U.S. teachers lead race toward education's nadir

0 Comments | Insight on the News, March 30, 1998 | by Richard Grenier

With the warm, glowing feeling President Clinton seems adept at producing when the wind is right, he announced some weeks ago that it was every American's right to go to college. He promised, moreover, that he'd proceed by some financial device or other to make this Possible. What a wonderful feeling we had. Eventually every American would be studying astrophysics or Elizabethan drama or Chinese history -- or at least accounting. We'd be the most educated nation in history.

But just what use would astrophysics or Chinese history be to a population that cannot solve elementary arithmetic problems, a population that for some years has been at the bottom of the international intelligence listings?

For those to whom democracy means the banishment of any form of superiority (and for some decades now this has been a goal of part of our culture), this plunge to the bottom must be exhilarating. But what would students who cannot complete grammar-school arithmetic do when exposed to arts and science curriculums at decent universities? They obviously wouldn't un-derstand a word of what's taught in advanced physics courses nor, frankly, would they care. Dropout rates would be astronomical. (A question not completely irrelevant: Isn't happiness possible without a college degree?)

But why is a country with the historic dynamism of America in the world's intellectual subbasement? The Third International Mathematic and Science Study has tested thousands of fourth-, eighth- and 12th-grade students from more than 40 countries, and from about half that many countries in the high-school years. (Asian nations, traditionally high scorers, did not participate for the latter years.) The fourth-grade results, released in June, showed the United States to be well above the international average. But the eighth-grade results, which had been released seven months earlier, showed American students to be well below the international average in mathematics.

And the sharp intake of breath that the mathematics scores produced was nothing compared to what greeted American students' performance in the 12th grade, details of which were released last week. In mathematics, of the 13 countries participating (with the Netherlands and Scandinavia leading the pack), the United States was third -- from the bottom. In advanced mathematics (with France leading), the United States only was one up from the bottom. And in physics (11 places behind Lithuania), the United States was dead last.

A national howl went up from a country whose economic dominance increasingly has been based on information and technology. Can America's economic position be maintained with ratings like these in those disciplines necessary to compete in technical innovation?

"You cannot blame this on the schoolchildren," Clinton bravely proclaimed to the National Council of Jewish Women after learning the results. "There is no excuse for this. There is something wrong with the system." Clinton is proposing, as a remedy, to send thousands of federally funded teachers out to the nation. He also strongly supports reducing class size, another fad that will cost a fortune and accomplish, frankly, nothing.

No sensible person would dream of blaming the schoolchildren, obviously, but there are other people to blame in the educational system. Our teachers may be the most ignorant and ill-prepared of the industrial world. A July report from the Education Department said 36 percent of the teachers in our public schools, for example, are teaching a subject in which they have neither a college major nor even a minor. And when it comes to the physical sciences, the percentage of teachers with no qualifications reaches 50 percent.

Those who haven't made a study of it rarely realize how low a product our schools of education turn out. As John Leo writes in US. News & World Report, "Largely because of the culture of teachers' colleges, our public education is pervaded by social attitudes that work against achievement." One such attitude is "the heavy emphasis on feelings, subjectivity and self-esteem at the expense of actual learning and thinking."

And if you thought that such ecstatic states of feeling had gone out of fashion, you should realize that "cooperative learning," history as group therapy and other such manifestations of 1960s-style flower-power equalitarianism still flourish at teachers' colleges -- and consequently throughout our educational system. Many teachers today still oppose the very word "teacher" as too authoritarian, preferring "facilitator." But it's the rare teacher who, unprepared, will be able to "facilitate" a student's way through quantum physics or differential equations.

A further powerful pressure against achievement is that of textbook publishers. They send salespeople to talk to teachers and ask them what they'd like to have in textbooks. But these are the same unqualified "ed-school" people who caused the problem. And in turning this one around we'll have our work cut out for us.