Solutions for Education

What follows are some thoughts on education and why it continues to yield lesser results by Charles Murray, sociologist and expert on IQ and testing.

            If you test people for different abilities, you will find one has musical talent; another, athletic; another, interpersonal skills.  And none of these are related.  But there are 3 common abilities --verbal, mathematical and spatial reasoning skills—that correlate.  Doing well in one implies highly likely to be above average in the others. Together, we could call these the Academic Abilities.  And this is the source of IQ measurements.  Students with high IQs succeed in school.  This talent is fairly fixed among individuals. 

            Almost everyone knows what it is like to be poor at some aptitude.  You were the last kid chosen in sports.  You are tone deaf and can’t see the poetry in music.  And kids who aren’t chosen by the teacher for an answer, soon realize their lack of academic talent.  It’s demoralizing because “smarts” has a lot to do with not only status but credentials for success later in life.

            If you think schools just do a bad job when students don’t score well, talk to teachers who have struggled with lower academic ability students.  Progress is slow. Concepts won’t be remembered the next day. Now nobody would insist that we can make a klutz into a super athlete, or a shy kid an extrovert. Only in our public schools do we romantically insist that we can make low academic ability students into geniuses.  It simply isn’t true. And this is the problem with No Child Left Behind.

            We should define what is meant by verbal/math/spatial reasoning.  Here’s a problem from an 8^th grade achievement test.  “If a company had 90 workers last year and this year they have 10% more, how many workers does the company have?” If you say 99 congratulations. 2/3 of 8^th graders can’t answer this.  Note this tests reasoning ingenuity.  It has been discovered that 90% of students can identify last year’s 90 workers; a large portion can calculate 10% (= 9).  But the final step of adding the two together is what stumps so many.  Now we could “teach the test” by teaching problems of this type, but there are thousands of other reasoning questions, so the overall score is little changed. Bottom line, a large majority of students can memorize a large amount of material. But ingenuity is rarer.

What then separates schools with good scores vs. those with poor ones?  Excellent question.  It was first investigated in the Coleman Report of the 1950s, to investigate differences in academic achievements of rich kids and poor. Everybody in Congress, who sanctioned the study, had theories.  Credentials of teachers, curriculum, facilities, money spent per student or per teacher—none were found to correlat with achievement.  Family background was far and away the most important factor in school success. Subsequent studies of adoptions proved that IQ is partly due to environment.  If you live in a upper middle class neighborhood, have parents greatly interested in your education and spend time with your learning, you’ll have higher academic achievement. Subsequently attempts to increase ability in students from poor backgrounds in programs such as Head Start have been spectacularly unsuccessful.  (Spending per student in Head Start is 3 times that of an elementary common ed, yet 2 years hence, has no measureable improvement in student scores! It’s little more than day-care for the poor.) Yet we also know there are truly bad public schools with low achievement.  These have violent classrooms, nonexistent standards, incompetent teachers and competent ones who have given up. 

We could start forming conclusions here, but let’s talk college first.  Ever since the 1920s colleges have said that to comfortably do the coursework, you need an IQ of 115 (upper 16%, SAT 1180).  110 can struggle and get a degree.  Even 105 can achieve it by targeting easy courses and majors.  About 50% of high school graduates try college.  With diluted courses, this now yields 35% graduation rate. (It was 25% in the 60s) But that means that 2/3 of students join the workforce soon after high school.  Here’s the weird thing.  High School counselors promote college to 90% of students.  Meanwhile the liberal arts education of colleges—teaching a wide body of general learning--has atrophied.  Most public schools no longer teach the lesser version of this “core knowledge” of our culture.  Why teach this?  You need a core knowledge of things like Huck Finn, Wall Street, smoke-filled room politics, Minutemen, Mount Everest and Mecca, to be able to function as a knowledgeable citizen.  This is core knowledge of our culture which was taught prior to the 1980s. Public schools avoid much of this because it has controversy.

Now let’s talk education solutions based on these findings.  First, nearly all students have aptitude at memorization especially in lower grades. Public schools need to return to teaching core knowledge.  Add ethics to this and demonstrate it by providing an environment that is safe, orderly and respectful.  Everyone is entitled to a place where they can learn all they dare to learn and be respected.  If you’re not a Mensa it doesn’t mean that you can’t become a truly good person.  Teaching the forgotten half how to make a living is also in order.  “If you like to operate machinery, do you realize you can make a lot more being a crane operator than a pizza delivery man? Show up every day, work hard, get along with everyone.” Career tech has been an unvarnished success.  It should be further supported.  Sending the message to young people that they should go to college no matter what (Ahem, politicians and guidance counselors) is a bad message.   On the other hand, with gifted students we should encourage them to go as far and fast as possible, letting them find limits in ability. Helicopter parenting and self-esteem teaching (possessing a big opinion of oneself) techniques are ruining students.   Studies show that kids avoid doing anything of risk where they might crash and burn when they get constant accolades.  Even the best need to crash and burn a few times (learn limits) to instill humility.  Leaders, geniuses who aren’t humble, who don’t sympathize with ordinary folks, are tyrants in behavior.  Another area of lack in public education is verbal rigor.  USA’s verbal reasoning skills have been on a downward trend because we have come to accept just about any form of verbal expression.

Finally, expand choice. When people talk about “common sense” they mean a practical wisdom (born from cultural knowledge) that applies logic in an appropriate manner—rightly assessing the consequences of a course of action.  This is what comprises the success of private schools, largely through the template of the paragraph above.  They don’t make IQs go from 100 to 140.  They make more functional citizens and impart Christian faith.  They teach history, which is the way we develop vicarious experience. They teach core knowledge, recognizing that certain issues are so fundamental to the human condition that people must think about them. 

Personal note: I think Murray has come pretty close to the solutions.  I had the privilege of attending a parochial high school that was like the Harvard of high schools.  University physics major was fun and breezy after St. John’s Academy. They performed, on Turbo, the things Murray advises for the gifted half of students. My wife taught first grade at a local parochial school.  She had problem students she took under wing after school.  Big strong carpenters and small engine repairmen still happily holler greetings at her at Walmart to this day. I remember them when they were 3 feet tall.  This is how people should turn out.

None of this is to say we shouldn't pay teachers fairly or support school building projects.  But the real keys are letting teachers be free to teach, good class environments, and having parents who take an interest in the child's education.