One of my writing goals is to simplify the complexity of the problems facing the USA today. This effort is like trying to find my way through a very complex maze. An instructor of mine once told me that “anytime you study a problem, it becomes more complex.” I agree with his analysis, but I also like the Zen thought that when we start studying a mountain, it first becomes a complex amalgamation of physics, geology, geography, chemistry, and biology. However, once we really understand it, it becomes a mountain again. A Zen cycle of simplicity, complexity and then simplicity.
This is the problem facing my analysis of the Education System in America. It is complex and overwhelming. I have been working in the system for almost fifty years now. I have taught every grade from pre-kindergarten to college Ph.D. classes. I have written several blogs on this subject already. However, as each day goes by, what I have said the day before seems less and less adequate. Many friends have disputed my thoughts on education. They think that I am wrong, and that the system can be saved by some tweaks here and there. I disagree. I have not changed my thoughts on this problem. We need an entirely new concept and system of Public Education.
The Public Education System in America is like a bomb that has exploded. You cannot put the bomb back together even if you do manage to find all the pieces of the bomb. The Public Education System in America is dysfunctional and outdated. It is rapidly disintegrating as the many outside forces that impact it are ignored or mishandled. The most important of these forces involve technological and social changes, but they also include a well-funded political effort on the Right to privatize education.
The rich in America understand that Public Education is not serving the needs of students and families. Those with money and power are cannibalizing the present Public Education System with vouchers and charters to establish elite schools for the wealthy and privileged. The dream of a Public Education System which would prepare all children with the tools and skills needed to be successful in a Democratic society has been abandoned by many in this country. We are moving towards a two-tier system of education. Much like we have one system of justice for the rich and powerful and another for the poor and underprivileged, we are moving towards the same structure in our schools
For the past seven years, I have been working as a substitute teacher in two different high schools in my local area. While I think many of the same problems plague elementary schools and universities, there are notable differences. Thus, in this blog, I want to focus on the problems that I have seen over the past few years that high schools are trying to deal with.
The two high schools where I am teaching are comprised of mainly low-income students in an area of low-income families. The two high schools I substitute for received the following ratings by Public School Review based on a comparison of test scores statewide.
High School 1 -Rating: 2/10 Bottom 50%
High School 2- Rating: 4/10 Bottom 50%
Arizona ranked worst state in America for teachers, study says
Arizona public school system ranked worst in America; study says
The results for Arizona are dismal and put Arizona at the bottom of states in terms of supporting education. However, I do not believe that these statistics should lead anyone to feel that Arizona is simply a bad state for education. In the first place, ratings and rankings only tell a portion of the story. I have seen many schools across this country. I doubt that the problems in Arizona are much different than for most public schools in America.
We have a systems problem here and my best guess is that most public high schools will be within three standard deviations of a mean around test scores or any other rating scales you can use. Thus, using the same statistical methods we use for determining the quality of any process, it would be foolish to say that any one school is clearly better than the rest. The same forces are at play across this country in our public schools. We are looking at a system and not simply a group of isolated schools.
The following are the major forces causing the deterioration of Public High Schools today. I will address each of these in more detail.
- Technology that replaces traditional skills learned in school. g., AI replacing writing skills
- Lock step education methods
- Low investment in education by students and parents
- Lack of student discipline
- Attacks by politicians on the Right who are pandering to voters and parents at the expense of teachers and students
- Over emphasis on testing and high school rankings
- Technology that replaces traditional skills learned in school. g., AI replacing writing skills
Years ago, in 1975 when I was doing my student internship for my undergraduate teaching degree, I allowed my students in my classes to use calculators. The math teachers in the school were appalled but I did not desist. They went to the principal who ordered me to stop allowing my students to use calculators. “What, he said if the batteries went bad? How would they do any math?” I replied, “What if their pencils ran out of lead?” He was not amused.
From calculators to computers to cell phones to the internet and now Artificial Intelligence, the world that students live in today bears little or no resemblance to the world that many of us once knew. However, the fundamental problem here is not technology. Marshal McLuhan nailed the problem fifty years ago. The world outside schools is not richer and more dense with knowledge and skills than the world inside schools. Once upon a time, students went to a dense environment of wise instructors, libraries and books that were unavailable to the wider community. Today, a child of three holds in their hands more knowledge than in the Library of Congress. That child is also exposed to ideas from all over the world and not just Po-Dunk Iowa. Schools cannot compete with this. Schools are becoming more and more irrelevant. Students know this but parents, teachers, administrators, and politicians either are blind to the fact or too vested in the present system to seek major changes.
- Lock step education methods:
Standardized testing. Standardized curriculums. Grades following one after another in silent marching precision. Our nation seems obsessed with insuring that everyone marches to the same drummer. Do you have children? Do you see anything identical about each child. Take a classroom of 32 students and how many of them will be identical in knowledge, skills, abilities, and interests.
Now put 32 students, Latino, African American, Asian American, White American, and Native American all in an English class studying Romeo and Juliet in old English. How many of them do you think will be interested? I did not find an interest in Shakespeare until I was nearly fifty years old. My interest really began when I discovered something that high school English teachers seem to ignore. Plays were meant to be watched not read. They were never written to be read. And if they were read, they should be in a language that someone might understand. I watch many BBC shows on the tele and I use the English subtitles to understand what they are saying otherwise I am lost. I assume that the British are using some version of “modern English.” They still argue that Americans do not speak English.
We need a system of Customized Education for all students today. My program of Free Public Education would start with three-year-olds and extend to ninety plus year olds. In other words, I want Free Public education for life not just for a temporary time in youth. We say that people are our most important assets. We need to start treating them like they are important. We need to provide life-time education that will continue to prepare citizens for careers today, tomorrow, and next year.
- Low investment in education by students and parents:
Here is a law. “If people have no investment in something they do not value it. When people are invested, they do value it more.” Parents send their schools to free public schools. Students go to school for free until college and sometimes even to college. Many parents value schools for their babysitting function rather than for the purpose that schools were designed to serve. Parents are irate when schools and teachers go on strike. However, across America schools and teachers are at the bottom of the barrel when it comes to funding. I have seen more than eighty percent of funding requests here in Arizona vetoed in referendums since 2010. This comes at a time when funding for teachers and schools in Arizona ranks at the bottom of the US list of states.
I am for “Free Public Education” but that means in terms of money individually paid by parents and teachers for education. That does not mean I think students and parents should be given a Free Lunch. Indeed, I want to see accountability on the part of students and families for the education that their children will receive. Parents and students should have accountability not in terms of monetary compensation but in terms of time donated to the education system. They need to have a program in education whereby parents and students support their education using time allotments paid to the schools. One of the teacher aides I worked with a few weeks ago suggested that she would like to see parents with their children in school sitting in class with their kids on a regular rotating basis. This is a great idea but only one of many that could be instituted to help ensure that students and parents have a vested interest in education.
- Lack of student discipline:
Student discipline is a major problem in public schools today. I have seen teachers and substitutes walk out of school after their first day on the job. Schools today are loaded with security guards and even armed police in some schools. On any daily roster of students there will be a few serving in-school suspension and some serving out-of-school suspension. Every year, I see more and more students in detention.
Kids behave towards teachers with the same arrogance that their parents may have for teachers and education. The poorer the classroom in terms of demographics, the worse the discipline will be. It does not matter whether the class is Black, White, Brown, or Red, the poorer the social economic status of the class, the more behavior problems you have in the classroom. The wealthier people are the more they seem to value education. This is not a hard and fast rule, but a general observation based on my almost fifty plus years of teaching. This is one of the reasons so many of the wealthy are pulling their kids out of public schools.
Today, teachers are so little respected that many of them are afraid to discipline their students. I had a security guard tell me that she would not intervene in a fight between students as she did not want to take the risk of either being hurt or sued. Teachers should not have to be disciplinarians. Once upon a time, when I was a young, if I disobeyed a teacher and my father found out about it, I was punished. This was typical of my generation. No questions asked. The teachers was right, and I was wrong. Somewhere in the mid-seventies, there was a sea change of major proportions. Suddenly, teachers were besieged with challenges like “What did you do to make my Johnny or Mary act out?” “It is your (teachers) fault that my child is failing.” Teachers are now in the wrong when students are disciplined or given a failing grade. There is little or no support among many families for teachers. The teacher is wrong. The student is right.
A few nights ago, before a concert, I sat with two other retired teachers. We discussed the sea change I noted above and what the potential causes were. Here were some theories”
- The teachings of Benjamin Spock were too liberal
- Parents feel guilty they do not spend enough time with their children
- Single parent families lack the ability to discipline their children
- TV promoting a set of values antagonistic towards education
- Too many people that were not well served by public school education in the past
At the time, I did not challenge any of these theories. I simply listened and questioned. Over the next few days, I found something wrong with each theory. I am still searching for the reason. I welcome any ideas you may have. Please leave them in the comments section. I will try to think about and reply to each idea. Nevertheless, discipline is a major problem, and it will go away unless we understand its root cause. One solution might be to have parents join their children for in-school suspensions or pay a fine for out of school suspensions. Perhaps that could be a “Parental Responsibility.” I think it would put a rapid stop to much of the behavior problems that teachers have to put up with today.
- Attacks by politicians on the Right who are pandering to voters and parents at the expense of teachers and students
The Right Wing in this country want to destroy Public School Education. They are waging a war on education every single day of the year in every single state in the Union. They are engaging the families of children with promises of “Parental Rights.” This panders to the same parents that have a low respect for education and believe that schools are brainwashing their children. This has been an issue among White Supremacists and Southern Bigots since the early years of the Jim Crow laws. This group is (though they would deny it) racist, sexist, xenophobic and homophobic. They are against Gay Rights, Minority Rights, Women’s Rights, and Immigrant Rights. They are for Parental Rights but not a word for “Parental Responsibilities.”
The politicians to curry votes, tell parents that books are pornographic or racist. Their kids are being brainwashed by liberal teachers. School boards are being packed with radical parents who want to fire school superintendents, principals, and teachers over what is taught and how it is taught. In fact, I can point to some of each of the above that have been fired in the past few weeks here in Arizona. Books are being banned in over thirty states in America and librarians are fearful for their jobs. Politicians are enacting laws whereby teachers can be fined and charged with a crime for teaching certain topics like Critical Race Theory and Gender Studies or Sex Education.
In my seventy-six years on this earth, I have worked with all sorts of people. But never have I seen a less moral or ethical group than the politicians that now sit mostly in the Republican Party. I have seldom believed in conspiracy theories ever since reading C. Wright Mills “The Power Elite.” He argued convincingly to me at the time that the wealthy and powerful in America may seem to be working together but it was mutual interests that dedicated their actions rather than any coordinated planning or effort.
Wright Mills is now rolling over in his grave. There is an interlocking and well-coordinated group of Right-Wing organizations in this country which plan, fund, and orchestrate major efforts to elect politicians that support their interests, to push laws and bills that support their interests and to block any efforts to make their planning and funding more transparent. If you doubt what I am saying, look up the following names on Wikipedia and see what you conclude. Pay attention to the organizations they serve and their reliance on dark money for their activities. I think you will see more than just a casual merging of interests in their activities.
What can we do about this situation? Is America doomed by money, power politics and large corporate interests overriding the public good? Many would say that the end is near. The democracy that we hoped for in this country is over. People are powerless to change a juggernaut that is fueled by rich billionaires and served by minions with law degrees and no morals or ethics. I am still waiting to hear from the Republican Ethics Committee concerning the fate of George Santos. I doubt the Republicans will overside their power interests in the service of the public good. Santos will probably remain in power until the next election when I would hope he will be kicked out on his lying butt.
- Over emphasis on testing and high school rankings:
A well-intentioned effort to ensure quality in schools. Unfortunately based on stupidity and ignorance of statistics and relevance. My teacher here was Dr. Edward Deming. The noted quality expert and pioneer who helped the Japanese become world leaders in quality. Deming was against ratings and ranking that were often used in business to assess employee performance. The same logic that he used to refute the relevance of these ratings apply to the schools system of ratings and rankings. Deming said:
“Evaluation of performance, merit rating, or annual review… The idea of a merit rating is alluring. The sound of the words captivates the imagination: pay for what you get; get what you pay for; motivate people to do their best, for their own good. The effect is exactly the opposite of what the words promise… The fact is that the system that people work in and the interaction with people may account for 90 or 95 percent of performance.”
If you look at the ratings for schools anyplace in America, you will find that the wealthier the area in which the school lies, the higher their rankings will be in testing and all other metrics. Here in Arizona, my two schools are in the bottom twenty-five percent of schools in terms of rankings. Scottdale has the highest ranked schools in the system. It is no surprise that Scottsdale has the highest per capital income in the state. The wealthier the school district the higher their performance rating will be. Nevertheless, I would not assume that students from Scottsdale have any greater native ability than my students. I would only assume that they do better on standardized tests.
A few years ago, I took the Forbes 200 list of richest people in the world. About sixty percent of them had a college degree. Forty percent never went to college or did not finish a degree. I did a correlation analysis to see what the strength was between net worth and education. I was quite surprised to find that the average net worth of those without a college degree was 1.5 billion dollars higher than those with a college degree. 3.5 Billion net worth with no college degree versus 2.0 Billion for those with a college degree. College has been overhyped as a path to success.
Ratings and rankings are no measure of life success or even of learning to think. I would argue that the people who excel on college standardized tests are less able to think for themselves and more likely to conform to norms of thinking and behavior. Regard all the lawyers in America who have gone to Harvard, Yale and Cornell but seem to have little or no ethics or standards other than winning or money. Both Deming and J. K. Galbraith wrote about the sorry state of MBA programs in America when it came to teaching ethics and morals. We have too many students now who excel on standardized tests but have no morals or ethics. They have learned that these things do not matter.
Conclusions:
Here is the part where we live happily ever after. The good guy wins, the bad guy loses. Right triumphs over might, and justice wins out over injustice. If only this were true. Maybe as Martin Luther King said, justice will eventually prevail. I am not so sure he is right anymore. All empires since the Akkadian Empire in 2330 BCE, (Arguably the first empire in history) have ebbed and waned and eventually declined. Many have predicted that the USA is now on the downward path. I will say one thing. Our Founding Fathers knew that a public education system was the cornerstone of a democratic society. Thomas Jefferson said:
”I know no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion by education.”
Without a Free, Egalitarian and Open Public Education System, America will continue any decline that many believe has already started.
PS: Today (May 9th) I noticed that Jim Hightower had also published some thoughts on Education. I am providing a link to his thoughts as well. He is a good writer and I always enjoy reading his ideas. He has a great sense of humor.
I began to see more clearly that the right wing was orchestrating a systematic attack against not only universities but also against public school education. However, it has only been in the last few years that I realized how ubiquitous this assault was. The appointment of Betsy DeVos as Secretary of Education under Trump was a message that meant the right-wing were more powerful than anyone had yet realized. The attack on public education is now an all-out assault.
On his campaign website, under the heading “Protect Conservative Values,” Vance complains that “hundreds of billions of American tax dollars” get sent to universities that “teach that America is an evil, racist nation.” These universities “then train teachers who bring that indoctrination into our elementary and high schools.” The speakers and presenters at this conference read like a “who’s who” of Trump loyalists and big lie theorists.
I was an above average student until high school. After starting high school, I spent the next four years being bored and getting into trouble. I probably spent more time in detention than I did in the classroom. Many teachers despised and loathed me. My father kept thinking I would go to college which was some sort of a fantasy on his part. With no money and my poor grades, there was not a single college in the country that I could have been accepted to.
Despite efforts by my first wife Julia and myself, our marriage soon unraveled again. We agreed to separate. I moved out and wanting to change careers, I made the decision to go back to school and focus on training in industry. I was accepted into a Ph.D. Program at the University of Minnesota in the Department of Vocational Education. My major would be Training and Organization Development with a supporting field in Adult Education. By this time, my GI Bill had run out and I was now living alone and paying child support. I applied for and was accepted as a research assistant with the Minnesota Research and Development Center in Vocational Education on the St. Paul Campus. This job together with several summer internships and a very frugal lifestyle enabled me to pay my bills, my child support, and my tuition.
I completed my Ph.D. degree in four years and graduated in 1986. My dissertation was on “Conflict in Organizations.” I was hired by a management consulting firm in Bloomington, Minnesota. I worked the next thirteen years as a trainer and consultant in both for-profit and not-for-profit organizations. In 1999, I joined the faculty of Globe University as a business instructor. I had also been working part-time as an adjunct instructor at Metropolitan State University where I was employed for 16 years. In 2015, I retired from Metropolitan State University. I left Globe University when they closed their doors in 2017.
Theory (CRT) comes into this match sporting a record of 25 wins and 25 losses. Both opponents have lost matches to Trickle Down Theory and the Birther Theory. The winner of this match will face the reigning champion, The Theory of the Big Steal.
The testability of the theory’s major tenets
A theory may propose various tenets. That is the theory will assert specific things that belong with the theory. For instance Q’Anon Theory proposes that a group of Democratic politicians who are pedophiles meet regularly in the basement of a pizza parlor in D.C. to plot nefarious schemes for taking over the world. One of the major tenets of CRT is the notion that racism is ordinary and not aberrational. To measure the Q’Anon Theory all we would have to do is find a pizza parlor in D.C. where a number of pedophiliac Democratic politicians meet. This would be an easy tenet to test since the number of good pizza parlors in D.C. can be counted on one hand.
Eliminate all communists
I look out and see lawyers with Magna and Summa Cum Laude degrees from Yale, Harvard, Cornell, Brown, and other Ivy League Universities who can fashion legal arguments designed to circumvent and pervert any sane person’s idea of justice. They have corrupted our Criminal Justice System into a Criminal Injustice System. The winner in a court room is the one with the most money who can hire the best and brightest lawyers. An argument by one defense attorney claims that a self-styled vigilante shooting three unarmed people is a tragic case of self-defense. Another defense lawyer for three murdering racists suggests that the victim in the case was shot because he had come to Satilla Shores “in his khaki shorts with no socks to cover his long, dirty toenails.”
I look out and see corporate executives who will ignore the danger posed to the environment and climate because they can make more money today than by creating a sustainable system. I see too many people willing to “shop till they drop.” A materialistic mentality that supports the greed endemic in Corporate America. A focus on short-term thinking that drains the earth of the resources it needs for sustainability in order to reap mega-profits today. The “hell with the future” is the motto of Corporate America.
Is there any meaning to what I am seeing? Am I just getting too old? Is my brain incapable of understanding things anymore? Journalists are murdered because they report the truth. Innocent people are slaughtered while they watch a Christmas parade. A pregnant woman is shot eleven times on her doorstep. Fifty or more people rob a series of stores in what the news calls “mass grab fests.” A six-year-old child is killed in a car seat by some maniac with road rage. There is no bottom to the bizarre. No one can imagine what the next day will bring. All attempts to discover what is causing these problems or how they can be stopped seem futile. They are meaningless crimes without rhyme or reason in a world that George Orwell would never have imagined possible. Up is down, right is wrong, facts and truth do not exist, everything is fake. There is no sanity.
This morning while doing a 4-mile run in the Casa Grande Mountains, I thought a lot about his advice. I realize that much of what I have said above could be considered a rant. I would like to think it was somewhat of a catharsis. Another friend told me yesterday that I sounded like a man in despair. I resonated with the word despair. I regard optimism as ideologically unsound given our present world. Many people have advised me to stay hopeful. There is a fine line between hopeful and optimism. I am not sure I can manage the divide. Despair on the other hand fits my mood just fine. Despair is defined as: “The complete loss or absence of hope.”
We have elected people that will support an insurrection against free and fair elections. The most important element of Democracy. People that prefer to ignore that on January 6th, we almost had a coup against democracy in America. On November 17th, we had these same people vote to ignore the censuring of one of their comrades who parodied the killing of an opposition opponent.
I look out my window and see a public school system that is being dismantled by racists, bigots, elitists, and sexists who do not want the schools to actually teach anything that might be construed as controversial. Two thousand five hundred years ago, Socrates was executed for trying to teach the children of the Athenian elite to think for themselves. Schools and educators are still being attacked for trying to teach children to think. How can our future generations create a better world when they are besieged with information that keeps them in a past that never existed and feeds them myths about the way the world works?
Will the USA survive? All great empires have eventually declined. It took 300 years for the Roman Empire to fall after it began its decline. We are witnessing the decline of the American Empire. How long will it take to fall is well beyond my ability to foresee. If history is any indication, it will take many years and the decline will be gradual but punctuated by episodes of tragedy and elation. The tragedies will far outnumber the elations. Study any system in decline and you can see the gradual disintegration that accompanies all declines. It is already clear that our Public Education, Political Systems and Legal Systems are in decline. Trying to stop the declines is futile. You cannot stop the decline of an old bridge or an old building. You must rebuild from the ground up. Sadly, I see neither the drive nor the desire to do the work that needs to be done to help restore democracy in America.
A winner will need to rely on their team, but great riders will often find that they are suddenly alone and need to finish the race on their own. Perhaps their support riders are worn out or perhaps it is evident that the leader needs to charge ahead to gain time or prevent an adversary from gaining too much advantage. The great riders know when you to use their team and when to go it alone.
Mark Cavendish when he was at his peak was considered the best sprinter who ever lived. This year for the 2021 Tour de France he was almost not selected by any of the teams. At 36 years old, most thought that his racing days were over. To the surprise of all, Mark secured a contract with one of the Tour teams. Even more of a surprise was his winning four stages in the Tour to tie the record of Eddy Merckx for most stage wins in the Tour de France. Mark did not know he was too old to win. There is a time to hold em and a time to fold em, but it is very difficult to know when that time is. One thing is for certain, never listen to other people.
The Tour de France is comprised of three main types of riders. There are the sprinters who are best on flat ground. There are the mountaineers who excel at hills and mountains. There are the general classification (GC) riders who are good at both hills and flat ground but are not usually as good as the sprinters and mountaineers at their respective terrain. The GC riders are most likely the best all-around riders and may be able to win a few stages in both the flats and the hills. However, the GC riders are much more concerned with their overall time and will generally forego racing with sprinters or mountaineers who may break with the Peloton in an attempt to win a stage. There is lots of strategy involved in winning the Tour and I do not have the time or knowledge to say more about it.
No rider on the Tour de France has ever won all the stages. Two or three riders have captured the Polka Dot (Best Mountain Rider), Green (Best Sprinter) and Yellow (Overall time leader) jerseys in the same Tour but no rider has ever won all 21 stages in one race. We all have good days and bad days. Some days we wake up full of energy and other days we should just stay in bed.
Tour riders line up maybe 2 miles or so before the actual start line. Two hundred riders will be almost welded together behind a pace car as they casually ride up to the start. As soon as they reach the start line, they are off in a rush of cycles jostling for position. A large mass of cyclists is called the Peloton and most riders will try to stay with this group for reasons of riding efficiency and aerodynamics. Riding alone is more effort and energy wasteful than riding in a group. Nevertheless, some game or crazy rides will try to leave the pack. It may happen soon in the race or half way through the race, but eventually a breakaway group or individual will try to go it alone. The boldness of these breakaway riders is thrilling. Daring to challenge the best riders in the world by themselves.
Aging Capriciously 