You’re Not Nice

This is a comment I often hear after I post a blog on education that is critical of our education performance and especially if critical of educators. Thus, I would like to explore the reasons with you.

First, we need to face some realities:

• American education performance has been mired in unacceptable territory for many decades.

• Educators have defined the problems as being the fault of everyone but themselves. Mirrors are outlawed in education venues. Pogo cartoons are also not allowed.

• The achievement gap is not changing for the better. The Colorado Closing the Achievement Gap Commission Final Report of 11/05 concluded that over the last third of a century the gap had gotten “demonstrably worse” in spite of spending billions to find solutions. Robert Kennedy called the gap a stain on our national honor but that hasn’t motivated educators to take the known steps required to fix it. They won’t allow themselves to admit they are wrong in their beliefs about what works in education.

• American students are not being prepared for the global competition for knowledge based jobs.

• The remediation rate for those who go to 2 or 4 year colleges is very high and not being reduced.

• Education schools overemphasize pedagogy to the virtual exclusion of subject knowledge. And the pedagogy they teach is technically wrong in important ways.

• The reason for this state of affairs – tragic for millions of students as well as for the nation – is that an army of American educators and reading experts are fundamentally wrong in their ideas about education . . . E.D. Hirsch, The Knowledge Deficit

The list could be a lot longer but I hope you get the point. The problems in education are not being addressed effectively and kids and their futures are being irreparably harmed. Thus, if we assume that we must play by the educators’ rules the status quo will continue ad infinitum:

• Civility and harmony at all times—that is, suppress the truth because it might lead to stressful situations.

• Swear fealty to educators as the education experts and agree that no education outsider has any grounds to identify problems or offer constructive criticism.

• Parrot the educator line that they are underpaid and overworked. Which considering their performance is totally false.

• Agree to leave all education decisions to the educators because they are the experts.

• Agree to the status quo preserving process educators use to maintain control and ensure no change occurs that might require them to perform better or renounce their false educational beliefs.

After 7 years working on understanding the education situation, interviewing numerous educators over 6 states and associated people like school board members, state education department denizens and members of the public, I realized that being civil and trying to reason with people in the education establishment was futile. They have simply decided that their vested interest is more important than serving the kids’ needs at the level they deserve.

Therefore, the question comes down to a simple one. Are you on the side of the poorly performing education bureaucracy or are you on the side of the kids and their future. That is an easy decision for me and hopefully for you. E.D. Hirsch has been working on this problem for decades longer than I have. He has concluded that educators will not change on their own. They will have to be forced by public and political pressure. I write the things I do on education in an attempt to inform the public on the reality in education. I am attempting to get people to go beyond the pseudo “good news” propaganda that is ubiquitously offered by the education establishment. Being nice when kids are being continually harmed has a very low priority for me.

The above applies to the mainline schools. There are charter schools (not all by any means) that perform much better than the mainline schools. This is especially true if they have strong leadership and a balanced philosophy where subject knowledge is valued. However, these schools affect a tiny minority of students. We must reform the mainline schools to make a difference for millions of kids.