May 9, 2007
Blaming teachers for America's education woes
Listen to this commentary:
NPR’s On Point program recently examined the issues of teacher certification, evaluation, and tenure. This segment raised some of the questions that we have been hearing a lot recently in the media: How can we improve public schools? Do we need to expect more of our teachers? Do we need more stringent standards (i.e. standardized tests) for evaluating the performance of our public schools?
As is almost always the case with On Point, time was given to all sides of the debate. The program was not intended as a forum for heaping abuse on teachers and school administrators, nor did it become that. However, the premise of the program troubled me a bit.
There is a general consensus that we need to raise our educational standards (especially in math and science) in order to compete in the global economy. While America’s lagging K-12 educational performance has been a source of hand-wringing for years, the issue is more urgent today than it was in the past. Like it or not, we are now truly in the “global” economy. American workers are competing with Chinese, Indian, and South Korean workers for jobs. Most of the foreign competition works for lower wages. If they also have better math and science skills, then it doesn’t take a college degree (no pun intended) to predict that we will lose our competitiveness over the long haul.
But the discussion often goes awry when we start probing for the causes behind the status quo. Who bears responsibility for the current deficiencies in the educational attainments of American youth? The most common answers are: teachers and the public school system. Standardized test after standardized test reveals that Johnny and Sally can’t work algebra problems as competently as kids in Taiwan and South Korea. Most of us (especially the parents of Johnny and Sally) don’t hesitate in assigning blame: American teachers aren’t as competent as teachers overseas. This must be the answer. It has to be.
With all due respect to the educators in the room, the K-12 curriculum isn’t exactly rocket science. Nor is teaching it an arcane art that is somehow akin to atom-splitting or solving the conflicts in the Middle East. It is doubtful that teachers in Taiwan and South Korea possess secret teaching techniques that magically transform kids into science whizzes and mathematics virtuosos.
Rather than focusing on teachers, perhaps we should look closer to home. The difference might just lie with the kids themselves----and their parents.
A number of years ago I fell into a discussion with one of my Taiwanese colleagues about the relative priorities of high school students in Taiwan and the United States. When I described the overweening emphasis on sports in American high schools, he was astounded. Ambitious sixteen year-olds in Taiwan spend a lot more time thinking about their math scores than they do about football or cheerleading, my colleague said. Why, he asked me, do American kids spend so much time and energy worrying about school sports, when so few of them end up with athletic scholarships, and even fewer end up going on to the pros? I didn’t have a good answer.
The aforementioned NPR segment gave another peak at youthful priorities. During the call-in portion of the show, a high school student called in to air her views about the state of American education. The show’s host asked why she wasn’t in school. She blithely answered that she had skipped classes for the day because she was “picking out a prom dress.”
I don’t mean to single out the current generation of young people for criticism. I was a high school student myself a little more than twenty years ago. Priorities weren’t much different in my day: Only the eggheads fretted over their math scores. The cool kids focused on sports, music, social activities, and the like.
There is a lot more to the story. Americans have always been known for their creativity, entrepreneurial spirit, and individualism---not their lockstep dedication to formal education. The much maligned Vice President Dan Quayle summed up the American attitude during the 1988 election season. When queried by reporters about his poor undergraduate grades, Quayle said, “I have never claimed to be anything other than an average student. But the question is not, what kind of a student are you---the question is: what are you going to do with your life?”
Quayle was of course guilty of a number of logical errors. “Doing something with your life” often requires doing well in school. But American history is all too full of stories about the dropout entrepreneur who becomes a millionaire. And our popular culture glorifies musicians and athletes a lot more than it does scientists and mathematicians. Kids intercept these broad cultural messages, and they act accordingly.
If the global economy now demands that we Americans reshuffle our priorities, then let’s reshuffle them. Let’s not, however, blame teachers because American kids don’t study like Taiwanese kids. No amount of teaching can improve test scores until students and parents change their priorities. That is going to mean more time cracking the books---and a lot less time for the television, the i-Pod, and other frivolities that have long been the preoccupations of American youth.