A friend of mine recently expressed an interest in fixing our broken education system. I shared with her a few resources to begin looking at the problem. As she saw it, there was a problem in providing quality education to children. A child moving from one part of the country to another would find himself either too far ahead of peers or too far behind peers at the new school. This happened to her children. She rightly perceived that some schools are not imparting the skills our children need.
I referred her to an excellent book, Class Warfare: Besieged Schools, Bewildered Parents, Betrayed Kids and the Attack on Excellence by J Martin Rochester (2004), which describes the perspective of a frustrated parent. It is an excellent book: https://www.amazon.com/Class-Warfare-Besieged-Bewildered-Excellence/dp/1594030448/
The author, Dr. Rochester is a Professor of Political Science at the University of Missouri-St. Louis. The book "Class Warfare" speaks of the experience he has lived in combating incompetent education and the results of his research on the depth and breadth of the problem. His book has 241 referenced footnotes. It is a resource for people starting to look into the problem. The background is that Dr. Rochester bought a home in what he believed to be a good school district for his children, and then was shocked to find how bad the quality of education truly was. I recommend this book.
My story is that I was shocked at the deficiencies in my children's education in the Plano schools. I ran for the Plano ISD (PISD) Board of Trustees a few times to try and fix the math curriculum. There was a disastrous program called "Connected Math" that was crippling math education in Plano. I found a way to provide my children with tutoring to help them get around the problems with the PISD curriculum. You find yourself so busy providing your child with the tutoring they need that you give up trying to fix the system. Then your children graduate and you walk away from the problems at PISD. I did write about it in this blog to try and help other parents: https://planoparents.blogspot.com/2010/09/surviving-connected-math-6th-grade.html
There are many factors leading to failure in the schools. One is the shift to "student centered" education instead of "teacher centered" education. "A guide on the side instead of a sage on the stage" is their slogan. A well written book that shows instruction (sage on the stage) is still useful is: "The Academic Achievement Challenge: What Really Works in the Classroom?" by Jeanne S. Chall PhD. Dr. Chall is Harvard professor. I recommend her book. https://www.amazon.com/Academic-Achievement-Challenge-Really-Classroom/dp/1572305002/
It is important to recognize that the problems in our schools have been documented steadily for decades. There was a sensation when the Secretary of Education under President Ronald Reagan issued the report "A Nation at Risk" in 1983. This statement in the report got attention: "If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war." It is now 37 years later and our schools have gotten worse instead of better. Here are a few places where you can access the report. (1) https://www2.ed.gov/pubs/NatAtRisk/risk.html (2) In downloadable PDF https://edreform.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/A_Nation_At_Risk_1983.pdf
If you wonder why I say our schools have gotten worse, besides the continuing decline of necessary skills there is increasing evidence of damage to our children, to our society, by teachers and administrators trying to redesign our society by brainwashing our children. One example is the transgender push, trying to turn boys into girls and girls into boys. Another example is the creation of an army of violent thugs who call themselves "Antifa." This violence comes from left wing indoctrination in both our high schools and our universities.
How can we fix a problem that has been with us for so long? We begin, I think, by recognizing a pattern of unsolvable problems. Besides problems in our public schools, we have seen an overlap with problems in our universities. In God and Man at Yale by William F. Buckley Jr. (1951) we learn that the economics department was promoting Socialism and the university administration was promoting atheism. (https://www.amazon.com/God-Man-Yale-Superstitions-Academic/dp/089526692X/) Political indoctrination of our college age children by socialists has been going on for much longer that this: 1951 to 2020 being 69 years.
Another seemingly intractable problem has been poverty in the black community. The root problem was spelled out in 1965 in The Moynihan Report (https://www.amazon.com/Moynihan-Report-Family-National-Action/dp/1945934298/). Even then the author Daniel Moynihan mentions that he found the problem well defined in an academic report published in 1950 by E. Franklin Frazier, meaning the root cause has been known for 70 years but the problem remains unsolved.
Why then are these problems apparently unsolvable? I believe it is because there is a group of people dedicated to maintaining these problems and making them worse. When Donald Trump became President there was a group of government employees who declared they would resist his efforts to improve our government. They called themselves "the resistance." It is people like this who are dedicated to keeping blacks poor, our school children poorly educated, and our college students upset and hostile to our society.
As a member of the Students for a Democratic Society once said, "The issue is never the issue. The issue is always the revolution." Until we recognize this underlying thread within of all our long lasting problems we can never solve these problems.
Robert Canright
