Opening Up a Discussion of Secretary Duncan's Remarks to the Inter-American Development Bank

Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has recently delivered an interesting speech to the Inter-American Development Bank that deserves more discussion than it has generated. At the end of the speech, he invites the leaders present to discuss his presentation, and although I wasn't invited, I'm going to join in anyway.

For me the most interesting part of the speech is probably the section just before he begins closing with (well deserved) complimentary remarks on the rebuilding of Haiti's educational system. What follows is a much longer quotation than I usually excerpt, but the matter is vital:

"I talk a lot about the economic value and the personal freedom that a world-class education provides. But I absolutely reject the distinction between preparing students to be career-ready, with employability skills, and preparing students to be global, well-rounded citizens, with critical thinking skills.

"I believe that is a false choice. In fact, I belief there is a happy convergence between the career skills needed to succeed in a knowledge-based economy and the citizenship skills and global competencies needed to participate in modern democracy and civil society.

"Employers today want graduates who have the ability to adapt, innovate, synthesize data, and communicate effectively. They want employees who can both learn independently and work in teams. But many of those same traits—knowing how to ask good questions, working collaboratively with others to solve problems, and appreciating diversity—are also clearly invaluable for participation in civil society.

"In fact, these are global competencies that we should want for all our students. A student with a world-class education should be able to use their knowledge and skills to investigate the world beyond their immediate environment, recognize other's perspectives, and communicate their ideas effectively to diverse audiences."

This is thoughtful, praiseworthy prose, and although I think  the secretary continues to draw the wrong conclusion from his premises, they (and much else in the speech) certainly deserve a response from those of us who believe that current policy is requiring too many students to stay in school for too long, and is hurting those it intends to help. I will explain my reasoning beginning tomorrow.

What's Wrong With PBS's American Graduate Project

"Graduating to Nothing": that was my alternative title for this entry.

In short, PBS's American Graduate project has the same shortcomings that plague America's thought leaders with respect to education: it's based on a 20th century, domestic view of the world, when we are actually living in a more globalized 21st century.

If you watch the advertising for American Graduate, you see the usual American emphasis (a legitimate one) in such public service broadcasts, which is on those being left behind by our compulsory comprehensive ("K-12", although too many of these students don't reach 12th grade, which is largely the point) public education system. We are informed that roughly one quarter of all students don't graduate from high school, which we are to infer is a terrible problem (it is, when it equates to being a "dropout", that is, one who self-excludes [I take the term from Bourdieu & Passeron, Reproduction, p. 42] from the taxpayer-supported education system we make available for free but which is being rejected even at that price); and we are also led to believe that the correct alternative goal is to graduate, to receive that diploma. But to graduate, in its etymology, means to "move on" to a next, higher level, or grade -- it's a beginning of something new, not a conclusion -- and it may fairly be asked, our high school graduates whom we celebrate with so much energy, with balloons and caps and gowns and rolled paper, are graduating to what? To college success? Data from the ACT and other organizations show that the average American student does graduate from high school and moves on to college, but because of poor secondary school preparation for higher education, has to undertake remediation and gain thereby a premature debt burden, falls behind in obtaining credits, grows discouraged, and drops out without a degree, but with over $25,000 in debt, typically owed to a cohort of higher social class (bankers, college marketers, guidance counsellors, and so on) than the student. What kind of inheritance is this?

But if instead this student the American Graduate is concerned about attempts to find work, good luck: a quick perusal of youth unemployment rates around the world shows that those developed countries that pursue a strategy of extending general education to as many students for as long as possible, as opposed to those that end general education after around nine years and then force students into a choice between college and vocational preparation, suffer much higher youth unemployment than the latter group. Compare, for example, youth unemployment in English-speaking nations (who are under considerable American influence) and similar formerly imperial nations of western Europe (Spain, Portugal, France, French-speaking Belgium) with those of central Europe that have long respected the mastery of trades and, by extension, for labour: I am thinking specifically of Switzerland, Austria, and Germany (the Netherlands and Norway are Germanic neighbours that also have low youth unemployment, and east Asian countries like Japan and Singapore are also on the right track). Where would that relatively low-achieving (in academics) student be better off, here or there? Here, if he (or she, although the problems are piling up faster for our young men than our young women) decides against more humiliation and debt via schooling, the only likely choices are between crime and unemployment; there he or she would have access to job training leading to a legally established qualification, employment with good social benefits, and self-respect.  

What kind of legacy are we leaving the underprivileged next American generation? And how long will it take our thought leaders to discover that their advice may well be leading to social disaster, exploding into our own version of the Arab Spring?

The Older the Students, the More School Choices are Needed

Today I've run across yet another disturbing report, this time on the PBS News Hour, on the costs our society incurs when students drop out of school. While the ultimate cause of declining prospects for dropouts is overpopulation in the Third World, our best response has to be to increase the number of schooling options available to secondary school students.

Opponents of school choice usually argue in favor of equity, and advocate making our existing local schools better, since opening up competing alternatives will likely leave some (most often those children unfortunately stuck with ignorant and careless parents, if the parents are still around at all) with the inferior, leftover options, since the better choices will likely already have been taken up by those families that are more educationally ambitious and better informed. I can imagine conceding that point, and recent evidence about the new school choice options in Indiana, which has the nation's most generous school voucher law, which I applaud, is showing that some of the private school beneficiaries there are taking advantage of their new opportunities to leave the neediest students behind in the traditional public schools, which become the repositories of all those kids who aren't getting chosen because they aren't the most attractive, from the private schools' points of view.

So how about this: leave our primary schools, through sixth grade, as local monopolies, as they do in Finland and Singapore, two often-praised school systems with very different approaches in other ways, thereby providing an equal opportunity to all children (and we have an enormous amount of work to do to raise the level of our many poorly performing schools so that all children will have an equal opportunity to get off to a good start in school); then allow chartered alternatives to become established from middle school onward, since it's obvious that not all students are succeeding in even our best model local primary schools and middle schools, and some can benefit from alternative provision, a point the defenders of traditional school districts will likely concede; and finally, in upper secondary, allow strictly college preparatory and strictly vocational schools to exist and receive taxpayer funding through vouchers, in addition to our traditional provision of comprehensive high schools? The establishment of a viable vocational sector is particularly important for us, since those countries that have a vocational sector that successfully competes for middle school graduates, meaning virtually all (mostly Germanic) European countries from Switzerland northward to Norway, have much lower youth unemployment rates than those in the English-speaking world whose educational systems traditionally treat work like four-letter word, to be avoided and delayed for as long as possible.

Let's stop begging students to stay in schools they hate, and instead provide them with some alternatives they may like a lot better.

If You Hear the "College and Careers" Mantra, Expect a Blurred Vision

I've just been watching a new video posted on Facebook by the Silicon Valley Education Foundation (SVEF) about their Stepping Up To Algebra program and an accompanying summer school program to prepare incoming 9th graders for high school biology. The video is, I believe, indicative of the prevailing philosophy of SVEF and its sister organizations such as California STEM (an acronym for science, technology, engineering, and mathematics).  

These people have good hearts, and we should wish all educators well, but the mantra repeated at the end of the film as well as earlier, stressing getting "all our students ready for college and careers" (they stress "all"; I am also drawing attention to the "and"), is typical of the double vision, denial of reality, and lack of focus that is plaguing education in California and elsewhere. It is out of touch with reality: our existing institutions of higher education are overcrowded, with current students unable to get the classes they need and our tax base unable to support so much tertiary education; doubling our supply of college students is a hopeless, foolish notion. And its lack of focus is resulting in masses of students badly prepared for both college and careers.

One wonders if Muhammed Chaudrhy, President and CEO, has ever had the experience of working closely with a student, getting him to pass the high school exit exam after numerous failures, and then meeting that same student six months after graduation to find that he is unemployed and out of school. "What are you doing these days?" "Nothing" (as he has just gotten off a bus bringing in protesters for some sort of demonstration--that's what passes for work in much of America today). What a pitiful waste of energy! This young person could have been gaining valuable training for a career, but instead was forced to devote many hours to the intricacies of eliminating multiple choice options and learning really basic skills, perhaps in algebra that should have been learned in 7th (not 8th) grade, that will do him essentially no good at all in the new life that is just getting started, and started badly, in a state so disastrously led. 

Our Achievement Gap Stems, in Part, From Our Fixation on the Achievement Gap

I just today read an excellent article in The Washington Post on Kosen, Japan's special polytechnical schools that accept students as early as 15, give them five years of vocationally oriented technical training during what would  be our high school and junior college years, and then watch them leave with an average of 20 job offers per new graduate; if they stay an extra two years and earn a diploma roughly equivalent to a master's degree, the ratio goes up to 30 job offers per graduate.

I also read today that the percentage of young Americans aged 20 to 24 who are employed has shrunk from 74 percent in 2000 to just 62 percent now, the lowest since the 1930s.

Our obsession with having our young people correctly fill in bubble sheets is severely underserving our youth. Some of them, like my own children, do pretty well on such tests, and generally still turn out all right; others, like the many I taught at Locke High School in Watts, have almost no good options available to them; and well-meaning educational leaders who moved to end (rather than modernize) their vocational programs because "each and every student is expected to go to college" have unwittingly promoted a disaster. 

On No Child Left Behind

Assemblywoman Brownley, of whom I wrote yesterday, does not mean badly, I presume; she is, I suppose, listening to the complaints of local public school officials, who complain of "creaming". According to this contention, when charter schools allegedly "cream" or "cherry pick" students, they are taking those who are easiest to educate and likeliest to produce high test scores, and leaving the other, more difficult, lower scoring students behind.

My first objection to this argument is that it regards students as property, currently owned by existing districts, and metaphorically regards them as inanimate objects (cream, cherries), rather than real human beings with preferences, aspirations, and (with their families) a constitutionally protected right to the pursuit of happiness, as they see fit.

But after discounting these inappropriate metaphors, these objections raise the legitimate question, "What would you do about those children who are hardest to teach, come from the most scholastically disadvantaged backgrounds, the ones least likely to get selected in a selective competition for students--those 'last' who, in the words of Jesus, will eventually become 'first'?"

This is a large issue, and I will only introduce an answer here, which I will develop a defence for as this series of posts develops (and I look forward to dialogue with commentators): we need a modern, effective system of vocational education for our family members, friends, and neighbors who are less scholastically inclined, so that when they exit our formal school system, usually at a younger age, they transition smoothly into well paying, respectable, respected, productive jobs and lives as our fellow citizens, free and prepared to return to further education when their desires and changing maturity levels indicate that such is the right move for them at that time.