The February 7 Wall Street Journal quoted secretary of education, Arne Duncan, saying, "Educationally, we used to lead the world, and we have sort of lost our way in the last couple of decades. We just have to educate ourselves to a better economy."
Supposedly, Mr. Duncan came to Washington from Chicago. His statement is more indicative of someone who arrived from a cave or another planet.
"Lost our way in the last couple of decades?" In 1983, 26 years ago, then secretary of education, Terrel Bell, put forth "A Nation At Risk." It said we had sort of lost our way in education. Finding "a rising tide of mediocrity" in the U. S., it painted Germany, South Korea and, especially, Japan, as countries that were leaving us in the economic dust.
You remember Japan. "A Nation At Risk" and media stories portrayed Japan as an economic colossus astride the globe. The reason? Its students scored high on tests. High test scores equals terrific economy. But around 1990, Japan's bubble burst and its economy sank into the Pacific, taking the other "Asian Tiger" economies with it.
It has yet to recover. Japan has suffered almost 20 years of either recession or stagnation. Its students still ace tests in international comparisons, but the Japanese now know that high test scores do nothing "to educate ourselves to a better economy."
A few years after "A Nation At Risk" scared people, the United States began the longest sustained economic expansion in its history. And it was real--productivity soared. A 1994 New York Times headline read "The American Economy: Back on Top." Had we "educated ourselves to a better economy?" No. International studies of math and science found American students average to below average depending on the subject and grade. Three months after the Times headline, IBM CEO, Lou Gerstner took to the Times' op-ed page with "Our Schools Are Failing."
In more recent international tests, rather than having "sort of lost our way," American students have improved their standing in mathematics and held their own pretty good standing in science. They have also held their own in international studies of reading where they have always scored very high.
Since the launch of Sputnik in 1957, schools have been the scapegoat of choice for any social crisis, real or imagined. Fact: the U. S. had a satellite-capable rocket in the air in 1956 and chose not to put anything into orbit. Political, strategic and diplomatic reasons all played roles in that decision as did the internecine warfare among Army, Navy and Air Force, bickering over who should get to go first. But, after Sputnik went up, Life ran a five-part series, "Crisis in Education." Life was not alone in where it placed the blame.
Similarly, the schools were blamed for the urban riots in the 1960's. At least then, New York Times education reporter, Fred Hechinger, saw the scam: "Almost 10 years ago," Hechinger wrote in 1967, "when the first Soviet sputnik went into orbit, the schools were blamed for America's lag in space. Last week, in the Senate, the schools were blamed for the ghetto riots. In each case, the politicians' motives were suspect. Their reflex reaction, when faced with a national crisis, is to assign guilt to persons with the least power to hit back. The schools, which are nonpolitical but dependent on political purse strings, fill the bill of emergency whipping boy."
If anything, the current catastrophe only emphasizes the weak link between schools and the economy. High scoring nations have suffered at least as much economic damage as the U. S. Above-average Iceland is an economic basket case. France, whose students also score well, is on strike. In spite of its test aces, Japan's Nikkei stock index hit a 26-year low in October 2008.
The most recent global competitiveness reports from the Institute for Management Development and from the World Economic Forum, which just had its annual bash in Davos, Switzerland, ranked the U. S. as the most globally competitive in the world--as they have for years. Whether or not today's cataclysm will affect the next sets of rankings, you can be assured of one thing: the schools will have had nothing to do with it.
Follow Gerald Bracey on Twitter: www.twitter.com/gbracey123
The economic crisis was not brought on by a lack of intelligence, but by greed, lust for power and immorality at the highest levels of government and business. Government was bought out by business so that government stopped performing its function. I don't see any evidence that the crisis was brought about by any lack of intelligence on the part of these officials.
But there was a lack of morality in these officials. And that leads me to cite your second flawed assumption: that schools' job is only academic. To teach certain subjects with no regard to the moral implications.
That is where the schools failed. When religion was taken out of the schools, there was no moral or value system that replaced it. So our leaders have learned that what is important is individual success, since that is what the schools taught them.
Grades and getting into good colleges and getting good respectable jobs- that is the value system that society and the schools teach. And the officials who led us into this economic mess learned their lessons well. It's all about achieving success in life and success is measured by your grades, your job and your money.
It is a sin of omission. Schools have failed to teach the values that are important and instead have taught individual achievement as the only important value.
While you make a good point about greed (can't speak for Bracey, but can assure you he agrees), you make a serious error in logic when attributing moral lapses in the corporate sector to "when religion was taken out of the schools." The public school were always (nominally, at least), secular institutions, and always must be, as the establishment clause of the Constitution guarantees. If religion has anything to do with it (and I would categorically deny this faulty assumption), then the failure is with parents and churches, not public schools.
Of course, if you are going to stick by this faulty logic, then where do you place blame for all the previous moral lapses in American history? Similar greed that led to the Great Depression? McCarthyism? The dismal treatment of Native Americans? Jim Crow? Slavery? Etc, etc, etc? I assume we're talking events that happened before you claim that "religion was taken out of the schools." So where can we place blame for those immoral actions and others? If we follow your logic, it was because they HAD religion in the schools.
Duncan has been trying to appoint to the Department of Education the leading lights of neoliberalism, who want nothing more than deskilled and poorly paid teachers. These cats need to invoke a crisis to get what they want. They are currently on a campaign to vilify Linda Darling Hammond, Obama's adviser, whose research shows the effectiveness of a highly trained and certified corp of teachers. Heaven help us if they succeed.
The schools do not get a pass on this one. English and math are not enough.