Murray's observations of US education

Many of our prescriptions and some of our politics of education is misguided. So says conservative sociologist, Charles Murray. I’ll relate his reasoning over several posts beginning today.  You can test kids for many abilities and most are distinct—musical ability is not related to athletic ability, etc. But 3, mathematical, verbal, and spatial reasoning are somewhat correlated.  Call this “academic ability” and it is the basis for IQ theory. But half the students will be below average and they get frustrated by school. So here’s an achievement test question for 8^th grade.  If you have a company of 90 workers and the next year it has 10% more, how many workers does it have then? Only 62% of 8^th graders can answer the correct ‘99’. Many can calculate the 10%=9 but many don’t realize you have to add this to 90.  Now as teacher, you can teach the test by drilling on this type of question, but there are hundreds of others too.  So what happens are the first 3 blunders of public education.  (1) Politicians and educrats brag that they can make poor students improve markedly.  Sociology disproves this, but this romantic myth pervades education policy. (2) Teachers, expected to provide the miracles of education improvement of poor students, teach the test which they have either seen or have seen like tests many times.  (3) While it is proven that even poor students have an ability to memorize a great deal (it’s the “reasoning” that forms the basis for academic ability) memorization is greatly downplayed in modern education.  Too bad! In order to function in a culture, you have to know a lot of stuff about how things operate—core culture values—what’s a minuteman, a smoke-filled room, how do you make a cheeseburger or change a toilet flapper, and so forth.  Sans memorization, we create a body of students who cannot cope.  Teaching the test only works temporarily and does nothing to really elevate reasoning skills. Educrats who insist they can miraculously transform dullards into geniuses, ask the public to throw money at the problem. Hence more money only helps get better teachers and student scores in countries where dire underspending has been happening.

            Besides romanticizing education, not teaching core cultural knowledge and teaching tests, there are more problems with public ed.  (4) Disruption and lack of discipline hurts all the students in a class and this is the biggest indicator of schools with an F grade.  Bad teachers, no standards, few resources often go with this. In the 50’s the Coleman Report on education found, to the stunned surprise of politicians, that quality of schools did not yield achievement, but family values did.  Pols didn’t listen.  They gave $$$ to poverty area schools under Title I.  Acheivement actually fell!  No Child Left Behind penalized schools which didn’t progress.  No change in student scores. (5) Hence throwing money at the problem doesn’t fix it.  US schools are almost twice as expensive as any others in the world, and kids scores are about #30 in OECD.  Parochial (religious-based) schools spend half what public schools do and get higher test results—even when applied to low-income scholarship students.  But the parochial schools have discipline, memorization, allow teachers more often to teach freely and some other things we’ll cover tomorrow.

            (6) Too many kids are told to go to college.  90% are encouraged to attend by high school counselors but only 35% of them will get a degree.  The other 65% will struggle with college and drop out. They should be advised, “Hey, you like to operate equipment?  Do you know a crane operator makes a lot more than a pizza delivery man?” Colleges estimate IQ of 115-120% or about 9-12% of seniors will be able to handle college material. (7)To try to handle the excess, colleges have done grade inflation (easier grades) and steered students to curricula with less rigor in math or verbal skills like social sciences, humanities, and things like recreational science. But there are too many grads and few jobs in these areas. Colleges are saavy.  Employers use a BA or BS as a screen for abilities, so colleges pack ‘em in and charge more. (8)But the lesser grading standards mean the smartest students aren’t getting enough education and are slowed down.  Thus we see widespread statistical illiteracy among the gifted, little history, and almost no liberal arts. (Some things like humanity and humility are so important for a gifted leader, that we MUST think about them.) (9) Both HS and colleges promote self-esteem which promotes a risk-averse, selfish, foolhardy, autonomy. No wonder we have less entrepreneurship. For the first time in 400 years, America has fewer business start-ups than closings. Next post: How to fix it.

            So here’s Murray’s solutions. (1) re-install memorization of core cultural values that are not politically motivated in K-8.  (2) Get rid or education’s romantic myth that they can make a genius out of an average student. (3) provide a stable, disciplined environment that gives all kids a shot at maximum learning. The upshot of these 3 things is that if you aren’t a genius, you can still come out of school having enjoyed it, armed with a lot of know-how, a very good person even if you aren’t Einstein. (4) Teachers should be free to teach and evaluate one another informally with shared ideas. (5) Involve families.  16 hours a day, students aren’t in school, so what are they learning. 4 & 5 are often the two most widely observed factors in highly education-successful countries.  (6) Let the gifted go as fast as they can. (7) Teach the forgotten half how to make a good living—dependable, good attitude, hard workers, cooperative—and enhance career tech programs. (8) School choice.  Competition among schools.  Not one size fits all. (9) Use more certifications (like CPA exams, bar exams, plumbing license exams) instead of degrees.  Murray then notes that private schools have no magical monopoly on this basket of techniques, high-scoring countries are not all alike.  These are just principles found from sociological studies. Yet as I pass this around to the many teachers in my family they agree that Murray is spot-on.