Academic rights: when public education fails, minorities with few other advantages are particularly hurt

National Review, Sept 15, 1997 by Glynn Custred

LAST November the people of California passed Proposition 209 (the California Civil Rights Initiative) which prohibits preferential treatment based on race, ethnicity, or sex in public contracting, public employment, and public education. During the campaign many who agreed in principle with the initiative were concerned about the effect it might have on minority inclusion, especially in college and university admissions. It was asked over and over again, "If you take preferences away from them, what will you give them in return?"

This of course is the wrong question. What we should be asking is why so many minorities fail to qualify for college in the first place. This shifts attention from how colleges can accommodate themselves to low-performing minorities, and toward the real problem of why the public schools are preparing so few minority students for college admission in the first place.

In fact this goes to the very heart of the problem of social and economic inequality, for the kind of universal education which the public schools are supposed to provide is essential not only for college admission, but also for training and retraining in all occupations. Moreover, in modern society education helps to determine everything from income levels and social class all the way to physical and mental health. The more education, or intellectual capital, which people possess, the greater their chances of advancement -- regardless of race and ethnicity.

The unequal distribution of intellectual capital begins with the informal education children receive in the home. With ineffective formal schooling, the gap between those children who arrive at school with more of this vital resource and those who arrive with less will grow wider and wider, eventually creating a permanent gap between the two. Mass universal education is therefore one of the most powerful engines for social equality a modern society possesses. If, however, this engine does not work well, the initial gap will persist and become evident in inequalities throughout the entire society.

By almost every measure American K - 12 public education is a failure. This is revealed not only by comparisons with other countries, but also by growing dissatisfaction among parents and increasing complaints by employers about the inadequate preparation of their work force. Although everybody is hurt by this massive failure, minorities suffer even more because of their initial disadvantage.

THERE are a number of reasons why our schools are so bad. Among them is the stubborn adherence by the education establishment to such demonstrably failed methods as bilingual education, which deprives children who speak little or no English of full access to the national language; "whole language" teaching, which replaces effective reading with what amounts to a psycholinguistic guessing game; and "integrated math" (analogous to whole language reading), which transforms instruction into a game designed to allow students to "discover" math for themselves at the expense of computational skills and accuracy in calculation.

Behind all this is an educational ideology, derived from "progressivism," which has become a rigid orthodoxy masquerading as continual reform in an effort to cover its failure. This orthodoxy rejects knowledge-based education and those methods traditionally associated with it, among them teacher-directed instruction, drill, individual study, and memorization. These methods, say the educationists, numb critical thinking and turn students away from learning. In its place they advocate the "naturalistic," "project-oriented," "hands-on" approach where the teacher is replaced by a "facilitator" who coaches while the students "discover" for themselves the skills they need for "lifelong learning." Or as the shop-worn doggerel goes, "The sage on the stage gives way to the guide on the side."

The notion that all learning should be "naturalistic," like the untutored learning of the mother tongue, and that public schools must institutionalize this process in all domains, flies in the face of common sense, long experience, and scientific research. It also ignores the practical realities of providing mass education for a heterogeneous population.

Another fallacy is that knowledge is less important than knowledge-seeking skills, since the explosion of knowledge today makes it impossible to learn everything about a subject. Thus schools shouldn't bother with "mere facts" but should focus instead on teaching "accessing skills" and such "higher order" or "metacognitive skills" as "critical thinking," "problem solving," etc.

However, since critical thinking is not a detachable tool but instead involves thinking critically about something, the more knowledge one possesses (in domains such as literature, carpentry, history, brick laying, mathematics, etc.), the more analogies one will have at one's disposal for thinking critically about something new. To emphasize "critical thinking" as an all-purpose skill while de-emphasizing knowledge actually serves to decrease a student's ability to think critically.