ON EDUCATION: BY RITA KRAMER
doctor-horsefeathers.com
In an article (see below) in the New York Sun, Andrew Wolf discussed the continuing relevance of Rita Kramer's book, Ed School Follies. Horsefeathers is pleased to offer(following the Wolf article) Mrs. Kramer's current thoughts on a crisis that has worsened in recent years.
Education School Crisis
BY ANDREW WOLF
March 21, 2005
My erstwhile Bronx High School of Science classmate, Arthur Levine of Columbia University Teachers College, was in the news last week. He is the author of a three-part report on the state of the nation's education schools, the first part of which was released last week. It focuses on the programs designed to educate school leaders. Mr. Levine rejects every existing program as "inadequate and appalling."
Financing this four-year project is a laundry list of the usual suspects, the foundations behind every hare-brained educational "reform." Their ideas have taken American schools from among the world's best to a solid position among the world's most mediocre. Mr. Levine is not wrong about the uselessness of the current programs to train school leaders. He wants to eliminate the doctorate in education, and require a new master's degree in educational administration for principals and other school system administrators. He charges, accurately, that many of the graduate courses required of teachers and principals, upon which increases in salary depends, are a waste of time.
There is already predictable resentment among the education schools that largely follow the Teachers College educational philosophy and are now being told that what they do doesn't work. Bruce Cooper, chairman of the Division of Educational Leadership at Fordham University, said of Mr. Levine to the Westchester/Rockland Journal News, "I think he's in a funny position, because he hasn't cleaned up his own act."
The problem is that Mr. Levine may question the programs and structure of the education schools, but never challenges the underlying ideology that drives these institutions. Everything we need to know about the problems surrounding the education of teachers and administrators has been said in a book that is now nearly 15 years old, but still as fresh as if it was written yesterday.That book is "Ed School Follies," by Rita Kramer, the author of many books on education, child rearing, and historical subjects. She spent a year traveling, checking out schools of education in every corner of our nation. She visited the top schools (including Teachers College), private colleges, state universities, and church affiliated schools. At the end, having interviewed scores of professors, students, and educators, and sat in on many classes at each of the schools she discusses, Ms. Kramer painted a uniformly disturbing picture.
According to Ms. Kramer, prospective teachers are taught little of practical classroom strategies and little academic content. There is much discussion about the ills of society, racism, and sexism, almost always slanted to the left, usually to the far left. There is a lot of hand wringing about testing, and how it destroys the self-esteem of our children.
Ms. Kramer points out that "where the purpose of the educational system is to promote 'self-esteem' regardless of actual accomplishment, substitutes for accomplishment must be found. In the current political climate the chief substitute for measurable individual achievement has become emphasis on the (superior) characteristics of the racial or ethnic subgroup to which one belongs. As a result, the emphasis is shifted from the common values of the larger society to identification with the special interests - and perceived grievances - of this or that racial or ethnic group."
Testing is to be avoided not just for the supposed ill effects on the children, but because "no one wants to know the actual results of these policies - whether they really help poor students, how they affect the bright and the gifted. The ed school establishment is more concerned with politics - both academic and ideological - than with learning."
Departure from this value system is not permitted. Those who dare question the prevailing wisdom of cooperative learning strategies such as the "workshop model" mandated in all New York City classrooms, risk being called elitist or racist. In this perverse world, high performance is not the goal, but something that is actually to be avoided.
Since this book is based on research done more than 15 years ago, one might hope that perhaps things have changed for the better since then. Unfortunately, that does not appear to be the case.
The enduring validity of Ms. Kramer's conclusions was driven home to me recently when I participated in a panel discussion on progressive education at the Fieldston School in the Riverdale section of the Bronx. I was joined on the panel by a professor from the Bank Street College of Education, one of the city's leading educational schools, whose president, Augusta Kappner, was appointed by Mayor Bloomberg to the Panel on Educational Policy.
The Bank Street College professor's presentation, frequently punctuated with concerns about peace and justice and racism, might have been taken right out of Ms. Kramer's book, yet another chapter in her distressing narrative. As I listened to him just last month, it became instantly clear to me just how fresh "Ed School Follies" remains.
The value system promoted in the ed schools has fully infected our school systems, as evidenced by the unfortunate curriculum choices and inflexible instructional mandates of the Department of Education here in New York. The last place reform will come from are those responsible for perpetuating these wrong-headed ideas in the first place.
An author is supposed to feel gratified when a book continues to be relevant years after it was published, but I confess to mixed feelings in this case. “Ed School Follies” was intended to let a wider public in on what went on in the institutions that trained the teachers for our children’s schools. It was not the only expose of its kind in the years after the National Commission on Excellence in Education published its report entitled “A Nation at Risk.” That widely publicized 1983 report characterized America’s schools as threatened by “a rising tide of mediocrity” and went on to declare that “If an unfriendly foreign power attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war” [but] “we have allowed this to happen to ourselves.” The report brought the shocking news that while we spent more per pupil on public education than any other nation, our students were consistently among the lowest scoring on international tests of academic achievement, especially in math and science.
It would be gratifying to be able to report that the many subsequent books and articles describing the dismal situation of American education finally changed things, but while there is greater awareness of the problems in our schools, and more efforts to solve them by offering parents choices outside the state system through charter schools and vouchers, the educational establishment goes on throwing more money into the system despite the fact that student achievement remains abysmally low.
What does it say that books like “Ed School Follies,” published more than a decade ago, still describe the current situation? It means, for one thing, that teachers are trained in the context of an ideology that has succeeded in redefining the goal of the public schools. Understanding the history of our democratic institutions and our inherited culture has been replaced by the attempt to turn the schools into agencies of social change. Striving for excellence has been replaced by the push toward egalitarianism that denies differences in abilities, discourages hard work, and fosters a “self-esteem” that has more to do with the politics of group identity than accomplishments earned through effort.
The strategies taught to our future teachers, few of whom have mastered any body of knowledge, any specific subject, include an emphasis on a multiculturism that makes all cultures equal, downplaying the Western tradition underlying this country’s distinctive character and achievements. A panoply of education-school fads have grown out of the theory that children “construct” their own knowledge, that teachers should not present themselves as authorities but as “facilitators.” These pedagogical fashions include the “whole language” method of teaching reading by word recognition rather than by phonics and the “fuzzy math” that encourages children to “construct” their own ways of dealing with numbers to arrive at their own answers, in the hope that they will get the concept if not the recognizably right solution. The advantages of these bizarre tactics for learning are said to be that they do not stifle the young mind with rote learning, drills, or even what have been described as “mere facts.” What the disadvantages are can be seen in the constant lowering of standards, evisceration of curricula, failure to encourage brighter students with more challenging opportunities, and—perhaps worst of all—failure to meet the needs of the students most at risk. While most children from middle-class families, read to and stimulated in various ways from their earliest days, manage to deal with the non-systematic approaches to letters and numbers, the children of poverty and broken homes who get their first taste of learning when they come to school are left behind, fail to thrive, and drop out in large numbers. This despite the fact that over and over it has been demonstrated that they learn better in programs based on the tried and true methods—phonics, memorization, and active instruction by authoritative teachers who impose discipline and convey clear expectations.
Between the destructive effects of the ideology-driven education-school establishment and the self-interest of the teachers’ unions protecting mediocre and even inadequate performance, there seems to be little hope for the schools unless the public-school monopoly gives way to some form of competition. When parents become aware of alternatives to the systems that are failing their children and demand the right to choose their schools, books like “Ed School Follies” will no longer be read. And as the author, I won’t mind.
--Rita Kramer |
