Why Have Americans Never Admired Their Own Schools?

School Administrator, May, 1996 by Harold "Bud" Hodgkinson

I am proud to be labeled a contrarian, if that means that one must look at the evidence before making a judgment about anything.

For the past 10 years or so, I have been amazed at the ease with which any negative comment about the public schools appeared in print and the extreme difficulty of getting anything that was factual and neutral into the public domain. (Indeed, I once received an award from an education press group for doing the best factual piece during that year dealing with the achievements of America s public schools. I found out later that mine was the only piece entered. No one else had written anything positive about schools in that entire year.)

In 1993, I published a synthesis of virtually everything that was known about school achievement, from the Sandia Report to the SATs. The conclusion: America's top 20 percent of students are world class on almost any measure, the next 40 percent are deserving of postsecondary education in some package, and the bottom 30 to 40 percent are awful. The latter is due mainly to disadvantages our nation's youngsters bring with them to the kindergarten door on the first day of school, such as having one of the highest rates of youth poverty of any NATO country.

The performance gap between Japan's top and bottom tenth is very small. The distance from the U.S. top and bottom is huge. In my April 1993 article for the monthly journal Phi Delta Kappan, "American Education: The Good, The Bad, and The Task," I advocated a national effort to get more of the bottom group into the middle with a special focus on reducing youth poverty--the greatest single force holding down school achievement.

Responses to that call were fascinating. Many contended that if one praised the schools for anything, teachers would get lazy and students would stop learning. Others said that poverty was the fault of the child and that working hard to transcend poverty was what America was all about. Still others said the news media were not in the business of praising people, that only bad news is news, that I was dumping all of education's problems on the American family, that I was against standards, etc.

All of the Contrarians, from Bracey to Berliner to me, have been labeled "apologists for the status quo," even though we have all been quite specific about what needs to be done to make schools better.

The truth of any social institution is complex in terms of results. Consider Aid for Families with Dependent Children, a highly successful program for 25 percent of recipients who are off the program in six months or less, awful for another 25 percent who are still on after 37 months, while the middle half are skewed toward the successful side. That is simply too complex to be a good sound bite for Dan Rather, but it is precisely the nature of the evidence for AFDC and schools.

Why do our contemporaries insist that nothing positive be said about schools? Although Berliner's book documents brilliantly the existence of the conspiracy, he does not explain the reason for its existence. My belief is that the nation's public schools (and teachers) never have been admired during any period in American history.

Being a very ahistorical people, Americans never have looked back in history to see whether we could learn something that would make contemporary school reform efforts more effective.

If one goes back to Arthur Bestor's Educational Wastelands, to Why Johnny Can't Read, to the Conant Report, or to Albert Lynd's Quackery in the Public Schools, one finds criticism well before the now-institutionalized report, A Nation at Risk, assumed by many to be the first major criticism of public education, had ever seen the light of day.

In addition, schools of education have been regularly trounced by university faculty as being second-rate, partly for perceived inferior scholarship by the education faculty, partly for their habit of associating with (or even visiting!) public schools, which, as every arts and sciences professor knew, were full of intellectual contaminants, something akin to visiting a leper colony. Indeed, this author took part in a debate in New York City on public schools and heard the distinguished philosopher Sydney Hook describe an education course as "imitation pearls cast before real swine."

Why this almost pathological revulsion in academe over the public schools?

If one goes back to the early days of the nation, one can find several clues. The first laws making school attendance compulsory appeared in 1642 and 1647 in New England (of course). They came to be known as the Old Deluder Laws because of their function. Satan was the Old Deluder, and because the devil finds work for idle hands to do, it seemed wise to teach young people to read and write, primarily to keep the devil away. No reference was made to the creation of a new American intellectual elite nor the formation of a new political leadership nor anything else grandiose or deserving of respect, just teaching little brats to read to keep the devil from their door. Law, medicine, and preaching all clearly were professions. Keeping school was not; anybody could do it, even before the Declaration of Independence!