Teach the Best and Stomp the Rest: The American Schools...Guilty as Charged?

By William C. Knaak and Jean T. Knaak

This book is an experienced analysis of the failures of American schools to provide learning for a majority of its students including those known as the forgotten halfand the reasons for those failures. It explores who is being educated, and what is known about learning in terms of prerequisites, brain differences and cultures. The book describes the failed initiatives of more money, class size reduction, school choice, magnet schools, vouchers, and merit pay for teachers. Charter schools dont cut it for a majority of our children. No Child Left Behind (NCLB) and Race To the Top (RTT) are expensive, unmitigated disasters.

The American schools have mostly missed the promise of change and technology and are now engaged in massive fallacious testing, resulting in little benefit to the nation and significant harm to the children. Outrageously priced Higher Education has little to offer to improve the national education malaise, and lumbers on in its dismal, disorderly state. However, American schools in their INNOCENCE are a product of and restricted by their governmental, economic, civic, and ecologic environment. As described in the closure of the book, The Future, the major structural changes needed to re-create our national learning system have overrun national planning and thinking capacity. Fortunately, there are promising patterns of change in progress.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Trafford Publishing
• Release date: May 15, 2013
• ISBN: 9781466988644

William C. Knaak

William C. Knaak was the founding superintendent of the 916 AVTI, an international leader in individualized, competency and computer-based education. The systems and instructional materials are still used broadly internationally. Dr. Knaak has been a high school teacher, superintendent, associate professor at the University of Minnesota, and a conference speaker on education, futurism and environment. He has been an international consultant in technical training, curriculum, and evaluation, working in Jamaica, Honduras, Sudan, Zimbabwe, South Africa, Egypt, Iran, People’s Republic of China, Jordan, Venezuela, Canada, Mexico, Tanzania and Korea and travelled informally in many other countries. He has authored two previous books and many professional articles. Dr. Knaak is a graduate of the University of Minnesota with a PhD in Education. He has a rural Minnesota background, and is still a tree farmer. Jean T. Knaak has been a high school teacher and director of a 13 school district cooperative center. She is a small business owner and corporate president. She earned a PhD in Education from the University of Minnesota, and has been President of the 55,000 member American Vocational Association (now ACTE). Appointed by the U.S. President to the National Advisory Council on Vocational-Technical Education she served as Vice-Chair. Dr. Jean Knaak has organized and managed education and curriculum development projects in a number of countries including Honduras, Zimbabwe, South Africa, Jamaica, Mexico, and China. She has travelled informally in numerous other countries. She has served as an officer and conference leader for several professional organizations.

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© Copyright 2013 William C. Knaak and Jean T. Knaak.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the written prior permission of the author.

Cartoons by: James E. Zaiser

Design and editorial assistance: Barbara Lyman, Alternative Designs

ISBN: 978-1-4669-8863-7 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4669-8862-0 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4669-8864-4 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2013905867

1. American schools.

2. Charter schools.

3. Vouchers.

4. School choice.

5. High stakes testing.

6. Racial learning gap

Trafford rev. 05/09/2013

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Contents

Introduction

About the Book

Chapter I: The Failure to Educate

Chapter II. Who Gets Educated? The Chosen—Not the Damned

Chapter III: What is Now Known about Schools and Human Learning

A. Innocence.

B. All Can Learn

C. Blockers to Learning

D. Failed Initiatives.

Chapter IV. Missing the Promise of Change and Technology

Chapter V. The Fossilization of Fallacious Testing

Chapter VI. The Dismal Disorderly Disintegration of Higher Education

A. Higher Education

B. Research in Education—Fraud or Fantasy?

C. Teacher Training—Preserve The Bubble At All Costs.

Chapter VII. The Reluctant Conspiracy

Chapter VIII. The Future

References

Introduction

The Greater Grand Jury of the people of the United States is in on the case of the American Schools. Sixty years of research as well as testimony from parents, employers, post-secondary institutions, national and state governments, mainstream media and the military has produced conclusive, damaging evidence. The weight of this evidence has led to the following indictments:

1.   The American schools have failed to educate a substantial majority of the children and youth of this country. These youth have not learned enough upon leaving school or graduation to perform adequately in work, in post-secondary education or the military.

2.   The failure of the schools to produce learning for a satisfying and productive life is primarily due to the learning conditions in the schools. Students in America do arrive at school with differences due to inherited learning abilities, home conditions, race, sexual orientation, motivation, self-esteem, and English language ability. All of these factors can introduce temporary blockers to learning, but nearly all of these blockers can be overcome or modified to educate an effective citizen.

3.   These school learning conditions are a major cause of emotional illnesses and lawlessness for many of our troubled youth. Learning conditions in American schools often produce repeated failure for a majority of students. Repeated failure over which a student has little or no control leads to a host of behavioral problems, learning problems, and sometimes to crime and suicide.

4.   The results of schools’ failure to educate have fallen unequally upon the population of this country. It is clear that a considerable burden of the failure to educate has fallen on children who are not academic learners, on racial minorities, and on recent immigrants. Fifty years of assorted, expensive educational treatments have not relieved this burden in any meaningful way.

5.   The schools continuing failure to educate its majority student population is a strong factor in the increased widening of the earnings gap between the most highly paid and middle-income workers in this country. This is an explosive social issue not readily solvable through government initiated tax or welfare policy.

6.   The school’s failure to educate the majority has dumped an enormous burden on the American military and American employers in all walks of employment including: industry, commerce, and government. In 2012, American wars were being fought by soldiers who are several cuts above the current average high school output, of whom, as reported by the military, 80% are not educationally or physically competent for military service. We now depend on: the voluntary military (many of whom are recruited with college incentives), the deployment of the nation’s Reserves and National Guard, and private security forces. This higher cut draw is from well-educated skilled workers who are important for a prosperous U.S. economy. This draw has, in turn, accelerated the shifting of professional and high skill jobs overseas by American global industry in order to remain afloat in the global market.

7.   Because of largely unresolved issues of impotence in the face of other forces: tradition, innocence, self-interest, ego, and others, American Schools have failed to respond to compelling evidence that most of its students (perhaps 95%) can learn most things that are important to know for a satisfying and prosperous life. They can learn these things at the same level of competence now claimed by the academic top third of school learners.

8.   These indictments are handed down individually and collectively on all elements that are involved in American school learning conditions, public and private. Some of these elements are identified as The Reluctant Conspiracy. However, the indictment is broader in scope, including the lack of national governance and guidance for American education. The indictment also includes public attitudes in America about economics and ecology as well as education. In INNOCENCE, in the first decade of the 21st Century, popular opinion, exacerbated by the mainstream media, has unfairly dumped a major part of the blame for the failures of the American schools on their teachers and their unions. They share, but only share, the failure indictment with the other conspirators.

American schools, as they have existed and will continue to exist, are a product of their governmental and civic environment. Children develop in the world they inhabit, not in a school cocoon. Schools and children separate or together cannot be malleableized as a singular entity, up or down. A Constitution, a Supreme Court, a President and a Congress as a national entity that does not and is not expected to provide equality mandates about: household income, education of parents, poverty rates, children born out of wedlock, health care coverage, school spending, academic learning genes, and equal media representation, cannot fairly expect they can mandate the schools, as a singular entity, to produce equal outcomes in all phases of learning for all children and youth in America.

About the Book

The purposes of this book are to emancipate and elevate the forgotten half of our students in American schools, and to energize and enhance our Chosen students. The authors do not pretend these are easy tasks.

The term forgotten half was popularized after the reports of the Goodlad Studies and the National Commission on Excellence in the early 1980’s described American schooling as something of a disaster. The A Nation at Risk report described schooling as providing appropriate education for something less than half of the nation’s children, with the remainder short-changed and ill-prepared for jobs and effective citizenship. (A Nation at Risk, 1983) Other studies of that time and into the present, indicate that the percentage of the forgotten is closer to two-thirds, and hasn’t changed very much since. Continued diminution of this forgotten human resource over past years and to the present may be a major contributor to our nation’s economic and social problems in 2013.

Our Chosen students in American schools receive a good to excellent education as described in Chapter II, and many enhancement programs for the Chosen are already in place or planned. But they are handicapped by a national lack of focus. These students can learn and contribute much more than they currently are doing.

In setting a tone, Chapter I: The Failure to Educate lays out an accumulation of the curses that have been laid-on American schools from 1980 into 2013. No attempt to either categorize or evaluate the integrity of any of these quotations is made, except to say that some were likely unfair or biased. But, there is no compensating array of plaudits for the American schools. The few plaudits that exist are mostly defensive in character and do not deal with the main issues of this book. One purpose of Chapter I is to illustrate the overwhelmedness of displeasure directed at American schools over a period of time. In writing about the American schools the term public schools is not used for two reasons. First, the private and parochial-private elementary and secondary schools make up something less that 10% of the overall school population, and these schools mostly have a choice as to whether they enter any research or effectiveness studies. Many, if not most, do not. Charter schools, in general, are in this private category but most have public financial support. Second, in the limited studies of private education, or in company with public education, it is seldom clear if they are really open enrollment, or if they have selective intake and non-governed expulsion of students.

The use of the word American and America to represent the nation and schools of the United States of America is a tip of the hat to common usage and clarity. It simply makes it easier to not have to translate quotes from other writers back to the USA vernacular. We acknowledge the claims of all of the many countries to the name of the Italian merchant, adventurer, and explorer Amerigo Vespucci, for whom (arguably) the entire western hemisphere was named.

Chapter II: Who Gets Educated? describes the processes (as they pulsated over an historical time line) by which teaching the best while stomping the rest gets played out in the operation of the American schools.

The issues of ability tracking of arbitrary categories of high school students are explored through two World Wars, and into the post WWII G.I. Bill. But, the issue really goes back to separation of children into bluebirds, cardinals and canaries in the second grade.

In Chapter II, the tenor of the book slips from prosecutor to defense attorney. (Author William C. Knaak authored an earlier book on Tort Liability in School Districts). Teach the Best and Stomp the Rest is basically a non-attacking book. Starting with our founders and with tracking advocates, it is clear that in decision-making about education, intentions were often good. The perpetrators of failed policies and promotions were often INNOCENT in understanding of the then and future impact of their decisions. If you are religious you can say, Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do. If you are not religious, you can call them no-fault decisions. The INNOCENCE theme is often used throughout the remainder of this book.

Chapter III identifies, from our perspective, What is Now Known about schools and human learning. We expect to draw criticism from the old canon of European-based culture and the new canon of gender, sex, racial, and other equity issues. This book is not presented as, or intended to be, a research report. Rather it is a presentation and discussion of critical issues regarding the status of learning and schooling in America over the past seventy years to 2013. The book includes current columnist’s writings and news items as well as juried studies from the formal research sector. To that we add nearly 100 years of body learning, and experienced observation in teaching, learning and multiple other facets of education. Maintaining a flow of readability in these complex issues while giving proper credit to the studies, writings, and ideas of others is not an easy task, and we plead for tolerance on that account. The book identifies sources and provides references for further study.

Chapter III leads off with the INNOCENCE factor. In trying to arrive at congruence in how learning should be designed and managed today, it is quite useless to point fingers at our forbearers or school and political leaders of even a decade ago as to what they should have believed or known, much less those of the previous sixty years. Most people simply did the best they could with what they had or believed at the time. Today, many folks still live with the inability to translate meaningful educational policy from current facts available. Some are less INNOCENT than others, but, as discussed later, the human brain works with many influences other than facts.

Chapter III than takes up the matter of All Can Learn, which is a well-known education reform cry, and the basis for the 2002 legislation, No Child Left Behind (NCLB). The chapter discusses the solid evidence behind the all can learn contention, and some of the evidential brain issues involved, and their limitations. The All Can Learn model is discussed further in the NCLB section of the book.

Chapter III then moves to Blockers to Learning which explores the issues of why all have not learned, some real and some imagined, digging deeply into matters of childhood development as preparation for learning, and issues of sex, modalities, time, race, parenting, and other cultures and diversions. Critics and editors of this book have said, This is too much, because the story has been told elsewhere. But telling the story will help potential readers, such as black minorities understand our awareness of at least a partial extent of their pain. This is critical background to The Future discussed in Chapter VIII.

As an integral piece of Chapter III deals with Failed Initiatives—more or less organized efforts to solve the problems of American schools. These initiatives include some of the current hot political buttons such as school choice, vouchers, charter schools, merit pay for teachers, No Child Left Behind, and Race to the Top. Some of these initiatives have had pieces of progress, some have had a few scintillations of success but are leading to significant sociological failures, and none are replicable as solutions to the more serious ineffectiveness problems of the American schools.

Chapter IV: Missing the Promise of Change and Technology is based on the impact that the accelerated pace of change and technological advances have had on international and national society as a whole, including education but apart from the toys of the classroom. These changes have had major impact (often unrealized) on how Americans internalize communication and information, especially as related to society, government, ecology, the economy and education. These changes often render obsolete or ineffectual educational reforms based on tinkering with existing antiquated classroom or teacher education structures.

Fallacious Testing as described in Chapter V is clearly one of those areas where technology has (INNOCENTLY) overrun human understanding of how children learn and how learning can be improved. Adults in all ranges of education and intelligence have had a technical fascination with how numbers from group centered testing can be manipulated on the computer to produce meaningless results. (Aside from testing students, bear witness to American Banking) This learning gap has detracted from the use of computers to test individual learning and provide new assisting learning modalities. Connecting international group testing results to a sluggish American economy is popular but has only remote basis in fact. Improper use of some kinds of testing with small children can be cruel, while neglecting and detracting from the skilled use of technology to improve the competence of children and adults in America.

In Chapter VI we discuss how the grandeur of American higher education, once a world model, has morphed into a very expensive non-entity beginning to have a negative effect on the nation in general, and specifically on elementary and secondary education in America. College Education in America is in absolute danger of joining the many other industries in the nation that have become over-priced and outsourced to other countries. Much of what is now called College may be transferred to more efficient and acceptable learning modalities in this country. The liberal education and cultural advantages of American Universities (which we used to understand as higher education) has been lost to internal wars of canons about what constitutes learning and culture. Community based cultural growth for a much broader population base is already under way and growing. Intellectual discourse is leaving the senior professors behind and has become the province of think tankers employed by private industry and foundations of sometimes-questionable bias. Those in college classes and some in high schools are increasingly taught by semi-skilled contingents or private contractors.

The Reluctant Conspiracy in Chapter VII is interconnected to a myriad of complexities. Mostly they function in INNOCENCE and good faith in their impact on school learning and learning conditions, public and private. In 2013 they are in a state of flux. No attempt is made to rank or classify the conspirators—that is left to the judgment of the reader. The word conspirator, as used here, is intended in the better definitional sense of the word—to unite to plan, to breath together, to contribute, or to contrive in producing a desired objective or deed. These conspirators do not deliberately plan to commit evil against American education, and especially not against children. But in cohort, and mostly in INNOCENCE, many, if not most, of their efforts have had little positive and often negative impact on effective schooling in America.

Chapter VIII The Future describes three ways people tend to look at the future: First, fatalistic—you go down a fast-flowing river with little control; Second, predictable—by futurists based on aggregating and analyzing trends; Third, controllable, in a process often referred to as management by constructive change. This chapter includes some of each of these future looks, but focuses on the third. It starts with a brief history, then description of the current scene, then a desired end, and finally how to get there.

The book recognizes that American education does not exist in a vacuum, or even function as an independent entity. Instead, it is strongly responsive to national entities and power structures of governance, economics, ecology, and sociology. Significant change in education does not happen without changes in the other structures. Hence, in describing a desired future for American education, we also describe desired futures for American ecology, American governance, and American financial economics. A constitutional convention may be necessary to make these changes.

Finally in INNOCENCE, we consider the national and international seemingly disruptive times of 2008 into 2013 as potentially implosive to the betterment of all of the peoples of this nation and the world. Great strides are being made in recent non-destructive neurological research using computers with increased sociological sensitivity in exploring how the human brain learns and functions. A series of emergent awakening patterns are described which will influence how Americans are accepting new knowledge and innovations to manage our governments, ecology and our learning.

Chapter I: The Failure to Educate

American schools, as they exist today, owe their structure or lack of structure to the founders of our Declaration of Independence and Constitution. In the founders’ deliberations the schools were unmentioned and essentially ignored, so the founders thereby abdicated any concept of a central purpose of public schools. Hence, there is no system of American education and schools, but rather a conglomerate that has largely grown ad hoc. Recorded history of the deliberations of the founders does not reveal much learned discussion about the issues, except a seemingly weary decision to leave it to the states. For many years leave it to the states was viewed as a wise decision on the part of the founders, and therefore it was often deemed illegal and unconstitutional for Congress to enact any laws regarding or to provide money for elementary and secondary education.

In considering the long-term wisdom of leaving education to the states, it is useful to remember that the same wise body also agreed to leave the issue of slavery to the states and allowed the slaves to be counted as 3/5 of a person for population representation in Congress. History suggests that it was the economy of the northern shipping industry as well as the use of slave labor on plantations that drove the leave it to the states decision. The founders also decided to allow only white male property owners to vote, and senators were elected by state legislators.

It took a terrible bloody civil war to retract the founders’ decision on slavery. But, the remnants of that decision dragged on through the Rosa Parks back of the bus decision and the Brown vs. the Topeka Board of Education school desegregation decision of 1954. Following the Brown decision, the southern states did everything they legally could to resist integration and opposed any federal aid that might undercut that effort. Meanwhile, northern liberals were insisting that white and black children be treated equally. A further impasse about federal participation in education developed with the issue of possible participation of the many Catholic schools in large cities. Influential liberal Democrats from those cities argued that funds for needy students should go to both private and public schools. Other liberal Democrats argued that there needed to be a clear separation between church and state and opposed any aid to private schools.

Later, Republicans were concerned about any effort to expand the federal role in education. They felt that increasing federal money in elementary and secondary schools would lead to a more intrusive role in educational policy and practice. The fear was a national control of the thought processes of children somewhat akin to the Nazi and Fascist influences in Europe and the Holy Emperor concept in Japan.

Given the deadlock, congressional advocates of increased federal spending for education were mostly stymied during the Eisenhower presidency. Even after John F. Kennedy won the presidency in 1961 and the Democrats controlled both houses of Congress, racial politics of the south and religious politics of the north blocked federal education spending.

However, American schools are indebted to their founders for the lack of structure of schools today. Most historians agree that the founders combined a lot of wisdom, and also that they were largely elitist in character in the better sense of the word as we use it today. And, that was likely true of the leaders in the colonies where schools and education were more for the privileged who could deal with abstract learning. The trades of the day and commercial skills were mostly learned through apprenticeship. The folks of that day simply did not know anything else. Having no other guidance and in their INNOCENCE, the people largely organized the schools of the country in the elitist model.

In brief, what may have started as an abdication on matters of education of our children has morphed into a host of highly charged emotional and political issues: of the benignity of the founders, states’ rights, local control, separation of church and state, treatment of minority races, women’s rights, sexual orientation, and bullies ad infinitum. None of these issues are directly related to the quality and educational outcomes of the American Schools.

As time progressed, with the early 1960’s following the economic rush of WWII, there seemed to be a sense in Congress and in some State Legislatures that American Schools (remaining mostly elitist) were not meeting the needs of either a majority of our children or our country.

Lyndon Johnson assumed the presidency after the assassination of John Kennedy in 1963. Re-elected in 1964 in a landslide, he pushed through landmark civil rights legislation followed by the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA). He announced his intention to enact programs that would construct a Great Society. After discussing civil rights, he declared: A third place to build the Great Society is in the classrooms of America. There your children’s lives will be shaped. Our society will not be great until every young mind is set free to scan the farthest of thought and imagination. Poverty must not be a bar to learning, and learning must offer an escape from poverty. In his INNOCENCE President Johnson simply did not understand the learning process, or the barriers to changing the American Schools.

In the 1970’s Americans began to embrace a concept that learning for many of their children was deficient, and that this was largely a fault of their schools.

Max Lerner summed it up in his syndicated column, The bleak facts are well-known. Since the 1960’s there has been a decline in the capacity of young Americans to read, write, reckon and reason. The present-day American armed forces are shockingly illiterate. An economy with an advanced technology finds itself having to communicate, at times, in comic book form. This is not a basis for a number one nation.

John Naisbitt said in Megatrends, The 1970’s were not the best years for the public school system, but rather may have been the system’s darkest hour. There was a widespread belief that the quality of education was declining mightily. (Naisbitt, 1982)

George Gallop reported that in 1974, 48% of the public gave schools an A or B rating. In 1980 only 36% gave the schools those grades.

The National Home Education Research Institute estimated that two million children are currently home schooled.

A massive study entitled A Study of Schooling was directed by John Goodlad, former dean of the Graduate School of Education at the University of California at Los Angeles, and funded by several prestigious foundations. The study began in mid-l970, and involved more than 27,000 interviews conducted by 43 researchers in 13 communities. Goodlad discussed these studies in some detail in his 1984 book, A Place Called School. He summarized, American schools are in trouble. Large numbers of students are leaving school ill-prepared for jobs and effective citizenship, and even many of those who appear to be making it are short-changed. (Goodlad, 1984)

In 1981 President Reagan appointed Terrell Bell of Colorado as Secretary of Education. Secretary Bell appointed a National Commission on Excellence in Education to examine American schooling. In urgent, bold language its report A Nation at Risk described American schooling as something of a disaster, providing appropriate education for less than half of the nation’s children. Several other studies confirmed this analysis, and it received considerable media attention. The underserved portions of the school population were widely labeled as the forgotten half. The report, published in 1983, stated that the failure of the schools had placed the nation at risk.

In an Open Letter to the American People the Commission said that America’s economic, cultural, and spiritual role in the world is being threatened by the lax standards and misguided priorities in the schools. The educational foundations of our society are being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a nation and as a people. If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war. As it stands, we have allowed this to happen to ourselves.

The report identified the following as Indicators of Risk:

•   International comparisons of student achievement revealed that on 19 academic tests American students were never first or second and in comparison with other industrialized nations, and were last seven times.

•   Some 23 million American adults are functionally illiterate by the simplest tests of everyday reading, writing, and comprehension.

•   About 13% of all 17-24 year olds in the United States can be considered functionally illiterate. Functional illiteracy among minority youth may run as high as 40%.

•   Average achievement of high school students on most standardized tests is now lower than 26 years ago when Sputnik was launched.

•   Over half the population of gifted students does not match their ability with comparable achievement in school.

•   The College Board’s Scholastic Aptitude Tests (SAT) demonstrate a virtually unbroken decline from 1963 to 1980. Average verbal scores dropped over 50 points and average mathematics scores dropped nearly 40 points.

•   College Board’s achievement tests also reveal consistent declines in recent years in such subjects as physics and English.

•   Both the number and proportion of students demonstrating superior achievement on the SATs (i.e., those with scores of 650 or higher) have also dramatically declined.

•   Many 17-year-olds do not possess the higher order intellectual skills we should expect of them. Nearly 40% cannot draw inferences from written material; only one-fifth can write a persuasive essay; and only one third can solve a mathematics problem requiring several steps.

•   There was a steady decline in science achievement scores of U.S. 17-year-olds as measured by national assessments of science in 1969, 1973, and 1977.

•   Between 1975 and 1980, remedial mathematics courses in public four-year colleges increased by 72% and now constitute one-quarter of all mathematics courses taught in those institutions.

•   Average tested achievement of students graduating from college is also lower.

•   Business and industrial leaders complain that they are required to spend millions of dollars on costly remedial education and training programs in such basic skills as reading, writing, spelling and computation.

•   The Department of the Navy, for example, reported to the Commission that one quarter of its recent recruits cannot read at the ninth grade level, the minimum needed to understand written safety instructions. Without remedial work they cannot begin, much less complete the sophisticated training essential in much of the modern military.

The report also suggested a long list of proposed reforms of the existing public schools, with greatly increased federal expenditures for education.

The late Al Shanker, then President of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), and an early advocate of education reform said, The phrase, ‘A Nation at Risk’ puts education on the same par as national defense. A nation at risk means that a country can go down. It can disappear. We may be willing to spend a lot of money to make a lot of changes, but, you know, it is hopeless, because we come up against inflexible unions, school boards and administrators. If leaders of government and industry, after having vested time, effort and prestige on programs to rebuild American education find their efforts frustrated, there is no question about where the tilt of the public will go. There will be a massive move to try something else, and it will all be over. And so it has been.

A Nation at Risk initiated a new focus on outcomes and standards, but it also stirred choice-based reform efforts. Out of these stirrings came school vouchers in private and public schools, magnet schools, charter schools, and, exponentially, more home schooling. New York City had so many students applying for charter school admission that they had to set up a lottery system. They also passed a law requiring them to be unionized after two years of existence. Minnesota, which enacted the first charter school law in 1991, reported a 2007-2008 enrollment increase in charter schools of 4,000 students, the largest since charters began in 1991.

Since 2001-02, enrollment in charter schools in Minnesota has steadily increased and there followed a call for the reform of charter schools. None of these alternative choices have given evidence of solving the American school problem, but the thrust to depart from American schools, as we knew them, continues unabated.

But nothing much has happened to suggest that the pressure of alternatives has affected the structure or effectiveness of the traditional American schools. President Reagan was not impressed with the prospective costs of reform, and simply proposed more tax credits for private school attendance in his education initiative. His administration proposed eliminating the U.S. Department of Education, and sent previously authorized and dedicated federal funds out to the states in block grants, essentially letting the states decide how and if they wanted to reform education, and how and if they would manage to fund the reforms.

Present Reagan understood neither the complexities of school learning nor the barriers to changing the American Schools.

George H. W. Bush announced he wanted to be known as The Education President. He assembled the nation’s governors in a first-ever summit on education. Working with the National Governor’s Association his administration developed six national goals that he announced in his 1990 state of the union address. The agendas stated a goal that by the year 2000 all children would start school ready to learn and that there would be a national high school graduation rate of 90%. He named his package of proposals America 2000. Federal funding continued in block grants.

Bill Clinton’s wife, Hillary, served on the national commission created by then Education Secretary Terrell Bell, which created the A Nation at Risk report. This same report generated the expression the forgotten half, to describe the underserved population of the American schools. This report concluded, As these young Americans navigate the passage from youth to adulthood, far too many flounder. Their lives as adults start in the economic limbo of unemployment, part-time jobs, and poverty wages. Many of them never break free. It is also useful to remember that 80% of the forgotten 50% are white.

Clinton cited this report frequently in his campaign, and again at his economic summit in Little Rock. His transition team developed a proposal to create 300,000 youth apprenticeships—at an estimated cost of $1 billion over four years. In the proposal, on-the-job work experience would be combined with the last two years of high school and two years of additional postsecondary education. It was loosely patterned after programs in Europe, especially Germany, whose apprenticeships have been, and are widely respected as the most effective vocational education in the world.

The apprenticeship proposal was encouraged by industry leaders. They were concerned about international competition from competitors such as Germany and Japan—who do a better job than the United States in preparing most young people—not just the academically talented—to enter skilled jobs in a technologically oriented economy.

But the planned apprenticeship surge got lost in the political shuffles. When Bill Clinton took office in 1993 he labeled his education initiative Goals 2000. Most of us could not see much difference from Bush’s America 2000, but the Clinton administration regarded the reauthorization of ESEA as a strong break from earlier revisions. It required that states create performance-based accountability systems for schools by the year 2000. With no meaningful federal enforcement, it was largely ignored, and those states that responded did so with toothless laws and rules for local districts.

In preparation for the 1999 reauthorization of ESEA, the Clinton administration prepared proposals to streamline funding and strengthen standards and accountability. Conservative Republicans, ever mindful of local control, offered their own proposal, Academic Achievement for All Act (Straight A’s). It mainly consisted of putting the federal aid money into block grants for the states without federal guidance. Both the Democratic and Republican proposals died without action.

Presidents George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton understood neither the complexities of school learning, nor the barriers to changing the American schools.

President George W. Bush campaigned on results of allegedly successful school reform in Texas where he had been governor. Like his father, he aspired to be an education president and was reading to a third grade class in Florida when the terrorists struck the towers on 09/11/2001. His choice for Education Secretary was Clarence Paige, who had been a reform advocate as Superintendent of the Houston, Texas school district. President Bush’s initial education charge was a sparse document entitled No Child Left Behind with four simplistic principles: A) increase accountability for student performance, B) focus on what works, C) reduce bureaucracy and increase flexibility, and D) empower parents. This was passed on to Congress and eventually emerged as the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB). The Act, in the form of a re-authorization of the ESEA was passed with strong support from both chambers of Congress and both parties. Despite its awesome beginning, NCLB has not improved education for the vast majority of Americans and in 2012 was responsible for several negative impacts on American education. NCLB is discussed in detail in Chapter III D as a failed initiative.

President G. W. Bush simply did not fully understand the complexities of school learning, nor the states’ rights complexities and other barriers to changing American schools.

President Barack Obama did not bring to the presidency the experience of the more usual cauldron of the American elementary and secondary schools. He started in a Catholic Elementary School whose nuns are known to be rigorous in teaching basic skills. His later years in elite elementary, secondary and collegiate institutions honed a natural talent for abstract learning. There was no nonchalance in his home about learning. His mother reportedly woke him at 4:30 a.m. before school to tutor him. When he complained, she would say, to wit, This is not a picnic for me either, Buster.

President Obama’s campaign did not reflect any hope for designed structural changes in American Schools. He alternately flipped from: telling teachers how wonderful and important they are (and who could disagree) and deserving of more money, to petulant support for charter schools (so long as they use proper data to measure results), and giving money to the states with more rigorous standards (despite evidence that shows this usually increases dropout rates). He would allow money for merit pay for teachers (only if real results could be measured), and advocate a longer school year (at any cost based on proportionately extended nine-month teacher contracts, and over parent objections). Utilizing recession-based stimulus funds President Obama and his Education Secretary Arne Duncan promulgated a $4.3 billion Race to the Top educational extravaganza discussed in more detail in Chapter III under failed initiatives.

In brief, other than holding on to NCLB concepts of assessing data, the President’s proposals for reform of NCLB and those coming from congressional education committees are really a change-back to processes and procedures that have already been tried and defeated multiple times over many years. Given the severity of the situation, it is roughly equivalent to rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.

The jury is still out on whether President Obama really understands the complexities of school learning and or the barriers created by states’ rights and other barriers that are faced in trying to change American Education. And So the Criticism of the American Schools Continues.

At that time the 18,000 functionally obsolete school districts in the nation lurched on, a few with, but most without significant change. (The change processes being roughly equivalent to trying to simultaneously move 18,000 cemeteries).

The public comment, literature, and media have been replete over the years with critique of the American schools. Some of these, gathered from a throw file of quotations about education derived from conference addresses, periodicals, newspapers, books, TV programs, editorials and others follow. The use of this series of quotations from an informal collection is an attempt to illustrate the impact of a collage of opinions. It is hoped that some original sources may be tolerant if they are not totally identified in the process.

Education Commission of the States: In 1990, about two and a half million students would graduate from high school. The report stated that unless public education is improved, two million of them, or about 80% would be unemployable because they would be technologically illiterate.

Time Magazine ran a major magazine theme entitled Help! Teachers Can’t Teach, also carried in Reader’s Digest. They cited economist Milton Friedman standing before Boston’s Hyde Park High School as uniformed guards searched entering students for weapons. Friedman says, Parents know their kids are getting a bad education, but—many of them see no alternative.

Lou Dobbs: Writing about the 20th Anniversary of A Nation at Risk, referred to the report as one that shocked Americans with its negative depiction of this country’s school system. Still failing the grade since then, there has regrettably been little improvement. The reading proficiency of 17 year-olds actually dropped from 1990 to 1999, while their performance in math and science remained nearly stagnant.

Peter Incardone: The number of remedial readers in America’s secondary schools is at an all-time high. Nearly two out of every five students are reading below grade level.

Chester E. Finn, Jr., former Assistant Secretary of Education, wrote on the op-ed page of the Wall Street Journal, The public school system as we know it cannot reform itself. It is an ossified government monopoly that functions largely for the benefit of its employees and interest groups rather than that of children and taxpayers.

Economist/columnist Paul Krugman wrote in 2009, The economic crisis has placed huge additional stress on our creaking educational system. We need to wake up and realize that one of the keys to our nation’s success is now a wasting asset.

In Education USA, Jan 2009: Sadly, the odds of graduating from high school in 50 of America’s largest urban cities amounts to essentially, a coin toss. (Graduation rate for Afro-American students in the class of 1998 was 56 %).

Headline in Minneapolis Star-Tribune, July 2007: Math is up slightly, but reading is down a bit on the Minnesota Comprehensive tests. After last years’ steep declines, holding steady might be considered good news.

Associated Press: Student achievement is continuing a decline that began three years ago, the federal government said in releasing an annual state-by-state survey of educational achievement in the United States. Asked if the results, known as the annual wall chart could be condemned as horrible, the Education Secretary said, Yes, it is a terrible report. The executive director of the National Association of Secondary School Principals said, Young people are simply too complex to hang on a wall. The chart has as much to offer educational improvement as the Edsel offered the automotive industry.

Minneapolis Star-Tribune: (a) When it comes to teaching kids math, the Netherlands is eating our lunch. So is Japan, Hong Kong, Finland, New Zealand, Scotland and a host of other countries—Minnesota is going to be 10,000 scientists and engineers short. Anyone who doubts there is a problem with the American System has only one other explanation—our kids are stupider than those in the rest of the world. (b) We must stop lying to ourselves about our schools. An alarming number of kids are growing up dumb. The school system is nearing collapse; America is falling behind its competitors. We are short changing too many of our young people—and in the process we are damaging our nation’s future.

St Paul Pioneer Press: (a) Not so long ago employers thought all of their workers learned reading, ’riting, and ’rithmetic in the schools. Now they are finding that many of their employees need training in the fundamentals—remedial education. As a result, some Twin Cities businesses are starting to look like Little Red School Houses. We are talking about a big problem here. (b) Test scores are down for the second consecutive year. What’s more, lower ranking students are apparently not taking the tests, which means that lower scores are being made by top-ranking students. After all, Minnesotans are paying one of the highest tax rates in the nation to support public education. We seem to be getting less education for more money each year. Curriculum planning is a conceptual swamp. There is a lack of broad agreement among educators about what students need to know to be educated.

New York Times: Secretaries who can’t read and bookkeepers who can’t cope with fractions are among employees with academic shortcomings who cost U.S. businesses millions of dollars each year according to a survey conducted by the Center for Public Resources. Losses due to errors in inventory control, accounting and even correspondence impact significantly on product quality and corporate performance. More than 75% of those surveyed ‘reported’ the problem was so severe that they must collectively spend millions of dollars in remedial training for their employees each year.

Edward Rust, outspoken insurance executive and financial contributor writing on schools in USA Today: Throwing money at the worst schools only rewards poor performance and the focus must shift from inputs to outputs.

David T. Kearns, former chairman and CEO of XEROX Corp, quoted in Minneapolis Star and Tribune: Three out of four major corporations already are giving new workers basic reading, writing and arithmetic courses. Corporate training is bigger than our entire elementary, secondary and higher education systems put together. Corporations already spend billions every year on training—at XEROX $210 million in one year alone. It is a cost that I resent because when business does remedial teaching we are doing the schools’ product recall work for them.

Harold Stevenson, Professor and Author: American educators have spent their time tinkering with educational philosophies that have no hope of improving scores in math, reading and other subjects vital to the country’s future. Stevenson also debunked the claim that the best U.S. Students are as good as their best students. His research indicates, that the gap between the top 10% of American students and the best Asian students is about the same as the gap between the averages of each group. Eighty percent of the folks who write the complex manuals for American cars were recruited from the foreign born because the skills are not available here.

James Bovard, Washington author, writing in the Washington Monthly: Of course if the quality of teaching actually improved as the unions claim, all the agitation would not be so bad. But as it turned out, the same years that saw the triumph of teacher unions also were marked by a virtual collapse of public schools, student performance plummeted, academic standards declined, literacy eroded.

A "Message as published in the Wall Street Journal by United Technologies Corp. of Hartford, Conn: A University of Chicago study shows Russian high school students are ten times better educated in math and science than American students. While Ivan and Olga are waltzing through advanced calculus, Johnny and Suzy are stumbling over fractions. It is disgraceful that a time so crucial to our nation, many of our students aren’t even learning the basics."

Sam Dillion in the New York Times, 2008: Many states use inflated graduation rates for federal reporting under the NCLB Law, and different ones at home. Some researchers say that federal figures obscure a dropout epidemic so severe that only about 70% of the one million U.S. students who start ninth grade each year graduate four years later. Mississippi, for example, keeps a set of books that report an 87% graduation rate but use a lower rate of 67% to combat a dropout crisis. California sends Washington D.C. a graduation rate of 83%, but reports 67% on a state website. Delaware reports 84%, but publishes four different lower rates at home. The reporting disincentive is actually built into the law. Congress did not make dropouts a central focus of the law, and states were allowed to negotiate dozens of different ways to carry out the law. New Mexico defined its rate as the number of enrolled 12th graders who receive a diploma. This method ignores all students who leave before the 12th grade.

Life Magazine: Public schools—the American equivalent of Russian agriculture.

Minneapolis Star and Tribune: Report Flunks Most Middle School Math Books. Math textbooks used in 75% of U.S. middle school classrooms were rated unsatisfactory in a report released Friday by Project 2061, a math and science reform group led by a former astronaut, George (Pinky) Nelson. The report released at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science was called the first of its kind because of its in-depth analysis of whether math textbooks actually help students meet key learning goals.

Diane Ravitch, (Ravitch, 2010) senior fellow at the Brookings Institute and member of the Koret Task Force on K-12 Education at the Hoover Institute:

"Imagine a federal education program that rewards economic segregation. Imagine further that this program has spent about 120 billion over 35 years without narrowing the gap between poor kids and their better-off peers. Wouldn’t members of Congress be clamoring to change it? Unfortunately not. The program is Title I, the biggest single federal outlay for K-12 education, which currently distributes more than $8 billion annually to schools with high concentrations of poor children. Two congressionally mandated evaluations have shown that it has not improved the performance of poor children relative to others.

Why has Title I failed? Because no one really knows which methods and approaches are most successful? Title I is a funding stream for schools. It supports a wide variety of salaries, equipment and approaches. But the research on what works is meager, and most schools that get Title I dollars are not successful.

Here’s how Title I promotes economic segregation: Funds from Washington go to state capitals to local school districts to schools with the greatest concentration of poor children. In many cities only schools where at least 60% of the students are poor receive Title I money. Thus, in such districts, poor children are eligible for federal Title I money only if they can be enrolled in a school where most kids are also poor, and where programs do not have any demonstrated benefit for improvement. Millions of equally poor children receive no Title I funding at all."

In The Chronicle of Higher Education, Ronald Berman, professor of English literature at the University of California at San Diego and former chairman of the National Endowment of the Humanities: To depend on remedial programs to improve students reading and writing is somewhat like swatting mosquitoes to prevent yellow fever.

Chester Finn, author of Troublemaker, A Personal History of School Reform since Sputnik: NCLB got things backward. The law should have set national standards and measures for the nation, and then freed states to produce those results as they think best. Instead, it left standards up to the states, which have an incentive to dumb them down to make compliance easier. A nation at risk? Now more than ever.

Bill Gates, CEO of Microsoft, speaking at a National Governors’ Conference: When I compare our high schools to what I see when I’m traveling abroad, I am terrified for our workforce of tomorrow. In 2001 India graduated a million more students from college than the U.S. did, while China had six times as many university students majoring in engineering. Many of these students are now staying home to work, saying no to U.S. jobs. As a result U.S. based companies are finding it increasingly attractive to build not only their manufacturing plants abroad but their manufacturing as well. America’s high schools are obsolete.

David Gergen, Professor of economics, political commentator, and editor at large, writing in U.S. News and World Report, April, 2005: When the nation’s governors gathered for a national ‘education summit’ their partnering organization, ACHIEVE, presented data showing that the U.S. high school dropout rate has actually gotten worse since 1983. Of the kids who now reach ninth grade, 32% disappear before high school graduation. Another third finish high school, but aren’t ready for college or work. Thus, about two thirds of the students are being left behind, many being low income and minority kids. Only the upper third leave high school ready for college, work or citizenship.

Joe Nathan, Director of the Center of School Change, University of Minnesota’s Hubert Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs, now at Macalester College in St. Paul: A state-wide study shows that three-fourths of entering students don’t have college-level math skills, and half don’t have college-level writing skills.

A survey conducted by the Northwestern National Life Insurance Company reported at the Minnesota 5th Annual Workplace Minnesota Conference that 56% of the human resource managers and 77% of customer service managers surveyed said most high school graduates lack the skills or abilities required to perform entry level jobs.

A bi-partisan federal commission on schools said: The United States has been committing unthinking, unilateral educational disarmament. America’s economic, cultural and spiritual role in the world is being threatened by lax standards and misguided priorities in the schools. The educational foundations of our society are being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a nation and as a people.

American Educator, official professional journal of the AFT: What Secondary Students Abroad are Expected to Know? Principal researcher Dawn Krusemark says, As compared with other countries, our student achievement levels are lowest in math and science. For example U.S. thirteen-year-olds ranked fourteenth out of fifteen countries in a study of math proficiency conducted by the International Assessment of Educational Progress. Jordan was the only country that scored beneath us.

As reported in The Lion: In California, a young man sued the San Francisco Unified School District for $500,000 because it awarded him a high school diploma even though he was barely literate. When he tried to get a job as a clothing salesman he could not understand the application forms because his reading level was below 5th grade.

In September of 2012 a Gallop Poll reported that only 37% of Americans say that kids who go to public schools get a good education.

The Executive Director of the American Career and Technical Association in 2012:

•   Every nine seconds in America a student becomes a dropout.

•   An estimated 3.8 million youth ages 18-24 are neither employed or in school.

•   High school students from the lowest income families dropped out of school at six times the rate of their peers from higher income families.

•   In urban school districts 50-60% of high school students drop out of school.

•   Dropouts cost our nation more than $300 billion in lost wages, lost taxes and lost productivity over their lifetime.

•   The United States high school graduation rate is 17th internationally.

•   The U.S. college graduation rate is 14th internationally.

•   In a survey of U.S. manufacturers, 90% reported moderate to severe shortages of skilled workers.

•   Over 300,000 skilled information technology jobs went unfilled over the last decade because of no qualified applicants.

•   Up to 55% of college freshmen must enroll in courses in reading, writing and mathematics.

•   One in four freshmen in four-year colleges fail to return to school for a sophomore year.

•   One in two freshmen in community colleges fails to return.

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Business Executive Harold M. Williams said, Over time, no activity can flourish if the public takes a dim view of it. Over a longer term no activity can continue unaltered, if public apathy or distrust becomes active antagonism.

There are many who take the position of the need for total abandonment. To paraphrase Dr. Walter Edman, When the horse dies you ought to dismount. There is no point to: (a) trying to feed the horse more grain, (b) beating the horse harder, (c) buying a new saddle, or, (d) blaming the horse’s parents.

Chapter II. Who Gets Educated? The Chosen—Not the Damned

As a perspective, America’s valuing about the relationship of its Chosen and Damned student population will permeate this book.

The American schools do provide a reasonably good education for about one-fourth to one-third of their students despite the indictments of the Introduction of this book, and the widely publicized failures identified in Chapter I. If this were not true, the nation’s schools would have collapsed, and would not be even close to holding their relatively stable output with the rest of the world.

These successful students learn to a mastery level most of the things that their teachers intend that they learn. They are generally classified as A or B students and represent less than 1/3 of the total class or school. In the process of repeated success in schoolwork most of them become immune to the mental illness, stress and anxiety that tend to characterize the majority of students who are experiencing repeated failure.

The favored group of achievers tends to be identified early (usually by the third grade) and usually remain in that group through high school. This group will favor the academic and abstract as their mode of learning. Based on how they are identified and move through the schooling process they are referred to as the Chosen in this book. This term is used in the Biblical context of the word, to select for special privilege or divine favor. Academic competitiveness in elementary schools is largely within this Chosen group. There are very few who move up from below. The majority of students who are not in the favored selected position, for known and unknown reasons, will be referred to as the Damned. The Damned are those who are condemned vigorously and often irascibly as failures by the American schools.

The Chosen

How is this special Chosen group of successful, immune students selected?

Each year each elementary school teacher across the country receives 15-40 new students. Regardless of the size of the class the teacher’s mindset is that 20 to 30% of the class will master the content to be taught (A and B level), about 40% will learn some things but not really master the content (C level), and 20-30% will learn very little or fail completely (D or F). In INNOCENCE this mindset about teaching and levels of learning is very solidly fixed in the mind of the teachers because: (a) this was their experience in elementary and secondary schools, (b) this mindset was taught as professional education in teacher training institutions across the country, and (c) this mindset is regularly reinforced by comrade teachers, school grading and reporting policies, by many parents and school boards, and by textbook publishers and state departments of education.

In other words, most of the teachers have a built-in expectation that less than 1/3 of the students will actually master skills and the content of the course subject or grade being taught. There is no feeling of responsibility for obtaining a higher level of attainment for all students. This the way it is—a minority will get it and the rest won’t.

With that posture the teacher will then present lessons to the class, mainly in a group setting. This will be mostly a frontal approach include talking; (lecturing) writing on the chalkboard; using an overhead, a power point, smart board, audio-visual or TV projector; but aimed, in almost all cases, at the group. There may be some seat work where all students will receive the same workbooks with more or less equal time for completion. There may also be some homework, and the Chosen will be about 70% more apt to receive help at home, if needed.

After presentation there will usually be some type of group follow up, such as class discussion. Most of the discussion will consist of teachers asking questions, usually about the facts presented in the lecture. It is in the discussion sessions the teacher initiates that the Chosen students begin to emerge visibly. Long-term studies of teachers in classrooms have found that teachers tend to focus their instruction on students who are docile, attentive, raise their hands to answer questions, and nod at the right moment. The same students are encouraged to participate and are reinforced in their learning. Group instruction, as practiced in most of these classrooms, tends to give the most teaching and attention to a small group of students. These attended to students seem to be able to learn at the pace set by the instructor or to help set the pace. In international research, Dahloff of Sweden found that in each country student teachers get practice in cueing to the right student. In the USA cueing is to the upper 1/4 to 1/5.

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At this stage it is about as common as recess that the teacher, mostly on her/his own judgment, sometimes assisted with tests, will begin to group students according to perceived ability in reading and mathematics. There are usually two groups in mathematics and three to four in reading, depending on class size. Some regrouping occurs early in the first grade but changes thereafter are relatively rare. One reason for lack of changes is that the work of the groups becomes sharply differentiated, and it is difficult for other students to catch up.

Students who come from homes where more highly educated parents have helped them acquire vocabulary and verbal