Examiner column for September 29.
This is the week of “Education Nation” in Rockefeller Center and on NBC news. This national summit on what needs to be done to improve schools in the United States is drawing attention from political leaders (including President Obama), and educational pundits from pre-kindergarten through university.
Education Nation has elicited dire pronouncements including the following: Colin Powell says we have a “drop out crisis,” President Obama would not send his daughters to a public school, and Brian Williams tells us we are receiving report cards that put us 20th in the world in mathematics, and show that nearly half all eighth graders read below grade level. The doom and gloom news keeps coming via live streaming on the NBC website.
All this contrasts sharply set against my experience Friday
with fifty teachers and administrators from Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, formerly
part of the U.S.S.R. Through the “Open World Program,” founded by James
Billington, Librarian of Congress, these educators are spending two weeks in
Washington D.C. and will observe schools in Pennsylvania, New York, and Ohio. I
was asked to speak to them, and their views on our educational system served to
place our “crisis” in perspective.
After my fifteen minutes of remarks on our educational system (bottom line: teachers matter most, and they must love their students), they asked questions for two hours. Did our students want to come to school? Were girls encouraged to pursue an education? Were teachers pressured to endorse a particular political candidate?
Their
questions led me to examine our system with new eyes. I will not dispute
statistics that say we are falling behind in mathematics to some countries that
drill math facts during long school days. We always place at the top when there
are measures of creativity and innovation in math and science.
I won’t dispute the reading scores data for eighth graders. Do you remember when you were in eighth grade? Were you interested in reading? I rest my case. (By eleventh grade, our students are scoring much better.)
Are our teachers asked to endorse political candidates when citizens show up at local schools for voting? Do we discourage girls from going on to college? Don’t we offer Graduate Equivalent Degrees (GEDs) for students who are forced out of high school by family emergencies or other factors requiring them to work? Do we not have open enrollment policies in thousands of community colleges across the country, allowing everyone, regardless of age, to retool after a job layoff, or complete an associate’s degree at their own pace before transferring to a four year institution?
Before we use terms like “education crisis”, we need to look carefully at our system and how we are measuring its success. Isn’t our system the one held up as a model internationally, with students applying for student visas every day? Anyone teaching college knows that international students love being here. They know nothing about our “education crisis.”
Certainly we should try to improve schools and close achievement gaps in various sub-groups. But education is not a crisis in the United States; it is a right, a gift, and envied the world over.
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