[R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] Counting the Origins of Failure

[Bill Totten]

by Ira David Socol

education.change.org (July 13 2009)


If education in the United States of the 21st Century is failing, that
failure has been built over a very long time. And I do not think that it
can be "fixed" in any meaningful way unless people understand that the
failures we see today are our system working exactly as it was intended to.

Yes, that's what I'm saying. Our American public education system is doing
exactly what it was designed to do. It is separating "winners" from
"losers" and it is reinforcing our economic gap. The system was designed
in the 1840s and at the turn of the 20th Century to separate society into
a vast majority of minimally trained industrial workers and a small,
educated elite. It was designed to enforce White, Protestant,
Middle-Class, "Typically-abled" standards on an increasingly diverse
American population. A few blessed children in each generation who met
those standards might move up in society. The rest would be consigned to
low wage manual labor. It was designed to ensure that the children of the
elites had the opportunities they needed to remain the elite. Everything
about the system - from the way schools are funded, to the way standards
are created, to the system of tests, to our peculiar form of college
admissions, to our notions of disability - was created to meet the
employment goals of the United States from the mid 19th Century to the mid
20th Century.

Unfortunately we are fifty years past that historic moment, and we are no
longer happy with the results.

But if you want different results you will not get there through changing
teachers, or changing managers, or expecting more from students. You can
only change the results by changing the system itself.

That means changing everything, from the buildings to the timetable, from
the calendar to the notion of age-based grades, from the idea of classroom
competition to the furniture, from the accepted sense of "paying
attention" to the purpose of teachers. All of that contributes to the
"failures" we see today because all of that was designed from the start to
create those failures.


The design

American education was largely designed in two bursts of change. In the 20
years before the American Civil War writers such as William Alcott and
Henry Barnard largely defined the classroom and the school. Alcott swapped
out benches and long tables for desks and chairs with backs, and
introduced reluctant American teachers to the newest information
technology - the chalkboard and individual student slateboard. Barnard,
jumping on the "Prussian Model" bandwagon (industrializing America was
deeply enamored at the time of all the efficiency ideas coming from
Berlin, including school {*} and university design), designed the
multi-classroom school building for the new idea of age-based grades. He
told teachers to put the alphabet charts above those new chalkboards, to
put the flag to "stage right" of the teacher's desk, and pointed out that
the design of the school's grounds, entrances, and corridors, should
control student behavior. 

_____

{*} "The adoption of the Prussian model required the creation of a vast
hierarchical bureaucracy of administrators, which in turn led to the
abandonment of the one-room schoolhouses, the consolidation of the public
schools, and the strict segregation of children according to age". Robert
Hardaway, America Goes to School: Law, Reform, and Crisis in Public
Education (1995). 
_____

In the twenty years beginning in 1890, the systems of the 1840s were made
efficient. Now there were not just age-based grades but discrete subjects.
Not just days in school but specific moments devoted to single subjects.
Not just assessments but state-wide tests which enforced classroom
conformity. American education was no longer viewed as craft or social
responsibility, but as one more example of mass production.

Age-based grades were the perfect fit for the new industrial age. The raw
material (students) would be pulled in at one end, and through repeated
"stampings" would emerge eight years later as compliant workers and
citizens. Quality checks at the end of each year would assess whether that
raw material was defective or not. If detective, a stamping would be
repeated, if that did not work, the student would be discarded. This
filtered the population effectively for the employment needs of the 19th
Century. Most never made it through the whole process, and very, very few
would emerge at the end of eight years considered ready for further
polishing (high school completion was rare well into the 20th Century).
Premium "raw materials" - the children of the elite - were obviously not
treated this way. They were hand-formed by tutors or the teachers at
private academies. This assured that the American aristocracy would
maintain their position.


We're still there

This theory of education, as the equivalent of industrial processing,
remains dominant. Everything about "accountability" - the chant of both
the left and the right these days, is based in this. Yes, it has always
been controversial. Many in 19th Century America resisted giving up the
"One Room Schoolhouse" with its multiage grouping of students, its
individualized instruction, its peer-to-peer instruction, and its
acceptance of students who entered at any point and moved at their own
pace. And before the Reagan era washed in a new age of educational
conservatism, many public schools were experimenting with less emphasis on
age as the determiner of what should be learned. But if any experiments
survived Reagan, No Child Left Behind, with its insistence that every
student learn at the exact same rate, cemented the industrial process
legally as national policy.

And this is the source of most of our failure. Age-based grades and the
industrial model ensure that in every classroom, at least one-third of
students will be bored, and one-third will be behind. Age-based grades
create disabilities, by insisting that there is a "norm" for every age,
and labeling those not "there" yet with pathological descriptions. Call it
whatever euphemism you desire, but the idea is always "retardation" - by
very definition. Age-based grades - by creating rigid "norms" - damage
those from differing ethnic groups and cultures. Age-based grades destroy
those entering school from below middle-class backgrounds, since we are
all well aware that poverty is the number one predictor of "starting
behind" - and if you start behind, even if all schools were equal,
age-based grades all but guarantee that you will fail at every step.

And every "grade level expectation" published by every state, and every
achievement test, reinforces this system of failure.

So we continue to stamp, and we continue to filter. Oh, we've put in many
more inspection points, and we've put in many more stages of remedial
processing, but nothing has changed. And when the failure inevitably
occurs, we do what every industrial manager does, we blame the raw
material ("our students are not prepared for school") or we blame the
industrial workers ("the problem", as Bill Gates, Senior put it on NPR,
"is the teachers").


America needs to decide

Our complaint now, wrongly, whether the education secretary is appointed
by a right-wing ideologue like George W Bush or a liberal former community
organizer like Barack Obama, is a complaint about a system which we think
does not work well enough. If you believe that then you will look at
management (Charter Schools), or inspection (high-stakes testing), or
replacing workers with industrial robots (scripted instruction, Teach for
America).

The problem is that the system is doing what it was designed to do:
sending the children of our elite to Ivy League universities and sending
the children of our poor out to the streets. We see it as a "problem" only
because the employment profile has changed, so instead of dumping those
filtered out into factories and mines, we dump them into crime and
nothingness.

If we want a different result, it is the system - not the students, not
the teachers - not even really the management - which must change. These
groups, after all, are just humans, humans responding to the system they
are forced to survive in.

The educational system, and all the structures created to support that
system - the buildings, furniture, time schedules, tests - are the
problem. Decades of tinkering with the details have not altered the
results at all, because those results are a creation of the system itself.
So if Americans want change, it is time for them to insist on real change.

- Ira Socol

Over the next few days I'll be looking at the structures of this system.
Please share your thoughts along the way. And many thanks to Clay Burell
for this opportunity to speak to all of you at change.org

You can find my blog on education, technology, and "special needs"
education at SpeEdChange. You can find my books on Amazon.com

http://education.change.org/blog/view/counting_the_origins_of_failure


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