Ch 3.9 | 📚Our education system is failing us
Education inequality
In many ways, educational inequality is a product of many political challenges. Educational inequality, student loan debt and the need for education to keep pace with a rapidly changing job market lead to challenges resolving income inequality. These problems are complex and require substantial funding and policy reforms.
This is yet another complex and divisive subject. I desperately want to believe that we are all aligned in our desire to ensure that the United States has the best public education system in the world. In fact, it has been on a downward slide in recent years.
Why that’s happening and what we can do about it are important issues we should explore.
We know that money alone won’t do the trick. America is one of several nations that have substantially increased public school spending over decades without seeing gains for the children of low-income parents. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, total expenditures for public elementary and secondary schools in the United States were $857.3 billion in FY 2022r: per pupil, 38% more than the OECD member average, double the real dollars we spent in 1980, and four times the real dollars per pupil in 1950.
Here is the question that plagues me: Is it possible that the poor quality of public education in our country is intentional? Has the government reaped what it sowed? Is it possible that it’s not political infighting, budgets or even debates over how to best educate our population that have caused our education system to perform so badly?
Of course, there is evidence that it is partly due to a “brain drain” that led high achieving women to leave the teaching profession in search of higher paying jobs as new sectors opened up in the 1960s. But if education was important to the government, why wouldn’t we have ensured that salaries kept up with the market to attract the best talent? Is it conceivable that the government is actually getting what it’s paying for? Could it be intentional? At some level, logic should dictate that if what is being turned out in our school system was not in alignment with what the state and federal governments wanted, wouldn’t they change it? Could it be that the governments are getting what they have ordered because they do not want our children to be educated, they do not want us to think too much?
For example, when I was in public school in the ’70s and early ’80s there was an acknowledgement that not everyone had the capacity to attend college. So we had vocational training to ensure that everyone graduating from high school would have a skill whether that was farming, metal shop, auto shop or even home economics. Today, those programs have been phased out despite the diverse opportunities they afford students with or without college. “Vocational education” is a broad term often used to describe any number of fields and programs, ranging from agriculture, marketing, health, and occupational home economics, to trade, industry, technology, and communications. Many of these professions generally do not require college, and in fact, historically, they were never intended to.
Public education: A history lesson
The 1917 Smith-Hughes Act, the law that first supported federal funding for vocational education in American schools, quite specifically described “vocational education” as preparation for careers not requiring a bachelor’s degree. Over time, however, a stigma we know all too well developed around these programs, where “vocational education” meant “not good enough.” But when was the last time we reassessed this line of thinking? Because in our current economy, the data suggests we’re very, very wrong in making such hasty assumptions.
In 2001, Congress passed the No Child Left Behind Act. That law required states, in exchange for federal education funding, to test their students every year and to ensure that all students would eventually be proficient in math and reading. Yet, millions of American children get to fourth grade without learning to read proficiently, and that puts them on the high school dropout track. The ability to read by third grade is critical to a child’s success in school, life-long earning potential and their ability to contribute to the nation’s economy and its security. Children can succeed at advancing to a third grade reading level if policymakers focus on school readiness, school attendance, summer learning, family support and high-quality teaching. To put an even finer point on the subject, studies show that 75 percent of U.S. prisoners are illiterate, and two-thirds of students who cannot read proficiently by the end of the fourth grade will end up in jail or on welfare.
Think about this: We are spending four times as much real money on schooling as we did 60 years ago, but 60 years ago virtually everyone, Black or white, could read and write.
Before 1852 American education consisted of one-room school houses, independent teachers and students of all ages attending of their own free will. Curriculums and funding came directly from local communities without a federalized bureaucracy ruling over every facet like today. From 1852-1918 things changed as the government began pushing to enforce compulsory schooling laws all across America. These were coupled with new child labor laws in an effort to take children off the farms from under their family’s tutelage and force them into indoctrination camps under the government’s tutelage.
Between 1896 and 1920 a small number of powerful industrialists such as Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller, together with their private foundations, spent more money on mass forced schooling than the government did. If you want to know their motives, you need only read the first public mission statement of Rockefeller’s General Education Board, printed in 1913:
In our dreams, people yield themselves with perfect docility to our molding hands. The present education conventions of intellectual and character education fade from their minds and unhampered by tradition we work our own good will upon a grateful and responsive folk. We shall not try to make these people or any of their children into men of learning or philosophers, or men of science. We have not to raise up from them authors, educators, poets or men of letters, great artists, painters, musicians, nor lawyers, doctors, statesmen, politicians, creatures of whom we have ample supply. The task is simple. We will organize children and teach them in a perfect way the things their fathers and mothers are doing in an imperfect way.
The real purpose of modern schooling was announced by Edward Ross of the University of Wisconsin in the same year that was written. Ross is generally considered one of the three founders of the 20th century discipline called sociology and in a book bluntly called “Social Control,” he wrote:
“Plans are underway to replace community, family, and church with propaganda, education, and mass media. ... People are only little plastic lumps of human dough.”
Another insider, H. H. Cadard, chairman for the Psychology Department at Princeton back then, called government schooling, approvingly,
the perfect organization of the hive with the anthill.
Cadard wrote further,
standardized testing would cause the lower classes to confront their biological inferiority, sort of like wearing a dunce cap. In time that would discourage reproduction of the ants on the anthill.
Here we are 100 years later and the results are in line with Cadard's assessment. Today, there are 7.9 million low-income children under 8 years old in the United States. If current trends hold true, 83%, or 6.6 million of these children, are at increased risk of dropping out of high school because they can't read proficiently by the end of third grade. And once they drop out, the statistics get very bleak: Almost 85 percent of teenagers in the juvenile justice system are functionally illiterate; seven out of 10 adult prisoners can’t read above a fourth grade level; and dropouts make up 90 percent of Americans on welfare and 75 percent of food stamp recipients. The evidence is overwhelming. Illiteracy damages lives. And the window of opportunity to do something about it closes quickly. This is not good for America.
I once asked a high school principal why we didn’t change early education in America. Replace the current annual advancement from kindergarten through second grade with a system where no child can advance to what is currently thought of as third grade until they are able to read. I was told that too many parents objected. They didn’t want their kids stigmatized by being “left behind.” This seems like an outlandish construct. Why should we continue to advance students who can’t read? The outcomes are known and obvious. The only thing I can conclude is that it is intentional.
I welcome any and all thoughts in the comments section on this very important subject!
The track record of federal higher education policy is pathetic. Just consider the fact that post-secondary education in America is hostile to free expression and open academic inquiry, and has undermined American exceptionalism.
To quote the Heritage Foundation:
Our education system needs to be rebalanced to focus far more on bolstering the workforce skills of Americans who have no interest in pursuing a four-year academic degree. It should reflect a fuller picture of learning after high school, placing apprenticeship programs of all types and career and technical education on an even playing field with degrees from colleges and universities. Rather than continuing to buttress a higher education establishment captured by woke “diversicrats” and a de facto monopoly enforced by the federal accreditation cartel, federal postsecondary education policy should prepare students for jobs in the dynamic economy, nurture institutional diversity, and expose schools to greater market forces.
Can we bring back civics education?
If we expect to preserve American democracy and the American identity, we need to bring civics back to our education system.
Over the past 50 years, civics and U.S. history education in American schools has dwindled, eroding public trust in government and neglecting traditional civics teaching. Resources have favored math, science, and test preparation, while social studies, including civics, has been devalued and instruction quality declined. Partisan politics further deters schools from addressing civics education effectively. It's time to revive civics in our schools.
One result of the disappearance of civics is Americans’ notorious ignorance about our system of government. According to a 2017 survey, just one in four Americans can name all three branches; a third can’t name any; 37 percent can’t name a single right protected by the First Amendment.
In "Educating For American Democracy", the authors warn:
In recent decades, we as a nation have failed to prepare young Americans for self-government, leaving the world’s oldest constitutional democracy in grave danger, afflicted by both cynicism and nostalgia, as it approaches its 250th anniversary. The time has come to recommit to the education of our young people for informed, authentic and engaged citizenship. Our civic strength requires excellent civic and history education to repair the foundations of our democratic republic. Not only social studies but all academic disciplines, co-curricular activities, and many organizations outside schools play important roles in educating young people for constitutional democracy and therefore contribute to historical and civic education, broadly conceived. All hands are needed at this challenging time to build a new foundation for excellence in civic and history education.
In his book, “Bill of Obligations, the Ten Habits of Good Citizens,” Richard Haass, president of the nonpartisan Council on Foreign Relations, writes:
One major reason that American identity is fracturing is that we are failing to teach one another what it means to be American. We are not tied together by a single religion, race, or ethnicity. Instead, America is organized around a set of ideas that needs to be articulated again and again to survive. It is thus essential that every American gets a grounding in civics—the country’s political structures and traditions, along with what is owed to and expected of its citizens—starting in elementary school and continuing through college. It should be reinforced within families and communities. It should be emphasized by our political and religious leaders, by CEOs and journalists.
He continues:
Only eight states and the District of Columbia require a full year of high-school civics education. One state (Hawaii) requires a year and a half, 31 require half a year, and 10 require little or none.
At the college level, the situation is arguably worse. According to a 2015 study of more than 1,000 colleges and universities, less than a fifth require any civics coursework. As Ronald Daniels, the president of Johns Hopkins University, has written, “Our curricula have abdicated responsibility for teaching the habits of democracy.”
It should come as no surprise, then, that Americans know little about the history, ideals and practices of their own political system.
In 2021, The Atlantic published an article by George Packer titled, "Can Civics Save America?" In it, he points out:
Civic education sounds dull, dutiful, and antiquated, like paper drives or the Presidential Physical Fitness Test—but today it bears all the passion and distemper of our fraught politics. Last year, the Republican pollster Frank Luntz found that a majority of Americans of both parties rank civics as their top choice for how to “strengthen the American identity,” ahead of national service (preferred by Democrats) and religious activity (favored by Republicans). Civics, if left undefined, is the one solution for polarization that both sides support.
It’s also the most bitterly contested subject in education today. Civics is at the heart of the struggle to define the meaning of the American idea.
Unfortunately, once again, the lack of common sense leadership is undermining our ability to make progress on this important initiative. As Packer points out:
Unlike Educating for American Democracy, the Biden administration’s rule, like its conservative critics, imposes a fixed view of civics and U.S. history in place of inquiry, debate, and disagreement. By intent or blunder, the left and right are colluding to undermine the noble, elusive goal of giving American children the ability to think and argue and act together as citizens.