Counting the Origins of Failure
Published July 13, 2009 @ 12:05AM PT
If education in the United States of the 21st Century is failing, that failure has been built over a very long time. And I do not think that it can be “fixed” in any meaningful way unless people understand that the failures we see today are our system working exactly as it was intended to.
Yes, that’s what I’m saying. Our American public education system is doing exactly what it was designed to do. It is separating “winners” from “losers” and it is reinforcing our economic gap. The system was designed in the 1840s and at the turn of the 20th Century to separate society into a vast majority of minimally trained industrial workers and a small, educated elite. It was designed to enforce White, Protestant, Middle-Class, “Typically-abled” standards on an increasingly diverse American population. A few blessed children in each generation who met those standards might move up in society. The rest would be consigned to low wage manual labor. It was designed to ensure that the children of the elites had the opportunities they needed to remain the elite. Everything about the system – from the way schools are funded, to the way standards are created, to the system of tests, to our peculiar form of college admissions, to our notions of disability – was created to meet the employment goals of the United States from the mid 19th Century to the mid 20th Century.
Unfortunately we are 50 years past that historic moment, and we are no longer happy with the results.
But if you want different results you will not get there through changing teachers, or changing managers, or expecting more from students. You can only change the results by changing the system itself.
That means changing everything, from the buildings to the timetable, from the calendar to the notion of age-based grades, from the idea of classroom competition to the furniture, from the accepted sense of “paying attention” to the purpose of teachers. All of that contributes to the “failures” we see today because all of that was designed from the start to create those failures.
The design
American education was largely designed in two bursts of change. In the 20 years before the American Civil War writers such as William Alcott and Henry Barnard largely defined the classroom and the school. Alcott swapped out benches and long tables for desks and chairs with backs, and introduced reluctant American teachers to the newest information technology – the chalkboard and individual student slateboard. Barnard, jumping on the “Prussian Model” bandwagon (industrializing America was deeply enamored at the time of all the efficiency ideas coming from Berlin, including school* and university design), designed the multi-classroom school building for the new idea of age-based grades. He told teachers to put the alphabet charts above those new chalkboards, to put the flag to “stage right” of the teacher’s desk, and pointed out that the design of the school’s grounds, entrances, and corridors, should control student behavior.
In the 20 years beginning in 1890, the systems of the 1840s were made efficient. Now there were not just age-based grades but discrete subjects. Not just days in school but specific moments devoted to single subjects. Not just assessments but state-wide tests which enforced classroom conformity. American education was no longer viewed as craft or social responsibility, but as one more example of mass production.
Age-based grades were the perfect fit for the new industrial age. The raw material (students) would be pulled in at one end, and through repeated “stampings” would emerge eight years later as compliant workers and citizens. Quality checks at the end of each year would assess whether that raw material was defective or not. If detective, a stamping would be repeated, if that did not work, the student would be discarded. This filtered the population effectively for the employment needs of the 19th Century. Most never made it through the whole process, and very, very few would emerge at the end of eight years considered ready for further polishing (high school completion was rare well into the 20th Century). Premium “raw materials” – the children of the elite – were obviously not treated this way. They were hand-formed by tutors or the teachers at private academies. This assured that the American aristocracy would maintain their position.
We’re still there
This theory of education, as the equivalent of industrial processing, remains dominant. Everything about “accountability” – the chant of both the left and the right these days, is based in this. Yes, it has always been controversial. Many in 19th Century America resisted giving up the “One Room Schoolhouse” with its multiage grouping of students, its individualized instruction, its peer-to-peer instruction, and its acceptance of students who entered at any point and moved at their own pace. And before the Reagan era washed in a new age of educational conservatism, many public schools were experimenting with less emphasis on age as the determiner of what should be learned. But if any experiments survived Reagan, No Child Left Behind, with its insistence that every student learn at the exact same rate, cemented the industrial process legally as national policy.
And this is the source of most of our failure. Age-based grades and the industrial model ensure that in every classroom, at least one-third of students will be bored, and one-third will be behind. Age-based grades create disabilities, by insisting that there is a “norm” for every age, and labeling those not “there” yet with pathological descriptions. Call it whatever euphemism you desire, but the idea is always “retardation” – by very definition. Age-based grades – by creating rigid “norms” – damage those from differing ethnic groups and cultures. Age-based grades destroy those entering school from below middle-class backgrounds, since we are all well aware that poverty is the number one predictor of “starting behind” – and if you start behind, even if all schools were equal, age-based grades all but guarantee that you will fail at every step.
And every “grade level expectation” published by every state, and every achievement test, reinforces this system of failure.
So we continue to stamp, and we continue to filter. Oh, we’ve put in many more inspection points, and we’ve put in many more stages of remedial processing, but nothing has changed. And when the failure inevitably occurs, we do what every industrial manager does, we blame the raw material (“our students are not prepared for school”) or we blame the industrial workers (“the problem,” as Bill Gates, Sr. put it on NPR, “is the teachers.”).
America needs to decide
Our complaint now, wrongly, whether the education secretary is appointed by a right-wing ideologue like George W. Bush or a liberal former community organizer like Barack Obama, is a complaint about a system which we think does not work well enough. If you believe that then you will look at management (Charter Schools), or inspection (high-stakes testing), or replacing workers with industrial robots (scripted instruction, Teach for America).
The problem is that the system is doing what it was designed to do: sending the children of our elite to Ivy League universities and sending the children of our poor out to the streets. We see it as a “problem” only because the employment profile has changed, so instead of dumping those filtered out into factories and mines, we dump them into crime and nothingness.
If we want a different result, it is the system – not the students, not the teachers – not even really the management – which must change. These groups, after all, are just humans, humans responding to the system they are forced to survive in.
The educational system, and all the structures created to support that system – the buildings, furniture, time schedules, tests – are the problem. Decades of tinkering with the details have not altered the results at all, because those results are a creation of the system itself. So if Americans want change, it is time for them to insist on real change.
- Ira Socol
Over the next few days I’ll be looking at the structures of this system. Please share your thoughts along the way. And many thanks to Clay Burell for this opportunity to speak to all of you at change.org
You can find my blog on education, technology, and "special needs" education at SpeEdChange. You can find my books on Amazon.com
* - "The adoption of the Prussian model required the creation of a vast hierarchical bureaucracy of administrators, which in turn led to the abandonment of the one-room schoolhouses, the consolidation of the public schools, and the strict segregation of children according to age." Hardaway, R. (1995). America Goes to School: Law, Reform, and Crisis in Public Education
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Comments (22)
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Author
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Educational researcher at Michigan State University focusing on Universal Design Technology and the structure of education. Author. Historian.
getting to the root of the problem. Haven't there been cross currents the whole time? Home schooling? Religious Schooling?
E
Posted by Eric Siegel on 07/13/2009 @ 03:34AM PT
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You have articulated and substantiated things that I've said much more clumsily for a long time. I've tweeted this, and look forward to further installments!
Posted by Siobhan Curious on 07/13/2009 @ 09:32AM PT
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Nice post, Ira.
My colleague, Steve Taffee, wrote a series of blog posts this spring on the topic of "Constraining Innovation." He talks about traditional school design, grades, lumping students by age leve, etc as barriers to innovation. I think you'll like Steve's work, especially considering he is a fellow Michigan State Spartan ;-)
Here are a few links to his Constraining Innovations Posts:
Constraining Innovation: Textbooks and Textbook Publishers: http://taffee.edublogs.org/2009/06/14/constraining-innovation-textbooks-and-textbook-publishers/
Constraining Innovation: Architectural Models: http://taffee.edublogs.org/2009/05/27/constraining-innovation-school-architectural-models/
Constraining Innovation: AP Courses:
http://taffee.edublogs.org/2009/05/15/contraining-innovation-ap-courses/
Constraining Innovation: Grading and Assessment Systems: http://taffee.edublogs.org/2009/05/12/constraining-innovation-grading-and-assessment-systems/
Posted by Matt Montagne on 07/13/2009 @ 11:46AM PT
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Nice links, Matt. I'm looking forward to the AP courses article, because definitely constrain me and most teachers I know who teach it. Blech.
Posted by Clay Burell on 07/13/2009 @ 12:43PM PT
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As a critique of the US educational system that is rooted
in history, this piece is awesome.
You may like my post today, titled, "The Coming Jobless Society."
www.modelminority.blogspot.com
~m.
Posted by Model Minority on 07/13/2009 @ 02:19PM PT
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The history lesson is great, Ira; thanks. But, do we really want change? Do we really want to change the whole system? Who is going to take the responsibility of changing the whole system?
Most people, it seems to me, really only want to change only a few things, even if they agree that the whole system is screwed up.
We don't have any evidence that changing the whole system in a community the size and shape of the U.S. is going to work. I don't think most people really want to change the whole system; they just want to get rid of text books, or the unions, or grade levels, or ... pick something. Furthermore, I think most people really haven't thought through the ramifications of changing the whole system.
I whole heartedly aggree that there are lots of the parts that need changing, and maybe scraping the whole thing is the only way that any of the parts will really get changed satisfactorily, but let's not pretend that any of us know where we're going.
Posted by Dan McGuire on 07/13/2009 @ 02:26PM PT
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@ Ira
Great post and thanks for sharing. As an administrator the task of overhauling the system is often daunting. I appreciate the freedom I have in my private school system to be the crazy lunatic pushing for change. Looking at the history of how we've arrived at where we are in education is always fascinating. What I'm now curious about is where we should go especially at the secondary level? I understand we work in a broken system - what is the alternative? I've read Kohn "The Schools are Children Deserve" and see it as a starting point. Do you have any schools you could recommend that are doing something radically different? We have our own changes in mind link here: http://vision2012pnd.wikispaces.com/ . I'd love to see a list of schools that are making these changes a reality.
Posted by Charlie Roy on 07/13/2009 @ 06:07PM PT
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Hey Charlie,
High Tech High is one model to take a close look at. Here is a 15 minute video that is well worth your time if you haven't seen it: http://www.mobilelearninginstitute.org/21stcenturyeducation/films/film-larry-rosenstock.html
I believe they are located in San Diego.
Science Leadership Academy in Philly is another one to take a look at: http://www.scienceleadership.org/drupaled/
Finally, this TED Talk from Gever Tulley on the "Tinkering School" perhaps gives us some ideas about what is possible as well: http://www.ted.com/talks/gever_tulley_s_tinkering_school_in_action.html
Cheers!
Matt
Posted by Matt Montagne on 07/13/2009 @ 07:27PM PT
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does clay burell share any insights about education informed by his experiences in asia anywhere on this blog?
Posted by v v on 07/13/2009 @ 06:18PM PT
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v,
I'm inferring you think Asian education is superior to American, and thus we can learn something from it. It's a complicated proposition on several fronts.
First, American education among the wealthier districts is doing well enough as is. It's mostly the urban and rural poor whose schools suffer. So the education problem is as much a poverty problem as anything else.
As for Asia, I can only speak about China and Korea first-hand. China is way behind most nations because it's still developing. Its classrooms are over-crowded and under-resourced, its pedagogy rote and skill and drill.
Korea scores high on standardized tests, but not because of its schools - in which Korean parents have no faith - as much as its night and weekend cram schools. The kids do nothing but study from age 3 to 18, and the result is high suicide rates, stunted personalities, and mastery of test-taking at the expense of creativity and innovation. Parents are economically pinched paying for these cram schools. Google GDP spent on education in Korea and you'll see they spend more per capita on tutors and cram schools than any other nation - yet their kids drop out of Ivy League universities more than any other country, because they can't do the academic work. They've only been trained for testing success. Search Korea on this blog and you'll find a few posts with data.
Japan, my wife tells me - and she's Korean, and majored in Japanese Studies - is very similar to Korea in the above respects.
I'm moving to Singapore to begin teaching there in a week. Its education minister himself said that Singapore education, despite its high test scores, lacks due to its failure to create critical thinkers, creators, problem-solvers. Search "Gerald Bracey" on this blog, and on Google (add "international comparisons") and you'll find that reference.
Finally, there are economic, demographic, and linguistic/ethnic factors in America that you don't find in Korea (99+% ethnic Korean population) and China.
Social factors too: Gun ownership and sales are illegal in Asian countries, so you don't have gang issues like in the States. Drug laws are draconian, so you don't have those issues either, among parents or students. Families are much more closely-knit than in America. Education is valued in Confucian Asian. Teachers are respected.
So it's pretty apples and oranges, in short.
Posted by Clay Burell on 07/14/2009 @ 08:02AM PT
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i'm not saying the US should copy the asian educational model, but there are aspects of it that the US could benefit from. as you said, in general people in the US do not value education as much as the asian countries do, and families aren't as closely knit and don't help each other out as much. we need to talk about those 2 aspects more when we talk about improving education in the US. thankfully president obama and people like bill cosby touch on the first point, but not so much the second. we here in the US are used to our materially easy lives (relatively speaking) and often find it too inconvenient to help out extended family. sometimes it is too 'inconvenient' to find out how to help our own children with their education.
Posted by v v on 07/15/2009 @ 05:34AM PT
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No doubt. Like I said, I was inferring, since ppl usually ask about Asia because they hear about test scores. If I inferred wrongly, my mistake.
Short of transplanting Confucianism, I don't see much hope for America shiting eastward. I've featured a work of cultural psychology by Richard Nisbett on this blog called "The Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners Think Differently ... and Why" - and it does a bang-up job of marshalling the historical roots of our differences but, more interestingly, the emprical evidence from contemporary psychological research of how radical those differences are. A great read.
Posted by Clay Burell on 07/16/2009 @ 09:31AM PT
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i have so much to read this summer- but i will definitely put that on my list, especially coming from someone who has worked is Asia and is married to a Korean woman. I myself lived in Taiwan for 7 years, have upper intermediate Mandarin speaking ability and am married to a taiwan-born man who has advanced beginner english ability. it has made for an interesting 16 year marriage (i have a lot of grey hair).
i don't think you have to transplant confucianism. you just have to exchange ideas and show you walk the walk, not just talk the talk. ira has some truly revolutionary ideas that i'm sure will be harder for some people to grasp than my simple idea that extended family needs to help each other more. actually, if the economy gets worse and worse, i won't have to do any persuading. family members will move in with each other like they did during the great depression and then people will learn the lesson for themselves again.
Posted by v v on 07/17/2009 @ 12:58PM PT
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Ira, I love teaching but hate my job. I like your big picture point of view so much that I want to see you follow through and say what you think the system should look like so that these other objectives, smiling and caring, grow along with intellect. I thought maybe Dr. Linda Darling-Hammond might have had a good idea by looking at Finland, et al, open-ended assessments. I'm curious what you would make of that.
Posted by Mark Hurych on 07/13/2009 @ 06:48PM PT
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Are there any other countries who have overcome something similar to these issues that we can look to for guidance? Or, perhaps more interestingly, are there many countries with failures similar to our own that have NOT had a history that was equally similar?
Posted by Ronak Shah on 07/13/2009 @ 07:06PM PT
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Great article... but i agree why not look at countries like Finland which don't do tests, homework or grades and the other nonsenses so dominant in the US?
In the UK they're also moving away from SATs-type testing towards the approaches outlined by prof Paul Black, the UK assessment reform group and the ideas of working inside the black box. See:
http://pifactory.wordpress.com/2009/02/16/uk-moves-closer-to-ending-damaging-tests/
http://pifactory.wordpress.com/2008/10/18/working-inside-the-black-box/
Posted by David Whitfield on 07/15/2009 @ 11:02AM PT
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Ira,
This is a great article and I completely agree with the points that you make. It is so much easier for us to pick at the small points than to look at the big picture and what needs to be changed. Also, many people do not want to change the system because of fear. Fear that the elite would be giving up some of its power, often times we don't realize that by holding someone down a part of us has to stay down there with them. By neglecting to change the system, our ENTIRE country suffers but is usually those in poverty and minorities that are struck the hardest. While we all know this is no easy task I don't believe that it is impossible but it requires a great deal of commitment from ALL people.
Thank you for sharing this piece with us, it was so wonderful to hear a person talk about changes in education without pointing the finger at small pieces like there is a magically silver bullet that will solve it all.
Posted by A J on 07/16/2009 @ 06:24AM PT
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I felt that the educational process I was subject to in elementary school and high school was mechanical and inhumane and in no way prepared me to live a creative life. I felt like I was labeled and categorized and ranked and rated against my classmates and that there was no concern at all for me personally and what unique talents or interests I might have wanted to develop. The school system in this country, like in many countries, is sad and disgraceful.
Posted by Tony Rocco on 07/17/2009 @ 12:41PM PT
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Thanks Ira,
That was great. Education in the US is over due for a good over haul. The Obama administration seems preocupied with pre school and graduate level but it is k thru 12 that is in the worst shape. As you say we are using industrial age methods in the information age and it is just plain not working. Even the Montessori and other innovative programs are not really giving 21 century children in this country what they need. Today's children need to have not only the basic three R's but a good understanding of the world around them, both at home and abroad. Rather than go on here please see my blog at; www:Thebestpublicschoolsever.blogspot.com.
Posted by Barb Ashman on 07/17/2009 @ 02:00PM PT
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Have a look at what a high school senior wrote about this very topic.....indeed there are similarities.
http://www.aboundlessworld.com/why-our-current-education-system-is-failing/
Thus, the synergy is present to change....
Posted by Michael Lambert on 07/18/2009 @ 07:26PM PT
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Excellent article and a correct assumption! Our current educational system is driving us back instead of forward. It takes educators with a true vision and courage to move all students, teachers and communities forward out of the 'Flintstones Cave' to a more progressive system
Posted by Mike Pryor on 07/21/2009 @ 10:57AM PT
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One educational method that got bypassed in this country is the Montessori method. Sure, the homeschoolers picked up on it, and some schools exist in mostly upper-class neighborhoods. But it's child-centered, emphasize on self-directed activity, multiple paths to learning goes so counter to the mass production approach of American mainstream education. What a waste.
Posted by Mimi Stratton on 07/28/2009 @ 05:12PM PT
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