Inside American Education (3 page)

The serious social problems of many inner city youngsters cannot explain the downward trend of American education in general, nor even fully explain the educational catastrophes in bad neighborhoods. The fervor with which various social problems are seized upon as explanations of American educational deficiencies is not based on any evidence that will stand up under scrutiny. These explanations are only a symptom of the desperate necessity of shoring up the dogma that educational failures could not possibly be the fault of the public school system.

Financial Factors

When all else fails, spokesmen and apologists for the education establishment blame a lack of money—often expressed as a
lack of “commitment” by the public or the government—for their problems. The issue is posed as how “serious” the public, or its political leaders, are about “investing” in the education of the next generation. This cleverly turns the tables on critics and loads guilt onto the tax-paying public for the failures of American schools and colleges. Implicit in all this is the wholly unsupported assumption that more money means better education. Neither comparisons among states, comparisons over time, nor international comparisons, lend any credence to this arbitrary (and self-serving) assumption.

States that spend more per pupil in the public schools do not generally have any better educational performance to show for it. The correlation between financial inputs and educational outputs is very weak and shaky. Connecticut, for example, spent more than $4,000 per pupil in 1984 but student test scores were lower than those in Vermont, which spent just under $3,000 per pupil. Rhode Island also spent close to $4,000 per pupil and had the lowest average SAT scores of the three. New York state spent more than $5,000 per pupil that year, finished just barely ahead of Rhode Island, and significantly behind Vermont.
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One could cite other cases where the more expensively educated students did better but, over all, there is no real evidence to support the claim that more money means better educational quality. More affluent communities are typically better-educated communities, where parents emphasize education to their children, and may be more willing and able to put more money into the local schools. But it is by no means clear that whatever better educational results come out of this combination of circumstances is due to the money. A highly respected Brookings Institution study concluded: “When other relevant factors are taken into account, economic resources are unrelated to student achievement.”
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One reason why spending has so little effect on educational performance is that most of the money never reaches the classroom. Studies of the Milwaukee and New York City school systems show that less than half the money spent per high school student in New York or per elementary school student in Milwaukee actually reached the school—and less than a third of the total expenditure went to classroom services.
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Over a period of a quarter of a century, teachers’ salaries have been
a declining percentage of school budgets,
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as bureaucracies and other non-instructional costs absorbed the growing sums of money being spent on the educational establishment.

Looking at money input and educational output over time makes the education establishment’s claims of inadequate financing look even more ridiculous. The period of declining test scores was also a period when expenditures on education were rising—rising not only in money terms but also in real terms, allowing for inflation. Per-pupil expenditures rose 27 percent in real terms during the decade of the 1970s and 29 percent in real terms during the decade of the 1980s. This was after a huge 58 percent increase in real terms during the decade of the 1960s—which was the very decade when the long decline in performance began. Financial input was not lacking. Educational output was lacking—and still is.

An international look at per-pupil expenditures likewise gives the lie to claims that more money produces better education. Despite claims that money is needed to hire more teachers to relieve “overcrowded classrooms,” the United States already has a smaller average class size than a number of countries whose educational achievements are higher. Japan, for example, averages 41 students per class, compared to 26 for the United States. In mathematics, where the performance gap is especially glaring, the average class size in Japan is 43, compared to 20 in the U.S.
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Within the United States, the ratio of pupils to teachers declined throughout the entire era from the 1960s to the 1980s, when test scores were also declining.
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In over-all per-pupil expenditure, the U.S. ranks near the top, even though the performance of its students often ranks at or near the bottom. American elementary and secondary school pupils receive more educational expenditures each than pupils in most Western European countries, more than pupils in Canada, more than 50 percent higher expenditures than in Japan or Australia, and more than twice the per-pupil expenditure in New Zealand.
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Our schools are already turning out some of the most expensive incompetents anywhere. Making them still more expensive will not change that.

Here too the education establishment has resorted to deception, in order to deny plain facts and claim more money. Instead of comparing real expenditures per pupil in various countries, they compare the percentage of annual national output
devoted to education, as “a measure of national effort.” Because the United States has the largest national output in the world, the percentage going to education is lower than that in some other countries, though not usually by much.
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But percentages are not a measure of resources. Existing resources devoted to educating pupils in the United States already exceed what other nations have found sufficient to produce much better results. It is not “national effort” that is lacking. What is lacking is the educational system’s ability to deliver results after it has been supplied with ample resources.

Higher Education

At the college level, the claim that more money translates into better education is likewise blatantly fallacious. As increasingly vast sums of money have poured into colleges and universities over the past half-century, one of the most striking results has been that professors have taught fewer and fewer classes, and have done more and more research. When Jacques Barzun wrote his classic
Teacher in America
back in the 1940s, he referred to a typical college professor spending 15 hours a week in the classroom.
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Today, even half of that time would be considered an excessive teaching load at many institutions. Indeed, 35 percent of today’s faculty teach undergraduates only 4 hours a week or less. At research universities, 51 percent of the faculty teach undergraduates only 4 hours or less, and fewer than 10 percent spend as much as 11 hours a week teaching undergraduates.
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However, more than half of research university faculty spend 11 or more hours per week on research.
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College professors, like elementary and high school teachers, often claim that their time in the classroom underestimates how much time they spend on instruction, because it omits the time spent preparing lectures, grading examinations, and the like. For university professors, the teaching of graduate students must be added to their undergraduate teaching load, though graduate seminars often require little or no preparation on the professor’s part, when they serve primarily as a forum for the presentation of students’ papers. Still, a study of the total time spent on duties relating to instruction showed an average of only about 15 hours a week among faculty at
research universities, slightly less than the time spent on research—and less than one third of all their weekly working hours, including time spent taking part in various scholarly activities and earning additional money with outside consulting, lecturing, or other activities.
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More money for higher education will never mean more teaching—much less better teaching—as long as that money goes into reducing teaching loads and financing more research.

At Harvard, the number of faculty members more than doubled between 1952 and 1974, while the undergraduate student population grew by only 14 percent. Yet the number of courses enrolling undergraduates actually
fell
by 28 percent.
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At the University of Wisconsin, a study found that only about one-fourth of the economics professors taught two courses in the semester surveyed.
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As long as research competes with teaching for the time of professors, throwing more money at colleges and universities is unlikely to improve either the quantity or the quality of education. The amount of money currently being thrown at higher education is already so large that there are literally dozens of institutions receiving more than $100 million each in research and development funds. Johns Hopkins University receives more than $500 million.
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The money it receives in tuition payments is less than one-fifth its annual receipts.
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In academia, as elsewhere, money talks—and what it says is “research.”

It is not only the attraction of research money that lures professors out of the classroom. The spread of the publish-or-perish principle reinforces a drive for research at the expense of teaching. More than three-quarters of all faculty members at four-year academic institutions say that it is difficult for anyone to get tenure in their department without publishing. In research universities, more than 90 percent say so.
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One symptom of the relative importance given to teaching versus research are the many instances of untenured faculty members who receive teacher-of-the-year awards, only to be told that their contracts will not be renewed. During a recent span of years at M.I.T., three out of four untenured recipients of such awards were denied tenure.

None of this is meant to claim that research is not important, nor even to assess its relative importance compared to teaching. The point is simply that more money does not translate
into more or better education, at the college or university level, any more than elsewhere in the American educational system.

DOGMAS AND AGENDAS

American education is undermined by numerous dogmas and numerous hidden agendas. The dogmas fall into two general categories—dogmas about education and dogmas about the larger society. “Self-esteem,” “role models,” “diversity,” and other buzzwords dominate educational policy—without evidence being either asked or given to substantiate the beliefs they represent. Sweeping beliefs about the general society, or about how life ought to be lived, likewise become prevalent among educators without empirical verification being required. More important, world-saving crusades based on such beliefs have increasingly intruded into the classroom, from kindergarten to college, crowding out the basic skills that American students lack. Some of this represents changing views among educators as to the role of education. Behind much of the world-saving curriculum, however, are the organized efforts of outside interests and movements, determined to get their special messages into the classroom.

For example, a pharmaceutical company which manufactures birth control products supplies thousands of so-called “sex education” kits to high schools.
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Automobile interests promote driver education.
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Such commercial interests are joined by psychological experimenters, disarmament advocates, crusaders for world population control, and innumerable other “causes” that invade the classroom to absorb time sorely needed to teach American children to read, write, do mathematics—and to learn to
think
critically, rather than repeat propaganda.

Unfortunately, the educational establishment itself is heavily involved in non-educational issues, fashions, and crusades. A symptom of this mindset can be found in the February 1990 issue of
PTA Today
magazine, published by the National Parent-Teacher Association, featuring articles on (1) diet and cancer; (2) food allergies; (3) radon gas dangers; (4) medicines; (5) vaccination; (6) speech disorders; (7) aging and dying; (8) AIDS;
(9) teenage drivers; (10) corporal punishment and (11) being a hospital patient. Not one article dealt with the educational basics in which American schools are so deficient. Instead, the focus was on matters of personal lifestyle and general world-saving. The largest teacher’s union in the country, the National Education Association, likewise often wanders far afield from education, to promote all sorts of ideological crusades. At the N.E.A.’s annual meeting in 1991, for example, delegates passed resolutions on things ranging from nuclear weapons to immigration, housing, highways, environmentalism, and “development of renewable energy resources.”
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These political interests of the education establishment often find their way right into the classroom, as children are given assignments to write letters to public officials, in order to forward such political agendas, whether to urge the President of the United States toward a certain policy on nuclear weapons,
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or to demand that state legislators appropriate more money for education.
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It speaks volumes about today’s educators that a captive audience of school children would be used in this way.