The Schools Cannot Be Reformed

In a thoughtful, erudite essay in "The Atlantic" magazine, John McWhorter explains what NYC schools should do to help more Black students enter the vaunted specialized high schools.  I like John McWhorter, a lot.  He is a smart guy who usually has something interesting to say.  Not this time.

His analysis is correct and his suggestions are eminently reasonable.  The problem, as the kids are wont to say, is:  BTDT ("been there, done that).  It has all been tried, before.  All of it.  Result:  zero, zip, nada.

American public education has been in a state of continuous reform since John Dewey published "My Pedagogic Creed" in A.D. 1897, 122 years ago.  (Wikipedia describes Dewey as a "philosopher, psychologist, and educational reformer.")  I mark the modern phase of education reform to 1957, when the then USSR simultaneously launched Sputnik into orbit and propelled the U.S. into the "Space Race".

With the paranoia of the Cold War, the U.S. turned on the taps and a torrent of money started flowing into an education system that, until then, could best be described as somebody's hobby.  Like an anabolic steroid, truly massive amounts of money made the schools of education consequential in a way they had never been before, and the teachers associations turned from amateur interest groups into powerful labor unions and the most effective political lobbyists in the country.

The public schools we have, today, are not the result of ignorance or inattention.  They are what the Education Mafia made them.  Professors of education dedicate their professional careers to studying education.  They hold colloquia and symposia, they publish peer reviewed papers, on the basis of which they design curricula, write textbooks, and train teachers. 

John McWhorter, intelligent man that he is, cannot tell these people anything they have not already thought of, long ago.  Which brings us back to NYC's specialized high schools and why Black students are statistically invisible in them.  There are only two possible explanations.  Either (a) there is something wrong with Black people, or (b) there is something wrong with the schools.

My money is on (b). 

With few exceptions, American public schools are educationally inert.  Let's be clear about what that means.  You are thinking, wait, Ed, we know some schools are better than others.  True, but not because of the schools, per se, but because of the students, themselves.  The students make the schools, not vice versa.  The children of wealthier, educated, professional (mainly White) parents bring more with them than the children of blue collar and welfare (mainly Black) parents.

One depressing, and unimpeachable, example is the work done by Todd Risley and Betty Hart, who demonstrated that by age 3, there is a 30 million word gap between the children of middle class professional parents and the children of welfare mothers.  Not just numbers of words, but also quality and diversity of the words (welfare children tend to hear the same words, over and over).  This is a consequential gap that only increases over time.

We desperately want the schools to compensate for these disadvantages.  They cannot.  In other words, the more a child depends on the schools for his education, the worse it will be for that child. 

To put it bluntly, we have hired the wrong people for the job.

This thought came to me some years ago during a discussion on academic placement.  I pointed out that, starting in 1st grade or kindergarten, a school needs to know only the child's birth date, and they can fully determine the entire arc of that child's educational career for the next 12 yrs.

How can this possibly be right?  The schools take into account nothing about a child's interests, abilities, and achievements over time.  Who does this?  Imagine going to a physician and, as you start to describe your pain, he stops you and says all he needs is your birth date.  On that basis he will know exactly how to treat you.  You would run away from that doctor as fast as you can.

I characterized this educational (mal)practice as "the astrological theory of academic placement".  Bingo!  Think of it this way:  we need astronomers to run our schools but we hired astrologers.  Astronomers are scientists.  Astrologers are superstitious charlatans.  And no amount of "reform" will turn astrologers into astronomers.

John McWhorter is pissing into the wind.  The schools, as they are presently constituted, cannot do what he wants them to do.  If they could, they would have done it, already.