XVIII
You know you’re in trouble when the President of the United States asks, “Is our children learning?” But it isn’t just the intellectually challenged who are missing the boat on education. We’ve all got to get real—and get serious—because our ability to compete and prosper as a nation depends on our children being well educated and prepared to live in this complex world.
Year after year, the statistics show the same thing: American students struggle to hold their own, compared to students in other countries—especially in math and science. The latest international rankings in math and science just came out. Who was at the top?
1. 1. South Korea
2. 2. Japan
3. 3. Singapore
Where was the United States? Number eighteen of twenty-four. That’s just plain shameful.
A lot of you may not remember the last time we fell behind in math and science. It was 1957, and that year the Soviet Union (our archenemy in the cold war) launched Sputnik, the first man-made satellite, into space. Americans just went crazy. We couldn’t let that stand. The government began pouring money into math and science education. Twelve years later, we put the first man on the moon.
I believe that most parents care about the quality of their kids’ schools. But too often they’re blind to what’s really going on. They don’t know how to evaluate quality. In a recent Gallup poll, 76 percent of parents said they were satisfied with their children’s schools. A lot of them pointed to the fact that their kids were getting good grades. But what they have to understand is that just because a kid is doing well against his peers in America, doesn’t mean he’s doing well. We’re not getting clobbered by Japan, South Korea, and Singapore in math and science scores because their kids are smart and disciplined and ours are stupid and lazy. They’re clobbering us because their parents and their schools demand more of them. In America our kids attend school 180 days a year. Japanese kids go to school 240 days a year. If we want our kids to catch up, you’d think we’d at least start by sending them to school for as long as the kids in Japan. The three-month summer vacation is a sacred cow. I once wrote a newspaper column calling for the extension of the school year. I got bombarded for that lousy idea—mostly from teachers. One of them even made her class write to the mean old Grinch who wanted to steal their summer vacation. Do you know how it feels to get twenty-eight pieces of mail from nine-year-olds, telling you in big block letters that you’re a dope?
The truth is, I’m not fully convinced that more school days equals quality education. The real key is how you introduce kids to the basics. I’ve always believed that the ten-year span from five to fifteen is the make-or-break time. That’s when the fundamentals have to be instilled. And the people we charge with this priceless task are our schoolteachers.
NO TEACHER LEFT BEHIND?
The prestige of classroom teaching in this country is pretty low. How do I know? Because while we pay lip service to how important teachers are, we don’t do anything tangible to support our words. If this were a company, and teachers were valued employees, what would the company do? It would recruit them aggressively. It would invest in training. It would compensate them well. It would provide ways for them to share their expertise. It would take note of those who really excel. We do none of those things with teachers. And how many parents are encouraging their kids to become teachers? “Are you crazy?,” they say. “Nobody can live on a teacher’s salary.”
We’re really upside down. In a completely rational society, teachers would be at the tip of the pyramid, not near the bottom. In that society, the best of us would aspire to be teachers, and the rest of us would have to settle for something less. The job of passing civilization along from one generation to the next ought to be the highest honor anyone could have.
Too bad we don’t live in that perfect world. Judging by pay and prestige, teaching school ranks pretty close to the bottom of all professions requiring a college education. The average starting salary for new teachers is about 30 percent less than the average starting salary for all other college graduates. How can the teaching profession attract the best and brightest when there’s so little incentive?
Even our President brags about having been a C student. He ran against Al Gore and John Kerry, two extremely well-educated men, and mocked their “fancy, elite” educations. It was a bit disingenuous, since Bush attended Yale and Harvard. But he loves to play the “average” card. Bush was the cool kid who never studied, and he ran on that platform.
He also ran on the No Child Left Behind program, which he proclaimed as his proudest achievement while governor of Texas. Only after Bush managed to push the program through Congress as a federal mandate did we learn that the Texas record was not exactly sterling. An inquiry into the Texas No Child Left Behind program revealed widespread test-rigging and numbers-fudging by educators and administrators. I guess they were thinking that desperate times required desperate measures. And that’s the problem with No Child Left Behind. It promotes desperation. That’s what you get when you set up a rigid formula for judging excellence that is entirely test-based and doesn’t account for the thousands of variables that constitute learning. Oh, and by the way, it would help if the government would fully fund the mandate before it saddled struggling school districts across the country with the burden.
LET’S GET BACK TO BASICS
Too many teachers start out dedicated to this noblest of professions and wind up selling real estate or becoming computer programmers by their mid-thirties because they’re burned out, or disillusioned, or need more money, or are just plain tired of being at the bottom of the pyramid.
Looking back, I have to wonder what happened. I remember the great teachers I had as a kid. Everyone in town looked up to them, not just the kids. There were a few of them who had more influence on my life than anybody else outside my own family.
It wasn’t that long ago, but you’ve got to admit that if I still remember individual teachers, they must have really been something. When I was in the ninth grade, I had a teacher named Miss Marian Raber. She’s memorable because she taught me to communicate in writing. That lesson in organizing my thoughts and presenting my ideas cogently has been of lasting value.
Maybe the problem today is that teachers don’t have time for the basics because they’re too busy being cops and social workers and surrogate parents and drug counselors and psychiatrists. As if being a teacher weren’t hard enough!
Teachers today have a brand-new problem to worry about—getting shot in the classroom. As I write this, I’m looking at three school shootings just in the last week—even though most schools have metal detectors.
I think maybe a little tough love is in order—and a lot of people are going to scream, but hear me out. Why don’t we say that every kid has a right to go to school in this country—until the first time he shows up with a gun, a switchblade, or a little white bag of coke. Then we write him off. Send him packing. Think of it as a form of educational triage.
Here’s the way I see it. There are some kids who will make it no matter what you do or don’t do. Then, there’s the large majority who need a lot of help to make it. And finally, there are some who just can’t be helped, and who suck up all of the resources and attention like a black hole.
While I’m at it, here’s another idea that will have people up in arms. Let’s learn the value of failure. The word flunk isn’t even in the vocabulary of our schools anymore. At some point all the childhood development experts and psychologists got together and said it was emotionally damaging to tell a kid he’d failed. Their motto: “No child left behind, even if he can’t read!”
There’s a word for that in my book. It’s called malpractice. I think a teacher who passes a student who can’t do the work is no different than a surgeon who sews you up with a sponge still inside. Kids can handle flunking the fifth grade. The real killer is notflunking and finding out ten years down the road that they don’t have the basic skills to earn a living.
Maybe those experts could use a lesson from General George Patton, who said, “I don’t measure a man’s success by how high he climbs but by how high he bounces when he hits bottom.”
Our high school dropout rate is a tragedy. But an even bigger tragedy is the number of high school graduates who can barely read their diplomas. (I’ve got to confess that I couldn’t read my diploma, either. But mine was written in Latin.)
These kids will find themselves competing with high school graduates overseas who can read their diplomas—some even in Latin, or any one of four or five different languages. And that’s the bottom line: the ability to compete. Let’s not cheat our children and our nation out of that.
LEARNING BY READING
I can’t leave this subject without making a pitch for reading. Since you’re reading this, I want to thank you for buying my book. If you borrowed it from the library, don’t forget to return it. I hope you learn a little bit, and maybe crack a smile every few pages. But even if you weren’t reading my book, it would be fine with me—as long as you’re reading something.
A word to parents: The biggest favor you can do for your kids is to have plenty of books around the house. Read to them, read around them, be a family that reads. (And if you’re not such a good reader yourself, it’s never too late to learn.)
Show me a kid who loves to read—I don’t care if it’s a comic book, a science fiction novel, or a book about the history of dinosaurs—and I’ll show you a kid who’s going to do well in life. My parents weren’t highly educated people. Pop made it through the fourth grade, and Mom through the third grade. But in our household, my sister and I were encouraged to read. I was voracious, and I could be a bit of a show-off with my newfound knowledge. I remember a day in the third grade when we were studying the Greeks, and our teacher asked if anyone knew the name of Ulysses’ dog. My hand shot up. For some reason I knew the answer, and I won the admiration of my teacher and the other kids—at least for that day.
I especially loved vocabulary. I got a kick out of words. I still do. I’m always looking for the best word to describe my thoughts. That’s why I went through about twenty drafts to write this book. I drove everyone crazy.
The idea of writing a book never occurred to me until I was sixty years old. But once it took hold, I realized that a lifetime of reading had taught me how to form a coherent thought and tell a story and speak my mind on the page. Reading and writing are still my favorite pastimes. Oh, and I like to talk, too.