Inside American Education (47 page)

The second largest institutional liability of the public school system in the United States is tenure. While the calibre of people entering the teaching profession is the key limiting factor on the quality of education possible in the public schools, the tenure and seniority system reduces the incentives to reach even these limits.
There is simply no institutional pay-off to being a good teacher
. Pay and promotion depend on such things as seniority and additional education-course credits amassed during the summers, neither of which has any demonstrable correlation with better teaching. Some individuals may indeed become outstanding teachers for individual reasons, but there is no
institutional
reason to become a good teacher, when serving time is what is rewarded. As none other than the president of the American Federation of Teachers put it:

People are paid for coming in the morning and leaving at night, and for saying “Good morning” in the morning and “Good afternoon” in the afternoon and never confusing the two.
¹³

Yet another major liability of the American school system is the multitude of regulations and externally imposed requirements which snarl the educational system in red tape and tie the hands of those who actually do the teaching. In part this grows out of a justifiable suspicion of educators and a desire to make education “teacher-proof.” The magnitude of this external micro-management is hard to imagine for anyone who has not seen, for example, the several volumes of the Education Code for California, or similar minute regulations in other states. Congress has piled on top of this a mass of federal regulations, governing everything from athletics to foreign languages and lire extinguishers, and courts have produced an alarming number of precedents making it risky and costly for a school to expel students for even the most flagrant misconduct.

While these many attempts at micro-management impose large costs and constraints on public school systems, they are often very ineffective as a way to monitor educational effectiveness, as measured by actual results. Any attempt at serious educational reform must, at the outset, recognize the utter futility of micro-management of processes as a means of improving educational outcomes.

To these institutional liabilities must be added liabilities in the attitudes of educators, politicians, parents, and the general public. Whatever the lofty rhetoric of the educational establishment, their actions clearly and consistently demonstrate their view of the school system as a place whose primary purpose is to provide employment for teachers and administrators, with students being a means to that end. Students are also treated as guinea pigs for social experiments and as targets for propaganda for world-saving causes (though if emotionalized superficiality could save the world, it would have been saved long ago). The desires of parents or the public to put the education of the students ahead of the career ambitions, or the psychological, ideological, or ego satisfactions of educators, are treated tactically as obstacles to be circumvented.

Among the external influences on educational policy, labor unions have historically been prominent in promoting laws extending the number of years that students must be kept in school—and out of the job market, where they would otherwise compete with the unions’ members. In short, students are to be warehoused in the public schools, for the benefit of others. Some parents also want students warehoused for a certain number of hours a day, as a baby-sitting service. Here too, the educational needs of the students are considered secondary, at best.

Politicians, the media, and the public too often want educational goals and results expressed in simple terms, even when those terms distort reality beyond recognition. Perennial focus on “the dropout problem” is a classic example. Reformers and the establishment alike express alarm at whatever percentage of high school students fail to stay on to graduation. Yet, clearly, every single person in the whole society drops out of education at some point. Otherwise, everyone would go on to get a Ph.D. and spend the rest of his life as a post-doctoral fellow on campus. The term “drop-out,” like so many other buzzwords, serves as an evasion of the need to address specifics—in this case, why it is better or worse for some people to terminate their education at different times.

Many of those who drop out have already ceased to be serious students, if they ever were, and while in school not only absorb resources that are wasted on them, but also generate disorder, disruption, intimidation, and violence that jeopardize the education of others. If one is concerned with education, rather than with body count, there is a very serious question as to whether, or how much, public policy should be geared to reducing drop-out statistics. Yet, as long as those statistics remain politically potent, all sorts of ways will be found to keep students in school, regardless of what that means in terms of the education (or even physical safety) of other students.

Once again, the generosity of the American public is apparent in campaigns to reduce drop-out rates. Literally millions of dollars have been contributed in a single city, not only from the public treasury but also from private donations, to try to reduce the drop-out rates in New York and Boston, for example. Often enough, these campaigns fail, even in statistical terms, as well as in terms of getting some meaningful education
to those who drop out. The “alternative schools” set up for drop-outs or potential drop-outs are widely recognized as dumping grounds,
¹⁴
ways of meeting politically defined goals in a politically expedient way.

Like so many labels put on people, the label “drop-out” describes a transient observation as if it were an eternal fact. A statistical survey by the U.S. Department of Education showed that nearly half of all the drop-outs surveyed later returned to complete their high school education within four years of their originally scheduled graduation—and an additional 12 percent were still working toward graduation.
¹⁵
Altogether, nearly three-fifths resumed their education later. The experience of trying to earn a living with inadequate education no doubt had an influence, both in their return to school and in the attitudes with which they regarded education afterwards. But that experience could only be acquired outside of school. Forcing them to remain in school, or enticing them to remain in school with pseudo-education, would have denied them that experience.

The politicized hysteria to which both the educational system and the political system are so vulnerable has created a dropout “crisis” at a time when a record high percentage of American youngsters complete high school. As of 1940, only one-fourth of young adults in the United States had completed high school. By 1970, this had climbed to just over hall. During the 1980s, when hysteria about drop-outs became rampant, more than four-fifths of all high school students—black and white—graduated.
¹⁶

Colleges and Universities

In addition to postgraduate institutions unsurpassed anywhere in the world, American higher education still has many small liberal arts colleges where the education of undergraduates remains the central purpose. As noted in Chapter 5, many of these small colleges are more effective educationally than more renowned research universities. For these colleges, as well as for the large universities, the generosity of the American public is simply unrivalled. In no other country can so many private institutions of higher learning survive on private support. Australia,
for example, is still struggling to establish its first private university, which is treated in the media there as a far-out experiment. By contrast, a number of American colleges receive contributions annually from at least half of all their living alumni—and dead alumni often contribute in their wills. Voluntary contributions to higher education from alumni, foundations, corporations, and others totaled nearly $10 billion in 1989-90, about one-fourth of this coming from alumni.
¹⁷
In addition, endowments built up from past contributions exceeded one billion dollars in each of a dozen academic institutions in 1990, led by Harvard with an endowment of more than four and a half billion dollars.
¹⁸
In addition to this private generosity, the federal government in academic year 1987-88 contributed nearly $15 billion in appropriations, grants, and contracts, while state governments contributed more than $33 billion.
¹⁹

Among the leading institutional liabilities of American colleges and universities are tenure and faculty self-governance. While tenure in the academic world is not as destructive of incentives as it is in the public schools, because academic tenure is not combined with lock-step pay and promotion based on the mere passage of time, academic tenure is made more pernicious than it needs to be by being combined with faculty self-governance and the up-or-out system of promotion. The temptation to log-rolling is very strong among colleagues who must regard each other as “facts of life” for years to come. More fundamentally, it is the wholly unaccountable nature of faculty self governance which makes it so dangerous—and so vulnerable to strident groups, threatening to make life unpleasant on campus for all who oppose their demands.

While the faculty as a whole will suffer if their decisions drive the college or university into financial straits, that is a very weak incentive or constraint for an individual faculty member pushing an individual project. This is one of the inherent problems of collectivized decision-making by unaccountable individuals, whether in an academic setting or a political setting, here or overseas. Yet seldom, if ever, is collectivized decision-making so utterly unaccountable as among college and university professors.

Elected officials in democratic countries can be defeated for re-election or even recalled during their terms of office. In totalitarian
countries, they are purged. Among business decision-makers, red ink can destroy even the biggest corporations in a relatively short time, if the situation is not turned around, and even a failure to make the most of profit opportunities can attract hostile takeover bids or a stockholder revolt that ends in heads rolling in the executive suites. Yet absolutely nothing prevents a tenured professor from promoting or voting for disastrous institutional policies for years—or decades—on end.

It would be considered a gross violation of “academic freedom” to fire anyone because the policies he supported in faculty meetings over the years have led to a drastic decline in the college or university’s academic standing or financial viability. In virtually no other institution anywhere is there such a blank check for irresponsibility.

Given the degree of insulation from accountability, the degree of self-indulgence found among academics can hardly be surprising. Where else do people protest events outside their institutions by refusing to carry out the duties for which they are paid? Yet it has been common at leading elite institutions for professors to cancel classes to protest decisions made in Washington concerning foreign policy or military action. Moreover, these self-awarded additional days of paid vacation are often treated as some kind of sacrifice to a cause.

In recent times, there has been a progressively more politicized, esoteric, and self-indulgent set of tendencies in academia, diluting and polluting academic endeavors with trendy ideological movements like “deconstructionism” in literature and “critical legal studies” in the law schools—to name just two. These symbolize the new scholasticism, with its inbred, self-congratulatory nihilism and its abdication of traditional responsibilities of training the young in fundamental intellectual disciplines, rather than in the ideological fashions of the day. In addition to these signs of decadence in traditional fields, there have been developing new, so-called “interdisciplinary” fields like feminist studies, ethnic studies, peace studies, and other semi-academic endeavors, more or less frankly propagandistic and politically activist, and less restrained by disciplinary canons still persisting and resisting complete politicization of the social sciences and humanities.

Not all self-indulgence is ideological. The sacrifice of teaching for research has long been a scandal at the large universities,
and a growing emphasis on seeking research grants has spread the research ethos even to the small liberal arts colleges. The role of research in putting a professor’s qualifications to a stronger test than the applause of sophomores is not to be denied. However, the
amount
of the research output required for this useful purpose falls far short of the research output required by the competitive pressures of individuals and institutions, all engaged in the zero-sum game of pursuing prestige and all typically financed in their mutually cancelling efforts by the taxpayers’ money.

RE-ORGANIZATION

The most important thing to re-organize about education is our own thinking about it. Our purpose cannot be to project yet another Utopia as to what teaching methods are best, what educational goals are the loftiest, or what kind of end-product would represent the student of our dreams. We need to begin instead by facing up to the debacle in which we find ourselves, so as to understand not only the institutional and attitudinal factors behind the failures of the educational system, but also the factors behind its successes in thwarting repeated attempts at fundamental reform. We need to face the harsh reality of the kind of people we are dealing with, the kind of bitter fight we can expect from them if we try to disturb their turf and perks—and the bleak future of our children if we don’t.

Despite the lofty rhetoric which is as much a part of the educational world as the cap and gown, we must face up to what educators have actually done, as distinguished from what they have said: