NAS Blog

NAS Board of Advisors member Christina Hoff Sommers weighs in on a question posed by Room for Debate at the New York Times : “Is single-sex education in general — public or private, from elementary school through college — helpful or harmful?” Sommers’ argument – that this is a necessary option – includes something I hadn’t thought of before:

Single-sex schooling is not for everyone. But it can help some students to become more focused and well-rounded. Girls cannot leave it to boys to dissect the frog, and boys cannot leave it to girls to edit the school newspaper. When a 2007 British study compared life outcomes for thousands of middle-aged graduates of single-sex and coed schools, it found that “gender stereotypes” were “exacerbated” in coed schools and “moderated” in single-sex schools. In single-sex schools, males were more likely to focus on language and literature, and females on math and science. And for girls, “single-sex schooling was linked to higher wages.”

Sandra Stotsky, head of NAS’s Arkansas affiliate, participated in this week’s New York Times Room for Debate, which posed the question, “Given that a high school diploma, a bachelor’s degree and even graduate school are no longer a ticket to middle-class life, and all these years of education delay the start of a career, does our society devote too much time and money to education?”

Stotsky answered:

What a strange question: Does our society devote too much time and money to education? We spend much more on K-12 schools now than ever before but get so much less in return mainly because our high schools have long failed to address the real range of adolescents’ interests. We have oversold the worth of a college degree to compensate for a high school diploma with little academic or career meaning.

Finland offers all students leaving ninth grade the option of a three-year general studies high school or a three-year vocational high school.

Possibly half of the students now enrolled in our public universities and four-year colleges would be more motivated to study and develop better work habits in programs of their choice that could have been available to them in high school. As for many of the dropouts in ninth and 10th grades, their long-term costs to society could have been avoided if they had been offered programs in high school that appealed to young adolescents more interested in practical activities than the reading and writing required in authentic college-level courses.

If Race to the Top and Common Core’s high school standards had aimed at strengthening the high school curriculum so that a high school diploma meant more than it now does — and the percentages of remedial math and reading courses at public colleges were drastically reduced — that would have been a major step forward. Instead, the U.S. Department of Education seduced most states into adopting reading and mathematics standards that in effect mean most high school students declared “college ready” will be even less prepared for authentic college-level work than those now going into nonselective post-secondary institutions.

Other developed countries offer adolescents a choice of curricula. Finland, for example, offers all students leaving ninth grade — the end of compulsory schooling — the option of attending a three-year general studies high school or a three-year vocational high school, with about 50 percent of each age cohort enrolling in each type of high school. The “comprehensive” American high school has outlived its usefulness, but our policy makers have chosen to weaken its academic goals and ignore its career-forming capacity rather than serve the diversity of adolescent interests, talents and needs in grades 9 through 12 — at a much greater cost to the students, their families and society.

Over at The Beacon, I have a post on the latest requirement that Something Else must be taught in K-12 history textbooks. This time it is gay history but the real problem is the politicization of textbook content. Result: history is just “one damn thing after another.”

While tying my shoes last night in the gym locker room, I overheard a snippet of two women’s conversation. An Asian woman in a green t-shirt was saying to the tattooed (non-Asian) Zumba instructor, “Well, you know, their school is so easy, and then summer is all play…” She was concerned about academic rigor, especially for her son in first grade. Zumba woman asked if the teacher could give the boy extra work, and she recommended a summer math program she’d heard good things about.

Green t-shirt made an effort to appreciate the suggestion, but it was clear from her voice she felt she needed a more profound solution. I mentally recommended, “You could home-school him,” but as if she read my mind she dismissed the idea aloud: “He wouldn’t listen to me if I tried to teach him.”

“Maybe it’s better than you think,” offered the other woman. “It’s only first grade. You never know what’s easy and what’s hard at that level.”

“Yeah, maybe I just don’t know the difference,” said Green Shirt, trying to be agreeable. But she did. “I mean, it seems like he’s moved ahead in language arts since last year, but I compared his math homework to a Chinese math assignment, and his is much easier.”

How different she sounded from the typical American mother, worried that school is stressing out her child, defiant toward any teacher who might dare to give a low grade, quick to make excuses for poor performance. This mom blamed the school, but only because it didn’t push her child harder.

I may be stereotyping to assume that her Asian-ness lent itself to this mindset, but the words of Amy Chua in the Wall Street Journal are still ringing in my ears and I can’t help but wonder if her cultural heritage, with its focus on academic excellence, had something to do with it. The woman at the gym was American and spoke without an accent, and clearly she was trying to accept the  ”normal” level of U.S. education, but the comparison to China made her doubtful.

I realized I had just been given a glimpse of the troubled mind of the Americanized Tiger Mother. I don’t know which school her son attends (probably one in Hoboken, where the gym is), but I hope it gets the chance to hear her concerns before she conforms to the lenient parents around her and resigns her children’s education to schools that are “so easy.”

My post “Betrayed by Higher Ed” has occasioned so many comments and emails that I want to offer a group response.  Readers here and abroad expressed incredulity and dismay that a student of mine had reached college sophomore level without reading a single book.  My evidence is anecdotal, but while book-free students may not be the norm, neither are they the exception.  Unfortunately, even when students have read books in school, those books were usually politically-correct, multiculturalist drivel.  This is not news, as the academy has now devolved into third generation dumbing down.  A high school teacher emailed that

There is a pervasive attitude that `the kids can’t do it.’ Bullshit. Teachers won’t let them because it’s `easier’ to just read it all aloud in class (since it takes up more time) or just read some of it.  In a meeting today . . . two of my colleagues brought up dropping [Fahrenheit 451] since their students `couldn’t handle it.’  An AP teacher shared an assignment for Of Mice and Men. She passed around journal books where the students summarize each chapter on the left side of the page and then draw a picture on the right to represent a ‘theme’ of the chapter.”

This is what passes for reading and for writing, and it’s not just in high school.  Electronica’s erosion of reading ability means that reading books is no longerexpected at any level.  In a presentation last year, the Columbia University Core Curriculum directors sheepishly admitted that even their celebrated and historic program now finds it must resort to having students read excerpts rather than entire books.

Impoverished reading begets impoverished writing.  I also heard from Will Fitzhugh of The Concord Review who struggles to preserve the meaningfully-researched high school history essay, a Herculean task when the previously mentioned AP teacher also “doesn’t assign an essay anymore because they are `too painful’ for her to read.”

So if teachers don’t have students read and don’t have students write, what do they do?  In The Intercollegiate Review (print only), R. V. Young writes about the decay of Freshman Comp., using as his example Jonathan Alexander’s composition class at U.C. Irvine devoted to developing “sexual literacy.”  According to his U.C.I. listing, Dr. Alexander “works at the intersection of the fields of writing studies and sexuality studies, where he explores what discursive theories of sexuality have to teach us about literacy and literate practice in pluralistic democracies.”  Dr. Young understandably despairs of reforming what he finds to be not an educational system at all but “a curious and uneven amalgam of job training, indoctrination, and custodial care.”

Amen, brother.

So argues Michele Kerr in an opinion piece in the San Jose Mercury News. According to her, having students take Advanced Placement tests when they aren’t adequately prepared for them can cause them to miss the basics of high school education. Thus, many students encounter material in reverse order: college-level work in high school (which often goes over their heads), and remedial education when they get to college.

In a recent post, Ashley Thorne discusses “Lessons of a Professional Paper-Writer”. Thorne cites a fascinating Chronicle of Higher Education column entitled “The Shadow Scholar: The man who writes your students’ papers tells his story.”

Obviously this is a class (inequality) issue: those with money can afford to buy entrance to careers, those without cannot advance in life unless they work hard–something not required of their affluent peers. Therefore I propose a federal program, “No Term Papers Left Behind” to close the writing gap by 2025. This means-tested program will fund ghost writing in high school and college. No child, no term paper ought to be left behind. Those who are more affluent but lack the proper skills may also be eligible if their standardized test scores fall below a certain level. Differences in intelligence and upbringing are no excuse for failing our children. We need to embrace those differences!

Statutory definition: “children” are eligible until 26 or until they complete their degree.

This vital federal program will “grow the economy” and give a hand up to the disadvantaged. With a degree in hand, they will earn (but not learn) more. With this increase in aggregate demand, they can stimulate the consumer durable sector of the economy and buy houses to soak up the inventory of unsold homes.

Privacy and confidentiality are ensured and will be protected to the utmost. The U.S. Department of Education will not tolerate revelations of plagiarism: it is nobody’s business but the student who does (or doesn’t do) the work. After all, if someone does the work, then American productivity continues to rise—to the benefit of rich and poor alike. So, those dirty rats who would undermine the American dream of college credentialism will be punished.

Meanwhile, practice safe cheating until bourgeois morality (work, thrift, excellence) fades with the introduction of these new teaching methods. It is in the interest of “social justice” and American competitiveness that we have more college graduates. Only then can we boast “We ‘r Numbyr Wun!”

Be patriotic! Cheat! Spend!

Discussing Claude Shannon’s communication theories, my student Hali asked about reading comprehension, and I thought of Bernard Knox (who died July 22).  His New York Times obituary by Wolfgang Saxon reads, in part,

[During World War Two, the O.S.S.] sent [Knox] into northern Italy . . . and it was there that he rekindled his passion for the classics.  Holed up in an abandoned villa, he discovered a bound copy of Virgil and opened it to a section of the first Georgic that begins, ‘Here right and wrong are reversed; so many wars in the world, so many faces of evil.’

Professor Knox recalled, in Essays Ancient and Modern, ‘These lines, written some 30 years before the birth of Christ, expressed, more directly and passionately than any modern statement I knew of, the reality of the world I was living in: the shell-pocked, mine-infested fields, the shattered cities and the starving population of that Italy Virgil so loved, the misery of the whole world at war.’”

He continued, ‘As we ran and crawled through the rubble I thought to myself: “If I ever get out of this, I’m going back to the classics and study them seriously.” ‘ ”

Imagine what’s necessary to comprehend this brief, poetic passage.  Besides knowing the definitions of common words, one’s vocabulary must contain uncommon words (“villa,” “rekindled”).   The meaning of the sentences requires understanding the grammatical relationships and punctuation (parenthetical and serial commas, quote within a quote, colon).  Knox’s and Virgil’s imagery and metaphors require imagination.  And comprehension also involves so-called “domain knowledge” (“Virgil,” “Georgic,” “classics”), cultural knowledge and historical consciousness (“O.S.S.,” “bound copy,” “30 years before the birth of Christ”), and the multiculturalism-free notions of “evil” and “right and wrong.”

Mark Bauerlein (among others) argues here that reading is neither a transferable skill nor really testable because “all texts contain embedded assumptions, things the writer assumes the reader will know.”  Despite massive growth in college developmental (i.e., remedial) reading programs, it seems that only grammar and decoding are teachable; deep reading involves complex acrobatics including knowledge that fewer and fewer students possess.  As Michael Silverblatt says here, reading classes can teach “effective word recognition, but reading isn’t done with just the eyes, or the eyes and the lips, it’s done with the mind.”

Over at Pajamasmedia, “Zombie” is in the midst of a five part analysis of the Texas textbook battle.  In The Language Police (2004), Diane Ravitch argued that to avoid offending any conceivable sensibility, publishers produce absurd textbooks in which men cannot be depicted as larger than women, Asians cannot appear studious, and the elderly must not be ill or infirm.  In a word:  pablum.  Zombie, however, sees the Texas smackdown as a significant rebellion against the Left’s Gramscian “long march through the institutions” which has necessitated speech codes, historical revisionism, and dubious curriculum standards.  One recalls the noxious National Standards for U.S. and World History exposed by Lynne Cheney here and National Council of the Teachers of English “standards” that include expectations such as “Students use spoken, written, and visual language to accomplish their own purposes . . . .”  Oh, the rigor!  American education may wear the face of Alfred E. Neuman, but he has a globalist, multiculturalist, social justice lovin’ grin.

Zombie lambasts both Right and Left in the Texas shoot-out but he also notes that

. . . activists [once] denounced nationwide educational standards which prevented teachers from presenting `alternative’ facts and viewpoints. But now that the once-alternative progressive framework has become ascendent [sic] and dominates the education landscape, the left (or at least the Obama wing of the left) has flipped policies, and these days they insist on imposing nationwide educational standards to prevent any local schoolboards or states from sneaking off the political plantation and exposing students to conservative values.

Running through Friday; check it out.