Third World America (14 page)

Historically education has been the great equalizer. The path to success. The springboard to the middle class—and beyond. It was a promise we made to our people. A birthright we bestowed on each succeeding generation: the chance to learn, to improve their minds, and, as a result, their lives. But something has gone terribly wrong—and we’ve slipped further and further behind.

Among thirty developed countries ranked by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, the United States ranked twenty-fifth in math and twenty-first in science.
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Even the top 10 percent of American students, our best and brightest, ranked only twenty-fourth in the world in math literacy.
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A National Assessment of Educational Progress report found that just 33 percent of U.S. fourth graders and 32 percent of eighth graders were “proficient” in reading—while 33 percent of fourth graders and 25 percent of eighth graders performed below a “basic” level of reading.
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In 2001, amid much fanfare, the D.C. establishment passed No Child Left Behind, shook hands, patted one another on the backs, and checked education reform off their to-do lists.
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But it turned out to be reform in name only.
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Despite a goal of 100 percent proficiency in reading and math, eight years later we are not even close. In Alabama, only 20 percent of eighth graders are proficient in math. In California, it’s just 23 percent. In New York, it’s 34 percent.

“Education,” said President Obama during his May 2010
commencement address at Hampton University, “is what has always allowed us to meet the challenges of a changing world.”
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But he made it clear that the bar for meeting those challenges has been raised, and that a high school diploma—formerly, in the president’s words, “a ticket into a solid middle-class life”—is no longer enough to compete in what he called the “knowledge economy.”

“Jobs today often require at least a bachelor’s degree,” he said, “and that degree is even more important in tough times like these.
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In fact, the unemployment rate for folks who’ve never gone to college is over twice as high as for folks with a college degree or more.”

But rather than rising “to meet the challenges of a changing world,” we’re taking a tumble.
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Our high schools have become dropout factories. We have one of the lowest graduation rates in the industrialized world: Over 30 percent of American high school students fail to leave with a diploma. And even those who do graduate are often unprepared for college.
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The American College Testing Program, which develops the ACT college admissions test, says that fewer than one in four of those taking the test met its college readiness benchmark in all four subjects: English, reading, math, and science. And among those who are qualified, many are having trouble making the payments necessitated by large tuition increases.

University of California–Davis honors student Rajiv Narayan was raised in a two-income, solidly middle-class family. But shortly after he started college, his family’s financial security was upended when both of his parents lost their jobs, driving their family income down from $90,000 to $30,000 per year. “Initially, I did not worry too much over my financial situation,”
he says. “I work hard, my grades are high, and from my understanding, FAFSA [the Free Application for Federal Student Aid] and the California grant system are designed to support good students from low-income backgrounds.”

But the university’s aid programs, it turned out, weren’t flexible enough to accommodate his family’s abrupt and radical change in financial circumstances. “For me to receive more aid, my parents would have to be unemployed for two years,” he explained. Instead, the amount his family was expected to contribute toward his tuition jumped from $17,000 to $27,000. Set on finishing his degree, Rajiv applied for more loans and trimmed his expenses, budgeting just $18 per week for groceries, while his brother—who graduated from the University of California–Berkeley with about $80,000 in loans—took on a third job to help him cover the increased costs. “It appears I’m being punished for my new financial hardship,” he says.

To save money and avoid going into debt, UC Berkeley student Ramon Quintero moved into a motor home.
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“They increased tuition, they increased the rent,” he says. “But instead of giving you more grants, they give you more loans.”

Patsy Ramirez says she was able to go to the University of California–Riverside with the help of a $10,000 grant, paying for the rest of her tuition, her books, and her living expenses with a part-time job.
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But the grant program was cut, and without it, she couldn’t afford to continue college.

Amy Brisendine was a student at the University of California–Santa Barbara, studying to become a nurse.
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A 32 percent tuition increase in November 2009 forced her to drop out of college, and she now works five to six days a week waitressing and bartending at two restaurants. “I will try to finish my
education if and when the economy gets better,” she says, “but until then, I am continuing to work.”

So as education becomes more and more important, why are we allowing our future workforce to become less and less educated?

Academy Award–winning filmmaker Davis Guggenheim set out to find the answer. The result is his film
Waiting for Superman
(the phrase comes from one young student’s dream of being rescued by Superman).
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In it, he shows us the stories behind the statistics and exposes the bloody battlefield America’s education system has become. The many opposing forces are deeply entrenched behind decades-old Maginot Lines—and our children are getting caught in the crossfire.

Guggenheim isn’t afraid to point fingers. From politicians who pay lip service to education reform but never manage to change a thing to school boards and bureaucrats more concerned with protecting their turf than educating our kids, there is plenty of blame to go around. He turns a particularly withering spotlight on America’s teachers’ unions—which have gone from improving pay and working conditions for teachers to thwarting real reform and innovation and protecting incompetent teachers from being fired.

Guggenheim is not anti-teacher.
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Indeed, he sees good teachers as true heroes. In 2001, he made
The First Year
, a powerful look at a group of inspiring teachers battling to overcome soul-sapping obstacles to teach our children—particularly those in inner-city classrooms. But his new film shows how it’s become next to impossible to get rid of bad or indifferent teachers.

By way of example, he cites the state of Illinois, which has 876 school districts.
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Of those, only 38 have ever successfully fired an incompetent teacher with tenure. “Compare that to
other professions,” says Guggenheim in the film’s narration. “For doctors, one in fifty-seven lose their medical licenses. One in ninety-seven attorneys lose their law licenses. But for teachers, only one in twenty-five hundred has ever lost their teaching credentials.”

In New York, tenured teachers awaiting disciplinary hearings on offenses ranging from excessive lateness to sexual abuse—along with those accused of incompetence—are allowed to bide their time, sitting around reading or playing cards for seven hours a day, in places dubbed “Rubber Rooms,” while still collecting their full paycheck.
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On average, they remain in this well-paid limbo for over a year and a half—and some for three years or longer—costing the state $65 million a year.
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And, as Guggenheim points out, “None of this deals with the larger pool of teachers who just aren’t good at their jobs.”

This takes an enormous toll on the quality of the education America’s children receive. In the film, Stanford’s Eric Hanushek says if “we could just eliminate the bottom six to ten percent of our teachers and replace them with an average teacher, we could bring the average U.S. student up to the level of Finland, which is at the top of the world today.”
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The film charts the connection between the unions’ clout and their generous political giving.
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Between them, the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers have made nearly $58 million in federal political contributions since 1989. Andrew Coulson of the Cato Institute points out that this is “roughly as much as Chevron, Exxon Mobil, the NRA, and Lockheed Martin combined.”
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According to Guggenheim, “Since 1971, educational spending in the U.S. has grown from $4,300 to more than $9,000 per
student—and that’s adjusted for inflation.” But while spending is way up, results are not.

Unlike repairing America’s roads, bridges, and dams, it will take more than just a massive infusion of dollars to fix our schools.
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Part of the problem is the system itself. Based on the Prussian educational model, which was designed to produce obedient soldiers and compliant citizens, the American version was a product of the Industrial Revolution—designed to ensure a pool of pliant, homogenized worker bees.
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Our schools were factories to produce factory workers, an assembly line to produce assembly-line drones. But this one-size-fits-all model is grotesquely out of step with the creativity and problem solving our modern age requires.

Plus, as President Obama pointed out, society’s demands are different than they used to be.
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In the 1950s, only 20 percent of high school graduates were expected to go to college. Another 20 percent were meant to go straight into skilled jobs, such as accounting or middle management.
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The remaining 60 percent would become factory workers or go back to work on their farms. “The problem is,” says Guggenheim, “our schools haven’t changed—but the world around them has.”
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Once again, it’s a question of priorities.
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Just look at the explosion of spending on America’s jails over the past twenty years. During that time, new prisons have been popping up at a rate even McDonald’s would envy—and the number of people living behind bars has tripled, to more than two million.
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In fact, America has more people living behind bars than any other country.
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Sadly, in that prison population are close to 150,000 children.
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With their high dropout rates, too many of America’s schools have become preparatory facilities not for college but
for jail. Time after time, when the choice has come down to books versus bars, our political leaders have chosen to build bigger prisons rather than figure out how to send fewer kids to them. How is it that we are willing to spend so much more on kids
after
they are found guilty of crimes than we are when they could really use the help?

In the end, the blame for the chronic inability to fix our educational system has to be laid at the feet of our leaders in Washington. As predictably as a school bell, every election season our candidates promise to transform our schools—and, just as predictably, they fail to do so.

George W. Bush signed No Child Left Behind into law—but despite its passage, millions and millions of schoolkids have been left behind.

Bill Clinton started his second term vowing, “My number one priority for the next four years is to ensure that all Americans have the best education in the world.”
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But as of 1999, America’s eighth graders ranked nineteenth in the world in math and eighteenth in science.
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We saw a similar pattern with George W’s father, who promised to “revolutionize America’s schools.” “By the year 2000,” Bush 41 vowed in his 1990 State of the Union address, “U.S. students must be the first in the world in math and science achievement.
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Every American adult must be a skilled, literate worker and citizen.… The nation will not accept anything less than excellence in education.” But 2000 arrived, and out of twenty-seven nations, the United States ranked eighteenth in mathematics, fourteenth in science, and fifteenth in reading literacy.
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Far from accepting nothing less than excellence, we’ve grown accustomed to our educational system’s persistent failure,
content to point out the occasional jewel spotted amid the dung: a marvelous charter school here, a high-performing inner-city academy there. We’ve allowed that old Washington motto to carry the day: “If it’s broke, don’t fix it.”

But if we are to survive—and avoid turning into Third World America—it’s essential that we make it easier for creativity and fresh thinking to flourish in our classrooms. We need to start looking at things in bold and different ways.

What Abraham Lincoln said in his second annual address to Congress in 1862 applies powerfully to today’s educational crisis: “The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present.… As our case is new, so we must think anew and act anew.”
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And when it comes to saving our children—and our future—there is not a moment to waste.