Breaking the cycle of poverty … education

The quickest way to become more financially self-sufficient is to get a job that pays well.

Education plays a big part.  Right now, we’re not doing very well at that, especially in our cities, where unemployment and poverty are highly concentrated. 

Now a big reason for unemployment and poverty in our cities is lack of jobs, period.  Employers have been chased out by high taxes, ridiculous regulations, city corruption, union rules, and an increasingly unskilled and undereducated pool of workers.    

The public school systems in those cities are at the heart of many of those issues.  First, because they suck enormous sums out of city budgets, which puts more pressure on the remaining tax base; second, because they are failing to educate their students properly, leading to a poorly trained workforce; and third, because it’s hard to convince potential employees with children to take jobs where they will have to put up with bad schools. 

It would seem that improving the public school system would yield positive economic benefits. 

But defining the situation that way is part of the problem.  Politicians think in terms of the “public school system” – which to them means facilities, equipment, administrators, teachers’ salaries and work conditions.  So they think in terms of more funding to build better facilities, add more administrators and teachers, increase everybody’s pay, and dump more money into school budgets.

Left out of all this are students and the quality of education they’re actually getting. 

Most city schools in particular and many public schools nationally aren’t doing a very good job of educating students.  Some colleges and universities now have to provide remedial reading courses to incoming freshmen to make up for what their high schools failed to do.  Our students generally lag the world in math and science.  Some students who might once have been classified as functionally illiterate are allowed to graduate from our high schools.  

You can blame social promotion run amuck or the desire of teachers to avoid hurting students’ feelings or incurring the wrath of parents, but the result is the same.  And it’s not just limited to city public schools; the same dumbing down process is taking place all over the country. 

Honestly, we’re becoming a pretty dumb nation.  Nobody wants to acknowledge that.  

Yes, computers and the Internet now make it possible to learn anything about everything, yet both have also fostered an intellectually lazy class of kids increasingly dependent on them for even the simplest tasks.  There’s no reason to learn – or for that matter teach – how to arrive at an answer when you can push a few keys and the answer appears.  There’s no reason to learn or teach spelling or grammar when software will catch your errors.  Why do your own research for a report when someone has probably already published it online? 

As such, many of today’s students don’t have fundamental skills like simple arithmetic, reading, writing, and critical thinking when – and if – they graduate from high school.

It’s not for lack of aptitude that they’re undereducated.   They are plenty smart; just not well educated.  And that’s because we’re too content with the status quo.   

One reason we accept mediocrity in education is because to demand achievement is to appear heartless and cruel to the less fortunate or “intellectually gifted” among us.  So we continually lower the bar for what is an acceptable education, instead of pushing for better.  Why?  We do it primarily to boost the self-esteem -- and political loyalty -- of key constituencies politicians and special interest groups favor: those they feel need extra support and assistance to compete on the mythical “level playing field.”       

And also to take the heat off of teachers and administrators in areas that continue to underperform.  

But has any specific group proven to be less capable of learning than others?  Are urban kids inherently dumber than suburban kids?  Are black kids genetically unable to reach the same levels of knowledge as other groups?  Does someone’s household income determine their IQ?

I don’t think so. 

So I have no patience with those who automatically cast groups into lower educational expectations just because of their economic status, their location, their race, or their ethnicity.  It may make it easier for some to justify poor or indifferent performance, and to create new classes of “victims” who need special assistance, but it’s nonsense at best and more likely a not-so-subtle form of paternalistic elitism.     

If we truly want everyone in America to have the equal opportunity to succeed, then everyone needs to have an equal education.  To determine if they have, we must employ national standardized testing. 

We also need to reduce the power of local and state school boards in determining curricula and set a national curriculum for all schools – a curriculum that would guarantee that all students nationwide at least cover the same basic subjects using the same basic texts.

That doesn’t mean there can’t be local nuances, like teaching state history, but the core subjects of math, English, and science need to be taught the same nationwide, using the same lesson plans, as a rigidly enforced baseline.  And then have the results measured the same.     

The long term goal should be to remove the institutional differences in what’s being taught – and how – in our public schools. We need to make certain that a kid who earns a diploma from Camden High has at least the same basic knowledge and literacy as a kid who graduates from Coral Gables High.  

And the only way you can insure that is by applying equal standards, measuring success objectively, and setting hard and fast milestones that students and teachers need to pass. 

It also means stopping the pattern of feeding false hopes and expectations. 

It starts with grading.  Grades in many elementary, middle and high schools today are meaningless.  That’s because too many teachers give out “A” s like M&Ms – which is why graduating “with Honors”  doesn’t mean what it once did.   

Inflated grades may make parents beam but they do a real disservice to the kids who get them.  When those kids graduate and are confronted with how little they really know, it will be devastating; far worse than had they been told the truth years before, when there was still time to correct their weaknesses.     

When I was a kid in New Jersey, we had the “Iowa Tests” near the end of certain school years.  In Florida, we had the Florida Senior Placement Test near the end of your senior year.  Both objectively scored you on how well you tested in math, language and other areas.  The Iowa Tests went a step further and showed how you ranked against their multi-state averages. 

As I recall, no one was outraged that their little darlings had to endure these tests.  No one I know ever protested the way the tests were structured, the questions used, or the ultimate results. 

Consequently, I can’t understand why everybody gets their panties in a knot when something like nationwide standardized testing is proposed today.  There are statewide tests already; this would just be expanding the scope to take in the whole country.  Yet any movement toward a national standardized test process to measure student and teacher performance is fiercely opposed by teachers, unions, and even parents in many areas, as was the case with the ill-fated No Child Left Behind program. 

So you have to wonder why.   And I think we all know the reason. 

They’re afraid to face the reality national tests might reveal.

In terms of the fundamentals, too many high school graduates can’t read or write very well.  Without a calculator or computer many more lack basic math skills; we’re not talking factoring for square roots here – just the basics.  Like, say, determining whether 20% off the original price is a better deal than $15 off with a coupon.  You know, stuff they’ll encounter every day.          

While parents might be stunned, employers know this already.  And have for years.   

A couple of years ago I had to show a recent Boston University graduate – an honors grad in high school – how to determine what 15% of something was.  She honestly did not know that 15% was the result of multiplying by .15 because she didn't understand the basic concept of "percent."

Then there are the poorly written and sometimes unfathomable cover letters and e-mails I get from recent college grads looking for a job.  I feel embarrassed for many of them.  

These aren’t isolated instances.   Just ask employers.  We’ve all had similar experiences.

What can we do to fix this? 

First, we have to pull off the blinders and see where we really are.  As a nation, we have to embrace periodic, standardized testing over the objections of the teachers, teachers’ unions, and parents. 

The tests have to be truly standardized – the same test for everyone – on math, English, and science for starters.  After all, if an inner city, suburban, or rural black, white, Hispanic or Asian kid graduates from high school they’ll be competing for a job – or a slot in college – against kids from other races and backgrounds, not just the same type of people they went to high school with. 

The first time out will be rough.  The tests themselves will be attacked as unfair, insensitive to cultural differences and not a real measure of what students know or how well teachers are performing. 

That’s all bullshit.  It’s also self-serving rationalization; something we’ve had quite enough of.

There are plenty of committed students who want a good education.  There are excellent, competent teachers prepared to deliver that to them in every state and city in the country.   Many parents go above and beyond to push their kids to learn and succeed. 

So this isn’t about them.  It’s about the others. 

The ones who will whine the most will be those who have something to hide. 

Administrators and teachers already know if their students are getting a good education.  They also know who has been cooking the books all along to make some school averages better than they really are.  Or those simply “teaching to the test” to prep students on the same questions they’ll face, without explaining the underlying concepts.  (Or worse yet, correcting answers for students while they are taking their tests—which has been documented.)

They also know who the good teachers are, who is really doing their job, and whose students are performing the best as a result.   At the same time, they know which teachers suck at their job, do the absolute minimum, and should be fired before they do any more damage. 

They aren’t stupid.  Those who are confident about what they’re doing and are playing by the rules won’t like the tests, but they’ll accept them.  Those who fear the probability of a bad outcome will fight them tooth and nail.  And of course the teachers’ unions will do whatever they can to water down the tests, and the ramifications of the results.

The simple truth is this: nobody really knows what today’s students and teachers are doing, or how well anything is working.  Nobody knows if the billions spent on public education are making any difference.  Nobody knows if kids today are getting the education we all think they should.    

That’s why we need nationwide standardized testing to see where we all stand.  The reality is that unless you know where you are, you can’t begin to address what needs to happen.

And if you don’t set a bar in the first place, how do you know? 

If we’re serious about giving people an equal opportunity to succeed and lift themselves out of a perpetual low-income situation, we have to provide everyone with access to the same quality standard education regardless of race, ethnicity, income, or location.

We shouldn’t let anyone stand in the way of that goal.