The following year he took a page out of the Bush playbook: “Our Goals 2000 proposal will empower individual school districts to experiment with ideas like chartering their schools to be run by private corporations, or having more public school choice. . . .”
In 1995 he called for a government “that helps each and every one of us to get an education and to have the opportunity to renew our skills.” And, three years later, he repeated virtually the exact same message. “We must make our public elementary and secondary schools the world’s best. . . . I laid out a 10-point plan to move us forward and urged all of us to let politics stop at the schoolhouse door.”
Five years after that, in his 2000 State of the Union address (by that point you really couldn’t name things after the year 2000 anymore), Clinton explained, “First and foremost, we need a 21st century revolution in education, guided by our faith that every single child can learn.”
But Clinton was a lame duck by this point, so now it was time for President George W. Bush to pick up the torch—or at least the rhetoric. Which he gladly did. In his 2002 State of the Union address, Bush said, “Good jobs begin with good schools, and here we’ve made a fine start. Republicans and Democrats worked together to achieve historic education reform so that no child is left behind.”
Now no child would ever be left behind. They promised.
President Obama has also made education a top priority. In his 2009 State of the Union address, Obama explained, “We must address . . . the urgent need to expand the promise of education in America . . . our schools don’t just need more resources. They need more reform.”
In 2011, he declared, “The quality of our math and science education lags behind many other nations. . . . Instead of just pouring money into a system that’s not working, we launched a competition called Race to the Top.” He also pressed for more funding of college education.
As all of this has been going on, our children have been the ones suffering. In one 1992 study, American thirteen-year-olds ranked 13th out of 15 industrialized countries in science and 14th out of 15 in math. Despite the last two decades of rhetoric, it hasn’t gotten any better.
In 1996, just 25 percent of our fourth graders, 28 percent of our eighth graders, and 34 percent of our high school seniors were proficient readers. Reading performance had not improved since the early 1970s. Today, just 33 percent of fourth graders, 32 percent of eighth graders, and 38 percent of high school seniors read at or above grade level. So our kids aren’t doing much better now than they were doing forty years ago.
From 1965 to 2009, the federal government spent some $2 trillion on education. And we have almost nothing to show for it.
So, here we are at another crossroads in time. If we do nothing then I can assure you of two things: First, our politicians will continue to stand before the nation every January to offer ideas on how to “fix things”; and second, our kids will keep paying the price. With that in mind, I’m ready to offer a solution that, while admittedly impossible to ever get done, would actually help to radically alter this heart-wrenching game we’re playing with our future. Ready? Here it is:
We should fire all 3.5 million public school teachers in America and shut down all of our publicly funded universities.
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Save the Patient
Let’s compare our education crisis to a health crisis. Instead of a massive epidemic of terrible test scores and failing teachers, let’s instead pretend that we have a massive flu outbreak in schools across the country.
Under my proposal we’d shut down those schools immediately so that we could stop the spread of the disease, find the source of the problem, and come up with a clear way to kill it. On the other hand, what we’re actually doing is letting the kids continue to show up to infected schools every day even though we know many will get sick and that, eventually, the flu will spread destruction throughout our entire society.
Given that analogy, which plan is really the radical one?
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Calling that controversial might be the understatement of the century, but I’d argue that what we’re doing now—which is basically fiddling while Rome burns (or, in some cases, pouring gasoline on the fire)—is actually the radical thing. What I am proposing is far less controversial when you consider that it has a chance to actually solve the problem.
THE REAL THIRD RAIL: EDUCATION REFORM
It’s funny—people say that entitlement programs like Social Security are the “third rail” of American politics (talk about reforming them and your campaign dies), but I think education is the real third rail. Think about it: when is the last time you’ve heard a politician offer a meaningful (translation: radical) idea to reset our education system? It hardly ever happens. Instead we continue to spend more and more money even as the results get worse and worse. It’s the very definition of insanity.
“Primary responsibility for education should rest with those states, localities, and private institutions that have made our nation’s educational system the best in the world. . . .”
—Jimmy Carter, upon signing the Department of Education Organization Act in 1979
Since apparently no politician has enough backbone to say it, I will: spending more money on public education is the same thing as flushing it down a toilet—except that flushing it down the toilet doesn’t make your kids stupid. It’s not “compassionate” to maintain the status quo and watch our kids keep falling behind the rest of the world. The compassionate thing would be to offer something new, something that has a real chance to reform the system.
The evidence is clearly on my side. America’s educational performance has gone nowhere over the last four decades, even though we’ve tripled spending per student since 1970 in real dollars.
If the numbers don’t persuade you, then maybe a moral argument will. By failing to act, we are proving to be delinquent not only as Americans, but as parents. This kind of neglect would be unacceptable in any other realm. If we fail our kids physically, by not providing food or clothes or shelter, the government comes knocking at the door to take them away. But when we fail them mentally, by not providing the teachers and facilities and equipment they need to compete in the world, the government pats itself on its back and gives itself more money.
Worst of all, we let this happen. It’s easy to lay blame, and there’s plenty of it to go around, but, ultimately, it’s us—average American parents—who have allowed this to happen. We elect the politicians who pass these laws and who raise our taxes to pay for them. And even when it’s clear they’re failing, we agree to put those same people back in office.
The only way to end what I think is really a cycle of abuse of our children is to stop it cold turkey. Small reforms are not only ineffective, they’re also no match for the powerful forces behind the status quo: the lobbies and unions—and the politicians who are in bed with them. No, if we are going to win this battle—one that is both literally and figuratively a battle for the future of America—then it’s going to be won with a plan that no one sees coming.
WHAT COMES NEXT
My plan may be radical, but it’s not insane: Soon after we fire the 3.5 million public school teachers, we’ll hire the best 3.3 million of them back. Then we’ll go out and find the best 200,000 teachers in the world and we’ll hire them, too. They’ll replace the people who long ago made the mistake of deciding that working in a classroom was a right and not a privilege; the people who hide their poor performance behind tenure and union contracts; and the people who believe that their personal political views deserve a prominent place in their curriculum.
But I’m realistic. I understand that, even given the overwhelming evidence in favor of radical change, it won’t come easy. Americans may want the best for their kids, but they also generally favor the status quo. So we’re going to have to make the case to our neighbors and friends—and that starts by explaining how we got here in the first place.
Thanks in part to our education syste
m, we tend to think that we’re smarter than the stupid guys in the funny wigs who came before us. But that’s because we are mistaking technology, progress, and access to information for intelligence. We think that because we know how to use iPhones (but not build them), browse the Internet (but not understand how it works), and use Google (but not really know anything), our educational system is working just great. By the same token, we think that those dumb aristocrats who used horses to get around and didn’t have electricity were Neanderthals.
It’s just not true. Intelligence achieved through education cannot be measured by the future inventions of society. It can only be measured against the rest of the world at that time. And, apples to apples, our Founders were among the best.
At the time of the American Revolution, nine in ten American adults in New England could read and write. That was the highest rate in the civilized world, thanks largely to parents who wanted their kids to read the Bible.
Early Americans heavily favored public education as a method of lifting people up from ignorance. As John Adams wrote in 1775, “Education makes a greater difference between man and man than nature has made between man and brute.” After the revolution, seven states immediately wrote provisions about education into their constitutions.
In terms of curriculum, our Founders believed in education in the classics with a heavy emphasis on facts and figures. In other words, learning stuff that’s useful, as opposed to “Feeling Special Time” stuff. Jefferson said history had to be the key, since it was only by learning history that people would learn to guard their freedom. More advanced students could take on geography, advanced mathematics, Greek, Latin, and so on.
This was the common perspective at the time. “It is not indeed the fine arts which our country requires,” Adams wrote to his wife during the revolution. “[T]he useful, mechanic arts are those which we have occasion for in a young country. . . . I must study politics and war, that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history and naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture, in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry and porcelain.”
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Finland? Really?
Finland’s education system is famously effective. Why? Not because they pay more than we do—we actually spend one-third more per pupil than Finland. It’s about teacher quality and work ethic. Teachers are only selected from the top 10 percent of graduates of the master’s in education program, and students there receive specialized attention and keep longer school hours. Finland doesn’t start teaching kids until age seven and they don’t focus on homework—instead, they focus on student learning and ensuring that students spend enough time learning to achieve their goals. There are, of course, a lot of differences between the United States and Finland, but it would be nice to focus on the students instead of the teachers (and their unions) for a while.
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The Founders wanted local governments—and, unbelievably, parents!—to be in control of their kids’ education. Thomas Jefferson wrote, “If it is believed that these elementary schools will be better managed by the governor and council or any other general authority of the government, than by the parents within each ward, it is a belief against all experience.”
Go ahead and read that quote a few more times. A belief against all experience. Jefferson was too polite to say it this way, but, basically, you’re an idiot if you think that some government can educate kids better than parents can. It’s common sense. Yet if you try to make that case today it’s somehow you who are the idiot.
Jefferson didn’t stop there—he effectively suggested school vouchers in 1779, and proposed that it should be parents’ choice whether to allow their children to go to school (he said it was a mistake to “shock the common feelings by a forcible transportation and education of the infant against the will of his father”). Most important, he said it would be a huge mistake to force people to pay for teachers with whom they didn’t agree. “To compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation of opinions which he disbelieves and abhors, is sinful and tyrannical,” he wrote.
Unfortunately, a century later, Jefferson’s warning disintegrated in the face of the Progressive era. Though he lived and died before the period we now call the Progressive era, one of the leaders in this “progressive education” crusade was Horace Mann, a champion for universal public education. Mann, like the Founders, believed that education was of paramount importance. But he wedded education to the notion that he and people like him should run it.
One of Mann’s goals was to cut out certain brands of religion, including Catholicism, from the public square. He wanted the state to run education in order to unify the population, and he particularly admired the Prussian system, where the state sponsored education from kindergarten through college. There, public education started off as a virtual indoctrination center directed against freedom of religion.
Sound familiar? In Stop Stealing Dreams, Seth Godin writes:
After a self-financed trip to Prussia, [Mann] instituted the paramilitary system of education he found there, a system he wrote up and proselytized to other schools, first in the Northeast U.S. and eventually around the country.
Mann’s ideas caught on and pretty soon the idea of “public” education became widespread. Obviously, this had a great effect on literacy and the availability of education for the common man, but it also taught the elites that they could rule the masses through the education system itself.
The first person to really understand this, and exploit it, was John Dewey. Dewey was an academic at the University of Michigan, University of Chicago, and Columbia University and his goal was to “reconstruct” American society in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Whereas Mann was a well-intentioned American with some good ideas—along with plenty of bad ones—Dewey was a full-on European elite in his thinking. He believed that the American notion of individual rights was empty, and he put far more emphasis on the “right” to food, housing, medical care, and free education. Put it this way: Dewey once said that he was impressed by the “marvelous development of progressive educational ideas and practices under the fostering care of the Bolshevist government.”
Dewey was also a supporter of the idea that elites (like himself) should determine how and what people learn. He rejected natural individualism—aka “liberty”—and said that individuals instead had to be made free “with the aid and support of conditions, cultural and physical: including in ‘cultural,’ economic, legal and political institutions as well as science and art.”
This was indoctrination, pure and simple. Worse, it was leftist/progressive indoctrination. It would be one thing to “indoctrinate” kids with the values that America stood for (you know: one nation, under God, with liberty and justice for all)—but putting them into schools where they’d be fed European elitist propaganda? No thanks.
John Dewey didn’t believe in moral admonitions. Like the famous philosopher Rousseau, Dewey believed that kids should be left to their own devices. Want to teach a kid not to murder somebody? Let him murder his friend and then feel bad about it.
Children, he wrote, “should be allowed as much freedom as possible; prohibitions and commands, the result of which either upon themselves or their companions they cannot understand, are bound to be meaningless; their tendency is to make the child secretive and deceitful.” The only morality kids should be taught, Dewey believed, is how to get along with others. And the job of the schools was to teach the unity of the people under the nonreligious state.
Even Dewey recognized the value of science and mathematics. He rejected only the teaching of morality and religion. It was later, with the federalization of education, that American educational standards began to drop. When the feds took charge of the educational system—for the noble purpose of ending segregation—th
ey wrecked it. Local control went away. Faraway regulators were making rules for kids they’d never even meet. And the kids simply stopped learning. Dewey’s idea of collective, top-down control of education was becoming a reality.
FOLLOW THE MONEY
When it comes to the destruction of American education, there’s really only one question that always needs to be asked: who profits?
Take a look at public school primary education:
While the government spent about $2,800 per student in 1961, it now spends well in excess of $10,000 per student, after adjusting for inflation.
In 1961, 14.6 percent of teachers didn’t even have a college degree; today, it’s less than 1 percent. Meanwhile, more than half of our teachers now have master’s or doctorate degrees, as opposed to less than a quarter in 1961. Why? Because the unions negotiated that you can make more money with additional degrees. Unfortunately, degrees don’t ensure quality, and neither do higher salaries. Teachers are now paid over 45 percent more than they were in 1961, after adjusting for inflation.
So, back to the question I originally asked: who profits from this? Certainly not our kids; they’re struggling. Teachers are doing better, but no one is accusing them of making too much money, by any stretch. So, who is making money and growing their power base off the status quo? Simple: the teachers unions.
In 2010, just . . .
20% of fourth graders,
17% of eighth graders,