Inside American Education (40 page)

The big-time college athlete is often as isolated from the social life of a college as he is from its academic life. Many top football teams have special separate dormitories for their players—usually with better accommodations and better food than those for the regular students receive at the same colleges.
⁴⁹
Moreover, coaches and boosters have even been known to come to the rescue of athletes when they get into trouble with the law.
⁵⁰
Then, when the student’s eligibility eventually runs out, he usually finds himself out on the street with no skills, no degree, and perhaps no character.

PART THREE
ASSESSMENT

CHAPTER 10
The Empire Strikes Back

Today the NEA is far larger than the United Auto Workers, larger than the Electrical Workers, larger than the State, County, and Municipal Employees, and larger than the Steelworkers. My friends, we are now the largest union in all of America by a half million members.

—Mary Hatwood Futrell, President National Education Association
¹

E
DUCATION
is a vast empire. Both the National Education Association and its chief rival, the American Federation of Teachers, are huge unions with large sums of money available to support political lobbying, and significant blocs of votes to throw onto the scales at election time. The headquarters of the National Education Association in Washington employs more than 500 people and spends well over $100 million dollars a year. The N.E.A. is also the dominant teacher’s union in every state except New York, where the rival American Federation of Teachers holds sway.
²
At both the national and the state and local levels, the N.E.A. has vast sums of money available for political purposes and for propaganda campaigns to get the public to see the world as the N.E.A. sees it—for example, to equate bigger school budgets with better education.

Both the elementary and secondary schools, on the one hand, and higher education, on the other, encompass large numbers of people and huge sums of money. With more than $170 billion being spent annually on the education of more than 40 million elementary and secondary school students,
³
education is a major sector of the economy. Higher education
is also a very significant part of the education empire, with more than 12 million students, of whom more than 7.2 million are full time and 6.5 million are full-time undergraduates.
⁴
Colleges and universities spend more than $105 billion annually.
⁵
Both in higher education and in the elementary and secondary schools, by far most of the money comes from government—whether state, federal, or local.

With millions of jobs, millions of students, and hundreds of billions of dollars at stake, the education establishment has not welcomed criticism or critics. As N.E.A. President Mary Hatwood Futrell put it:

The Nation’s students today are threatened only by the failure of policymakers to give education the money it deserves.
⁶

In pursuit of that money, the N.E.A. has become a political power, as well as the largest labor union in the country. In Minnesota, for example, the state affiliates of the N.E.A. and the American Federation of Teachers together often contribute more money to politicians running for statewide office than
all other political organizations in the state
, put together.
⁷
In higher education as well, there is the same sense of entitlement to other people’s money—and the same sense of not needing to justify their own performance. As tax-exempt entities, some colleges and universities have joined in campaigns to raise state taxes from which they benefit.
⁸
Nor is this sense of entitlement to other people’s money limited to tax money. At a meeting of dozens of academic fund-raising organizations, the head of one such organization denounced corporate donations that were earmarked for particular purposes as “something we can’t live with.”

“How dare they do this?” he asked, and challenged those present: “What are we doing to hold these companies accountable?”
The Chronicle of Higher Education
reported that his speech “was met with wild applause.”
⁹

While it may be taken as axiomatic in some education establishment circles that they need as much money as possible, with as few restrictions as possible, there is also a sense of a political need to respond to critics. But this is only a political necessity, to be met in ways that are politic, without necessarily being substantive. Both the schools and the colleges and universities have developed many ways of responding to criticism,
and ways of seeking to discredit critics,
without having to confront the specifics
of their criticisms. Tactics, rather than arguments, have become standard responses.

ARGUMENTS WITHOUT ARGUMENTS

Even though educators consider themselves to be “thinking people,” there is a remarkable absence of substantive arguments in their responses to critics. These responses include evading the specifics of the criticisms and arbitrarily attributing Utopian beliefs to critics. Schools and colleges each have additional substitutes for arguments, specialized for their respective issues.

Evading the Specifics

Critics of particular policies or programs are often depicted as “bashing” the entire enterprise of education or the entire function of teaching. It is as if critics of corruption in the Teamsters’ Union were answered by saying that they were “bashing” trucking and failing to understand its vital role in the American economy.

A word like “bashing” conveys absolutely no information, other than a dislike of the criticism, and contributes nothing to a logical or factual assessment of its validity. The issue is not one of critics’ “blanket contempt” for the country’s universities, as a former Stanford professor has claimed,
¹⁰
or that critics “condemn the whole of higher education,” as retired Harvard president Derek Bok has charged.
¹¹
Rather, the issue is one of very specific criticisms which such distortions evade, without having to produce any substantive arguments. When Johns Hopkins University president William Richardson said that America “could not and would not do without universities,” he was demolishing one of the most flimsy and shabby of all straw men.
¹²

Hiding the specifics which have been challenged inside some larger and more innocuous generality is a common tactic at all levels of education. For example, critics of psychological-conditioning or attitude-changing programs in the public
schools are depicted as people who “do not want students to call on their personal experiences for any oral or written response to any question or assignment.”
¹³
In other words, the broad generality of “personal experiences” is substituted for the specific kinds of interrogations and assignments imposed by teachers and “facilitators” in brainwashing courses.

Straw Man Utopias

Anyone who argues that particular educational policies and programs have made things worse, and who points to evidence that things were in fact better before such policies and programs were initiated, is almost certain to be depicted as someone who believes in a “golden age” of the past. This trivializing distortion has become common among educators, including the president of Williams College,
¹⁴
the president of Harvard University and the dean of its faculty, and a professor at the University of Pennsylvania who responded to criticism of so-called “Afro-centric history” by saying that its critics seem to believe that “if we went back to an earlier time there was a perfect history.”
¹⁵
Critics are seeking “an intellectual Camelot that never existed,” according to Dartmouth president James Freedman.
¹⁶
“Edenic” is the characterization of critics’ “diatribes” by Duke University Professor Stanley Fish.
¹⁷

The widespread use of such sweeping pronouncements in lieu of arguments raises a fundamental question: Is no policy to be judged by whether it makes matters better or worse, simply because its proponents arbitrarily choose to characterize its critics as believing in a golden age, Eden, perfection, or Camelot? This tactic is one of a number of ways of seeming to argue, without actually using any arguments. Misdirection has long been one of the skills of the professional magician. It is increasingly one of the skills of the professional educator.

THE SCHOOLS

The public schools’ responses to criticism have been both verbal and institutional. The verbal responses have been largely tactical, rather than substantive—typically blaming the short-comings
of the school on the problems of others or the demands of others.

The Problems of Others

Blaming social problems outside the school for academic shortcomings inside the school has become a common tactic of educators. Typical of this trend was the response of a California teacher who said, “the real culprit is the dramatically changing student population,” including “pistol-packing gang members, Third World immigrants,” and the like.
¹⁸

There is no question that serious social problems exist outside the schools and beyond their control. But the real question is whether such facts can account for the downward trends of the past generation. Gang violence, for example, no doubt takes its academic toll in many inner-city schools, but is that where the decline in test scores has been concentrated? Mexican American youngsters have in fact had small
increases
in their S.A.T. scores in recent years and black students have had even greater increases—all while the national average has been drifting downward.
¹⁹
As for immigrant children from the Third World, so many Vietnamese youngsters have excelled academically, become valedictorians and won prizes, that this is scarcely considered news anymore.

As noted in Chapter 1, the problem is not that more low scores from disadvantaged children are being averaged in, thereby bringing down the national average. On the contrary, there has been a sharp decline
at the top
in the number of high-scoring youngsters.

While the arguments of the education establishment will not stand up under scrutiny, the more fundamental and intractable problem is that they are not subjected to scrutiny in the first place, either by educators themselves or by those in the media who uncritically repeat and amplify their excuses.

The Demands of Others

Just as comedian Flip Wilson says, “The devil made me do it,” so education officials often say, in effect, “The public made me
do it,” when defending practices which are otherwise difficult to defend. Thus the intrusions of all sorts of non-academic material, activities, and programs into the public schools have been depicted as responsibilities loaded onto the school system by “society.” But this claim too will not stand up under scrutiny. Throughout most of the twentieth century, there has been an on-going tug-of-war between educators and laymen, with the National Education Association and other establishment groups pushing for the introduction of innumerable non-academic courses and programs into the public schools, while the laymen have attempted to promote a concentration on academic subjects.
²⁰
In recent times especially, the public is often kept uninformed, or is deliberately misled about such programs, precisely in order to avoid adverse public reactions to fashionable “innovations.”

Even a sympathetic writer, describing the introduction of a program called
Man: A Course of Study
into the Oregon public schools, found that education officials kept it as quiet as possible to avoid parental opposition, and even among those teachers who were themselves enthusiastic about teaching this curriculum, only 4 percent favored it on grounds that the students would like it.
²¹
Yet promoters of this program have depicted it as a course that will “permit children to gather data” and “formulate hypotheses” through cross-cultural comparisons.
²²
If one takes this seriously, a picture emerges of elementary school children demanding to “formulate hypotheses” in anthropology and to test these hypotheses against data graciously supplied by those willing to “permit” them to do so.

This picture of such spontaneous desires hardly fits the facts. Like other programs such as “Quest,”
Man: A Course of Study
was heavily promoted nationwide. The National Science Foundation spent at least $200,000 annually “to hold promotion conferences for school decision-makers and officials, to lobby them to buy the program.” This was in addition to millions of dollars in federal money spent to develop the program in the first place and “NSF grants to train teachers in the MACOS philosophy and pedagogy.”
²³
As with so many other claims by educators to be responding to public demand, this claim was a phoney, used to disguise the self-interest of promoters and brainwashers.

A “death education” curriculum has likewise been defended as a way to “help students learn about the function of funerals and the funeral director in our society.”
²⁴
Again, it is pictured as if students want to do this, and the teacher is just trying to help, like a good Samaritan. Moreover, the theme of meeting an unmet need is reinforced by the sentence introducing a chapter in a textbook for this psychological curriculum: “Death and dying are often considered to be taboo areas for discussion in our society.”
²⁵
Like so much else that is arbitrarily assumed in the field of education, the assumption that death was not commonly discussed before in schools turns out, upon investigation, to be utterly false.