Why Science Needs Donald Trump

I read articles like this so you don't have to, "Are the best students really that advanced?" about the latest results from TIMSS.

TIMSS is the "Trends In International Math And Science Study".  It compares achievement in math and science of students in about 40 countries, including the U.S.  This particular version of the study hails from 1995 but is merely a variant of the kind of international comparison done since about 1965.  It used to be done every ten years, now every four or five years.

Students used to be compared at approximately the 4th grade, 8th grade, and 12th grade levels.  Then, 12 graders were not included for a while.  Now, it seems they are being included, again, at least for some countries.  I will touch on the reason for this, shortly.

The international comparisons are restricted to math and science, for obvious reasons.  Testing in Chinese language and literature would be meaningless since Americans, for example, do not study the subject.  And yet, there are structural difficulties, even with math and science.  For example, the U.S. is one of the few countries that seriously tries to offer the same education to every student.  In fact, for complicated reasons that would require their own essay, we are reluctant to let any student off the college-prep track.

Many other countries, like the high achieving East Asians, perform a rather aggressive educational "triage".  Typically around the 8th grade, sometimes as early as the 6th grade, students are sorted into vocational and academic tracks.  The academic track, itself, is often bifurcated into the parallel tracks of Arts and Sciences.  Prospective scientists and engineers are being specially groomed since about age 13 years.

You have to know there is a world of difference between the kind of math and science you can teach to a select group of highly motivated, high achieving, college-bound, science-intending students, and a heterogeneous group of students, many of whom may not even be college material, and whose chief common characteristic is indifference to mathematics, if not outright aversion to it.  TIMSS reflects this difference, spectacularly, and the Americans hate it.

Over the years, the TIMSS has been vised and revised for one primary reason:  the Americans don't like the results.  And yet, for all the revisions, this one result about American students remains stubbornly robust over some 50 years:

• by the end of 4th grade, they score in the top quartile;
• by the end of 8th grade, they are at the median; and 
• by the end of high school, they are at the bottom.

In other words, American students do reasonably well at 4th grade, decline to mediocrity by 8th grade, then a sheer drop to the bottom in high school. This result has been so consistent for so long that some years ago (circa 2000?) the "Economist Newspaper" was moved to comment that 

"American schools are bad for American children. The longer they are in school the worse they do."

This view was corroborated in 2009 by an NYU study of foreign-born children in NYC schools, "Age of entry and the high school performance of immigrant youth".  Stiefel, Schwartz, and Conger compared American-born children of immigrant parents to foreign-born immigrant children.  They hypothesized that children who had spent more time in NYC schools would perform better than children, educated elsewhere, who then entered NYC schools in mid-stream.

Much to the surprise of the authors---but not to anyone familiar with TIMSS---the results were just the reverse.  And, by the way, this is why 12^th grade was excluded from TIMSS for several testing cycles;  the Americans did not like it.  If you restrict TIMSS to 4^th and 8^th grades, the American “Education Mafia” can defensibly assert that, “Well, OK, maybe American education is not all it should be, but it’s no disaster neither.”

Yes, it is a disaster.  Of the 40 industrial countries (and a couple of others) in TIMSS, American public education decidedly provides the worst “Bang for the buck.”  It is the most expensive of all public school systems (with the possible exception of Switzerland) and it gets the worst possible results (with the possible exceptions of Turkey and Cyprus).  The worst Bang for the buck, no doubt.

Friends, you have to meditate on these two facts:  (1) American schools are bad for American children, and (2) this fact has been well known---Well Known---for 50 years.  Naturally, profound change in American public education is in the offing, right?

Wrong.

For reasons that are poorly understood---through no fault of the Education Mafia, who publish their theories widely in books, academic papers, popular journals, Op-eds in local and national newspapers, and in Congressional testimonies---the Education Mafia will only double down on their current theories of education.  Nobody wants the schools we have except the Education Mafia, and there is no way around them.

The U.S. does not have a ministry of education, like France, e.g., where all children use the same textbooks and on this day at this time everyone is, literally, on the same page.  Indeed, it was famously, and humorously, observed that during the height of French colonialism, little African children in Chad and Gabon, reading from the same books as the children of their French masters, would begin their history lesson with “Our ancestors the Gauls.” (Those little children are not reading about their ancestors the Gauls, or anything else, anymore.  The French are gone and the children are too busy foraging for food and dodging bullets.  Post-colonialism has been a catastrophe for them.)

And yet, it is a mistake to suppose that American public schools are not centrally directed.  Oh, there might be a bit of wiggle room, here and there, but you are only deluding yourself if you do not see the uniformity of policy and practice across the country.  There is a de facto, if not de jure, syndicate of education schools (primus inter pares, Columbia Teachers College), teachers unions, and multifarious professional organizations like the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, National Association of State Boards of Education, The Council of Chief State School Officers, and at least a dozen like these, that constitute what I call the “Education Mafia”.  These people talk to each other, they compare notes, they testify on each other’s behalfs, and they plan the future of your children, whether you like it or not.

The Education Mafia is the single most fearsome political lobby in the country.  They have some five million members (probably more), a lot of their own money, they control the education budget to the tune of some $650 BBBillion per year, and they are organized at every level of government, local, state, and federal.  They are truly massive, their social and political roots run deep, and they are unreformable.

That is, the Education Mafia are unreformable under the current political regime.  So long as the Democratic Party belongs to Donna Brazile and the Clinton Crime Family, so long as the Republican Party belongs to Karl Rove and the Bush Family, there is no hope for reform.  None.  Zero.  Zip.

The only hope for education reform is to reduce the existing political parties into “smoking pile[s] of rubble”, and to break the back of the Education Mafia.  My only hope for the 2016 elections was to see the Rove/Bush wing of the Republican Party defeated.  In fact, Donald Trump has reduced both parties to smoking piles of rubble, and I am eternally grateful to him for that, alone.  We live in exciting times.

It remains to be seen what President Trump will do with public education.  His nomination of Betsy DeVos to Education Secretary is sadly uninspiring.  Charters and vouchers will not be our salvation.  But, the man has time so let’s give him a chance (and some encouragement).  If Donald Trump breaks the back of the Education Mafia, it will be a new dawn in science education, and a new start for a whole lot of other things, to boot.