Let me get this out of the way right up front: I am not qualified to give you an authoritative opinion on any aspect of education. I’ve received absolutely no training either theoretical or practical, and apart from being the recipient of an education, I’ve got no experience in this area at all.
But that’s not gonna stop me from mouthing off.
There’s been a lot of talk about education lately. Most of this talk seems to have come from some of the Democrat candidates for President, since the Republican candidates all seem to want to focus on how evil Mexicans are. Nevertheless, it’s been a topic of public debate.
I’m a big believer in education. I’m a huge believer in education. If you showed me a list of public policy areas and asked me to rank them in order of importance, education would be number one and everything else would be tied for eighth. Except for a couple of obviously stupid and trumped-up topics, like government waste and border security. Ugh.
Anyway, what I’m saying here is that education is important to me. I believe it’s the silver bullet, as the cliché goes. All of our social problems, from poverty to drug use to crime to public health, are closely correlated to education. As a rule of thumb, the better your education when you’re a kid, and the more educational opportunities you have growing up, the more likely you are to become a productive, healthy, safe adult.
Every time some politician stands up and talks about some social issue that’s crawled under his skin — abortion, gun control, whatever — I ask myself why he isn’t talking about education. Because while, depending on the problem, education might not be the sole answer, it’s practically always a part of the answer.
That said, much of the focus these days seems to be on what they call early childhood education. If you, like me, were born before about 1980, you might not even know exactly what early childhood education is. Unless you’re a parent, in which case I’m sure you know far more about it than I ever will, and I fully expect my readers with kids to climb out of the woodwork and leave corrections at the bottom to every little thing I get wrong here. Welcome to the party, friends; please throw only spoiled fruit, because the ripe stuff can leave one hell of a bruise.
Early childhood education is, broadly speaking, the sum total of all the education a kid gets between birth and age six. When I was little, that meant kindergarten between the ages of five and six and, to a lesser extent, half-day daycare for a year or so before that. While there was plenty of actual educating going on during kindergarten, everything that came before that was your stereotypical I-wanna-play-with-the-fire-truck stuff. Unstructured supervised play with other kids.
But during the eighties, preschool became more popular, particularly among suburban middle-class families who generally tend to send their kids to public schools rather than private schools. Preschool isn’t mandated by law and it’s usually not available for free, but depending on where you live it might be open to kids as young as three.
Around the time I was starting high school, the concepts of preschool education and the Head Start program started to blur a little bit. Head Start, if you don’t know, is a forty-year-old federal initiative that tries to provide assistance to very young kids in low-income households. Rather than being a single program, Head Start is a sort of umbrella name for a number of assistance measures, ranging from preschool programs to early English instruction for children of first-generation immigrants all the way down to prenatal care for mothers living in poverty.
The idea behind Head Start was that young kids from certain demographic groups — families below the poverty line, immigrant families, foster families and so on — were consistently underperforming in school compared to other kids. To change that, so the thinking went, we’ll give these kids a “head start” so they’ll be more likely to get the most out of their public educations. Thus, as part of his Great Society social agenda, President Johnson authorized the federal Head Start program.
But the devil, as always, is in the details. Head Start has been the subject of brutal and unrelenting criticism over the past four decades. Some studies claim that the program is entirely, one-hundred-percent ineffectual. Others say that while the kids who come out of Head Start do test better than kids from the same at-risk groups who didn’t participate, those differences are entirely wiped out by the end of second grade as the kids who attend above-average public schools test better than the kids who attend below-average public schools across the board, with no strong correlation to Head Start participation.
The other issue, of course, is that Head Start is stigmatizing. How kids interact with their peers has a huge effect on what they get out of public education, and kids who receive public assistance are consistently teased by their peers for it. The much-maligned School Breakfast Program — also part of the Great Society — faces the same challenge. Educators and administrators have tried for forty years to treat disadvantaged kids differently without looking like they’re treating disadvantaged kids differently, and they still haven’t quite figured it out.
But let’s get back to the point here: Head Start, despite taking a ton of criticism, has remained open for business for the past forty years in large part because some evidence indicates that it’s working. While differences in test scores between Head Start participants and non-participants are virtually erased by the end of second grade, studies show that Head Start kids are statistically much more likely to finish high school than their non-Head Start siblings. So one test says the program doesn’t do anything, while the other test says it helps.
What does this mean? It means our test sucks.
In the postwar era, government tried as hard as possible to run its programs like they were science experiments. You measure things, then you make a change, then you measure things again in order to see what happened. That’s fine if you’re trying to determine the effect of a stove on a pot of water; thermometers are plentiful. But when you’re trying to measure something like how are kids are doing, a question that’s not even well defined, the problem becomes more difficult. How are we supposed to know how our kids are doing? Measure one way, you get one answer; measure the same kids another way, you get a conflicting answer. What’s the truth?
That’s why I’m skeptical of the push to expand early childhood education. It’s a noble sentiment, but does it make practical sense? It seems to me that before we rush great guns into expanding a federal program that nobody’s quite sure is working, we should maybe spend a little time trying to define our goals and figure out ways to take useful measurements.
We need to invent a thermometer for education.
Which, of course, brings us to No Child Left Behind. This program, which passed with overwhelming support in 2001, has taken nothing but crap ever since. The most frequently raised criticism is that because No Child Left Behind established a system of standardized tests, teachers were given an incentive to warp their curricula in order to teach just what’s on the test in order to maximize test scores.
That’s a legitimate critique. But the problem is that we don’t know how else to measure our public education system. Oh sure, we could hire six million observers and send them out to poke their noses into classrooms and literally watch the teacher teach, but how do you get actionable data out of that? We need to improve public education, which means we need to measure public education, and the only way anybody’s ever come up with for doing that is through giving the students tests.
Now, admittedly there are a lot of other criticisms of No Child Left Behind. People could write entire books criticizing the initiative — and they have. But the question of just how we’re supposed to evaluate public education as a whole is bigger than just this one program. It’s the single largest challenge we face, the deepest moat we have to cross before we can make our schools better.
So early childhood education: fine. Helping disadvantaged kids: fine. But given the state of public education across the country right now, practically all kids are disadvantaged. Practically all kids need help. And I don’t just mean three-year-olds need help identifying their shapes and colors. High-school kids need help too. They need help developing a sense of lifelong curiosity about the world, a sense of open-mindedness and the desire to understand how big, complex things like jet engines and the economy and the public education system work. It’s not enough to fill their heads with facts so they can score well on a test; we have to inspire them and fill them with hope and ambition and a stubborn insistence on thinking for themselves.
How the heck are you supposed to measure that? Is there a test we can give to help evaluate a kid’s ambition? Is there a test for hope?
And most importantly of all, does early childhood education make young adults more thoughtful, more curious, more humble and more ravenous? Or does it just make us all feel better to think that we’re sending a nation of six-year-olds off to the first grade on a level playing field, so they all have an equal shot at spending the next twelve years memorizing and repeating facts and developing minds that have more in common with tape recorders than they do with human beings?
I’m skeptical. Education should be our hands-down, no-arguments, permanent top priority, but I’m not sure these approaches are worth the effort we’re putting into them.
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The idea, I think, is that the reason disadvantaged children don’t do as well in school is because children of parents who have well-paying jobs and some education of their own are more likely to live in what early childhood/elementary educators call an “enriched environment.” That’s a fancy term for having parents with enough leisure time and energy left at the end of the day to play with you, read to you, and just generally spend time stimulating your little mind because they aren’t working three jobs. If disadvantaged families can’t provide that kind of stimulation due to socioeconomic factors, the reasoning goes, let’s provide it for them.
And as you note, it works… for a couple of years. The problem with Head Start is that once its over, you’re still dealing with a kid that takes his homework home to a house where there might only be one parent working three jobs to make ends meet, and who doesn’t have the time or energy to hold up the parental end of the educational efforts, and the kids who didn’t need Head Start are going home to the same parents who read to them, play with them, and talk to them.
One could argue that Head Start correlates with higher rates of high school graduation because they’re the ones with the parents who could scrape up enough time and energy to GET them to Head Start in the first place, making them the ones more likely to keep after the kid to stay in school, even if the kid isn’t testing all that well.
So I suspect that the study showing that test scores even out by second grade is the more accurate measure of the effectiveness of Head Start, and the study showing graduation rates is really measuring the correlation between going to Head Start and having parents that are able to engage more effectively in their children’s education, despite their socioeconomic disadvantages.
Tiff
Friday, December 14th, 2007, 10:43 am
What do you tink about school choice?
Personally I think that letting parents choose their kids’ school can only improve things. The only real danger I see is that over time government is going to demand more and more control over the private schools that end up receiving the payments for students (much as colleges do now).
Not a perfect plan, but better than anything the DOE will come up with.
Stephen R
Friday, December 14th, 2007, 10:53 am
Tiff — excellent point!
Stephen R
Friday, December 14th, 2007, 10:55 am
Honestly, Stephen, I’m not crazy about school choice. I’m not totally opposed to it — as I am to vouchers — but I’m not a fan.
What you say is true, but you’re only telling half the story. Yes, letting parents who care pull their kids out of one school and move them to another will improve things … but only for those kids. The other kids, the ones whose parents didn’t go to the monumental effort of investigating schools and finding an alternative, will be stuck in an environment from which all the kids of more engaged parents have fled.
In other words, you’re helping some kids by screwing the others.
The better solution is to keep the kids with the active parents in underperforming schools, providing an upward impetus.
Note, please, that I said I think it’s a better solution. I didn’t say it’s the best solution. I don’t know what the best solution is. I’m just pretty sure that taking the people who care the most out of a school isn’t it.
Jeff Harrell
Friday, December 14th, 2007, 11:01 am
Jeffy,
You don’t have children, and there are some schools that suck and some schools that don’t. The neighborhood school my now 7-year-old was to attend had a full 1/3 of the student body in special education and/or ESL classes. Test scores are pretty bad, or at least below average.
My son, however, won the lottery, literally, to get into a public charter school down the road where the test scores are in the top 2% of the state. Why should I have to send my kid to the shitty school again? Because it would be unfair for who?
I, as a person too poor to move to a different neighborhood with uniformly better schools, care about my son’s education and like that my state allows for innovative schools to spring up that actually provide a challenging curriculum for all its students. My son shouldn’t be screwed because his mom can’t afford to live in a posh suburb. I should at least have some alternative to the shitty neighborhood school.
K
Friday, December 14th, 2007, 11:20 am
Yes, you should have an alternative to a s—y neighborhood school. And that alternative is a GOOD neighborhood school, not a special school that only the rich kids and lottery winners can attend.
Quality public education isn’t a privilege. Everyone is entitled to it, not just the rich or lucky (which is really the same thing) kids.
Minerva
Friday, December 14th, 2007, 11:25 am
You can say “everyone deserves a good public education”, but I’m not going to send my kid to the bad school waiting for that to happen. The only way for the bad schools to become good is competition with other schools like public charter schools that out-perform them year after year while still drawing from the same potential pool of kids. Another school like my son’s with its unique curriculum is already in the works because it’s that successful. No school is going to get better if everyone HAS to go to that school whether it’s good or bad with the only alternative being a private school.
K
Friday, December 14th, 2007, 11:33 am
So K’s position is “every child can get left behind so long as mine gets what’s coming to him.”
K obviously doesn’t understand the value of UNIVERSAL education. When the kid who lives next door gets a better education, your kid benefits because he’ll grow up in a place with less crime, less drugs, and less poverty.
It’s typical short-sighted self-interest leading to longer term self-destruction. Thank god K isn’t running the country.
Minerva
Friday, December 14th, 2007, 11:42 am
In the United Kingdom people move to live by the best schools. I’m sure it happens in the USA and other countries—but it’s more prevalent in the UK from what I’ve read.
House prices skyrocket and so forth and pretty soon you simply cannot afford to move next to a quality school.
All schools should be palaces for the students. Teachers should be paid far more than we pay them now. Kids should be taught skills, not rote memorization (anybody remember memorizing the times table? Not the principles beyond it, but just flat out memorization?).
How do we do this? I personally think it needs an overhaul. Go to all the charter schools and the top schools in the country—public or private. Find out (beyond the obvious more money) what they’re doing right. Then do the same in the highest ranked countries around the globe, and the best schools in the lower ranked countries. Spend a couple billion simply gathering data over a year or two.
Then apply it across the board. Raise whatever taxes, cut whatever programs, but pay for education. If that means the Navy doesn’t get a carrier, or the retirement age goes up to 70, or anything—pay for education.
I don’t have any answers myself. I’m not involved in education, beyond attending a university. However, I believe the answers are out there and whatever comes back—vouchers like Sweden, school choice like country x, longer school year like Germany or Japan—we do it. Whatever the cost.
I’m with Jeff: give kids the best education in the world however you do it, then think about other things.
Wednesday Keller
Friday, December 14th, 2007, 12:04 pm
@Stephen R: Thanks, in college, I roomed for two years with an early childhood/elementary education major. I majored in Political Science. We debated this stuff a lot.
@K and Minerva: Simmer down. I have only my own experience to go on with this, but here goes: As one of those kids who did really well in school but was surrounded by kids who didn’t, my family and I had to make a choice. I was fortunate to get a scholarship to a fancy-pants prep school downtown and get out of the decaying, failing public school I was in. (You should see the test scores. Shudder.)
A couple of years later, when we all headed off to college, I got a full academic scholarship to a small liberal arts school. A kid who did as well as I did at the public school but who chose to stay there went off to college at the same time, intending to be a doctor… but had to switch to a less-strenuous major because he hadn’t had the high school preparation for a pre-med program. My childhood best friend, who did just as well as I did until she decided that playing dumb would make her popular didn’t go to college that fall- she had a baby instead.
It’s all well and good to say that EVERY child deserves a good education- this is true, and I agree with it. But while we’re standing around figuring out how to deliver one, it’s deeply, deeply offensive to me to have it suggested that I, at the age of 12, should have been willing to sacrifice my own future, in the hopes that my presence in a shitty school would benefit children who hated smart kids and made it a point to ostracize them.
I’m all for improving education for everyone. But the way to do it is not by screwing over the motivated kids on the way.
Tiff
Friday, December 14th, 2007, 1:50 pm
As a current high school student, I certainly can’t be expected to have all the answers, but I wanted to mention my agreement on the point of teaching skills instead of facts. Standardized tests may be useful measurements of education, but because of their presence I spent all of my high school career committing facts to short-term memory, only to realize this year that I didn’t learn much at all. I believe classes that taught skills like essay writing, algebra, and etiquette would have been more useful. Seriously, the last time I heard anything about a “predicate” was sixth grade, and in college I will be expected to remember it all.
The prospect of going to college next year with nothing but scraps for a long-term education frightens me.
Rose of Montague
Friday, December 14th, 2007, 4:27 pm
Rose, you won’t be required in college to remember it all. College isn’t like that. College will ideally refine your ability to think critically. A college education means that you have developed the ability to know where and how to look for answers to problems that you need to be solved.
As far as a quality education is everybody’s right, that is correct intellectually. However, if I have to choose between my child’s good, and some other child’s good, I’m choosing mine. Otherwise, I’m a lousy parent. It’s as simple as that.
Having good students (and their parents) stay at lousy school will achieve very little except make those people believe that they got cheated. If people can’t leave, then what incentive do the administrators and staff of those poor schools have to change? That is the status quo. Sure, you can put pressure on the school board (if you have one), but they answer to the electorate, and unseating incumbents at any level is difficult, and unless you want to do it yourself, you’re going to have a great deal of difficulty getting anywhere. Individually, you’re just an annoyance. You have to have some degree of collaboration between parents in order to have any hope of achieving significant change. If you’re going to that amount of trouble, why not just organize your own school, instead of settling for influencing third parties? Now we’re back to letting parents make their own choices about how their children get educated.
As far as vouchers go, why should the well-to-do have the ability to make those choices, and not the less well-off? That’s what mandatory public education boils down to. Those that have the means can opt out of the system if it doesn’t meet their expectations. Those that don’t have the means are stuck. Stuck in the same system that is being transformed by education professionals to something less than it was fifty years ago, when we spent far less money and got better results.
Chris
Saturday, December 15th, 2007, 8:51 am
I think one of the major problems with the education system at this point is that every time anyone tries to fix anything with it, they go about it as if it’s a business, which is not the case. Schools are penalized for having low test scores like a retail store is penalized for having low sales. But in retail, you can fire the help—you can’t fire third-graders who still can’t write their names. You can fire the teachers, but usually that doesn’t help.
All of the teachers I know actually care about children and want to help—but they’re limited by regulations put in place by people who don’t understand, just as the children are limited by parents who don’t care about education.
I don’t know what the answer is, but cutting funds to schools that are already under-performing isn’t it.
ray
Saturday, December 15th, 2007, 11:42 am
Ray has a good point.
I sometimes wonder if we don’t have it backwards. A lot of times we expect schools to bring about this great social reform. Good education will end poverty, lower unemployment, erase the crime rates! But I think it’s the other way around…we need social reform to make education more effective. I work in a high school in an extremely poor area, and I wonder how they expect my kids to sit and learn algebra or grammar while they think about their dad who’s in jail again, or while they can’t do homework because Mom works two jobs and they have to take care of their three younger siblings. I marvel at the kids who choose to come to school because it’s right and provides them with a chance at a future, even though getting in with the Latin Kings could provide them with drugs and income today.
I don’t know how to fix things, but I know that we need to fix a few things in our society before we can expect our educational system to work miracles.
Christine
Sunday, December 16th, 2007, 8:02 am
oh geez …
Darleen
Monday, December 17th, 2007, 10:43 am
The idea that education will be universally good is a pipe dream, frankly.
I don’t know what the solution is, but I do know that trying to create a level playing field is exactly what the No Child Left Behind act seems to be trying to create, and let me tell you, it sucks.
The problem with creating a level playing field for all kids is that it means you can’t aim high, you have to aim low. Lowest common denominator comes to mind. So while my kid gets to go to some advanced class ONCE A WEEK, he spends the other 4 days bored out of his skull.
The teachers in his class have their hands tied in terms of curricula. The work they send home is utterly laughable, and yet I’m sure there are students struggling.
You will never have 100% success in education, and we need to stop trying. We need to stop pandering to the unmotivated, the unwilling, and, to be blunt, the unintelligent. I’m sorry, but some kids just have genetics working against them. Having a child repeat a grade may be stigmatizing but it may also be necessary.
Schools are not like the real world, and I’m often surprised how parents and school administrators alike continue to make it into some feel-good “everyone’s a winner” environment. I don’t see him as bringing other kids up, I see the likely effect is for other kids to bring him down. Success is not celebrated in this country and it sure as hell is not celebrated in our schools.
I think I like the suggestion made by some blogger, wish I could remember where, that suggested school administrators should be forced to watch “The Incredibles” until it’s message stuck. Our kids don’t need a level playing field, our kids need to be challenged. They need to be shown that failure is not something to be dreaded, and that in recovering from failure you can often learn the toughest lessons. Some kids will get left behind, but those that succeed will be stronger for it.
I am not interested in another generation of wimps who go out into the world and start whining because things don’t work the way they do in high school and college. I totally agree that education is a solution or will be involved in every solution we can ever come up with. Education is a silver bullet. What we have going on today, and what people want to do to “fix” it is not a solution, it will not gain us educated adults. We’ve got to acknowledge that the playing field is not level, that different kids, regardless of socioeconomic background, are going to have different abilities and talents. I’m not even that worried about my son, but I do worry about the child who can’t get into the advanced learning classes but is still pretty darn intelligent. What happens to that kid? Are we content to let them suffer and be dragged down in the interest of “fairness”. That doesn’t seem fair to me at all.
Jason O
Monday, December 17th, 2007, 11:51 am
Interesting discussion! I’m just a parent, getting ready to deal with all this stuff (my kids are 4 and 2). I have no answers whatsoever.
I do share Jeff’s feeling, however, that all the focus on “early childhood educating” - like for 3 and 4 year olds - is probably mostly useless. I’d much rather see energies and resources focused on the “middle school” years - to me the most critical years of a child’s education.
Meanwhile, I’m dealing with “redshirting” parents who keep telling me to hold my daughter back one more year, just like they are doing, and Kindergarten teachers complaining about the redshirted kids being disruptive and how hard it is to teach classes with such a wide range of ages … such is life in the hyper-competitive suburbs.
All I want is to LIMIT the years and days my children have to spend in school, and maximize their time dreaming, pretending and playing. I have this funny feeling that down the road we’ll find that structured education before age 6 or 7 is either useless or inhibiting.
This is completely a tangent, but you will not believe some of the preschools out here. We saw one - for three year olds! - where they had homework and worksheets! They expected three year olds to sit at desks and listen to a teacher at the board.
Too much school, I say! Too much school, too much homework, too little childhood.
Liz
Tuesday, December 18th, 2007, 3:52 pm