Are public schools worth saving?
American public schools are caught in a thunderstorm of reforms. It started more than half a century ago and goes on, producing more havoc and wreckage on its way. New Math in the 1960s, privatization movement in the 1970s, the fear of “educational disarmament” in the 1980s, “fuzzy math” and “whole language” in the 1990s, No Child Left Behind, testing and accountability in the 2000s, Common Core, charter schools and vouchers in the 2010s.
All these initiatives ostensibly were meant to improve the aging public school system, which for a long time could afford itself to be inefficient. Half a century ago there were many jobs accepting high school graduates: “Don’t know what algebra is? You won’t need it on the assembly line. Cannot read well? The wires are color-coded.” But in the 1980s the economic landscape started to change. In some sectors of the economy large corporations moved their factories overseas, along with mid-level blue-collar jobs. The other sectors were given away to foreign companies. The employment opportunities that defined the post-Second-World-war American Dream dwindled, making the incompetence of public school system glaringly apparent.
What can public school system offer to remedy the situation? Suggesting to send less-brilliant kids to vocational schools and community colleges right after middle school is political suicide for any superintendent. Instead, schools brandish the slogan of “college-readiness” — everyone can learn, everyone can attend college, and everyone can get a high-skilled job. But more often than not this policy leads to further watering down the curriculum, to grade inflation, and to complete devaluation of high school diploma.
High school graduates often don’t know basic math, many of them can barely read, and the subjects like physics, chemistry, biology, geography, astronomy are as foreign to them as foreign language that they also did not learn at school. But is it their fault? There is no rigorous science education in American schools. Elementary and Middle-school “science” rarely goes beyond showcasing a handful of amusing facts about nature like water cycle, while the more advanced high school subjects are abridged and not mandatory.
Just for giggles, let us compare the curricula of modern American school with Russian school from 1957, the same year when the Sputnik was launched and four years before Yuri Gagarin, the first astronaut, orbited the Earth. Yes, I know, I am comparing today’s America with the country that does not exist anymore, but I believe that its past achievements owed much to its education system — the system that the American policymakers were studying, confronted with the Sputnik crisis.
At that time, the Soviet secondary education consisted of three years of primary school and seven years of secondary school, ten years altogether. Algebra and geometry started in sixth grade, high school math included trigonometry and pre-calculus.
Physics started in 6th grade and went for five years. See this Schaum’s outlines of college physics? Pretty much everything included in this book — mechanics, thermodynamics, electricity, nuclear physics — was taught within Russian secondary school physics course.
Chemistry started in 7th grade and comprised four years course. Geography and Biology — six year course each. Foreign language — mandatory, starting from 5th grade. Astronomy, one year. Psychology, one year. Seven years of history offered the complete timeline from stone ages to contemporary times. Events that happened in the last couple of centuries were presented with an obvious political slant, but at least they were mentioned.
Russian and native languages were taught through elementary and middle school, and Russian, native and foreign literature was taught from the first through the senior grade.
There were manual labor classes, where students learned how to use vise, or how to operate an electric drill — I still remember the safety rules that I copied to my notebook and learned by heart before I was allowed to use the equipment. And, of course, systematic physical education for the whole ten years.
At that time the school week comprised six days, not five, but classes in elementary school took only four hours a day, and the summer break lasted full three summer months. Modern Russian 11-year school has a similar subject lineup and schedule, but the school week is five days long like in the United States. Psychology had been ditched long ago, and computer literacy classes have been added.
Compared to this comprehensive program, the mandatory subjects and their content offered by American public schools cannot be considered as anything but a joke. One may argue that 21-st century schoolkids do not need as much math and physics and chemistry as their grandparents studied in the 1950s, but I insist on the opposite: the only two types of jobs one will be able to get in the near future are either unskilled or high-skilled, with pretty much nothing in between. With machine learning, artificial intelligence, with the need to rid the planet from non-degradable plastic and to recycle spent nuclear fuel, one needs to learn not less but more math and physics and chemistry than half a century ago.
As an indirect admission of low-density content of American curricula, there have been suggestions to make the 12th grade — the senior grade — optional. Another program conducted in eight states — Connecticut, Kentucky, Maine, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and Vermont — allowed tenth-graders to test out of high school courses, earn diplomas, and advance to community colleges.
These are the steps in the right direction, but not radical enough. Schools must overhaul their programs, figure out what and how they teach, because the amount of knowledge they presently pass on to most students can be easily compressed into eight or nine years. The strength of American school system is in elective subjects, where one can choose to learn dancing or carpentry or video production, but one can as easily choose not to learn trigonometry or physics or foreign language.
Seeing what happens with reading instruction, the cornerstone of modern education, I have little hope for changes to the better. I am talking about so-called “whole language”, which morphed and took different guises several times, and is still around. I will talk about it in a later installment.
