This is a response to teacherken's excellent diary from yesterday What does it mean to be educated? I have been spending a lot of time lately, in private reflection and in conversation with others, discussing the answer to this question, with the goal in mind of how to fix American public schools. Those who have read my comments in teacherken and other education diaries will not be surprised by my answer to this question. I have come to the conclusion that it is not American schools that need fixing (though improvements can and should be made), it is American culture that needs fixing.
I recently received an email from a colleague of mine with a link to an article on the problems of education, specifically the degree to which American schools show a disturbing lack of rigor. This was my response:
A big part of the problem, in my opinion, is the general cultural lack of intellectual rigor that is on display in everyday life. Philosophically speaking, Americans in general are an uncurious people, more driven by facts without context than by a desire to understand the meaning of those facts or the process by which they were derived. The “bottom line” is all that matters. In my experience, Americans tend to care more about the goal than the means of obtaining it, failing to understand that the journey is as important as the destination. We teach high school students to focus on graduation, instead of education. The entire educational establishment teaches students to focus on grades (which are often arbitrary measures of a student’s work ethic) instead of on learning and displaying subject competence, creativity, original thinking or intellectual growth. Colleges in this regard are no different than the K-12 educational system that students emerged from. Getting one’s degree is the important thing; it doesn't really matter what the degree is or the degree to which one actually mastered their specialty.
Consider the cultural implications of the following quote:
“Nearly a third of the nation’s population is illiterate or barely literate — a figure that is growing by more than 2 million a year. A third of high school graduates never read another book for the rest of their lives, and neither do 42 percent of college graduates. In 2007, 80 percent of the families in the United States did not buy or read a book.” ~excerpt from Empire of Illusion by Chris Hedges
When the country in which we live tolerates (and to some degree even exults in) that type of willful ignorance, what do you expect from college students? Our culture celebrates overpaid athletes and celebrities, and we give fame and notoriety to the most base examples of crass and ignorant behavior. We mock honor and intelligence and are shocked when our students act accordingly. The solution to America’s education crisis is not more rigor in school. The solution is for more Americans to show rigor in life.
Reading teacherken's diary yesterday, I was reminded of several conversations that I have had with students of mine. I have spent the last five years of my life teaching at an alternative high school for students who often had severe behavior problems and/or had failed for most of their educational career. This year I switched schools to a more traditional comprehensive high school, with a completely new set of challenges. Unfortunately, one thing has remained the same. The focus on achievement, regardless of the meaning of the achievement, is the goal. In my experience as a teacher in the alternative school, the emphasis was almost entirely upon helping students to pass the state end of course tests that many had failed their entire lives. While I was fairly successful at this, I do not believe that I actually helped educate these students -- I helped them to pass a test they needed in order to graduate. I have conflicting views of the overall goodness of that, but I do believe I helped them to a degree by showing them that success is possible. That does not replace the fact that these students often left my classroom with little more knowledge of world history than when they first entered it.
In my new school, I am faced with an entirely new challenge: students who are not only going to pass the state EOCT, but are in fact competing to get the highest scores possible. In the case of my government students, they have no end of year test, but are competing with each other, in many cases directly, for entrance at universities and colleges. Unfortunately the problem remains the same: students who are obsessed with numbers instead of knowledge. Children who believe their worth is measured by a number that is arbitrarily assigned by a teacher. I'm a good teacher -- I try to be as fair as possible, I reason out my grading scale in an effort to be as just as possible and to reflect, to the highest degree I can, the level of real learning a student displays in his/her work, but I am not perfect. There will always be a degree of subjectivity to my grading. Comparing grades across teachers is not only impossible, it is unfair to students. Yet that is precisely what schools and colleges across America do -- disregarding the fact that different school divisions have different cut scores for an A as opposed to a B and thousands of different teachers with different biases handing out these grades. I used to like to tell students that I don't give grades, students earn them -- but that's not entirely true.
The effect of this obsession with numbers has been horrific. Students of mine, when asked, talk openly of learning just enough for the test and then forgetting all of it. Several of my students have been prescribed high doses of medication for ADHD, depression, anxiety and other ailments, with little to no concern for the future mental and physical health of these students. Some of my students speak openly about their abuse of these drugs. I have had students literally get down on their knees and beg for a tenth of a point increase so that they can get an "A" instead of a "B" because that will increase their chances of beating out some of their classmates for a spot at a university that they want to attend. As a rule, I don't give extra credit. But it's hard to say no to their request, when I know that a college views a 92 B the same as an 85 B, while viewing a 93 A in a much more favorable light. What's the difference between a 92 student and a 93 student? Hell if I know. To my way of thinking the two are compatible students who exhibit almost the same level of work and competence. But that's not how the system has trained these kids to think.
This is the end result of the obsession with testing. The ends are more important than the means. Our students are being chewed up and spit out by a system that does not value their creativity, personality, interests or humanity. They are being told that their value is wrapped up in a number. Their worth is wrapped up in what college they can convince to take them on as a paying customer. A diploma is just a means to an end -- either getting a job or getting into college. Our kids are being schooled. They are not being educated.