First

A brief analysis of American education
[You can view the PDF here.]

To venture into the heap of quotations that education has amassed over the years offers little hope for those who think kindly of the accelerating progress of thought and mind. It is by far not a tragedy – the ends sought have remained remarkably constant: to enlighten Plutarch’s “internal dank gloom” of a mind that has neither “dispelled nor dispersed” in the world’s symposium.

What is unfortunate is that the means of achieving this enlightenment – schooling, as Mark Twain put it, has managed only to “interfere with my education.” It is the predicament of this gap between education and schooling with which the reformer is faced with today – its forms capable of manifesting only too easily with the advancement of time.

Schooling, where education enables, at its essence manages to best bring out the natural aversion to the disabling dogma of fact without purpose. It is an all too necessary aversion – the essence of innovation is dependent not on contentment with improving within the bounds of one’s current lot, but extending beyond it entirely to further collective progress. Neuroscientist Jeff Hawkins implores us that is an all too natural one as well – the framework of thought and creativity is brought about through the mind’s ability to establish analogies between otherwise unrelated aspects of life.[1]

Yet, if the mind is only a model of reality, then education is the broadening of this model by uniting disparate experiences – facts and figures included – to forge a more complete representation of our existence. The emerging science of the mind is quickly bridging the gap between philosophies' light. Much less encouraging words can be said about the state of the system.

Move on up
From the original colonies, education in America has created an impressive history for itself – the preeminent Harvard University, opened in 1636, predating the nation. The prided Ivy League was all but set by 1764, with the exception of Cornell University in 1865.

Initially, most schools were private and – in another mark of time gone by – churches established early universities to train ministers. Following the national government’s Land Ordinance of 1785, a portion of every unincorporated township would be turned over for schools.[2]

Not until the 1840s was the arc from private to public schools firmly set in motion under America’s Second Great Awakening. The most prominent of these education reformers was Horace Mann. Born into poverty, he had been one to make the most of the promise of education: he graduated as valedictorian from Brown University in 1819, going on to study law, and soon afterwards tutoring Latin and Greek. Practicing law in Dedham, Massachusetts, Mann was part of the town’s school committee – the nation’s first free and tax-underwritten school. He invested his life from 1827 to 1837 in the Massachusetts House and Senate.

In 1837, Mann became Massachusetts’ secretary of education, where he set about creating a statewide network of common schools. Tellingly, his agenda focused on equipping schools with necessary resources, seeking out higher pay for teachers, implementing a broader curriculum, and extending education to 16 years of age. Indeed, not much has changed.

By 1900, some 31 states required 8- to 14- year old students to attend school, and by 1918, every state required students to complete at least elementary school. McGuffey Readers, memorization, and corporal punishment were the norm. Secondary education remained less attainable – in 1870, two percent of 14 to 17-year olds graduated high school, reaching ten percent in 1900. Of note, aside from schools integration in 1954, the Supreme Court in 1925 upheld a student's right to attend private schools to meet compulsory education laws.[3]

In search of progress
Amidst this, progress remains elusive. Schools have long succeeded in establishing a basic workforce and groundwork for college, yet it lacks the flexibility for its charges to break beyond this stifling, all be it in a betrayal of both words, ambiguity. Trying – and failing – to blend disparate philosophies and techniques to meet every child's needs, schools have managed to do neither. Mandatory courses indifferent to individual aims and gimmickery are the norm.[6]

Much the same, high expectations and lax standards for admission to advanced courses make for stagnation and deterioration of quality – and a submission to bare note and fact. This burden, more often than not, results in an apathy and restlessness that works against the pursuit of empowerment. For the students who give up out of boredom or frustration, the response, paradoxically, is a further dilution of standards. Do less and think less are not the mantras of innovation.

Soon an extreme polarity forms – pervasive throughout mindsets and scores. Resistance between student and teacher – each ignorant of the other – diminishes the classroom to the doldrums of simple worksheets and drills, and sooner or later uproar out of boredom. For the bright few, such an atmosphere is at best a game for those already adept at pushing paper, and at worst, an imprisonment. It is much the same for the less gifted. Schools are not the meritocracy where rigor necessitates passion. No, they are the houses of vacuous ability.

To illustrate this point, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development has reported that United States has a rather low variance (29.1% of the international average) in science-performance between schools, but a gap of an astounding (94% - versus an international norm of 68%) within them. (7) Schools, at their essence, suffer from a lack of substantive ends. They do not aspire to be mere centers of rote and drill and are far removed from a liberal course of study. In this in-between, everything for everybody state, progress ceases.

What, then, should be a schools aim? Preferably, it is one that realizes the necessity of schools specialization to overcome muddled thought and execution. And with these independent schools, comes a liberating multitude of choice that reaches a more dynamic end: Education would become, most succinctly, what one chooses to make of it. It is from this current lack of identity that the institutional predicaments one faces today have come. Testing cannot fill this lack of identity – it in fact only compounds it, by implementing an intensely narrow metric that results in entropy as the result of specificity. The effect is that of running in circles all the while shooting a shotgun's scattering of incoherent initiatives and policy. To draw upon Charles Dickens' “leprosy of unreality,” significant progress can be made from loosening the unyielding control of a wayward organizational structure and lack of centralizing ideology and returning it to the schoolhouse.

“I don't know the key to success,” Bill Cosby goes, “but the key to failure is trying to please everybody.” Focus is paramount.

Idle reform
Invariably, problems come with a panel and report. Particularly interesting – and entrenched – problems make for dozens. Former president Clinton's Goals 2000 program, passed in 1994, reads wonderfully: by 2000, every child would come to school ready to learn; each adult literate and possessing the skills needed for the global economy.[8] Kids would learn to “use their minds well.” The others fall rather short. High school graduation rates have yet to surpass, let alone reach, 90 percent. A trip back to the future finds that American schools are not first in the world in science and mathematics “achievement.” Certainly, one wonders how the goal of all schools free of drugs, violence, and firearms found its way into an otherwise rational set of goals free of smirks – or worse, twinkled eyes.

Occasionally, progress, however haphazard, is made too. The No Child Left Behind Act may indeed be, as the White House proclaims, “the most sweeping reform of federal education policy in a generation.” Whether or not sweeping and successful are one in the same is debatable. The law is centered around a framework for achieving “adequate yearly progress.” Such progress is determined by annual testing of students in grades 3-8 on “challenging” state standards. Relative progress, rather admirably, must be achieved among all sub-groups of race, socioeconomic status, and disability. Schools that fail to progress sufficiently for two consecutive years begin a progress of restructuring and districts must offer failing students the choice to attend school elsewhere; three years of lagging growth opens up additional funding for tutoring and supplemental programs; four years subjects a school to “increasingly tough corrections” including the removal of staff and takeover.[9]

Not all is admirable. The law boasts of its unprecedented flexibility – perhaps too much of it. In the ode to states' rights, each is responsible for determining its standards and assessing them. The result, The Economist notes, is more or less a gaming of the system.[10] Among the inflexible, one principal interviewed for this paper frets that a school's progress can quite literally hang disproportionately in the balance of a handful of students in one of the various sub-groups.

Others criticize the disinclination to request the full funding allotted for the act and the vacuous scramble to teach to the test, taking recess away all the while. This is all well and good, but it does not discredit the policy as a whole.

It is by all counts much better than most propose. A liberal voucher program without equally liberal autonomy for all schools fails to account for the supposed “competition” that results. Without the incentives that privatization provides, what serves as the impetus for distressed schools to improve? The interest in a constitutional amendment for education is similarly misguided. By sheer influence of resource and well-crafted legislation, the federal government can tacitly achieve the same ends. And fights, after all, are best avoided.

Sources
[1] On Intelligence. Jeff Hawkins, Sandra Blakeslee. Times Books. 9 September 2004.
[2] Land Ordinance of 1785. Indiana History Documents. Indiana Historical Bureau. http://www.statelib.lib.in.us/www/ihb/resources/docldord.html.
[3] Supreme Court Decisions. The Heritage Foundation. http://www.heritage.org/research/education/schoolchoice/SupremeCourtDecisions.cfm
[4] History of American Education Web Project. University of Notre Dame. http://www.nd.edu/~rbarger/www7/.
[5] Philosophy as a Basis for Curriculum Decisions. Allan C. Ornstein. Contemporary Issues in Curriculum. 2003.
[6] Senior Year: A Teenage Wasteland. Mary Tedrow. Teacher Magazine. 1 August 2007. http://tinyurl.com/22hmz9.
[7] Between-school and in-school variance in school performance on the science scale. PISA 2006. Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. http://www.pisa.oecd.org/document/2/0,3343,en_32252351_32236191_39718850_1_1_1_1,00.html
[8] Goals 2000: Educate America Act. United States Department of Education. http://www.ed.gov/legislation/GOALS2000/TheAct/intro.html.
[9] Fact Sheet: No Child Left Behind Act. The White House. January 2000. http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2002/01/20020108.html.
[10] What chance co-operation? The Economist. 24 February 2007.