SAVING AMERICAN SCHOOLS

In a free economy, people get the market they deserve. In a democracy, they get the government and the public institutions they deserve. In either case, that's not necessarily the market, or the government, or the institutions, they want.

In the USA, we get the schools we deserve. We've been worrying about that since at least Brown vs. Board of Education and the advent of Sputnik 50 years ago. And well before that, John Dewey and the progressive education movement made us question what we wanted from our schools.

What we have today appears to be the worst of both worlds. We have eliminated recess. We are making 3-year-olds attend school for 7 or more hours a day, and carry backpacks half the size of the children themselves. By the time they are in high school, most youngsters start school well before 8 AM, get home from after-school activities at 5, and do homework until late into the night.

But despite a workload that would make even American adults feel overworked, nearly half of all children of color do not graduate. The students, of all racial backgrounds, who do graduate, are as likely as not to have to take remedial writing and math in college. If there were remedial history classes, more than half our college students would need those too--we just don't think history is important enough to rate "remediation."

Simultaneously, we decry the inadequacies of our schools and demand that our children spend ever more time in them--like the irate restaurant patron complaining that the food is terrible and the servings are too small.

We want our children to have the standard of living we now enjoy, and we know that they can't do it with the same kind of education we had. In today's "information economy," they have to know a lot more than their parents ever did just to stay even with them. But we can't imagine how to operate schools that will teach those needed skills to all the young people who need them.

As Bill Gates and the experts he listens to are telling us repeatedly, the real problem happens in high school. We're actually doing a pretty good job with preschool, kindergarten, and elementary school, and a reasonably decent job in college. Until puberty rears its ugly head, our schools are at least in the running with those of Europe and Japan. And then, chaos takes over.

Some basic axioms:

1) what most people graduate from high school knowing shouldn't take 12 years to learn. In fact, a case can be made that many students actually lose ground in high school, and come out knowing less than they did in the 8th grade. In my own experience as a college English composition teacher, in both remedial and non-remedial courses, I have found myself teaching 5th-grade grammar and spelling over and over again. In many of the schools where I taught, my superiors told me not to bother--just give up on grammar and go on to the finer points of writing. This is like giving up on teaching a baby to walk, and going on to the finer points of the marathon. Nonetheless, our adult workplaces are now full of people whose education has followed this direction, with the predictable dreadful results.

2) Many people see high school as the place where children learn to become social adults. That's often true, but it's also even scarier than teaching composition to people who don't know grammar. The adults who became who they are in high school are usually those who never went on to college and will never go on to a career that can support a family. The "social skills" they learn in high school mostly involve either bullying or submission to bullying, casual sex, substance abuse, eating disorders, cheating, and assiduous avoidance of work.

3) The skills children will actually need in the adult world, they will almost never acquire in high school. The luckier and more affluent kids will learn from their parents, or some other adult role model in the family or at school, how to envision and plan for a future, defer gratification, pick up useful information wherever it is to be found, manage money, and stay out of trouble. The rest of the generation will learn either by accident along the way, or not at all.

How could we improve this system? Why not use the mostly-wasted four years of high school to teach the things kids so desperately need:

• money management and financial planning
• some marketable entry-level skills
• ethics, including sexual ethics

and set up a context in which these things can actually be learned, by

• separating the sexes
• providing apprenticeships
• abolishing intermural team sports.

Graduates of such a system will be able to support themselves while going to college to prepare themselves for careers. The colleges will be teaching pretty much what they teach now, but probably will need considerably fewer remedial courses. (Right now, the first two years in most US colleges are at best a rerun of the last two years of US high school. The difference between good colleges and mediocre colleges is that the former repeat the last two years of good high schools and the latter repeat the last two years of mediocre high schools. The only way to achieve a net gain for the high school graduate would be to send graduates of mediocre high schools into good colleges and graduates of good high schools into the third year of good colleges. Given the socioeconomic class system in this country, the former is not going to happen, though the latter happens increasingly often through Advanced Placement courses.)

Yet another suggestion that might improve the college experience and the life that follows it would be to limit college admissions to people over 21 (and certified child prodigies.) Thus, college administrators would no longer have to function in loco parentis, the issues related to underage drinking would vanish, and the students and administrators could quit fighting each other and get on with real education.

That, of course, leaves a 3- or 4-year gap between high school and college. In Israel, that's when kids join the army. I'm not suggesting a draft, but some sort of program of civic apprenticeship, whether military or civilian, might work. The various proposals for compulsory national service that get floated in Congress periodically are basically a poorly-concealed scheme for union-busting in the public sector. But there are plenty of entry-level jobs in the public sector already which could be filled by high school graduates who need to try their wings.

Yet another possibility for the use of this gap might be early marriage and childbearing. If women could bear their children, and get them out of diapers and into preschool, before college, they would be able to begin their careers after graduation at the same starting point as their male agemates, and not have to take any time out of the workforce after that. This could conceivably eliminate or at least reduce the earnings gap between the sexes. It would also reduce the biological problems now resulting from delayed childbearing, such as infertility.

But probably the greatest benefit would be that high school graduates would enter college with a serious desire to learn what colleges are prepared to teach them. Having already had a taste of the working world for people without degrees, they would be prepared to buckle down to gain real-world skills and credentials.

Right now our school system is up for grabs. If we are ever going to uproot and replant, this is the time. Good luck to all of us.