1.
Our Failing Public Schools

Everyone seems to know that our schools are in desperate need of reform. The quality of public education seems to have declined, and schools are not up to the task of readying young people for the challenges of the next century. An apparently watered-down curriculum ensures that all students, regardless of whether they have mastered necessary skills, can graduate. "Social promotion" without requirements to master grade-appropriate skills is now commonplace, so even elite colleges must run "remedial" courses for freshmen in basic math and literacy, and business executives complain that high school graduates are ill-prepared for even relatively unskilled jobs.

Everyone seems to know that keeping teenagers from dropping out has become the primary purpose of high schools, which have shifted away from core academic instruction, attempting to keep young people interested with less rigorous alternatives. Instead of teaching basic skills, schools appear to concentrate on "self-esteem" and "values clarification," although they have discarded traditional values along with traditional skills, so that students no longer absorb the moral values that schools once inculcated.

Everyone seems to know as well that schools have abandoned traditional phonics reading methods that teach the alphabet so children can sound out words until they achieve fluency. Instead, teachers encourage children to commit "word pictures" to memory or, worse, let them pretend to read and even invent the meaning as they go along. Professional educators evidently impose these unproven methods despite demands for phonics instruction by parents and many reading experts. Because better-educated parents are better prepared to teach their children to read, the abandonment of phonics may affect poor children most of all.

Math can be hard work for some children, so modern teaching attempts instead to entertain, ignoring drill in arithmetic, memorization of multiplication tables, and the mechanics of long division.

Everyone seems to know that immigrant children suffer most from schools’ confusion of purpose since minority group advocates have pressured school systems, as well as Congress, to require bilingual education in order to maintain native languages and cultures. While public schools once "Americanized" students, conditioning them for an English-speaking job market, today’s immigrant children reportedly complete public school unable to speak, read, or write English and unprepared to function in the national economy.

Former Xerox chairman and Bush administration assistant education secretary David Kearns concludes that "public education has put this country at a terrible competitive disadvantage. . . . If current . . . trends continue, American business will have to hire a million new workers a year who can’t read, write or count."

"The vast majority of Americans," says Education Secretary Richard Riley, "do not know that they do not have the skills to earn a living in our increasingly technological society and international marketplace."

Louis Gerstner, chairman of IBM and host of a 1996 state governors’ "summit" on education goals, says we need to improve our skills "if Americans are to succeed in the world marketplace," but since the education reforms begun by an earlier governors’ conference in 1989, school performance has mostly "gotten worse." "Yeah," concludes Reagan administration education secretary William Bennett, "we’re dumber than we thought we were."¹

Most Americans agree with these indictments, although they are not sure what to do about them. Most adults remember that when they were students, public schools were safer, more academically serious, and focused both on basic learning and on more advanced thinking skills. They believe schools now do worse, even though a modern economy demands they do better. But this story, whatever partial truths it contains, is more a culturally embedded fable that has remained mostly unchanged for a century than a factual account.

Warnings like those of executives Gerstner and Kearns and education officials Bennett and Riley are now routine. But if schools are worse today than they used to be, then when, exactly, was the golden—or at least silver—age of education?

The 1960s and 1970s

Was it in the 1960s and 1970s? In 1974, best-selling author Vance Packard worried, "Are we becoming a nation of illiterates? [There is an] evident sag in both writing and reading . . . at a time when the complexity of our institutions calls for ever-higher literacy just to function effectively." He warned in Reader’s Digest that "there is indisputable evidence that millions of presumably educated Americans can neither read nor write at satisfactory levels."²

Perhaps Packard was right and a decline in student achievement had begun a full generation earlier. But what were critics saying during that prior generation? A 1961 report by the Council for Basic Education claimed that a third of ninth graders could read at only a second or third grade level because phonics had been abandoned. Entitled Tomorrow’s Illiterates: The State of Reading Instruction Today, the report included an essay by Dean Jacques Barzun of Columbia University, who noted that many of his graduate students "need coaching in the elements of literacy . . . , [partly because of] the loss of proper pedagogy in the lower schools."³

Attacks on the abandonment of phonics continued throughout the 1960s. Jeanne Chall’s Learning to Read: The Great Debate was published in 1967,⁴ then reissued in 1983. The press often reported surveys demonstrating deteriorating literacy. According to a 1960 Harris poll, only 10 percent of Americans considered themselves "avid book readers." A Gallup poll two years later reported that just 21 percent looked at books even casually.⁵

The 1950s

Okay, so how about the 1950s? Today people look back on that decade as a time when schools did their job well, but contemporary observers were not impressed. Hannah Arendt warned in 1958 that academic standards "of the average American school lag . . . far behind the average standards in . . . Europe."⁶

Life magazine agreed. A multipart series on the "crisis" in American education⁷ profiled two students: an American eleventh grader in one of our best middle-class public schools and a tenth grader in the Soviet Union. While Chicago‘s Stephen Lapekas was reading Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped, Moscow’s Alexei Kutzkov had studied English as a foreign language and completed works by Shakespeare and George Bernard Shaw. For the American, Life noted that "getting educated seldom seems too serious," but for the Russian, high grades were "literally more important than anything else in his life." Concluding that "U.S. high school students are . . . ignorant of things [elementary] school students would have known a generation ago," Life wondered how we could hope to win the cold war.⁸

In 1961, decades before William Bennett embarked on a similar crusade, Max Rafferty, a California district superintendent of schools preparing to enter politics as a Republican education reformer, declared in a Reader’s Digest article that teachers "have been brainwashed for a quarter of a century with slogans like: ‘There are no eternal verities’; ‘Everything is relative’; ‘Teach the child, not the subject’; and—worst of all—‘Nothing is worth learning for its own sake.’"⁹

In 1958, historian Arthur Bestor complained in a U.S. News and World Report interview that physics, chemistry, and mathematics were now "taught to a shrinking proportion of students":

Our standard for high school graduation has slipped badly. Fifty years ago a high-school diploma meant something. . . . We have simply misled our students and misled the nation by handing out high-school diplomas to those who we well know had none of the intellectual qualifications that a high-school diploma is supposed to represent—and does represent in other countries. It is this dilution of standards which has put us in our present serious plight.¹⁰

The launch of Sputnik in 1957 accelerated complaints about declining standards, but educational hand-wringing was even then nothing new. Bestor published his best-selling Educational Wastelands: The Retreat from Learning in Our Public Schools in 1953. A 1955 best-seller, Rudolf Flesch’s Why Johnny Can’t Read (reissued in 1986), warned that the refusal to use proven phonics methods "is gradually destroying democracy in this country; it returns to the upper middle class the privileges that public education was supposed to distribute evenly. . . ."¹¹

In 1957, the Saturday Evening Post derided what it described as a typical, middle-class elementary school for setting up a school bank "to help teach what it calls ‘the social phase’ of arithmetic." The mathematics curriculum consisted of "electing young bank presidents, taking turns being cashiers, and standing in line at the cardboard play bank the children built."¹² (So much for memorizing multiplication tables!) A proficiency test given in 1951 to Los Angeles eighth graders found that more than half could not calculate an 8 percent sales tax on an $8 purchase. A Time magazine account was headed "Failure in Los Angeles." Local newspapers focused on another shocking disclosure: "330 of L.A. High Schools’ Juniors Can’t Tell Time."¹³

Surely, one might think, at least 1950s schools were safe. But a 1958 Life magazine cover story charged that students in American cities "terrorize teachers . .   [and] it often takes physical courage to teach."¹⁴ A former teacher, Evan Hunter, fictionalized his experiences, including student assaults on teachers, in a 1953 book, Blackboard Jungle,¹⁵ which was made into a film starring Glenn Ford and Sidney Poitier. Its screenplay was nominated for an Academy Award.

The 1940s

In the 1940s Americans were also convinced that academic achievement had plummeted. A survey of business executives conducted during the decade found that by large margins they believed recent graduates were inferior to the previous generation in arithmetic, written English, spelling, geography, and world affairs. In only one domain were recent graduates deemed superior: "poise."¹⁶

Atlantic Monthly published a suburban Sharon, Massachusetts, school board member’s explanation of why even he had given up on public schools in the late 1940s: "If you find . . . your child cannot read or calculate half as well as you could at his age . . . you can do what other worried parents have done: mortgage your house [to put your child in a good private school]."¹⁷

Educators should return to the "three ‘r’s" rather than focusing on students’ feelings and beliefs, urged the newsletter of the National Council for American Education in 1950; "Emotional stability and attitudes and beliefs have always been considered—and we still believe them to be—the responsibilities of mothers and fathers," not schools. The superintendent of the Pasadena, California, schools was then fired after parents protested his de-emphasis of basic skills in favor of affective subject matter—a pedagogical practice remarkably similar to what upsets many Americans today who believe that such educational concepts are relatively new.

The Pasadena fight attracted national attention and typified battles throughout the country in which concerns about progressive pedagogy were mixed with McCarthyite paranoia about Communist influences in the teaching profession. In 1952 the journal Progressive Education summarized the most common complaints about schools: "attacks on textbooks that encourage inquisitive thinking and individual reasoning, . . . [m]ounting pressure to eliminate the ‘frills and fads’—by which are meant such vital services as nurseries, classes for the handicapped, testing and guidance, programs to help youngsters understand and appreciate their neighbors of different backgrounds [then called ‘brotherhood’ education, not today’s ’multiculturalism’]. . . ."¹⁸

Warnings that school failures doomed the next generation to political or economic catastrophe were as common in the 1940s as today. New York Times education editor Benjamin Fine declared in his widely acclaimed 1947 book, Our Children Are Cheated, "Education faces a serious crisis. . . . We will suffer the consequences of our present neglect of education a generation hence."¹⁹ Talking about airline reservation clerks he hired during World War II, a corporate training director complained that he had to "organize special classes to instruct them in . . . making change. . . . Only a small proportion [can] place Boston, New York, . . . Chicago, . . . Denver . . . in their proper sequence from east to west, or name the states in which they [are located]."²⁰

Automatic advancement to the next grade before students mastered skills of their current one was the focus of a heated mid-1940s controversy over "social promotion." A 1944 article quipped that "passing pupils" was "passing the buck."²¹

Quizzing students about American history has always been a surefire way to prove declining standards. In 1987, Chester Finn, a Reagan administration education official, and Diane Ravitch, a Columbia University professor, published a best-selling book on the subject, What Do Our 17-Year Olds Know?²² Very little, they concluded. But back in 1943, the New York Times developed a social studies test and administered it to seven thousand college freshmen nationwide. Only 29 percent knew that St. Louis was located on the Mississippi; only 6 percent knew the thirteen original states of the Union. Some thought Lincoln was the first president. The results, the Times reported, revealed a "striking ignorance of even the most elementary aspects of United States history."²³

Walter Lippmann shared this concern when, in 1940, he addressed the American Association for the Advancement of Science: "During the past forty or fifty years those who are responsible for education have progressively removed from the curriculum . . . the western culture which produced the modern democratic state."²⁴

World War I through the 1930s

During the Great Depression, abandonment of phonics was considered a major cause of schools’ well-known deterioration. A 1938 study of first-grade teaching professed that contemporary elementary "teachers . . . conspire against pupils in their efforts to learn; these teachers appear to be determinedly on guard never to mention a letter by name, . . . or to show how to use either letter forms or sounds in reading."²⁵

In the 1920s, business leaders reported dismay that educational preparation had become inadequate for the job market. The National Association of Manufacturers charged in 1927 that 40 percent of high school graduates could not perform simple arithmetic or accurately express themselves in English.²⁶ Woodrow Wilson appointed a presidential commission to study vocational education and international competitiveness in 1913. Its discovery that the United States (with fifteen times the population) had fewer vocational schools than Bavaria alone helped mobilize support for the Smith-Hughes Act of 1917, the first federal "voc-ed" legislation.²⁷

More than half the young men recruited by the army during World War I "were not able to write a simple letter or read a newspaper with ease." An analyst at the time reported that the "overwhelming majority of these soldiers had entered school, attended the primary grades where reading is taught, and had been taught to read. Yet, when as adults they were examined, they were unable to read . . . simple material."²⁸

The Early 1900s

In 1909, Ellwood P. Cubberly, the dean of Stanford’s education school, wrote that, in an ever more interdependent world economy, "whether we like it or not, we are beginning to see that we are pitted against the world in a gigantic battle of brains and skill." His book, Changing Conceptions of Education, warned that Americans were coming up short in this contest.²⁹

In 1902, the editors of the New York Sun opined that when they had attended school, children "had to do a little work. . . . Spelling, writing and arithmetic were not electives, and you had to learn." Now, however, schooling was "a vaudeville show. The child must be kept amused and learns what he pleases."³⁰ An Atlantic Monthly article of 1909 complained that basic skills instruction had been displaced in schools by "every fad and fancy" and noted that the curriculum resembled "the menu card of a metropolitan restaurant."³¹ Although the phrasing was more quaint, the indictment was nearly identical to that of a 1985 book denouncing the curricular eclecticism of contemporary education—The Shopping Mall High School.³²

The Nineteenth Century

Surely, one may think, there is an important respect in which proclamations of crisis are unique to the present: the transformation of American colleges into mass institutions must be responsible for complaints that universities are now forced to remediate secondary school failures. Yet Harvard’s Board of Overseers, shocked at entering students’ preparation, published samples of freshman writing to embarrass secondary schools in 1896. The Harvard professor who authored the board report wrote that there was "no conceivable justification for using the revenues of Harvard College" to instruct undergraduates who were unprepared for college work.³³ Another overseers’ report, five years earlier, had found that only 4 percent of students who applied for Harvard admission could write an essay, spell, or properly punctuate a sentence.³⁴

An 1898 writing exam at the University of California (Berkeley) found that 30 to 40 percent of entering freshmen were not proficient in English. Seemingly unaware that such a substantial proportion of admitted students flunked college readiness tests at the turn of the century,³⁵ the University of California’s Policy Committee to Assist Unprepared Students reported in 1981 that "we are convinced, by test score trends, basic skills course enrollment trends, and anecdotal evidence, that a decline in the skill level of UC’s entering freshmen has occurred."³⁶

Bilingual education controversies also have nineteenth-century origins. Wisconsin’s gubernatorial election turned on the issue of bilingual education in 1890. A massive mobilization of newly naturalized immigrant voters succeeded in ousting the Republican incumbent, William Hoard, who favored English for all children at a time when public schools in immigrant communities often taught only, or primarily, in German. The campaign led to the subsequent domination of Wisconsin politics by Democrats. Nonetheless, continuing nationwide complaints about bilingual education peaked a generation later, fed by anti-German prejudices stemming from World War I. Although a 1923 Supreme Court ruling prohibited states from requiring that all instruction, even in private schools, be in English,³⁷ the decision did little to stem the nativist tide.

One can go even further back to find complaints about scandalous school quality. America’s first standardized test was administered in 1845 to a select group of Boston’s brightest students (called "brag scholars" by the testing committee). Yet only 45 percent of these top fourteen-year-olds knew that water expands when it freezes. More disturbing, according to Massachusetts secretary of public instruction Horace Mann, Boston’s schools were ignoring higher-order thinking skills; what little students knew came from memorizing "words of the textbook, . . . without having . . . to think about the meaning of what they have learned." Thus, 35 percent knew from history classes that, prior to the War of 1812, the United States had imposed an embargo on British and French shipping, but few had any clue what "embargo" meant. In one school, 75 percent of the students knew the date of the embargo, but only 5 percent could define the term.³⁸

Lest the reader conclude that, if not well educated, at least young people once were better behaved, Mann also reported that three hundred Massachusetts teachers were forced by riotous and violent students to flee their classrooms in a single twelve-month period—the school year of 1837.³⁹

Evidently, to cite a variation on a Will Rogers adage, "The schools ain’t what they used to be and probably never were."⁴⁰

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Notes:

1.David Kearns, "An Education Recovery Plan for America," Phi Delta Kappan, April 1988, 565-70. David A. Kaplan, Pat Wingert, and Farai Chideta, "Dumber than We Thought," Newsweek, September 20, 1993, pp. 44-45; Louis V. Gerstner, Jr., Don't Retreat on School Standards, New York Times, December 30, 1995.

2. Vance Packard, "Are We Becoming a Nation of Illiterates?" Reader's Digest, April 1974, pp. 81-85.

3. Charles C. Walcutt, Tomorrow's Illiterates: The State of Reading Instruction Today (Boston: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1961), pp. xiii-xvi, 7.

4. Jeanne Chall, Learning to Read: The Great Debate (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1967).

5. Jib Fowles, "Are Americans Reading Less? Or More?" Phi Delta Kappan, May 1993, pp. 726-30.

6. Hannah Arendt, "The Crisis in Education," Partisan Review, Fall 1958, pp.493-513.

7. "Crisis in Education, Part I: Schoolboys Point Up a U.S. Weakness," Life, March 24, 1958, pp. 27-35.

8. "Crisis in Education, Part II: An Underdog Profession Imperils the Schools," Life, March 31, 1958, pp. 93-101.

9. Max Rafferty, "@at's Happened to Patriotism?" Reader's Digest, October 1961,pp.107-10.

10. Interview with Arthur Bestor, "What Went Wrong With U.S. Schools," U.S. News and World Report, January 24, 1958, pp. 68-77.

11. Rudolf Flesch, Why Johnny Can't Read: And What You Can Do About It (New York: Harper and Row, 1955), pp. 2-5, 132-33.

12. John Keats, "Are the Public Schools Doing Their Job?" Saturday Evening Post, September 21, 1957, p. 38.

13. "Failure in Los Angeles, Time, 195 1, pp. 93 -94.

14. "Crisis in Education, Part II," P. 94.

15. Evan Hunter, The Blackboard Jungle (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1953), pp. 83, 119.

16. Henry J. Fuller, "The Emperor's New Clothes, or Prius Dementat," Scientific Monthly, January 1951, pp. 32-41.

17. Albert Lynd, "Quackery in the Public Schools," Atlantic Monthly, March 1950, pp.33-38.

18. Archibald W. Anderson, "The Cloak of Respectability: The Attackers and Their Methods," Progressive Education 29, no. 3 (January 1952): 68.

19. Benjamin Fine, Our Children Are Cheated (New York: Holt, 1947).

20. Fuller, "Emperor's New Clothes."

21. Cited in David L. Angus, Jeffrey E. Mirel, and Maris A. Vinovskis, "Historical Development of Age Stratification in Schooling," Teachers College Record 90, no. 2 (Winter 1988): 211-36.

22. Diane Ravitch and Chester E. Finn, Jr., What Do Our 17-Year Olds Know? A Report on the First National Assessment of History and Literature (New York: Harper and Row, 1988).

23. Benjamin Fine, "Ignorance of U.S. History Shown by College Freshmen," New York Times, April 4, 1943.

24. Walter Lippmann, "Education without Culture," Commonweal, January 17,1941, p. 323.

25. Cited in Chall, Learning to Read, p. 152.

26. David C. Berliner, "Educational Reform in an Era of Disinformation," paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Association of Colleges of Teacher Education, San Antonio, Texas, February 1992, p. 54.

27. Carl F Kaestle and Marshall S. Smith, "The Federal Role in Elementary and Secondary Education, 1940-1980," Harvard Educational Review 54, no. 4 (November 1982): 391.

28. Daniel P. Resnick and Lauren B. Resnick, "The Nature of Literacy: An Historical Exploration," Harvard Educational Review 47, no. 3 (August 1977): 370-85, citing May Ayres Burgess, The Measurement of Silent Reading (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1921), pp. 11-12.

29. Kaestle and Smith, "Federal Role in Elementary and Secondary Education," p. 393.

30. Edward L. Butterworth, "You Have to Fight for Good Schools," Education Digest, December 1958.

31. Samuel P. Orth, "Plain Facts about Public Schools," Atlantic Monthly, March 1909, p. 289.

32. Arthur G. Powell, Eleanor Farrar, and David Cohen, The Shopping Mall High School: Winners and Losers in the Educational Marketplace (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1985).

33. "The Growing Illiteracy of American Boys," Nation, October 15, 1896.

34. Bernard Mehl, "Educational Criticism: Past and Present," Progressive Education 30 (March 1953): 157.

35. Mike Rose, Lives on the Boundary: The Struggles and Achievements of America's Underprepared (New York: Free Press, 1989) p. 6.

36. Michael W. Kirst, "Loss of Support for Public Schools: Some Causes and Solutions," Daedalus I 10 (Summer 1981): 59.

37. Meyer v. Nebraska, 262 U.S. 390 (1923).

38. Otis W. Caldwell and Stuart A. Courtis, Then and Now in Education,1845-1923 (Yonkers-on-Hudson, N.Y.: World Book Co., 1924), pp. 52, 54, 90, 125.

39. David K. Cohen and Barbara Neufeld, "The Failure of High Schools and the Progress of Education," Daedalus I 10 (Summer 1981): 87, n. 2.

40. Even this appropriation of Rogers' humor is time-worn. It was first used in a 1958 article about the surreal character of school critics' depictions of education in the past. Butterworth, "You Have to Eight for Good Schools, " P. 178.