| LEFT BACK A Century of Failed School Reforms Diane Ravitch New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000 |
Rating: 5.0 High |
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| ISBN-13 978-0-684-84417-6 | ||||
| ISBN-10 0-684-84417-6 | 555p. | HC | $30.00 | |
Explaining why America shifted from almost universal reliance on traditional elementary schooling (the three R's) at the end of the nineteenth century to an endless variety of inane educational fads in the twentieth demands recourse to something akin to the Dutch tulip mania. Yet it did happen. A progressive movement hatched in the minds of a small coterie of intellectuals took over, in the course of forty years, first the schools of education, then the majority of public elementary and secondary schools. Details of the curricula varied from reformer to reformer, but all efforts shared a disdain for academic subjects and traditional methods of teaching. The stated aim was to free children so that they could learn according to their own inclinations. At the same time, these reformers almost universally sought a curriculum of "utility" — by which they meant practical subjects like homemaking for girls and industrial arts for boys. Traditional academic courses like history, algebra and foreign languages were considered useless except for college-bound students, which the reformers imagined to be only 20 or 30 percent of students.
A partial explanation lies in the Great Depression of the 1930s, when American society seemed to be on the verge of collapse. Yet the progressive movement sprouted long before this time. It was during the thirties that the reformers turned to Russia, inspired by the apparent educational successes of the Bolshevik Revolution. They were exemplified by George Counts, who visited Russia twice in 1927 and 1929.1 He returned and gave a series of speeches brimming with fiery Marxist rhetoric. Unfortunately, the revolutionary Soviet schools which had so inspired Counts were even then being purged — along with their proponents. When word of the purges escaped the borders of Stalin's empire in the early 1930s, the passion of U.S. reformers to emulate Soviet educational plans dissipated. However, the reform movement did not.
It is a remarkable progression, encompassing the battle that ensued when Rudolf Flesch's Why Johnny Can't Read was published in 1955.
During the late fifties, the alarm generated by Sputnik resulted in a brief resurgence of traditional subjects, to meet the nation's need for engineers and other technical professionals. But the civil rights movement, the Vietnam War and the counterculture movement of the 1960s doomed that effort. Professional educators soon succeeded in bringing back their permissive models of education, which effectively meant that very little real education was accomplished. The result of letting students control their own schooling was typified by "Hamilton High", a pseudonym for a real high school where the staff made no demands and the students goofed around, freely partook of drugs, and abused teachers with little consequence.
There were vocal critics of this laxity. Prominent among them was Albert Shanker of the American Federation of Teachers.2 Parents and community leaders also protested with increasing vigor. The parents wanted their kids to know how to read, how to do sums, and to speak good English. But they made little headway until scores on the SAT tests began dropping. Ms. Ravitch gives the numbers.
"After reaching a high point in 1963, average SAT scores had dropped steadily to a historic low in 1980. The average verbal score had fallen from a high of 478 in 1963 to the 420s in the late 1970s, where it remained for the balance of the century. The average math score had dropped from a high of 502 in 1963 to a low of 466 in 1980 and then began a slow rebound in the early 1980s, returning almost to its previous high level by the mid-1990s. The number of students who scored over 600 on the verbal portion of the SAT fell from 116,585 in 1972 to 66,292 in 1983, from 11.3 percent of all test-takers to 6.9 percent of them; on the mathematics portion of the test, the number of high-scoring students dropped from 182,602 to 143,566 in the same years, from 17.9 percent of test-takers to 14.5 percent. Students' scores on most other national and state tests also fell in the 1970s. – Page 410 |
Faced with this measurable decline, which was intensely covered by the press, the nation's leaders began to take notice that something needed to be done. The 1983 report A Nation at Risk, with its blunt assessment, was the tipping point. But entrenched institutions are not turned around quickly. The country had to endure the multicultural movement and the self-esteem movement before the need for curricular and performance standards became clear enough to inspire action. At an education summit in 1989 the nation's governors, led by Bill Clinton of Arkansas, drafted a set of goals that included high school graduation rates, readiness of young children to begin school, adult literacy, and reductions in substance abuse and violence as well as standard curricula for various subjects.
Subsequently, federal agencies awarded grants to organizations of scholars and teachers to develop curricula in science, history, geography, the arts, civics, foreign languages, and English.3 Alas, Congress did not follow through with the funds to pay for high-level review of these standards, and many of them (especially history and English) were not worth much. The history curriculum was rife with bias: European nations "invaded", non-European ones "expanded into other countries"; twentieth-century U.S. presidents were described favorably if they were Democrats, denigrated if Republican; it cast the U.S. as a villain. The English standards were so lacking in rigor that the Department of Education cut off funding for them.
Such was the state of American education at the end of the twentieth century. The country had achieved its goal of universal primary and secondary education, and nearly all who wished to go to college could do so. This was a vast material improvement over the century's beginning, when secondary schools were rare and colleges virtually unattainable — a testament to the success of that earlier time's ideals.
"As the century opened, American education seemed to be firmly committed to the ideals of liberal education. There seemed to be a broad consensus between educators and parents that the purpose of schooling was to improve a youngster's ability to think and reason well through studying certain essential subjects. Behind this consensus was an implicit understanding that access to education was a democratic right and that the role of the school in a democratic society was to provide not just the three R's but access to the knowledge and thinking power necessary for every citizen. The promise of liberal education was that all children would study the same knowledge that had once been available only to elites. Opponents of liberal education, however, rose like dragons' teeth from the soil in the following decades, never understanding the promise, never seeing why children of workers and farmers needed the kind of education once deemed appropriate only for the elite." – Pages 49-50 |
Yet, as Ms. Ravitch notes, serious problems remained. In her Conclusion, she summarizes the situation thus:
"...in the closing years of the century it was obvious that the quality of schooling had not kept pace with its quantity. Students were staying in school longer than ever, but were they learning more than ever? Few thought so, nor did available evidence suggest that they were. More students were going on to college than ever before, but nearly a third of them found it necessary to take remedial courses in reading, writing, or mathematics. When so many first-year college students had not mastered the skills that were supposedly taught in secondary schools (or even earlier), it made a mockery of the 'educational ladder' that idealistic educators had advocated at the beginning of the twentieth century." – Page 454 |
So we enter the twenty-first century. Politicians still raise high the banner of education, vowing to improve it so American children can better compete with their counterparts in other nations. Results continue to underwhelm. It remains a mystery to me why this should be so. What could be more clearly vital to the future of each individual child and to the nation's future than broadly-based, effective education? How could providing such an education be so frequently flubbed?
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