The multifaceted crisis of America’s public schools
On Free to Choose, his popular public television series, Economist Milton Friedman stands before Boston’s Hyde Park High School as uniformed guards search entering students for weapons. In a voice-over Friedman says: “Parents know their kids are getting a bad education but . . . many of them can see no alternative.”
Speaking of educational reform, Richard H. Hersh, associate dean for teacher education at the University of Oregon, tells a meeting: “We’ve been rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.”
Says Professor J. Myron Atkin, dean of Stanford University’s School of Education: “For the first time, it is conceivable to envision the dismantling of universal, public, compulsory education as it has been pioneered in America.”
Like some vast jury gradually and reluctantly arriving at a verdict, politicians, educators and especially millions of parents have come to believe that the U.S. public schools are in parlous trouble. Violence keeps making headlines. Test scores keep dropping. Debate rages over whether or not one-fifth or more adult Americans are functionally illiterate. High school graduates go so far as to sue their school systems because they got respectable grades and a diploma but cannot fill in job application forms correctly. Experts confirm that students today get at least 25% more As and Bs than they did 15 years ago, but know less. A Government-funded nationwide survey group, the National Assessment of Educational Progress, reports that in science, writing, social studies and mathematics the achievement of U.S. 17-year-olds has dropped regularly over the past decade.
Rounding up the usual suspects in the learning crisis is easy enough. The decline of the family that once instilled respect for authority and learning. The influence of television on student attention span. The disruption of schools created by busing, and the national policy of keeping more students in school longer, regardless of attitude or aptitude. The conflicting demands upon the public school system, which is now expected not only to teach but to make up for past and present racial and economic injustice.
But increasingly too, parents have begun to blame the shortcomings of the schools on the lone and very visible figure at the front of the classroom. Teachers for decades have been admired for selfless devotion. More recently, as things went wrong, they were pitied as overworked martyrs to an overburdened school system. Now bewildered and beleaguered, teachers are being blamed—rightly or wrongly—for much of the trouble in the classroom.
One reason is simply that it is easier for society to find someone to blame than to hold up a mirror and see that U.S. culture itself is largely responsible. But the new complaints about teachering also arise from a dismaying discovery: quite a few teachers (estimates range up to 20%) simply have not mastered the basic skills in reading, writing and arithmetic that they are supposed to teach.
Of course, among the 2.2 million teachers in the nation’s public schools are hundreds of thousands of skilled and dedicated people who, despite immense problems, manage to produce the miraculous blend of care and discipline, energy, learning and imagination that good teaching requires. Many newcomers to the field are still attracted by the dream of helping children rather than for reasons of security or salary. The estimated average salary of elementary school teachers is $15,661, and of high school teachers $16,387, for nine months’ work. The average yearly pay of a plumber is about $19,700; for a government clerk it’s approximately $15,500. The best-educated and most selfless teachers are highly critical and deeply concerned about the decline in teaching standards and educational procedures. Their frustration is perhaps the strongest warning signal of all.
Horror stories about teaching abound. In Oregon a kindergarten teacher who had been given As and Bs at Portland State University was recently found to be functionally illiterate. How could this be? Says Acting Dean of the School of Education Harold Jorgensen: “It was a whole series of people not looking closely at her.”
In Chicago a third-grade teacher wrote on the blackboard: “Put the following words in alfabetical order.” During the weeklong teacher strike last winter, many Chicago parents were appalled by what they saw on television news of schools and teachers. Recalls one mother: “I froze when I heard a teacher tell a TV reporter, ‘I teaches English.’ ”
In the Milwaukee suburb of Wales, Wis., school board members were outraged when teachers sent them written curriculum proposals riddled with bad grammar and spelling. Teachers had written dabate for debate, documant for document. Would was woud, and separate was seperate. Angry parents waved samples of their children’s work that contained uncorrected whoppers, marked with such teacher comments as “outstanding” and “excellent.”
A Gallup poll has found that teacher laziness and lack of interest are the most frequent accusations of half the nation’s parents, who complain that students get “less schoolwork” now than 20 years ago. Whether the parent perceptions are fair or not, there is no doubt that circumstances have certainly changed some teacher attitudes. At a Miami senior high school this spring, one social studies teacher asked his pupils whether their homework was completed. Half the students said no. The teacher recorded their answers in his gradebook but never bothered to collect the papers. Says the teacher, who has been in the profession for 15 years and has now become dispirited: “I’m not willing any more to take home 150 notebooks and grade them. I work from 7:30 a.m. to 2 p.m., and that’s what I get paid for.” A longtime teacher in a large suburban school outside Boston told TIME it is common knowledge that some of her colleagues, anxious to preserve their jobs as enrollments dwindle, fail children simply to ensure hefty class size the next year.
The new doubts about teachers have led to a state-by-state demand from legislators and citizen groups that teachers take special examinations to prove they are competent, much like the student competency exams that have become a requirement in 38 states. Asks Indiana State Senator Joan Gubbins: “Shouldn’t we first see if the teachers are competent before we expect the kids to be competent?”
With 41 million pupils, public school education is one of the nation’s largest single government activities. Current expenditures (federal, state and local) run to $95 billion. So vast and costly an educational system does not cheerfully react to criticism or adapt to change.
The push toward testing teacher competency, however, depends less on Washington than on state and local governments. One of the most instructive battles fought over the issue occurred in Mobile, Ala., and was led by conservative attorney Dan Alexander, president of the board of education. In 1978, after the board required competency testing of Mobile high school seniors, Alexander was besieged by angry parents, at least partly because 53% of the students who took the city’s first competency exam flunked it. Recalls Alexander: “Parents came out of the woodwork saying, ‘If you’re going to crack down on my child, let me tell you about some of my children’s teachers.’ ” One parent brought him a note sent home by a fifth-grade teacher with a master’s degree, which read in part: “Scott is dropping in his studies he acts as if he don’t Care. Scott want pass in his assignment at all, he a had a poem to learn and he fell to do it.” Says Alexander: “I was shocked. I could not believe we had teachers who could not write a grammatically correct sentence. I took the complaints down to the superintendent, and what shocked me worse was that he wasn’t shocked.”
Alexander made the note public as the kickoff of a campaign for teacher testing. Says he: “Competency testing is probably a misnomer. You cannot test a teacher on whether he’s competent, but you certainly can prove he’s incompetent.” The proposed exams for veteran teachers were blocked by Alexander’s colleagues on the board. But they agreed that all new teachers should score at least 500 on the Educational Testing Service’s 3½-hr. National Teacher Examination (N.T.E.) which measures general knowledge, reading, writing and arithmetic. Only about half of the Mobile job applicants who took the N.T.E. in 1979 passed.
The American Federation of Teachers, which has 550,000 members, is opposed to testing experienced teachers, though it approves competency exams for new candidates. The much larger National Education Association is against any kind of competency testing for teachers, claiming teacher competency cannot be measured by written tests. Even so, some form of teacher testing has been approved in twelve states.* Proposals for teacher testing have been introduced in Colorado, Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, New York, Vermont and Wisconsin, and a bill in Oklahoma is scheduled to be signed into law this week. Polls say the teacher-testing movement is supported by 85% of U.S. adults.
Thus far actual test scores of teacher applicants seem depressing. In Louisiana, for instance, only 53% passed in 1978, 63% last year. What about the ones who fail? Says Louisiana Certification Director Jacqueline Lewis: “Obviously they’re moving out of state to teach in states where the tests are not required.” The results of basic achievement tests taken by job applicants at Florida’s Pinellas County school board (St. Petersburg, Clearwater) are not encouraging. Since 1976, the board has required teacher candidates to read at an advanced tenth-grade level and solve math problems at an eighth-grade level. Though all had their B.A. in hand, about one-third of the applicants (25% of the whites, 79% of the blacks) flunked Pinellas’ test the first time they took it in 1979.
In 1900, when only 6% of U.S. children graduated from high school, secondary school teachers were looked up to as scholars of considerable learning. Public school teachers were essential to what was regarded as the proud advance of U.S. education. By 1930, 30% of American 17-year-olds were graduating from high school, and by the mid-1960s, graduates totaled 70%. The American public school was hailed for teaching citizenship and common sense to rich and poor, immigrant and native-born children, and for giving them a common democratic experience. “The public school was the true melting pot,” William O. Douglas once wrote, “and the public school teacher was the leading architect of the new America that was being fashioned.”
The academic effectiveness of the system was challenged in 1957, when the Soviet Union launched its Sputnik satellite. Almost overnight, it was perceived that American training was not competitive with that of the U.S.S.R. Public criticism and government funds began to converge on U.S. schools. By 1964, achievement scores in math and reading had risen to an alltime high. But in the ’60s the number of students (and teachers too) was expanding tremendously as a result of the maturing crop of post-World War II babies. In the decade before 1969, the number of high school teachers almost doubled, from 575,000 to nearly 1 million. Writes Reading Expert Paul Copperman in The Literacy Hoax: “The stage was set for an academic tragedy of historic proportions as the nation’s high school faculty, about half of whom were young and immature, prepared to meet the largest generation of high school students in American history.” To compound the problem, many teachers had been radicalized by the 1960s. They suspected that competition was immoral, grades undemocratic, and promotion based on merit and measurable accomplishment a likely way to discriminate against minorities and the poor. Ever since the mid-1960s, the average achievement of high school graduates has gone steadily downhill.
Ironically, the slide occurred at a time when teachers were getting far more training than ever before. In the early 1900s, few elementary school teachers went to college; most were trained at two-year normal schools. Now a bachelor’s degree from college is a general requirement for teaching. Today’s teaching incompetence reflects the lax standards in many of the education programs at the 1,150 colleges around the country that train teachers. It also reflects on colleges generally, since teachers take more than half their courses in traditional departments like English, history and mathematics.
Research by W. Timothy Weaver, an associate professor of education at Boston University, seems to confirm a long-standing charge that one of the easiest U.S. college majors is education. Weaver found the high school seniors who planned to major in education well below the average for all college-bound seniors—34 points below average in verbal scores on the 1976 Scholastic Aptitude Test, 43 points below average in math. Teaching majors score lower in English than majors in almost every other field.
Evidence that many graduates of teacher-training programs cannot read, write or do sums adequately has led educators like Robert L. Egbert, president of the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education, to urge higher standards on his colleagues. The National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education has become warier about issuing its seal of approval, which is largely honorific, since state boards of education issue their own, often easygoing approval for teacher-training programs. Nevertheless, with an awakened interest in “consumer protection” for parents and pupils, the council denied accreditation to teacher-training programs at 31% of colleges reviewed in 1979, compared with 10% in 1973. Says Salem, Ore., School Superintendent William Kendrick: “For too long, we’ve believed that if you hold a teaching certificate you can do the job.”
Many teachers favor rigorous teaching standards, including the use of compulsory minimum-competency tests—at least for candidates starting out in their careers. They are dismayed by the public’s disapproval. Says Linda Kovaric, 32, a teacher at Olympic Continuation High School in Santa Monica, Calif.: “The administration tells you you’re doing a crummy job, parents tell you you’re doing a crummy job, kids even tell you you’re doing a crummy job. A lot of teachers these days feel and look like soldiers who returned from Viet Nam. You see the same glazed look in their eyes.”
Many teachers have come to see themselves as casualties in a losing battle for learning and order in an indulgent age. Society does not support them, though it expects them to compensate in the classroom for racial prejudice, economic inequality and parental indifference. Says American School Board Journal Managing Editor Jerome Cramer: “Schools are now asked to do what people used to ask God to do.” The steady increase in the number of working mothers (35% work full time now) has sharply reduced family supervision of children and thrown many personal problems into the teacher’s lap, while weakening support for the teacher’s efforts. Says Thomas Anderson, 31, who plans to quit this month after teaching social studies for seven years in Clearwater, Fla.: “I know more about some of my kids than their mothers or fathers do.”
A teacher’s view, in short, of why teachers cannot teach is that teachers are not allowed to teach. “The teacher today is expected to be mother, father, priest or rabbi, peacekeeper, police officer, playground monitor and lunchroom patrol,” says David Imig, executive director of the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education. “Over and above that, he’s supposed to teach Johnny and Mary how to read.” Adds Edith Shain, a veteran kindergarten teacher at the Hancock Park School in Los Angeles: “The teacher doesn’t know who she has to please. She’s not as autonomous as she once was.”
In the past 15 years the number of teachers with 20 years or more experience has dropped by nearly half. Four out of ten claim they plan to quit before retirement. In 1965 more than half of America’s teachers told polltakers they were happy in their work. Now barely a third say they would become teachers if they had to make the choice again.
For many teachers, whether to leave their profession is not seen as a question of choice, or economics, but as a matter of emotional necessity. The latest pedagogic phenomenon is something called “teacher burnout.” It is a psychological condition, produced by stress, that can result in anything from acute loss of will to suicidal tendencies, ulcers, migraine, colitis, dizziness, even the inability to throw off chronic, and perhaps psychosomatic, colds.
This spring the first national conference on teacher burnout was held in New York City. Surprisingly, the syndrome seems nearly as common in small towns and well-off suburbs as in big cities. The National Education Association has already held more than 100 local workshops round the country to help teachers cope with the problem, which University of California Social Psychologist Ayala Pines defines as “physical, emotional and attitudinal exhaustion.” Last March, Stress Consultant Marian Leibowitz held a burnout seminar in Edwardsville, Ill. (pop. 11,982). It drew a paying audience of 250 to a hall big enough for only 100.
According to Dr. Herbert Pardes, director of the National Institute of Mental Health, what emerges from the familiar litany of teacher complaints is that administrative headaches and even physical assaults on teachers can be psychologically less wounding than the frustrating fact that teachers feel unable to do enough that is constructive and rewarding in their classrooms. Whether it is blackboard jungle, red-tape jumble, a place of learning or a collective holding pen for the hapless young, the modern classroom, teachers claim, is out of teachers’ control. Some reasons:
Discipline and Violence. Last year 110,000 teachers, 5% of the U.S. total, reported they were attacked by students, an increase of 57% over 1977-78. Teachers believe administrators tend to duck the subject of violence in the schools to avoid adverse publicity. More than half the teachers assaulted feel that afterward authorities did not take adequate action. Today one in eight high school teachers says he “hesitates to confront students out of fear.” One in every four reports that he has had personal property stolen at school.
Since the Wood vs. Strickland Supreme Court decision of 1975, which upheld the right to due process of students accused of troublemaking, the number of students expelled from school has dropped by about 30%. As always in a democracy, the problem of expulsion turns in part on the question of concern for the rights of the disruptive individual vs. the rights of classmates and of society. School officials argue that it is wiser and more humane to keep a violent or disruptive student in school than to turn him loose on the streets. But, says John Kotsakis of the Chicago Teachers Union, “schools are now being asked to be more tolerant of disruptive or criminal behavior than society.” In a Washington, D.C., high school, a jealous boy tried to shoot his girlfriend in class. The boy was briefly suspended from school. No other action was taken. Says a teacher from that school: “These days if you order a student to the principal’s office, he won’t go. Hall monitors have to be called to drag him away.”
Student Attitudes Toward Learning. In a current hit song called Another Brick in the Wall, the rock group Pink Floyd brays: “We don’t need no education.” There is near unanimity among teachers that many students are defiantly uninterested in schoolwork. Says one West Coast teacher: “Tell me kids haven’t changed since we were in high school, and I’ll tell you you’re living in a fantasy world.” A New York panel investigated declining test scores and found that homework assignments had been cut nearly in half during the years from 1968 to 1977. Why? Often simply because students refuse to do them. Blame for the shift in student attitude has been assigned to such things as Watergate, the Viet Nam War, the Me culture. Also to television, which reduces attention span. Now there are 76 million TV homes in the U.S., vs. only 10 million in 1950. By age 18, the average American has spent an estimated 15,000 hours in front of the set, far more time than in school. Whatever the figures, teachers agree, television is a hard act to follow.
Shifting Tides of Theory. Because it is American, American education dreams of panaceas—universal modern cures for the ancient pain of learning, easy ways to raise test scores and at the same time prepare the “whole child” for his role in society. Education has become a tormented field where armies of theorists clash, frequently using language that is unintelligible to the layman. Faddish theories sweep through the profession, changing standards, techniques, procedures. Often these changes dislocate students and teachers to little purpose. The New Math is an instructive example. Introduced in the early ’60s without adequate tryout, and poorly understood by teachers and parents, the New Math eventually was used in more than half the nation’s schools. The result: lowered basic skills and test scores in elementary math. Exotic features, like binary arithmetic, have since been dropped. Another trend is the “open classroom,” with its many competing “learning centers,” which can turn a class into a bullpen of babble. There was the look-say approach to reading (learning to read by recognizing a whole word), which for years displaced the more effective “phonics” (learning to read by sounding out syllables).
Pedagogues seeking a “science of education” are sometimes mere comic pinpricks in a teacher’s side. For example, Ph.D. theses have been written on such topics as Service in the High School Cafeteria, Student Posture and Public School Plumbing. But many studies are hard on teacher morale. Sociologist James S. Coleman’s celebrated 1966 survey of pupil achievement seemed glum news for teachers. That study argued that family background made almost all the difference, and that qualities of schools and teachers, good and bad, accounted “for only a small fraction of differences in pupil achievement.” Later researchers, examining Coleman’s work, found that pupils do seem to learn more when they receive more hours of instruction.
The sensible thing for any effective teacher would be to fend off such theories as best he can and go on teaching. As teachers are fond of saying, “Teaching occurs behind closed doors.” But theory, some of it foolish and damaging, inexorably seeps under the doors and into the classrooms. For example, the sound idea that teachers should concentrate on whetting the interests of students and stirring creativity has been unsoundly used as an excuse to duck detailed schoolwork. Says Columbia’s Teachers College Professor Diane Ravitch: “It is really putting things backward to say that if children feel good about themselves, then they will achieve. Instead, if children are learning and achieving, then they feel good about themselves.” Ravitch believes U.S. education has suffered much from such pedagogic theories, and especially from the notion, which emerged from the social climate of the 1960s, that the pursuit of competency is “elitist and undemocratic.”
Textbooks and Paperwork. Teachers are consulted about textbooks but rarely decide what books are finally bought. The textbook business is a $1.3 billion a year industry. Books are ordered by editorial committees and updated at the pleasure of the publisher to sell in as many school systems as possible. Since the late 1960s, according to Reading Expert Copperman, publishers have found that if a textbook is to sell really well, it must be written at a level “two years below the grade for which it is intended.”
Paperwork done by teachers and administrators for district, state and national agencies proliferates geometrically. Though it all may be necessary to some distant bureaucrat—a most unlikely circumstance—when teachers comply they tend to feel like spindling, folding and mutilating all the forms. Paperwork wastes an enormous amount of teaching time. In Atlanta, for example, fourth-and fifth-grade teachers must evaluate their students on 60 separate skills. The children must be rated on everything from whether they can express “written ideas clearly” to whether they can apply “scarcity, opportunity cost and resource allocation to local, national and global situations.”
Administrative Hassles. School procedures, the size and quality of classes, the textbooks and time allotted to study are all affected by government demands, including desegregation of classes, integration of faculty, even federal food programs. One way or another, teachers are bureaucratically hammered at by public health officials (about vaccinations, ringworm, cavities, malnutrition), by social workers and insurance companies (about driver education and broken windows), by juvenile police, civil liberties lawyers, Justice Department lawyers, even divorce lawyers (about child custody).
Mainstreaming as Nightmare. Since the passage of Public Law 94-142 in 1975, it has been federal policy that all handicapped children, insofar as possible, be “mainstreamed,” i.e., educated in the same class with everyone else. The law is theoretically useful and just, as a means of avoiding unwarranted discrimination. But in practice it often puts an overwhelming strain on the teacher. “Mainstreaming is ludicrous,” says Detroit Counselor Jeanne Latcham. “We have children whose needs are complicated: a child in the third grade who has already been in 16 schools, children who need love and attention and disrupt the classroom to get it. Ten percent of the students in Detroit’s classrooms can’t conform and can’t learn. These children need a disproportionate amount of the teacher’s time. It’s a teacher’s nightmare—she can’t help them, but she never forgets them.”
The tangle of teaching troubles is too complex to be easily unraveled. But one problem whose solution seems fairly straightforward is the matter of illiterate and uninformed teachers. Competency tests can—and should—be administered to screen out teachers, old as well as novice, who lack basic skills. Such screening would benefit pupils, but it would also put pressure on marginal colleges to flunk substandard students bound for a career in teaching. Indiana University Education Professor David Clark asks rhetorically: “Is it more important to make it easy for kids to reach professional level, or to have good teachers?” Pressure is also needed to ensure adequate funding for teacher training. As a typical example, at the University of Alabama last year total instructional cost for a student in a teacher-ed program was $648, in contrast to $2,304 for an engineering student.
In a classic 1960s study titled The Miseducation of American Teachers, James D. Koerner, now program officer at the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, called for the opening of new paths to careers in teaching. At present a state certificate is required for public school teachers, who earn it by completing practice teaching and specialized education courses (such as philosophy of education and educational psychology). According to Koerner there is little evidence that this program of study improves teacher performance. Koerner calls for more intellectually demanding but more flexible requirements to make the field more attractive to talented people who lack specialized teaching credentials. A small step in this direction is a three-year-old pilot program run by the school board in Hanover, N.H. There, college graduates who want to teach are carefully screened for such qualities as imagination and love of children, as well as academic competency. After a year of probationary teaching, chosen candidates become certified teachers.
It has been argued that teaching needs to be more professional. But in some ways it is too professional now—too encrusted with useless requirements and too tangled in its own obscure professional jargon. The impenetrable language of educators has evolved into what Koerner calls “an artificial drive to create a profession.” But it is more damaging to the country than the jargon of law, say, or even government, because it sabotages the use of clear writing and clear thinking by tens of thousands of teachers, and through them, hundreds of thousands of students.
Violence in schools has got to be dealt with effectively. A muscular and unprecedented step in the right direction may have just been taken in California. Over a six-year period, Los Angeles County schools lost an estimated $100 million as a result of school muggings, lawsuits, theft and vandalism while city and school officials ineffectually wrung their hands over jurisdictional problems. Last month the attorney general for the state of California sued, among others, the mayor of Los Angeles, the entire city council, the chief of police and the board of trustees of the Los Angeles Unified School District, demanding that authorities put together some coordinated program to punish the criminals and cut down on violence and theft.
A promising proposal was made by legislators in Pennsylvania last year. They introduced bills requiring that schools report all attacks on teachers to state authorities and that criminal penalties be stiffened for school offenses. Under one of the measures, carrying a gun or knife in school would be treated as a serious crime, and a student who assaulted a teacher would face up to seven years in jail.
Principals need to be more willing to manage their schools. When necessary, the resignation of bad teachers must be sought, even though union grievance procedures can be costly and time consuming. “Too many principals are afraid of grievances,” says William Grimshaw, professor of political science at the Illinois Institute of Technology. More important, it should be easier to reward good teachers—if only with public recognition, which is rare at present. As Sylvia Schneirov, a third-grade teacher in Chicago, puts it: “The only praise you get is if your class is quiet and if your bulletin boards are ready when the superintendent comes—you better not have snowflakes on the board when you should have flowers.”
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