Anti-Intellectualism in the Public Schools and the Reform of Teacher Education

William Plank
French
MSU-Billings

[Editor's Note: This lecture was given at the conference called "Education 2000: American Schools and Public Choices," supported by the Montana Committee for the Humanities, Montana State University-Billings, Rocky Mountain College, Yellowstone Public Radio, Community Seven Television, the University of Montana, and The Montana Professor.]

The Marx Brothers gave short shrift to the pompous and self-righteous, but showed sympathy for frustrated lovers and other unfortunate people. In the 1932 movie, Horsefeathers, Groucho sang a song with the refrain, "Whatever it is, I'm against it." Well, whatever it is, that is not a substantive reform of teacher education in the public schools...whatever it is, I'm against it.

Now when the public educational establishment, composed of 1200 college and university schools of education, a dozen or so accreditation agencies, 2,700,000 teachers, 25,000 school psychologists who are certified to practice on your kid but not on the general public, 100,000 school counselors, 14,000 school boards composed of laymen presumably there to protect local control, 97,000 school board members, 215,000 administrators, 270,000 special education teachers, and a budget of one quarter of a trillion dollars...when this educational establishment tells me they want more money for research into educational methodology and to produce more Bachelors of Science in Education and more Doctors of Education: I'm against it.

And when well-meaning folks come along and tell me that we need more charter schools to escape the mediocrity and the danger of the public schools, when the president tells me in the State of the Union message that we now have 1700 charter schools and by next year we need to have 3000, well: I'm against it. I'm against this kind of closet elitism...but I am in favor of an elite education for everyone.

And especially when people come along and tell me that we need to hand out vouchers to people who may then abandon the wretched schools and flock to the excellent schools: I'm against it. I owe you an explanation. Let me begin with the voucher system.

Listen to Tom Tancredo. Tom Tancredo is the man with the beautiful and ancient name of the Vikings who conquered Sicily and southern Italy in the 11th century and went on the first crusade in 1090 to clear the Holy Land of the heathen. He writes the following, contradicting himself, by the way, in the second sentence: "The implication here is that it is impossible to have high-quality education occurring in any classroom regulated by the state. The fact is, there are some great public schools and some lousy private schools. Without the benefits of the free-market competition, however, there is little if any incentive to expand the number of the former or eliminate the latter."/1/

Let us look closely at this free-market competition which is supposed to bring about educational excellence. The free market has as many bankruptcies as successes, and the supporters of the voucher system are apparently ready to accept a sacrifice generation, a bankruptcy generation or two of students while the smart and lucky students flee to the good schools and the poor schools collapse in their incompetency. But there is more: the free market has another name: the struggle for the survival of the fittest. That struggle has yet another name: biological evolution. Natural selection! Institutions, schools, organizations, ecosystems and cultures are systemic organisms which follow the same systemic rules, the same principles as biological organisms. Manfred Eigen and Ruthild Winkler have demonstrated that well in their book, The Laws of the Game, applying the game model to organisms and systems of all kinds. The mechanics of biological evolution, for each successful organism, has a dozen, a hundred, a thousand failures, whose fossils we find buried in the dirt of the ages. This is evolution, what the neo-Darwinist Michael Ruse of the University of Guelph calls "that immense squandering of forms."/2/ And yet, the very people who are full of wrath at the teaching of evolution in the public schools are willing to submit their own children, and especially their neighbors' children, to that indifferent mechanism. I believe in biological evolution, but I don't like it very much, because there are too many losers for the number of winners and I do not believe that we have to let our schools operate according to its cruel mechanism. I do not believe that it is necessary to "squander" the students in some schools while others take their vouchers to what they imagine to be a better school. I'm against it.

Is this the only means of school reform? To submit to the indifferent systemic forces of nature rather than to create a functional system which gives everyone a chance at an elite education? Must we submit to the free-market competition as the only way to make the schools better? Why, my goodness, you already have free-market competition aplenty and look what it has got you! This competition, this survival of the fittest has got you Philips-Andover, Groton, Choate-Rosemary Hall, Exeter, Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Cornell, Stanford! How much more free-market do you want in education? These are the schools for the sons and daughters of the one percent of the population who owns 90% of the wealth, while the rest of the schools, private and public, educate the children of the other 99% who own ten percent of the wealth. Why, Bill Gates alone has the equivalent income of about 40% of the poorest Americans.

This kind of cruel school reform I call "the Bosom of Abraham Theory" of school reform. You all remember the 16th chapter of Luke where Lazarus the beggar has gone to paradise, where he lies in the bosom of Abraham. And the rich man sees him from his torment in hell and begs that Lazarus should dip the tip of his finger in water and cool his tongue burning in the flames. And Abraham's answer is something like: too bad, you had your chance. Is that the answer you are going to give someone who didn't take his voucher and go to a good school? Too bad! You had your chance!

Rather than an intelligent and just and well thought-out school reform, where all are given a chance, the Bosom of Abraham theory, like the theory of biological evolution and the open-market theory, requires that some win and some lose, some go to the putative academic purgatory and others go to the academic heaven. The German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche referred to this passage from Luke to claim that Christians are cruel people, who enjoy seeing their enemies suffer. Surely that cannot be the case. I have no choice but to tolerate biological evolution and the occasional business failures that are part of the open market, but it seems to me that no children need be the losers in some Manichean theory of educational reform where some of us take our vouchers to another school or just take our marbles and go home.

The discontent with the public schools has created a curious compact between African-Americans, Hispanics, and white Republicans. Some of them want the good education they know is possible, and the others want to hang onto it. Sixty-eight percent of African-Americans now favor vouchers. Liberal whites oppose them. Teachers unions fiercely oppose them. But in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where they are permitted, 43% of public school teachers have enrolled their kids in private schools, rather than where they teach, and whether they are using vouchers or not, it shows that the teachers in public schools themselves in Milwaukee don't trust the public schools. In Milwaukee, 6,200 kids are in the voucher system in private schools, both secular and religious. The plan is income based at 175% of the federal poverty level, the student receiving $4,900 or the cost of tuition, whichever is lower. Although the entire education community is against it, the mayor, the governor, and the legislature have forced it.

Jeb Bush, governor of Florida, has declared that if a school is not performing adequately, 100% of the students are eligible for a $4,000 voucher for a school of their choice. Florida must sound like a paradise to the proponents of the voucher system and those who love the idea of the survival of the fittest. It's got a nice climate, too. [Since this address was given, the courts in Florida have declared the voucher system unconstitutional according to the Florida constitution.]

Now, lest ye think that this lets the public schools off the hook, let us consider their condition. I have begun to think that the educational establishment does not realize the low estimation into which the public schools have fallen. Part of what follows will be a consideration of the SAT scores and public and private schools.

James Bryant Conant became president of Harvard in 1933, an institution which, he thought, "was dominated by a distinct social group that he despised...full of rich boys who had gone to New England boarding schools."/3/ Encouraged by the writings of Thomas Jefferson to the effect that there was a natural aristocracy of "virtue and talents" and an "artificial aristocracy founded on wealth and birth, without either virtue or talents,"/4/ Conant encouraged his colleagues to seek out a test of pure intelligence. They found this examination in the Scholastic Aptitude Test, sometimes called the Scholastic Assessment Test, the SAT, developed by Princeton psychology professor, Carl Brigham...and the rest is history. It became and still is the most important test a graduating high school student can take. In retrospect, Conant was naïve in hoping that such tests would locate those young Archimedes from the wrong side of the tracks and from some impoverished family and that the life of the intellect would become democratized.

Grumpy old critics like to say that the SAT does not mean much; and perhaps it does not measure the physiological quality of the human brain, the excellence of its hardware, so to speak. But it certainly provides an index to a student's history of academic alertness; his ambition; his attention span; his self-discipline and application; his satisfaction in learning; his family's academic and cultural traditions; whether he had access to a high school where enriched English, math through calculus, laboratory science courses and foreign languages were offered; the educational and cultural level of the public schools he attended; whether he attended an expensive prep school; and whether he had reconfigured his neural apparatus with recreational chemicals. In short, it reflects the intellectual advantages of a stable family and its high socio-economic status, as education research indicates. And so Professor Conant's ideals were frustrated: "The SAT created...national education standards for the elite, and the elite have benefited tremendously from that."/5/ They found out how to get high scores and set about doing so. You know what an elitist is: he's a person who has a better education than you do and does not apologize for it.

In 1997, David Berliner and Bruce Biddle published their book, A Manufactured Crisis, in which they demonstrated well that the politicians who authored the notorious report, A Nation at Risk, were, as they said, fraudulent and wrong. By comparing the scores on the SAT over the last several years, pointing out that more minorities were taking the test, they concluded that a drop of 90 points or so on the average score was meaningless, especially considering the arcane way the SAT is graded. They pointed out that out of the 138 questions on the SAT, you could miss four or five and drop your score 90 points, and that four or five more mistakes out of 138 are insignificant, especially when aggregate scores are concerned. By the way, their solution for the problems of the public schools was the creation of some magical compassion for the students and an equally magical respect for teachers.

But when we talk about the differences in SAT scores among students, we are not talking about a hundred points, we are talking about 400, 500, and 600 points. So although the aggregate scores of the last few years prove little about the so-called dumbing down of America, i.e., the manufactured crisis of a nation at risk, the SAT does indicate that the Ivy Leagues skim off the cream of the crop and the rest go to school closer to home.

I recently spent a long afternoon with the College Handbook and another long afternoon reading webpages and I came to the conclusion that colleges and universities all over the United States are dissembling, exaggerating, or lying about their institution in the attempt to attract students. Expensive institutions which attract the brightest, best, and richest students and professors flaunt the mid-range score of their freshman class. Those which are embarrassed to do so do not list these scores. A few years ago, the College Book listed the average score of the lower 10% of the freshman class of my institution as 450. Considering that a perfect score is 1600, then 450 is a borderline moron who graduated from some Montana high school. One of our state institutions a few years ago simply refused to deny entrance to 200 students they knew could not make the grade because they could not afford to lose state funds for them.

The College Handbook ranks colleges on the SAT scores of the freshman class, that is, seniors graduated from high school, in the following way:

Montana institutions fall into the "moderately difficult," i.e., 75% of the freshman class will have SAT scores of over 900 and 25% will have under 900. To satisfy your curiosity, here are a few 50% mid-range combined scores:

You may notice that the mid-range scores of Mississippi College, the Baptist college, were from 100 to 170 points higher than any Montana institution, leading me to believe that Baptists in Mississippi are smarter than Montanans. Whether the SAT means anything or not, the freshmen with the highest SAT scores tend to concentrate at the Ivy Leagues. These expensive schools recruit among the smart kids: The University of Chicago (which would be an Ivy League school if it were on the east coast) sent out 45,000 recruiting letters to the nation's top sophomores./6/ Although Chicago claims it does not admit solely on the basis of the SAT score, after having decided on its freshman class, Rick Bischoff of the admissions committee, ran them through a computer program and found that the average score of the 1529 men and the 1631 woman was about 1420.

Now look around you at your friends and colleagues. How many millionaires or multimillionaires do you see? Not many, I'll bet. Why is that? Why isn't this room full of rich people? Why isn't Ted Turner back there with a face full of anxiety? Because there is no crisis in education for the rich, any more than there is a crisis in legal advice or health care for the rich, and I'll spare you all the quotations from F. Scott Fitzgerald on the rich. You're here because you are relatively poor and concerned about the quality of your kid's education and you've got a knot in your belly because income tax time is coming fast. This conference about parental choice is class-based. If Karl Marx were here, he would be taking notes and saying, "I told you so."

To come to the point, the SAT scores are massively affected by the quality of the teachers in the elementary and secondary schools. Let's look at the reputation of the public schools and how it got that way, and at the quality of teachers and their products. Here is where I make some new friends.

A comparison of the public schools with private schools, especially the expensive prep schools, is telling. These are the schools where FDR, JFK, and George Bush went. The expensive prep schools where the yearly tuition runs almost $20,000 not counting board, refuse to hire teachers with a BSED. Call up the webpage for Choate-Rosemary Hall (I have appended a a copy to this paper and have distributed 20 copies for you to look at). You will see 149 faculty members in grades 9-12. There are 124 BA degrees in the subject matter, 78 MA degrees, 18 BS, 19 MS, 5 M. Ed., 2 MD, 5 PhDs. And zero BSEDs. About seventy of these degrees come from Ivy League universities. The same is true for Exeter. Groton, grades 8-12, has all BAs, masters degrees, and PhDs from prestige universities in the US and Europe. Philips-Andover has 220 faculty members, with 166 masters degrees or PhDs in subject matter. These are the teachers who teach the sons and daughters of the 1% of the people who own 90% of American wealth, and they don't want any Bachelors of Science in Education messing around with their students.

Private schools are largely free of teacher certification and avoid hiring certified teachers. The National Association of Independent Schools (NAIS) has a half million students. There are five million students in religious schools, i.e., 10% of US students. There are 8,248 Catholic schools with 2.6 million students. The Catholics graduate 97% and 94% go to college. Minority enrollment in Catholic schools is 25% and a minority student in a Catholic school is three times more likely to get a college degree than a public school minority. A study found "that African-American and Hispanic students in Catholic schools have a 91% graduation rate."/20/ In public schools, it is 87% for whites and 62% for African-Americans and Hispanics.

The Protestants have 13,000 schools and 1.8 million students. They charge lower tuition than the elite prep schools and give you three years of math, three of foreign language, science, three years of history, one year of geography and are beginning Latin and Greek. Ninety-four percent go on to college. There are 6,000,000 Jews in the United States and 170,000 Jewish children in Jewish schools.

The SAT scores in the public schools in 1998 were 1011; in the religious schools 1042; and in the secular private schools 1,111, 100 points above the public schools. Groton's SAT score was 1380, 400 points above the education majors. On the National Assessment of Educational Progress in 1996, the public schools averaged 148 in science; the Catholics, 163; and other private schools 161. Private schools were 20 points ahead in history.

More and more people are home-schooling their children. The Home School Legal Defense Association has 55,000 members. There are 1.5 million home schooled children and they are growing by 15% a year. Home schools are now legal in all fifty states and certification is not generally required.

If you are not familiar with the ACT test, it is a series of four tests, each with 36 points. The final score is determined by adding the four scores and dividing by four. The national norm of 1.7 million high school students is 21. For home schoolers is it 22.8. It is higher than the norm in 47 out of fifty states. Some home schoolers in some states could have got into the finest colleges: the average in Vermont is 30.5; Massachusetts: 25. North Dakota: 25.7; Wyoming; 25.8; Oregon: 24.9. Home schoolers averaged 24.6 in reading and 23.4 in English.

The public schools need to realize that the only way out of their present disrepute is to become so good that nobody in his right mind will want to home-school or go to a private school. The right wing, in such a book as Inside American Education, by the African-American, Thomas Sowell, an admirer of Phyllis Schlafly, angrily associates the public schools with Planned Parenthood and secular humanism, and even along with some liberals accuses the school psychologists and counselors of driving a wedge between a child and his or her parents.

And Albert Shanker, who sought to raise standards, has died. Bob Chase, president of the NEA says, "Unions have not done enough to raise standards." Sandra Feldman, president of the American Federation of Teachers, points out the importance of salaries, modern school buildings, reduction of class sizes, and discipline policies, but nowhere is there an energetic statement about the reform of teacher education./21/ But the unions have already been accused of being part of the problem, and if they do nothing to improve public education may well be in danger: John McCain, Republican candidate for president, stated: "If you really want a better education system, you've got to break the teachers' unions."/22/ It is not enough to follow the recommendations of Berliner and Biddle in Manufactured Crisis, to do more research into methodology, to have compassion for the students, and increase respect for the teachers. We have had it with research into methodology. Compassion comes cheap and respect has to be earned and it is more difficult to get than a raise in salary.

The best immediate approach, being done in other states and other countries, is to get rid of the BSED immediately, get rid of the Doctor of Education, both bogus degrees, get rid of the NCATES and the other accreditation agencies which have not been the friend of the student or of the life of the mind, close down the undergraduate schools of education, and require a liberal arts major before certification through a minimum number of courses, preferably a special program that can be completed in one summer. There is now an alternative certification of people with arts and sciences degrees, a program operating in 41 states which includes 75,000 of the nation's teachers. Connecticut is another state which requires a major in a solid subject. Leo Klagholz, commissioner of education in New Jersey, stated that "in teaching, there is no clear link between training and practice. Competence in teaching is equally distributed between the trained and the untrained."/23/ These alternates are more mature, have a better retention rate, come from better universities than BSEDs. There are presently 5,800 out of 30,000 teachers with alternate certificates in New Jersey, and the number is expected to rise to 10,000, or one third, in ten years./24/

The education establishment cannot reform itself. It must be done by an enlightened legislature. I do not want to see the public schools exposed to the mechanisms of natural selection and survival of the fittest, or to the Bosom of Abraham theory of school reform. I'm against it.

Make no mistake about it: I am in favor of the preservation and the success of the public school. Billings Senior High School prepared my children to go to Princeton and Cornell. But, even if you can educate your children just as well at home, it is no substantive reform to take your marbles and stomp off. It is no substantive reform to set up some sort of voucher system or charter school like some sort of yearning elitist thinking your kids are going to get a Choate or Groton education from teachers with the academically anemic Bachelors of Science in Education.

We must close the schools of education; we must put the accreditation agencies out on the street because they have perpetuated this mess; we must stop giving the BSED and the Doctor of Education degrees. We must require full-fledged subject matter BA degrees. That is the immediate beginning of the solution for public education.

Simply to let students, sometimes with government assistance, escape the public schools is to condemn the vast majority of our future citizens to academic purgatory.

And I'm against it!


Endnotes

  1. Tom Tancredo, "Education Vouchers: America Can't Afford to Wait" <http://121org/SuptDocs/IssuPprs/Ipvouch.htm>.[Back]

  2. Michael Ruse, In Defense of Darwin and Taking Darwin Seriously.[Back]

  3. Nicholas Lehman, Newsweek (Sept 1999): 52 ff.[Back]

  4. Ibid., 54.[Back]

  5. Ibid., 57.[Back]

  6. "Inside the Admissions Office," Newsweek (5 April 1999): 55-61.[Back]

  7. Martin L. Gross, Conspiracy of Ignorance (New York: Harper Collins, 1999), 3.[Back]

  8. Ibid., 44.[Back]

  9. Ibid., 229.[Back]

  10. Ibid., 230.[Back]

  11. Ibid., 232.[Back]

  12. Ibid., 98.[Back]

  13. Ibid., 51.[Back]

  14. Craig Howley, Aimee Howley, Edwina D. Pendarvis, Education Policy Analysis Archives, 1.6 (4 May 1993); This is an electronic journal, available from <http://olam.ed.asu.epaa/vin6.html>. See also Howley, Howley, and Pendarvis, Out of Our Minds: Anti-Intellectualism and Talent Development in American Schooling, New York: Teachers College Press, 1995.[Back]

  15. Ibid.[Back]

  16. Ibid.[Back]

  17. Howley, 12.[Back]

  18. Gross, 190.[Back]

  19. Ibid., 155.[Back]

  20. Ibid., 126.[Back]

  21. Billings Gazette, 30 October 1999.[Back]

  22. Ibid.[Back]

  23. Gross, 178.[Back]

  24. Ibid.[Back]


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