald’s, a model of modern corporate enterprise. The meals served there are bother-free and relatively cheap even if positively bad for your health.
A third approach to what is wrong with American education is proposed by those who consider themselves invested in school reform, which is the attempt that has gone on at least since the Sixties to improve the way education is delivered to children. Improvements in teacher preparation and curriculum design are accomplished through the application of scientific findings about the encounter between teacher and student as well as the scientific research that describes the various social, economic and institutional factors that impinge on the teacher-student encounter. The reformist perspective aims to change education from within by empowering professionals to take back the school systems of the nation from politicians who grandstand about education without having to know much about it, even if the movement sometimes has to recruit politicians, of whatever political party, to accomplish its goals: higher standards for majority and minority students, diversity as part of the school curriculum as well as part of the process of recruiting students to one or another school, and the introduction into the classroom of such new technologies as computers, the Internet, and power point presentations. That means reformers will support big city mayors like Daley in Chicago and Bloomberg in New York who wanted control of their school systems because that is better than leaving schools in the charge of most educational professionals. Large scale private philanthropy of the sort made familiar by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation support “small schools”, project based curricula, and other educational initiatives through joint projects with big and small city mayors.
The educational elite at places like Teachers College at Columbia University and the Harvard School of Education, both of which offer courses in reform, put themselves at odds with the majority of teachers colleges which are regarded by the reformers as responsible for the rote teaching practices and the low standards that had given rise to the need for reform what with the emphasis of most teacher education programs on the social rather than the intellectual needs of children, and curricula for teacher preparation that are long on how to teach and short on what is to be taught. In the view of the reformers, every group of students from the ablest to the least able is ill served by usual educational practice. The ablest are bored; the majority are not pressed to be all they can be; and the least able students are just lost. Something has to be done and there is no substitute for good teaching and good curricula, those pre-high tech stalwarts of education.
The most prominent advocate of the reform model for educational change was Barack Obama, who selected Arne Duncan as his Secretary of Education. Duncan made his reputation as the Superintendent of Schools in Chicago where, with mayoral support, he was able to further a reformist agenda, which includes breaking down large comprehensive high schools into smaller high schools that use whatever carrot might appeal to students, whether cosmetics or nuclear science or the performing arts, to attract students to the public equivalent of the charter schools that had operated as alternatives to both parochial education, because they did not charge fees, and as alternatives to public schools, because they were thematically organized and could try out curricula and forms of educational organization on their own.
Obama has also adopted part of the conservative approach in that, under the name of “Race to the Top”, he wants to extend the testing regime of “No Child Left Behind”. Teacher salaries will be tied at least in part to student performances as those are measured by standardized external testing. Teachers and not just schools and students will be held accountable for their performances, even if the only measurement is done of students, rather than by testing teachers directly for in class performance or knowledge of the subjects they are to teach, or reviewing schools for their atmosphere and other indicators of adherence in their practices to the idea of a learning centered environment.
There is a fourth view on what is wrong with American education that can be added to the three views already mentioned. Education is not a reflection of social or economic structure or even of the culture of a society as a whole; rather, it is a particular kind of paradoxical culture all its own that stands beyond and behind all cultures. Education as an institution is and transmits the tools for making use of culture, and so has the dynamics of culture rather than that of other organizations or of society as a whole. It has the backing and filling, the rhetorical certainties, the vibrant imagery, the attempt at influence, the modeling and the instruction, and the occasions for trial and error learning, that are part of any and all cultures as long as there has been culture, even if, as an institution that employs people to perform a task, it is also subject to the discipline of budgeting and to the organizational authorities to which it may or may not find itself answerable. Education is both protean and shapeless because it is based in culture—or, rather, the idea of culture is based in the dynamics of what was generically defined as education by Plato, who thought of education as both what discovered convention and what critiqued it
Education as an institution is therefore difficult to understand, much less change. What goes on there is deeply entwined with all the things people think are the means to accomplish the purposes of education, such as motivated lessons and individual encouragement and structured class discussions and is also entwined with all the ends people think education is supposed to accomplish, such as vocational preparation and tolerance for the beliefs of others and the development of good character. But the constraints on education do not consist only of means that are hackneyed and ends that are limited or else immeasurable. Rather, education is also and most deeply entwined with the ways of life and thought that seem “inevitable”, or “natural”, even when those terms are taken to mean just the particular way a particular student learns or just the beliefs, including the beliefs about learning, that are specific to a particular culture, and not those ineluctable mental practices that grow out of the general human condition. Some people think in abstractions because of having been exposed to abstractions ever since they were little. Some people think in terms of infinity because their geography seems to go on forever or think in terms of justice because they remember their oppression. And some people think logically because that is what thinking is: deciding what inferences from a set of facts are legitimate and which inferences are not.
Education is an institution that is paradoxically related to the idea of custom in that it both transmits customary thought and is also the mechanism for transcending customary thought. People, for example, take for granted what education is and how it is to be done in that they want to replicate for their children what they remember as both the good and bad things about their own education. Put as a cliché, it is the idea that we had tougher standards back then; teachers wouldn’t let you get away with things. More concretely, a parent might ask how and why teachers would convey the idea of multiplication before they teach how to add and subtract? We didn’t do it that way back then. The way I think is the way thinking is, because thinking is the objectification of the way I think, and so I cannot help but think that way and think that thinking is that way, the way thinking has to be. We had junior high schools in separate buildings; we had gym classes; we had home room. Any alteration is painful to the memory of administrators, politicians, parents, who want children to learn through a rite of passage that sanctifies the learning just as their own learning was sanctified for them.
And yet learning is the kind of thing that resists sanctification, for then it is not learning, and learning is of greater and greater utility as students learn how to write and think about matters that don’t have foregone conclusions. That is certainly true if students are to take up even moderately middle class jobs in a high tech society, even if they think, while they are students or study under teachers and administrators who think that way, that education means only to learn skills and facts that leave the self sacrosanct, its principles determined by some other force, such as religion or patriotism or the conventionalities of whatever social class it is in which a student resides.
The advocates for the point of view that education is most practical in that it is most job related when it is most for its own sake, when it works to train the mind to do the imaginative and thoughtful things the mind can do, are regarded as supporters of elitism, when what they are saying is that as many people as possible should be allowed to find their way into that elite, whatever are the limits in size of a group for which intellectual and aesthetic attainment are a matter of achievement rather than a matter of right. The difference between the right to an education and the right to be considered educated is very fundamental and not readily bridged. That fourth point of view can be properly ascribed to John Dewey, however out of fashion he may be these days, because he thought that education distills practical reason from experience and there is nothing else in morality or social life or philosophical inquiry than practical reason.