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Education: A National Embarrassment

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JOHN REINIERS Special to Hernando Today

Published: November 24, 2007

It must be political correctness or American chauvinism, or maybe it's the drinking water. We just can't seem to get outraged over the dismal outcomes from our K12 school system.

My view has always been to focus on parents first, then the teachers.

We are a country of the disinterested, dysfunctional or functionally illiterate parents, many of whom were high school dropouts.

Perhaps it would be more helpful to start with our culture. American experts are loathe to attribute the superior educational achievements of Asian American kids to their natural superiority. OK.

Then maybe it's their culture: Their respect for elders, discipline, authority, and how they value educational achievement. Forty eight percent of Asian immigrants have university degrees, compared to 27 percent of us American born.

Instead of examining student assessments done by the United States, let's take a look a more level playing field - The Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), a worldwide test of 15 year olds coordinated by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. The USA is consistently below the international average. In 2003, the U.S. came in at 24 out of 29 countries compared.

White students performed above the OECD average in math and problem-solving, while Hispanic and black students came in below. Of all Latin American immigrants, 47 percent have no high school diploma and their children have the highest dropout rate.

Countries consistently on top are Finland, Canada, Singapore, Japan and South Korea. And while England and Wales are struggling, Northern Ireland is above the OECD average and Scotland consistently performs in the top third. Even Macao, Hungary and Poland beat our kids in problem-solving. And funding per student isn't the answer.

The Czech Republic is in the top ten, yet spent only one third as much as the U.S. The same with Singapore. We throw all kinds of money at our kids in the inner cities and outcomes are dismal.

The best performing educational systems seem to attract and recruit the best teachers.

While the U.S. typically recruits teachers from the bottom third of graduates, other high performing countries do just the opposite. In fact, South Korea recruits from the top 5 percent of graduates.

One answer is that in many other cultures teachers are given a higher professional status than in the U.S. Internationally renowned economist Milton Friedman was convinced that the decline in the perception of professional status began in the 1960s with "teachers' unions taking control of the schools...and since the teachers' unions started emerging, you have the decline in the quality of schooling."

Coincidentally the '60s ushered in the counter-culture generation - drugs, rejection of authority, hippies, ambivalent sexual mores, and freedom of personal expression and self interest, and on and on.

One can legitimately speculate as to whether this clear rejection of traditional American values has now redefined the job of an educator from one of simply teaching, to that of being surrogate parent/motivator/disciplinarian of the progeny of this prototypical American generation.

You would think that offering teachers big salaries, is the answer, but countries such as Switzerland, Germany and the U.S., with the highest teacher salaries are not in the top tier of best performing educational systems.

Top performing countries pay no more than average salaries.

If we accept the fact that too many parents are not role models for their children, for whatever reason, and that this contributes to the appalling high school dropout rate, it would be of value to examine what successful countries are doing with failing students, and at what point they are intervening.

Surprisingly, - or maybe not - it is reported that Finland - in the gold standard - intervenes quickly when pupils fail, and has as many as one teacher in seven dedicated to special education. This is individual one-on-one remedial instruction.

This would be a staggering commitment by the school system and taxpayers, but given the failure of far too many parents and our culture, educators as surrogate parents may be the only solution to break the cycle of generations doomed to poverty - which is now being exacerbated by the alarming high school drop out rate of the children of Latin American immigrants.

These are the 50 percent who pay no income taxes, use social safety net programs, and yet insist they "played by the rules" while they either learned no marketable skills in high school or just dropped out.

These are the people who are in need of early intervention by the school system.

They need a path to success, otherwise they will become angry adults we now see demanding government entitlements.

The irony is there are many people who did "play by the rules," yet became unfortunate victims of chance - perhaps health issues, being laid off - whatever. These are the folks who really deserve our support.

In the U.S., we have a constitutional right to fail. When it comes to education and values, we have certainly done a good job. It makes it awfully difficult to lecture the superiority of the American way with either our international friends, or our enemies.

John Reiniers writes regularly for Hernando Today. He lives in Spring Hill.

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