For about 30 years, American public education has been seen as ‘failing’. To combat the low performance of so many of our public schools, efforts of reform have been mounted, though usually only at the local level. There is disagreement about how well these reforms have worked, though some have clearly performed quite well, and deserve wider implementation.
Public schools are, by and large, still administered by and are answerable to state and local communities and governments; for this reason school reform has been piecemeal. A thorough re-doing of the public school system has not been attempted on the national level. The ‘No Child Left Behind’ Act has many mandates that local systems are obliged to obey – these have apparently forced schools to use more instructional time on standardized test readiness, and have (more happily) required that teachers be licensed in their subject area. Some schools have even been forced to close or reorganize for failing to meet the performance criteria set forth by the NCLB Act.
However, in this country, no national effort has been undertaken to change the basic character of our schools. Though some reform efforts have (to their immense credit), been directed at demanding higher performance from students, often in poor rural and inner-city school districts, the average school is still not extremely demanding of students academically.
Some very influential thinkers have become impatient with the pace of school reform, and with the general condition of our schools. I agree that there are, in certain cases, vested interests that may be overly wary of changing schools too radically, and that these interests sometimes interfere with school improvements. I also believe that teachers, for example, should have a high level of general education (higher than is generally the case now), and should also be exposed to a more practical, common-sense training program than is offered in most college and university education departments. But there is often a striking omission in the ongoing (the less charitable person might term it ‘unending’) debate on education reform. I am referring to the low demands placed on the students themselves in the majority of American public schools. We are unwilling to make students work harder, and at a higher level. We condemn low student performance generally (we profess to be aghast at our middling to low ranking in student performance vis a vis other nations), but seem to have a failure of nerve when it comes to making school curricula more challenging.
I agree that some of the resistance comes from our national unwillingness to invest properly in public education. Take science education as an example. Teacher salaries are too low to attract candidates with backgrounds in engineering, chemistry, physics, biology, and so forth; they can find more lucrative (and higher-status) employment in other fields. And what if we were to increase the number of periods of science by two a week on the national level? We would have to hire teachers, purchase equipment, and build or renovate classrooms. The money to these things would not be forthcoming.
However, a good deal of the resistance is also cultural. As a twenty-year educator, I can say with assurance that some aspects of learning that are inherently difficult or dull (however necessary), have, over time, been minimized or taken out of school curricula altogether. Ancient languages are no longer studied, except in elite institutions. Literature selections have become more ‘readable’ – i.e., easier. Poetry memorization is seen as anachronistic. Personal essays are in; research papers are out. Mathematics is more ‘engaging’ perhaps, than it used to be, but I have found that since students do not master multiplication tables and other basic computational skills, the ‘engaging’ qualities of today’s math lessons are lost on many of them.
The notion that children are fragile, that they may be permanently harmed by pushing them too hard, has become a guiding principle both among some parents as well as with educators. This school of thought, now a couple of generations into being, is, I believe, cowardly at its root; it shows a misunderstanding of the basic nature of children. We take the inner feelings of children more seriously than children themselves naturally would wish us to do; and we show a misplaced solicitude by protecting them from failure and other kinds of consequences, both in and out of school.
