The Smart Society. Peter D. Salins

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ may be broken, living-wage jobs in short supply, and families forced to live in unstable or unsafe conditions. But the buck supposedly stops in the classroom. Thus teachers can find themselves charged with remedying an impossibly broad set of challenges that go far beyond reading at grade level.⁹

      They have a point. In chapters 3 and 4 I address ways in which we can significantly boost student achievement and, while not letting teachers off the hook, also not impose on them the entire burden of eliminating performance disparities.

      The other opposition comes from a segment of contrarian opinion that believes that education reform efforts aimed at closing achievement gaps are largely futile because schoolchildren’s cognitive and cultural disadvantages are too deep-seated to overcome. Instead, they argue that not all Americans need to be educated to the level of college readiness, and that this goal is not achievable in any case. The policy prescription we are to infer from this bleak assessment is that we should go back to the old paradigm of cognitive and social stratification: stop wasting money or energy on school reform and focus education efforts on those most likely to succeed academically with the goal of preparing them—and only them—for college, and, as in the old days, steer the educational losers into industries and occupations that may require specialized training (e.g., hair stylists, telephone installers) but not a thorough general education.

      Are the contrarians correct? First, their position is not new; it is merely a rationale for reestablishing the status quo that prevailed in the first two-thirds of the last century. Taken to its extreme, it echoes the educational elitists of every era to justify the kind of educational rationing and stratification that used to be endemic throughout the world—something repugnant to the egalitarian American ethos. But the best empirical refutation is found in the academic fortunes of upper-middle-class American children. Central to the contrarian’s view is the argument that half of all children must be—in terms of statistical logic—below average and therefore should be automatically disqualified from aspiring to or getting a college education. Yet this same logic should also apply to children from the upper middle class. Countless studies refute the notion that just because upper-middle-class adults engage in “assortative” (i.e., class-based) mating, their children have any genetic advantage in intelligence.¹⁰ Yet, despite not being necessarily “smarter” than the general population—or even than the majority of disadvantaged children—nearly all upper-middle-class children graduate from high school and most go on to and graduate from college—mainly because their well-educated parents see to it. Bottom line: if upper-middle-class kids of middling (or even inferior) ability can get—and benefit from—a good education, then all other kids should be able to as well. So, despite the doubters, we need not abandon the idealistic new American public education paradigm; we just have to make it work.

      MILESTONES ON THE ROAD TO THE NEW PARADIGM

      Widespread acceptance of America’s new educational paradigm did not occur overnight; it is the product of a half century of study and reconsideration. Perhaps the first crack in the old paradigm was the 1954 Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education, which ended de jure school segregation in the South. Clearly, the court’s ruling was primarily grounded in the flagrant unconstitutionality of state-mandated segregation. But a key element in the court’s motivation was the desire to raise the academic achievement of black schoolchildren. The court’s thinking was influenced by the research of sociologist Kenneth Clark and others that for the first time challenged the prevailing socioeconomic determinism that took the poor school performance of blacks—segregated or not—for granted.¹¹ Thus Brown might be considered the country’s first step on the path to holding schools, not children, responsible for educational outcomes.

      As noted earlier, the Soviet Union’s launch of the Sputnik space satellite in 1957 suddenly made Americans aware that the United States was in danger of losing the global race for technological superiority, the one domain in which Americans had long displayed unchallenged leadership. The fact that the country might be overtaken not by a friendly Western competitor but by its dangerous Cold War adversary heightened Americans’ anxiety and sense of inferiority. The response of the Eisenhower administration was to launch a host of committees and studies and, ultimately, to sharply increase federal aid for public school instruction in science and mathematics.

      In 1965, as part of the Lyndon Johnson administration’s “Great Society” reforms, Congress passed the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), which, for the first time, specifically directed federal school aid to raise the academic achievement levels of underperforming schoolchildren, most of them poor, urban, and minorities. In terms of policy, this was the first concrete attempt to decouple student achievement from socioeconomic or cognitive determinants. This legislation also established Head Start, the first (and still the largest) federal foray into promoting preschool education for disadvantaged youngsters. (The importance and design of an effective preschool experience is the subject of chapter 3.)

      A singular aspect of the new paradigm story is the expanding role of the federal government in education policy. In fact, to a large extent it is the “federalization” of education that has defined the new paradigm. The old paradigm, although strongly impacted by national intellectual and advocacy currents like the common school movement, nevertheless was implemented entirely by the individual states and localities. In contrast, every element in the new paradigm depends on national perceptions and national action. The U.S. Supreme Court ended school segregation. National Cold War anxieties and national civil rights advocacy prompted federal aid to address their concerns. One key advance in this march toward the federalization of education policy—along new paradigm lines—was the creation of a cabinet-level federal education agency. A modest movement in this direction had already been taken during the Eisenhower administration in the establishment of the U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW) in 1953. The definitive step, however, was the transfer of national education policy and oversight from HEW to an independent Department of Education under President Jimmy Carter in 1979.

      A cascade of influential reports and popular books has both shaped and responded to federal education policy. Two books in particular that highlighted the failings of American public schools caught the public imagination: Death at an Early Age by Jonathan Kozol and Why Johnny Can’t Read by Rudolf Flesch.¹² These works drove yet more nails into the coffin of the old paradigm of socioeconomic and cognitive educational determinism. But the most influential of all the postwar education reports by far was A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform, authored by a blue-ribbon commission of prominent educators under the auspices of the Reagan administration in 1983.¹³ The report charged that “the educational foundations of our society” were being “eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a Nation and a people” and “If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war.” Beyond its hyperbolic rhetoric, the report was one of the earliest to note the poor performance of American students on international tests in mathematics, science, and language arts. Among its many other indictments, it asserted that 23 million Americans (about 14 percent of all adults) were “functionally illiterate” and a majority of the rest lacked “ ‘higher order’ intellectual skills”; that Scholastic Aptitude Test scores for college-bound seniors had fallen over the previous twenty years; and that colleges had to offer remedial courses to a high proportion of their underprepared entering students.

      Federal spending on education has grown dramatically as Congress has continually tweaked the various provisions of the ESEA under its successive reauthorizations. Federal aid to state and local public schools has grown from $2 billion in 1965 to more than $56 billion in 2008.¹⁴ But the reauthorization of ESEA in 2001—optimistically titled No Child Left Behind—exponentially increased the intensity of federal intervention in state and local school policy. This legislation, more than СКАЧАТЬ