We left middle age a long time ago and driven by simple curiosity wondered what life would be like when we would no longer be in it. The future, it seemed, was beyond our lifetime.
But we were wrong. Now, years later, we see that future now – we are living in it. What we see we have written about before—the reality that when the great nation-powers of history stopped educating their children, they lost that World power, never to regain it. Today, we see that our failure to educate our young people has resulted in a genuinely ignorant lost generation of millennials leading our long slide towards mediocrity.
That truth has so far meant nothing to those most responsible for that failed education – parents and the education establishment itself.
Does anyone in America care about education – or the lack of it?
The education establishment still seems interested and concerned although their endless resistance to change continues to be disastrous. The political establishment, involved for a while as we entered the 21st Century, barely mentions it. Parents only want their children to be happy.
Once upon a time America’s system of public education was the best in the World. Our ability to provide significant higher education attracted the interest of those who lived abroad and they have sent their college-age children here to be further educated for generations: one- quarter of all the students at Harvard today are foreign students.
But the all- consuming failure of the elementary and secondary systems – from the money-driven horrific decisions to change how reading and math were taught to the very poor preparation of teachers – has broken the system at those levels to such a degree that they are essentially useless and are failing our children every single day and have been for years.
Looking at the history of this failure reveals one essential fact: that the system refused to reasonably and successfully make necessary changes but rather has fought them at every level.
That resistance has already become apparent as Artificial Intelligence continues to present ways and means of improving what must be changed in preparing both teachers and children for new – found success.
MISTAKES
Public education began in the years following the change from 13 separate colonies of England to the establishment of the United States of America.
Those in charge believed the new nation’s children should learn to read so they could read the Bible. From one room school houses developed as the nation moved to uncharted territory in the South and West to those classes in the established areas of the North, the system in development had teachers teaching to a broad, general “middle” – meaning that the bright kids, the slower kids and those in the larger middle group – could all learn what they had to learn in each grade level if they received the help each needed from a well prepared teacher. In time, the support of parents at home became a critical piece of the process.
While two World Wars interfered with growth for a time, it would not slow the growing power of an educated public. Young women became our chief source of teachers as the profession provided them with a new stature in life.
Teachers soon recognized the importance of parental guidance and they began to quietly depend on Moms and Dads to help make certain that homework was properly done and good behavior in school was essential and expected.
The development of Parent Teacher Associations helped foster that informal working relationship as the professionals shared thinking and planning with those parents who had time to work with them.
Teacher development programs on the college level grew until courses in education became Schools of Education on college campuses throughout the nation.
Becoming a teacher for women became a major step up the professionalization of women in the workplace – and an excellent target for women with a relatively limited horizon at the time. Women were welcomed as secretaries and assistants in the corporate world, as nurses in the medical world and as salespeople in the retail business world. Teaching was clearly a goal for those women who had the intellect and patience to dedicate themselves to preparing generations of young people for life in America.
Working women made America the first middle class nation in history right after the end of World War 11 but the majority of women kept the house and helped children learn.
And then two major events changed the growing and successful landscape in education forever.
Able for the first time to make and control their own decision about child birth, women were able to choose a new way of life which included decisions to join the professions which had been totally dominated by men: Medicine, Dentistry, Law, Engineering, Architecture and Finance.
And in 1970, the California School system introduced two new ways of teaching reading and arithmetic.
Developed to increase the system’s desire for more money coming into education through the sale of entirely new materials – the changes moved across the country rapidly and in a very short time, they were universally accepted.
Sadly, it was a staggering mistake and produced an endlessly growing series of failures that we live with today.
Schools of Education changed their teaching of teachers accordingly and what had been a very successful way of teaching reading and math disappeared.
Today, our millennials can no longer sign their name to a legal document. They cannot make change in a supermarket unless a clerk does it for them. They cannot even tell time from a clock on the wall because they read digital time on their phones.
By the year 2000, the then Dean of Teachers College at Columbia University said that “…the best women no longer select teaching as a profession….”
By the mid-2000’s two major studies were produced to indicate that Schools of Education were not doing the job of preparing teachers.
The most serious recommendation was that the preparation of teachers could best be improved by introducing them to children and classroom work the way nursing school students are introduced to patients and hospitals – in the very first year of attendance in college and for all the years thereafter. Those studying to be teachers don’t go into a classroom with children until the last six months of their four years in a School of Education.
No such change has taken place.
As testing showed clear evidence of student failures, the political establishment, which had kept hands off education but for speeches about it, intervened. They called for an endless series of tests during the course of the year to see whether students were learning. They established national tests in reading and math that students all across the country would take to see whether progress was being made and if so, how and where. Results of these national tests showed students seriously failing to meet grade level standards in reading and math – in some cases by more than two grades.
Stunned, the political system backed the development of Charter schools run by individuals not associated with school systems but funded by tax monies reserved only for public schools. It was a stunning step beyond anything America had done to better public school education. It still exists to this day and continues to find support from the clueless political system.
As testing students remained in force, it soon became obvious that many of these Charter schools simply focused on teaching to the test – a significant no-no in the world of education.
Yet, there has never been a published document which claims that after twenty years Charter schools have produced better, more successful students in college than public schools.
He pushed then Governor Andrew Cuomo into giving the city $50 million to form Pre-K classes throughout the city most often not in existing schools because they had no room for them.
A study of Pre-K after the first year indicated that most facilities had not offered the children the kind of support established by experts in the early education field – mostly regarding the staffing of such schools. The principal recommendation was that there should be professional support for every four students in a Pre-K class. Informal and incomplete studies indicated that none of that support was evident anywhere in NYC’s Pre-K program. Despite the promise by Cuomo’s top aide that studies of performance would be taken, none were. We don’t know today whether Pre-K in New York City is worth a dime much less millions of dollars.
RESISTANCE
Years ago we went to Waco, Texas at the request of a multi-million dollar family foundation which recognized that if a child could not read by the time he or she was out of the third grade, the years ahead would be grim.
Waco was a city of 35,000 people – a perfectly sized laboratory for change.
We spent two years working in close cooperation with the school Superintendent and leadership staff to bring all kinds of learning materials and methods into the system
We worked closely with elementary and Junior High personnel.
We heard the tearful complaints of Junior High teachers at the terrible preparation of those coming from elementary schools.
And we noticed time and time again that when we worked with new materials in elementary classrooms always delighting the children involved, we saw the way teachers “withdrew” –standing in the back of the classroom arms across chests, lips pursed, eyes squinting in discomfort.
We saw that exact look again just a few weeks ago when the New York Times’ Ezra Klein had a lengthy recorded interview with Rebecca Winthrop, Education Specialist and Director of the Center for Universal Education at the Brookings Institute in Washington, DC.
Their conversation was cordial and mutually informative until Klein introduced the impact of Artificial Intelligence into America’s public schools. They discussed the work of teachers who were beginning to learn how to impactfully employ AI techniques in their own work in preparing and presenting material in the classroom.
But then Klein went into the possibility of turning A.I. into a teacher for each child… A teacher who could learn exactly how that child thought and felt and learned.
It was exactly the same idea presented here in a piece we wrote some months ago. Klein said an A.I. teacher for each child would free a classroom teacher from the pressures of reaching each child and would let that teacher answer questions and provide direction and bring the other social graces of children in a classroom to the kids in the class.
The chill coming from Ms. Winthrop could be felt through the computer screen. Her lips pursed, her eyes squinted and she was quick to simply dismiss the possibilities without any real discussion. No…the teacher is in the class to teach and cannot be replaced in any way. The ideas that Klein presented were simply impossible…A.I. would have a real place in the classroom but never as a direct teacher of any child…no matter how possible that could all be.
In 2010, a small group of very brilliant educators had developed a complete program called the Common Core, a multi-state, educational initiative with the goal of increasing consistency across all State standards, or essentially what K-12 students throughout the country should know about the English language, reading and mathematics at each grade level.
The program was presented to schools across the nation at the end of the school year before Summer break. It came with a promise ( a bribe?) that each school district accepting the program would gain funding to cover the cost of making a major change in the way English/reading and math/arithmetic were presented – and then some financial payment for the teachers’ learning the program well enough to successfully present it.
The program presentation was butchered by school systems nationwide.
Teachers began teaching with the program at Summer’s end…with little or no time to properly learn and understand it. It was a disastrous mess and though it received top marks for what it could do…very few schools even got close to those possibilities.
There was much talk about teachers needing to actually learn the program well enough to use it. The developers of the program traveled the country trying to help. It was a mess and a failure.
The pandemic crushed what was left of it.
Nothing like it existed before and nothing like it has been developed since.
The old ways prevail and the system of education has simply and finally failed – even though it continues to this day and into the future.
There are those who feel that all-powerful nation-states across history have purposely failed to educate people so as to make ruling them easier.
We do not. America has failed to educate its children because it has not cared enough to make the changes in teaching and the teaching of teachers important enough in the order of things to correct the obvious areas of failure.
Parents who at one time would sit with their children as they did homework or make certain that the saw homework each night, no longer do. Today there is little or no homework after years of a great deal of homework without anybody at home even working with their children. Complaints from those parents was all the school system got…homework disappeared.
Happy children, living in their phones, do not make learning happen.
Ignorance is not bliss but is the foundation of personal and national failure.
Our newest political “leaders” are coming from this environment. We call many of them ‘progressives’ because they seem to have good hearts – but no ability to even begin to use common sense. They are our lost generation.
Caring enough will no longer be enough to change this. It will take a commitment to do something if we are to be what we’ve been.