March 02, 2007 09:55 PM UTC

The Dumbing of American Education

• 2 Comments
• by: yevrahnevets

Jeffco Public Schools is an outstanding example of a school district which systematically weeds out its highest quality human capital, though is by no means exceptional as such: The attrition rate for new teachers in their first five years in the profession is over 50%. Though I have no hard evidence to support my hunch, I am personally convinced that those 50% disproportionately represent the most intelligent and talented new teachers, for two reasons: 1) They are the ones who have alternatives, and 2) They are the ones most frustrated by, and often directly targeted as a result of, the systematic dedication to mediocrity in American education. There are plenty of teachers (and administrators) of minimal intelligence, talent, and charisma who are willing to make sure nothing disrupts the status quo in American education or in their membership in that club, because it is a public trough for them: There are few other professions they could have entered so easily, and be so well protected in, with complete indifference to their qualities as teachers, once they have managed to survive their probationary period (in Jeffco, 3 years) in one school. Brilliant teachers, on the other hand, want to see education work: They are in it out of love, foregoing higher salaries and higher social status, because they care about education, and as such, strive to improve it. Despite endless lip-service to the contrary, nothing is more anathema to the education sub-culture. So they (the best teachers) end up disproportionately frustrated with education’s failings, and disproportionately targeted for rocking the boat (such as, in the case of one Jeffco school riddled with internal and district-wide political problems, one excellent teacher having his career quietly destroyed because he defended his choice to teach evolutionary theory in social studies classes as an essential component of understanding living systems in general).

The public debates over school vouchers, standardized testing, NCLB, Pay-for-performance and other popular remedies to education’s woes, while useful discussions within their limited scope, all miss the fundamental problems education is facing, and divert attention from the fundamental solutions that are needed. We need to completely revamp how we administer our schools, freeing them both from the well-organized anti-intellectual minorities that cripple education (and sometimes American research science, as well), and from the vice-grip of the cowardly, self-serving bureaucrats whose guiding priority is the avoidance of any  negative attention (such as that which might be garnered by offending the anti-intellectual crowd). As it stands now, we systematically guarantee mediocrity in our education system, no matter how many standardized tests we impose, no matter how much school choice we implement, no matter how we reconstitute pay-schedules for teachers. None of those remedies will do anything to address the overall hostility of American Public Education to the best, most intelligent, most charismatic, and most valuable teachers.

I am not implying that there are no such teachers in education: There are still many. But far fewer than there could be, and far fewer than there should be. Some of those excellent, truly brilliant teachers may be satisfied, but more frequently they are the most aggravated, most disgruntled and disgusted members of the profession. That is why they leave in droves. One of our biggest political-cultural follies is to have designed an institution of education which is hostile to the most educated, and in so doing, to have deprived our public school students of exposure to forms of thought and perspeption that would far more successfully inspire and motivate them than the shallow, mechanical, fluffy educational paradigms discussed in professional training seminars.

Hiring committees are composed of people who often have only a basic, superficial understanding of their own discipline, and who look to hire people similar to themselves. They will generally pass up on the best, because they have no idea what the best looks and sounds like.

Not only in our selection and rejection of educators, but also in how we spend the limited resources available for education, do we set dry mediocrity as our educational priority. Enormous resources are clumsily diverted toward the least motivated students, in the vain belief that cushioning them in expensive educational bubbles will save them from their own indifference, while pretty good students who could become great with the same kind of devoted attention are largely ignored, because they don’t represent any “problem” (the very best students, admittedly, do have programs designed to serve their needs, though many of the teachers who teach in those programs are not exceptional themselves, since, as I’ve said, education is not geared to recruit exceptional teachers, and is, in fact, often hostile to them).

Without a social movement to break this cycle of mediocrity in American education, one that goes beyond superficial window-dressing, we will continue to be seen as, and in fact be, the intellectual light-weights of the developed world, in spite of the fact that we have a very small class of some of the most brilliant minds in the world. That’s because we have created a society in which our children are carefully protected from those brilliant minds unless and until the former go to college, neither exposed to their ideas, nor their passion, nor their perspective on the value of thought and wonder. And so we have the culture we deserve: One rich in mindless distractions, and poor in the love of wisdom.