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The Nation's Pulse
Beyond Steven Brill
Without good old-fashioned middle-class ideals, what good is school reform?
Temptations to bash the teachers unions are, confessedly, immense. And omnipresent—those scenes, for instance, last winter at the Wisconsin statehouse, aswarm then with obnoxious public employee union members, teachers included, behaving as though the public had elected them, and not Governor Scott Walker, to sort out the state’s economic tribulations.
Steven Brill’s new book, Class Warfare: Inside the Fight to Fix America’s Schools (Simon & Schuster) bombards the teacher unions with scorn and statistics. Conversely, it celebrates the efforts of school reformers such as Wendy Kopp of Teach for America. It’s being widely reviewed and cited, not least on account of Brill’s prominence as the founder of Court TV (now truTV).
The book is certainly welcome, even if all it achieves is diversion of the unions from their favorite tasks—collecting dues and protecting the jobs of inferior teachers. “Truly effective teaching,” zealous and inspirational, Brill argues, is the desideratum for which we should strive. Such teaching can “overcome student indifference, parental disengagement and poverty.” Which, in at least a limited sense, must surely be the case. The assertion, all the same, rubs the wrong way against assertions that, it strikes me, we might want to check out with the attention normally reserved for headline topics like charter schools and crusading superintendents.
Brill puts the bad-schools monkey on the unions’ back. Is that its only natural habitat? Consider an essay in the New York Times of last September 4. The Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Philip Schultz recounts his battle with dyslexia. He remembers how the dyslexic child he was found himself seated with two others like him at a separate table in the classroom, away from the normal kids. He couldn’t tie his shoes or tell time. “I not only couldn’t read but often couldn’t hear or understand what was being said to me.…My situation then seemed hopeless.”
So he got from there to here…how, precisely? “My mother read the one thing I would listen to—Blackhawk comics—over and over again, hoping against hope that by some leap of faith or chance I would start to identify letters and then begin to arrange them into words and sentences, and begin the intuitive, often magical, process of turning written language into spoken language.
“One night, lying in bed as she read to me, I realized that if I was ever going to learn to read I would have to teach myself.” And so he willed himself into “being” an invented character who could both read and write. “Starting that night, I’d lie in bed silently imitating the words my mother read, imagining the taste, heft and ring of each sound as if it were coming out of my mouth.…And suddenly I was reading.”
The effects of families on learning and motivation are profound. What we may no longer grasp is that those efforts are pivotal. I offer a thesis: the United States can have the greatest schools in the history of humanity—provided it supports the cultural conditions for such schools. Those conditions, I posit, include families reflexively committed to the educational enterprise, unwilling to turn away from it for frothier considerations. Such a thesis is less reckless than it possibly sounds. It is grounded in experience (that “better guide than reason,” John Dickinson called it). We have walked this ground before. We know its contours.
A good school is a school whose pupils have parents who care about their children’s schooling—and demonstrate that care in ways direct and indirect. By policing homework. By carrying on intelligent conversation. By inspecting report cards. By following in the footsteps of Philip Schultz’s mother, with A. A. Milne in hand, or just Blackhawk comics: reading, reading, reading. By…well, you know what I’m talking about, through that experience of which I spoke, or possibly just through intuition. The so-called royal road to learning leads, one might say, through the family kitchen.
There is a chirpy 1950s feel to this exhortation: Oh, David, oh, Ricky, Dad’s home, shall we gather around the table for some good old Πr2? Let us step apart from the pitying stereotype. The '50s were the high tide of middle-classness in America. Social and economic success engendered the desire for more of the same. Ambition and self-respect, not to mention hard work, were OK. In fact, they were good. The middle class was a demanding class. It insisted on standards of a certain sort: not the highest in history, perhaps, but higher than anything seen around this place since then.
The social revolution that began in the early 1960s—instituted, ironically, by the children of the middle classes—changed the culture of the public schools. The old stodginess (as some saw it) was out; mere vitality, or just occasional curiosity, was in. The culture of the revolution was egalitarian: A’s for everyone, no D’s, no F’s, for sure. It was as though a whole society, marching with some order and exertion toward a distant goal, stopped suddenly, unbuckled its belt, sat down for a rest, sporadically fell back into line, walked a few paces, more raggedly than before, then sat down again. In due course, rather than conning Worsdworth, students were agitating for the right to protest war and racism. The Age of Relaxation commenced. We live in it yet.
THE OLD MIDDLE-CLASS ideals aren’t gone. In middle- and upper-middle-class communities, parents who don’t volunteer at the elementary school, or supervise homework, or (preferably) both, are rare birds. Their children’s public schools thrive, as do the private schools—Christian ones, particularly—that have sprung up to intensify the educational experience for families with the wherewithal. Notice additionally the steadily growing number of middle-class families that teach their children at home. I used to shake my head at such people. How was this thing going to be made to work? Well, it does work, so far as I can judge. The parents who undertake the vast and all-absorbing task of homeschooling are in earnest. They want the same things little Ricky and little David’s parents wanted for their kids in days of yore. They may indeed want those things more intently. Charter schools, at the public level, respond to and serve the same instincts: that my child (never mind my address, my job, my race or color) should receive the same strict, generous care the children of more affluent parents receive.
We get back to want. In order to get, you first (as a general rule) have to want. What any culture wants—truly, deeply wants—it gets eventually. The educational standards and outcomes we used to have, we somehow don’t want anymore—possibly even feel guilty about expecting. Our failure to get the good things we kind of, but insufficiently, want, we blame on someone else. The teacher unions, yes! The government, for not paying the teachers enough in the first place!
What might we do, culturally speaking, to get good schools again? Many may not agree with my own prescription, but I’d begin as a nation and a society, using law, example, and precept to rebuild the marriage culture, wherein most people not so long ago married and stayed that way, “for better, for worse; for richer, for poorer.” Such a creed has to be preached without intermission, in churches, in schools, in the media, not least in the entertainment industry, where these days it draws the most derision.
The schools of the '50s, and earlier, were far from perfect. At least they reflected a general social commitment to work and achievement, a commitment fostered by families as essential to their own well-being and to the long-term good of society. Can we go home again? Maybe so, maybe not—but one shudders to think of the alternatives.
About the Author
William Murchison, a Dallas-based columnist for Creators Syndicate and author of Mortal Follies: Episcopalians and the Crisis of Mainline Christianity (Encounter Books), is completing a biography of John Dickinson..
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Bill Hussein O'Stalin| 11.29.11 @ 7:15AM
Schools as we know them are dead. There are several districts experimenting with online high school courses.
Ten years from now many school systems will be gone, replaced by educational modules over the internet.
Uhro| 11.30.11 @ 1:07AM
Okay. Maybe. But you are making one huge assumption. See I'd say that most parents (means something over 50%) DO NOT wish to have their children at home during these 5.5 - 6 hours per day.
Many parents will fight with arguments like the expenses of an almost round-the-clock PC running, heavy internet use, and the multiple devices and myriad of software -- especially factoring 2 or 3 children at home who need these resources simultaneously.
Homes with dual working parents or single working parents will not go for this. Many of them. The last thing they want is their kids running around unsupervised in their own homes.
There will be much pushback.
Timothy L. Pennell| 11.29.11 @ 8:56AM
As long as there are Teacher's Unions, there will be PATHETIC Public Schools. As long as Children are FORCED in to these Public Union Facilities, they will be UNABLE to compete with Asia, for Jobs in the High Tech Fields. As long as Democrat Politicians ala Barack Hussein Obama, continue to choose UNION MONEY, over our Children's Educations, this Country will fall behind, in the Race for the Future. We will cede our position as the World's Leader, in all of these fields, and continue our Impression of The End of The British Empire. It's becoming more inevitable, by the day.
Tina B| 11.29.11 @ 9:10AM
Mr. Murchison how you have hit the nail on the head. IMHO.
I became a teacher with the blessing of the same wonderful parents who oversaw ever year, every report card, every phone call home, and with a passion. My Polish engineer Papa taught me Intermediate Alg, College Alg, Trig, Modern Geometry, Calc I and Calc II. We got As. About the only thing he couldn't help me with was Probability and Stats. And he did police my homework more after he was retired than before.
The family unit is under fire from the liberal culture, and being destroyed as we well know by the government and the media. Without a strong family, and the ideals that faith in a Holy God bring to light, education of the type we saw in the 50s, as I grew up, is finished.
I tried for 30 years to instill a love of learning and math in my 8th graders, but it was too late for many of them. They were already driven by the culture to be sexy, athletic, slick, domineering, deceitful, sexually aware and experienced, famous, alluring, selfish, intimidating, bisexual, powerful, violent, and so many other things I was taught to avoid by my family of European immigrants. To love learning, and enjoy the pursuit of mathematical excellence and problem solving was totally foreign to most of my students.
However, I taught two classes every year who were different. They had grades and test scores that enabled them to take and pass Alg I in 8th grade. Many of them were straight A students, some even received perfect scores on the state assessments. The main difference in the two classes and the other four were in their families. At open house nights, those two class' sets of parents showed up. Then they asked questions, listened to me introduce myself and my goals for the year, and told me their goals for the year for their children. We had a relationship for the whole year established as allies and educational supports.
The other four classes I taught had almost no one in the room at open house. No-shows for parent conferences were also common with these kids, no matter what time we tried to schedule them, morning, noon, or evening. And when a mom or dad occasionally did show up, the tenor of the meeting was often adverserial and began with an attack on the teachers and sometimes finished with tears.
If there was a family unit to work with, I could do wonders in my math classroom. If there was none, or very little family unit, and it was not supportive for the child, I could try my best, and sometimes succeeded in overcoming these obstacles to learning, but often no one could.
The brain learns optimally when the child feels safe and loved. Absent that one can only hope and pray and keep on trying. As bad as the public educational system is today, there really are a few teachers battling the odds and winning. But not often enough for America's future as the greatest country in the world.
Yancey| 11.29.11 @ 10:12AM
Tina hits the nail on the head with the comment about a supportive family backing up the student: "If there was a family unit to work with, I could do wonders in my math classroom. If there was none, or very little family unit, and it was not supportive for the child, I could try my best, and sometimes succeeded in overcoming these obstacles to learning, but often no one could."
Anybody remember the movie Kramer versus Kramer?
That movie from perverted-land Hollywood signified the openness of America to divorce.
Now with single motherhood considered near sainthood, more birthcontrol methods than active NASA programs, men and women in their midlife still on the almost nightly prowl for after work "fun?!" strip clubs across the nation, porn on TV, one night stands, flings, dating sites that are there to allow for hookups, adults at 44 addicted to relationships on Facebook.....WE DO NOT HAVE HOMES.
America does not have functioning, real homes.
If you don't have mom and dad MARRIED and living under the same roof, monagamous, then you NEVER will have a child that will succeed.
Even the near utopia of multi-millions of $$, top facilities, and best teachers really won't make a shred of difference.
MikeBee| 11.29.11 @ 11:48AM
Tina and Bill M.,
You are absolutely correct! My wife teaches in a poor urban school district, one of the nation's worst performing school districts. When she first started, sixteen years ago, her school was located on the edge of two neighborhoods in the city. One, a mostly affluent neighborhood with nice and more expensive homes; the other, a poorer neighborhood consisting mostly of rental homes. The children she taught from both neighborhoods were black. The children from the nicer neighborhood usually had both parents at home. These parents supported my wife in her mission to teach their children, and valued education for their children. Their children typically performed well in my wife's class. The children from the rental neighborhood usually had only one parent at home, a single mom. The children's parent did not value education, and simply wanted the children out of the home during the day, at the state-sponsored "day care," called a public school. Often, the children from this rental neighborhood were missing from class, as their job was to care for younger children in the home, when Mom was away at work (or wherever). Many of these kids raised themselves, as Mom would return home from work, too tired to do anything but eat dinner and fall into bed, to get up the next day and do it all over again. The children from this rental neighborhood generally did not perform as well in school, although there were exceptions for individual children who were highly talented and gifted.
There are three specific things that we can do as a society to improve public schools, and until we do them, they will not improve in inner cities, no matter what we try.
First, as a society, we should support two-parent households, and create disincentives for one-parent households.
Second, we should encourage inner-city blacks and deep Southern whites to change their culture. As Thomas Sowell points out in a 61-page study found in his book, "Black Rednecks and White Liberals," this loser culture initially came from a poor area of Great Britain, close to Scotland. These folks settled in the deep South of the U.S., and became slaveowners early in this country's history. Blacks learned the same culture from their slaveowners in the deep South. This culture, as Sowell points out, does NOT value education as a way to get ahead in life. Today, this culture has largely changed in that area of Great Britain, and in the deep South. It still remains among poor blacks in the U.S., and needs to change there, also. Liberals today champion this destructive culture as being "black culture," but it really is black people adopting the worst of white culture. So, change this culture.
Finally, third, we should allow public schools to kick children out of school permanently, if they are constantly interrupting the learning process for other kids. At the very least, single Moms who want the free babysitting service will encourage their bad child to be better, so that they won't have him at home. Society should, once again, institute military schools, where undisciplined children can go after they are kicked out of the regular public school learning environment. There, severe discipline can help these unruly children to succeed in life.
Three steps, problem solved!
Petronius| 11.29.11 @ 9:48AM
So right about wanting. People today do not want their minds taxed. They want to be amused. The problem is the disconnect between the knowledge offered in school and the knowledge required for success in the real world. You do not get the latter in any classroom anywhere.
rn| 11.29.11 @ 9:58AM
Homeschooling. This is the way to go. I'll put a 13 or 14 year old who has been homeschooled facing off against a routine public school district 13 or 14 year old...and the better kid? Which one has cultivated a better hunger for learning? A greater self-drive? More self-confidence? Every time. (you know the answer)
We have low end performers in the public school system. Low end teachers and administrators. They can't and won't tackle the discipline issues.
But the biggest problem that your kid at a public school faces is that 30-40% of his peers are not there to learn. 10% are there to create pure mayhem.
Appleby| 11.29.11 @ 10:39AM
My Mama didnt graduate from high school, yet her grammar is faultless and she admonished us constantly for incorrect speech: *Dont say THESE ONES! Its redundant!* *Dont say THE REASON IS BECAUSE! The Reason Is MEANS Because!* *Enthused is a verb -- say Enthusiastic!* *Chickens LAY; Children LIE!* and so forth. When our two-room school began teaching Whole-Word reading and my next sister floundered, Mama taught her to read using phonics and instructed me to drill her until she was proficient.
Daddy never graduated from high school, but his grammar school insisted the children memorize all the important documents from American History, and every Friday the farm kids had to stand before the class and such parents and relatives as might attend, and recite classical poems that might cover two or three pages. And mind you, these had to be memorized in the evenings following a full load of chores or even while doing said chores, and recited to Mama or Daddy at the drop of a hint. Lightning mental arithmetic was also required, and Daddy could add and subtract in his head more quickly than I could with a calculator. We travelled all around the country by car, and the last stop before we left town was the library; our gifts were books, and we played Game of the States and Go to the Head of the Class as well as Scrabble and Monopoly. And dont forget that the old Warner Brothers cartoons used classical music as a background, which when I started taking *Music Appreciation* at Bible College, caused the whole class to erupt in giggles when some portentious theme triggered the memory of Bugs Bunny.
And lets not forget *Sword Drill* at Bible School and Wednesday night meeting -- I can find any book or passage in the Bible in under 30 seconds even today because of my pitting my speed against my sisters and friends, but I was not as fast as Mama and probably still couldnt beat her!
And if Mama and Daddy could do all that without formal education, what on earth would we proffer as an excuse if we fell short of that standard?
cicero| 11.29.11 @ 1:16PM
We seem to forget that it was the public schools and colleges that lead the charge for the permissive society. Sex education in the classroom starting in the 3rd grade lead to chaos in attempted socializtion. The girls became three legged antelopes. Co-ed physical education lead the kids to believe that there was no difference between boys and girls, and that it was all right for boys to inflict physical punishment on girls.
Now you want to use the public schools to put the lid back on Pandora's box? Good luck. You will first have to tear down what you have, and replace it with what you want. The current group in charge of the classrooms will have to be replaced - by whom? Oh yes, you will to clean out those in charge of teaching our next round of teachers.
Sorry folks, but there is no simple answer. Only parents can affect the changes necessry. That will entail the abolishing of the public shcool/college system, and replacement by a private system that is answerable to the parents who will have to pay for it.
Al Adab| 11.29.11 @ 2:07PM
Until the public edication system returns to teaching, rather than questioning, American values and Western Civ, we must seriously consider our commitment to its ongoing funding. Do we as a society receive value for the dollar invested when the product - the student or graduate - is trained to be inimical to our values?
martin j smith| 11.29.11 @ 3:02PM
To get our schools back to their purpose ,of actually teaching skills like Reading,Writing and Mathematics
parents must be very involved in monitoring every aspect of the schools life starting with their own kids but even beyond that. And, Government must be far less cozy with Teacher Unions.
cicero| 11.29.11 @ 3:55PM
The purpose of the public schools is more than just the teaching of reading, writing, and arithmatic. The whole purpose was to teach the values of the culture that was America. Our predessors knew that the maintenance of the republic required an educated citizenry. That meant passing on the values to the next generation.
We seem to be spending an inordinate amount of time on reading and math, and spending no time or money of history or civics. We can succeed with the reading and math if we have disciplined classrooms. To teach history and civics properly, we need a respect for our own history and for our way of life. That is sorely missing in our public school system. And more money is not the answer.
Pat| 11.29.11 @ 4:03PM
Parents who care about their children’s school don’t necessarily a good school make. Sure, parents in affluent suburbs spend more time on education than ghetto moms with 3 kids by two different fathers and a bad crack habit. But, as consumers, these affluent parents are paying Ferrari GTB prices for the quality workmanship of a Ford Pinto. Affluent suburban schools host websites where you can track your kids’ homework assignments hour by hour and teachers within these affluent schools assign enough daily homework to make Asian sweatshops employing underage kids envious.
With all this frantic activity, few parents actually assess what value they are receiving for their bucks – it’s as if they’re paying a New York sidewalk vendor $200 for a Rolex and not realizing it takes more than a counterfeit logo on a cheap watch to make a Rolex. Keeping your kid occupied for hours every day and well into the evening isn’t the same as educating your child, but try telling that to suburban workaholics attempting to raise a couple of future citizens.
There are far too many subjects being taught today, high schools have become mini-universities with a course catalog filled with junk classes. Typical homework assignments are “Write 500 words on a subject of your choice” – my niece chose to write on the fashion industry – so a popular television show on runway models provides the scholarly research for an English composition – amazing that such nonsense is actually taken seriously. This isn’t education, it’s well supervised, and expensive, babysitting. And where is the federal or state law which requires formal education to run to 16 or 18 years? If Americans merely want to extend their kids’ adolescence into their twenties through unending, valueless classwork, then America has the finest schools in the world.
But extending adolescence isn’t necessary to a good education. During an earlier era, Americans cranked out new invention after new invention and did so with a population attaining only an average 8 years of formal education. Tack another 4 years onto that statistic and what do you have, a kid qualified to enter college in order to endure 4 to 6 more years of sitting in class. As a society, are we any better off with keeping our children out of the workforce until they’re 22 or 24 years old? What we need aren’t middle class values, we need education consumers who won’t buy a $200 Rolex and then walk away thinking they scored a real bargain.
Slacker| 11.29.11 @ 4:54PM
Middle class ideals are the solution? Good luck with that.
The problem is we pretend almost everybody is middle class but, it isn’t so. Income redistribution and progressive taxation have created a faux middle class. Most of the lower middle class would crash and burn if left to fend for themselves.
Today we live among idiots. For the last 50 years we have practiced some sort of backwards eugenics where we encouraged idiots to breed. We also imported Mexico’s underclass. Now we can’t figure out why our “average” kids seem to be getting dumber.
The middle class of the 1950’s stood on their own. Today we have an underclass pretending to be middle class. What should we expect?
Yancey| 11.30.11 @ 12:59AM
Had a conversation with a 6th semester junior at one of America's elite universities tonight. He was commenting about how the days are just so much shorter now. Early darkness, nightfall, etc. He chatted on about this for a moment. I replied, "Well, you won't have to put up with shortening days much longer. Soon they'll be gradually getting longer."
He looked at me quizzically. "What?" he asked. "How do you know?"
I couldn't believe this and asked him, "Well surely you know the shortest day in the year is coming up. Rather soon now. What day is it?"
He had no idea. None. Zip.
Worse, he was losing train of thought. I thought he'd surely want to know. I figured that he'd be a bit embarrassing to not know. No, he was not embarrassed. He did not think this relevant or worthy of his time.
Slouching toward Gomorrah anyone? Or for those who find that too offensive, just substitute the word Abyss.
This student is our future. Said student is nearly 23 years old. Looks all-American type. His grades are okay; he is not worried about graduating. He is clueless about the job market that awaits him, however.
Emily| 11.29.11 @ 7:05PM
Thought experiment. What if the Department of Ed and federal funding disappear and local communities must figure out how to run schools with what is left? Some good things might happen!
irish19| 11.29.11 @ 7:30PM
They might indeed if onerous federal requirements for paperwork and useless subjects also disappeared.
marshcope| 11.29.11 @ 7:11PM
Re the girl who did a paper on a TV fashion show; the teacher could have have told her that if she was interested in Fashion she should research the business and advertising sides of Fashion and modeling, and the clothing business. If nothing else she could learn about Asian clothing factories.
POST American| 11.30.11 @ 1:23AM
---------------Chicken feed DIS-traction---------------
-------------------------ALERT!---------------------------
marshcope| 11.30.11 @ 2:51AM
Ok, Post. What I may have been getting at was imagining that a Superteacher could have led the girl toward looking into the global clothing business, and found out something about the subject, if she was interested in Fashion. Light a fire in a highschooler's brain and get the kid interested in Something out in the world.